SHAKSPERE--THE FUTURE
Strange as it may seem, the topmost proof of a race is its own born poetry. The presence of that, or the absence, each tells its story. As the flowering rose or lily, as the ripened fruit to a tree, the apple or the peach, no matter how fine the trunk, or copious or rich the branches and foliage, here waits _sine qua non_ at last. The stamp of entire and finished greatness to any nation, to the American Republic among the rest, must be sternly withheld till it has put what it stands for in the blossom of original, first-cla.s.s poems. No imitations will do.
And though no _esthetik_ worthy the present condition or future certainties of the New World seems to have been outlined in men"s minds, or has been generally called for, or thought needed, I am clear that until the United States have just such definite and native expressers in the highest artistic fields, their mere political, geographical, wealth-forming, and even intellectual eminence, however astonishing and predominant, will const.i.tute but a more and more expanded and well-appointed body, and perhaps brain, with little or no soul.
Sugar-coat the grim truth as we may, and ward off with outward plausible words, denials, explanations, to the mental inward perception of the land this blank is plain; a barren void exists. For the meanings and maturer purposes of these States are not the constructing of a new world of politics merely, and physical comforts for the million, but even more determinedly, in range with science and the modern, of a new world of democratic sociology and imaginative literature. If the latter were not establish"d for the States, to form their only permanent tie and hold, the first-named would be of little avail.
With the poems of a first-cla.s.s land are twined, as weft with warp, its types of personal character, of individuality, peculiar, native, its own physiognomy, man"s and woman"s, its own shapes, forms, and manners, fully justified under the eternal laws of all forms, all manners, all times. The hour has come for democracy in America to inaugurate itself in the two directions specified--autochthonic poems and personalities--born expressers of itself, its spirit alone, to radiate in subtle ways, not only in art, but the practical and familiar, in the transactions between employers and employed persons, in business and wages, and sternly in the army and navy, and revolutionizing them. I find nowhere a scope profound enough, and radical and objective enough, either for aggregates or individuals. The thought and ident.i.ty of a poetry in America to fill, and worthily fill, the great void, and enhance these aims, electrifying all and several, involves the essence and integral facts, real and spiritual, of the whole land, the whole body. What the great sympathetic is to the congeries of bones, joints, heart, fluids, nervous system and vitality, const.i.tuting, launching forth in time and s.p.a.ce a human being--aye, an immortal soul--such relation, and no less, holds true poetry to the single personality, or to the nation.
Here our thirty-eight States stand to-day, the children of past precedents, and, young as they are, heirs of a very old estate. One or two points we will consider, out of the myriads presenting themselves.
The feudalism, of the British Islands, ill.u.s.trated by Shakspere--and by his legitimate followers, Walter Scott and Alfred Tennyson--with all its tyrannies, superst.i.tions, evils, had most superb and heroic permeating veins, poems, manners; even its errors fascinating. It almost seems as if only that feudalism in Europe, like slavery in our own South, could outcrop types of tallest, n.o.blest personal character yet--strength and devotion and love better than elsewhere--invincible courage, generosity, aspiration, the spines of all. Here is where Shakspere and the others I have named perform a service incalculably precious to our America.
Politics, literature, and everything else, centers at last in perfect _personnel_, (as democracy is to find the same as the rest;) and here feudalism is unrival"d--here the rich and highest-rising lessons it bequeaths us--a ma.s.s of foreign nutriment, which we are to work over, and popularize and enlarge, and present again in our own growths.
Still there are pretty grave and anxious drawbacks, jeopardies, fears.
Let us give some reflections on the subject, a little fluctuating, but starting from one central thought, and returning there again. Two or three curious results may plow up. As in the astronomical laws, the very power that would seem most deadly and destructive turns out to be latently conservative of longest, vastest future births and lives.
We will for once briefly examine the just-named authors solely from a Western point of view. It may be, indeed, that we shall use the sun of English literature, and the brightest current stars of his system, mainly as pegs to hang some cogitations on, for home inspection.
As depicter and dramatist of the pa.s.sions at their stormiest outstretch, though ranking high, Shakspere (spanning the arch wide enough) is equaled by several, and excelled by the best old Greeks, (as Eschylus.) But in portraying mediaeval European lords and barons, the arrogant port, so dear to the inmost human heart, (pride! pride! dearest, perhaps, of all--touching us, too, of the States closest of all--closer than love,) he stands alone, and I do not wonder he so witches the world.
From first to last, also, Walter Scott and Tennyson, like Shakspere, exhale that principle of caste which we Americans have come on earth to destroy. Jefferson"s verdict on the Waverley novels was that they turned and condensed brilliant but entirely false lights and glamours over the lords, ladies, and aristocratic inst.i.tutes of Europe, with all their measureless infamies, and then left the bulk of the suffering, down-trodden people contemptuously in the shade. Without stopping to answer this hornet-stinging criticism, or to repay any part of the debt of thanks I owe, in common with every American, to the n.o.blest, healthiest, cheeriest romancer that ever lived, I pa.s.s on to Tennyson, his works.
Poetry here of a very high (perhaps the highest) order of verbal melody, exquisitely clean and pure, and almost always perfumed, like the tuberose, to an extreme of sweetness--sometimes not, however, but even then a camellia of the hot-house, never a common flower--the verse of inside elegance and high-life; and yet preserving amid all its super-delicatesse a smack of outdoors and outdoor folk. The old Norman lordhood quality here, too, crossed with that Saxon fiber from which twain the best current stock of England springs--poetry that revels above all things in traditions of knights and chivalry, and deeds of derring-do. The odor of English social life in its highest range--a melancholy, affectionate, very manly, but dainty breed--pervading the pages like an invisible scent; the idleness, the traditions, the mannerisms, the stately _ennui_; the yearning of love, like a spinal marrow, inside of all; the costumes brocade and satin; the old houses and furniture--solid oak, no mere veneering--the moldy secrets everywhere; the verdure, the ivy on the walls, the moat, the English landscape outside, the buzzing fly in the sun inside the window pane.
Never one democratic page; nay, not a line, not a word; never free and _nave_ poetry, but involved, labored, quite sophisticated--even when the theme is ever so simple or rustic, (a sh.e.l.l, a bit of sedge, the commonest love-pa.s.sage between a lad and la.s.s,) the handling of the rhyme all showing the scholar and conventional gentleman; showing the laureate too, the _attache_ of the throne, and most excellent, too; nothing better through the volumes than the dedication "to the Queen"
at the beginning, and the other fine dedication, "these to his memory"
(Prince Albert"s,) preceding "Idylls of the King."
Such for an off-hand summary of the mighty three that now, by the women, men, and young folk of the fifty millions given these States by their late census, have been and are more read than all others put together.
We hear it said, both of Tennyson and another current leading literary ill.u.s.trator of Great Britain, Carlyle--as of Victor Hugo in France--that not one of them is personally friendly or admirant toward America; indeed, quite the reverse. _N"importe_. That they (and more good minds than theirs) cannot span the vast revolutionary arch thrown by the United States over the centuries, fixed in the present, launched to the endless future; that they cannot stomach the high-life-below-stairs coloring all our poetic and genteel social status so far--the measureless viciousness of the great radical Republic, with its ruffianly nominations and elections; its loud, ill-pitched voice, utterly regardless whether the verb agrees with the nominative; its fights, errors, eructations, repulsions, dishonesties, audacities; those fearful and varied and long-continued storm and stress stages (so offensive to the well-regulated college-bred mind) wherewith Nature, history, and time block out nationalities more powerful than the past, and to upturn it and press on to the future;--that they cannot understand and fathom all this, I say, is it to be wondered at?
Fortunately, the gestation of our thirty-eight empires (and plenty more to come) proceeds on its course, on scales of area and velocity immense and absolute as the globe, and, like the globe itself, quite oblivious even of great poets and thinkers. But we can by no means afford to be oblivious of them.
The same of feudalism, its castles, courts, etiquettes, personalities.
However they, or the spirits of them hovering in the air, might scowl and glower at such removes as current Kansas or Kentucky life and forms, the latter may by no means repudiate or leave out the former. Allowing all the evil that it did, we get, here and today, a balance of good out of its reminiscence almost beyond price.
Am I content, then, that the general interior chyle of our republic should be supplied and nourish"d by wholesale from foreign and antagonistic sources such as these? Let me answer that question briefly:
Years ago I thought Americans ought to strike out separate, and have expressions of their own in highest literature. I think so still, and more decidedly than ever. But those convictions are now strongly temper"d by some additional points, (perhaps the results of advancing age, or the reflection of invalidism.) I see that this world of the West, as part of all, fuses inseparably with the East, and with all, as time does--the ever new yet old, old human race--"the same subject continued," as the novels of our grandfathers had it for chapter-heads.
If we are not to hospitably receive and complete the inaugurations of the old civilizations, and change their small scale to the largest, broadest scale, what on earth are we for?
The currents of practical business in America, the rude, coa.r.s.e, tussling facts of our lives, and all their daily experiences, need just the precipitation and tincture of this entirely different fancy world of lulling, contrasting, even feudalistic, anti-republican poetry and romance. On the enormous outgrowth of our unloos"d individualities, and the rank, self-a.s.sertion of humanity here, may well fall these grace-persuading, _recherche_ influences. We first require that individuals and communities shall be free; then surely comes a time when it is requisite that they shall not be too free. Although to such results in the future I look mainly for a great poetry native to us, these importations till then will have to be accepted, such as they are, and thankful they are no worse. The inmost spiritual currents of the present time curiously revenge and check their own compell"d tendency to democracy, and absorption in it, by mark"d leanings to the past--by reminiscences in poems, plots, operas, novels, to a far-off, contrary, deceased world, as if they dreaded the great vulgar gulf-tides of to-day. Then what has been fifty centuries growing, working in, and accepted as crowns and apices for our kind, is not going to be pulled down and discarded in a hurry.
It is, perhaps, time we paid our respects directly to the honorable party, the real object of these preambles. But we must make _reconnaissance_ a little further still. Not the least part of our lesson were to realize the curiosity and interest of friendly foreign experts,[35] and how our situation looks to them. "American poetry,"
says the London "Times,"[36] is the poetry of apt pupils, but it is afflicted from first to last with a fatal want of raciness. Bryant has been long pa.s.sed as a poet by Professor Longfellow; but in Longfellow, with all his scholarly grace and tender feeling, the defect is more apparent than it was in Bryant. Mr. Lowell can overflow with American humor when politics inspire his muse; but in the realm of pure poetry he is no more American than a Newdigate prize-man. Joaquin Miller"s verse has fluency and movement and harmony, but as for the thought, his songs of the sierras might as well have been written in Holland.
Unless in a certain very slight contingency, the "Times" says: "American verse, from its earliest to its latest stages, seems an exotic, with an exuberance of gorgeous blossom, but no principle of reproduction. That is the very note and test of its inherent want. Great poets are tortured and ma.s.sacred by having their flowers of fancy gathered and gummed down in the _hortus siccus_ of an anthology. American poets show better in an anthology than in the collected volumes of their works. Like their audience they have been unable to resist the attraction of the vast orbit of English literature. They may talk of the primeval forest, but it would generally be very hard from internal evidence to detect that they were writing on the banks of the Hudson rather than on those of the Thames. ....In fact, they have caught the English tone and air and mood only too faithfully, and are accepted by the superficially cultivated English intelligence as readily as if they were English born. Americans themselves confess to a certain disappointment that a literary curiosity and intelligence so diffused [as in the United States] have not taken up English literature at the point at which America has received it, and carried it forward and developed it with an independent energy. But like reader like poet. Both show the effects of having come into an estate they have not earned. A nation of readers has required of its poets a diction and symmetry of form equal to that of an old literature like that of Great Britain, which is also theirs. No ruggedness, however racy, would be tolerated by circles which, however superficial their culture, read Byron and Tennyson."
The English critic, though a gentleman and a scholar, and friendly withal, is evidently not altogether satisfied, (perhaps he is jealous,) and winds up by saying: "For the English language to have been enriched with a national poetry which was not English but American, would have been a treasure beyond price." With which, as whet and foil, we shall proceed to ventilate more definitely certain no doubt willful opinions.
Leaving unnoticed at present the great masterpieces of the antique, or anything from the middle ages, the prevailing flow of poetry for the last fifty or eighty years, and now at its height, has been and is (like the music) an expression of mere surface melody, within narrow limits, and yet, to give it its due, perfectly satisfying to the demands of the ear, of wondrous charm, of smooth and easy delivery, and the triumph of technical art. Above all things it is fractional and select. It shrinks with aversion from the st.u.r.dy, the universal, and the democratic.
The poetry of the future, (a phrase open to sharp criticism, and not satisfactory to me, but significant, and I will use it)--the poetry of the future aims at the free expression of emotion, (which means far, far more than appears at first,) and to arouse and initiate, more than to define or finish. Like all modern tendencies, it has direct or indirect reference continually to the reader, to you or me, to the central ident.i.ty of everything, the mighty Ego. (Byron"s was a vehement dash, with plenty of impatient democracy, but lurid and introverted amid all its magnetism; not at all the fitting, lasting song of a grand, secure, free, sunny race.) It is more akin, likewise, to outside life and landscape, (returning mainly to the antique feeling,) real sun and gale, and woods and sh.o.r.es--to the elements themselves--not sitting at ease in parlor or library listening to a good tale of them, told in good rhyme.
Character, a feature far above style or polish--a feature not absent at any time, but now first brought to the fore--gives predominant stamp to advancing poetry. Its born sister, music, already responds to the same influences. "The music of the present, Wagner"s, Gounod"s, even the later Verdi"s, all tends toward this free expression of poetic emotion, and demands a vocalism totally unlike that required for Rossini"s splendid roulades, or Bellini"s suave melodies."
Is there not even now, indeed, an evolution, a departure from the masters? Venerable and unsurpa.s.sable after their kind as are the old works, and always unspeakably precious as studies, (for Americans more than any other people,) is it too much to say that by the shifted combinations of the modern mind the whole underlying theory of first-cla.s.s verse has changed? "Formerly, during the period term"d cla.s.sic," says Sainte-Beuve, "when literature was govern"d by recognized rules, he was considered the best poet who had composed the most perfect work, the most beautiful poem, the most intelligible, the most agreeable to read, the most complete in every respect,--the Aeneid, the Gerusalemme, a fine tragedy. To-day, something else is wanted. For us the greatest poet is he who in his works most stimulates the reader"s imagination and reflection, who excites him the most himself to poetize.
The greatest poet is not he who has done the best; it is he who suggests the most; he, not all of whose meaning is at first obvious, and who leaves you much to desire, to explain, to study, much to complete in your turn."
The fatal defects our American singers labor under are subordination of spirit, an absence of the concrete and of real patriotism, and in excess that modern esthetic contagion a queer friend of mine calls the _beauty disease_. "The immoderate taste for beauty and art," says Charles Baudelaire, "leads men into monstrous excesses. In minds imbued with a frantic greed for the beautiful, all the balances of truth and justice disappear. There is a l.u.s.t, a disease of the art faculties, which eats up the moral like a cancer."
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 cla.s.s 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 superst.i.tions, 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 Cla.s.ses of men, being authoritatively called for in imaginative literature, will certainly appear. What is. .h.i.therto 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 h.e.l.lenic 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 cl.u.s.ter 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 ill.u.s.trious 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, G.o.ds? 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 cla.s.sical 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-cla.s.s 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 pa.s.sionate--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 cla.s.s, 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 pa.s.sing through of just the stages and crudities we have pa.s.sed or are pa.s.sing 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-cla.s.s 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 ma.s.s 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-cla.s.s 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 pa.s.sing 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 n.o.bles 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.