Complete Prose Works
in the _hortus siccus_ of an anthology. American poets show better in
an anthology than in the collected volumes of their works. Like their
audience they have been unable to resist the attraction of the vast
orbit of English literature. They may talk of the primeval forest, but
it would generally be very hard from internal evidence to detect that
they were writing on the banks of the Hudson rather than on those of the
Thames. ....In fact, they have caught the English tone and air and mood
only too faithfully, and are accepted by the superficially cultivated
English intelligence as readily as if they were English born. Americans
themselves confess to a certain disappointment that a literary curiosity
and intelligence so diffused [as in the United States] have not taken
up English literature at the point at which America has received it, and
carried it forward and developed it with an independent energy. But like
reader like poet. Both show the effects of having come into an estate
they have not earned. A nation of readers has required of its poets a
diction and symmetry of form equal to that of an old literature like
that of Great Britain, which is also theirs. No ruggedness, however
racy, would be tolerated by circles which, however superficial their
culture, read Byron and Tennyson."
The English critic, though a gentleman and a scholar, and friendly
withal, is evidently not altogether satisfied, (perhaps he is jealous,)
and winds up by saying: "For the English language to have been enriched
with a national poetry which was not English but American, would have
been a treasure beyond price." With which, as whet and foil, we shall
proceed to ventilate more definitely certain no doubt willful opinions.
Leaving unnoticed at present the great masterpieces of the antique, or
anything from the middle ages, the prevailing flow of poetry for the
last fifty or eighty years, and now at its height, has been and is (like
the music) an expression of mere surface melody, within narrow limits,
and yet, to give it its due, perfectly satisfying to the demands of the
ear, of wondrous charm, of smooth and easy delivery, and the triumph of
technical art. Above all things it is fractional and select. It shrinks
with aversion from the sturdy, the universal, and the democratic.
The poetry of the future, (a phrase open to sharp criticism, and not
satisfactory to me, but significant, and I will use it)--the poetry of
the future aims at the free expression of emotion, (which means far, far
more than appears at first,) and to arouse and initiate, more than to
define or finish. Like all modern tendencies, it has direct or indirect
reference continually to the reader, to you or me, to the central
identity of everything, the mighty Ego. (Byron's was a vehement dash,
with plenty of impatient democracy, but lurid and introverted amid all
its magnetism; not at all the fitting, lasting song of a grand, secure,
free, sunny race.) It is more akin, likewise, to outside life and
landscape, (returning mainly to the antique feeling,) real sun and gale,
and woods and shores--to the elements themselves--not sitting at ease in
parlor or library listening to a good tale of them, told in good rhyme.
Character, a feature far above style or polish--a feature not absent at
any time, but now first brought to the fore--gives predominant stamp to
advancing poetry. Its born sister, music, already responds to the same
influences. "The music of the present, Wagner's, Gounod's, even the
later Verdi's, all tends toward this free expression of poetic emotion,
and demands a vocalism totally unlike that required for Rossini's
splendid roulades, or Bellini's suave melodies."
Is there not even now, indeed, an evolution, a departure from the
masters? Venerable and unsurpassable after their kind as are the old
works, and always unspeakably precious as studies, (for Americans
more than any other people,) is it too much to say that by the
shifted combinations of the modern mind the whole underlying theory
of first-class verse has changed? "Formerly, during the period term'd
classic," says Sainte-Beuve, "when literature was govern'd by recognized
rules, he was considered the best poet who had composed the most perfect
work, the most beautiful poem, the most intelligible, the most
agreeable to read, the most complete in every respect,--the Aeneid, the
Gerusalemme, a fine tragedy. To-day, something else is wanted. For us
the greatest poet is he who in his works most stimulates the reader's
imagination and reflection, who excites him the most himself to poetize.
The greatest poet is not he who has done the best; it is he who suggests
the most; he, not all of whose meaning is at first obvious, and who
leaves you much to desire, to explain, to study, much to complete in
your turn."
The fatal defects our American singers labor under are subordination of
spirit, an absence of the concrete and of real patriotism, and in excess
that modern esthetic contagion a queer friend of mine calls the _beauty
disease_. "The immoderate taste for beauty and art," says Charles
Baudelaire, "leads men into monstrous excesses. In minds imbued with a
frantic greed for the beautiful, all the balances of truth and justice
disappear. There is a lust, a disease of the art faculties, which eats
up the moral like a cancer."
Of course, by our plentiful verse-writers there is plenty of service
perform'd, of a kind. Nor need we go far for a tally. We see, in
every polite circle, a class of accomplished, good-natured persons,
("society," in fact, could not get on without them,) fully eligible for
certain problems, times, and duties--to mix egg-nog, to mend the broken
spectacles, to decide whether the stewed eels shall precede the sherry
or the sherry the stewed eels, to eke out Mrs. A. B.'s parlor-tableaux
with monk, Jew, lover, Puck, Prospero, Caliban, or what not, and to
generally contribute and gracefully adapt their flexibilities and
talents, in those ranges, to the world's service. But for real crises,
great needs and pulls, moral or physical, they might as well have never
been born.
Or the accepted notion of a poet would appear to be a sort of male
odalisque, singing or piano-playing a kind of spiced ideas, second-hand
reminiscences, or toying late hours at entertainments, in rooms stifling
with fashionable scent. I think I haven't seen a new-published, healthy,
bracing, simple lyric in ten years. Not long ago, there were verses in
each of three fresh monthlies, from leading authors, and in every one
the whole central _motif_ (perfectly serious) was the melancholiness
of a marriageable young woman who didn't get a rich husband, but a poor
one!
Besides its tonic and _al fresco_ physiology, relieving such as this,
the poetry of the future will take on character in a more important
respect. Science, having extirpated the old stock-fables and
superstitions, is clearing a field for verse, for all the arts, and
even for romance, a hundred-fold ampler and more wonderful, with the new
principles behind. Republicanism advances over the whole world. Liberty,
with Law by her side, will one day be paramount--will at any rate be
the central idea. Then only--for all the splendor and beauty of what has
been, or the polish of what is--then only will the true poets appear,
and the true poems. Not the satin and patchouly of today, not the
glorification of the butcheries and wars of the past, nor any fight
between Deity on one side and somebody else on the other--not Milton,
not even Shakspere's plays, grand as they are. Entirely different and
hitherto unknown Classes of men, being authoritatively called for in
imaginative literature, will certainly appear. What is hitherto most
lacking, perhaps most absolutely indicates the future. Democracy has
been hurried on through time by measureless tides and winds, resistless
as the revolution of the globe, and as far-reaching and rapid. But in
the highest walks of art it has not yet had a single representative
worthy of it anywhere upon the earth.
Never had real bard a task more fit for sublime ardor and genius than
to sing worthily the songs these States have already indicated. Their
origin, Washington, '76, the picturesqueness of old times, the war of
1812 and the sea-fights; the incredible rapidity of movement and breadth
of area--to fuse and compact the South and North, the East and West,
to express the native forms, situations, scenes, from Montauk to
California, and from the Saguenay to the Rio Grande--the working out on
such gigantic scales, and with such a swift and mighty play of changing
light and shade, of the great problems of man and freedom,--how far
ahead of the stereotyped plots, or gem-cutting, or tales of love,
or wars of mere ambition! Our history is so full of spinal, modern,
germinal subjects--one above all. What the ancient siege of Illium, and
the puissance of Hector's and Agamemnon's warriors proved to Hellenic
art and literature, and all art and literature since, may prove the
war of attempted secession of 1861-'65 to the future esthetics, drama,
romance, poems of the United States.
Nor could utility itself provide anything more practically serviceable
to the hundred millions who, a couple of generations hence, will inhabit
within the limits just named, than the permeation of a sane, sweet,
autochthonous national poetry--must I say of a kind that does not now
exist? but which, I fully believe, will in time be supplied on scales as
free as Nature's elements. (It is acknowledged that we of the States
are the most materialistic and money-making people ever known. My own
theory, while fully accepting this, is that we are the most emotional,
spiritualistic, and poetry-loving people also.)
Infinite are the new and orbic traits waiting to be launch'd forth in
the firmament that is, and is to be, America. Lately, I have wonder'd
whether the last meaning of this cluster of thirty-eight States is not
only practical fraternity among themselves--the only real union, (much
nearer its accomplishment, too, than appears on the surface)--but for
fraternity over the whole globe--that dazzling, pensive dream of ages!
Indeed, the peculiar glory of our lands, I have come to see, or expect
to see, not in their geographical or republican greatness, nor wealth or
products, nor military or naval power, nor special, eminent names in any
department, to shine with, or outshine, foreign special names in similar
departments,--but more and more in a vaster, saner, more surrounding
Comradeship, uniting closer and closer not only the American States, but
all nations, and all humanity. That, O poets! is not that a theme worth
chanting, striving for? Why not fix your verses henceforth to the
gauge of the round globe? the whole race? Perhaps the most illustrious
culmination of the modern may thus prove to be a signal growth of
joyous, more exalted bards of adhesiveness, identically one in soul, but
contributed by every nation, each after its distinctive kind. Let us,
audacious, start it. Let the diplomats, as ever, still deeply plan,
seeking advantages, proposing treaties between governments, and to bind
them, on paper: what I seek is different, simpler. I would inaugurate
from America, for this purpose, new formulas--international poems. I
have thought that the invisible root out of which the poetry deepest in,
and dearest to, humanity grows, is Friendship. I have thought that both
in patriotism and song (even amid their grandest shows past) we have
adhered too long to petty limits, and that the time has come to enfold
the world.
Not only is the human and artificial world we have establish'd in the
West a radical departure from anything hitherto known--not only men and
politics, and all that goes with them--but Nature itself, in the main