To-day, something else
is wanted. For us the greatest poet is he who in his works most
stimulates the reader's imagination and reflection, who excites him
the most himself to poetize. The greatest poet is not he who has done
the best; it is he who suggests the most; he, not all of whose meaning
is at first obvious, and who leaves you much to desire, to explain, to
study, much to complete in your turn."
The fatal defects our American singers labor under are subordination
of spirit, an absence of the concrete and of real patriotism, and in
excess that modern esthetic contagion a queer friend of mine calls
the _beauty disease_. "The immoderate taste for beauty and art," says
Charles Baudelaire, "leads men into monstrous excesses. In minds
imbued with a frantic greed for the beautiful, all the balances of
truth and justice disappear. There is a lust, a disease of the art
faculties, which eats up the moral like a cancer."
Of course, by our plentiful verse-writers there is plenty of service
perform'd, of a kind. Nor need we go far for a tally. We see, in
every polite circle, a class of accomplished, good-natured persons,
("society," in fact, could not get on without them,) fully eligible
for certain problems, times, and duties--to mix egg-nog, to mend the
broken spectacles, to decide whether the stewed eels shall precede
the sherry or the sherry the stewed eels, to eke out Mrs. A. B.'s
parlor-tableaux with monk, Jew, lover, Puck, Prospero, Caliban, or
what not, and to generally contribute and gracefully adapt their
flexibilities and talents, in those ranges, to the world's service.
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