Complete Prose Works
sense, is fair adhesion to itself, for purposes beyond--and that,
finally, the personality of mortal life is most important with reference
to the immortal, the unknown, the spiritual, the only permanently real,
which as the ocean waits for and receives the rivers, waits for us each
and all.
Much is there, yet, demanding line and outline in our Vistas, not only
on these topics, but others quite unwritten. Indeed, we could talk the
matter, and expand it, through lifetime. But it is necessary to return
to our original premises. In view of them, we have again pointedly
to confess that all the objective grandeurs of the world, for highest
purposes, yield themselves up, and depend on mentality alone. Here, and
here only, all balances, all rests. For the mind, which alone builds
the permanent edifice, haughtily builds it to itself. By it, with
what follows it, are convey'd to mortal sense the culminations of
the materialistic, the known, and a prophecy of the unknown. To
take expression, to incarnate, to endow a literature with grand and
archetypal models--to fill with pride and love the utmost capacity, and
to achieve spiritual meanings, and suggest the future--these, and these
only, satisfy the soul. We must not say one word against real materials;
but the wise know that they do not become real till touched by emotions,
the mind. Did we call the latter imponderable? Ah, let us rather
proclaim that the slightest song-tune, the countless ephemera of
passions arous'd by orators and tale-tellers, are more dense, more
weighty than the engines there in the great factories, or the granite
blocks in their foundations.
Approaching thus the momentous spaces, and considering with reference to
a new and greater personalism, the needs and possibilities of American
imaginative literature, through the medium-light of what we have already
broach'd, it will at once be appreciated that a vast gulf of difference
separates the present accepted condition of these spaces, inclusive of
what is floating in them, from any condition adjusted to, or fit for,
the world, the America, there sought to be indicated, and the copious
races of complete men and women, along these Vistas crudely outlined.
It is, in some sort, no less a difference than lies between that
long-continued nebular state and vagueness of the astronomical worlds,
compared with the subsequent state, the definitely-form'd worlds
themselves, duly compacted, clustering in systems, hung up there,
chandeliers of the universe, beholding and mutually lit by each other's
lights, serving for ground of all substantial foothold, all vulgar
uses--yet serving still more as an undying chain and echelon of
spiritual proofs and shows. A boundless field to fill! A new creation,
with needed orbic works launch'd forth, to revolve in free and lawful
circuits--to move, self-poised, through the ether, and shine like
heaven's own suns! With such, and nothing less, we suggest that New
World literature, fit to rise upon, cohere, and signalize in time, these
States.
What, however, do we more definitely mean by New World literature? Are
we not doing well enough here already? Are not the United States this
day busily using, working, more printer's type, more presses, than any
other country? uttering and absorbing more publications than any other?
Do not our publishers fatten quicker and deeper? (helping themselves,
under shelter of a delusive and sneaking law, or rather absence of law,
to most of their forage, poetical, pictorial, historical, romantic,
even comic, without money and without price--and fiercely resisting
the timidest proposal to pay for it.) Many will come under this
delusion--but my purpose is to dispel it. I say that a nation may
hold and circulate rivers and oceans of very readable print, journals,
magazines, novels, library-books, "poetry," &c.--such as the States
to-day possess and circulate--of unquestionable aid and value--hundreds
of new volumes annually composed and brought out here, respectable
enough, indeed unsurpass'd in smartness and erudition--with
further hundreds, or rather millions, (as by free forage or theft
aforemention'd,) also thrown into the market--and yet, all the while,
the said nation, land, strictly speaking, may possess no literature at
all.
Repeating our inquiry, what, then, do we mean by real literature?
especially the democratic literature of the future? Hard questions to
meet. The clues are inferential, and turn us to the past. At best, we
can only offer suggestions, comparisons, circuits.
It must still be reiterated, as, for the purpose of these memoranda, the
deep lesson of history and time, that all else in the contributions of
a nation or age, through its politics, materials, heroic personalities,
military eclat, &c., remains crude, and defers, in any close and
thorough-going estimate, until vitalized by national, original
archetypes in literature. They only put the nation in form, finally tell
anything--prove, complete anything--perpetuate anything. Without doubt,
some of the richest and most powerful and populous communities of the
antique world, and some of the grandest personalities and events, have,
to after and present times, left themselves entirely unbequeath'd.
Doubtless, greater than any that have come down to us, were among those
lands, heroisms, persons, that have not come down to us at all, even
by name, date, or location. Others have arrived safely, as from voyages
over wide, century-stretching seas. The little ships, the miracles that
have buoy'd them, and by incredible chances safely convey'd them, (or
the best of them, their meaning and essence,) overlong wastes, darkness,
lethargy, ignorance, &c., have been a few inscriptions--a few immortal
compositions, small in size, yet compassing what measureless values of
reminiscence, contemporary portraitures, manners, idioms and beliefs,
with deepest inference, hint and thought, to tie and touch forever the
old, new body, and the old, new soul! These! and still these! bearing
the freight so dear--dearer than pride--dearer than love. All the best
experience of humanity, folded, saved, freighted to us here. Some of
these tiny ships we call Old and New Testament, Homer, Eschylus, Plato,
Juvenal, &c. Precious minims! I think, if we were forced to choose,
rather than have you, and the likes of you, and what belongs to, and has
grown of you, blotted out and gone, we could better afford, appaling as
that would be, to lose all actual ships, this day fasten'd by wharf,
or floating on wave, and see them, with all their cargoes, scuttled and
sent to the bottom.
Gather'd by geniuses of city, race or age, and put by them in highest
of art's forms, namely, the literary form, the peculiar combinations
and the outshows of that city, age, or race, its particular modes of the
universal attributes and passions, its faiths, heroes, lovers and gods,
wars, traditions, struggles, crimes, emotions, joys, (or the subtle
spirit of these,) having been pass'd on to us to illumine our own
selfhood, and its experiences--what they supply, indispensable and
highest, if taken away, nothing else in all the world's boundless
store-houses could make up to us, or ever again return.
For us, along the great highways of time, those monuments stand--those
forms of majesty and beauty. For us those beacons burn through all the
nights. Unknown Egyptians, graving hieroglyphs; Hindus, with hymn and
apothegm and endless epic; Hebrew prophet, with spirituality, as in
flashes of lightning, conscience like red-hot iron, plaintive songs and
screams of vengeance for tyrannies and enslavement; Christ, with bent
head, brooding love and peace, like a dove; Greek, creating eternal
shapes of physical and esthetic proportion; Roman, lord of satire, the
sword, and the codex;--of the figures, some far off and veil'd, others
nearer and visible; Dante, stalking with lean form, nothing but fibre,
not a grain of superfluous flesh; Angelo, and the great painters,
architects, musicians; rich Shakspere, luxuriant as the sun, artist and
singer of feudalism in its sunset, with all the gorgeous colors, owner
thereof, and using them at will; and so to such as German Kant and
Hegel, where they, though near us, leaping over the ages, sit again,
impassive, imperturbable, like the Egyptian gods. Of these, and the like
of these, is it too much, indeed, to return to our favorite figure,
and view them as orbs and systems of orbs, moving in free paths in the
spaces of that other heaven, the kosmic intellect, the soul?
Ye powerful and resplendent ones! ye were, in your atmospheres, grown
not for America, but rather for her foes, the feudal and the old--while
our genius is democratic and modern. Yet could ye, indeed, but breathe
your breath of life into our New World's nostrils--not to enslave us, as
now, but, for our needs, to breed a spirit like your own--perhaps, (dare
we to say it?) to dominate, even destroy, what you yourselves have left!
On your plane, and no less, but even higher and wider, must we mete
and measure for to-day and here. I demand races of orbic bards, with
unconditional uncompromising sway. Come forth, sweet democratic despots
of the west!
By points like these we, in reflection, token what we mean by any land's
or people's genuine literature. And thus compared and tested, judging
amid the influence of loftiest products only, what do our current
copious fields of print, covering in manifold forms, the United States,
better, for an analogy, present, than, as in certain regions of the sea,
those spreading, undulating masses of squid, through which the whale
swimming, with head half out, feeds?
Not but that doubtless our current so-called literature, (like an
endless supply of small coin,) performs a certain service, and may-be,
too, the service needed for the time, (the preparation-service, as
children learn to spell.) Everybody reads, and truly nearly everybody
writes, either books, or for the magazines or journals. The matter has
magnitude, too, after a sort. But is it really advancing? or, has it
advanced for a long while? There is something impressive about the huge
editions of the dailies and weeklies, the mountain-stacks of white
paper piled in the press-vaults, and the proud, crashing, ten-cylinder
presses, which I can stand and watch any time by the half hour. Then,
(though the States in the field of imagination present not a single
first-class work, not a single great literatus,) the main objects,
to amuse, to titillate, to pass away time, to circulate the news, and
rumors of news, to rhyme and read rhyme, are yet attain'd, and on
a scale of infinity. To-day, in books, in the rivalry of writers,
especially novelists, success, (so-call'd,) is for him or her who
strikes the mean flat average, the sensational appetite for stimulus,
incident, persiflage, &c., and depicts, to the common calibre, sensual,
exterior life. To such, or the luckiest of them, as we see, the
audiences are limitless and profitable; but they cease presently. While
this day, or any day, to workmen portraying interior or spiritual life,
the audiences were limited, and often laggard--but they last forever.
Compared with the past, our modern science soars, and our journals
serve--but ideal and even ordinary romantic literature, does not,
I think, substantially advance. Behold the prolific brood of the
contemporary novel, magazine-tale, theatre-play, &c. The same endless
thread of tangled and superlative love-story, inherited, apparently from
the Amadises and Palmerins of the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries over
there in Europe. The costumes and associations brought down to date, the
seasoning hotter and more varied, the dragons and ogres left out--but
the _thing_, I should say, has not advanced--is just as sensational,