This is something in which all
Teutonic poetry is rich and which forms, I think, the most genuine and
spontaneous part of modern taste, and especially of American taste.
Just as some people are naturally enthralled and refreshed by music,
so others are by landscape. Music and landscape make up the spiritual
resources of those who cannot or dare not express their unfulfilled
ideals in words. Serious poetry, profound religion (Calvinism, for
instance), are the joys of an unhappiness that confesses itself; but
when a genteel tradition forbids people to confess that they are
unhappy, serious poetry and profound religion are closed to them by
that; and since human life, in its depths, cannot then express itself
openly, imagination is driven for comfort into abstract arts, where
human circumstances are lost sight of, and human problems dissolve in
a purer medium. The pressure of care is thus relieved, without its
quietus being found in intelligence. To understand oneself is the
classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic. In the
presence of music or landscape human experience eludes itself; and
thus romanticism is the bond between transcendental and naturalistic
sentiment. The winds and clouds come to minister to the solitary ego.
Have there been, we may ask, any successful efforts to escape from the
genteel tradition, and to express something worth expressing behind
its back? This might well not have occurred as yet; but America is so
precocious, it has been trained by the genteel tradition to be so wise
for its years, that some indications of a truly native philosophy and
poetry are already to be found.
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