Complete Prose Works
With the poems of a first-class land are twined, as weft with warp, its
types of personal character, of individuality, peculiar, native, its
own physiognomy, man's and woman's, its own shapes, forms, and manners,
fully justified under the eternal laws of all forms, all manners, all
times. The hour has come for democracy in America to inaugurate
itself in the two directions specified--autochthonic poems and
personalities--born expressers of itself, its spirit alone, to radiate
in subtle ways, not only in art, but the practical and familiar, in the
transactions between employers and employed persons, in business and
wages, and sternly in the army and navy, and revolutionizing them. I
find nowhere a scope profound enough, and radical and objective enough,
either for aggregates or individuals. The thought and identity of
a poetry in America to fill, and worthily fill, the great void, and
enhance these aims, electrifying all and several, involves the essence
and integral facts, real and spiritual, of the whole land, the whole
body. What the great sympathetic is to the congeries of bones, joints,
heart, fluids, nervous system and vitality, constituting, launching
forth in time and space a human being--aye, an immortal soul--such
relation, and no less, holds true poetry to the single personality, or
to the nation.
Here our thirty-eight States stand to-day, the children of past
precedents, and, young as they are, heirs of a very old estate. One or
two points we will consider, out of the myriads presenting themselves.
The feudalism, of the British Islands, illustrated by Shakspere--and by
his legitimate followers, Walter Scott and Alfred Tennyson--with all its
tyrannies, superstitions, evils, had most superb and heroic permeating
veins, poems, manners; even its errors fascinating. It almost seems as
if only that feudalism in Europe, like slavery in our own South, could
outcrop types of tallest, noblest personal character yet--strength and
devotion and love better than elsewhere--invincible courage, generosity,
aspiration, the spines of all. Here is where Shakspere and the others
I have named perform a service incalculably precious to our America.
Politics, literature, and everything else, centers at last in perfect
_personnel_, (as democracy is to find the same as the rest;) and here
feudalism is unrival'd--here the rich and highest-rising lessons it
bequeaths us--a mass of foreign nutriment, which we are to work over,
and popularize and enlarge, and present again in our own growths.
Still there are pretty grave and anxious drawbacks, jeopardies, fears.
Let us give some reflections on the subject, a little fluctuating, but
starting from one central thought, and returning there again. Two or
three curious results may plow up. As in the astronomical laws, the
very power that would seem most deadly and destructive turns out to be
latently conservative of longest, vastest future births and lives.
We will for once briefly examine the just-named authors solely from a
Western point of view. It may be, indeed, that we shall use the sun
of English literature, and the brightest current stars of his system,
mainly as pegs to hang some cogitations on, for home inspection.
As depicter and dramatist of the passions at their stormiest outstretch,
though ranking high, Shakspere (spanning the arch wide enough) is
equaled by several, and excelled by the best old Greeks, (as Eschylus.)
But in portraying mediaeval European lords and barons, the arrogant
port, so dear to the inmost human heart, (pride! pride! dearest,
perhaps, of all--touching us, too, of the States closest of all--closer
than love,) he stands alone, and I do not wonder he so witches the
world.
From first to last, also, Walter Scott and Tennyson, like Shakspere,
exhale that principle of caste which we Americans have come on earth to
destroy. Jefferson's verdict on the Waverley novels was that they turned
and condensed brilliant but entirely false lights and glamours over the
lords, ladies, and aristocratic institutes of Europe, with all
their measureless infamies, and then left the bulk of the suffering,
down-trodden people contemptuously in the shade. Without stopping to
answer this hornet-stinging criticism, or to repay any part of the
debt of thanks I owe, in common with every American, to the noblest,
healthiest, cheeriest romancer that ever lived, I pass on to Tennyson,
his works.
Poetry here of a very high (perhaps the highest) order of verbal
melody, exquisitely clean and pure, and almost always perfumed, like the
tuberose, to an extreme of sweetness--sometimes not, however, but even
then a camellia of the hot-house, never a common flower--the verse
of inside elegance and high-life; and yet preserving amid all its
super-delicatesse a smack of outdoors and outdoor folk. The old Norman
lordhood quality here, too, crossed with that Saxon fiber from which
twain the best current stock of England springs--poetry that revels
above all things in traditions of knights and chivalry, and deeds of
derring-do. The odor of English social life in its highest range--a
melancholy, affectionate, very manly, but dainty breed--pervading
the pages like an invisible scent; the idleness, the traditions, the
mannerisms, the stately _ennui_; the yearning of love, like a spinal
marrow, inside of all; the costumes brocade and satin; the old
houses and furniture--solid oak, no mere veneering--the moldy secrets
everywhere; the verdure, the ivy on the walls, the moat, the English
landscape outside, the buzzing fly in the sun inside the window pane.
Never one democratic page; nay, not a line, not a word; never free and
_naïve_ poetry, but involved, labored, quite sophisticated--even when
the theme is ever so simple or rustic, (a shell, a bit of sedge, the
commonest love-passage between a lad and lass,) the handling of the
rhyme all showing the scholar and conventional gentleman; showing the
laureate too, the _attaché_ of the throne, and most excellent, too;
nothing better through the volumes than the dedication "to the Queen"
at the beginning, and the other fine dedication, "these to his memory"
(Prince Albert's,) preceding "Idylls of the King."
Such for an off-hand summary of the mighty three that now, by the women,
men, and young folk of the fifty millions given these States by their
late census, have been and are more read than all others put together.
We hear it said, both of Tennyson and another current leading literary
illustrator of Great Britain, Carlyle--as of Victor Hugo in France--that
not one of them is personally friendly or admirant toward America;
indeed, quite the reverse. _N'importe_. That they (and more good minds
than theirs) cannot span the vast revolutionary arch thrown by the
United States over the centuries, fixed in the present, launched to
the endless future; that they cannot stomach the high-life-below-stairs
coloring all our poetic and genteel social status so far--the
measureless viciousness of the great radical Republic, with its
ruffianly nominations and elections; its loud, ill-pitched voice,
utterly regardless whether the verb agrees with the nominative; its
fights, errors, eructations, repulsions, dishonesties, audacities;
those fearful and varied and long-continued storm and stress stages (so
offensive to the well-regulated college-bred mind) wherewith Nature,
history, and time block out nationalities more powerful than the
past, and to upturn it and press on to the future;--that they cannot
understand and fathom all this, I say, is it to be wondered at?
Fortunately, the gestation of our thirty-eight empires (and plenty more
to come) proceeds on its course, on scales of area and velocity immense
and absolute as the globe, and, like the globe itself, quite oblivious
even of great poets and thinkers. But we can by no means afford to be
oblivious of them.
The same of feudalism, its castles, courts, etiquettes, personalities.
However they, or the spirits of them hovering in the air, might scowl
and glower at such removes as current Kansas or Kentucky life and forms,
the latter may by no means repudiate or leave out the former. Allowing
all the evil that it did, we get, here and today, a balance of good out
of its reminiscence almost beyond price.
Am I content, then, that the general interior chyle of our republic
should be supplied and nourish'd by wholesale from foreign and
antagonistic sources such as these? Let me answer that question briefly:
Years ago I thought Americans ought to strike out separate, and have
expressions of their own in highest literature. I think so still,
and more decidedly than ever. But those convictions are now strongly
temper'd by some additional points, (perhaps the results of advancing
age, or the reflection of invalidism.) I see that this world of the
West, as part of all, fuses inseparably with the East, and with all,
as time does--the ever new yet old, old human race--"the same subject
continued," as the novels of our grandfathers had it for chapter-heads.
If we are not to hospitably receive and complete the inaugurations of
the old civilizations, and change their small scale to the largest,
broadest scale, what on earth are we for?
The currents of practical business in America, the rude, coarse,
tussling facts of our lives, and all their daily experiences, need just
the precipitation and tincture of this entirely different fancy world
of lulling, contrasting, even feudalistic, anti-republican poetry and
romance. On the enormous outgrowth of our unloos'd individualities,
and the rank, self-assertion of humanity here, may well fall these
grace-persuading, _recherché_ influences. We first require that
individuals and communities shall be free; then surely comes a time
when it is requisite that they shall not be too free. Although to such
results in the future I look mainly for a great poetry native to us,
these importations till then will have to be accepted, such as they are,
and thankful they are no worse. The inmost spiritual currents of the
present time curiously revenge and check their own compell'd tendency
to democracy, and absorption in it, by mark'd leanings to the past--by
reminiscences in poems, plots, operas, novels, to a far-off, contrary,
deceased world, as if they dreaded the great vulgar gulf-tides of
to-day. Then what has been fifty centuries growing, working in, and
accepted as crowns and apices for our kind, is not going to be pulled
down and discarded in a hurry.
It is, perhaps, time we paid our respects directly to the honorable
party, the real object of these preambles. But we must make
_reconnaissance_ a little further still. Not the least part of our
lesson were to realize the curiosity and interest of friendly foreign
experts,[35] and how our situation looks to them. "American poetry,"
says the London "Times,"[36] is the poetry of apt pupils, but it is
afflicted from first to last with a fatal want of raciness. Bryant has
been long passed as a poet by Professor Longfellow; but in Longfellow,
with all his scholarly grace and tender feeling, the defect is more
apparent than it was in Bryant. Mr. Lowell can overflow with American
humor when politics inspire his muse; but in the realm of pure poetry he
is no more American than a Newdigate prize-man. Joaquin Miller's verse
has fluency and movement and harmony, but as for the thought, his songs
of the sierras might as well have been written in Holland.
Unless in a certain very slight contingency, the "Times" says: "American
verse, from its earliest to its latest stages, seems an exotic, with an
exuberance of gorgeous blossom, but no principle of reproduction. That
is the very note and test of its inherent want. Great poets are tortured
and massacred by having their flowers of fancy gathered and gummed down