Complete Prose Works
all the other parts of a specimen of literature or art are ready and
waiting, can breathe into it the breath of life, and endow it with
identity.
"The true question to ask," says the librarian of Congress in a paper
read before the Social Science Convention at New York, October, 1869,
"The true question to ask respecting a book, is, _has it help'd any
human soul?_" This is the hint, statement, not only of the great
literatus, his book, but of every great artist. It may be that all works
of art are to be first tried by their art qualities, their image-forming
talent, and their dramatic, pictorial, plot-constructing, euphonious and
other talents. Then, whenever claiming to be first-class works, they are
to be strictly and sternly tried by their foundation in, and radiation,
in the highest sense, and always indirectly, of the ethic principles,
and eligibility to free, arouse, dilate.
As, within the purposes of the Kosmos, and vivifying all meteorology,
and all the congeries of the mineral, vegetable and animal worlds--all
the physical growth and development of man, and all the history of the
race in politics, religions, wars, &c., there is a moral purpose, a
visible or invisible intention, certainly underlying all--its results
and proof needing to be patiently waited for--needing intuition,
faith, idiosyncrasy, to its realization, which many, and especially
the intellectual, do not have--so in the product, or congeries of
the product, of the greatest literatus. This is the last, profoundest
measure and test of a first-class literary or esthetic achievement, and
when understood and put in force must fain, I say, lead to works, books,
nobler than any hitherto known. Lo! Nature, (the only complete, actual
poem,) existing calmly in the divine scheme, containing all, content,
careless of the criticisms of a day, or these endless and wordy
chatterers. And lo! to the consciousness of the soul, the permanent
identity, the thought, the something, before which the magnitude even
of democracy, art, literature, &c., dwindles, becomes partial,
measurable--something that fully satisfies, (which those do not.) That
something is the All, and the idea of All, with the accompanying idea
of eternity, and of itself, the soul, buoyant, indestructible, sailing
space forever, visiting every region, as a ship the sea. And again lo!
the pulsations in all matter, all spirit, throbbing forever--the eternal
beats, eternal systole and diastole of life in things--wherefrom I feel
and know that death is not the ending, as was thought, but rather the
real beginning--and that nothing ever is or can be lost, nor ever die,
nor soul, nor matter.
In the future of these States must arise poets immenser far, and make
great poems of death. The poems of life are great, but there must be the
poems of the purports of life, not only in itself, but beyond itself.
I have eulogized Homer, the sacred bards of Jewry, Eschylus, Juvenal,
Shakspere, &c., and acknowledged their inestimable value. But,
(with perhaps the exception, in some, not all respects, of the
second-mention'd,) I say there must, for future and democratic purposes,
appear poets, (dare I to say so?) of higher class even than any of
those--poets not only possess'd of the religious fire and abandon of
Isaiah, luxuriant in the epic talent of Homer, or for proud characters
as in Shakspere, but consistent with the Hegelian formulas, and
consistent with modern science. America needs, and the world needs, a
class of bards who will, now and ever, so link and tally the rational
physical being of man, with the ensembles of time and space, and with
this vast and multiform show, Nature, surrounding him, ever tantalizing
him, equally a part, and yet not a part of him, as to essentially
harmonize, satisfy, and put at rest. Faith, very old, now scared away
by science, must be restored, brought back by the same power that caused
her departure--restored with new sway, deeper, wider, higher than ever.
Surely, this universal ennui, this coward fear, this shuddering at
death, these low, degrading views, are not always to rule the spirit
pervading future society, as it has the past, and does the present. What
the Roman Lucretius sought most nobly, yet all too blindly, negatively
to do for his age and its successors, must be done positively by some
great coming literatus, especially poet, who, while remaining fully
poet, will absorb whatever science indicates, with spiritualism, and
out of them, and out of his own genius, will compose the great poem
of death. Then will man indeed confront Nature, and confront time and
space, both with science, and _con amore_, and take his right place,
prepared for life, master of fortune and misfortune. And then that which
was long wanted will be supplied, and the ship that had it not before in
all her voyages, will have an anchor.
There are still other standards, suggestions, for products of high
literatuses. That which really balances and conserves the social and
political world is not so much legislation, police, treaties, and dread
of punishment, as the latent eternal intuitional sense, in humanity,
of fairness, manliness, decorum, &c. Indeed, this perennial regulation,
control, and oversight, by self-suppliance, is _sine qua non_ to
democracy; and a highest widest aim of democratic literature may well
be to bring forth, cultivate, brace, and strengthen this sense, in
individuals and society. A strong mastership of the general inferior
self by the superior self, is to be aided, secured, indirectly, but
surely, by the literatus, in his works, shaping, for individual or
aggregate democracy, a great passionate body, in and along with which
goes a great masterful spirit.
And still, providing for contingencies, I fain confront the fact, the
need of powerful native philosophs and orators and bards, these States,
as rallying points to come, in times of danger, and to fend off ruin
and defection. For history is long, long, long. Shift and turn the
combinations of the statement as we may, the problem of the future
of America is in certain respects as dark as it is vast. Pride,
competition, segregation, vicious wilfulness, and license beyond
example, brood already upon us. Unwieldy and immense, who shall hold in
behemoth? who bridle leviathan? Flaunt it as we choose, athwart and
over the roads of our progress loom huge uncertainty, and dreadful,
threatening gloom. It is useless to deny it: Democracy grows rankly up
the thickest, noxious, deadliest plants and fruits of all--brings worse
and worse invaders--needs newer, larger, stronger, keener compensations
and compellers.
Our lands, embracing so much, (embracing indeed the whole, rejecting
none,) hold in their breast that flame also, capable of consuming
themselves, consuming us all. Short as the span of our national life has
been, already have death and downfall crowded close upon us--and will
again crowd close, no doubt, even if warded off. Ages to come may never
know, but I know, how narrowly during the late secession war--and more
than once, and more than twice or thrice--our Nationality, (wherein
bound up, as in a ship in a storm, depended, and yet depend, all our
best life, all hope, all value,) just grazed, just by a hair escaped
destruction. Alas! to think of them! the agony and bloody sweat of
certain of those hours! those cruel, sharp, suspended crises!
Even to-day, amid these whirls, incredible flippancy, and blind fury of
parties, infidelity, entire lack of first-class captains and leaders,
added to the plentiful meanness and vulgarity of the ostensible
masses--that problem, the labor question, beginning to open like a
yawning gulf, rapidly widening every year--what prospect have we? We
sail a dangerous sea of seething currents, cross and under-currents,
vortices--all so dark, untried--and whither shall we turn? It seems
as if the Almighty had spread before this nation charts of imperial
destinies, dazzling as the sun, yet with many a deep intestine
difficulty, and human aggregate of cankerous imperfection-saying, lo!
the roads, the only plans of development, long and varied with all
terrible balks and ebullitions. You said in your soul, I will be empire
of empires, overshadowing all else, past and present, putting
the history of Old-World dynasties, conquests behind me, as of no
account--making a new history, a history of democracy, making old
history a dwarf--I alone inaugurating largeness, culminating time. If
these, O lands of America, are indeed the prizes, the determinations of
your soul, be it so. But behold the cost, and already specimens of the
cost. Thought you greatness was to ripen for you like a pear? If you
would have greatness, know that you must conquer it through ages,
centuries--must pay for it with a proportionate price. For you too, as
for all lands, the struggle, the traitor, the wily person in office,
scrofulous wealth, the surfeit of prosperity, the demonism of greed,
the hell of passion, the decay of faith, the long postponement, the
fossil-like lethargy, the ceaseless need of revolutions, prophets,
thunder-storms, deaths, births, new projections and invigorations of
ideas and men.
Yet I have dream'd, merged in that hidden-tangled problem of our fate,
whose long unraveling stretches mysteriously through time--dream'd out,
portray'd, hinted already--a little or a larger band--a band of brave
and true, unprecedented yet--arm'd and equipt at every point--the
members separated, it may be, by different dates and States, or south,
or north, or east, or west--Pacific, Atlantic, Southern, Canadian--a
year, a century here, and other centuries there--but always one, compact
in soul, conscience-conserving, God-inculcating, inspirid achievers, not
only in literature, the greatest art, but achievers in all art--a new,
undying order, dynasty, from age to age transmitted--a band, a class,
at least as fit to cope with current years, our dangers, needs, as those
who, for their times, so long, so well, in armor or in cowl, upheld
and made illustrious, that far-back feudal, priestly world. To offset
chivalry, indeed, those vanish'd countless knights, old altars, abbeys,
priests, ages and strings of ages, a knightlier and more sacred cause
to-day demands, and shall supply, in a New World, to larger, grander
work, more than the counterpart and tally of them.
Arrived now, definitely, at an apex for these Vistas, I confess that
the promulgation and belief in such a class or institution--a new and
greater literatus order--its possibility, (nay certainty,) underlies
these entire speculations--and that the rest, the other parts, as
superstructures, are all founded upon it. It really seems to me the
condition, not only of our future national and democratic development,
but of our perpetuation. In the highly artificial and materialistic
bases of modern civilization, with the corresponding arrangements and
methods of living, the force-infusion of intellect alone, the depraving
influences of riches just as much as poverty, the absence of all high
ideals in character--with the long series of tendencies, shapings, which
few are strong enough to resist, and which now seem, with steam-engine
speed, to be everywhere turning out the generations of humanity like
uniform iron castings--all of which, as compared with the feudal ages,
we can yet do nothing better than accept, make the best of, and even
welcome, upon the whole, for their oceanic practical grandeur, and their
restless wholesale kneading of the masses--I say of all this tremendous
and dominant play of solely materialistic bearings upon current life in
the United States, with the results as already seen, accumulating, and
reaching far into the future, that they must either be confronted and