But touch'd by the national test, or tried by
the standards of democratic personality, they wither to ashes. I say I
have not seen a single writer, artist, lecturer, or what-not, that
has confronted the voiceless but ever erect and active, pervading,
underlying will and typic aspiration of the land, in a spirit kindred
to itself. Do you call those genteel little creatures American poets?
Do you term that perpetual, pistareen, paste-pot work, American art,
American drama, taste, verse? I think I hear, echoed as from some
mountain-top afar in the west, the scornful laugh of the Genius of
these States.
Democracy, in silence, biding its time, ponders its own ideals, not of
literature and art only--not of men only, but of women. The idea of
the women of America, (extricated from this daze, this fossil and
unhealthy air which hangs about the word _lady_,) develop'd, raised to
become the robust equals, workers, and, it may be, even practical
and political deciders with the men--greater than man, we may admit,
through their divine maternity, always their towering, emblematical
attribute--but great, at any rate, as man, in all departments; or,
rather, capable of being so, soon as they realize it, and can bring
themselves to give up toys and fictions, and launch forth, as men do,
amid real, independent, stormy life.
Then, as towards our thought's finale, (and, in that, overarching the
true scholar's lesson,) we have to say there can be no complete or
epical presentation of democracy in the aggregate, or anything like
it, at this day, because its doctrines will only be effectually
incarnated in any one branch, when, in all, their spirit is at the
root and centre.
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