Complete Prose Works
nursing-beds, these; but only from such beginnings and stocks,
indigenous here, may haply arrive, be grafted, and sprout, in time,
flowers of genuine American aroma, and fruits truly and fully our own.
I say it were a standing disgrace to these States--I say it were a
disgrace to any nation, distinguish'd above others by the variety and
vastness of its territories, its materials, its inventive activity,
and the splendid practicality of its people, not to rise and soar above
others also in its original styles in literature and art, and its
own supply of intellectual and esthetic masterpieces, archetypal, and
consistent with itself. I know not a land except ours that has not, to
some extent, however small, made its title clear. The Scotch have their
born ballads, subtly expressing their past and present, and expressing
character. The Irish have theirs. England, Italy, France, Spain, theirs.
What has America? With exhaustless mines of the richest ore of epic,
lyric, tale, tune, picture, etc., in the Four Years' War; with, indeed,
I sometimes think, the richest masses of material ever afforded a
nation, more variegated, and on a larger scale--the first sign of
proportionate, native, imaginative Soul, and first-class works to match,
is, (I cannot too often repeat,) so far wanting.
Long ere the second centennial arrives, there will be some forty to
fifty great States, among them Canada and Cuba. When the present century
closes, our population will be sixty or seventy millions. The Pacific
will be ours, and the Atlantic mainly ours. There will be daily electric
communication with every part of the globe. What an age! What a land!
Where, elsewhere, one so great? The individuality of one nation must
then, as always, lead the world. Can there be any doubt who the leader
ought to be? Bear in mind, though, that nothing less than the mightiest
original non-subordinated SOUL has ever really, gloriously led, or ever
can lead. (This Soul--its other name, in these Vistas, is LITERATURE.)
In fond fancy leaping those hundred years ahead, let us survey America's
works, poems, philosophies, fulfilling prophecies, and giving form and
decision to best ideals. Much that is now undream'd of, we might then
perhaps see establish'd, luxuriantly cropping forth, richness, vigor of
letters and of artistic expression, in whose products character will be
a main requirement, and not merely erudition or elegance.
Intense and loving comradeship, the personal and passionate attachment
of man to man--which, hard to define, underlies the lessons and ideals
of the profound saviours of every land and age, and which seems to
promise, when thoroughly develop'd, cultivated and recognized in manners
and literature, the most substantial hope and safety of the future of
these States, will then be fully express'd.[29]
A strong fibred joyousness and faith, and the sense of health _al
fresco_, may well enter into the preparation of future noble American
authorship. Part of the test of a great literatus shall be the absence
in him of the idea of the covert, the lurid, the maleficent, the devil,
the grim estimates inherited from the Puritans, hell, natural depravity,
and the like. The great literatus will be known, among the rest, by his
cheerful simplicity, his adherence to natural standards, his limitless
faith in God, his reverence, and by the absence in him of doubt, ennui,
burlesque, persiflage, or any strain'd and temporary fashion.
Nor must I fail, again and yet again, to clinch, reiterate more plainly
still, (O that indeed such survey as we fancy, may show in time this
part completed also!) the lofty aim, surely the proudest and the purest,
in whose service the future literatus, of whatever field, may gladly
labor. As we have intimated, offsetting the material civilization of our
race, our nationality, its wealth, territories, factories, population,
products, trade, and military and naval strength, and breathing breath
of life into all these, and more, must be its moral civilization--the
formulation, expression, and aidancy whereof, is the very highest height
of literature. The climax of this loftiest range of civilization, rising
above all the gorgeous shows and results of wealth, intellect, power,
and art, as such--above even theology and religious fervor--is to be its
development, from the eternal bases, and the fit expression, of absolute
Conscience, moral soundness, Justice. Even in religious fervor there
is a touch of animal heat. But moral conscientiousness, crystalline,
without flaw, not Godlike only, entirely human, awes and enchants
forever. Great is emotional love, even in the order of the rational
universe. But, if we must make gradations, I am clear there is something
greater. Power, love, veneration, products, genius, esthetics, tried by
subtlest comparisons, analyses, and in serenest moods, somewhere fail,
somehow become vain. Then noiseless, withflowing steps, the lord,
the sun, the last ideal comes. By the names right, justice, truth, we
suggest, but do not describe it. To the world of men it remains a
dream, an idea as they call it. But no dream is it to the wise--but the
proudest, almost only solid, lasting thing of all. Its analogy in the
material universe is what holds together this world, and every object
upon it, and carries its dynamics on forever sure and safe. Its lack,
and the persistent shirking of it, as in life, sociology, literature,
politics, business, and even sermonizing, these times, or any times,
still leaves the abysm, the mortal flaw and smutch, mocking civilization
to-day, with all its unquestion'd triumphs, and all the civilization so
far known.[30]
Present literature, while magnificently fulfilling certain popular
demands, with plenteous knowledge and verbal smartness, is profoundly
sophisticated, insane, and its very joy is morbid. It needs tally and
express Nature, and the spirit of Nature, and to know and obey the
standards. I say the question of Nature, largely consider'd, involves
the questions of the esthetic, the emotional, and the religious--and
involves happiness. A fitly born and bred race, growing up in right
conditions of out-door as much as in-door harmony, activity and
development, would probably, from and in those conditions, find it
enough merely _to live_--and would, in their relations to the sky, air,
water, trees, &c., and to the countless common shows, and in the fact of
life itself, discover and achieve happiness--with Being suffused night
and day by wholesome extasy, surpassing all the pleasures that wealth,
amusement, and even gratified intellect, erudition, or the sense of art,
can give.
In the prophetic literature of these States, (the reader of my
speculations will miss their principal stress unless he allows well for
the point that a new Literature, perhaps a new Metaphysics, certainly a
new Poetry, are to be, in my opinion, the only sure and worthy supports
and expressions of the American Democracy,) Nature, true Nature, and
the true idea of Nature, long absent, must, above all, become fully
restored, enlarged, and must furnish the pervading atmosphere to poems,
and the test of all high literary and esthetic compositions. I do not
mean the smooth walks, trimm'd hedges, poseys and nightingales of the
English poets, but the whole orb, with its geologic history, the kosmos,
carrying fire and snow, that rolls through the illimitable areas, light
as a feather, though weighing billions of tons. Furthermore, as by
what we now partially call Nature is intended, at most, only what is
entertainable by the physical conscience, the sense of matter, and
of good animal health--on these it must be distinctly accumulated,
incorporated, that man, comprehending these, has, in towering
superaddition, the moral and spiritual consciences, indicating his
destination beyond the ostensible, the mortal.
To the heights of such estimate of Nature indeed ascending, we proceed
to make observations for our Vistas, breathing rarest air. What is
I believe called Idealism seems to me to suggest, (guarding against
extravagance, and ever modified even by its opposite,) the course
of inquiry and desert of favor for our New World metaphysics, their
foundation of and in literature, giving hue to all.[31]
The elevating and etherealizing ideas of the unknown and of unreality
must be brought forward with authority, as they are the legitimate heirs
of the known, and of reality, and at least as great as their parents.
Fearless of scoffing, and of the ostent, let us take our stand,
our ground, and never desert it, to confront the growing excess and
arrogance of realism. To the cry, now victorious--the cry of sense,
science, flesh, incomes, farms, merchandise, logic, intellect,
demonstrations, solid perpetuities, buildings of brick and iron, or
even the facts of the shows of trees, earth, rocks, &c., fear not, my
brethren, my sisters, to sound out with equally determin'd voice,
that conviction brooding within the recesses of every envision'd
soul--illusions! apparitions! figments all! True, we must not condemn
the show, neither absolutely deny it, for the indispensability of its
meanings; but how clearly we see that, migrate in soul to what we can
already conceive of superior and spiritual points of view, and, palpable
as it seems under present relations, it all and several might, nay
certainly would, fall apart and vanish.
I hail with joy the oceanic, variegated, intense practical energy, the
demand for facts, even the business materialism of the current age,
our States. But we to the age or land in which these things, movements,
stopping at themselves, do not tend to ideas. As fuel to flame, and
flame to the heavens, so must wealth, science, materialism--even this
democracy of which we make so much--unerringly feed the highest mind,
the soul. Infinitude the flight: fathomless the mystery. Man, so
diminutive, dilates beyond the sensible universe, competes with,
outcopes space and time, meditating even one great idea. Thus, and
thus only, does a human being, his spirit, ascend above, and justify,
objective Nature, which, probably nothing in itself, is incredibly and
divinely serviceable, indispensable, real, here. And as the purport
of objective Nature is doubtless folded, hidden, somewhere here--as
somewhere here is what this globe and its manifold forms, and the light
of day, and night's darkness, and life itself, with all its experiences,
are for--it is here the great literature, especially verse, must get its
inspiration and throbbing blood. Then may we attain to a poetry worthy
the immortal soul of man, and widen, while absorbing materials, and,
in their own sense, the shows of Nature, will, above all, have, both
directly and indirectly, a freeing, fluidizing, expanding, religious
character, exulting with science, fructifying the moral elements, and
stimulating aspirations, and meditations on the unknown.
The process, so far, is indirect and peculiar, and though it may be
suggested, cannot be defined. Observing, rapport, and with intuition,
the shows and forms presented by Nature, the sensuous luxuriance, the
beautiful in living men and women, the actual play of passions, in
history and life--and, above all, from those developments either in
Nature or human personality in which power, (dearest of all to the sense
of the artist,) transacts itself-out of these, and seizing what is in
them, the poet, the esthetic worker in any field, by the divine magic
of his genius, projects them, their analogies, by curious removes,
indirections, in literature and art. (No useless attempt to repeat
the material creation, by daguerreotyping the exact likeness by mortal
mental means.) This is the image-making faculty, coping with material
creation, and rivaling, almost triumphing over it. This alone, when