Literatures are renewed, as they are originated, by uncontrived impulses of nature, as if the sap moved unbidden in the mind.
In the same essay occurs this wide-worldly phrase:
There is a greater thing than the spirit of the age, and that is the spirit of the ages.
A man capable of the deep, wide thought which these excerpts contain is not the man seriously to consider Mr. Björkman’s appeal. Literature is not a response to a monetary or other invitation; it is as inevitable as the sunrise, and opportunity neither originates nor develops it. The conditions that govern the rise of sap and its transformations into beauty cannot be set up by legislation nor made easier by Nobel prizes. An artist of original power, born pregnant with a poem, a picture, or a symphony, will inevitably give it birth. His necessity is not to receive but to give. He is independent of the caprice of chance. He has no thought of a chance “for sincere artistic expression.” He is not interested in the control of circumstance; he is the instrument of something that controls him. Opportunity never knocks at his door; his door cannot be opened from without; it is pushed open by an indwelling, outgrowing guest. The process is as uncontrived as the unfolding of an acorn into an oak.
I fear that Mr. Björkman’s definition of art, if he have one, needs expansion. The so-called art which he wishes to have encouraged as something geographically local is an imitation which probably would suffice in a petty world of orthodox socialism, where writing was a kind of sociological business. Since unmistakable art is born, not manufactured or induced, it were folly to try to nurture it. Unborn art is nurtured by an inner sap; it cannot be fed on sedative pap. It always has been and always will be born of suffering, in unexpected, unprepared places, like all its wild and wonderful kin. Eugenics cannot be applied to its unfathomable heredity.
The soul of a nation is not in its literature but in its contemporary life. Literatures haven’t souls, even if, haply, they have considerable vitality or permanence. Literatures are intricate autobiographies, vague symbols of personal feeling, lifted by a modicum of consciousness into mystic articulation. The great literatures that are on the way will be more and more psychological. What people call love in the world of realism will play a sublimer part in the world of consciousness. Prose and poetry in which our conscious life is more intimately portrayed will challenge and in a million years increase consciousness, so that through emphasis and use this later acquisition of the race will transmute information into perfect organic knowledge. A larger consciousness will break up the chaos of unnumbered antagonisms in human relationships. The literature of description and the blind play of instinct has served its purpose and had its day. The literature of the future must deal with a vaster world than that in which animals prey upon one another. Such a literature will not bear the name of a man, a state, a nation, or an age.
We are opposed to the whole idea of nationalism; we even object to worldliness in literature; we want something still bigger: a literature with a sense of the planets in it. In this new day it is too late to fuss about nations, geographical literatures, and races. We are called toward the universe and mankind. In this land of blended nationalities our hope is to evolve a literature vitalized by the blood of multitudinous races and linked in pedigree with the infinite ages of the past. Walt Whitman’s poetry was cosmic; the new poetry will extend to the planets. The summit of Parnassus now rests in the gloom of the valley, and the poet of the future will look down from the higher eminence to which science has called him. Man today soars in flying machines in the old realm of his young imagination. Poets must outreach mere science.
What little patriots call a nation is a huge dogma that must be overcome. In poetry there must be an increasingly larger sense of the universe instead of nations as man’s habitation. National literatures are exclusive of and alien to one another; they should be interrelated and fundamentally combinable. There can be no local literature if the thought of the world is embodied in it, and any other quality of literature must lack integrity. Wild dreamers insist upon a literature that shall be superior to political boundaries. The idea of nationalism involves the setting up of barriers and the fossilizing of life. It is a small idea that belongs to the dark ages. If we are ever to expand in feeling, thought, and achievement we must rise above nations into the starry spaces. We shall at least be citizens of the world, and, if citizens of the world, then truth-seekers beyond the reach of land and sea.
The little question put to President Wilson by Mr. Björkman cannot escape a negative answer, unless through petty exclusions and barbaric insularities we continue trying to organize, cement, and perpetuate a nation—that smug dream of our forefathers who reeked with selfishness and reveled in a freedom that at the core was slavery. Statehood must give way to a universal brotherhood. And if this were achieved it would still be idle twaddle to talk about “providing money for the poet’s purse and laurels for his brow”; for a poet—I am not thinking of facile versifiers, who are capable of intoxicating emotional persons with philological colors and sensuous music—is rewarded not by money but by understanding, and he fashions his own laurel, even as the sea pink crowns itself with its ample glory. The kind of poet whose measure is taken by Mr. Björkman’s pale solicitude is already generously provided for by an unpoetic public, and there awaits his moist brow a laurel of uncritical, national homage.
Whitman, chanter of the earth’s major note, and Blake, exquisite singer of its subtlest minors, are clearly recognizable mutations. Apart from the work of four or five men English verse falls into infinite grades of imitative excellence and mediocrity. The best of it is highly finished manufactured or in part reproduced art, obedient to a commercial age, in which little men with renowned names gossip about nations, and worship the god of utility.