We do not need, in attempting to answer this question, any definition of idealism, in its philosophical7 or in its more purely8 literary sense. There are certain fundamental human sentiments which lift men above brutes9, Frenchmen above "frog-eaters," and Englishmen above "shop-keepers." These ennobling sentiments or ideals, while universal in their essential nature, assume in each civilized10 nation a somewhat specific coloring. The national literature reveals the myriad11 shades and hues12 of private and public feeling, and the more truthful13 this literary record, the more delicate and noble become the harmonies of local and national thought or emotion with the universal instincts and passions of mankind. On the other hand, when the literature of Spain, for instance, or of Italy, fails, within a given period, in range and depth of human interest, we are compelled to believe either that the Spain or[Pg 88] Italy of that age was wanting in the nobler ideals, or that it lacked literary interpretation14.
In the case of America we are confronted by a similar dilemma15. Since the beginning of the seventeenth century this country has been, in a peculiar16 sense, the home of idealism; but our literature has remained through long periods thin and provincial17, barren in cosmopolitan18 significance; and the hard fact faces us to-day that only three or four of our writers have aroused any strong interest in the cultivated readers of continental19 Europe. Evidently, then, either the torch of American idealism does not burn as brightly as we think, or else our writers, with but few exceptions, have not hitherto possessed20 the height and reach and grasp to hold up the torch so that the world could see it. Let us look first at the flame, and then at the torch-bearers.
Readers of Carlyle have often been touched by the humility21 with which that disinherited child of Calvinism speaks of Goethe's doctrine22 of the "Three Reverences23," as set forth25 in Wilhelm Meister. Again and again, in his correspondence and his essays, does Carlyle recur26 to that teaching of the threefold Reverence24:[Pg 89] Reverence for what is above us, for what is around us and for what is under us; that is to say, the ethnic27 religion which frees us from debasing fear, the philosophical religion which unites us with our comrades, and the Christian28 religion which recognizes humility and poverty and suffering as divine.
"To which of these religions do you specially29 adhere?" inquired Wilhelm.
"To all the three," replied the sages30; "for in their union they produce what may properly be called the true Religion. Out of those three Reverences springs the highest Reverence, Reverence for Oneself."
An admirable symbolism, surely; vaguer, no doubt, than the old symbols which Carlyle had learned in the Kirk at Ecclefechan, but less vague, in turn, than that doctrine of reverence for the Oversoul, which was soon to be taught at Concord31.
As one meditates32 upon the idealism of the first colonists33 in America, one is tempted34 to ask what their "reverences" were. Toward what tangible36 symbols of the invisible did their eyes instinctively37 turn?
For New England, at least, the answer is[Pg 90] relatively38 simple. One form of it is contained in John Adams's well-known prescription39 for Virginia, as recorded in his Diary for July 21, 1786. "Major Langbourne dined with us again. He was lamenting41 the difference of character between Virginia and New England. I offered to give him a receipt for making a New England in Virginia. He desired it; and I recommended to him town-meetings, training-days, town-schools, and ministers."
The "ministers," it will be noticed, come last on the Adams list. But the order of precedence is unimportant.
Here are four symbols, or, if you like, "reverences." Might not the Virginia planters, loyal to their own specific symbol of the "gentleman,"—no unworthy ideal, surely; one that had been glorified42 in European literature ever since Castiligione wrote his Courtier, and one that had been transplanted from England to Virginia as soon as Sir Walter Raleigh's men set foot on the soil which took its name from the Virgin40 Queen,—might not the Virginia gentlemen have pondered to their profit over the blunt suggestion of the Massachusetts commoner? No doubt; and yet how much picturesqueness43[Pg 91] and nobility—and tragedy, too—we should have missed, if our history had not been full of these varying symbols, clashing ideals, different Reverences!
One Reverence, at least, was common to the Englishman of Virginia and to the Englishman of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. They were joint45 heirs of the Reformation, children of that waxing and puissant46 England which was a nation of one book, the Bible; a book whose phrases color alike the Faerie Queen of Spenser and the essays of Francis Bacon; a book rich beyond all others in human experience; full of poetry, history, drama; the test of conduct; the manual of devotion; and above all, and blinding all other considerations by the very splendor47 of the thought, a book believed to be the veritable Word of the unseen God. For these colonists in the wilderness48, as for the Protestant Europe which they had left irrevocably behind them, the Bible was the plainest of all symbols of idealism: it was the first of the "Reverences."
The Church was a symbol likewise, but to the greater portion of colonial America the Church meant chiefly the tangible band of[Pg 92] militant49 believers within the limits of a certain township or parish, rather than the mystical Bride of Christ. Except in Maryland and Virginia, whither the older forms of Church worship were early transplanted, there was scanty50 reverence for the Establishment. There was neither clergyman nor minister on board the Mayflower. In Rufus Choate's oration52 on the Pilgrims before the New England Society of New York in 1843, occurred the famous sentence about "a church without a bishop53 and a state without a King"; to which Dr. Wainwright, rector of St. John's, replied wittily54 at the dinner following the oration that there "can be no church without a bishop." This is perhaps a question for experts; but Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard, and John Cotton would have sided with Rufus Choate. The awe55 which had once been paid to the Establishment was transferred, in the seventeenth-century New England, to the minister. The minister imposed himself upon the popular imagination, partly through sheer force of personal ascendency, and partly as a symbol of the theocracy,—the actual governing of the Commonwealth56 by the laws and spirit of the sterner Scriptures57.[Pg 93] The minister dwelt apart as upon an awful Sinai. It was no mere58 romantic fancy of Hawthorne that shadowed his countenance59 with a black veil. The church organization, too,—though it may have lacked its bishop,—had a despotic power over its communicants; to be cast out of its fellowship involved social and political consequences comparable to those following excommunication by the Church of Rome. Hawthorne and Whittier and Longfellow—all of them sound antiquarians, though none of them in sympathy with the theology of Puritanism—have described in fit terms the bareness of the New England meeting-house. What intellectual severity and strain was there; what prodigality60 of learning; what blazing intensity61 of devotion; what pathos62 of women's patience, and of children, prematurely63 old, stretched upon the rack of insoluble problems! What dramas of the soul were played through to the end in those barn-like buildings, where the musket64, perhaps, stood in the corner of the pew! "How aweful is this place!" must have been murmured by the lips of all; though there were many who have added, "This is the gate of Heaven."[Pg 94]
The gentler side of colonial religion is winningly portrayed65 in Whittier's Pennsylvania Pilgrim and in his imaginary journal of Margaret Smith. There were sunnier slopes, warmer exposures for the ripening66 of the human spirit, in the Southern colonies. Even in New England there was sporadic67 revolt from the beginning. The number of non-church-members increased rapidly after 1700; Franklin as a youth in Boston admired Cotton Mather's ability, but he did not go to church, "Sunday being my studying day." Doubtless there were always humorous sceptics like Mrs. Stowe's delightful68 Sam Lawson in Oldtown Folks. Lawson's comment on Parson Simpson's service epitomizes two centuries of New England thinking. "Wal," said Sam, "Parson Simpson's a smart man; but I tell ye, it's kind o' discouragin'. Why, he said our state and condition by natur was just like this. We was clear down in a well fifty feet deep, and the sides all round nothin' but glare ice; but we was under immediate obligations to get out, 'cause we was free, voluntary agents. But nobody ever had got out, and nobody would, unless the Lord reached down and took 'em. And whether he would or not[Pg 95] nobody could tell; it was all sovereignty. He said there wan't one in a hundred, not one in a thousand,—not one in ten thousand,—that would be saved. Lordy massy, says I to myself, ef that's so they're any of 'em welcome to my chance. And so I kind o' ris up and come out."
Mrs. Stowe's novel is fairly representative of a great mass of derivative69 literature which draws its materials from the meeting-house period of American history. But the direct literature of that period has passed almost wholly into oblivion. Jonathan Edwards had one of the finest minds of his century; no European standard of comparison is too high for him; he belongs with Pascal, with Augustine, if you like, with Dante. But his great treatises70 written in the Stockbridge woods are known only to a few technical students of philosophy. One terrible sermon, preached at Enfield in 1741, is still read by the curious; but scarcely anybody knows of the ineffable71 tenderness, dignity, and pathos of his farewell sermon to his flock at Northampton: and the Yale Library possesses nearly twelve hundred of Edwards's sermons which have never been printed at all. Nor does anybody, save here and there an antiquarian, read[Pg 96] Shepard and Hooker and Mayhew. And yet these preachers and their successors furnished the emotional equivalents of great prose and verse to generations of men. "That is poetry," says Professor Saintsbury (in a dangerous latitudinarianism, perhaps!), "which gives the reader the feeling of poetry." Here we touch one of the fundamental characteristics of our national state of mind, in its relation to literature. We are careless of form and type, yet we crave72 the emotional stimulus73. Milton, greatest of Puritan poets, was read and quoted all too seldom in the Puritan colonies, and yet those colonists were no strangers to the emotions of sublimity74 and awe and beauty. They found them in the meeting-house instead of in a book; precisely75 as, in a later day, millions of Americans experienced what was for them the emotional equivalent of poetry in the sermons of Henry Ward35 Beecher and Phillips Brooks76. French pulpit oratory77 of the seventeenth century wins recognition as a distinct type of literature; its great practitioners78, like Massillon, Bourdaloue, Bossuet, are appraised79 in all the histories of the national literature and in books devoted to the evolution of literary species. In[Pg 97] the American colonies the great preachers performed the functions of men of letters without knowing it. They have been treated with too scant51 respect in the histories of American literature. It is one of the penalties of Protestantism that the audiences, after a while, outgrow80 the preacher. The development of the historic sense, of criticism, of science, makes an impassable gulf81 between Jonathan Edwards and the American churches of the twentieth century. A sense of profound changes in theology has left our contemporaries indifferent to the literature in which the old theology was clothed.
There is one department of American literary production, of which Bossuet's famous sermon on Queen Henrietta Maria of England may serve to remind us, which illustrates83 significantly the national idealism. I mean the commemorative oration. The addresses upon the Pilgrim Fathers by such orators84 as Everett, Webster, and Choate; the countless85 orations86 before such organizations as the New England Society of New York and the Phi Beta Kappa; the papers read before historical and patriotic87 societies; the birthday and centenary discourses[Pg 98] upon national figures like Washington or Lincoln, have all performed, and are still performing, an inestimable service in stimulating88 popular loyalty89 to the idealism of the fathers. As literature, most of this production is derivative: we listen to eloquence90 about the Puritans, but we do not read the Puritans; the description of Arthur Dimmesdale's election sermon in The Scarlet91 Letter, moving as it may be, tempts92 no one to open the stout93 collections of election sermons in the libraries. Yet the original literature of medi?val chivalry94 is known only to a few scholars: Tennyson's Idylls outsell the Mabinogion and Malory. The actual world of literature is always shop-worn; a world chiefly of second-hand95 books, of warmed-over emotions and it is not surprising that many listeners to orations about Lincoln do not personally emulate96 Lincoln, and that many of the most enthusiastic dealers97 in the sentiment of the ancestral meeting-house do not themselves attend church.
The other ingredients of John Adams's ideal Commonwealth are no less significant of our national disposition98. Take the school-house. It was planted in the wilderness for the training[Pg 99] of boys and girls and for a future "godly and learned ministry99." The record of American education is a long story of idealism which has touched literature at every turn. The "red school-house" on the hill-top or at the cross-roads, the "log-colleges" in forgotten hamlets, the universities founded by great states, are all a record of the American faith—which has sometimes been called a fetich—in education. In its origin, it was a part of the essential programme of Calvinism to make a man able to judge for himself upon the most momentous100 questions; a programme, too, of that political democracy which lay embedded101 in the tenets of Calvinism, a democracy which believes and must continue to believe that an educated electorate102 can safeguard its own interests and train up its own leaders. The poetry of the American school-house was written long ago by Whittier, in describing Joshua Coffin's school under the big elm on the cross-road in East Haverhill; its humor and pathos and drama have been portrayed by innumerable story-writers and essayists. Mrs. Martha Baker103 Dunn's charming sketches104, entitled "Cicero in Maine" and "Virgil in Maine," indicate the idealism once taught[Pg 100] in the old rural academies,—and it is taught there still. City men will stop wistfully on the street, in the first week of September, to watch the boys and girls go trudging105 off to their first day of school; men who believe in nothing else at least believe in that! And school and college and university remain, as in the beginning, the first garden-ground and the last refuge of literature.
That "town-meeting" which John Adams thought Virginia might do well to adopt has likewise become a symbol of American idealism. Together with the training-day, it represented the rights and duties and privileges of free men; the machinery106 of self-government. It was democracy, rather than "representative" government, under its purest aspect. Sentiments of responsibility to the town, the political unit, and to the Commonwealth, the group of units, were bred there. Likewise, it was a training-school for sententious speech and weighty action; its roots, as historians love to demonstrate, run back very far; and though the modern drift to cities has made its machinery ineffective in the larger communities, it remains107 a perpetual spring or feeding stream to the broader currents[Pg 101] of our national life. Without an understanding of the town-meeting and its equivalents, our political literature loses much of its significance. Like the school-house and meeting-house, it has become glorified by our men of letters. John Fiske and other historians have celebrated109 it in some of the most brilliant pages of our political writing; and that citizen literature, so deeply characteristic of us, found in the plain, forthright110, and public-spirited tone of town-meeting discussions its keynote. The spectacular debates of our national history, the dramatic contests in the great arena111 of the Senate Chamber112, the discussions before huge popular audiences in the West, have maintained the civic113 point of view, have developed and dignified114 and enriched the prose style first employed by American freemen in deciding their local affairs in the presence of their neighbors. "I am a part of this people," said Lincoln proudly in one of his famous debates of 1858; "I was raised just a little east of here"; and this nearness to the audience, this directness and simplicity115 and genuineness of our best political literature, its homely116 persuasiveness117 and force, is an inheritance of the town-meeting.[Pg 102]
Bible and meeting-house, school-house and town-meeting, thus illustrate82 concretely the responsiveness of the American character to idealistic impulses. They are external symbols of a certain state of mind. It may indeed be urged that they are primarily signs of a moral and social or institutional trend, and are therefore non-literary evidence of American idealism. Nevertheless, institutional as they may be deemed, they lie close to that poetry of daily duty in which our literature has not been poor. They are fundamentally related to that attitude of mind, that habitual118 temper of the spirit, which has produced, in all countries of settled use and wont119, the literature of idealism. Brunetière said of Flaubert's most famous woman character that poor Emma Bovary, the prey120 and the victim of Romantic desires, was after all much like the rest of us except that she lacked the intelligence to perceive the charm and poetry of the daily task. We have already touched upon the purely romantic side of American energy and of American imagination, and we must shortly look more closely still at those impulses of daring, those moods of heightened feeling, that intensified121 individualism,[Pg 103] the quest of strangeness and terror and wild beauty, which characterize our romantic writing. But this romanticism is, as it were, a segment of the larger circle of idealism. It is idealism accentuated122 by certain factors, driven to self-expression by the passions of scorn or of desire; it exceeds, in one way or another, the normal range of experience and emotion. Our romantic American literature is doubtless our greatest. And yet some of the most characteristic tendencies of American writing are to be found in the poetry of daily experience, in the quiet accustomed light that falls upon one's own doorway123 and garden, in the immemorial charm of going forth to one's labor124 and returning in the evening,—poetry old as the world.
Let us see how this glow of idealism touches some of the more intimate aspects of human experience. "Out of the three Reverences," says Wilhelm Meister, "springs the highest Reverence, Reverence for Oneself." Open the pages of Hawthorne. Moving wholly within the framework of established institutions, with no desire to shatter the existing scheme of social order, choosing as its heroes men of the[Pg 104] meeting-house, town-meeting, and training-day, how intensely nevertheless does the imagination of this fiction-writer illuminate125 the Body and the Soul!
Take first the Body. The inheritance of English Puritanism may be traced throughout our American writing, in its reverence for physical purity. The result is something unique in literary history. Continental critics, while recognizing the intellectual and artistic126 powers revealed in The Scarlet Letter, have seldom realized the awfulness, to the Puritan mind, of the very thought of an adulterous minister. That a priest in southern Europe should break his vows128 is indeed scandalous; but the sin is regarded as a failure of the natural man to keep a vow127 requiring supernatural grace for its fulfilment; it may be that the priest had no vocation129 for his sacred office; he is unfrocked, punished, forgotten, yet a certain mantle130 of human charity still covers his offence. But in the Puritan scheme (and The Scarlet Letter, save for that one treacherous131, warm human moment in the woodland where "all was spoken," lies wholly within the set framework of Puritanism) there is no forgiveness for a sin of the[Pg 105] flesh. There is only Law, Law stretching on into infinitude until the mind shudders133 at it. Hawthorne knew his Protestant New England through and through. The Scarlet Letter is the most striking example in our national literature of that idealization of physical purity, but hundreds of other romances and poems, less morbid134 if less great, assert in unmistakable terms the same moral conviction, the same ideal.
Yet, in spite of its theme, there was never a less adulterous novel than this book which plays so artistically135 with the letter A. The body is branded, is consumed, is at last, perhaps, transfigured by the intense rays of light emitted from the suffering soul.
"The soul is form and doth the body make."
In this intense preoccupation with the Soul, Hawthorne's romance is in unison136 with the more mystical and spiritual utterances137 of Catholicism as well as of Protestantism. It was in part a resultant of that early American isolation139 which contributed so effectively to the artistic setting of The Scarlet Letter. But in his doctrine of spiritual integrity, in the agonized140 utterance138, "Be true—be true!" as well as in[Pg 106] his reverence for purity of the body, our greatest romancer was typical of the imaginative literature of his countrymen. The restless artistic experiments of Poe presented the human body in many a ghastly and terrifying aspect of illness and decay, and distorted by all passions save one. His imagination was singularly sexless. Pathological students have pointed141 out the relation between this characteristic of Poe's writing, and his known tendencies toward opium-eating, alcoholism, and tuberculosis142. But no such explanation is at hand to elucidate143 the absence of sexual passion from the novels of the masculine-minded Fenimore Cooper. One may say, indeed, that Cooper's novels, like Scott's, lack intensity of spiritual vision; that their tone is consonant144 with the views of a sound Church of England parson in the eighteenth century; and that the absence of physical passion, like the absence of purely spiritual insight, betrays a certain defect in Cooper's imaginative grasp and depth. But it is better criticism, after all, to remember that these three pioneers in American fiction-writing were composing for an audience in which Puritan traditions or tastes were predominant. Not one of the three men[Pg 107] but would have instantly sacrificed an artistic effect, legitimate146 in the eyes of Fielding or Goethe or Balzac, rather than—in the phrase so often satirized—"bring a blush to the cheek of innocence147." In other words, the presence of a specific audience, accustomed to certain Anglo-Saxon and Puritanic restraint of topic and of speech, has from the beginning of our imaginative literature co?perated with the instinct of our writers. That Victorian reticence148 which is so plainly seen even in such full-bodied writers as Dickens or Thackeray—a reticence which men like Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Wells think so hypocritical and dangerous to society and which they have certainly done their utmost to abolish—has hitherto dominated our American writing. The contemporary influence of great Continental writers to whom reticence is unknown, combined with the influence of a contemporary opera and drama to which reticence would be unprofitable, are now assaulting this dominant145 convention. Very possibly it is doomed149. But it is only within recent years that its rule has been questioned.
One result of it may, I think, be fairly admitted.[Pg 108] While very few writers of eminence150, after all, in any country, wish to bring a "blush to the cheek of innocence," they naturally wish, as Thackeray put it in one of the best-known of his utterances, to be permitted to depict151 a man to the utmost of their power. American literary conventions, like English conventions, have now and again laid a restraining and compelling hand upon the legitimate exercise of this artistic instinct; and this fact has co?perated with many social, ethical152, and perhaps physiological153 causes to produce a thinness or bloodlessness in our books. They are graceful154, pleasing, but pale, like one of those cool whitish uncertain skies of an American spring. They lack "body," like certain wines. It is not often that we can produce a real Burgundy. We have had many distinguished155 fiction-writers, but none with the physical gusto of a Fielding, a Smollett, or even a Dickens, who, idealist and romanticist as he was, and Victorian as were his artistic preferences, has this animal life which tingles156 upon every page. We must confess that there is a certain quality of American idealism which is covertly157 suspicious or openly hostile to the glories of bodily sensation. Emerson's thin[Pg 109] high shoulders peep up reproachfully above the desk; Lanier is playing his reproachful flute158; Longfellow reads Frémont's Rocky Mountain experiences while lying abed, and sighs "But, ah, the discomforts159!"; Irving's Astoria, superb as were the possibilities of its physical background, tastes like parlor160 exploration. Even Dana's Before the Mast and Parkman's Oregon Trail, transcripts161 of robust162 actual experience, and admirable books, reveal a sort of physical paleness compared with Turgenieff's Notes of a Sportsman and Tolsto?'s Sketches of Sebastopol and the Crimea. They are Harvard undergraduate writing, after all!
These facts illustrate anew that standing108 temptation of the critic of American literature to palliate literary shortcomings by the plea that we possess certain admirable non-literary qualities. The dominant idealism of the nation has levied163, or seemed to levy164, a certain tax upon our writing. Some instincts, natural to the full-blooded utterance of Continental literature, have been starved or eliminated here. Very well. The characteristic American retort to this assertion would be: Better our long record and habit of idealism than a few masterpieces more or less. As a[Pg 110] people, we have cheerfully accepted the Puritan restraint of speech, we have respected the shamefaced conventions of decent and social utterance. Like the men and women described in Locker-Lampson's verses, Americans
"eat, and drink, and scheme, and plod,— They go to church on Sunday; And many are afraid of God— And more of Mrs. Grundy."
Now Mrs. Grundy is assuredly not the most desirable of literary divinities, but the student of classical literature can easily think of other divinities, celebrated in exquisite165 Greek and Roman verse, who are distinctly less desirable still.
"Not passion, but sentiment," said Hawthorne, in a familiar passage of criticism of his own Twice-Told Tales. How often must the student of American literature echo that half-melancholy but just verdict, as he surveys the transition from the spiritual intensity of a few of our earlier writers to the sentimental166 qualities which have brought popular recognition to the many. Take the word "soul" itself. Calvinism shadowed and darkened the meaning, perhaps, and yet its spiritual passion made the word "soul" sublime167. The reaction against Calvinism[Pg 111] has made religion more human, natural, and possibly more Christlike, but "soul" has lost the thrilling solemnity with which Edwards pronounced the word. Emerson and Hawthorne, far as they had escaped from the bonds of their ancestral religion, still utter the word "soul" with awe. But in the popular sermon and hymn168 and story of our day,—with their search after the sympathetic and the sentimental, after what is called in magazine slang "heart-interest,"—the word has lost both its intellectual distinction and its literary magic. It will regain169 neither until it is pronounced once more with spiritual passion.
But in literature, as in other things, we must take what we can get. The great mass of our American writing is sentimental, because it has been produced by, and for, an excessively sentimental people. The poems in Stedman's carefully chosen Anthology, the prose and verse in the two volume Stedman-Hutchinson collection of American Literature, the Library of Southern Literature, and similar sectional anthologies, the school Readers and Speakers,—particularly in the half-century between 1830 and 1880,—our newspapers and[Pg 112] magazines,—particularly the so-called "yellow" newspapers and the illustrated170 magazines typified by Harper's Monthly,—are all fairly dripping with sentiment. American oratory is notoriously the most sentimental oratory of the civilized world. The Congressional Record still presents such specimens171 of sentiment—delivered or given leave to be printed, it is true, for "home consumption" rather than to affect the course of legislation—as are inexplicable172 to an Englishman or a Frenchman or an Italian.
Immigrants as we all are, and migratory173 as we have ever been,—so much so that one rarely meets an American who was born in the house built by his grandfather,—we cling with peculiar fondness to the sentiment of "Home." The best-known American poem, for decades, was Samuel Woodworth's "Old Oaken Bucket," the favorite popular song was Stephen Foster's "My Old Kentucky Home," the favorite play was Denman Thompson's "Old Homestead." Without that appealing word "mother" the American melodrama174 would be robbed of its fifth act. Without pictures of "the child" the illustrated magazines would go into bankruptcy175. No country has witnessed[Pg 113] such a production of periodicals and books for boys and girls: France and Germany imitate in vain The Youth's Companion and St. Nicholas, as they did the stories of "Oliver Optic" and Little Women and Little Lord Fauntleroy.
The sentimental attitude towards women and children, which is one of the most typical aspects of American idealism, is constantly illustrated in our short stories. Bret Harte, disciple176 of Dickens as he was, and Romantic as was his fashion of dressing177 up his miners and gamblers, was accurately178 faithful to the American feeling towards the "kid" and the "woman." "Tennessee's Partner," "The Luck of Roaring Camp," "Christmas at Sandy Bar," are obvious examples. Owen Wister's stories are equally faithful and admirable in this matter. The American girl still does astonishing things in international novels, as she has continued to do since the eighteen-sixties, but they are astonishing mainly to the European eye and against the conventionalized European background. She does the same things at home, and neither she nor her mother sees why she should not, so universal among us is the chivalrous179 interpretation of actions and situations[Pg 114] which amaze the European observer. The popular American literature which recognizes and encourages this position of the "young girl" in our social structure is a literature primarily of sentiment. The note of passion—in the European sense of that word—jars and shatters it. The imported "problem-play," written for an adult public in Paris or London, introduces social facts and intellectual elements almost wholly alien to the experience of American matinée audiences. Disillusioned180 historians of our literature have instanced this unsophistication as a proof of our national inexperience; yet it is often a sort of radiant and triumphant181 unsophistication which does not lose its innocence in parting with its ignorance.
That sentimental idealization of classes, whether peasant, bourgeois182, or aristocratic, which has long been a feature of Continental and English poetry and fiction, is practically absent from American literature. Whatever the future may bring, there have hitherto been no fixed183 classes in American society. Webster was guilty of no exaggeration when he declared that the whole North was made up of laborers185, and Lincoln spoke132 in the same terms in his[Pg 115] well-known sentences about "hired laborers": "twenty-five years ago I was a hired laborer184." The relative uniformity of economic and social conditions, which prevailed until toward the close of the nineteenth century, made, no doubt, for the happiness of the greatest number, but it failed, naturally, to afford that picturesqueness of class contrast and to stimulate186 that sentiment of class distinction, in which European literature is so rich.
Very interesting, in the light of contemporary economic conditions, is the effort made by American poets in the middle of the last century to glorify187 labor. They were not so much idealizing a particular laboring188 class, as endeavoring, in Whitman's words, "To teach the average man the glory of his walk and trade." Whitman himself sketched189 the American workman in almost every attitude which appealed to his own sense of the picturesque44 and heroic. But years before Leaves of Grass was published, Whittier had celebrated in his Songs of Labor the glorified images of lumberman and drover, shoemaker and fisherman. Lucy Larcom and the authors of The Lowell Offering portrayed the fine idealism of the young women—of the[Pg 116] best American stock—who went enthusiastically to work in the cotton-mills of Lowell and Lawrence, or who bound shoes by their own firesides on the Essex County farms. That glow of enthusiasm for labor was chiefly moral, but it was poetical190 as well. The changes which have come over the economic and social life of America are nowhere more sharply indicated than in that very valley of the Merrimac where, sixty and seventy years ago, one could "hear America singing." There are few who are singing to-day in the cotton-mills; the operators, instead of girls from the hill-farms, are Greeks, Lithuanians, Armenians, Italians. Whittier's drovers have gone forever; the lumbermen and deep-sea fishermen have grown fewer, and the men who still swing the axes and haul the frozen cod-lines are mostly aliens. The pride that once broke into singing has turned harsh and silent. "Labor" looms191 vast upon the future political and social horizon, but the songs of labor have lost the lyric192 note. They have turned into the dramas and tragedies of labor, as portrayed with the swift and fierce insistence193 of the short story, illustrated by the Kodak. In the great agricultural sections of the West and South the[Pg 117] old bucolic194 sentiment still survives,—that simple joy of seeing the "frost upon the pumpkin195" and "the fodder196 in the stock" which Mr. James Whitcomb Riley has sung with such charming fidelity197 to the type. But even on the Western farms toil198 has grown less manual. It is more a matter of expert handling of machinery. Reaping and binding199 may still have their poet, but he needs to be a Kipling rather than a Burns.
Our literature, then, reveals few traces of idealization of a class, and but little idealization of trades or callings. Neither class nor calling presents anything permanent to the American imagination, or stands for anything ultimate in American experience. On the other hand, our writing is rich in local sentiment and sectional loyalty. The short story, which has seized so greedily the more dramatic aspects of American energy, has been equally true to the quiet background of rural scenery and familiar ways. American idealism, as shown in the transformation200 of the lesser201 loyalties202 of home and countryside into the larger loyalties of state and section, and the absorption of these, in turn, into the emotions of nationalism, is particularly illustrated in our political verse. A striking[Pg 118] example of the imaginative visualization203 of the political units of a state is the spirited roll-call of the counties in Whittier's "Massachusetts to Virginia." But the burden of that fine poem, after all, is the essential unity204 of Massachusetts as a sovereign state, girding herself to repel205 the attack of another sovereign state, Virginia. Now the evolution of our political history, both local and national, has tended steadily206, for half a century, to the obliteration207, for purposes of the imagination, of county lines within state lines. At the last Republican state convention held in Massachusetts, there were no county banners displayed, for the first time in half a century. Many a city-dweller to-day cannot tell in what county he is living unless he has happened to make a transfer of real estate. State lines themselves are fading away. The federal idea has triumphed. Doubtless the majority of the fellow citizens of John Randolph of Roanoke were all the more proud of him because the poet could say of him, in writing an admiring and mournful epitaph:—
"Beyond Virginia's border line His patriotism208 perished."
The great collections of Civil War verse, which[Pg 119] are lying almost unread in the libraries, are store-houses of this ancient state pride and jealousy209, which was absorbed so fatally into the larger sectional antagonism210. "Maryland, my Maryland" gave place to "Dixie," just as Whittier's "Massachusetts to Virginia" was forgotten when marching men began to sing "John Brown's Body" and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." The literature of sectionalism still lingers in its more lovable aspect in the verse and fiction which still celebrates the fairer side of the civilization of the Old South: its ideals of chivalry and local loyalty, its gracious women and gallant211 men. Our literature needs to cultivate this provincial affection for the past, as an offset212 to the barren uniformity which the federal scheme allows. But the ultimate imaginative victory, like the actual political victory of the Civil War, is with the thought and feeling of Nationalism. It is foreshadowed in that passionate213 lyric cry of Lowell, which sums up so much and, like all true passion, anticipates so much:—
"O Beautiful! my Country!"
The literary record of American idealism thus illustrates how deeply the conception of[Pg 120] Nationalism has affected214 the imagination of our countrymen. The literary record of the American conception of liberty runs further back. Some historians have allowed themselves to think that the American notion of liberty is essentially215 declamatory, a sort of futile216 echo of Patrick Henry's "Give me Liberty or give me Death"; and not only declamatory, but hopelessly theoretical and abstract. They grant that it was a trumpet-note, no doubt, for agitators217 against the Stamp Act, and for pamphleteers like Thomas Paine; that it may have been a torch for lighting218 dark and weary ways in the Revolutionary War; but they believe it likewise to be a torch which gleams with the fire caught from France and which was passed back to France in turn when her own great bonfire was ready for lighting. The facts, however, are inconsistent with this picturesque theory of contemporary reactionists. It is true that the word "liberty" has been full of temptation for generations of American orators, that it has become an idol219 of the forum220, and often a source of heat rather than of light. But to treat American Liberty as if she habitually221 wore the red cap is to nourish a Francophobia as[Pg 121] absurd as Edmund Burke's. The sober truth is that the American working theory of Liberty is singularly like St. Paul's. "Ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh." A few sentences from John Winthrop, written in 1645, are significant: "There is a twofold liberty, natural ... and civil or federal. The first is common to man with beasts and other creatures. By this, man, as he stands in relation to man simply, hath liberty to do what he lists; it is a liberty to evil as well as to good. This liberty is incompatible222 and inconsistent with authority.... The other kind of liberty I call civil or federal, it may also be termed moral.... This liberty is the proper end and object of authority, and cannot subsist223 without it; and it is a liberty to that only which is good, just, and honest. This liberty you are to stand for, with the hazard (not only of your goods, but) of your lives, if need be.... This liberty is maintained and exercised in a way of subjection to authority; it is of the same kind of liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free."
There speaks the governor, the man of affairs, the typical citizen of the future republic. The[Pg 122] liberty to do as one pleases is a dream of the Renaissance224; but out of dreamland it does not work. Nobody, even in revolutionary France, imagines that it will work. Jefferson, who is popularly supposed to derive225 his notion of liberty from French theorists, is to all practical purposes nearer to John Winthrop than he is to Rousseau. The splendid phrases of his "Declaration" are sometimes characterized as abstractions. They are really generalizations226 from past political experience. An arbitrary king, assuming a liberty to do as he liked, had encroached upon the long-standing customs and authority of the colonists. Jefferson, at the bidding of the Continental Congress, served notice of the royal trespass227, and incidentally produced (as Lincoln said) a "standard maxim228 for free society."
It is true, no doubt, that the word "liberty" became in Jefferson's day, and later, a mere partisan229 or national shibboleth230, standing for no reality, degraded to a catchword, a symbol of antagonism to Great Britain. In the political debates and the impressive prose and verse of the anti-slavery struggle, the word became once more charged with vital meaning; it glowed under the heat and pressure of an idea. Towards[Pg 123] the end of the nineteenth century it went temporarily out of fashion. The late Colonel Higginson, an ideal type of what Europeans call an "1848" man, attended at the close of the century some sessions of the American Historical Association. In his own address, at the closing dinner, he remarked that there was one word for which he had listened in vain during the reading of the papers by the younger men. It was the word "liberty." One of the younger school retorted promptly231 that since we had the thing liberty, we had no need to glorify the word. But Colonel Higginson, stanch232 adherent233 as he was of the "good old cause," was not convinced. Like many another lover of American letters, he thought that William Vaughn Moody234's "Ode in Time of Hesitation235" deserved a place by the side of Lowell's "Commemoration Ode," and that when the ultimate day of reckoning comes for the whole muddled236 Imperialistic237 business, the standard of reckoning must be "liberty" as Winthrop and Jefferson and Lincoln and Lowell and Vaughn Moody understood the word.
In the mean time we must confess that the history of our literature, with a few noble exceptions,[Pg 124] shows a surprising defect in the passion for freedom. Tennyson's famous lines about "Freedom broadening slowly down from precedent238 to precedent" are perfectly239 American in their conservative tone; while it is Englishmen like Byron and Landor and Shelley and Swinburne who have written the most magnificent republican poetry. The "land of the free" turns to the monarchic240 mother country, after all, for the glow and thunder and splendor of the poetry of freedom. It is one of the most curious phenomena241 in the history of literature. Shall we enter the preoccupation plea once more? Enjoying the thing liberty, have we been therefore less concerned with the idea? Or is it simply another illustration of the defective242 passion of American literature?
Yet there is one phase of political loyalty which has been cherished by the imagination of Americans, and which has inspired noteworthy oratory and noble political prose. It is the sentiment of union. In one sense, of course, this dates back to the period of Franklin's bon mot about our all hanging together, or hanging separately. It is found in Hamilton's pamphlets, in Paine's Crisis, in the Federalist, in Washington's[Pg 125] "Farewell Address." It is peculiarly associated with the name and fame of Daniel Webster, and, to a less degree, with the career of Henry Clay. In the stress of the debate over slavery, many a Northerner with abolitionist convictions, like the majority of Southerners with slave-holding convictions, forgot the splendid peroration243 of Webster's "Reply to Hayne" and were willing to "let the union go." But in the four tragic244 and heroic years that followed the firing upon the American flag at Fort Sumter the sentiment of union was made sacred by such sacrifices as the patriotic imagination of a Clay or a Webster had never dreamed. A new literature resulted. A lofty ideal of indissoluble union was preached in pulpits, pleaded for in editorials, sung in lyrics245, and woven into the web of fiction. Edward Everett Hale's Man Without a Country became one of the most poignantly246 moving of American stories. In Walt Whitman's Drum-Taps and his later poems, the "union of these States" became transfigured with mystical significance: no longer a mere political compact, dissoluble at will, but a spiritual entity247, a new incarnation of the soul of man.[Pg 126]
We must deal later with that American instinct of fellowship which Whitman believed to have been finally cemented by the Civil War, and which has such import for the future of our democracy. There are likewise communal248 loyalties, glowing with the new idealism which has come with the twentieth century: ethical, municipal, industrial, and artistic movements which are full of promise for the higher life of the country, but which have not yet had time to express themselves adequately in literature. There are stirrings of racial loyalty among this and that element of our composite population,—as for instance among the gifted younger generation of American Jews,—a racial loyalty not antagonistic249 to the American current of ideas, but rather in full unison with it. Internationalism itself furnishes motives250 for the activity of the noblest imaginations, and the true literature of internationalism has hardly yet begun. It is in the play and counterplay of these new forces that the American literature of the twentieth century must measure itself. Communal feelings novel to Americans bred under the accepted individualism will doubtless assert themselves in our prose and verse. But it is to be[Pg 127] remembered that the best writing thus far produced on American soil has been a result of the old conditions: of the old "Reverences"; of the pioneer training of mind and body; of the slow tempering of the American spirit into an obstinate251 idealism. We do not know what course the ship may take in the future, but
"We know what Master laid thy keel, What Workman wrought252 thy ribs253 of steel, Who made each mast and sail and rope, What anvil254 rang, what hammers beat, In what a forge and what a heat Were shaped the anchors of thy hope!"
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1
devoted
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| adj.忠诚的，忠实的，热心的，献身于...的 | |
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dyke
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| n.堤，水坝，排水沟 | |
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accomplishments
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| n.造诣；完成( accomplishment的名词复数 )；技能；成绩；成就 | |
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aspirations
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| 强烈的愿望( aspiration的名词复数 )； 志向； 发送气音； 发 h 音 | |
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immediate
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| adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的 | |
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temperament
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| n.气质，性格，性情 | |
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philosophical
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| adj.哲学家的，哲学上的，达观的 | |
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purely
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| adv.纯粹地，完全地 | |
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brutes
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| 兽( brute的名词复数 )； 畜生； 残酷无情的人； 兽性 | |
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civilized
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| a.有教养的，文雅的 | |
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myriad
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| adj.无数的；n.无数，极大数量 | |
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hues
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| 色彩( hue的名词复数 )； 色调； 信仰； 观点 | |
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truthful
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| adj.真实的，说实话的，诚实的 | |
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interpretation
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| n.解释，说明，描述；艺术处理 | |
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dilemma
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| n.困境，进退两难的局面 | |
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peculiar
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| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
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provincial
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| adj.省的，地方的；n．外省人，乡下人 | |
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cosmopolitan
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| adj.世界性的，全世界的，四海为家的，全球的 | |
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continental
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| adj.大陆的，大陆性的，欧洲大陆的 | |
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possessed
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| adj.疯狂的；拥有的，占有的 | |
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humility
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| n.谦逊，谦恭 | |
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doctrine
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| n.教义；主义；学说 | |
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reverences
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| n.尊敬，崇敬( reverence的名词复数 )；敬礼 | |
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reverence
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| n.敬畏，尊敬，尊严；Reverence:对某些基督教神职人员的尊称；v.尊敬，敬畏，崇敬 | |
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forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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recur
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| vi.复发，重现，再发生 | |
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ethnic
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| adj.人种的，种族的，异教徒的 | |
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Christian
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| adj.基督教徒的；n.基督教徒 | |
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specially
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| adv.特定地；特殊地；明确地 | |
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sages
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| n.圣人( sage的名词复数 )；智者；哲人；鼠尾草（可用作调料） | |
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concord
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| n.和谐；协调 | |
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meditates
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| 深思，沉思，冥想( meditate的第三人称单数 )； 内心策划，考虑 | |
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colonists
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| n.殖民地开拓者，移民，殖民地居民( colonist的名词复数 ) | |
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tempted
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| v.怂恿（某人）干不正当的事；冒…的险（tempt的过去分词） | |
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ward
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| n.守卫，监护，病房，行政区，由监护人或法院保护的人（尤指儿童）；vt.守护，躲开 | |
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tangible
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| adj.有形的，可触摸的，确凿的，实际的 | |
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instinctively
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| adv.本能地 | |
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relatively
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| adv.比较...地，相对地 | |
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prescription
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| n.处方，开药；指示，规定 | |
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virgin
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| n.处女，未婚女子；adj.未经使用的；未经开发的 | |
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lamenting
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| adj.悲伤的，悲哀的v.（为…）哀悼，痛哭，悲伤( lament的现在分词 ) | |
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glorified
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| 美其名的，变荣耀的 | |
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picturesqueness
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picturesque
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| adj.美丽如画的，（语言）生动的，绘声绘色的 | |
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joint
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| adj.联合的，共同的；n.关节，接合处；v.连接，贴合 | |
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puissant
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| adj.强有力的 | |
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splendor
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| n.光彩；壮丽，华丽；显赫，辉煌 | |
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48
wilderness
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| n.杳无人烟的一片陆地、水等，荒漠 | |
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49
militant
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| adj.激进的，好斗的；n.激进分子，斗士 | |
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50
scanty
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| adj.缺乏的，仅有的，节省的，狭小的，不够的 | |
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51
scant
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| adj.不充分的，不足的；v.减缩，限制，忽略 | |
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52
oration
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| n.演说，致辞，叙述法 | |
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53
bishop
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| n.主教，（国际象棋）象 | |
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54
wittily
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| 机智地，机敏地 | |
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55
awe
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| n.敬畏，惊惧；vt.使敬畏，使惊惧 | |
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56
commonwealth
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| n.共和国，联邦，共同体 | |
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57
scriptures
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| 经文，圣典( scripture的名词复数 )； 经典 | |
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58
mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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59
countenance
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| n.脸色，面容；面部表情；vt.支持，赞同 | |
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60
prodigality
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| n.浪费，挥霍 | |
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61
intensity
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| n.强烈，剧烈；强度；烈度 | |
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62
pathos
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| n.哀婉，悲怆 | |
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63
prematurely
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| adv.过早地，贸然地 | |
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64
musket
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| n.滑膛枪 | |
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65
portrayed
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| v.画像( portray的过去式和过去分词 )；描述；描绘；描画 | |
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66
ripening
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| v.成熟，使熟( ripen的现在分词 )；熟化；熟成 | |
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67
sporadic
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| adj.偶尔发生的 [反]regular；分散的 | |
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delightful
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| adj.令人高兴的，使人快乐的 | |
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derivative
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| n.派(衍)生物；adj.非独创性的，模仿他人的 | |
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treatises
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| n.专题著作，专题论文，专著( treatise的名词复数 ) | |
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71
ineffable
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| adj.无法表达的，不可言喻的 | |
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72
crave
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| vt.渴望得到，迫切需要，恳求，请求 | |
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73
stimulus
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| n.刺激，刺激物，促进因素，引起兴奋的事物 | |
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74
sublimity
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| 崇高，庄严，气质高尚 | |
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75
precisely
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| adv.恰好，正好，精确地，细致地 | |
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76
brooks
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| n.小溪( brook的名词复数 ) | |
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77
oratory
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| n.演讲术；词藻华丽的言辞 | |
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practitioners
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| n.习艺者，实习者( practitioner的名词复数 )；从业者（尤指医师） | |
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79
appraised
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| v.估价( appraise的过去式和过去分词 )；估计；估量；评价 | |
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80
outgrow
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| vt.长大得使…不再适用；成长得不再要 | |
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81
gulf
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| n.海湾；深渊，鸿沟；分歧，隔阂 | |
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82
illustrate
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| v.举例说明，阐明；图解，加插图 | |
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83
illustrates
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| 给…加插图( illustrate的第三人称单数 )； 说明； 表明； （用示例、图画等）说明 | |
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84
orators
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| n.演说者，演讲家( orator的名词复数 ) | |
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85
countless
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| adj.无数的，多得不计其数的 | |
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86
orations
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| n.（正式仪式中的）演说，演讲( oration的名词复数 ) | |
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87
patriotic
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| adj.爱国的，有爱国心的 | |
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88
stimulating
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| adj.有启发性的，能激发人思考的 | |
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89
loyalty
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| n.忠诚，忠心 | |
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90
eloquence
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| n.雄辩；口才，修辞 | |
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91
scarlet
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| n.深红色，绯红色，红衣；adj.绯红色的 | |
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92
tempts
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| v.引诱或怂恿（某人）干不正当的事( tempt的第三人称单数 )；使想要 | |
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94
chivalry
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| n.骑士气概，侠义；（男人）对女人彬彬有礼，献殷勤 | |
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95
second-hand
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| adj.用过的，旧的，二手的 | |
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96
emulate
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| v.努力赶上或超越，与…竞争；效仿 | |
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97
dealers
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| n.商人( dealer的名词复数 )；贩毒者；毒品贩子；发牌者 | |
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98
disposition
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| n.性情，性格；意向，倾向；排列，部署 | |
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99
ministry
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| n.(政府的)部；牧师 | |
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100
momentous
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| adj.重要的，重大的 | |
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101
embedded
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| a.扎牢的 | |
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102
electorate
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| n.全体选民；选区 | |
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103
baker
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| n.面包师 | |
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104
sketches
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| n.草图( sketch的名词复数 )；素描；速写；梗概 | |
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105
trudging
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| vt.& vi.跋涉，吃力地走（trudge的现在分词形式） | |
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106
machinery
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| n.(总称)机械，机器；机构 | |
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107
remains
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| n.剩余物，残留物；遗体，遗迹 | |
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108
standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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109
celebrated
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| adj.有名的，声誉卓著的 | |
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110
forthright
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| adj.直率的，直截了当的 [同]frank | |
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111
arena
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| n.竞技场，运动场所；竞争场所，舞台 | |
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112
chamber
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| n.房间，寝室；会议厅；议院；会所 | |
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113
civic
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| adj.城市的，都市的，市民的，公民的 | |
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114
dignified
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| a.可敬的，高贵的 | |
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115
simplicity
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| n.简单，简易；朴素；直率，单纯 | |
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116
homely
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| adj.家常的，简朴的；不漂亮的 | |
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117
persuasiveness
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| 说服力 | |
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118
habitual
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| adj.习惯性的；通常的，惯常的 | |
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119
wont
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| adj.习惯于；v.习惯；n.习惯 | |
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120
prey
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| n.被掠食者，牺牲者，掠食；v.捕食，掠夺，折磨 | |
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121
intensified
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| v.（使）增强， （使）加剧( intensify的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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122
accentuated
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| v.重读( accentuate的过去式和过去分词 )；使突出；使恶化；加重音符号于 | |
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123
doorway
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| n.门口，(喻)入门；门路，途径 | |
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124
labor
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| n.劳动，努力，工作，劳工；分娩；vi.劳动，努力，苦干；vt.详细分析；麻烦 | |
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125
illuminate
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| vt.照亮，照明；用灯光装饰；说明，阐释 | |
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126
artistic
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| adj.艺术(家)的，美术(家)的；善于艺术创作的 | |
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127
vow
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| n.誓(言)，誓约；v.起誓，立誓 | |
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128
vows
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| 誓言( vow的名词复数 )； 郑重宣布，许愿 | |
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129
vocation
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| n.职业，行业 | |
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130
mantle
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| n.斗篷，覆罩之物，罩子；v.罩住，覆盖，脸红 | |
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131
treacherous
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|
| adj.不可靠的，有暗藏的危险的；adj.背叛的，背信弃义的 | |
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132
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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133
shudders
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| n.颤动，打颤，战栗( shudder的名词复数 )v.战栗( shudder的第三人称单数 )；发抖；（机器、车辆等）突然震动；颤动 | |
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134
morbid
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|
| adj.病的；致病的；病态的；可怕的 | |
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135
artistically
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| adv.艺术性地 | |
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136
unison
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| n.步调一致，行动一致 | |
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137
utterances
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| n.发声( utterance的名词复数 )；说话方式；语调；言论 | |
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138
utterance
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| n.用言语表达，话语，言语 | |
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139
isolation
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| n.隔离，孤立，分解，分离 | |
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140
agonized
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|
| v.使（极度）痛苦，折磨( agonize的过去式和过去分词 )；苦斗；苦苦思索；感到极度痛苦 | |
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141
pointed
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|
| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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142
tuberculosis
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| n.结核病，肺结核 | |
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143
elucidate
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|
| v.阐明，说明 | |
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144
consonant
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|
| n.辅音；adj.[音]符合的 | |
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145
dominant
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|
| adj.支配的，统治的；占优势的；显性的；n.主因，要素，主要的人(或物)；显性基因 | |
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146
legitimate
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|
| adj.合法的，合理的，合乎逻辑的；v.使合法 | |
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147
innocence
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| n.无罪；天真；无害 | |
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148
reticence
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| n.沉默，含蓄 | |
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149
doomed
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| 命定的 | |
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150
eminence
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| n.卓越，显赫；高地，高处；名家 | |
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151
depict
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| vt.描画，描绘；描写，描述 | |
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152
ethical
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| adj.伦理的，道德的，合乎道德的 | |
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153
physiological
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| adj.生理学的，生理学上的 | |
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154
graceful
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| adj.优美的，优雅的；得体的 | |
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155
distinguished
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| adj.卓越的，杰出的，著名的 | |
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156
tingles
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| n.刺痛感( tingle的名词复数 )v.有刺痛感( tingle的第三人称单数 ) | |
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157
covertly
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| adv.偷偷摸摸地 | |
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158
flute
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| n.长笛；v.吹笛 | |
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159
discomforts
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| n.不舒适( discomfort的名词复数 )；不愉快，苦恼 | |
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160
parlor
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| n.店铺，营业室；会客室，客厅 | |
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161
transcripts
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| n.抄本（ transcript的名词复数 ）；转写本；文字本；副本 | |
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162
robust
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| adj.强壮的，强健的，粗野的，需要体力的，浓的 | |
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163
levied
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| 征（兵）( levy的过去式和过去分词 )； 索取； 发动（战争）； 征税 | |
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164
levy
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| n.征收税或其他款项，征收额 | |
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165
exquisite
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| adj.精美的；敏锐的；剧烈的，感觉强烈的 | |
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166
sentimental
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| adj.多愁善感的，感伤的 | |
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167
sublime
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| adj.崇高的，伟大的；极度的，不顾后果的 | |
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168
hymn
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| n.赞美诗，圣歌，颂歌 | |
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169
regain
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| vt.重新获得，收复，恢复 | |
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170
illustrated
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| adj. 有插图的，列举的 动词illustrate的过去式和过去分词 | |
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171
specimens
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| n.样品( specimen的名词复数 )；范例；（化验的）抽样；某种类型的人 | |
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172
inexplicable
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| adj.无法解释的，难理解的 | |
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173
migratory
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| n.候鸟，迁移 | |
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174
melodrama
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| n.音乐剧；情节剧 | |
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175
bankruptcy
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| n.破产；无偿付能力 | |
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176
disciple
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| n.信徒，门徒，追随者 | |
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177
dressing
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| n.(食物)调料；包扎伤口的用品，敷料 | |
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178
accurately
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| adv.准确地，精确地 | |
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179
chivalrous
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| adj.武士精神的；对女人彬彬有礼的 | |
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180
disillusioned
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| a.不再抱幻想的，大失所望的，幻想破灭的 | |
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181
triumphant
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| adj.胜利的，成功的；狂欢的，喜悦的 | |
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182
bourgeois
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| adj./n.追求物质享受的(人)；中产阶级分子 | |
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183
fixed
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| adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的 | |
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184
laborer
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| n.劳动者，劳工 | |
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185
laborers
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| n.体力劳动者，工人( laborer的名词复数 )；（熟练工人的）辅助工 | |
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186
stimulate
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| vt.刺激，使兴奋；激励，使…振奋 | |
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187
glorify
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| vt.颂扬，赞美，使增光，美化 | |
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188
laboring
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|
| n.劳动，操劳v.努力争取(for)( labor的现在分词 )；苦干；详细分析；（指引擎）缓慢而困难地运转 | |
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189
sketched
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| v.草拟（sketch的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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190
poetical
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| adj.似诗人的；诗一般的；韵文的；富有诗意的 | |
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191
looms
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| n.织布机( loom的名词复数 )v.隐约出现，阴森地逼近( loom的第三人称单数 )；隐约出现，阴森地逼近 | |
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192
lyric
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| n.抒情诗，歌词；adj.抒情的 | |
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193
insistence
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| n.坚持；强调；坚决主张 | |
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194
bucolic
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| adj.乡村的；牧羊的 | |
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195
pumpkin
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| n.南瓜 | |
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196
fodder
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| n.草料；炮灰 | |
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197
fidelity
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| n.忠诚，忠实；精确 | |
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198
toil
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| vi.辛劳工作，艰难地行动；n.苦工，难事 | |
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199
binding
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| 有约束力的，有效的，应遵守的 | |
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200
transformation
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| n.变化；改造；转变 | |
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201
lesser
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| adj.次要的，较小的；adv.较小地，较少地 | |
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202
loyalties
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| n.忠诚( loyalty的名词复数 )；忠心；忠于…感情；要忠于…的强烈感情 | |
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203
visualization
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| n.想像，设想 | |
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204
unity
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| n.团结，联合，统一；和睦，协调 | |
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205
repel
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| v.击退，抵制，拒绝，排斥 | |
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206
steadily
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| adv.稳定地；不变地；持续地 | |
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207
obliteration
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| n.涂去，删除；管腔闭合 | |
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208
patriotism
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| n.爱国精神，爱国心，爱国主义 | |
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209
jealousy
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| n.妒忌，嫉妒，猜忌 | |
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210
antagonism
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| n.对抗，敌对，对立 | |
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gallant
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| adj.英勇的，豪侠的；(向女人)献殷勤的 | |
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offset
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| n.分支，补偿；v.抵消，补偿 | |
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passionate
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| adj.热情的，热烈的，激昂的，易动情的，易怒的，性情暴躁的 | |
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affected
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| adj.不自然的，假装的 | |
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essentially
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| adv.本质上，实质上，基本上 | |
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216
futile
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| adj.无效的，无用的，无希望的 | |
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agitators
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| n.（尤指政治变革的）鼓动者( agitator的名词复数 )；煽动者；搅拌器；搅拌机 | |
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218
lighting
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| n.照明，光线的明暗，舞台灯光 | |
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219
idol
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| n.偶像，红人，宠儿 | |
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220
forum
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| n.论坛，讨论会 | |
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221
habitually
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| ad.习惯地，通常地 | |
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222
incompatible
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| adj.不相容的，不协调的，不相配的 | |
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223
subsist
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| vi.生存，存在，供养 | |
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224
renaissance
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| n.复活，复兴，文艺复兴 | |
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225
derive
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| v.取得；导出；引申；来自；源自；出自 | |
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226
generalizations
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| 一般化( generalization的名词复数 )； 普通化； 归纳； 概论 | |
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227
trespass
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| n./v.侵犯，闯入私人领地 | |
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228
maxim
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| n.格言，箴言 | |
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229
partisan
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| adj.党派性的；游击队的；n.游击队员；党徒 | |
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230
shibboleth
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| n.陈规陋习；口令；暗语 | |
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231
promptly
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| adv.及时地，敏捷地 | |
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232
stanch
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| v.止住（血等）；adj.坚固的；坚定的 | |
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233
adherent
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| n.信徒，追随者，拥护者 | |
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234
moody
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| adj.心情不稳的，易怒的，喜怒无常的 | |
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235
hesitation
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| n.犹豫，踌躇 | |
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236
muddled
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| adj.混乱的；糊涂的；头脑昏昏然的v.弄乱，弄糟( muddle的过去式)；使糊涂；对付，混日子 | |
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237
imperialistic
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| 帝国主义的，帝制的 | |
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238
precedent
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| n.先例，前例；惯例；adj.在前的，在先的 | |
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239
perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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240
monarchic
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| 国王的，君主政体的 | |
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241
phenomena
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| n.现象 | |
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242
defective
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| adj.有毛病的，有问题的，有瑕疵的 | |
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243
peroration
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| n.（演说等之）结论 | |
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244
tragic
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| adj.悲剧的，悲剧性的，悲惨的 | |
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245
lyrics
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| n.歌词 | |
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246
poignantly
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247
entity
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| n.实体，独立存在体，实际存在物 | |
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248
communal
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| adj.公有的，公共的，公社的，公社制的 | |
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249
antagonistic
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| adj.敌对的 | |
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250
motives
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| n.动机，目的( motive的名词复数 ) | |
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251
obstinate
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| adj.顽固的，倔强的，不易屈服的，较难治愈的 | |
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252
wrought
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| v.引起；以…原料制作；运转；adj.制造的 | |
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253
ribs
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| n.肋骨( rib的名词复数 )；（船或屋顶等的）肋拱；肋骨状的东西；（织物的）凸条花纹 | |
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254
anvil
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| n.铁钻 | |
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