How easily every phase of American business life may take on the hues of romance is illustrated by the history of our railroads. No wonder that Bret Harte wrote a poem about the meeting of the eastward and westward facing engines when the two sections of the Union Pacific Railroad at last drew near each other on the interminable plains and the two engines could talk. Of course what they said was poetry. There was a time when even the Erie Canal was poetic. The Panama Canal to-day, in the eyes of most Americans, is something other than a mere feat of engineering. We are doing more than making "the dirt fly." The canal represents victory over hostile forces, conquest of unwilling Nature, achievement of what had long been deemed impossible, the making not of a ditch, but of History.
So with all that American zest for camping, fishing, sailing, racing, which lies deep in the Anglo-Saxon, and which succeeds to the more primitive era of actual struggle against savage beasts or treacherous men or mysterious forests. It is at once an outlet and a nursery for romantic emotion. The out-of-doors movement which began with Thoreau's hut on Walden Pond, and which has gone on broadening and deepening to this hour, implies far more than mere variation from routine. It furnishes, indeed, a healthful escape from the terrific pressure of modern social and commercial exigencies. Yet its more important function is to provide for grown-ups a chance to "play Indian" too.
But outdoors and indoors, after all, lie in the heart and mind, rather than in the realm of actual experience. The romantic imagination insists upon taking its holiday, whether the man who possesses it gets his holiday or not. I have never known a more truly romantic figure than a certain tin-pedler in Connecticut who, in response to the question, "Do you do a good business?" made this perfectly Stevensonian reply: "Well, I make a living selling crockery and tinware, but my business is the propagation of truth."
This wandering idealist may serve to remind us again of the difference between romance and romanticism. The true romance is of the spirit. Romanticism shifts and changes with external fortunes, with altering emotions, with the alternate play of light and shade over the vast landscape of human experience. The typical romanticist, as we have seen, is a man of moods. It is only a Poe who can keep the pitch through the whole concert of experience. But the deeper romance of the spirit is oblivious of these changes of external fortune, this rising or falling of the emotional temperature. The moral life of America furnishes striking illustrations of the steadfastness with which certain moral causes have been kept, as it were, in the focus of intense feeling. Poetry, undefeated and unwavering poetry, has transfigured such practical propaganda as the abolition of slavery, the emancipation of woman, the fight against the liquor traffic, the emancipation of the individual from the clutches of economic and commercial despotism. Men like Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, women like Julia Ward Howe, fought for these causes throughout their lives. Colonel Higginson's attitude towards women was not merely chivalric (for one may be chivalrous without any marked predisposition to romance), but nobly romantic also. James Russell Lowell, poet as he was, outlived that particular phase of romantic moral reform which he had been taught by Maria White. But in other men and women bred in that old New England of the eighteen-forties, the moral fervor knew no restraint. Garrison, although in many respects a most unromantic personality, was engaged in a task which gave him all the inspiration of romance. A romantic "atmosphere," fully as highly colored as any of the romantic atmospheres that we are accustomed to mark in literature, surrounded as with a luminous mist the figures of the New England transcendentalists. They, too, as Heine said of himself, were soldiers. They felt themselves enlisted for a long but ultimately victorious campaign. They were willing to pardon, in their comrades and in themselves, those imaginative excesses which resemble the physical excesses of a soldier's camp. Transcendentalism was thus a militant philosophy and religion, with both a destructively critical and a positively constructive creed. Channing, Parker, Alcott, Margaret Fuller, were warrior-priests, poets and prophets of a gallant campaign against inherited darkness and bigotry, and for the light.
The atmosphere of that score of years in New England was now superheated, now rarefied, thin, and cold; but it was never quite the normal atmosphere of every day. On the purely literary side, it is needless to say, these men and women sought inspiration in Coleridge and Carlyle and other English and German romanticists. In fact, the most enduring literature of New England between 1830 and 1865 was distinctly a romantic literature. It was rooted, however, not so much in those swift changes of historic condition, those startling liberations of the human spirit which gave inspiration to the romanticism of the Continent, as it was in the deep and vital fervor with which these New Englanders envisaged the problems of the moral life.
Other illustrations of the American capacity for romance lie equally close at hand. Take, for instance, the stout volume in which Mr. Burton Stevenson has collected the Poems of American History. Here are nearly seven hundred pages of closely printed patriotic verse. While Stedman's Anthology reveals no doubt national aspirations and national sentiment, as well as the emotional fervor of individuals, Mr. Stevenson's collection has the advantage of focussing this national feeling upon specific events. Stedman's Anthology is an enduring document of American idealism, touching in the sincerity of its poetic moods, pathetic in its long lists of men and women who are known by one poem only, or who have never, for one reason or another, fulfilled their poetic promise. The thousand poems which it contains are more striking, in fact, for their promise than for their performance. They are intimations of what American men and women would have liked to do or to be. In this sense, it is a precious volume, but it is certainly not commensurate, either in passion or in artistic perfection, with the forces of that American life which it tries to interpret. Indeed, Mr. Stedman, after finishing his task of compilation, remarked to more than one of his friends that what this country needed was some "adult male verse."
The Poems of American History collected by Mr. Stevenson are at least vigorous and concrete. One aspect of our history which especially lends itself to Mr. Stevenson's purpose is the romance which attaches itself to war. It is scarcely necessary to say nowadays that all wars, even the noblest, have had their sordid, grimy, selfish, bestial aspect; and that the intelligence and conscience of our modern world are more and more engaged in the task of making future wars impossible. But the slightest acquaintance with American history reveals the immense reservoir of romantic emotion which has been drawn upon in our national struggles. War, of course, is an immemorial source of romantic feeling. William James's notable essay on "A Moral Substitute for War" endeavored to prove that our modern economic and social life, if properly organized, would give abundant outlet and satisfaction to those romantic impulses which formerly found their sole gratification in battle. Many of us believe that he was right; but for the moment we must look backward and not forward. We must remember the stern if rude poetry inspired by our Revolutionary struggle, the romantic halo that falls upon the youthful figure of Nathan Hale, the baleful light that touches the pale face of Benedict Arnold, the romance of the Bennington fight to the followers of Stark and Ethan Allen, the serene voice of the "little captain," John Paul Jones:—"We have not struck, we have just begun our part of the fighting." The colors of romance still drape the Chesapeake and the Shannon, Tecumseh and Tippecanoe. The hunters of Kentucky, the explorers of the Yellowstone and the Columbia, the emigrants who left their bones along the old Santa Fé Trail, are our Homeric men.
The Mexican War affords pertinent illustration, not only of romance, but of reaction. The earlier phases of the Texan struggle for independence have much of the daring, the splendid rashness, the glorious and tragic catastrophes of the great romantic adventures of the Old World. It is not the Texans only who still "remember the Alamo," but when those brilliant and dramatic adventures of border warfare became drawn into the larger struggle for the extension of slavery, the poetic reaction began. The physical and moral pretence of warfare, the cheap splendors of epaulets and feathers, shrivelled at the single touch of the satire of the Biglow Papers. Lowell, writing at that moment with the instinct and fervor of a prophet, brought the whole vainglorious business back to the simple issue of right and wrong:
"'Taint your eppyletts an' feathers
Make the thing a grain more right;
'Taint afollerin' your bell-wethers
Will excuse ye in His sight;
Ef you take a sword an' dror it,
An' go stick a feller thru,
Guv'ment aint to answer for it,
God'll send the bill to you."
But far more interesting is the revelation of the American capacity for romance which was made possible by the war between the States. Stevenson's Poems of American History and Stedman's Anthology give abundant illustration of almost every aspect of that epical struggle. The South was in a romantic mood from the very beginning. The North drifted into it after Sumter. I have already said that no one can examine a collection of Civil War verse without being profoundly moved by its evidence of American idealism. In specific phases of the struggle, in connection with certain battle-fields and certain leaders of both North and South, this idealism is heightened into pure romance, so that even our novelists feel that they can give no adequate picture of the war without using the colors of poetry. Most critics, no doubt, agree in feeling that we are still too near to that epoch-making crisis of our national existence to do it any justice in the terms of literature. Perhaps we must wait for the perfected romance of the years 1861-65, until the men and the events of that struggle are as remote as the heroes of Greece and Troy. Certainly no one can pass a final judgment upon the verse occasioned by recent struggles in arms. Any one who has studied the English poetry inspired by the South-African War will be painfully conscious of the emotional and moral complexity of all such issues, of the bitter injustice which poets, as well as other men, render to one another, of the impossibility of transmuting into the pure gold of romance the emotions originating in the stock market, in race-hatred, and in national vainglory.