This question whether the reader has sufficient command of the inherited language of literature is always an acute one for the author; the lasting successes in literature have been made at those moments when a knowledge of the past was wide-spread, and the audience were as familiar with the older literature as the writers were. Historical as Virgil seems to us in the _Æneid_, almost antiquarian, he offered to his first readers nothing they were not familiar with, and little that would not immediately kindle an emotion. In one sense then he may be said to have spoken in a contemporary language. But neither he nor his audience would have understood the doctrine that art becomes great by being contemporary, and that it becomes contemporary by discrediting the past. “To have great poets, there must be great audiences too”, said Whitman, and here, as elsewhere, we are coming to realize, he got at the permanent truth of the matter. For it is a sound observation of literary historians that a country exercises its impulses toward art, in any period, as much by what it reads of the older books as by what it writes; the two activities must go together if the contemporary great writer is to get a competent hearing, and they must be studied together if we are to estimate justly the culture of an epoch. In what was produced, some decades of the eighteenth century in England look to us destitute of poetry, but in those very moments Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton were widely loved, and enjoyed perhaps a more humane and significant treatment from the critics than they have often had since. The weakness of contemporary poetry in Addison’s time, in Warton’s and Gray’s, was not that they knew the elder masters, but that their practise departed so widely from them and became so contemporary. The revival in the romantic age was brought about by rejecting the kind of art the early eighteenth century wrote, and by building on the still earlier art the eighteenth century had the wisdom to love.
In our day and in our land the question of the audience is peculiarly acute, and it has been rendered more so by the intentional efforts of those who believe that literature should be contemporary. Even without those efforts we, who come from many countries, with different race memories and with the legacy of different cultures, should have had difficulty enough to achieve a common language adequately rich in the best things of the past and welded into some continuity with our American future. If we write in those terms which to an Italian would be emotional, we shall hardly stir the pulses of a Scotchman or a Slav, and if we waken the race-memories of the Spanish or the French, we may leave quite cold the Dutch in Pennsylvania or the Swede in Minnesota. Our first hope, to which some of us still desperately cling, is that we may lose no one of these racial inheritances, but that by a jealous conserving and study of each of them, and by teaching them all to our children, we may build up one of the richest cultures that the accidents of migration have ever permitted the race to compose. The literature of America in a thousand years would carry in its majestic overtones the essential beauty of all the civilizations that have made their entry through our ports, the essential beauty too of the wonderful Indian civilizations which our European coming dispossessed, and above these overtones, perhaps, the far-off suggestions of the Greek and Roman worlds and the immemorial East.