THE RECLUSE
Early Vermont Minstrelsy
By Walter J. Coates
Vermonters of the twentieth century are prone to belittle, with a deprecatory shrug and an apologetic cough, the minstrels and minstrelsy of their own state. An educated and influential friend of mine—a Judge, interested, or supposedly interested, in literature—well illustrated the general business and professional public attitude of our present-day Vermonters when, in a conversation on literary topics the other day, he remarked: “Of course our state has never produced anything very extraordinary in the line of poetry—nothing to compare with the productions of other states.”
Never was a remark so unfounded. Never was an attitude of mind so mistaken and unjust as that of our present-day parvenus who are thus content to issue unfounded ex-cathedra judgments on a literary question whose merits very few Vermonters of the present generation have studied, even casually. For I found, on questioning my judicial friend, that, of the list of more than one hundred Vermont poets of the nineteenth century, he was even remotely familiar with only three or four; and, of the more than one hundred books published by Vermont bards in that same period, he was familiar with only two; namely, with Saxe’s and Dorr’s. I mentioned Eastman to him;—Eastman, whose poems were the first American lyric productions to gain favorable notice and recognition in England, from the critical Edinburgh Review,—Eastman, who was known, over the waters, as “the Burns of New England”,—who had a trans-Atlantic reputation before Bryant or Longfellow, or Lowell, even, could boast of such; but my friend knew him not—had, indeed, scarcely heard of such a poet. I directed him to the nearest public library, where I knew a copy of Eastman was available; and my appreciative but poetically misguided friend has since expressed keen delight over “discovering” an author whose work—the foremost production of Vermont poesy in the nineteenth century—ought (in part, at least) to be in the mind of every Vermont student and every intelligent Vermont citizen. It is a crushing comment on the present-day drift of Vermont culture away from the æsthetic and inspirational ideals of its past history, that its own fine poetry, great as that of any state in the Union, should be so little known and so little appreciated by the average descendant of a virile and intellectual ancestry. The “Green Mountain State” of Ethan Allen and Thomas Rowley; of Royall Tyler and Selah Gridley and William C. Bradley; of Charles G. Eastman and Achsa Sprague and James Buckham; of the progressive free-thinkers, and venturesome individualism, the political and social vitality and literary appreciativeness of former days, is almost wholly lacking in this present generation of herd culture, rotarian commercialism and success-serving idolatry. Not that we want for sweet singers or trenchant iconoclasts or rare idealists today: We have them all in full measure—as witness Wendell P. Stafford and Arthur W. Hewitt, and Cleghorn and Flower and Goodenough and Peach, and others, here and there, who keep the fires of intellectual freedom, social uplift and artistic expression alive on the hill-tops of a cowed and imitative civilization. What we lack is not genius; but the public mind and will to appreciate and encourage genius. And we will always and ever lack this public alertness, this public appreciativeness of Vermont genius, just so long as our youth-mind is obsessed by commercial ideals, harnessed to economic and industrial standards, and our educational system made subservient to the policies mapped out by chamber-of-commerce geographers and rotarian culture and idealism. The moral and intellectual and esthetic greatness of a people depend, as in the days of Pericles and of Queen Elizabeth, upon their general attitude of mind; and the attitude of mind is determined by the ideals of those who prescribe instruction for the young and set limits to the activities of the old. The intellectual liberalism of Washington’s era, and the political and religious democracy of Jeffer-
