Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

Before I enter upon a discussion of the first two of these elements(a discussion of the third as applied to this passage will be found in a laterlecture), I wish to return to a consideration of the page as an example of theGrand Style Ornate. That it is a successful example of such a style does notmark it as a product of the New World, but that it is so in 1851 is, from thepoint of view of English literature, a matter of remark.Americans were filled with a sense of newness, of vastness, and ofchallenge. As Walt Whitman put it:It almost seems as if a poetry with cosmic and dynamic features ofmagnitude and limitlessness suitable to the human soul, were neverpossible before.And for this big feeling within them they needed to employ a grand style,a swelling rhetoric unabashed. And they needed it at the precise momentthat England lost it.England did not lose it because of any diminution of her exterior orinterior greatness. Her exterior greatness had not yet reached its peak; andher interior greatness has never been greater than in our own time. She lostit for two reasons: one, the verbal expressions for that greatness had beenunder employment so long that it had begun to show exhaustion; and, two,the islanders (as I said earlier) had dwelt so long in congested proximity thata heroic view of one another was no longer possible. The mock heroic hadbeen able to flourish side by side with the heroic in the eighteenth century,but finally it had begun to sap the heroic. British feeling in regard to all thatwas venerable in their institutions did not decline, but their expression ofit became more and more an understatement in public and an affectionatepersiflage in private. Poet laureates found it increasingly difficult to celebrategreat personages and great events in the lofty language that was calledfor. English humor of the last half of the nineteenth century was preciselybased on the mocking application to daily life of the grandiose diction ofthe preceding centuries.But America was not overcrowded, and neither its geography norits history had been for centuries the subject of literature. The heroic flourishedside by side with the mock-heroic, and the mock-heroic itself seemedto be a smiling tribute to the heroic. All of the writers we are consideringwere highly “bookish” authors and may have been aware of the increasinghollowness of the English grand style (which accompanied an increasingprecision and beauty in the description of the homely and intimate), but201