Complete Prose Works
just as strain'd--remains about the same, nor more, nor less.
What is the reason our time, our lands, that we see no fresh local
courage, sanity, of our own--the Mississippi, stalwart Western men,
real mental and physical facts, Southerners, &c., in the body of our
literature? especially the poetic part of it. But always, instead, a
parcel of dandies and ennuyees, dapper little gentlemen from abroad, who
flood us with their thin sentiment of parlors, parasols, piano-songs,
tinkling rhymes, the five-hundredth importation--or whimpering and
crying about something, chasing one aborted conceit after another,
and forever occupied in dyspeptic amours with dyspeptic women. While,
current and novel, the grandest events and revolutions and stormiest
passions of history, are crossing to-day with unparallel'd rapidity and
magnificence over the stages of our own and all the continents, offering
new materials, opening new vistas, with largest needs, inviting the
daring launching forth of conceptions in literature, inspired by them,
soaring in highest regions, serving art in its highest (which is only
the other name for serving God, and serving humanity,) where is the man
of letters, where is the book, with any nobler aim than to follow in the
old track, repeat what has been said before--and, as its utmost triumph,
sell well, and be erudite or elegant?
Mark the roads, the processes, through which these States have arrived,
standing easy, henceforth ever-equal, ever-compact in their range
to-day. European adventures? the most antique? Asiatic or African? old
history--miracles--romances? Rather our own unquestion'd facts. They
hasten, incredible, blazing bright as fire. From the deeds and days of
Columbus down to the present, and including the present--and especially
the late secession war--when I con them, I feel, every leaf, like
stopping to see if I have not made a mistake, and fall'n on the splendid
figments of some dream. But it is no dream. We stand, live, move, in
the huge flow of our age s materialism--in its spirituality. We have had
founded for us the most positive of lands. The founders have pass'd to
other spheres--but what are these terrible duties they have left us?
Their politics the United States have, in my opinion, with all their
faults, already substantially establish'd, for good, on their own
native, sound, long-vista'd principles, never to be overturn'd, offering
a sure basis for all the rest. With that, their future religious forms
sociology, literature, teachers, schools, costumes, &c., are of course
to make a compact whole, uniform, on tallying principles. For how can
we remain, divided, contradicting ourselves, this way?[28] I say we can
only attain harmony and stability by consulting ensemble and the ethic
purports, and faithfully building upon them. For the New World, indeed,
after two grand stages of preparation-strata, I perceive that now a
third stage, being ready for, (and without which the other two were
useless,) with unmistakable signs appears. The First stage was the
planning and putting on record the political foundation rights of
immense masses of people--indeed all people--in the organization of
republican National, State, and municipal governments, all constructed
with reference to each, and each to all. This is the American programme,
not for classes, but for universal man, and is embodied in the compacts
of the Declaration of Independence, and, as it began and has now
grown, with its amendments, the Federal Constitution--and in the State
governments, with all their interiors, and with general suffrage; those
having the sense not only of what is in themselves, but that their
certain several things started, planted, hundreds of others in the same
direction duly arise and follow. The Second stage relates to material
prosperity, wealth, produce, labor-saving machines, iron, cotton, local,
State and continental railways, intercommunication and trade with all
lands, steamships, mining, general employment, organization of great
cities, cheap appliances for comfort, numberless technical schools,
books, newspapers, a currency for money circulation, &c. The
Third stage, rising out of the previous ones, to make them and
all illustrious, I, now, for one, promulge, announcing a native
expression-spirit, getting into form, adult, and through mentality, for
these States, self-contain'd, different from others, more expansive,
more rich and free, to be evidenced by original authors and poets
to come, by American personalities, plenty of them, male and female,
traversing the States, none excepted--and by native superber
tableaux and growths of language, songs, operas, orations, lectures,
architecture--and by a sublime and serious Religious Democracy sternly
taking command, dissolving the old, sloughing off surfaces, and from
its own interior and vital principles, reconstructing, democratizing
society.
For America, type of progress, and of essential faith in man, above
all his errors and wickedness--few suspect how deep, how deep it really
strikes. The world evidently supposes, and we have evidently supposed
so too, that the States are merely to achieve the equal franchise, an
elective government--to inaugurate the respectability of labor, and
become a nation of practical operatives, law-abiding, orderly and well
off. Yes, those are indeed parts of the task of America; but they
not only do not exhaust the progressive conception, but rather arise,
teeming with it, as the mediums of deeper, higher progress. Daughter of
a physical revolution--mother of the true revolutions, which are of
the interior life, and of the arts. For so long as the spirit is not
changed, any change of appearance is of no avail.
The old men, I remember as a boy, were always talking of American
independence. What is independence? Freedom from all laws or bonds
except those of one's own being, control'd by the universal ones. To
lands, to man, to woman, what is there at last to each, but the inherent
soul, nativity, idiocrasy, free, highest-poised, soaring its own flight,
following out itself?
At present, these States, in their theology and social standards, (of
greater importance than their political institutions,) are entirely held
possession of by foreign lands. We see the sons and daughters of the
New World, ignorant of its genius, not yet inaugurating the native, the
universal, and the near, still importing the distant, the partial, and
the dead. We see London, Paris, Italy--not original, superb, as where
they belong--but second-hand here, where they do not belong. We see the
shreds of Hebrews, Romans, Greeks; but where, on her own soil, do we
see, in any faithful, highest, proud expression, America herself? I
sometimes question whether she has a corner in her own house.
Not but that in one sense, and a very grand one, good theology, good
art, or good literature, has certain features shared in common. The
combination fraternizes, ties the races--is, in many particulars, under
laws applicable indifferently to all, irrespective of climate or
date, and, from whatever source, appeals to emotions, pride, love,
spirituality, common to human kind. Nevertheless, they touch a man
closest, (perhaps only actually touch him,) even in these, in their
expression through autochthonic lights and shades, flavors, fondnesses,
aversions, specific incidents, illustrations, out of his own
nationality, geography, surroundings, antecedents, &c. The spirit and
the form are one, and depend far more on association, identity and
place, than is supposed. Subtly interwoven with the materiality
and personality of a land, a race--Teuton, Turk, Californian, or
what-not--there is always something--I can hardly tell what it
is--history but describes the results of it--it is the same as the
untellable look of some human faces. Nature, too, in her stolid forms,
is full of it--but to most it is there a secret. This something is
rooted in the invisible roots, the profoundest meanings of that place,
race, or nationality; and to absorb and again effuse it, uttering words
and products as from its midst, and carrying it into highest regions,
is the work, or a main part of the work, of any country's true author,
poet, historian, lecturer, and perhaps even priest and philosoph. Here,
and here only, are the foundations for our really valuable and permanent
verse, drama, &c.
But at present, (judged by any higher scale than that which finds the
chief ends of existence to be to feverishly make money during one-half
of it, and by some "amusement," or perhaps foreign travel, flippantly
kill time, the other half,) and consider'd with reference to purposes
of patriotism, health, a noble personality, religion, and the democratic
adjustments, all these swarms of poems, literary magazines, dramatic
plays, resultant so far from American intellect, and the formation of
our best ideas, are useless and a mockery. They strengthen and nourish
no one, express nothing characteristic, give decision and purpose to no
one, and suffice only the lowest level of vacant minds.
Of what is called the drama, or dramatic presentation in the United
States, as now put forth at the theatres, I should say it deserves to
be treated with the same gravity, and on a par with the questions
of ornamental confectionery at public dinners, or the arrangement of
curtains and hangings in a ball-room--nor more, nor less. Of the other,
I will not insult the reader's intelligence, (once really entering into
the atmosphere of these Vistas,) by supposing it necessary to show,
in detail, why the copious dribble, either of our little or well-known
rhymesters, does not fulfil, in any respect, the needs and august
occasions of this land. America demands a poetry that is bold, modern,
and all-surrounding and kosmical, as she is herself. It must in no
respect ignore science or the modern, but inspire itself with science
and the modern. It must bend its vision toward the future, more than
the past. Like America, it must extricate itself from even the greatest
models of the past, and, while courteous to them, must have entire faith
in itself, and the products of its own democratic spirit only. Like her,
it must place in the van, and hold up at all hazards, the banner of
the divine pride of man in himself, (the radical foundation of the new
religion.) Long enough have the People been listening to poems in which
common humanity, deferential, bends low, humiliated, acknowledging
superiors. But America listens to no such poems. Erect, inflated, and
fully self-esteeming be the chant; and then America will listen with
pleased ears.
Nor may the genuine gold, the gems, when brought to light at last, be
probably usher'd forth from any of the quarters currently counted on.
To-day, doubtless, the infant genius of American poetic expression,
(eluding those highly-refined imported and gilt-edged themes,
and sentimental and butterfly flights, pleasant to orthodox
publishers--causing tender spasms in the coteries, and warranted not to
chafe the sensitive cuticle of the most exquisitely artificial gossamer
delicacy,) lies sleeping far away, happily unrecognized and uninjur'd by
the coteries, the art-writers, the talkers and critics of the saloons,
or the lecturers in the colleges--lies sleeping, aside, unrecking
itself, in some western idiom, or native Michigan or Tennessee repartee,
or stumpspeech--or in Kentucky or Georgia, or the Carolinas--or in some
slang or local song or allusion of the Manhattan, Boston, Philadelphia
or Baltimore mechanic--or up in the Maine woods--or off in the hut of
the California miner, or crossing the Rocky mountains, or along
the Pacific railroad--or on the breasts of the young farmers of
the northwest, or Canada, or boatmen of the lakes. Rude and coarse