No More Learning

I would not be
supposed to condemn truly imaginative prose. There is a simplicity of
splendor, no less than of plainness, and prose would be poor indeed if
it could not find a tongue for that meaning of the mind which is behind
the meaning of the words. It has sometimes seemed to me that in England
there was a growing tendency to curtail language into a mere
convenience, and to defecate it of all emotion as thoroughly as
algebraic signs. This has arisen, no doubt, in part from that healthy
national contempt of humbug which is characteristic of Englishmen, in
part from that sensitiveness to the ludicrous which makes them so shy of
expressing feeling, but in part also, it is to be feared, from a growing
distrust, one might almost say hatred, of whatever is super-material.
There is something sad in the scorn with which their journalists treat
the notion of there being such a thing as a national ideal, seeming
utterly to have forgotten that even in the affairs of this world the
imagination is as much matter-of-fact as the understanding. If we were
to trust the impression made on us by some of the cleverest and most
characteristic of their periodical literature, we should think England
hopelessly stranded on the good-humored cynicism of well-to-do
middle-age, and should fancy it an enchanted nation, doomed to sit
forever with its feet under the mahogany in that after-dinner mood which
follows conscientious repletion, and which it is ill-manners to disturb
with any topics more exciting than the quality of the wines. But there
are already symptoms that a large class of Englishmen are getting weary
of the dominion of consols and divine common-sense, and to believe that
eternal three per cent. is not the chief end of man, nor the highest and
only kind of interest to which the powers and opportunities of England
are entitled.

The quality of exaggeration has often been remarked on as typical of
American character, and especially o? American humor. In Dr. Petri's
_Gedrangtes Handbuch der Fremdworter_, we are told that the word
_humbug_ is commonly used for the exaggerations of the North-Americans.
To be sure, one would be tempted to think the dream of Columbus half
fulfilled, and that Europe had found in the West a nearer way to
Orientalism, at least in diction. But it seems tome that a great deal of
what is set down as mere extravagance is more fitly to be called
intensity and picturesqueness, symptoms ol the imaginative faculty in
full health and strength, though producing, as yet, only the raw and
formless material in which poetry is to work. By and by, perhaps, the
world will see it fashioned into poem and picture, and Europe, which
will be hard pushed for originality erelong, may have to thank us for a
new sensation.
The French continue to find Shakespeare exaggerated
because he treated English just as our country-folk do when they speak
of a 'steep price,' or say that they 'freeze to' a thing. The first
postulate of an original literature is that a people should use their
language instinctively and unconsciously, as if it were a lively part of
their growth and personality, not as the mere torpid boon of education
or inheritance. Even Burns contrived to write very poor verse and prose
in English. Vulgarisms are often only poetry in the egg. The late Mr.
Horace Mann, in one of his public addresses, commented at some length on
the beauty and moral significance ol the French phrase _s'orienter_ and
called on his young friends to practise upon it in life. There was not a
Yankee in his audience whose problem had not always been to find out
what was _about east_, and to shape his course accordingly. This charm
which a familiar expression gains by being commented, as it were, and.
set in a new light by a foreign language, is curious and instructive. I
cannot help thinking that Mr. Matthew Arnold forgets this a little too
much sometimes when he writes of the beauties of French style. It would
not be hard to find in the works of French Academicians phrases as
coarse as those he cites from Burke, only they are veiled by the
unfamiliarity of the language. But, however this may be, it is certain
that poets and peasants please us in the same way by translating words
back again to their primal freshness, and infusing them with a
delightful strangeness which is anything but alienation. What, for
example, is Milton's '_edge_ of battle' but a doing into English of the
Latin _acies? Was die Gans gedacht das der Schwan vollbracht_, what the
goose but thought, that the swan full brought (or, to de-Saxonize it a
little, what the goose conceived, that the swan achieved), and it may
well be that the life, invention, and vigor shown by our popular speech,
and the freedom with which it is shaped to the instant want of those who
use it, are of the best omen for our having a swan at last. The part I
have taken on myself is that of the humbler bird.