“‘I got it in my mither’s wame.’”
Yet Lowell, who spoke but twice in his own character, seems to have done better than most of his fellows; for he and Curtis are the only men of letters to find a place in a recent “Calendar of Great Americans.” All their contemporaries and predecessors were either not great, or else were something other than American,—cosmopolitan, provincial, or English. Irving, Cooper, Poe, Bryant, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier, Holmes, Prescott, Motley, Bancroft, Parkman,—not one of these will bear the test. As for Emerson, he is ruled out by name, because he was the “author of such thought as might have been native to any clime.” He is of the world, and therefore not American. It seems a hard judgment that the man who wrote “The Fortune of the Republic,” “The Young American,” and the “Concord Hymn,”—the man of whom it was recently said, so finely and so truly, that “he sent ten thousand sons to the war,”—should find himself at this late hour a man without a country. On such terms it is doubtful praise to be called a cosmopolitan: and in view of such a ruling it becomes evident that the exact nature of Americanism as a literary quality is yet to be defined. Lowell’s attempt in that direction, by-the-bye, is probably among the best. An American, according to Lowell’s idea of him,—so Mr. James says,—was a man at once fresh and ripe.
When it comes to practice, however, there is one American poet whose literary patriotism was never called in question. The reference is of course to Whitman. Listen to him, as he appeals to whoever “would assume a place to teach or be a poet here in the States:”—
“Who are you indeed who would talk or sing to America?
Have you studied out the land, its idioms and men?
Have you learned the physiology, phrenology, politics,
geography, pride, freedom, friendship of the land?
its substratums and objects?
Have you considered the organic compact of the first day
of the first year of Independence, signed by the
Commissioners, ratified by the States, and read
by Washington at the head of the army?
Have you possessed yourself of the Federal Constitution?
Do you see who have left all feudal processes and poems
behind them, and assumed the poems and processes
of Democracy?”
“Conservatism and timidity”! Here is one man, at all events, who is not to be accused of “continuing English tradition.” He, if nobody else, breathes a “haughty defiance of the Year One.” He may or may not be “ripe;” he certainly is “fresh.” If there be some who fail to enjoy his verse, there can be none who do not admire his courage.