Complete Essays, Literary Criticism, Cryptography, Autography, Translations & Letters
the efforts of our men of genius:—for genius, as a general rule, is poor in worldly goods and cannot write for nothing. Our genius being thus repressed, we are written at only by our “gentlemen of elegant leisure,” and mere gentlemen of elegant leisure have been noted, time out of mind, for the insipidity of their productions. In general, too, they are obstinately conservative, and the feeling leads them into imitation of foreign, especially of British models. This is the true source of the imitativeness with which as literary people, we have been justly charged.
In the second place, irreparable ill is wrought by the almost exclusive dissemination among us of foreign, that is to say of monarchical or aristocratical sentiment, in foreign books: nor is this sentiment less fatal to Democracy because it reaches the people themselves, directly, in the gilded pill of the poem or the novel.
We have next to consider the impolicy of our committing, in the national character, an open and continuous wrong, on the frivolous and altogether untenable pretext of expediency. Of this point we have spoken before.
The last, and by far the most important consideration of all, however, is that sense of insult and injury to which, also, we have already alluded—the animosity aroused in the whole active Intellect of the world—the bitter and fatal resentment excited in the universal heart of Literature—a resentment which will not, and which cannot, make nice distinction between the temporary perpetrators of the wrong, and that Democracy in general which not only permits but glories in its perpetration.
American Poetry
That we are not a poetical people, has been asserted so often and so roundly, both at home and abroad, that the slander, through mere dint of repetition, has come to be received as truth. Yet nothing can be farther removed from it. The mistake is but a corollary from the old dogma, that the calculating faculties are at war with the ideal; while, in fact, it may be demonstrated, that the two divisions of mental power are never to be found, in perfection, apart. The highest order of the imaginative intellect is always pre-eminently mathematical, or analytical; and the converse of this proposition is equally true.
The idiosyncrasy of our political position has stimulated into early action whatever practical talent we possessed. Even in our national infancy we evinced a degree of utilitarian ability, which put to shame the mature skill of our forefathers. While yet in leading-strings, we proved ourselves adepts in all the arts and sciences which promote the comfort of the animal man. But the arena of exertion, and of consequent distinction, into which our first and most obvious wants impelled us, has been regarded as the field of our deliberate choice. Our necessities have been mistaken for our propensities. Having been forced to make railroads, it has been deemed impossible that we should make verse. Because it suited us to construct an engine in the first instance, it has been denied that we could compose an epic in the second. Because we were not all Homers in the beginning, it has been somewhat too cavalierly taken for granted that we shall be all Jeremy Benthams to the end.
But this is the purees insanity. The principles of the poetic sentiment lie deep within the immortal nature of man, and have little necessary reference to the worldly circumstances which surround him. The poet in ARCADY, is, in KAMSCHADTKA, the poet still. The self-same Saxon current animates the British and the American heart; nor can any social, or political, or moral, or physical conditions, do more than momentarily repress the impulses, which glow in our own bosoms as fervently as in those of our progenitors.
Those who have taken most careful note of our literature for the last ten or twelve years, will be most willing to admit that we are a poetical people; and in no respect is this fact more strikingly evinced than in the eagerness with which we ourselves seek information in regard to our poetry and our poets. But, alas! we seek what is not easily to be found. A distinct, connected, and, especially, a comparative view of our poetical literature, has been long a desideratum. But how, or where, shall we supply it? Shall we pick it out for ourselves, piecemeal, from the columns of the ephemeral press? Shall we look here for even a few well-considered and honest opinions at random? The idea is preposterous. The corrupt character of our ordinary criticism has become notorious. Its powers have, been prostrated by its own arm. The intercourse between critic and publisher, as it now almost universally stands, is comprised either in the paying and pocketing of black-mail, as the price of a simple forbearance, or in a direct system of petty and contemptible bribery, properly so called—a system even more injurious than the former to the true interest of the public, and more degrading to the buyers and sellers of good opinion, on account of the more positive character of the service here rendered, for the consideration received.
We smile at the idea of any denial of our assertions upon this topic;—they are infamously true. In the charge of general corruption, there are, undoubtedly, some noble exceptions to be made. There are, indeed, some editors, who, maintaining, an entire independence, will receive no books from publishers at all, or who will receive them with a perfect understanding, on the part of these latter, that unbiassed critiques will be given. But these cases have always been insufficient to have much effect upon the popular mistrust;—a mistrust heightened by the exposure, no great while ago, of the machinations of coteries in BOSTON—coteries which, at the bidding of leading booksellers, manufactured, as required from time to time, a pseudo-public opinion by wholesale, for the benefit of any little hanger-on of the party, or pettifogging protector of the firm. We scarcely expect to be believed—but to so high a pitch of methodical assurance had the system of puffery at one time arrived, that certain publishers, in the city to which we allude made no scruple of keeping on hand an assortment of commendatory notices, prepared by their men of all-work, and of sending their notices around to the multitudinous papers within their influence, done up within the fly-leaves of the book. The grossness of these base attempts, however, has not escaped indignant rebuke from the more honorable portion of the press. Tricks such as these will scarcely be attempted again; and we hail these symptoms of restiveness under the yoke of unprincipled ignorance and quackery—strong only in combination—as the harbinger of a better era for the interests of real merit, and of the national literature as a whole.
It has become, indeed, the plain duty of each individual connected with the press, heartily to give whatever influence he possesses, to the good cause of integrity, and the Truth. The results thus attainable will be found worthy of his closest attention and best efforts. We shall thus frown down all conspiracies to foist inanity upon the public consideration, at the obvious expense of every man of talent who is not a member of a clique in power. We may even arrive, in time, at that desirable point from which a distinct view of our men of letters may be obtained, and their respective pretensions adjusted, by the standard of a rigorous and self-sustaining criticism alone. That their several positions are as yet properly settled—that the posts which a vast number of them now hold, are maintained by any better tenure than that of the chicanery upon which we have commented—will be asserted by none but the ignorant, or the parties who have best right to feel an interest in the “good old condition of things.” No two matters can be more radically different than the reputation of some of our prominent littérateurs, as gathered from the mouths of the people—who glean it from the paragraphs of the papers—and the same reputation as deduced from the private estimate of intelligent and educated men. We do not advance this fact as a new discovery. Its truth, on the contrary, is the subject, and has long been so, of every-day witticism and mirth.
Why not? Surely there can be few things more ridiculous than the general character and assumptions of the ordinary critical notices of new books. A back-woods editor, sometimes without the shadow of the commonest attainment—always without time—often without brains—does not hesitate to give the world to understand that he is in the daily habit of critically reading and deciding upon a flood of publications, one-tenth of whose title-pages he may possibly have turned over—three-fourths of whose contents would be Hebrew to his most desperate efforts at comprehension—an whose entire mass and amount, as might be mathematically demonstrated, would be sufficient to occupy, in the most cursory perusal, the attention of some ten or twenty readers for a month. What he wants in plausibility,