Complete Prose Works

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Admitting all this, with the priceless value of our political
institutions, general suffrage, (and fully acknowledging the latest,
widest opening of the doors,) I say that, far deeper than these,
what finally and only is to make of our western world a nationality
superior to any hither known, and out-topping the past, must be
vigorous, yet unsuspected Literatures, perfect personalities and
sociologies, original, transcendental, and expressing (what, in
highest sense, are not yet express'd at all,) democracy and the
modern. With these, and out of these, I promulge new races of
Teachers, and of perfect Women, indispensable to endow the birth-stock
of a New World. For feudalism, caste, the ecclesiastic traditions,
though palpably retreating from political institutions, still hold
essentially, by their spirit, even in this country, entire possession
of the more important fields, indeed the very subsoil, of education,
and of social standards and literature.

I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it
founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools,
theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced
anywhere in the past, under opposite influences. It is curious to me
that while so many voices, pens, minds, in the press, lecture-rooms,
in our Congress, &c., are discussing intellectual topics, pecuniary
dangers, legislative problems, the suffrage, tariff and labor
questions, and the various business and benevolent needs of America,
with propositions, remedies, often worth deep attention, there is one
need, a hiatus the profoundest, that no eye seems to perceive, no
voice to state. Our fundamental want to-day in the United States, with
closest, amplest reference to present conditions, and to the future,
is of a class, and the clear idea of a class, of native authors,
literatuses, far different, far higher in grade than any yet known,
sacerdotal, modern, fit to cope with our occasions, lands, permeating
the whole mass of American mentality, taste, belief, breathing into it
a new breath of life, giving it decision, affecting politics far
more than the popular superficial suffrage, with results inside and
underneath the elections of Presidents or Congresses--radiating,
begetting appropriate teachers, schools, manners, and, as its grandest
result, accomplishing, (what neither the schools nor the churches and
their clergy have hitherto accomplish'd, and without which this nation
will no more stand, permanently, soundly, than a house will stand
without a substratum,) a religious and moral character beneath the
political and productive and intellectual bases of the States. For
know you not, dear, earnest reader, that the people of our land may
all read and write, and may all possess the right to vote--and yet the
main things may be entirely lacking?--(and this to suggest them.)

View'd, to-day, from a point of view sufficiently over-arching,
the problem of humanity all over the civilized world is social and
religious, and is to be finally met and treated by literature. The
priest departs, the divine literatus comes. Never was anything more
wanted than, to-day, and here in the States, the poet of the modern is
wanted, or the great literatus of the modern. At all times, perhaps,
the central point in any nation, and that whence it is itself
really sway'd the most, and whence it sways others, is its national
literature, especially its archetypal poems. Above all previous lands,
a great original literature is surely to become the justification and
reliance, (in some respects the sole reliance,) of American democracy.

Few are aware how the great literature penetrates all, gives hue to
all, shapes aggregates and individuals, and, after subtle ways, with
irresistible power, constructs, sustains, demolishes at will. Why
tower, in reminiscence, above all the nations of the earth, two
special lands, petty in themselves, yet inexpressibly gigantic,
beautiful, columnar? Immortal Judah lives, and Greece immortal lives,
in a couple of poems.

Nearer than this. It is not generally realized, but it is true, as the
genius of Greece, and all the sociology, personality, politics and
religion of those wonderful states, resided in their literature or
esthetics, that what was afterwards the main support of European
chivalry, the feudal, ecclesiastical, dynastic world over
there--forming its osseous structure, holding it together for
hundreds, thousands of years, preserving its flesh and bloom, giving
it form, decision, rounding it out, and so saturating it in the
conscious and unconscious blood, breed, belief, and intuitions of men,
that it still prevails powerful to this day, in defiance of the mighty
changes of time--was its literature, permeating to the very marrow,
especially that major part, its enchanting songs, ballads, and
poems.[21]

To the ostent of the senses and eyes, I know, the influences which
stamp the world's history are wars, uprisings or downfalls of
dynasties, changeful movements of trade, important inventions,
navigation, military or civil governments, advent of powerful
personalities, conquerors, etc.. These of course play their part; yet,
it may be, a single new thought, imagination, abstract principle,
even literary style, fit for the time, put in shape by some great
literatus, and projected among mankind, may duly cause changes,
growths, removals, greater than the longest and bloodiest war, or the
most stupendous merely political, dynastic, or commercial overturn.

In short, as, though it may not be realized, it is strictly true, that
a few first-class poets, philosophs, and authors, have substantially
settled and given status to the entire religion, education, law,
sociology, &c., of the hitherto civilized world, by tinging and often
creating the atmospheres out of which they have arisen, such also must
stamp, and more than ever stamp, the interior and real democratic
construction of this American continent, to-day, and days to come.
Remember also this fact of difference, that, while through the antique
and through the mediaeval ages, highest thoughts and ideals realized
themselves, and their expression made its way by other arts, as much
as, or even more than by, technical literature, (not open to the
mass of persons, or even to the majority of eminent persons,) such
literature in our day and for current purposes, is not only more
eligible than all the other arts put together, but has become the only
general means of morally influencing the world. Painting, sculpture,
and the dramatic theatre, it would seem, no longer play an
indispensable or even important part in the workings and mediumship
of intellect, utility, or even high esthetics. Architecture remains,
doubtless with capacities, and a real future. Then music, the
combiner, nothing more spiritual, nothing more sensuous, a god, yet
completely human, advances, prevails, holds highest place; supplying
in certain wants and quarters what nothing else could supply. Yet in
the civilization of to-day it is undeniable that, over all the arts,
literature dominates, serves beyond all--shapes the character of
church and school--or, at any rate, is capable of doing so. Including
the literature of science, its scope is indeed unparallel'd.

Before proceeding further, it were perhaps well to discriminate on
certain points. Literature tills its crops in many fields, and some
may flourish, while others lag. What I say in these Vistas has its
main bearing on imaginative literature, especially poetry, the stock
of all. In the department of science, and the specialty of journalism,
there appear, in these States, promises, perhaps fulfilments, of
highest earnestness, reality, and life, These, of course, are modern.
But in the region of imaginative, spinal and essential attributes,
something equivalent to creation is, for our age and lands,
imperatively demanded. For not only is it not enough that the new
blood, new frame of democracy shall be vivified and held together
merely by political means, superficial suffrage, legislation, &c., but
it is clear to me that, unless it goes deeper, gets at least as firm
and as warm a hold in men's hearts, emotions and belief, as, in their
days, feudalism or ecclesiasticism, and inaugurates its own perennial
sources, welling from the centre forever, its strength will be
defective, its growth doubtful, and its main charm wanting. I suggest,
therefore, the possibility, should some two or three really original
American poets, (perhaps artists or lecturers,) arise, mounting the
horizon like planets, stars of the first magnitude, that, from their
eminence, fusing contributions, races, far localities, &c., together,
they would give more compaction and more moral identity, (the quality
to-day most needed,) to these States, than all its Constitutions,
legislative and judicial ties, and all its hitherto political,
warlike, or materialistic experiences. As, for instance, there could
hardly happen anything that would more serve the States, with all
their variety of origins, their diverse climes, cities, standards,
&c., than possessing an aggregate of heroes, characters, exploits,
sufferings, prosperity or misfortune, glory or disgrace, common to
all, typical of all--no less, but even greater would it be to possess
the aggregation of a cluster of mighty poets, artists, teachers, fit
for us, national expressers, comprehending and effusing for the men
and women of the States, what is universal, native, common to all,
inland and seaboard, northern and southern. The historians say of
ancient Greece, with her ever-jealous autonomies, cities, and states,
that the only positive unity she ever own'd or receiv'd, was the sad
unity of a common subjection, at the last, to foreign conquerors.
Subjection, aggregation of that sort, is impossible to America; but
the fear of conflicting and irreconcilable interiors, and the lack of
a common skeleton, knitting all close, continually haunts me. Or, if
it does not, nothing is plainer than the need, a long period to come,
of a fusion of the States into the only reliable identity, the moral
and artistic one. For, I say, the true nationality of the States, the
genuine union, when we come to a moral crisis, is, and is to be, after
all, neither the written law, nor, (as is generally supposed,) either
self-interest, or common pecuniary or material objects--but the fervid
and tremendous IDEA, melting everything else with resistless heat,
and solving all lesser and definite distinctions in vast, indefinite,
spiritual, emotional power.

It may be claim'd, (and I admit the weight of the claim,) that common
and general worldly prosperity, and a populace well-to-do, and with
all life's material comforts, is the main thing, and is enough. It may
be argued that our republic is, in performance, really enacting to-day
the grandest arts, poems, &c., by beating up the wilderness into
fertile farms, and in her railroads, ships, machinery, &c. And it
may be ask'd, Are these not better, indeed, for America, than any
utterances even of greatest rhapsode, artist, or literatus?

I too hail those achievements with pride and joy: then answer that the
soul of man will not with such only--nay, not with such at all--be
finally satisfied; but needs what, (standing on these and on all
things, as the feet stand on the ground,) is address'd to the
loftiest, to itself alone.

Out of such considerations, such truths, arises for treatment in
these Vistas the important question of character, of an American
stock-personality, with literatures and arts for outlets and
return-expressions, and, of course, to correspond, within outlines
common to all. To these, the main affair, the thinkers of the United
States, in general so acute, have either given feeblest attention, or
have remain'd, and remain, in a state of somnolence.

For my part, I would alarm and caution even the political and business
reader, and to the utmost extent, against the prevailing delusion
that the establishment of free political institutions, and plentiful
intellectual smartness, with general good order, physical plenty,
industry, &c., (desirable and precious advantages as they all are,)
do, of themselves, determine and yield to our experiment of democracy
the fruitage of success. With such advantages at present fully, or
almost fully, possess'd--the Union just issued, victorious, from the
struggle with the only foes it need ever fear, (namely, those within
itself, the interior ones,) and with unprecedented materialistic
advancement--society, in these States, is canker'd, crude,
superstitious, and rotten. Political, or law-made society is, and
private, or voluntary society, is also. In any vigor, the element of
the moral conscience, the most important, the verteber to State or
man, seems to me either entirely lacking, or seriously enfeebled or
ungrown.

I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face,
like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there,
perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the
United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying
principles of the States are not honestly believ'd in, (for all this
hectic glow, and these melo-dramatic screamings,) nor is humanity
itself believ'd in. What penetrating eye does not everywhere see
through the mask? The spectacle is appaling. We live in an atmosphere
of hypocrisy throughout. The men believe not in the women, nor the
women in the men. A scornful superciliousness rules in literature. The
aim of all the _litterateurs_ is to find something to make fun of. A
lot of churches, sects, &c., the most dismal phantasms I know, usurp
the name of religion. Conversation is a mass of badinage. From deceit
in the spirit, the mother of all false deeds, the offspring is already
incalculable. An acute and candid person, in the revenue department in
Washington, who is led by the course of his employment to regularly
visit the cities, north, south and west, to investigate frauds, has
talk'd much with me about his discoveries. The depravity of the
business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed,
but infinitely greater. The official services of America, national,
state, and municipal, in all their branches and departments, except
the judiciary, are saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood,
mal-administration; and the judiciary is tainted. The great cities
reek with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and
scoundrelism. In fashionable life, flippancy, tepid amours, weak
infidelism, small aims, or no aims at all, only to kill time. In
business, (this all-devouring modern word, business,) the one sole
object is, by any means, pecuniary gain. The magician's serpent in
the fable ate up all the other serpents; and money-making is our
magician's serpent, remaining today sole master of the field. The best
class we show, is but a mob of fashionably dress'd speculators and
vulgarians. True, indeed, behind this fantastic farce, enacted on the
visible stage of society, solid things and stupendous labors are to
be discover'd, existing crudely and going on in the background, to
advance and tell themselves in time. Yet the truths are none the less
terrible. I say that our New World democracy, however great a success
in uplifting the masses out of their sloughs, in materialistic
development, products, and in a certain highly-deceptive superficial
popular intellectuality, is, so far, an almost complete failure in its
social aspects, and in really grand religious, moral, literary, and
esthetic results. In vain do we march with unprecedented strides to
empire so colossal, outvying the antique, beyond Alexander's, beyond
the proudest sway of Rome. In vain have we annex'd Texas, California,
Alaska, and reach north for Canada and south for Cuba. It is as if
we were somehow being endow'd with a vast and more and more
thoroughly-appointed body, and then left with little or no soul.

Let me illustrate further, as I write, with current observations,
localities, &c. The subject is important, and will bear repetition.
After an absence, I am now again (September, 1870) in New York city
and Brooklyn, on a few weeks' vacation. The splendor, picturesqueness,
and oceanic amplitude and rush of these great cities, the unsurpass'd
situation, rivers and bay, sparkling sea-tides, costly and lofty
new buildings, facades of marble and iron, of original grandeur and
elegance of design, with the masses of gay color, the preponderance of
white and blue, the flags flying, the endless ships, the tumultuous
streets, Broadway, the heavy, low, musical roar, hardly ever
intermitted, even at night; the jobbers' houses, the rich shops, the
wharves, the great Central Park, and the Brooklyn Park of hills, (as
I wander among them this beautiful fall weather, musing, watching,
absorbing)--the assemblages of the citizens in their groups,
conversations, trades, evening amusements, or along the
by-quarters--these, I say, and the like of these, completely satisfy
my senses of power, fulness, motion, &c., and give me, through such
senses and appetites, and through my esthetic conscience, a continued
exaltation and absolute fulfilment. Always and more and more, as I
cross the East and North rivers, the ferries, or with the pilots
in their pilot-houses, or pass an hour in Wall street, or the gold
exchange, I realize, (if we must admit such partialisms,) that not
Nature alone is great in her fields of freedom and the open air,
in her storms, the shows of night and day, the mountains, forests,
seas--but in the artificial, the work of man too is equally great--in
this profusion of teeming humanity--in these ingenuities, streets,
goods, houses, ships--these hurrying, feverish, electric crowds
of men, their complicated business genius, (not least among the
geniuses,) and all this mighty, many-threaded wealth and industry
concentrated here.

But sternly discarding, shutting our eyes to the glow and grandeur of
the general superficial effect, coming down to what is of the only
real importance, Personalities, and examining minutely, we question,
we ask, Are there, indeed, _men_ here worthy the name? Are there
athletes? Are there perfect women, to match the generous material
luxuriance? Is there a pervading atmosphere of beautiful manners? Are
there crops of fine youths, and majestic old persons? Are there arts
worthy freedom and a rich people? Is there a great moral and religious
civilization--the only justification of a great material one? Confess
that to severe eyes, using the moral microscope upon humanity, a sort
of dry and flat Sahara appears, these cities, crowded with petty
grotesques, malformations, phantoms, playing meaningless antics.

Confess that everywhere, in shop, street, church, theatre, bar-room,
official chair, are pervading flippancy and vulgarity, low cunning,
infidelity--everywhere the youth puny, impudent, foppish, prematurely
ripe--everywhere an abnormal libidinousness, unhealthy forms, male,
female, painted, padded, dyed, chignon'd, muddy complexions, bad
blood, the capacity for good motherhood deceasing or deceas'd, shallow
notions of beauty, with a range of manners, or rather lack of manners,
(considering the advantages enjoy'd,) probably the meanest to be seen
in the world.[22]

Of all this, and these lamentable conditions, to breathe into them
the breath recuperative of sane and heroic life, I say a new founded
literature, not merely to copy and reflect existing surfaces, or
pander to what is called taste--not only to amuse, pass away time,
celebrate the beautiful, the refined, the past, or exhibit technical,
rhythmic, or grammatical dexterity--but a literature underlying life,
religious, consistent with science, handling the elements and forces
with competent power, teaching and training men--and, as perhaps the
most precious of its results, achieving the entire redemption of woman
out of these incredible holds and webs of silliness, millinery, and
every kind of dyspeptic depletion--and thus insuring to the States a
strong and sweet Female Race, a race of perfect Mothers--is what is
needed.

And now, in the full conception of these facts and points, and all
that they infer, pro and con--with yet unshaken faith in the elements
of the American masses, the composites, of both sexes, and even
consider'd as individuals--and ever recognizing in them the broadest
bases of the best literary and esthetic appreciation--I proceed with
my speculations, Vistas.

First, let us see what we can make out of a brief, general,
sentimental consideration of political democracy, and whence it has
arisen, with regard to some of its current features, as an aggregate,
and as the basic structure of our future literature and authorship.
We shall, it is true, quickly and continually find the origin-idea of
the singleness of man, individualism, asserting itself, and cropping
forth, even from the opposite ideas. But the mass, or lump character,
for imperative reasons, is to be ever carefully weigh'd, borne in
mind, and provided for. Only from it, and from its proper regulation
and potency, comes the other, comes the chance of individualism. The
two are contradictory, but our task is to reconcile them.[23]

The political history of the past may be summ'd up as having grown out
of what underlies the words, order, safety, caste, and especially out
of the need of some prompt deciding authority, and of cohesion at all
cost. Leaping time, we come to the period within the memory of people
now living, when, as from some lair where they had slumber'd long,
accumulating wrath, sprang up and are yet active, (1790, and on
eyen to the present, 1870,) those noisy eructations, destructive
iconoclasms, a fierce sense of wrongs, amid which moves the form, well
known in modern history, in the old world, stain'd with much blood,
and mark'd by savage reactionary clamors and demands. These bear,
mostly, as on one inclosing point of need.

For after the rest is said--after the many time-honor'd and really
true things for subordination, experience, rights of property, &c.,
have been listen'd to and acquiesced in--after the valuable and
well-settled statement of our duties and relations in society is
thoroughly conn'd over and exhausted--it remains to bring forward and
modify everything else with the idea of that Something a man is, (last
precious consolation of the drudging poor,) standing apart from
all else, divine in his own right, and a woman in hers, sole and
untouchable by any canons of authority, or any rule derived from
precedent, state-safety, the acts of legislatures, or even from what
is called religion, modesty, or art. The radiation of this truth is
the key of the most significant doings of our immediately preceding
three centuries, and has been the political genesis and life of
America. Advancing visibly, it still more advances invisibly.
Underneath the fluctuations of the expressions of society, as well as
the movements of the politics of the leading nations of the world,
we see steadily pressing ahead and strengthening itself, even in the
midst of immense tendencies toward aggregation, this image of
completeness in separatism, of individual personal dignity, of a single
person, either male or female, characterized in the main, not from
extrinsic acquirements or position, but in the pride of himself or
herself alone; and, as an eventual conclusion and summing up, (or else
the entire scheme of things is aimless, a cheat, a crash,) the simple
idea that the last, best dependence is to be upon humanity itself, and
its own inherent, normal, fullgrown qualities, without any superstitious
support whatever. This idea of perfect individualism it is indeed that
deepest tinges and gives character to the idea of the aggregate. For it
is mainly or altogether to serve independent separatism that we favor
a strong generalization, consolidation. As it is to give the best
vitality and freedom to the rights of the States, (every bit as
important as the right of nationality, the union,) that we insist on
the identity of the Union at all hazards.

The purpose of democracy--supplanting old belief in the necessary
absoluteness of establish'd dynastic rulership, temporal,
ecclesiastical, and scholastic, as furnishing the only security
against chaos, crime, and ignorance--is, through many transmigrations,
and amid endless ridicules, arguments, and ostensible failures, to
illustrate, at all hazards, this doctrine or theory that man, properly
train'd in sanest, highest freedom, may and must become a law, and
series of laws, unto himself, surrounding and providing for, not only
his own personal control, but all his relations to other individuals,
and to the State; and that, while other theories, as in the past
histories of nations, have proved wise enough, and indispensable
perhaps for their conditions, _this,_ as matters now stand in our
civilized world, is the only scheme worth working from, as warranting
results like those of Nature's laws, reliable, when once establish'd,
to carry on themselves.