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Show hid his Independence, fled to the backwoods back-woods or to Europe, and his sad case was hushed up as if it luid been Insanity In-sanity (for insanity was hushed up too) and buried with a whisper under the vaguely terrible epitaph dissipated, lie probably died young; at any rate he never 'did' anything. Whoever was unharnessed was lost." CENIUS KEPT IN HARNESS Writer Interestingly Describes Condition Condi-tion of American Literature Just Before Civil War. George Santayana in the New Republic Re-public writes of the stuffiness of American literature before the Civil war: "It would have been an interesting inter-esting thing if a thunderclap had suddenly sud-denly broken that cloudless new-world haying-weather, and if a cry of exasperation exas-peration had escaped some strong soul, surfeited by the emptiness and blandness of that prim little moral circle that thought It had overcome everything, when in fact it had touched nothing. But to the genteel m'nd of America, before Walt Whitman and the Civil war, there was no self-respecting opposition. Of course, in that boundless field of convention, prosperity prosper-ity and mediocrity any wild poppy might struggle up weedily here and there amid the serried corn. But the irregular genius had no chance. He felt sincerely ashamed of himself. He |
