For a long time the name of one man had been almost daily in my ears. I had been hearing much through the friend to whom I have last referred about his intuitive eye and critical acumen. That friend had informed me of the influence which his opinion carried; and of how this man held Keats high above poets to whom we have statues of brass, whose names we give to our streets. My curiosity was excited, and, while my desire to meet this man was largely mingled with timidity, I often felt a jealous pang at thinking that many of the people with whom I was acquainted knew him. At length I became distantly connected with an undertaking in which he was prominently concerned. Through the instrumentality of one friendly to us both, we met. It was a sacred night for me, and I sat and listened, enchanted. After some hours the talk wheeled round upon sonnets. “Sonnets!” he cried, starting up; “who can repeat the lines about Cortez in Keats? You all know it.” Some one began to read or repeat the sonnet. Until coming upon the words, “or like stout Cortez.” “That’s it, that’s it! Now go on.”
“Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”
“‘And all his men looked at each other with a wild surmise,’” he repeated, “‘silent upon a peak in Darien.’ The most enduring group ever designed. They are standing there to this day. They will stand there for ever and for ever; they are immutable. When an artist carves them you may know that Buonarotti is risen from the dead and is once more abroad.”
That portion of a book which is called a preface and put first, is always the last written. It may be human, but it is not logical, that when a man starts he does not know what he has to say first, until he finds out by an elaborate guess of several hundred pages what he wants to say last. It would be unbecoming of me in a collection of ignorant essays to affect to know less than a person of average intelligence; but I am quite sincere when I say I am not aware who the author is of the great aphorism that “After all, there is a great deal of human nature in man.” There is, I would venture to say, more human nature than logic in man. My copy of Keats is no exception to the general rule of books. The preface ought to precede immediately the colophon. Yet it is in the forefront of the volume, before even the very title page itself. It forms no integral part of the volume, and is unknown to the printer or publisher. It was given to me by a thoughtful and kind-hearted friend at whose side I worked for a considerable while. One time, years ago, he took a holiday and vanished, going from among us I knew not whither. On coming back he presented each of his associates with something out of his store of spoil. That which now forms the preface to my copy he gave me. It consists of twelve leaves; twelve myrtle leaves on a spray. When he was in Rome he bore me in mind and plucked this sprig at the grave of the poet. It is consoling to remember Keats is buried so far away from where he was born, when we cannot forget that the abominable infamy of publishing his love-letters was committed in his own country—here in England. His spirit was lent to earth only for a little while, and he gave all of it to us. But we were not satisfied. We must have his heart’s blood and his heart too. The gentlemen who attacked his poetry when he was alive really knew no better, and tried, perhaps, to be as honest as would suit their private ends. But the publication of the dead man’s love-letters, fifty years after he had passed away, cannot be attributed even to ignorance. If any money was made out of the book it would be a graceful act to give it to some church where the burial ground is scant, and the parish is in need of a Potter’s Field.
When I take down my copy of Keats, and look through it and beyond it, I feel that while it is left to me I cannot be wholly shorn of my friends. It is the only album of photographs I possess. The faces I see in it are not for any eye but mine. It is my private portrait gallery, in which hang the portraits of my dearest friends. The marks and blots are intelligible to no eye but mine; they are the cherished hieroglyphics of the heart. I close the book; I lock up the hieroglyphics; I feel certain the book will last my time. Should it survive me and pass into new hands—into the hands of some boy now unborn, who may pluck out of it posies of love-phrases for his fresh-cheeked sweetheart—he will know nothing of the import these marginal notes bore to one who has gone before him; unless, indeed, out of some cemetery of ephemeral literature he digs up this key—this Rosetta stone.
DECAY OF THE SUBLIME.
The sublime is dying. It has been pining a long time. At last dissolution has set in. Nothing can save it but another incursion of Goths and Huns; and as there are no Goths and Huns handy just now, the sublime must die out, and die out soon. You can know what a man is by the company he keeps. You can judge a people by the ideas they retain more than by the ideas they acquire. The philology of a tongue, from its cradle to its grave, is the social history of the people who spoke it. To-day you may mark the progress of civilisation by the decay bf the sublime. Glance at a few of the nations of earth as they stand. Italy and Spain still hold with the sublime in literature and art, although, being exhausted stocks, they cannot produce it any longer. France is cynical, smart, artistic, but never was and never can be sublime, so long as vanity rules her; and yet, by the irony of selection, sublime is one of her favourite words. Central Europe has had her sublime phases, but cannot be even thought of now in connection with the quality; and Russia and Turkey are barbarous still. If we come to the active pair of nationalities in the progress of current civilisation, the United States and England, we find the sublime in very poor case.
Young England across the water is the most progressive nation of our age, because it is the most practical. If ever there was a man who put his foot on the neck of the sublime, that man is Uncle Sam. His contribution to the arts is almost nothing. His outrages against established artistic canons have been innumerable. He owns a new land without traditions. He laughs at all traditions. He has never raised a saint or a mummy or a religion (Mormonism he stole from the East), a crusader, a tyrant, a painter, a sculptor, a musician, a dramatist, an inquisition, a star chamber, a council of ten. All his efforts have been in a strictly practical direction, and most of his efforts have been crowned with success. He has devoted his leisure time, the hours not spent in cutting down forests or drugging Indians with whisky, to laughing at the foolish old notions which the foolish old countries cherish. He had a wonderfully fertile estate of two thousand million acres, about only one fourth of which is even to this day under direct human management. In getting these five hundred million acres of land under him he had met all kinds of ground—valley, forest, mountain, plain. But in none of these did he find anything but axes and whisky of the least use. No mountain had been sanctified to him by first earthly contact with the two Tables of the Law. No plain had been rendered sacred as that upon which the miraculous manna fell to feed the chosen people. No inland sea had been the scene of a miraculous draught of fishes. All the land acquired and cultivated by Uncle Sam came to him by the right of whisky and the axe. The mountain was nothing more than so much land placed at a certain angle that made it of little use for tillage. The plains, the rivers, and inland seas had a simply commercial value in his eyes. He had no experience of a miracle of any kind, and he did not see why he should bow down and respect a mountain, that, to him, was no more than so many thousand acres on an incline unfavourable to cultivation. Such a condition of the ground was a bore, and he would have cut down the mountain as he had cut down the Indian and the forest, if he had known how to accomplish the feat. He saw nothing mystic in the waters or the moon. Were the rivers and lakes wholesome to drink and useful for carriage, and well stocked with fish? These were the questions he asked about the waters. Would there be moonlight enough for riding and working? was the only question he asked about that “orbèd maiden with white fire laden whom mortals call the moon.” His notions, his plains, his rivers, his lakes, were all “big,” but he never thought of calling them sublime. On his own farm he failed to find any present trace of the supernatural; and he discovered no trace of the supernatural in tradition, for there was no tradition once the red man had been washed into his grave with whisky. Hence Uncle Sam began treating the supernatural with familiarity, and matters built on the supernatural with levity. Now without the supernatural the sublime cannot exist any length of time, if at all.
It may be urged it is unreasonable to hold that the Americans have done away with the sublime, since in the history of all nations the earlier centuries were, as in America, devoted to material affairs. There is one fact bearing on this which should not be left out of count, namely, that America did not start from barbarism, or was not raised on a site where barbarism had overrun a high state of civilisation. The barbarous hordes of the north effaced the civilisation of old Rome, and raised upon its ashes a new people, the Italians, who in time led the way in art, as the old Romans had before them. The Renaissance was a second crop raised off the same ground by new men. The arts Rome had borrowed from Greece had been trampled down by Goths, who, when they found themselves in the land of milk and honey, sat down to enjoy the milk and honey, until suddenly the germs of old art struck root, and once more all eyes turned to Italy for principles of beauty. But America started with the civilisation of a highly civilised age. She did not rear her own civilisation on her own soil. She did not borrow her arts from any one country. She simply peopled her virgin plains with the sons of all the earth, who brought with them the culture of their respective nationalities. She has not followed the ordinary course of nations, from conflict to power, from power to prosperity, from prosperity to the arts, luxury, and decay. She started with prosperity, and the first use she made of her prosperity was, not to cultivate the fine arts in her own people, but to laugh at them in others. In the individual man the sense of humour grows with years. In nations the sense of humour develops with centuries. The literature of nations begins with battle-songs and hymns, and ends with burlesques and blasphemies.
Now although America has begun with burlesques and blasphemies, no one can for a moment imagine that America is not going to create a noble literature of her own. She is destined not only to found and build up a noble literature, but one which will be unique. When she has time, when she has let most of those idle one thousand five hundred million acres, she will begin writing her books. By that time she will have running in her veins choice blood from every race on earth, and it is a matter of certainty she will give the world many delights now undreamed of. No other nation on earth will have, or ever has had, such an opportunity of devoting attention to man in his purely domestic and social relations. The United States of to-day has, for practical purposes, no foreign policy. She has no foreign rivals, she is not likely to have foreign wars, while in her own country she has large bodies of men from every people on the world. She owns the largest assorted lot of mankind on the globe, and as years go by we may safely conclude she will add to the variety and number of her sons. In all this appears no hope for the sublime. There is no instance in literature of a nation going back from laughter to heroics. The two may exist side by side. But that is not the case in America. Up to this hour only one class of transatlantic writers has challenged the attention of Europe, and that class is humorous and profane. Emerson, Bryant, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Lowell, Holmes, and Irving are merely Europeans born in America. But Ward, Harte, Twain, and Breitmann are original and American.