Complete Prose Works

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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 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,
_litterateurs_, 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 constantly see, through all their worldly career,
however struggling and blind and lame, attempts, by all ages, all
peoples, according to their development, to reach, to press, to
progress on, and ever farther on, to more and more advanced ideals.

The glory of the republic of the United States, in my opinion, is
to be that, emerging in the light of the modern and the splendor of
science, and solidly based on the past, it is to cheerfully range
itself, and its politics are henceforth to come, under those universal
laws, and embody them, and carry them out, to serve them. And as only
that individual becomes truly great who understands well that, while
complete in himself in a certain sense, he is but a part of the
divine, eternal scheme, and whose special life and laws are adjusted
to move in harmonious relations with the general laws of Nature, and
especially with the moral law, the deepest and highest of all, and the
last vitality of man or state--so the United States may only become
the greatest and the most continuous, by understanding well their
harmonious relations with entire humanity and history, and all their
laws and progress, sublimed with the creative thought of Deity,
through all time, past, present, and future. Thus will they expand
to the amplitude of their destiny, and become illustrations and
culminating parts of the kosmos, and of civilization.

No more considering the States as an incident, or series of incidents,
however vast, coming accidentally along the path of time, and shaped
by casual emergencies as they happen to arise, and the mere result
of modern improvements, vulgar and lucky, ahead of other nations and
times, I would finally plant, as seeds, these thoughts or speculations
in the growth of our republic--that it is the deliberate culmination
and result of all the past--that here, too, as in all departments of
the universe, regular laws (slow and sure in planting, slow and sure
in ripening) have controll'd and govern'd, and will yet control and
govern; and that those laws can no more be baffled or steer'd clear
of, or vitiated, by chance, or any fortune or opposition, than the
laws of winter and summer, or darkness and light.

The summing up of the tremendous moral and military perturbations of
1861-'65, and their results--and indeed of the entire hundred years of
the past of our national experiment, from its inchoate movement down
to the present day (1780-1881)--is, that they all now launch the
United States fairly forth, consistently with the entirety of
civilization and humanity, and in main sort the representative of
them, leading the van, leading the fleet of the modern and democratic,
on the seas and voyages of the future.

And the real history of the United States--starting from that great
convulsive struggle for unity, the secession war, triumphantly
concluded, and _the South_ victorious after all--is only to be written
at the remove of hundreds, perhaps a thousand, years hence.

A MEMORANDUM AT A VENTURE

"All is proper to be express'd, provided our aim is only high enough."
--_J. F. Millet._

"The candor of science is the glory of the modern. It does not hide
and repress; it confronts, turns on the light. It alone has perfect
faith--faith not in a part only, but all. Does it not undermine the
old religious standards? Yes, in God's truth, by excluding the devil
from the theory of the universe--by showing that evil is not a law in
itself, but a sickness, a perversion of the good, and the other side
of the good--that in fact all of humanity, and of everything, is
divine in its bases, its eligibilities."

Shall the mention of such topics as I have briefly but plainly and
resolutely broach'd in the "Children of Adam" section of "Leaves of
Grass" be admitted in poetry and literature? Ought not the innovation
to be put down by opinion and criticism? and, if those fail, by the
District Attorney? True, I could not construct a poem which declaredly
took, as never before, the complete human identity, physical, moral,
emotional, and intellectual, (giving precedence and compass in a
certain sense to the first,) nor fulfil that _bona fide_ candor
and entirety of treatment which was a part of my purpose, without
comprehending this section also. But I would entrench myself more
deeply and widely than that. And while I do not ask any man to indorse
my theory, I confess myself anxious that what I sought to write and
express, and the ground I built on, shall be at least partially
understood, from its own platform. The best way seems to me to
confront the question with entire frankness.

There are, generally speaking, two points of view, two conditions of
the world's attitude toward these matters; the first, the conventional
one of good folks and good print everywhere, repressing any direct
statement of them, and making allusions only at second or third
hand--(as the Greeks did of death, which, in Hellenic social culture,
was not mention'd point-blank, but by euphemisms.) In the civilization
of to-day, this condition--without stopping to elaborate the arguments
and facts, which are many and varied and perplexing--has led to states
of ignorance, repressal, and cover'd over disease and depletion,
forming certainly a main factor in the world's woe. A nonscientific,
non-esthetic, and eminently non-religious condition, bequeath'd to us
from the past, (its origins diverse, one of them the far-back lessons
of benevolent and wise men to restrain the prevalent coarseness
and animality of the tribal ages--with Puritanism, or perhaps
Protestantism itself for another, and still another specified in the
latter part of this memorandum)--to it is probably due most of the ill
births, inefficient maturity, snickering pruriency, and of that human
pathologic evil and morbidity which is, in my opinion, the keel and
reason-why of every evil and morbidity. Its scent, as of something
sneaking, furtive, mephitic, seems to lingeringly pervade all modern
literature, conversation, and manners.

The second point of view, and by far the largest--as the world in
working-day dress vastly exceeds the world in parlor toilette--is the
one of common life, from the oldest times down, and especially in
England, (see the earlier chapters of "Taine's English Literature,"
and see Shakspere almost anywhere,) and which our age to-day inherits
from riant stock, in the wit, or what passes for wit, of masculine
circles, and in erotic stories and talk, to excite, express, and dwell
on, that merely sensual voluptuousness which, according to Victor
Hugo, is the most universal trait of all ages, all lands. This second
condition, however bad, is at any rate like a disease which comes to
the surface, and therefore less dangerous than a conceal'd one.

The time seems to me to have arrived, and America to be the place, for
a new departure--a third point of view. The same freedom and faith and
earnestness which, after centuries of denial, struggle, repression,
and martyrdom, the present day brings to the treatment of politics and
religion, must work out a plan and standard on this subject, not so
much for what is call'd society, as for thoughtfulest men and
women, and thoughtfulest literature. The same spirit that marks the
physiological author and demonstrator on these topics in his important
field, I have thought necessary to be exemplified, for once, in
another certainly not less important field.