Edward William Johnston under the pen name IL SECRETARIO, "American Letters -- Their Character and Advancement." The American Review: A Whig Journal of Politics, Literature, Art and Science. Volume I, Issue 6 (June 1845): pages 575-581.
[Continued page 579*]: Our laws, too, and our very politics [page 580*]: breathe scarcely less than our historic recollections and all our literary associations of the mother-country. In a word, though we have altered much, it as as yet chiefly either such things (political forms) as have, unless in extreme cases, little to do with literature; or we have altered unfavorably for it; or, where more advantageous, the change has yet too little time to create new modes of thought.
As yet, then, there are not causes, external to literature, which, acting upon it, can, unless very slowly, displace that which we inherit and give us a new one. And now of those agencies from within themselves, which continually modify Letters everywhere, and have given and may yet long continue to give to ours their particular character.
Naturally, the bright and creative eras of strict Literature (not Learning or Science), like those of the Imaginative Arts, bring after them each its period of tameness and imitation. The greatness too closely present dazzles men; all imitate, the greater part most servilely; they turn copyists, not of Nature, but of her copyist: in the admiration whjich has grown into an enthusiasm, even they of genius enough to have created for themselves -- they who can feel the great poets' or other great artists' work -- study him too much, learn to think with his thoughts; while they who cannot feel him, but perceive only what others do, copy him minutely, reproducing not his ideas, but their very expression.
Then ensues another part of the process of deterioration in letters and art. A great and a creative genius has given to the one or the other a sudden glory; all minds become warmed by it: a sensibility to his productions spreads even to those in whom that sensibility is but an imitative, a fictitious one; a multitude of imitators start up; the literature or the art takes the form of a mere school; its founder takes the place of Nature, in the imagination of his day -- his method becomes the rule -- his style, his diction, his handling (as the painters call it) must be used, in order to please, for he has grown into men's fancies, associations, and, to give delight, everything must recall him. But as a man's individuality is found in defects as well as beauties, the faults of the great writer often become beauties to his school;** and, being more easily copied than calm, still excellencies, are repoduced without end. At first, he will have given a great impulse to the mind and the taste of his day; but presently comes, by the law of compensations, an injury [t]o both. If he be a a poet (to confine ourselves to a single sort of example) he must have enriched his language in its expressive, its picturesque, and its harmonious forms, and, in a word, added greatly for it to that dialect of the fancy and senses, the mere terms of which, come, by and by, to have the power of producing in us, apart from their meaning, the pleasure, the sensation of poetry. No sooner has this happened, then you begin to have a sort of conventional verse, that breathes no thought, no imagination of its own, but pleases only because it has that diction, those sounds, the forms and the vocabulary, which have acquired for us a charm, and by the mere association with former emotions, affect us as poetry, though in reality but its jargon, when thus employed. At first, this answers well enough; but soon the poetic dialect, conctinually hacknied in sing-song, forfeits by abuse its power to please, and is degraded back into a common-place at which one stops his ears, just as at the most charming air, when all the street-organs have come to grind it. Thus is it that the bard builds up a tongue of his own, a language of the gods, such as Homer talks of; and thus, as soon as blockheads begin to jabber it, must it be abandoned, and a new one created by other great poets. The process wihich we have explained describes, as we think, a great part of what is now going on, and almost finished, in the literary world of the present. It seems to us to have degraded, almost to the point of extinction, the literary forms which it has heretofore employed.
Still there is some comfort. Verse is getting into a disrepute which delights us. There is nothing of which a London or a New York bookseller is so shy. Shortly, we trust to see it abandoned to tailors and man-milliners, as congenial to their pursuits alone, and employed to popularize (as it is already adequately doing) patent blacking, hoarhound candy, and quack medicines. They who rhyme upon these themes give us hopes, for they are the only ones equal to their subjects.
**Look, for instance, at those collections entitled "Beauties" of Shakespeare, and others; usually gathered, one might think, as examples of hyperbole, exaggeration and ill taste in every form.
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