For
know you not, dear, earnest reader, that the people of our land may
all read and write, and may all possess the right to vote--and yet the
main things may be entirely lacking?--(and this to suggest them.)
View'd, to-day, from a point of view sufficiently over-arching,
the problem of humanity all over the civilized world is social and
religious, and is to be finally met and treated by literature. The
priest departs, the divine literatus comes. Never was anything more
wanted than, to-day, and here in the States, the poet of the modern is
wanted, or the great literatus of the modern. At all times, perhaps,
the central point in any nation, and that whence it is itself
really sway'd the most, and whence it sways others, is its national
literature, especially its archetypal poems. Above all previous lands,
a great original literature is surely to become the justification and
reliance, (in some respects the sole reliance,) of American democracy.
Few are aware how the great literature penetrates all, gives hue to
all, shapes aggregates and individuals, and, after subtle ways, with
irresistible power, constructs, sustains, demolishes at will. Why
tower, in reminiscence, above all the nations of the earth, two
special lands, petty in themselves, yet inexpressibly gigantic,
beautiful, columnar? Immortal Judah lives, and Greece immortal lives,
in a couple of poems.
Nearer than this. It is not generally realized, but it is true, as the
genius of Greece, and all the sociology, personality, politics and
religion of those wonderful states, resided in their literature or
esthetics, that what was afterwards the main support of European
chivalry, the feudal, ecclesiastical, dynastic world over
there--forming its osseous structure, holding it together for
hundreds, thousands of years, preserving its flesh and bloom, giving
it form, decision, rounding it out, and so saturating it in the
conscious and unconscious blood, breed, belief, and intuitions of men,
that it still prevails powerful to this day, in defiance of the mighty
changes of time--was its literature, permeating to the very marrow,
especially that major part, its enchanting songs, ballads, and
poems.
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