Complete Prose Works

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To practically enter into politics is an important part of American
personalism. To every young man, north and south, earnestly studying
these things, I should here, as an offset to what I have said in
former pages, now also say, that may be to views of very largest
scope, after all, perhaps the political, (perhaps the literary and
sociological,) America goes best about its development its own
way--sometimes, to temporary sight, appaling enough. It is the fashion
among dillettants and fops (perhaps I myself am not guiltless,) to
decry the whole formulation of the active politics of America, as
beyond redemption, and to be carefully kept away from. See you that
you do not fall into this error. America, it may be, is doing very
well upon the whole, notwithstanding these antics of the parties and
their leaders, these half-brain'd nominees, the many ignorant ballots,
and many elected failures and blatherers. It is the dillettants, and
all who shirk their duty, who are not doing well. As for you, I advise
you to enter more strongly yet into politics. I advise every young man
to do so. Always inform yourself; always do the best you can; always
vote. Disengage yourself from parties. They have been useful, and
to some extent remain so; but the floating, uncommitted electors,
farmers, clerks, mechanics, the masters of parties--watching aloof,
inclining victory this side or that side--such are the ones most
needed, present and future. For America, if eligible at all to
downfall and ruin, is eligible within herself, not without; for I
see clearly that the combined foreign world could not beat her down.
But these savage, wolfish parties alarm me. Owning no law but their
own will, more and more combative, less and less tolerant of the idea
of ensemble and of equal brotherhood, the perfect equality of the
States, the ever-overarching American ideas, it behooves you to convey
yourself implicitly to no party, nor submit blindly to their dictators,
but steadily hold yourself judge and master over all of them.

So much, (hastily toss'd together, and leaving far more unsaid,) for
an ideal, or intimations of an ideal, toward American manhood. But the
other sex, in our land, requires at least a basis of suggestion.

I have seen a young American woman, one of a large family of
daughters, who, some years since, migrated from her meagre country
home to one of the northern cities, to gain her own support. She soon
became an expert seamstress, but finding the employment too confining
for health and comfort, she went boldly to work for others, to
house-keep, cook, clean, &c. After trying several places, she fell
upon one where she was suited. She has told me that she finds nothing
degrading in her position; it is not inconsistent with personal
dignity, self-respect, and the respect of others. She confers benefits
and receives them. She has good health; her presence itself is
healthy and bracing; her character is unstain'd; she has made herself
understood, and preserves her independence, and has been able to help
her parents, and educate and get places for her sisters; and her
course of life is not without opportunities for mental improvement,
and of much quiet, uncosting happiness and love.

I have seen another woman who, from taste and necessity conjoin'd, has
gone into practical affairs, carries on a mechanical business, partly
works at it herself, dashes out more and more into real hardy life, is
not abash'd by the coarseness of the contact, knows how to be firm and
silent at the same time, holds her own with unvarying coolness and
decorum, and will compare, any day, with superior carpenters, farmers,
and even boatmen and drivers. For all that, she has not lost the
charm of the womanly nature, but preserves and bears it fully, though
through such rugged presentation.

Then there is the wife of a mechanic, mother of two children, a woman
of merely passable English education, but of fine wit, with all her
sex's grace and intuitions, who exhibits, indeed, such a noble female
personality, that I am fain to record it here. Never abnegating her
own proper independence, but always genially preserving it, and what
belongs to it--cooking, washing, child-nursing, house-tending--she
beams sunshine out of all these duties, and makes them illustrious.
Physiologically sweet and sound, loving work, practical, she yet knows
that there are intervals, however few, devoted to recreation, music,
leisure, hospitality--and affords such intervals. Whatever she does,
and wherever she is, that charm, that indescribable perfume of genuine
womanhood attends her, goes with her, exhales from her, which belongs
of right to all the sex, and is, or ought to be, the invariable
atmosphere and common aureola of old as well as young.

My dear mother once described to me a resplendent person, down on Long
Island, whom she knew in early days. She was known by the name of the
Peacemaker. She was well toward eighty years old, of happy and sunny
temperament, had always lived on a farm, and was very neighborly,
sensible and discreet, an invariable and welcom'd favorite, especially
with young married women. She had numerous children and grandchildren.
She was uneducated, but possess'd a native dignity. She had come to
be a tacitly agreed upon domestic regulator, judge, settler of
difficulties, shepherdess, and reconciler in the land. She was a
sight to draw near and look upon, with her large figure, her profuse
snow-white hair, (uncoil'd by any head-dress or cap,) dark eyes, clear
complexion, sweet breath, and peculiar personal magnetism.

The foregoing portraits, I admit, are frightfully out of line from
these imported models of womanly personality--the stock feminine
characters of the current novelists, or of the foreign court poems,
(Ophelias, Enids, princesses, or ladies of one thing or another,)
which fill the envying dreams of so many poor girls, and are accepted
by our men, too, as supreme ideals of feminine excellence to be sought
after. But I present mine just for a change.

Then there are mutterings, (we will not now stop to heed them here,
but they must be heeded,) of something more revolutionary. The day is
coming when the deep questions of woman's entrance amid the arenas of
practical life, politics, the suffrage, &c., will not only be argued
all around us, but may be put to decision, and real experiment.

Of course, in these States, for both man and woman, we must entirely
recast the types of highest personality from what the oriental,
feudal, ecclesiastical worlds bequeath us, and which yet possess the
imaginative and esthetic fields of the United States, pictorial and
melodramatic, not without use as studies, but making sad work, and
forming a strange anachronism upon the scenes and exigencies around
us. Of course, the old undying elements remain. The task is, to
successfully adjust them to new combinations, our own days. Nor is
this so incredible. I can conceive a community, to-day and here, in
which, on a sufficient scale, the perfect personalities, without noise
meet; say in some pleasant western settlement or town, where a couple
of hundred best men and women, of ordinary worldly status, have by
luck been drawn together, with nothing extra of genius or wealth,
but virtuous, chaste, industrious, cheerful, resolute, friendly and
devout. I can conceive such a community organized in running order,
powers judiciously delegated--farming, building, trade, courts, mails,
schools, elections, all attended to; and then the rest of life, the
main thing, freely branching and blossoming in each individual, and
bearing golden fruit. I can see there, in every young and old man,
after his kind, and in every woman after hers, a true personality,
develop'd, exercised proportionately in body, mind, and spirit. I can
imagine this case as one not necessarily rare or difficult, but in
buoyant accordance with the municipal and general requirements of our
times. And I can realize in it the culmination of something better
than any stereotyped _eclat_ of history or poems. Perhaps, unsung,
undramatized, unput in essays or biographies--perhaps even some such
community already exists, in Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, or somewhere,
practically fulfilling itself, and thus outvying, in cheapest vulgar
life, all that has been hitherto shown in best ideal pictures.

In short, and to sum up, America, betaking herself to formative
action, (as it is about time for more solid achievement, and less
windy promise,) must, for her purposes, cease to recognize a theory of
character grown of feudal aristocracies, or form'd by merely literary
standards, or from any ultramarine, full-dress formulas of culture,
polish, caste, &c., and must sternly promulgate her own new standard,
yet old enough, and accepting the old, the perennial elements, and
combining them into groups, unities, appropriate to the modern, the
democratic, the west, and to the practical occasions and needs of our
own cities, and of the agricultural regions. Ever the most precious in
the common. Ever the fresh breeze of field, or hill, or lake, is more
than any palpitation of fans, though of ivory, and redolent with
perfume; and the air is more than the costliest perfumes.

And now, for fear of mistake, we may not intermit to beg our
absolution from all that genuinely is, or goes along with, even
Culture. Pardon us, venerable shade! if we have seem'd to speak
lightly of your office. The whole civilization of the earth, we know,
is yours, with all the glory and the light thereof. It is, indeed, in
your own spirit, and seeking to tally the loftiest teachings of it,
that we aim these poor utterances. For you, too, mighty minister! know
that there is something greater than you, namely, the fresh, eternal
qualities of Being. From them, and by them, as you, at your best, we
too evoke the last, the needed help, to vitalize our country and our
days. Thus we pronounce not so much against the principle of culture;
we only supervise it, and promulge along with it, as deep, perhaps a
deeper, principle. As we have shown the New World including in itself
the all-leveling aggregate of democracy, we show it also including the
all-varied, all-permitting, all-free theorem of individuality, and
erecting therefor a lofty and hitherto unoccupied framework or
platform, broad enough for all, eligible to every farmer and
mechanic--to the female equally with the male--a towering selfhood,
not physically perfect only--not satisfied with the mere mind's and
learning's stores, but religious, possessing the idea of the infinite,
(rudder and compass sure amid this troublous voyage, o'er darkest,
wildest wave, through stormiest wind, of man's or nation's
progress)--realizing, above the rest, that known humanity, in deepest
sense, is fair adhesion to itself, for purposes beyond--and that,
finally, the personality of mortal life is most important with
reference to the immortal, the unknown, the spiritual, the only
permanently real, which as the ocean waits for and receives the
rivers, waits for us each and all.

Much is there, yet, demanding line and outline in our Vistas, not only
on these topics, but others quite unwritten. Indeed, we could talk the
matter, and expand it, through lifetime. But it is necessary to return
to our original premises. In view of them, we have again pointedly to
confess that all the objective grandeurs of the world, for highest
purposes, yield themselves up, and depend on mentality alone. Here,
and here only, all balances, all rests. For the mind, which alone
builds the permanent edifice, haughtily builds it to itself. By it,
with what follows it, are convey'd to mortal sense the culminations of
the materialistic, the known, and a prophecy of the unknown. To
take expression, to incarnate, to endow a literature with grand and
archetypal models--to fill with pride and love the utmost capacity,
and to achieve spiritual meanings, and suggest the future--these, and
these only, satisfy the soul. We must not say one word against real
materials; but the wise know that they do not become real till touched
by emotions, the mind. Did we call the latter imponderable? Ah, let us
rather proclaim that the slightest song-tune, the countless ephemera
of passions arous'd by orators and tale-tellers, are more dense, more
weighty than the engines there in the great factories, or the granite
blocks in their foundations.

Approaching thus the momentous spaces, and considering with reference
to a new and greater personalism, the needs and possibilities of
American imaginative literature, through the medium-light of what we
have already broach'd, it will at once be appreciated that a vast
gulf of difference separates the present accepted condition of these
spaces, inclusive of what is floating in them, from any condition
adjusted to, or fit for, the world, the America, there sought to be
indicated, and the copious races of complete men and women, along
these Vistas crudely outlined. It is, in some sort, no less a
difference than lies between that long-continued nebular state and
vagueness of the astronomical worlds, compared with the subsequent
state, the definitely-form'd worlds themselves, duly compacted,
clustering in systems, hung up there, chandeliers of the universe,
beholding and mutually lit by each other's lights, serving for ground
of all substantial foothold, all vulgar uses--yet serving still more
as an undying chain and echelon of spiritual proofs and shows. A
boundless field to fill! A new creation, with needed orbic works
launch'd forth, to revolve in free and lawful circuits--to move,
self-poised, through the ether, and shine like heaven's own suns! With
such, and nothing less, we suggest that New World literature, fit to
rise upon, cohere, and signalize in time, these States.

What, however, do we more definitely mean by New World literature? Are
we not doing well enough here already? Are not the United States this
day busily using, working, more printer's type, more presses, than
any other country? uttering and absorbing more publications than any
other? Do not our publishers fatten quicker and deeper? (helping
themselves, under shelter of a delusive and sneaking law, or rather
absence of law, to most of their forage, poetical, pictorial,
historical, romantic, even comic, without money and without price--and
fiercely resisting the timidest proposal to pay for it.) Many will
come under this delusion--but my purpose is to dispel it. I say that
a nation may hold and circulate rivers and oceans of very readable
print, journals, magazines, novels, library-books, "poetry," &c.--such
as the States to-day possess and circulate--of unquestionable aid and
value--hundreds of new volumes annually composed and brought out
here, respectable enough, indeed unsurpass'd in smartness and
erudition--with further hundreds, or rather millions, (as by free
forage or theft aforemention'd,) also thrown into the market--and yet,
all the while, the said nation, land, strictly speaking, may possess
no literature at all.

Repeating our inquiry, what, then, do we mean by real literature?
especially the democratic literature of the future? Hard questions to
meet. The clues are inferential, and turn us to the past. At best, we
can only offer suggestions, comparisons, circuits.

It must still be reiterated, as, for the purpose of these memoranda,
the deep lesson of history and time, that all else in the
contributions of a nation or age, through its politics, materials,
heroic personalities, military eclat, &c., remains crude, and defers,
in any close and thorough-going estimate, until vitalized by national,
original archetypes in literature. They only put the nation in form,
finally tell anything--prove, complete anything--perpetuate anything.
Without doubt, some of the richest and most powerful and populous
communities of the antique world, and some of the grandest
personalities and events, have, to after and present times, left
themselves entirely unbequeath'd. Doubtless, greater than any that
have come down to us, were among those lands, heroisms, persons, that
have not come down to us at all, even by name, date, or
location. Others have arrived safely, as from voyages over wide,
century-stretching seas. The little ships, the miracles that have
buoy'd them, and by incredible chances safely convey'd them, (or the
best of them, their meaning and essence,) overlong wastes, darkness,
lethargy, ignorance, &c., have been a few inscriptions--a few
immortal compositions, small in size, yet compassing what measureless
values of reminiscence, contemporary portraitures, manners, idioms and
beliefs, with deepest inference, hint and thought, to tie and touch
forever the old, new body, and the old, new soul! These! and still
these! bearing the freight so dear--dearer than pride--dearer than
love. All the best experience of humanity, folded, saved, freighted
to us here. Some of these tiny ships we call Old and New Testament,
Homer, Eschylus, Plato, Juvenal, &c. Precious minims! I think, if we
were forced to choose, rather than have you, and the likes of you, and
what belongs to, and has grown of you, blotted out and gone, we could
better afford, appaling as that would be, to lose all actual ships,
this day fasten'd by wharf, or floating on wave, and see them, with
all their cargoes, scuttled and sent to the bottom.

Gather'd by geniuses of city, race or age, and put by them in highest
of art's forms, namely, the literary form, the peculiar combinations
and the outshows of that city, age, or race, its particular modes of
the universal attributes and passions, its faiths, heroes, lovers and
gods, wars, traditions, struggles, crimes, emotions, joys, (or the
subtle spirit of these,) having been pass'd on to us to illumine our
own selfhood, and its experiences--what they supply, indispensable
and highest, if taken away, nothing else in all the world's boundless
store-houses could make up to us, or ever again return.

For us, along the great highways of time, those monuments stand
--those forms of majesty and beauty. For us those beacons burn through
all the nights. Unknown Egyptians, graving hieroglyphs; Hindus, with
hymn and apothegm and endless epic; Hebrew prophet, with spirituality,
as in flashes of lightning, conscience like red-hot iron, plaintive
songs and screams of vengeance for tyrannies and enslavement; Christ,
with bent head, brooding love and peace, like a dove; Greek, creating
eternal shapes of physical and esthetic proportion; Roman, lord of
satire, the sword, and the codex;--of the figures, some far off and
veil'd, others nearer and visible; Dante, stalking with lean form,
nothing but fibre, not a grain of superfluous flesh; Angelo, and the
great painters, architects, musicians; rich Shakspere, luxuriant as
the sun, artist and singer of feudalism in its sunset, with all the
gorgeous colors, owner thereof, and using them at will; and so to such
as German Kant and Hegel, where they, though near us, leaping over the
ages, sit again, impassive, imperturbable, like the Egyptian gods. Of
these, and the like of these, is it too much, indeed, to return to our
favorite figure, and view them as orbs and systems of orbs, moving in
free paths in the spaces of that other heaven, the kosmic intellect,
the soul?

Ye powerful and resplendent ones! ye were, in your atmospheres,
grown not for America, but rather for her foes, the feudal and the
old--while our genius is democratic and modern. Yet could ye, indeed,
but breathe your breath of life into our New World's nostrils--not to
enslave us, as now, but, for our needs, to breed a spirit like your
own--perhaps, (dare we to say it?) to dominate, even destroy, what you
yourselves have left! On your plane, and no less, but even higher and
wider, must we mete and measure for to-day and here. I demand races of
orbic bards, with unconditional uncompromising sway. Come forth, sweet
democratic despots of the west!

By points like these we, in reflection, token what we mean by any
land's or people's genuine literature. And thus compared and tested,
judging amid the influence of loftiest products only, what do our
current copious fields of print, covering in manifold forms, the
United States, better, for an analogy, present, than, as in certain
regions of the sea, those spreading, undulating masses of squid,
through which the whale swimming, with head half out, feeds?

Not but that doubtless our current so-called literature, (like an
endless supply of small coin,) performs a certain service, and may-be,
too, the service needed for the time, (the preparation-service, as
children learn to spell.) Everybody reads, and truly nearly everybody
writes, either books, or for the magazines or journals. The matter has
magnitude, too, after a sort. But is it really advancing? or, has it
advanced for a long while? There is something impressive about the
huge editions of the dailies and weeklies, the mountain-stacks of
white paper piled in the press-vaults, and the proud, crashing,
ten-cylinder presses, which I can stand and watch any time by the half
hour. Then, (though the States in the field of imagination present not
a single first-class work, not a single great literatus,) the main
objects, to amuse, to titillate, to pass away time, to circulate the
news, and rumors of news, to rhyme and read rhyme, are yet attain'd,
and on a scale of infinity. To-day, in books, in the rivalry of
writers, especially novelists, success, (so-call'd,) is for him or
her who strikes the mean flat average, the sensational appetite for
stimulus, incident, persiflage, &c., and depicts, to the common
calibre, sensual, exterior life. To such, or the luckiest of them, as
we see, the audiences are limitless and profitable; but they cease
presently. While this day, or any day, to workmen portraying interior
or spiritual life, the audiences were limited, and often laggard--but
they last forever.

Compared with the past, our modern science soars, and our journals
serve--but ideal and even ordinary romantic literature, does not,
I think, substantially advance. Behold the prolific brood of the
contemporary novel, magazine-tale, theatre-play, &c. The same endless
thread of tangled and superlative love-story, inherited, apparently
from the Amadises and Palmerins of the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries
over there in Europe. The costumes and associations brought down to
date, the seasoning hotter and more varied, the dragons and ogres
left out--but the _thing_, I should say, has not advanced--is just as
sensational, just as strain'd--remains about the same, nor more, nor
less.

What is the reason our time, our lands, that we see no fresh local
courage, sanity, of our own--the Mississippi, stalwart Western men,
real mental and physical facts, Southerners, &c., in the body of our
literature? especially the poetic part of it. But always, instead, a
parcel of dandies and ennuyees, dapper little gentlemen from abroad,
who flood us with their thin sentiment of parlors, parasols,
piano-songs, tinkling rhymes, the five-hundredth importation--or
whimpering and crying about something, chasing one aborted conceit
after another, and forever occupied in dyspeptic amours with dyspeptic
women. While, current and novel, the grandest events and revolutions
and stormiest passions of history, are crossing to-day with
unparallel'd rapidity and magnificence over the stages of our own and
all the continents, offering new materials, opening new vistas, with
largest needs, inviting the daring launching forth of conceptions in
literature, inspired by them, soaring in highest regions, serving art
in its highest (which is only the other name for serving God, and
serving humanity,) where is the man of letters, where is the book,
with any nobler aim than to follow in the old track, repeat what
has been said before--and, as its utmost triumph, sell well, and be
erudite or elegant?

Mark the roads, the processes, through which these States have
arrived, standing easy, henceforth ever-equal, ever-compact in their
range to-day. European adventures? the most antique? Asiatic or
African? old history--miracles--romances? Rather our own unquestion'd
facts. They hasten, incredible, blazing bright as fire. From the
deeds and days of Columbus down to the present, and including the
present--and especially the late secession war--when I con them, I
feel, every leaf, like stopping to see if I have not made a mistake,
and fall'n on the splendid figments of some dream. But it is no dream.
We stand, live, move, in the huge flow of our age s materialism--in
its spirituality. We have had founded for us the most positive of
lands. The founders have pass'd to other spheres--but what are these
terrible duties they have left us?

Their politics the United States have, in my opinion, with all their
faults, already substantially establish'd, for good, on their own
native, sound, long-vista'd principles, never to be overturn'd,
offering a sure basis for all the rest. With that, their future
religious forms sociology, literature, teachers, schools, costumes,
&c., are of course to make a compact whole, uniform, on tallying
principles. For how can we remain, divided, contradicting ourselves,
this way?[28] I say we can only attain harmony and stability by
consulting ensemble and the ethic purports, and faithfully building
upon them. For the New World, indeed, after two grand stages of
preparation-strata, I perceive that now a third stage, being ready
for, (and without which the other two were useless,) with unmistakable
signs appears. The First stage was the planning and putting on record
the political foundation rights of immense masses of people--indeed
all people--in the organization of republican National, State, and
municipal governments, all constructed with reference to each, and
each to all. This is the American programme, not for classes, but for
universal man, and is embodied in the compacts of the Declaration of
Independence, and, as it began and has now grown, with its amendments,
the Federal Constitution--and in the State governments, with all their
interiors, and with general suffrage; those having the sense not
only of what is in themselves, but that their certain several things
started, planted, hundreds of others in the same direction duly arise
and follow. The Second stage relates to material prosperity, wealth,
produce, labor-saving machines, iron, cotton, local, State and
continental railways, intercommunication and trade with all lands,
steamships, mining, general employment, organization of great cities,
cheap appliances for comfort, numberless technical schools, books,
newspapers, a currency for money circulation, &c. The Third stage,
rising out of the previous ones, to make them and all illustrious, I,
now, for one, promulge, announcing a native expression-spirit,
getting into form, adult, and through mentality, for these States,
self-contain'd, different from others, more expansive, more rich
and free, to be evidenced by original authors and poets to come, by
American personalities, plenty of them, male and female, traversing
the States, none excepted--and by native superber tableaux and growths
of language, songs, operas, orations, lectures, architecture--and by
a sublime and serious Religious Democracy sternly taking command,
dissolving the old, sloughing off surfaces, and from its own interior
and vital principles, reconstructing, democratizing society.