Complete Prose Works
considerable exceptions still exist. However, it must be called the
general rule, sanction'd by immemorial usage, and will probably always
remain so.
_First party_--Why not, then, respect it in your poems?
_Answer_--One reason, and to me a profound one, is that the soul of a
man or woman demands, enjoys compensation in the highest directions for
this very restraint of himself or herself, level'd to the average, or
rather mean, low, however eternally practical, requirements of society's
intercourse. To balance this indispensable abnegation, the free minds
of poets relieve themselves, and strengthen and enrich mankind with free
flights in all the directions not tolerated by ordinary society.
_First party_--But must not outrage or give offence to it.
_Answer_--No, not in the deepest sense--and do not, and cannot. The
vast averages of time and the race _en masse_ settle these things. Only
understand that the conventional standards and laws proper enough for
ordinary society apply neither to the action of the soul, nor its poets.
In fact the latter know no laws but the laws of themselves, planted in
them by God, and are themselves the last standards of the law, and its
final exponents--responsible to Him directly, and not at all to mere
etiquette. Often the best service that can be done to the race, is
to lift the veil, at least for a time, from these rules and
fossil-etiquettes.
NEW POETRY--_California, Canada, Texas_.--In my opinion the time has
arrived to essentially break down the barriers of form between prose and
poetry. I say the latter is henceforth to win and maintain its character
regardless of rhyme, and the measurement-rules of iambic, spondee,
dactyl, &c., and that even if rhyme and those measurements continue
to furnish the medium for inferior writers and themes, (especially for
persiflage and the comic, as there seems henceforward, to the perfect
taste, something inevitably comic in rhyme, merely in itself, and
anyhow,) the truest and greatest _Poetry_, (while subtly and necessarily
always rhythmic, and distinguishable easily enough,) can never again, in
the English language, be express'd in arbitrary and rhyming metre, any
more than the greatest eloquence, or the truest power and passion. While
admitting that the venerable and heavenly forms of chiming versification
have in their time play'd great and fitting parts--that the pensive
complaint, the ballads, wars, amours, legends of Europe, &c., have, many
of them, been inimitably render'd in rhyming verse--that there have
been very illustrious poets whose shapes the mantle of such verse
has beautifully and appropriately envelopt--and though the mantle
has fallen, with perhaps added beauty, on some of our own age--it is,
not-withstanding, certain to me, that the day of such conventional rhyme
is ended. In America, at any rate, and as a medium of highest esthetic
practical or spiritual expression, present or future, it palpably
fails, and must fail, to serve. The Muse of the Prairies, of California,
Canada, Texas, and of the peaks of Colorado, dismissing the literary,
as well as social etiquette of over-sea feudalism and caste, joyfully
enlarging, adapting itself to comprehend the size of the whole people,
with the free play, emotions, pride, passions, experiences, that belong
to them, body and soul--to the general globe, and all its relations in
astronomy, as the savans portray them to us--to the modern, the busy
Nineteenth century, (as grandly poetic as any, only different,)
with steamships, railroads, factories, electric telegraphs, cylinder
presses--to the thought of the solidarity of nations, the brotherhood
and sisterhood of the entire earth--to the dignity and heroism of the
practical labor of farms, factories, foundries, workshops, mines, or
on shipboard, or on lakes and rivers--resumes that other medium of
expression, more flexible, more eligible--soars to the freer, vast,
diviner heaven of prose.
Of poems of the third or fourth class, (perhaps even some of the
second,) it makes little or no difference who writes them--they are good
enough for what they are; nor is it necessary that they should be
actual emanations from the personality and life of the writers. The very
reverse sometimes gives piquancy. But poems of the first class, (poems
of the depth, as distinguished from those of the surface,) are to be
sternly tallied with the poets themselves, and tried by them and their
lives. Who wants a glorification of courage and manly defiance from
a coward or a sneak?--a ballad of benevolence or chastity from some
rhyming hunks, or lascivious, glib _roué_?
In these States, beyond all precedent, poetry will have to do with
actual facts, with the concrete States, and--for we have not much more
than begun--with the definitive getting into shape of the Union. Indeed
I sometimes think _it_ alone is to define the Union, (namely, to give
it artistic character, spirituality, dignity.) What American humanity is
most in danger of is an overwhelming prosperity, "business" worldliness,
materialism: what is most lacking, east, west, north, south, is a fervid
and glowing Nationality and patriotism, cohering all the parts into one.
Who may fend that danger, and fill that lack in the future, but a class
of loftiest poets?
If the United States haven't grown poets, on any scale of grandeur,
it is certain they import, print, and read more poetry than any equal
number of people elsewhere--probably more than all the rest of the world
combined.
Poetry (like a grand personality) is a growth of many generations--many
rare combinations.
To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too.
BRITISH LITERATURE
To avoid mistake, I would say that I not only commend the study of
this literature, but wish our sources of supply and comparison vastly
enlarged. American students may well derive from all former lands--from
forenoon Greece and Rome, down to the perturb'd mediaeval times,
the Crusades, and so to Italy, the German intellect--all the older
literatures, and all the newer ones--from witty and warlike France,
and markedly, and in many ways, and at many different periods, from the
enterprise and soul of the great Spanish race--bearing ourselves
always courteous, always deferential, indebted beyond measure to the
mother-world, to all its nations dead, as all its nations living--the
offspring, this America of ours, the daughter, not by any means of the
British isles exclusively, but of the continent, and all continents.
Indeed, it is time we should realize and fully fructify those germs we
also hold from Italy, France, Spain, especially in the best imaginative
productions of those lands, which are, in many ways, loftier and subtler
than the English, or British, and indispensable to complete our service,
proportions, education, reminiscences, &c.... The British element
these States hold, and have always held, enormously beyond its fit
proportions. I have already spoken of Shakspere. He seems to me
of astral genius, first class, entirely fit for feudalism. His
contributions, especially to the literature of the passions, are
immense, forever dear to humanity--and his name is always to be
reverenced in America. But there is much in him ever offensive to
democracy. He is not only the tally of feudalism, but I should say
Shakspere is incarnated, uncompromising feudalism, in literature. Then
one seems to detect something in him--I hardly know how to describe
it--even amid the dazzle of his genius; and, in inferior manifestations,
it is found in nearly all leading British authors. (Perhaps we will have
to import the words Snob, Snobbish, &c., after all.) While of the great
poems of Asian antiquity, the Indian epics, the book of Job, the Ionian
Iliad, the unsurpassedly simple, loving, perfect idyls of the life and
death of Christ, in the New Testament, (indeed Homer and the Biblical
utterances intertwine familiarly with us, in the main,) and along down,
of most of the characteristic, imaginative or romantic relics of the
continent, as the Cid, Cervantes' Don Quixote, &c., I should say they
substantially adjust themselves to us, and, far off as they are, accord
curiously with our bed and board to-day, in New York, Washington,
Canada, Ohio, Texas, California--and with our notions, both of
seriousness and of fun, and our standards of heroism, manliness, and
even the democratic requirements--those requirements are not only not
fulfill'd in the Shaksperean productions, but are insulted on every
page.
I add that--while England is among the greatest of lands in political
freedom, or the idea of it, and in stalwart personal character, &c.--the
spirit of English literature is not great, at least is not greatest--and
its products are no models for us. With the exception of Shakspere,
there is no first-class genius in that literature--which, with a truly
vast amount of value, and of artificial beauty, (largely from the
classics,) is almost always material, sensual, not spiritual--almost
always congests, makes plethoric, not frees, expands, dilates--is cold,
anti-democratic, loves to be sluggish and stately, and shows much of
that characteristic of vulgar persons, the dread of saying or doing
something not at all improper in itself, but unconventional, and that
may be laugh'd at. In its best, the sombre pervades it; it is moody,
melancholy, and, to give it its due, expresses, in characters and
plots, those qualities, in an unrival'd manner. Yet not as the black
thunder-storms, and in great normal, crashing passions, of the Greek
dramatists--clearing the air, refreshing afterward, bracing with power;
but as in Hamlet, moping, sick, uncertain, and leaving ever after a
secret taste for the blues, the morbid fascination, the luxury of wo....
I strongly recommend all the young men and young women of the United
States to whom it may be eligible, to overhaul the well-freighted
fleets, the literatures of Italy, Spain, France, Germany, so full of
those elements of freedom, self-possession, gay-heartedness, subtlety,
dilation, needed in preparations for the future of the States. I only
wish we could have really good translations. I rejoice at the feeling
for Oriental researches and poetry, and hope it will go on.
DARWINISM--(THEN FURTHERMORE)
Running through prehistoric ages--coming down from them into the
daybreak of our records, founding theology, suffusing literature, and so
brought onward--(a sort of verteber and marrow to all the antique races
and lands, Egypt, India, Greece, Rome, the Chinese, the Jews, &c., and
giving cast and complexion to their art, poems, and their politics as
well as ecclesiasticism, all of which we more or less inherit,) appear
those venerable claims to origin from God himself, or from gods and
goddesses--ancestry from divine beings of vaster beauty, size, and power
than ours. But in current and latest times, the theory of human
origin that seems to have most made its mark, (curiously reversing the
antique,) is that we have come on, originated, developt, from monkeys,
baboons--a theory more significant perhaps in its indirections, or what
it necessitates, than it is even in itself. (Of the twain, far apart as
they seem, and angrily as their conflicting advocates to-day oppose
each other, are not both theories to be possibly reconcil'd, and even
blended? Can we, indeed, spare either of them? Better still, out of
them is not a third theory, the real one, or suggesting the real one, to
arise?)
Of this old theory, evolution, as broach'd anew, trebled, with indeed
all-devouring claims, by Darwin, it has so much in it, and is so needed
as a counterpoise to yet widely prevailing and unspeakably tenacious,
enfeebling superstitions--is fused, by the new man, into such grand,