Have we at present any such?
Then the thought at the centre, never too often repeated. Boundless
material wealth, free political organization, immense geographic
area, and unprecedented "business" and products--even the most active
intellect and "culture"--will not place this Commonwealth of ours
on the topmost range of history and humanity--or any eminence of
"democratic art"--to say nothing of its pinnacle. Only the production
(and on the most copious scale) of loftiest moral, spiritual and
heroic personal illustrations--a great native Literature headed with
a Poetry stronger and sweeter than any yet. If there can be any such
thing as a kosmic modern and original song, America needs it, and is
worthy of it.
In my opinion to-day (bitter as it is to say so) the outputs through
civilized nations everywhere from the great words Literature, Art,
Religion, &c., with their conventional administerers, stand squarely
in the way of what the vitalities of those great words signify, more
than they really prepare the soil for them--or plant the seeds, or
cultivate or garner the crop. My own opinion has long been, that for
New World service our ideas of beauty (inherited from the Greeks,
and so on to Shakspere--_query_--perverted from them?) need to be
radically changed, and made anew for to-day's purposes and finer
standards. But if so, it will all come in due time--the real change
will be an autochthonic, interior, constitutional, even local one,
from which our notions of beauty (lines and colors are wondrous
lovely, but character is lovelier) will branch or offshoot.
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