He then points out that while a national literature strictly includes “every mental effort made by the inhabitants of a country through the medium of the press,” yet no literature can be national in the highest sense unless it “bears upon it the stamp of national character.” This he illustrates by calling attention to certain local 78 peculiarities of English poetry as compared with that of the southern nations of Europe. He gives examples to show that the English poets excel their rivals in their descriptions of morning and evening, this being due, he thinks, to their longer twilights in both directions. On the other hand, the greater dreaminess and more abundant figurative language of southern nations are qualities which he attributes to their soft, voluptuous climate, where the body lies at ease and suffers the dream fancy “to lose itself in idle reverie and give a form to the wind and a spirit to the shadow and the leaf.” He then sums up his argument.
“We repeat, then, that we wish our native poets would give a more national character to their writings. In order to effect this, they have only to write more naturally, to write from their own feelings and impressions, from the influence of what they see around them, and not from any preconceived notions of what poetry ought to be, caught by reading many books and imitating many models. This is peculiarly true in descriptions of natural scenery. In these, let us have no more sky-larks and nightingales. For us they only warble in books. A painter might as well introduce an elephant or a rhinoceros into a New England landscape. [This comes, we must remember, from the young poet who 79 had written in his “Angler’s Song” six years before,—
“Upward speeds the morning lark
To its silver cloud.”]
We would not restrict our poets in the choice of their subjects, or the scenes of their story; but when they sing under an American sky, and describe a native landscape, let the description be graphic, as if it had been seen and not imagined. We wish, too, to see the figures and imagery of poetry a little more characteristic, as if drawn from nature and not from books. Of this we have constantly recurring examples in the language of our North American Indians. Our readers will all recollect the last words of Pushmataha, the Choctaw chief, who died at Washington in the year 1824: ‘I shall die, but you will return to your brethren. As you go along the paths, you will see the flowers and hear the birds; but Pushmataha will see them and hear them no more. When you come to your home, they will ask you, where is Pushmataha? and you will say to them, He is no more. They will hear the tidings like the sound of the fall of a mighty oak in the stillness of the wood.’ More attention on the part of our writers to these particulars would give a new and delightful expression to the face of our poetry. But the difficulty is, that instead of coming forward 80 as bold, original thinkers, they have imbibed the degenerate spirit of modern English poetry.”[28] What is meant by this last passage is seen when he goes on to point out that each little village then had “its little Byron, its self-tormenting scoffer at morality, its gloomy misanthropist in song,” and that even Wordsworth, in some respects an antidote to Byron, was as yet “a very unsafe model for imitation;” and he farther points out “how invariably those who have imitated him have fallen into tedious mannerisms.” He ends with a moral, perhaps rather tamely stated: “We hope, however, that ere long some one of our most gifted bards will throw his fetters off, and relying on himself alone, fathom the recesses of his own mind, and bring up rich pearls from the secret depths of thought.”[29]
“The true glory of a nation”—this is his final attitude—“is moral and intellectual preëminence;” thus distinctly foreshadowing the title of his friend Charles Sumner’s later oration, “The True Grandeur of Nations.” American literature had undoubtedly begun to exist before this claim was made, as in the prose of Irving and Cooper, the poetry of Dana and Bryant. But it had awaited the arrival of some one to formulate its claims, and this it found in Longfellow.
[16] New England Magazine, i. 27.
[17] Ibid. iv. 131.
[18] MS. letter.
[19] See Writings of William Austin, Boston, 1890.