To
complete the large compound of qualities that are required, in order
that an emulous people give birth to a drama, one is yet wanting; but
that one is not merely the most important of all, but is the one which
lifts the others into dramatic importance. Are we poetical? Ask any
number of continental Europeans, whether the English are a poetical
people. A loud, unanimous, derisive _no_ would be the answer. And
yet, there is Shakespeare! and around him, back to Chaucer and forward
to Tennyson, a band of such poets, that this prosaic nation has the
richest poetic literature in Christendom. Especially in this matter
are appearances delusive, and hasty inferences liable to be illogical.
From the prosers that one hears in pulpits, legislatures,
lecture-rooms, at morning calls and well-appointed dinner-tables in
Anglo-America, let no man infer against our poetic endowment.
Shakespeare, and Milton, and Burns, and Wordsworth, are of our stock;
and what we have already done in poetry and the plastic arts, while
yet, as a nation, hardly out of swaddling-clothes, is an earnest of a
creative future. We are to have a national literature and a national
drama.
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