Not the
mere bawling and braggadocio of them, but the radical emotion-facts,
the fervor and perennial fructifying spirit at fountain-head. And at
the risk of being misunderstood I should dwell on and repeat that a
great imaginative _literatus_ for America can never be merely good and
moral in the conventional method. Puritanism and what radiates from it
must always be mention'd by me with respect; then I should say, for
this vast and varied Commonwealth, geographically and artistically,
the puritanical standards are constipated, narrow, and non-philosophic.
In the main I adhere to my positions in "Democratic Vistas," and
especially to my summing-up of American literature as far as to-day is
concern'd. In Scientism, the Medical Profession, Practical Inventions,
and Journalism, the United States have press'd forward to the glorious
front rank of advanced civilized lands, as also in the popular
dissemination of printed matter (of a superficial nature perhaps, but
that is an indispensable preparatory stage,) and have gone in common
education, so-call'd, far beyond any other land or age. Yet the
high-pitch'd taunt of Margaret Fuller, forty years ago, still sounds
in the air: "It does not follow, because the United States print and
read more books, magazines, and newspapers than all the rest of the
world, that they really have therefore a literature." For perhaps
it is not alone the free schools and newspapers, nor railroads and
factories, nor all the iron, cotton, wheat, pork, and petroleum, nor
the gold and silver, nor the surplus of a hundred or several hundred
millions, nor the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, nor the last
national census, that can put this Commonweal high or highest on the
cosmical scale of history.
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