Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 098.djvu/89



is a great fact. Even the dim-eyed, bespectacled Old World can see and acknowledge that—crabbed and purblind as the aged witness is thought over the water. A greater fact, measured by square inches, it might be hard to find. Equally great, perhaps, if considered as the theatre of scenes of struggle and acts of enterprise, present and advent, in the drama of the world's progress, in the working out of interests, and the solution of problems, on a gigantic scale, material, moral, social, political. But one thing American there is, which we cannot yet regard as a great fact; one thing, which at best, is only a fiction founded upon fact: and that is, its poetical literature. Hitherto the national genius has sought—or rather has found ready to hand—other modes of expressing its character and asserting its power. It has been occupied with the task of ordering the chaos of elements, colossal and crude, rich with teeming germs of promise, amid which its lot is cast; it has been too busy to sing, though not to talk; it has had too many urgent calls on its physical faculties, its bread-winning arts and money-making appliances, to "go courting" the coy muses, or to build model stables for Pegasus. The young Titan's instinct has been to exercise his muscular frame in turning prairies into parks, and forests into cities, and rivers into mill-streams, rather than haunt the pine-woods in quest of aboriginal dryads, or invoke primæval silence in the depth of sylvan wilds, with hymns inspired by the ecstasy and attuned to the large utterance of the elder gods of song. Compared with her other attainments, America's poetry is backward, stunted, unshapen. It is, comparatively, a lisping speech. Its stars are many in number, but pale in lustre; not much differing from one another in glory, and altogether comprising a sort of milky way, with a soupçon of water in it; whereof the constellated members, though for ever singing as they shine, have not yet caught the rolling music of the spheres. American poetry is not of its mother earth, earthy. It is rather of the Old World, worldly.

Imitation is, in effect, the vice of transatlantic verse; the very head and front of its offending. Not yet has it learned to walk alone on the steeps of Parnassus, bold as is the national mien, and firm as is its step, on the level of this work-day world. Again and again we hear the complaint, that American poets give us back our own coin, thinned and deteriorated by the transit—"as if America had not the ore of song in all her rivers, and a mint of her own in every mountain, she does little more for the service of the muse than melt down our English gold and recast it in British forms." Again and again we hear it charged on the American bard, that he is a dealer rather than a producer, an echo rather than a voice, a shadow rather than a reality; that what he exports he can hardly be said to grow; that he has no faith in his native muses; that Europe is the Mecca of his poetical superstition—England the Jerusalem of his imaginative worship; and that when, at length, the harp is taken down from the trees where for centuries it has hung tuneless, it is