Complete Prose Works
sense, its construction, is different. The same old font of type, of
course, but set up to a text never composed or issued before. For Nature
consists not only in itself, objectively, but at least just as much in
its subjective reflection from the person, spirit, age, looking at
it, in the midst of it, and absorbing it--faithfully sends back the
characteristic beliefs of the time or individual--takes, and readily
gives again, the physiognomy of any nation or literature--falls like a
great elastic veil on a face, or like the molding plaster on a statue.
What is Nature? What were the elements, the invisible backgrounds and
eidolons of it, to Homer's heroes, voyagers, gods? What all through the
wanderings of Virgil's Aeneas? Then to Shakspere's characters--Hamlet,
Lear, the English-Norman kings, the Romans? What was Nature to Rousseau,
to Voltaire, to the German Goethe in his little classical court gardens?
In those presentments in Tennyson (see the "Idylls of the King"--what
sumptuous, perfumed, arras-and-gold Nature, inimitably described, better
than any, fit for princes and knights and peerless ladies--wrathful or
peaceful, just the same--Vivien and Merlin in their strange dalliance,
or the death-float of Elaine, or Geraint and the long journey of his
disgraced Enid and himself through the wood, and the wife all day
driving the horses,) as in all the great imported art-works, treatises
systems, from Lucretius down, there is a constantly lurking often
pervading something, that will have to be eliminated, as not only
unsuited to modern democracy and science in America, but insulting to
them, and disproved by them.[37]
Still, the rule and demesne of poetry will always be not the exterior,
but interior; not the macrocosm, but microcosm; not Nature, but Man. I
haven't said anything about the imperative need of a race of giant bards
in the future, to hold up high to eyes of land and race the eternal
antiseptic models, and to dauntlessly confront greed, injustice, and all
forms of that wiliness and tyranny whose roots never die--(my opinion
is, that after all the rest is advanced, _that_ is what first-class
poets are for; as, to their days and occasions, the Hebrew lyrists,
Roman Juvenal, and doubtless the old singers of India, and the British
Druids)--to counteract dangers, immensest ones, already looming in
America--measureless corruption in politics--what we call religion,
a mere mask of wax or lace;--for _ensemble_, that most cankerous,
offensive of all earth's shows--a vast and varied community, prosperous
and fat with wealth of money and products and business ventures--plenty
of mere intellectuality too--and then utterly without the sound,
prevailing, moral and esthetic health-action beyond all the money and
mere intellect of the world.
Is it a dream of mine that, in times to come, west, south, east, north,
will silently, surely arise a race of such poets, varied, yet one
in soul--nor only poets, and of the best, but newer, larger
prophets--larger than Judea's, and more passionate--to meet and
penetrate those woes, as shafts of light the darkness?
As I write, the last fifth of the nineteenth century is enter'd upon,
and will soon be waning. Now, and for a long time to come, what the
United States most need, to give purport, definiteness, reason why, to
their unprecedented material wealth, industrial products, education
by rote merely, great populousness and intellectual activity, is the
central, spinal reality, (or even the idea of it,) of such a democratic
band of-native-born-and-bred teachers, artists, _littérateurs_, tolerant
and receptive of importations, but entirely adjusted to the West, to
ourselves, to our own days, combinations, differences, superiorities.
Indeed, I am fond of thinking that the whole series of concrete and
political triumphs of the Republic are mainly as bases and preparations
for half a dozen future poets, ideal personalities, referring not to a
special class, but to the entire people, four or five millions of square
miles.
Long, long are the processes of the development of a nationality Only
to the rapt vision does the seen become the prophecy of the unseen.[38]
Democracy, so far attending only to the real, is not for the real only,
but the grandest ideal--to justify the modern by that, and not only to
equal, but to become by that superior to the past.
On a comprehensive summing up of the processes and present and hitherto
condition of the United States, with reference to their future, and
the indispensable precedents to it, my point, below all surfaces, and
subsoiling them, is, that the bases and prerequisites of a leading
nationality are, first, at all hazards, freedom, worldly wealth and
products on the largest and most varied scale, common education and
intercommunication, and, in general, the passing through of just the
stages and crudities we have passed or are passing through in the United
States.
Then, perhaps, as weightiest factor of the whole business, and of the
main outgrowths of the future, it remains to be definitely avow'd
that the native-born middle-class population of quite all the United
States--the average of farmers and mechanics everywhere--the real,
though latent and silent bulk of America, city or country, presents a
magnificent mass of material, never before equal'd on earth. It is this
material, quite unexpress'd by literature or art, that in every respect
insures the future of the republic. During the secession war I was with
the armies, and saw the rank and file, north and south, and studied them
for four years. I have never had the least doubt about the country in
its essential future since.
Meantime, we can (perhaps) do no better than to saturate ourselves with,
and continue to give imitations, yet awhile, of the esthetic models,
supplies, of that past and of those lands we spring from. Those wondrous
stores, reminiscences, floods, currents! Let them flow on, flow hither
freely. And let the sources be enlarged, to include not only the works
of British origin, as now, but stately and devout Spain, courteous
France, profound Germany, the manly Scandinavian lands, Italy's art
race, and always the mystic Orient. Remembering that at present, and
doubtless long ahead, a certain humility would well become us. The
course through time of highest civilization, does it not wait the
first glimpse of our contribution to its kosmic train of poems,
bibles, first-class structures, perpetuities--Egypt and Palestine and
India--Greece and Rome and mediaeval Europe--and so onward? The shadowy
procession is not a meagre one, and the standard not a low one. All that
is mighty in our kind seems to have already trod the road. Ah, never may
America forget her thanks and reverence for samples, treasures such
as these--that other life-blood, inspiration, sunshine, hourly in use
to-day, all days, forever, through her broad demesne!
All serves our New World progress, even the bafflers, head-winds,
cross-tides. Through many perturbations and squalls, and much backing
and filling, the ship, upon the whole, makes unmistakably for her
destination. Shakspere has served, and serves, may-be, the best of any.
For conclusion, a passing thought, a contrast, of him who, in my
opinion, continues and stands for the Shaksperean cultus at the present
day among all English-writing peoples--of Tennyson, his poetry. I find
it impossible, as I taste the sweetness of those lines, to escape the
flavor, the conviction, the lush-ripening culmination, and last honey of
decay (I dare not call it rottenness) of that feudalism which the
mighty English dramatist painted in all the splendors of its noon and
afternoon. And how they are chanted--both poets! Happy those kings and
nobles to be so sung, so told! To run their course--to get their deeds
and shapes in lasting pigments--the very pomp and dazzle of the sunset!
Meanwhile, democracy waits the coming of its bards in silence and in
twilight--but 'tis the twilight of the dawn.
Notes:
[35] A few years ago I saw the question, "Has America produced any great
poem?" announced as prize-subject for the competition of some university
in Northern Europe. I saw the item in a foreign paper and made a note
of it; but being taken down with paralysis, and prostrated for a long
season, the matter slipp'd away, and I have never been able since to get
hold of any essay presented for the prize, or report of the discussion,
nor to learn for certain whether there was any essay or discussion,
nor can I now remember the place. It may have been Upsala, or possibly
Heidelberg. Perhaps some German or Scandinavian can give particulars. I
think it was in 1872.
[36] In a long and prominent editorial, at the time, on the death of
William Cullen Bryant.
[37] Whatever may be said of the few principal poems--or their best
passages--it is certain that the overwhelming mass of poetic works,
as now absorb'd into human character, exerts a certain constipating,
repressing, indoor, and artificial influence, impossible to
elude--seldom or never that freeing, dilating, joyous one, with which
uncramp'd Nature works on every individual without exception.
[38] Is there not such a thing as the philosophy of American history and
politics? And if so, what is it?... Wise men say there are two sets
of wills to nations and to persons--one set that acts and works
from explainable motives--from teaching, intelligence, judgment,
circumstance, caprice, emulation, greed, etc.--and then another set,
perhaps deep, hidden, unsuspected, yet often more potent than the
first, refusing to be argued with, rising as it were out of abysses,
resistlessly urging on speakers, doers, communities, unwitting to
themselves--the poet to his fieriest words--the race to pursue its
loftiest ideal. Indeed, the paradox of a nation's life and career, with
all its wondrous contradictions, can probably only be explain'd from
these two wills, sometimes conflicting, each operating in its sphere,
combining in races or in persons, and producing strangest results.
Let us hope there is (indeed, can there be any doubt there is?) this
great unconscious and abysmic second will also running through the
average nationality and career of America. Let us hope that, amid all
the dangers and defections of the present, and through all the processes
of the conscious will, it alone is the permanent and sovereign force,
destined to carry on the New World to fulfil its destinies in the
future--to resolutely pursue those destinies, age upon age; to build,
far, far beyond its past vision, present thought; to form and fashion,
and for the general type, men and women more noble, more athletic than
the world has yet seen; to gradually, firmly blend, from all the States,
with all varieties, a friendly, happy, free, religious nationality--a
nationality not only the richest, most inventive, most productive and
materialistic the world has yet known, but compacted indissolubly, and
out of whose ample and solid bulk, and giving purpose and finish to it,
conscience, morals, and all the spiritual attributes, shall surely rise,
like spires above some group of edifices, firm-footed on the earth, yet
scaling space and heaven.
Great as they are, and greater far to be, the United States, too, are
but a series of steps in the eternal process of creative thought. And
here is, to my mind, their final justification, and certain perpetuity.
There is in that sublime process, in the laws of the universe--and,
above all, in the moral law--something that would make unsatisfactory,
and even vain and contemptible, all the triumphs of war, the gains of
peace, and the proudest worldly grandeur of all the nations that
have ever existed, or that (ours included) now exist, except that we