OUR NOVITIATE ENDED. assuredly should be that of freshness and joy; the sadness of declining races, only, has the beauty of natural pathos. There is no cause for morbidly introspective verse no need, I hope, for dilettanteism in this brave country of ours for centuries to come. 473 American ideal. I think, too, we may claim that there is no better The ideal of manhood than the American ideal, derived from an aggregation of characteristic types. Our future verse should be more native than that of the past, in having a flavor more plainly distinct from the motherland. Not that our former contingent misrepresented the America of its time. Even Longfellow's work, with so much of imported theme and treatment, conveyed a sentiment that came, say what we will, from no foreign source. The reason that a decidedly autochthonous kind was not then proffered, unless by Whitman, was that a distinction between the conditions of England and America was not more strongly established. Since the war our novitiate has ended. We welcome home-productions; our servility to foreign judgment has lessened, and we apply with considerable self-poise our own standards of criticism to things abroad. We have outlived the greed of a childhood that depends on sustenance furnished by its elders, and are far indeed from the senile atrophy which also must borrow to recruit its wasting powers. Our debt to acute foreign critics is none the less memorable. They, in truth, were the first to counsel us that we should lean upon ourselves; to insist that we ought at least to escape Old World limitations, the first to recognize so heartily anything purely American, even our sectional humor, as to bring about our discovery that it was not necessarily "a poor thing," although our "own." A national type. See pp. 7-9, 96, 97. Its promo tion. The copy right ques tion. See pp. 23-25. It is agreed that sectional types, which thus have lent their raciness to various productions, are subsidiary to the formation of one that shall be national. A character formed of mingling components must undergo the phases of defective hybridity; our own is just beginning to assume a coherence that is the promise of a similar adjustment in art. As local types disappear there may be special losses, yet a general gain. The lifting of the Japanese embargo was harmful to the purity of the insular art, but added something to the arts of the world at large. Even now our English cousins, seeking for what they term Americanism in our literature, begin to find its flavor stealthily added to their own. Nothing will strengthen more rapidly the native bias of our literature than its increase of dramatic tone. Speech, action, and passion will be derived from life as here seen, from factors near at hand and stuff of which the writer himself is moulded. Our playwrights are now encouraged by a copyright royalty. All classes of literary workmen, however, still endure the disadvantage of a market drugged with stolen goods. Shameless as is our legal plundering of foreign authors, our blood is most stirred by the consequent injury to home literature, - by the wrongs, the poverty, the discouragement to which the foes of International Copyright subject our own writThe nerve and vitality of the latter can have no stronger demonstration than by the progress which they make while loaded with an almost insufferable burden. When this shall at last be lifted, their forward movement may answer to the most sanguine American conjecture. Of two things they already are assured: First, the perception, the inborn taste, of their countrymen stands in need of less tutorage than that of taste. ers. THE NATIONAL INHERITANCE. 475 tongue. transatlantic Saxon races. Our people have blundered from isolation; confront them with the models of older lands, and they quickly learn to choose the fit and beautiful, and the time is now reached when the finest models are widely attainable. Secondly, Our our inheritance is a language that is relatively the English greatest treasure-house of the world's literature: at once the most laconic and the most copious of tongues, the sturdiest in its foundations of emotion and utility, the most varied by appropriation of synonyms from all languages, new and old; the youngest and most occidental of the great modes of speech, steadily diffusing itself about the globe, with no possible supplanter or successor except itself at further stages of maturity; finally, elastic and copious most of all in the land which adds to it new idioms, of cisatlantic growth, or assimilated from the dialects of many races that here contribute their diction to its own. A language whose glory is that even corruptions serve to speed its growth, and whose fine achievement long has been to make the neologism, even the solecism, of one generation the classicism of the next. This is the potent and sonorous instrument which our poet has at his command, and the genius of his country, like Ariel, bids him and THE twilight of the poets, succeeding to the Past, brightness of their first diurnal course, is a favora- Present, ble interval at which to review the careers of those Future. whose work therewith is ended. Although at such a time public interest may set in other directions, I Art's law. have adhered to a task so arduous, yet so fascinating to the critical and poetic student. When the lustre of a still more auspicious day shall yield in its turn to the recurring dusk, a new chronicler will have the range of noble imaginations to consider, heightened in significance by comparison with the field of these prior excursions. But, if I have not wholly erred in respect to the lessons derivable from the past, he will not go far beyond them. The canons are not subject to change; he, in turn, will dechangeless duce the same elements appertaining to the chief of arts, and test his poets and their bequests by the same unswerving laws. And concerning the dawn which may soon break upon us unawares, as we make conjecture of the future of American song, it is difficult to keep the level of restraint - to avoid "rising on the wings of prophecy." Who can doubt that it will correspond to the future of the land itself, of America now wholly free and interblending, with not one but a score of civic capitals, each an emulative centre of taste and invention, a focus of energetic life, ceaseless in action, radiant with the glow of beauty and creative power. |