Whitman: A Study
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Title: Whitman: A Study
Author: John Burroughs
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HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
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[Illustration: WALT WHITMAN]
WHITMAN
_A STUDY_
BY
JOHN BURROUGHS
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
Copyright, 1896,
BY JOHN BURROUGHS.
_All rights reserved._
CONTENTS
PAGE
PRELIMINARY 1
BIOGRAPHICAL AND PERSONAL 23
HIS RULING IDEAS AND AIMS 73
HIS SELF-RELIANCE 85
HIS RELATION TO ART AND LITERATURE 101
HIS RELATION TO LIFE AND MORALS 169
HIS RELATION TO CULTURE 205
HIS RELATION TO HIS COUNTRY AND HIS TIMES 229
HIS RELATION TO SCIENCE 249
HIS RELATION TO RELIGION 257
A FINAL WORD 263
"_All original art is self-regulated, and no original art can be regulated
from without; it carries its own counterpoise, and does not receive it
from elsewhere._"--TAINE.
"_If you want to tell good Gothic, see if it has the sort of roughness and
largeness and nonchalance, mixed in places with the exquisite tenderness
which seems always to be the sign manual of the broad vision and massy
power of men who can see_ past _the work they are doing, and betray here
and there something like disdain for it._"--RUSKIN.
"_Formerly, during the period termed classic, when literature was governed
by recognized rules, he was considered the best poet who had composed the
most perfect work, the most beautiful poem, the most intelligible, the
most agreeable to read, the most complete in every respect,--the Æneid,
the Gerusalemme, a fine tragedy. To-day something else is wanted. For us
the greatest poet is he who in his works most stimulates the reader's
imagination and reflection, who excites him the most himself to poetize.
The greatest poet is not he who has done the best, it is he who suggests
the most; he, not all of whose meaning is at first obvious, and who leaves
you much to desire, to explain, to study, much to complete in your
turn._"--SAINTE-BEUVE.
WHITMAN
PRELIMINARY
I
The writing of this preliminary chapter, and the final survey and revision
of my Whitman essay, I am making at a rustic house I have built at a wild
place a mile or more from my home upon the river. I call this place
Whitman Land, because in many ways it is typical of my poet,--an
amphitheatre of precipitous rock, slightly veiled with a delicate growth
of verdure, enclosing a few acres of prairie-like land, once the site of
an ancient lake, now a garden of unknown depth and fertility. Elemental
ruggedness, savageness, and grandeur, combined with wonderful tenderness,
modernness, and geniality. There rise the gray scarred cliffs, crowned
here and there with a dead hemlock or pine, where, morning after morning,
I have seen the bald-eagle perch, and here at their feet this level area
of tender humus, with three perennial springs of delicious cold water
flowing in its margin; a huge granite bowl filled with the elements and
potencies of life. The scene has a strange fascination for me, and holds
me here day after day. From the highest point of rocks I can overlook a
long stretch of the river and of the farming country beyond; I can hear
owls hoot, hawks scream, and roosters crow. Birds of the garden and
orchard meet birds of the forest upon the shaggy cedar posts that uphold
my porch. At dusk the call of the whippoorwill mingles with the chorus of
the pickerel frogs, and in the morning I hear through the robins' cheerful
burst the sombre plaint of the mourning-dove. When I tire of my
manuscript, I walk in the woods, or climb the rocks, or help the men clear
up the ground, piling and burning the stumps and rubbish. This scene and
situation, so primitive and secluded, yet so touched with and adapted to
civilization, responding to the moods of both sides of the life and
imagination of a modern man, seems, I repeat, typical in many ways of my
poet, and is a veritable Whitman land. Whitman does not to me suggest the
wild and unkempt as he seems to do to many; he suggests the cosmic and the
elemental, and this is one of the dominant thoughts that run through my
dissertation. Scenes of power and savagery in nature were more welcome to
him, probably more stimulating to him, than the scenes of the pretty and
placid, and he cherished the hope that he had put into his "Leaves" some
of the tonic and fortifying quality of Nature in her more grand and
primitive aspects.
His wildness is only the wildness of the great primary forces from which
we draw our health and strength. Underneath all his unloosedness, or free
launching forth of himself, is the sanity and repose of nature.
II
I first became acquainted with Whitman's poetry through the columns of the
old "Saturday Press" when I was twenty or twenty-one years old (1858 or
1859). The first things I remember to have read were "There was a child
went forth," "This Compost," "As I ebb'd with the Ocean of Life," "Old
Ireland," and maybe a few others. I was attracted by the new poet's work
from the first. It seemed to let me into a larger, freer air than I found
in the current poetry. Meeting Bayard Taylor about this time, I spoke to
him about Whitman. "Yes," he said, "there is something in him, but he is a
man of colossal egotism."
A few years later a friend sent me a copy of the Thayer & Eldridge edition
of "Leaves of Grass" of 1860. It proved a fascinating but puzzling book to
me. I grazed upon it like a colt upon a mountain, taking what tasted good
to me, and avoiding what displeased me, but having little or no conception
of the purport of the work as a whole. I found passages and whole poems
here and there that I never tired of reading, and that gave a strange
fillip to my moral and intellectual nature, but nearly as many passages
and poems puzzled or repelled me. My absorption of Emerson had prepared me
in a measure for Whitman's philosophy of life, but not for the ideals of
character and conduct which he held up to me, nor for the standards in art
to which the poet perpetually appealed. Whitman was Emerson translated
from the abstract into the concrete. There was no privacy with Whitman; he
never sat me down in a corner with a cozy, comfortable shut-in feeling,
but he set me upon a hill or started me upon an endless journey.
Wordsworth had been my poet of nature, of the sequestered and the idyllic;
but I saw that here was a poet of a larger, more fundamental nature,
indeed of the Cosmos itself. Not a poet of dells and fells, but of the
earth and the orbs. This much soon appeared to me, but I was troubled by
the poet's apparent "colossal egotism," by his attitude towards evil,
declaring himself "to be the poet of wickedness also;" by his seeming
attraction toward the turbulent and the disorderly; and, at times, by what
the critics had called his cataloguing style of treatment.
When I came to meet the poet himself, which was in the fall of 1863, I
felt less concern about these features of his work; he was so sound and
sweet and gentle and attractive as a man, and withal so wise and tolerant,
that I soon came to feel the same confidence in the book that I at once
placed in its author, even in the parts which I did not understand. I saw
that the work and the man were one, and that the former must be good as
the latter was good. There was something in the manner in which both the
book and its author carried themselves under the sun, and in the way they
confronted America and the present time, that convinced beyond the power
of logic or criticism.
The more I saw of Whitman, and the more I studied his "Leaves," the more
significance I found in both, and the clearer it became to me that a new
type of a man and a new departure in poetic literature were here
foreshadowed. There was something forbidding, but there was something
vital and grand back of it. I found to be true what the poet said of
himself,--
"Bearded, sunburnt, gray-neck'd, forbidding, I have arrived,
To be wrestled with as I pass for the solid prizes of the universe,
For such I afford whoever can persevere to win them,"--
I have persevered in my study of the poet, though balked many times, and
the effect upon my own mental and spiritual nature has been great; no such
"solid prizes" in the way of a broader outlook upon life and nature, and,
I may say, upon art, has any poet of my time afforded me. There are
passages or whole poems in the "Leaves" which I do not yet understand
("Sleep-Chasings" is one of them), though the language is as clear as
daylight; they are simply too subtle or elusive for me; but my confidence
in the logical soundness of the book is so complete that I do not trouble
myself at all about these things.
III
I would fain make these introductory remarks to my essay a sort of window
through which the reader may get a fairly good view of what lies beyond.
If he does not here get any glimpse or suggestion of what pleases him, or
of what he is looking for, it will hardly be worth while for him to
trouble himself further.
A great many readers, perhaps three fourths of the readers of current
poetry, and not a few of the writers thereof, cannot stand Whitman at all,
or see any reason for his being. To such my essay, if it ever comes to
their notice, will be a curiosity, may be an offense. But I trust it will
meet with a different reception at the hands of the smaller but rapidly
growing circle of those who are beginning to turn to Whitman as the most
imposing and significant figure in our literary annals.
The rapidly growing Whitman literature attests the increasing interest to
which I refer. Indeed, it seems likely that by the end of the century the
literature which will have grown up around the name of this man will
surpass in bulk and value that which has grown up around the name of any
other man of letters born within the century.
When Mr. Stedman wrote his essay upon the poet early in the eighties, he
referred to the mass of this literature. It has probably more than doubled
in volume in the intervening years: since Whitman's death in the spring of
'92, it has been added to by William Clark's book upon the poet, Professor
Trigg's study of Browning and Whitman, and the work of that accomplished
critic and scholar, so lately gone to his rest, John Addington Symonds.
This last is undoubtedly the most notable contribution that has yet been
made, or is likely very soon to be made, to the Whitman literature. Mr.
Symonds declares that "Leaves of Grass," which he first read at the age of
twenty-five, influenced him more than any other book has done, except the
Bible,--more than Plato, more than Goethe.
When we remember that the man who made this statement was eminently a man
of books, deeply read in all literatures, his testimony may well offset
that of a score of our home critics who find nothing worthy or helpful in
Whitman's work. One positive witness in such a matter outweighs any number
of negative ones.
IV
For making another addition to the growing Whitman literature, I have no
apology to offer. I know well enough that "writing and talk" cannot
"prove" a poet; that he must be his own proof or be forgotten; and my main
purpose in writing about Whitman, as in writing about nature, is to tell
readers what I have found there, with the hope of inducing them to look
for themselves. At the same time, I may say that I think no modern poet so
much needs to be surrounded by an atmosphere of comment and
interpretation, through which readers may approach him, as does Whitman.
His work sprang from a habit or attitude of mind quite foreign to that
with which current literature makes us familiar,--so germinal is it, and
so little is it beholden to the formal art we so assiduously cultivate.
The poet says his work "connects lovingly with precedents," but it does
not connect lovingly with any body of poetry of this century. "Leaves of
Grass" is bound to be a shock to the timid and pampered taste of the
majority of current readers. I would fain lessen this shock by interposing
my own pages of comment between the book and the public. The critic can
say so many things the poet cannot. He can explain and qualify and
analyze, whereas the creative artist can only hint or project. The poet
must hasten on, he must infold and bind together, he must be direct and
synthetic in every act. Reflection and qualification are not for him, but
action, emotion, volition, the procreant blending and surrender. He works
as Nature does, and gives us reality in every line.
Whitman says:--
"I charge you forever reject those who would expound me, for I cannot
expound myself."
The type of mind of Whitman's, which seldom or never emerges as a mere
mentality, an independent thinking and knowing faculty, but always as a
personality, always as a complete human entity, never can expound itself,
because its operations are synthetic and not analytic, its mainspring is
love and not mere knowledge. In his prose essay called "A Backward Glance
o'er Travel'd Roads," appended to the final edition of his poems, Whitman
has not so much sought to expound himself as to put his reader in
possession of his point of view, and of the considerations that lie back
of his work. This chapter might render much that I have written
superfluous, were there not always a distinct gain in seeing an author
through another medium, or in getting the equivalents of him in the
thoughts and ideals of a kindred and sympathetic mind. But I have not
consciously sought to expound Whitman, any more than in my other books I
have sought to expound the birds or wild nature. I have written out some
things that he means to me, and the pleasure and profit I have found in
his pages.
There is no end to what can be drawn out of him. It has been said and
repeated that he was not a thinker, and yet I find more food for thought
in him than in all other poets. It has been often said and repeated that
he is not a poet, and yet the readers that respond to him the most fully
appear to be those in whom the poetic temperament is paramount. I believe
he supplies in fuller measure that pristine element, something akin to the
unbreathed air of mountain and shore, which makes the arterial blood of
poetry and literature, than any other modern writer.
V
We can make little of Whitman unless we allow him to be a law unto
himself, and seek him through the clews which he himself brings. When we
try him by current modes, current taste, and demand of him formal beauty,
formal art, we are disappointed. But when we try him by what we may call
the scientific standard, the standard of organic nature, and demand of him
the vital and the characteristic,--demand of him that he have a law of his
own, and fulfill that law in the poetic sphere,--the result is quite
different.
More than any other poet, Whitman is what we make him; more than any other
poet, his greatest value is in what he suggests and implies, rather than
in what he portrays; and more than any other poet must he wait to be
understood by the growth of the taste of himself. "I make the only growth
by which I can be appreciated," he truly says.
His words are like the manna that descended upon the Israelites, "in which
were all manner of tastes; and every one found in it what his palate was
chiefly pleased with. If he desired fat in it, he had it. In it the young
men tasted bread; the old men honey; and the children oil." Many young
men,--poets, artists, teachers, preachers,--have testified that they have
found bread in Whitman, the veritable bread of life; others have found
honey, sweet poetic morsels; and not a few report having found only gall.
VI
In considering an original work like "Leaves of Grass," the search is
always for the grounds upon which it is to be justified and explained.
These grounds in this work are not easy to find; they lie deeper than the
grounds upon which the popular poets rest. Because they are not at once
seen, many readers have denied that there are any such grounds. But to
deny a basis of reality to a work with the history of "Leaves of Grass,"
and a basis well grounded on æsthetic and artistic principles, is not to
be thought of.
The more the poet eludes us, the more we know he has his hiding-place
somewhere. The more he denies our standards, the more we know he has
standards of his own which we must discover; the more he flouts at our
literary conventions, the more we must press him for his own principles
and methods. How does he justify himself to himself? Could any sane man
have written the Children of Adam poems who was not sustained by deepest
moral and æsthetic convictions? It is the business of the critic to search
for these principles and convictions, and not shirk the task by ridicule
and denial.
VII
If there was never any change in taste, if it always ran in the same
channels,--indeed, if it did not at times run in precisely opposite
channels,--there would be little hope that Walt Whitman's poetry would
ever find any considerable number of readers. But one of the laws that
dominate the progress of literature, as Edmond Shérer says, is incessant
change, not only in thought and ideas, but in taste and the
starting-points of art. A radical and almost violent change in these
respects is indicated by Whitman,--a change which is in unison with many
things in modern life and morals, but which fairly crosses the prevailing
taste in poetry and in art. No such dose of realism and individualism
under the guise of poetry has been administered to the reading public in
this century. No such break with literary traditions--no such audacious
attempt to tally, in a printed page, the living concrete man, an actual
human presence, instead of the conscious, made-up poet--is to be found in
modern literary records.
VIII
The much that I have said in the following pages about Whitman's radical
differences from other poets--his changed attitude towards the universe,
his unwonted methods and aims, etc.,--might seem to place him upon a
ground so unique and individual as to contradict my claims for his breadth
and universality. The great poets stand upon common ground; they excel
along familiar lines, they touch us, and touch us deeply, at many points.
What always saves Whitman is his enormous endowment of what is "commonest,
nearest, easiest,"--his atmosphere of the common day, the common life, and
his fund of human sympathy and love. He is strange because he gives us the
familiar in such a direct, unexpected manner. His "Leaves" are like some
new fruit that we have never before tasted. It is the product of another
clime, another hemisphere. The same old rains and dews, the same old sun
and soil, nursed it, yet in so many ways how novel and strange! We
certainly have to serve a certain apprenticeship to this poet, familiarize
ourselves with his point of view and with his democratic spirit, before we
can make much of him. The spirit in which we come to him from the other
poets--the poets of art and culture--is for the most part unfriendly to
him. There is something rude, strange, and unpoetic about him at first
sight that is sure to give most readers of poetry a shock. I think one
might come to him from the Greek poets, or the old Hebrew or Oriental
bards, with less shock than from our modern delicate and refined singers;
because the old poets were more simple and elemental, and aimed less at
the distilled dainties of poetry, than the modern. They were full of
action, too, and volition,--of that which begets and sustains life.
Whitman's poetry is almost entirely the expression of will and
personality, and runs very little to intellectual subtleties and
refinements. It fulfills itself in our wills and character, rather than in
our taste.
IX
Whitman will always be a strange and unwonted figure among his country's
poets, and among English poets generally,--a cropping out again, after so
many centuries, of the old bardic prophetic strain. Had he dropped upon us
from some other sphere, he could hardly have been a greater surprise and
puzzle to the average reader or critic. Into a literature that was timid,
imitative, conventional, he fell like leviathan into a duck-pond, and the
commotion and consternation he created there have not yet subsided. All
the reigning poets in this country except Emerson denied him, and many of
our minor poets still keep up a hostile sissing and cackling. He will
probably always be more or less a stumbling-block to the minor poet,
because of his indifference to the things which to the minor poet are all
in all. He was a poet without what is called artistic form, and without
technique, as that word is commonly understood. His method was analogous
to the dynamic method of organic nature, rather than to the mechanical or
constructive method of the popular poets.
X
Of course the first thing that strikes the reader in "Leaves of Grass" is
its seeming oddity and strangeness. If a man were to come into a dress
reception in shirt sleeves and with his hat on, the feature would strike
us at once, and would be magnified in our eyes; we should quite forget
that he was a man, and in essentials differed but little from the rest of
us, after all. The exterior habiliments on such occasions count for nearly
everything; and in the popular poetry rhyme, measure, and the language and
manners of the poets are much more than anything else. If Whitman did not
do anything so outré as to come into a dress reception with his coat off
and his hat on, he did come into the circle of the poets without the usual
poetic habiliments. He was not dressed up at all, and he was not at all
abashed or apologetic. His air was confident and self-satisfied, if it did
not at times suggest the insolent and aggressive. It was the dress circle
that was on trial, and not Walt Whitman.
We could forgive a man in real life for such an audacious proceeding only
on the ground of his being something extraordinary as a person, with an
extraordinary message to convey; and we can pardon the poet only on
precisely like grounds. He must make us forget his unwonted garb by his
unique and lovable personality, and the power and wisdom of his utterance.
If he cannot do this we shall soon tire of him.
That Whitman was a personality the like of which the world has not often
seen, and that his message to his country and to his race was of prime
importance, are conclusions at which more and more thinking persons are
surely arriving.
His want of art, of which we have heard so much, is, it seems to me, just
this want of the usual trappings and dress uniform of the poets. In the
essentials of art, the creative imagination, the plastic and quickening
spirit, the power of identification with the thing contemplated, and the
absolute use of words, he has few rivals.
XI
I make no claim that my essay is a dispassionate, disinterested view of
Whitman. It will doubtless appear to many as a one-sided view, or as
colored by my love for the man himself. And I shall not be disturbed if
such turns out to be the case. A dispassionate view of a man like Whitman
is probably out of the question in our time, or in any near time. His
appeal is so personal and direct that readers are apt to be either
violently for him or violently against, and it will require the
perspective of more than one generation to bring out his true
significance. Still, for any partiality for its subject which my book may
show, let me take shelter behind a dictum of Goethe.
"I am more and more convinced," says the great critic, "that whenever one
has to vent an opinion on the actions or on the writings of others, unless
this be done from a certain one-sided enthusiasm, or from a loving
interest in the person and the work, the result is hardly worth gathering
up. Sympathy and enjoyment in what we see is in fact the only reality,
and, from such reality, reality as a natural product follows. All else is
vanity."
To a loving interest in Whitman and his work, which may indeed amount to
one-sided enthusiasm, I plead guilty. This at least is real with me, and
not affected; and, if the reality which Goethe predicts in such cases only
follows, I shall be more than content.
XII
In the world of literature, as in the world of physical forces, things
adjust themselves after a while, and no impetus can be given to any man's
name or fame that will finally carry it beyond the limit of his real
worth. However "one-sided" my enthusiasm for Whitman may be, or that of
any of his friends may be, there is no danger but that in time he will
find exactly his proper place and level. My opinion, or any man's opinion,
of the works of another, is like a wind that blows for a moment across
the water, heaping it up a little on the shore or else beating it down,
but not in any way permanently affecting its proper level.
The adverse winds that have blown over Whitman's work have been many and
persistent, and yet the tide has surely risen, his fame has slowly
increased.
It will soon be forty years since he issued the first thin quarto edition
of "Leaves of Grass," and, though the opposition to him has been the most
fierce and determined ever recorded in our literary history, often
degenerating into persecution and willful misrepresentation, yet his fame
has steadily grown both at home and abroad. The impression he early made
upon such men as Emerson, Thoreau, William O'Connor, Mr. Stedman, Colonel
Ingersoll, and others in this country, and upon Professors Dowden and
Clifford, upon Symonds, Ruskin, Tennyson, Rossetti, Lord Lytton, Mrs.
Gilchrist, George Eliot, in England, has been followed by an equally deep
or deeper impression upon many of the younger and bolder spirits of both
hemispheres. In fact Whitman saw his battle essentially won in his own
lifetime, though his complete triumph is of course a matter of the distant
future.
XIII
But let me give without further delay a fuller hint of the attitude these
pages assume and hold towards the subject they discuss.
There are always, or nearly always, a few men born to each generation who
embody the best thought and culture of that generation, and express it in
approved literary forms. From Petrarch down to Lowell, the lives and works
of these men fill the literary annals; they uphold the literary and
scholarly traditions; they are the true men of letters; they are justly
honored and beloved in their day and land. We in this country have
recently, in the death of Dr. Holmes, mourned the loss of the last of the
New England band of such men. We are all indebted to them for solace, and
for moral and intellectual stimulus.
Then, much more rarely, there is born to a race or people men who are like
an irruption of life from another world, who belong to another order, who
bring other standards, and sow the seed of new and larger types; who are
not the organs of the culture or modes of their time, and whom their times
for the most part decry and disown,--the primal, original, elemental men.
It is here, in my opinion, that we must place Whitman; not among the
minstrels and edifiers of his age, but among its prophets and saviors. He
is nearer the sources of things than the popular poets,--nearer the
founders and discoverers, closer akin to the large, fervent, prophetic,
patriarchal men who figure in the early heroic ages. His work ranks with
the great primitive books. He is of the type of the skald, the bard, the
seer, the prophet. The specialization and differentiation of our latter
ages of science and culture is less marked in him than in other poets.
Poetry, philosophy, religion, are all inseparably blended in his pages. He
is in many ways a reversion to an earlier type. Dr. Brinton has remarked
that his attitude toward the principle of sex and his use of sexual
imagery in his poems, are the same as in the more primitive religions.
Whitman was not a poet by elaboration, but by suggestion; not an artist by
formal presentation, but by spirit and conception; not a philosopher by
system and afterthought, but by vision and temper.
In his "Leaves," we again hear the note of destiny,--again see the
universal laws and forces exemplified in the human personality, and turned
upon life with love and triumph.
XIV
The world always has trouble with its primary men, or with the men who
have any primary gifts, like Emerson, Wordsworth, Browning, Tolstoi,
Ibsen. The idols of an age are nearly always secondary men: they break no
new ground; they make no extraordinary demands; our tastes and wants are
already adjusted to their type; we understand and approve of them at once.
The primary men disturb us; they are a summons and a challenge; they break
up the old order; they open up new territory which we are to subdue and
occupy; the next age and the next make more of them. In my opinion, the
next age and the next will make more of Whitman, and the next still more,
because he is in the great world-current, in the line of the evolutionary
movement of our time. Is it at all probable that Tennyson can ever be to
any other age what he has been to this? Tennyson marks an expiring age,
the sunset of the feudal world. He did not share the spirit to which the
future belongs. There was not one drop of democratic blood in his veins.
To him, the people were an hundred-headed beast.
XV
If my essay seems like one continual strain to attain the unattainable, to
compass and define Whitman, who will not be compassed and defined, I can
only say that I regret it, but could not well help it. Talking about
Whitman, Symonds said, was like talking about the universe, and it is so.
There is somewhat incommensurable in his works. One may not hope to speak
the final word about him, to sum him up in a sentence. He is so palpable,
so real, so near at hand, that the critic or expounder of him promises
himself an easy victory; but before one can close with him he is gone. He
is, after all, as subtle and baffling as air or light.
... "I will certainly elude you,
Even while you should think you had unquestionably caught me, behold!
Already you see I have escaped from you."
It is probably this characteristic which makes Whitman an irrepressible
figure in literature; he will not down for friend or foe. He escapes from
all classification, and is larger than any definition of him that has yet
been given. How many times has he been exploded by British and American
critics; how many times has he been labeled and put upon the shelf, only
to reappear again as vigorous and untranslatable as ever!
XVI
So far as Whitman stands merely for the spirit of revolt, or of reaction
against current modes in life and literature, I have little interest in
him. As the "apostle of the rough, the uncouth," to use Mr. Howells's
words, the world would long ago have tired of him. The irruption into
letters of the wild and lawless, or of the strained and eccentric, can
amuse and interest us only for a moment. It is because these are only
momentary phases of him, as it were, and because underneath all he
embraces the whole of life and ministers to it, that his fame and
influence are still growing in the world. One hesitates even to call
Whitman the poet of "democracy," or of "personality," or of "the modern,"
because such terms only half define him. He quickly escapes into that
large and universal air which all great art breathes. We cannot sum him up
in a phrase. He flows out on all sides, and his sympathies embrace all
types and conditions of men. He is a great democrat, but, first and last
and over all, he is a great man, a great nature, and deep world-currents
course through him. He is distinctively an American poet, but his
Americanism is only the door through which he enters upon the universal.
XVII
Call his work poetry or prose, or what you will: that it is an inspired
utterance of some sort, any competent person ought to be able to see. And
what else do we finally demand of any work than that it be inspired? How
all questions of form and art, and all other questions, sink into
insignificance beside that! The exaltation of mind and spirit shown in the
main body of Whitman's work, the genuine, prophetic fervor, the
intensification and amplification of the simple ego, and the resultant
raising of all human values, seem to me as plain as daylight.
Whitman is to be classed among the great names by the breadth and
all-inclusiveness of his theme and by his irrepressible personality. I
think it highly probable that future scholars and critics will find his
work fully as significant and era-marking as that of any of the few
supreme names of the past. It is the culmination of an age of
individualism, and, as opposites meet, it is also the best lesson in
nationalism and universal charity that this century has seen.
BIOGRAPHICAL AND PERSONAL
I
Walt Whitman was born at West Hills, Long Island, May 30, 1819, and died
at Camden, N. J., March 26, 1892. Though born in the country, most of his
life was passed in cities; first in Brooklyn and New York, then in New
Orleans, then in Washington, and lastly in Camden, where his body is
buried. It was a poet's life from first to last,--free, unhampered,
unworldly, unconventional, picturesque, simple, untouched by the craze of
money-getting, unselfish, devoted to others, and was, on the whole,
joyfully and contentedly lived. It was a pleased and interested saunter
through the world,--no hurry, no fever, no strife; hence no bitterness, no
depletion, no wasted energies. A farm boy, then a school-teacher, then a
printer, editor, writer, traveler, mechanic, nurse in the army hospitals,
and lastly government clerk; large and picturesque of figure, slow of
movement; tolerant, passive, receptive, and democratic,--of the people; in
all his tastes and attractions, always aiming to walk abreast with the
great laws and forces, and to live thoroughly in the free, nonchalant
spirit of his own day and land. His strain was mingled Dutch and English,
with a decided Quaker tinge, which came from his mother's side, and which
had a marked influence upon his work.
The spirit that led him to devote his time and substance to the sick and
wounded soldiers during the war may be seen in that earlier incident in
his life when he drove a Broadway stage all one winter, that a disabled
driver might lie by without starving his family. It is from this episode
that the tradition of his having been a New York stage-driver comes. He
seems always to have had a special liking for this class of workmen. One
of the house surgeons of the old New York Hospital relates that in the
latter part of the fifties Whitman was a frequent visitor to that
institution, looking after and ministering to disabled stage-drivers.
"These drivers," says the doctor, "like those of the omnibuses in London,
were a set of men by themselves. A good deal of strength, intelligence,
and skillful management of horses was required of a Broadway stage-driver.
He seems to have been decidedly a higher order of man than the driver of
the present horse-cars. He usually had his primary education in the
country, and graduated as a thorough expert in managing a very difficult
machine, in an exceptionally busy thoroughfare.
"It was this kind of a man that so attracted Walt Whitman that he was
constantly to be seen perched on the box alongside one of them going up
and down Broadway. I often watched the poet and driver, as probably did
many another New Yorker in those days.
"I do not wonder as much now as I did in 1860 that a man like Walt Whitman
became interested in these drivers. He was not interested in the news of
every-day life--the murders and accidents and political convulsions--but
he was interested in strong types of human character. We young men had not
had experience enough to understand this kind of a man. It seems to me now
that we looked at Whitman simply as a kind of crank, if the word had then
been invented. His talk to us was chiefly of books, and the men who wrote
them: especially of poetry, and what he considered poetry. He never said
much of the class whom he visited in our wards, after he had satisfied
himself of the nature of the injury and of the prospect of recovery.
"Whitman appeared to be about forty years of age at that time. He was
always dressed in a blue flannel coat and vest, with gray and baggy
trousers. He wore a woolen shirt, with a Byronic collar, low in the neck,
without a cravat, as I remember, and a large felt hat. His hair was iron
gray, and he had a full beard and mustache of the same color. His face and
neck were bronzed by exposure to the sun and air. He was large, and gave
the impression of being a vigorous man. He was scrupulously careful of his
simple attire, and his hands were soft and hairy."
During the early inception of "Leaves of Grass" he was a carpenter in
Brooklyn, building and selling small frame-houses to working people. He
frequently knocked off work to write his poems. In his life Whitman was
never one of the restless, striving sort. In this respect he was not
typical of his countrymen. All his urgency and strenuousness he reserved
for his book. He seems always to have been a sort of visitor in life,
noting, observing, absorbing, keeping aloof from all ties that would hold
him, and making the most of the hour and the place in which he happened to
be. He was in no sense a typical literary man. During his life in New York
and Brooklyn, we see him moving entirely outside the fashionable circles,
the learned circles, the literary circles, the money-getting circles. He
belongs to no set or club. He is seen more with the laboring
classes,--drivers, boatmen, mechanics, printers,--and I suspect may often
be found with publicans and sinners. He is fond of the ferries and of the
omnibuses. He is a frequenter of the theatre and of the Italian opera.
Alboni makes a deep and lasting impression upon him. It is probably to her
that he writes these lines:--
"Here take this gift,
I was reserving it for some hero, speaker, general,
One who should serve the good old cause, the great idea, the progress
and freedom of the race,
Some brave confronter of despots, some daring rebel;
But I see that what I was reserving belongs to you just as much as to
any."
Elsewhere he refers to Alboni by name and speaks of her as
"The lustrous orb, Venus contralto, the blooming mother,
Sister of loftiest gods."
Some of his poems were written at the opera. The great singers evidently
gave him clews and suggestions that were applicable to his own art.
His study was out of doors. He wrote on the street, on the ferry, at the
seaside, in the fields, at the opera,--always from living impulses arising
at the moment, and always with his eye upon the fact. He says he has read
his "Leaves" to himself in the open air, and tried them by the realities
of life and nature about him. Were they as real and alive as they?--this
was the only question with him.
At home in his father's family in Brooklyn we see him gentle, patient,
conciliatory, much looked up to by all. Neighbors seek his advice. He is
cool, deliberate, impartial. A marked trait is his indifference to money
matters; his people are often troubled because he lets opportunities to
make money pass by. When his "Leaves" appear, his family are puzzled, do
not know what to make of it. His mother thinks that, if "Hiawatha" is
poetry, may be Walt's book is, too. He never counsels with any one, and is
utterly indifferent as to what people may say or think. He is not a
stirring and punctual man, is always a little late; not an early riser,
not prompt at dinner; always has ample time, and will not be hurried; the
business gods do not receive his homage. He is gray at thirty, and is said
to have had a look of age in youth, as he had a look of youth in age. He
has few books, cares little for sport, never uses a gun; has no bad
habits; has no entanglements with women, and apparently never contemplates
marriage. It is said that during his earliest years of manhood he kept
quite aloof from the "girls."
At the age of nineteen he edited "The Long Islander," published at
Huntington. A recent visitor to these early haunts of Whitman gathered
some reminiscences of him at this date:--
"Amid the deep revery of nature, on that mild October afternoon, we
returned to the village of Huntington, there to meet the few, the very
few, survivors who recall Walt's first appearance in the literary world as
the editor of 'The Long Islander,' nigh sixty years ago (1838). Two of
these forefathers of the hamlet clearly remembered his powerful
personality, brimful of life, reveling in strength, careless of time and
the world, of money and of toil; a lover of books and of jokes; delighting
to gather round him the youth of the village in his printing-room of
evenings, and tell them stories and read them poetry, his own and others'.
That of his own he called his 'Yawps,' a word which he afterwards made
famous. Both remembered him as a delightful companion, generous to a
fault, glorying in youth, negligent of his affairs, issuing 'The Long
Islander' at random intervals,--once a week, once in two weeks, once in
three,--until its financial backers lost faith and hope and turned him
out, and with him the whole office corps; for Walt himself was editor,
publisher, compositor, pressman, and printer's devil, all in one."
II
Few men were so deeply impressed by our Civil War as was Whitman. It
aroused all his patriotism, all his sympathies, and, as a poet, tested his
power to deal with great contemporary events and scenes. He was first
drawn to the seat of war on behalf of his brother, Lieutenant-Colonel
George W. Whitman, 51st New York Volunteers, who was wounded by the
fragment of a shell at Fredericksburg. This was in the fall of 1862. This
brought him in contact with the sick and wounded soldiers, and henceforth,
as long as the war lasts and longer, he devoted his time and substance to
ministering to them. The first two or three years of his life in
Washington he supported himself by correspondence with Northern
newspapers, mainly with the "New York Times." These letters, as well as
the weekly letters to his mother during the same period, form an intensely
pathetic and interesting record.
They contain such revelations of himself, and such pictures of the scenes
he moved among, that I shall here quote freely from them. The following
extract is from a letter written from Fredericksburg the third or fourth
day after the battle of December, 1862:--
"Spent a good part of the day in a large brick mansion on the banks of the
Rappahannock, immediately opposite Fredericksburg. It is used as a
hospital since the battle, and seems to have received only the worst
cases. Out of doors, at the foot of a tree, within ten yards of the front
of the house, I notice a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, etc.,
about a load for a one-horse cart. Several dead bodies lie near, each
covered with its brown woolen blanket. In the door-yard, toward the river,
are fresh graves, mostly of officers, their names on pieces of
barrel-staves, or broken board, stuck in the dirt. (Most of these bodies
were subsequently taken up and transported North to their friends.)
"The house is quite crowded, everything impromptu, no system, all bad
enough, but I have no doubt the best that can be done; all the wounds
pretty bad, some frightful, the men in their old clothes, unclean and
bloody. Some of the wounded are rebel officers, prisoners. One, a
Mississippian,--a captain,--hit badly in leg, I talked with some time; he
asked me for papers, which I gave him. (I saw him three months afterward
in Washington, with leg amputated, doing well.)
"I went through the rooms, down stairs and up. Some of the men were dying.
I had nothing to give at that visit, but wrote a few letters to folks
home, mothers, etc. Also talked to three or four who seemed most
susceptible to it, and needing it."
"December 22 to 31.--Am among the regimental, brigade, and division
hospitals somewhat. Few at home realize that these are merely tents, and
sometimes very poor ones, the wounded lying on the ground, lucky if their
blanket is spread on a layer of pine or hemlock twigs, or some leaves. No
cots; seldom even a mattress on the ground. It is pretty cold. I go around
from one case to another. I do not see that I can do any good, but I
cannot leave them. Once in a while some youngster holds on to me
convulsively, and I do what I can for him; at any rate, stop with him and
sit near him for hours, if he wishes it.
"Besides the hospitals, I also go occasionally on long tours through the
camps, talking with the men, etc.; sometimes at night among the groups
around the fires, in their shebang enclosures of bushes. I soon get
acquainted anywhere in camp, with officers or men, and am always well
used. Sometimes I go down on picket with the regiments I know best."
After continuing in front through the winter, he returns to Washington,
where the wounded and sick have mainly been concentrated. The Capital
city, truly, is now one huge hospital; and there Whitman establishes
himself, and thenceforward, for several years, has but one daily and
nightly avocation.
He alludes to writing letters by the bedside, and says:--
"I do a good deal of this, of course, writing all kinds, including
love-letters. Many sick and wounded soldiers have not written home to
parents, brothers, sisters, and even wives, for one reason or another, for
a long, long time. Some are poor writers, some cannot get paper and
envelopes; many have an aversion to writing, because they dread to worry
the folks at home,--the facts about them are so sad to tell. I always
encourage the men to write, and promptly write for them."
A glimpse of the scenes after Chancellorsville:--
"As I write this, in May, 1863, the wounded have begun to arrive from
Hooker's command from bloody Chancellorsville. I was down among the first
arrivals. The men in charge of them told me the bad cases were yet to
come. If that is so, I pity them, for these are bad enough. You ought to
see the scene of the wounded arriving at the landing here foot of Sixth
Street at night. Two boat-loads came about half past seven last night. A
little after eight, it rained a long and violent shower. The poor, pale,
helpless soldiers had been debarked, and lay around on the wharf and
neighborhood anywhere. The rain was, probably, grateful to them; at any
rate they were exposed to it.
"The few torches light up the spectacle. All around on the wharf, on the
ground, out on side places, etc., the men are lying on blankets and old
quilts, with the bloody rags bound round heads, arms, legs, etc. The
attendants are few, and at night few outsiders also,--only a few
hard-worked transportation men and drivers. (The wounded are getting to be
common, and people grow callous.) The men, whatever their condition, lie
there, and patiently wait till their turn comes to be taken up. Near by
the ambulances are now arriving in clusters, and one after another is
called to back up and take its load. Extreme cases are sent off on
stretchers. The men generally make little or no ado, whatever their
sufferings,--a few groans that cannot be repressed, and occasionally a
scream of pain, as they lift a man into the ambulance.
"To-day, as I write, hundreds more are expected, and to-morrow and the
next day more, and so on for many days.
"The soldiers are nearly all young men, and far more American than is
generally supposed,--I should say nine tenths are native-born. Among the
arrivals from Chancellorsville I find a large proportion of Ohio, Indiana,
and Illinois men. As usual, there are all sorts of wounds. Some of the men
are fearfully burnt from the explosion of artillery caissons. One ward has
a long row of officers, some with ugly hurts. Yesterday was, perhaps,
worse than usual. Amputations are going on,--the attendants are dressing
wounds. As you pass by, you must be on your guard where you look. I saw,
the other day, a gentleman--a visitor, apparently, from curiosity--in one
of the wards stop and turn a moment to look at an awful wound they were
probing, etc. He turned pale, and in a moment more he had fainted away and
fallen on the floor."
An episode,--the death of a New York soldier:--
"This afternoon, July 22, 1863, I spent a long time with a young man I
have been with a good deal from time to time, named Oscar F. Wilber,
company G, 154th New York, low with chronic diarrhoea, and a bad wound
also. He asked me to read him a chapter in the New Testament. I complied,
and asked him what I should read. He said: 'Make your own choice.' I
opened at the close of one of the first books of the Evangelists, and read
the chapters describing the latter hours of Christ and the scenes at the
crucifixion. The poor, wasted young man asked me to read the following
chapter also, how Christ rose again. I read very slowly, as Oscar was
feeble. It pleased him very much, yet the tears were in his eyes. He asked
me if I enjoyed religion. I said: 'Perhaps not, my dear, in the way you
mean, and yet, maybe, it is the same thing.' He said: 'It is my chief
reliance.' He talked of death, and said he did not fear it. I said: 'Why,
Oscar, don't you think you will get well?' He said: 'I may, but it is not
probable.' He spoke calmly of his condition. The wound was very bad; it
discharged much. Then the diarrhoea had prostrated him, and I felt that
he was even then the same as dying. He behaved very manly and
affectionate. The kiss I gave him as I was about leaving he returned
fourfold. He gave me his mother's address, Mrs. Sally D. Wilber, Alleghany
post-office, Cattaraugus County, New York. I had several such interviews
with him. He died a few days after the one just described."
And here, also, a characteristic scene in another of those long
barracks:--
"It is Sunday afternoon (middle of summer, 1864), hot and oppressive, and
very silent through the ward. I am taking care of a critical case, now
lying in a half lethargy. Near where I sit is a suffering rebel, from the
8th Louisiana; his name is Irving. He has been here a long time, badly
wounded, and has lately had his leg amputated. It is not doing very well.
Right opposite me is a sick soldier boy, laid down with his clothes on,
sleeping, looking much wasted, his pallid face on his arm. I see by the
yellow trimming on his jacket that he is a cavalry boy. He looks so
handsome as he sleeps, one must needs go nearer to him. I step softly over
to him, and find by his card that he is named William Cone, of the 1st
Maine Cavalry, and his folks live in Skowhegan."
In a letter to his mother in 1863 he says, in reference to his hospital
services: "I have got in the way, after going lightly, as it were, all
through the wards of a hospital, and trying to give a word of cheer, if
nothing else, to every one, then confining my special attention to the few
where the investment seems to tell best, and who want it most.... Mother,
I have real pride in telling you that I have the consciousness of saving
quite a number of lives by keeping the men from giving up, and being a
good deal with them. The men say it is so, and the doctors say it is so;
and I will candidly confess I can see it is true, though I say it myself.
I know you will like to hear it, mother, so I tell you."
Again he says: "I go among the worst fevers and wounds with impunity; I go
among the smallpox, etc., just the same. I feel to go without
apprehension, and so I go: nobody else goes; but, as the darkey said there
at Charleston when the boat ran on a flat and the rebel sharpshooters were
peppering them, '_somebody_ must jump in de water and shove de boat off.'"
In another letter to his mother he thus accounts for his effect upon the
wounded soldiers: "I fancy the reason I am able to do some good in the
hospitals among the poor, languishing, and wounded boys, is that I am so
large and well,--indeed, like a great wild buffalo with much hair. Many of
the soldiers are from the West and far North, and they like a man that has
not the bleached, shiny, and shaved cut of the cities and the East."
As to Whitman's appearance about this time, we get an inkling from another
letter to his mother, giving an account of an interview he had with
Senator Preston King, to whom Whitman applied for assistance in procuring
a clerkship in one of the departments. King said to him, "Why, how can I
do this thing, or anything for you? How do I know but you are a
secessionist? You look for all the world like an old Southern planter,--a
regular Carolina or Virginia planter."
The great suffering of the soldiers and their heroic fortitude move him
deeply. He says to his mother: "Nothing of ordinary misfortune seems as it
used to, and death itself has lost all its terrors; I have seen so many
cases in which it was so welcome and such a relief." Again: "I go to the
hospitals every day or night. I believe no men ever loved each other as I
and some of these poor wounded, sick, and dying men love each other."
Whitman's services in the hospitals began to tell seriously upon his
health in June, 1864, when he had "spells of deathly faintness, and had
trouble in the head." The doctors told him he must keep away for a while,
but he could not. Under date of June 7, 1864, he writes to his mother:--
"There is a very horrible collection in Armory Building (in Armory Square
Hospital),--about two hundred of the worst cases you ever saw, and I have
probably been too much with them. It is enough to melt the heart of a
stone. Over one third of them are amputation cases. Well, mother, poor
Oscar Cunningham is gone at last: (he is the 82d Ohio boy, wounded May 3,
'63). I have written so much of him I suppose you feel as if you almost
knew him. I was with him Saturday forenoon, and also evening. He was more
composed than usual; could not articulate very well. He died about two
o'clock Sunday morning, very easy, they told me. I was not there. It was a
blessed relief. His life has been misery for months. I believe I told you,
last letter, I was quite blue from the deaths of several of the poor young
men I knew well, especially two of whom I had strong hopes of their
getting up. Things are going pretty badly with the wounded. They are
crowded here in Washington in immense numbers, and all those that came up
from the Wilderness and that region arrived here so neglected and in such
plight it was awful (those that were at Fredericksburg, and also from
Belle Plain). The papers are full of puffs, etc., but the truth is the
largest proportion of worst cases get little or no attention.
"We receive them here with their wounds full of worms,--some all swelled
and inflamed. Many of the amputations have to be done over again. One new
feature is, that many of the poor, afflicted young men are crazy; every
ward has some in it that are wandering. They have suffered too much, and
it is perhaps a privilege that they are out of their senses. Mother, it is
most too much for a fellow, and I sometimes wish I was out of it; but I
suppose it is because I have not felt firstrate myself."
Of the Ohio soldier above referred to, Whitman had written a few days
before: "You remember I told you of him a year ago, when he was first
brought in. I thought him the noblest specimen of a young Western man I
had seen. A real giant in size, and always with a smile on his face. Oh,
what a change! He has long been very irritable to every one but me, and
his frame is all wasted away."
To his brother Jeff he wrote: "Of the many I have seen die, or known of
the past year, I have not seen or known of one who met death with any
terror. Yesterday I spent a good part of the afternoon with a young man of
seventeen named Charles Cutter, of Lawrence City, 1st Massachusetts Heavy
Artillery, Battery M. He was brought into one of the hospitals mortally
wounded in abdomen. Well, I thought to myself as I sat looking at him, it
ought to be a relief to his folks, after all, if they could see how little
he suffered. He lay very placid, in a half lethargy, with his eyes closed;
it was very warm, and I sat a long while fanning him and wiping the sweat.
At length he opened his eyes quite wide and clear, and looked inquiringly
around. I said, "What is it, my dear? do you want anything?" He said
quietly, with a good-natured smile, "Oh, nothing; I was only looking
around to see who was with me." His mind was somewhat wandering, yet he
lay so peaceful in his dying condition. He seemed to be a real New England
country boy, so good-natured, with a pleasant, homely way, and quite
fine-looking. Without any doubt, he died in course of the night."
Another extract from a letter to his mother in April, 1864:--
"Mother, you don't know what a feeling a man gets after being in the
active sights and influences of the camp, the army, the wounded, etc. He
gets to have a deep feeling he never experienced before,--the flag, the
tune of Yankee Doodle, and similar things, produce an effect on a fellow
never felt before. I have seen tears on the men's cheeks, and others turn
pale under such circumstances. I have a little flag,--it belonged to one
of our cavalry regiments,--presented to me by one of the wounded. It was
taken by the rebs in a cavalry fight, and rescued by our men in a bloody
little skirmish. It cost three men's lives just to get one little flag
four by three. Our men rescued it, and tore it from the breast of a dead
rebel. All that just for the name of getting their little banner back
again. The man that got it was very badly wounded, and they let him keep
it. I was with him a good deal. He wanted to give me something, he said;
he did not expect to live; so he gave me the little banner as a keepsake.
I mention this, mother, to show you a specimen of the feeling. There isn't
a regiment of cavalry or infantry that wouldn't do the same on occasion."
[An army surgeon, who at the time watched with curiosity Mr. Whitman's
movements among the soldiers in the hospitals, has since told me that his
principles of operation, effective as they were, seemed strangely few,
simple, and on a low key,--to act upon the appetite, to cheer by a healthy
and fitly bracing appearance and demeanor; and to fill and satisfy in
certain cases the affectional longings of the patients, was about all. He
carried among them no sentimentalism nor moralizing; spoke not to any man
of his "sins," but gave something good to eat, a buoying word, or a
trifling gift and a look. He appeared with ruddy face, clean dress, with a
flower or a green sprig in the lapel of his coat. Crossing the fields in
summer, he would gather a great bunch of dandelion blossoms, and red and
white clover, to bring and scatter on the cots, as reminders of out-door
air and sunshine.
When practicable, he came to the long and crowded wards of the maimed, the
feeble, and the dying, only after preparations as for a
festival,--strengthened by a good meal, rest, the bath, and fresh
underclothes. He entered with a huge haversack slung over his shoulder,
full of appropriate articles, with parcels under his arms, and protuberant
pockets. He would sometimes come in summer with a good-sized basket filled
with oranges, and would go round for hours paring and dividing them among
the feverish and thirsty.]
Of his devotion to the wounded soldiers there are many witnesses. A
well-known correspondent of the "New York Herald" writes thus about him in
April, 1876:--
"I first heard of him among the sufferers on the Peninsula after a battle
there. Subsequently I saw him, time and again, in the Washington
hospitals, or wending his way there, with basket or haversack on his arm,
and the strength of beneficence suffusing his face. His devotion surpassed
the devotion of woman. It would take a volume to tell of his kindness,
tenderness, and thoughtfulness.
"Never shall I forget one night when I accompanied him on his rounds
through a hospital filled with those wounded young Americans whose heroism
he has sung in deathless numbers. There were three rows of cots, and each
cot bore its man. When he appeared, in passing along, there was a smile of
affection and welcome on every face, however wan, and his presence seemed
to light up the place as it might be lighted by the presence of the God of
Love. From cot to cot they called him, often in tremulous tones or in
whispers; they embraced him; they touched his hand; they gazed at him. To
one he gave a few words of cheer; for another he wrote a letter home; to
others he gave an orange, a few comfits, a cigar, a pipe and tobacco, a
sheet of paper or a postage-stamp, all of which and many other things were
in his capacious haversack. From another he would receive a dying message
for mother, wife, or sweetheart; for another he would promise to go an
errand; to another, some special friend very low, he would give a manly
farewell kiss. He did the things for them no nurse or doctor could do, and
he seemed to leave a benediction at every cot as he passed along. The
lights had gleamed for hours in the hospital that night before he left it,
and, as he took his way towards the door, you could hear the voices of
many a stricken hero calling, 'Walt, Walt, Walt! come again! come again!'"
III
Out of that experience in camp and hospital the pieces called "Drum-Taps,"
first published in 1865,--since merged in his "Leaves,"--were produced.
Their descriptions and pictures, therefore, come from life. The vivid
incidents of "The Dresser" are but daguerreotypes of the poet's own actual
movements among the bad cases of the wounded after a battle. The same
personal knowledge runs through "A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and
Dim," "Come up from the Fields, Father," etc., etc.
The reader of this section of Whitman's work soon discovers that it is not
the purpose of the poet to portray battles and campaigns, or to celebrate
special leaders or military prowess, but rather to chant the human aspects
of anguish that follow in the train of war. He perhaps feels that the
permanent condition of modern society is that of peace; that war as a
business, as a means of growth, has served its time; and that,
notwithstanding the vast difference between ancient and modern warfare,
both in the spirit and in the means, Homer's pictures are essentially true
yet, and no additions to them can be made. War can never be to us what it
has been to the nations of all ages down to the present; never the main
fact, the paramount condition, tyrannizing over all the affairs of
national and individual life, but only an episode, a passing interruption;
and the poet, who in our day would be as true to his nation and times as
Homer was to his, must treat of it from the standpoint of peace and
progress, and even benevolence. Vast armies rise up in a night and
disappear in a day; a million of men, inured to battle and to blood, go
back to the avocations of peace without a moment's confusion or
delay,--indicating clearly the tendency that prevails.
Apostrophizing the genius of America in the supreme hour of victory, he
says:--
"No poem proud, I, chanting, bring to thee--nor mastery's rapturous
verse:--
But a little book containing night's darkness and blood-dripping wounds,
And psalms of the dead."
The collection is also remarkable for the absence of all sectional or
partisan feeling. Under the head of "Reconciliation" are these lines:--
"Word over all, beautiful as the sky!
Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be
utterly lost!
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly, softly wash
again, and ever again, this soil'd world;
... For my enemy is dead--a man divine as myself is dead;
I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin--I draw near;
I bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the
coffin."
Perhaps the most noteworthy of Whitman's war poems is the one called "When
Lilacs last in the Door-yard bloomed," written in commemoration of
President Lincoln.
The main effect of this poem is of strong, solemn, and varied music; and
it involves in its construction a principle after which perhaps the great
composers most work,--namely, spiritual auricular analogy. At first it
would seem to defy analysis, so rapt is it, and so indirect. No reference
whatever is made to the mere fact of Lincoln's death; the poet does not
even dwell upon its unprovoked atrocity, and only occasionally is the tone
that of lamentation; but, with the intuitions of the grand art, which is
the most complex when it seems most simple, he seizes upon three beautiful
facts of nature, which he weaves into a wreath for the dead President's
tomb. The central thought is of death, but around this he curiously
twines, first, the early-blooming lilacs which the poet may have plucked
the day the dark shadow came; next the song of the hermit thrush, the most
sweet and solemn of all our songsters, heard at twilight in the dusky
cedars; and with these the evening star, which, as many may remember,
night after night in the early part of that eventful spring, hung low in
the west with unusual and tender brightness. These are the premises whence
he starts his solemn chant.
The attitude, therefore, is not that of being bowed down and weeping
hopeless tears, but of singing a commemorative hymn, in which the voices
of nature join, and fits that exalted condition of the soul which serious
events and the presence of death induce. There are no words of mere
eulogy, no statistics, and no story or narrative; but there are pictures,
processions, and a strange mingling of darkness and light, of grief and
triumph: now the voice of the bird, or the drooping lustrous star, or the
sombre thought of death; then a recurrence to the open scenery of the land
as it lay in the April light, "the summer approaching with richness and
the fields all busy with labor," presently dashed in upon by a spectral
vision of armies with torn and bloody battle-flags, and, again, of the
white skeletons of young men long afterward strewing the ground. Hence the
piece has little or nothing of the character of the usual productions on
such occasions. It is dramatic; yet there is no development of plot, but
a constant interplay, a turning and returning of images and sentiments.
The poet breaks a sprig of lilac from the bush in the door-yard,--the dark
cloud falls on the land,--the long funeral sets out,--and then the
apostrophe:--
"Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,
Through day and night, with the great cloud darkening the land,
With the pomp of the inloop'd flags, with the cities draped in black,
With the show of the States themselves, as of crape-veiled women,
standing,
With processions long and winding, and the flambeaus of the night,
With the countless torches lit--with the silent sea of faces, and the
unbared heads,
With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces,
With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong
and solemn;
With all the mournful voices of the dirges, pour'd around the coffin,
To dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs--Where amid these you
journey,
With the tolling, tolling bells' perpetual clang;
Here! coffin that slowly passes,
I give you my sprig of lilac.
"(Nor for you, for one alone;
Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring;
For fresh as the morning--thus would I chant a song for you, O sane
and sacred death.
"All over bouquets of roses,
O death! I cover you over with roses and early lilies;
But mostly and now the lilac that blooms the first,
Copious, I break, I break the sprigs from the bushes;
With loaded arms I come, pouring for you,
For you and the coffins all of you, O death.)"
Then the strain goes on:--
"O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved?
And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone?
And what shall my perfume be, for the grave of him I love?
"Sea-winds, blown from east and west,
Blown from the eastern sea, and blown from the western sea, till
there on the prairies meeting:
These, and with these, and the breath of my chant,
I perfume the grave of him I love."
The poem reaches, perhaps, its height in the matchless invocation to
Death:--
"Come, lovely and soothing Death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later, delicate Death.
"Prais'd be the fathomless universe,
For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious;
And for love, sweet love--but praise! O praise and praise,
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding Death.
"Dark Mother, always gliding near, with soft feet,
Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?
Then I chant it for thee--I glorify thee above all;
I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly.
"Approach, encompassing Death--strong Deliveress!
When it is so--when thou hast taken them, I joyously sing the dead,
Lost in the loving, floating ocean of thee,
Laved in the flood of thy bliss, O Death.
"From me to thee glad serenades,
Dances for thee I propose, saluting thee--adornments and feastings for
thee;
And the sights of the open landscape, and the high-spread sky are
fitting,
And life and the fields, and the huge and thoughtful night.
The night, in silence, under many a star;
The ocean shore, and the husky whispering wave, whose voice I know;
And the soul turning to thee, O vast and well-veil'd Death,
And the body gratefully nestling close to thee."
IV
Whitman despised riches, and all mere worldly success, as heartily as ever
did any of the old Christians. All outward show and finery were intensely
distasteful to him. He probably would not have accepted the finest house
in New York on condition that he live in it. During his hospital
experiences he cherished the purpose, as soon as the war was over, of
returning to Brooklyn, buying an acre or two of land in some by-place on
Long Island, and building for himself and his family a cheap house. When
his brother Jeff contemplated building, he advised him to build merely an
Irish shanty. After what he had seen the soldiers put up with, he thought
anything was good enough for him or his people. In one of his letters to
his mother, he comments upon the un-American and inappropriate
ornamentation of the rooms in the Capitol building, "without grandeur and
without simplicity," he says. In the state the country was in, and with
the hospital scenes before him, the "poppy-show goddesses" and the Italian
style of decoration, etc., sickened him, and he got away from it all as
quickly as he could.
V
During the war and after, I used to see a good deal of Whitman in
Washington. Summer and winter he was a conspicuous figure on Pennsylvania
Avenue, where he was wont to walk for exercise and to feed his hunger for
faces. One would see him afar off, in the crowd but not of it,--a large,
slow-moving figure, clad in gray, with broad-brimmed hat and gray
beard,--or, quite as frequently, on the front platform of the street
horse-cars with the driver. My eye used to single him out many blocks
away.
There were times during this period when his aspect was rather
forbidding,--the physical man was too pronounced on first glance; the
other man was hidden beneath the broad-brimmed hat. One needed to see the
superbly domed head and classic brow crowning the rank physical man.
In his middle manhood, judging from the photos, he had a hirsute, kindly
look, but very far removed from the finely cut traditional poet's face.
VI
I have often heard Whitman say that he inherited most excellent blood from
his mother,--the old Dutch Van Velser strain,--Long Island blood filtered
and vitalized through generations by the breath of the sea. He was his
mother's child unmistakably. With all his rank masculinity, there was a
curious feminine undertone in him which revealed itself in the quality of
his voice, the delicate texture of his skin, the gentleness of his touch
and ways, the attraction he had for children and the common people. A lady
in the West, writing to me about him, spoke of his "great mother-nature."
He was receptive, sympathetic, tender, and met you, not in a positive,
aggressive manner, but more or less in a passive or neutral mood. He did
not give his friends merely his mind, he gave them himself. It is not
merely his mind or intellect that he has put into his poems, it is
himself. Indeed, this feminine mood or attitude might be dwelt upon at
much length in considering his poems,--their solvent, absorbing power, and
the way they yield themselves to diverse interpretations.
The sea, too, had laid its hand upon him, as I have already suggested. He
never appeared so striking and impressive as when seen upon the beach. His
large and tall gray figure looked at home, and was at home, upon the
shore. The simple, strong, flowing lines of his face, his always clean
fresh air, his blue absorbing eye, his commanding presence, and something
pristine and elemental in his whole expression, seemed at once to put him
_en rapport_ with the sea. No phase of nature seems to have impressed him
so deeply as the sea, or recurs so often in his poems.
VII
Whitman was preëminently manly,--richly endowed with the universal,
healthy human qualities and attributes. Mr. Conway relates that when
Emerson handed him the first thin quarto edition of "Leaves of Grass,"
while he was calling at his house in Concord, soon after the book
appeared, he said, "Americans abroad may now come home: unto us a man is
born."
President Lincoln, standing one day during the war before a window in the
White House, saw Whitman slowly saunter by. He followed him with his
eyes, and, turning, said to those about him, "Well, _he_ looks like a
_man_."
"Meeter of savage and gentleman on equal terms."
During Whitman's Western tour in 1879 or '80, at some point in Kansas, in
company with several well-known politicians and government officials, he
visited a lot of Indians who were being held as prisoners. The sheriff
told the Indians who the distinguished men were who were about to see
them, but the Indians paid little attention to them as, one after the
other, the officials and editors passed by them. Behind all came Whitman.
The old chief looked at him steadily, then extended his hand and said,
"How!" All the other Indians followed, surrounding Whitman, shaking his
hand and making the air melodious with their "Hows." The incident
evidently pleased the old poet a good deal.
VIII
Whitman was of large mould in every way, and of bold, far-reaching
schemes, and is very sure to fare better at the hands of large men than of
small. The first and last impression which his personal presence always
made upon one was of a nature wonderfully gentle, tender, and benignant.
His culture, his intellect, was completely suffused and dominated by his
humanity, so that the impression you got from him was not that of a
learned or a literary person, but of fresh, strong, sympathetic human
nature,--such an impression, I fancy, only fuller, as one might have got
from Walter Scott. This was perhaps the secret of the attraction he had,
for the common, unlettered people and for children. I think that even his
literary friends often sought his presence less for conversation than to
bask in his physical or psychical sunshine, and to rest upon his boundless
charity. The great service he rendered to the wounded and homesick
soldiers in the hospitals during the war came from his copious endowment
of this broad, sweet, tender democratic nature. He brought father and
mother to them, and the tonic and cheering atmosphere of simple,
affectionate home life.
In person Whitman was large and tall, above six feet, with a breezy,
open-air look. His temperament was sanguine; his voice was a tender
baritone. The dominant impression he made was that of something fresh and
clean. I remember the first time I met him, which was in Washington, in
the fall of 1863. I was impressed by the fine grain and clean, fresh
quality of the man. Some passages in his poems had led me to expect
something different. He always had the look of a man who had just taken a
bath. The skin was light and clear, and the blood well to the surface. His
body, as I once noticed when we were bathing in the surf, had a peculiar
fresh bloom and fineness and delicacy of texture. His physiology was
undoubtedly remarkable, unique. The full beauty of his face and head did
not appear till he was past sixty. After that, I have little doubt, it was
the finest head this age or country has seen. Every artist who saw him
was instantly filled with a keen desire to sketch him. The lines were so
simple, so free, and so strong. High, arching brows; straight, clear-cut
nose; heavy-lidded blue-gray eyes; forehead not thrust out and emphasized,
but a vital part of a symmetrical, dome-shaped head; ear large, and the
most delicately carved I have ever seen; the mouth and chin hidden by a
soft, long, white beard. It seems to me his face steadily refined and
strengthened with age. Time depleted him in just the right way,--softened
his beard and took away the too florid look; subdued the carnal man, and
brought out more fully the spiritual man. When I last saw him (December
26, 1891), though he had been very near death for many days, I am sure I
had never seen his face so beautiful. There was no breaking-down of the
features, or the least sign of decrepitude, such as we usually note in old
men. The expression was full of pathos, but it was as grand as that of a
god. I could not think of him as near death, he looked so unconquered.
In Washington I knew Whitman intimately from the fall of 1863 to the time
he left in 1873. In Camden I visited him yearly after that date, usually
in the late summer or fall. I will give one glimpse of him from my diary,
under date of August 18, 1887. I reached his house in the morning, before
he was up. Presently he came slowly down stairs and greeted me. "Find him
pretty well,--looking better than last year. With his light-gray suit,
and white hair, and fresh pink face, he made a fine picture. Among other
things, we talked of the Swinburne attack (then recently published). W.
did not show the least feeling on the subject, and, I clearly saw, was
absolutely undisturbed by the article. I told him I had always been more
disturbed by S.'s admiration for him than I was now by his condemnation.
By and by W. had his horse hitched up, and we started for Glendale, ten
miles distant, to see young Gilchrist, the artist. A fine drive through a
level farming and truck-gardening country; warm, but breezy. W. drives
briskly, and salutes every person we meet, little and big, black and
white, male and female. Nearly all return his salute cordially. He said he
knew but few of those he spoke to, but that, as he grew older, the old
Long Island custom of his people, to speak to every one on the road, was
strong upon him. One tipsy man in a buggy responded, 'Why, pap, how d' ye
do, pap?' etc. We talked of many things. I recall this remark of W., as
something I had not before thought of, that it was difficult to see what
the old feudal world would have come to without Christianity: it would
have been like a body acted upon by the centrifugal force without the
centripetal. Those haughty lords and chieftains needed the force of
Christianity to check and curb them, etc. W. knew the history of many
prominent houses on the road: here a crazy man lived, with two colored men
to look after him; there, in that fine house among the trees, an old
maid, who had spent a large fortune on her house and lands, and was now
destitute, yet she was a woman of remarkable good sense, etc. We returned
to Camden before dark, W. apparently not fatigued by the drive of twenty
miles."
In death what struck me most about the face was its perfect symmetry. It
was such a face, said Mr. Conway, as Rembrandt would have selected from a
million. "It is the face of an aged loving child. As I looked, it was with
the reflection that, during an acquaintance of thirty-six years, I never
heard from those lips a word of irritation, or depreciation of any being.
I do not believe that Buddha, of whom he appeared an avatar, was more
gentle to all men, women, children, and living things."
IX
For one of the best pen-sketches of Whitman in his old age we are indebted
to Dr. J. Johnston, a young Scotch physician of Bolton, England, who
visited Whitman in the summer of 1890. I quote from a little pamphlet
which the doctor printed on his return home:--
"The first thing about himself that struck me was the physical immensity
and magnificent proportions of the man, and, next, the picturesque majesty
of his presence as a whole.
"He sat quite erect in a great cane-runged chair, cross-legged, and clad
in rough gray clothes, with slippers on his feet, and a shirt of pure
white linen, with a great wide collar edged with white lace, the shirt
buttoned about midway down his breast, the big lapels of the collar thrown
open, the points touching his shoulders, and exposing the upper portion of
his hirsute chest. He wore a vest of gray homespun, but it was unbuttoned
almost to the bottom. He had no coat on, and his shirt sleeves were turned
up above the elbows, exposing most beautifully shaped arms, and flesh of
the most delicate whiteness. Although it was so hot, he did not perspire
visibly, while I had to keep mopping my face. His hands are large and
massive, but in perfect proportion to the arms; the fingers long, strong,
white, and tapering to a blunt end. His nails are square, showing about an
eighth of an inch separate from the flesh, and I noticed that there was
not a particle of impurity beneath any of them. But his majesty is
concentrated in his head, which is set with leonine grace and dignity upon
his broad, square shoulders; and it is almost entirely covered with long,
fine, straggling hair, silvery and glistening, pure and white as sunlit
snow, rather thin on the top of his high, rounded crown, streaming over
and around his large but delicately-shaped ears, down the back of his big
neck; and, from his pinky-white cheeks and top lip, over the lower part of
his face, right down to the middle of his chest, like a cataract of
materialized, white, glistening vapor, giving him a most venerable and
patriarchal appearance. His high, massive forehead is seamed with
wrinkles. His nose is large, strong, broad, and prominent, but
beautifully chiseled and proportioned, almost straight, very slightly
depressed at the tip, and with deep furrows on each side, running down to
the angles of the mouth. The eyebrows are thick and shaggy, with strong,
white hair, very highly arched and standing a long way above the eyes,
which are of a light blue with a tinge of gray, small, rather deeply set,
calm, clear, penetrating, and revealing unfathomable depths of tenderness,
kindness, and sympathy. The upper eyelids droop considerably over the
eyeballs. The lips, which are partly hidden by the thick, white mustache,
are full. The whole face impresses one with a sense of resoluteness,
strength, and intellectual power, and yet withal a winning sweetness,
unconquerable radiance, and hopeful joyousness. His voice is highly
pitched and musical, with a timbre which is astonishing in an old man.
There is none of the tremor, quaver, or shrillness usually observed in
them, but his utterance is clear, ringing, and most sweetly musical. But
it was not in any one of these features that his charm lay so much as in
his _tout ensemble_, and the irresistible magnetism of his sweet, aromatic
presence, which seemed to exhale sanity, purity, and naturalness, and
exercised over me an attraction which positively astonished me, producing
an exaltation of mind and soul which no man's presence ever did before. I
felt that I was here face to face with the living embodiment of all that
was good, noble, and lovable in humanity."
X
British critics have spoken of Whitman's athleticism, his athletic
temperament, etc., but he was in no sense a muscular man, an athlete. His
body, though superb, was curiously the body of a child; one saw this in
its form, in its pink color, and in the delicate texture of the skin. He
took little interest in feats of strength, or in athletic sports. He
walked with a slow, rolling gait, indeed, moved slowly in all ways; he
always had an air of infinite leisure. For several years, while a clerk in
the Attorney-General's Office in Washington, his exercise for an hour each
day consisted in tossing a few feet into the air, as he walked, a round,
smooth stone, of about one pound weight, and catching it as it fell. Later
in life, and after his first paralytic stroke, when in the woods, he liked
to bend down the young saplings, and exercise his arms and chest in that
way. In his poems much emphasis is laid upon health, and upon purity and
sweetness of body, but none upon mere brute strength. This is what he says
"To a Pupil:"--
1. Is reform needed? Is it through you?
The greater the reform needed, the greater the PERSONALITY you
need to accomplish it.
2. You! do you not see how it would serve to have eyes, blood,
complexion, clean and sweet?
Do you not see how it would serve to have such a body and Soul,
that when you enter the crowd, an atmosphere of desire and
command enters with you, and every one is impressed with your
personality?
3. O the magnet! the flesh over and over!
Go, mon cher! if need be, give up all else, and commence to-day to
inure yourself to pluck, reality, self-esteem, definiteness,
elevatedness,
Rest not, till you rivet and publish yourself of your own personality.
It is worthy of note that Whitman's Washington physician said he had one
of the most thoroughly natural physical systems he had ever known,--the
freest, probably, from extremes or any disproportion; which answers to the
perfect sanity which all his friends must have felt with regard to his
mind.
A few years ago a young English artist stopping in this country made
several studies of him. In one of them which he showed me, he had left the
face blank, but had drawn the figure from the head down with much care. It
was so expressive, so unmistakably Whitman, conveyed so surely a certain
majesty and impressiveness that pertained to the poet physically, that I
looked upon it with no ordinary interest. Every wrinkle in the garments
seemed to proclaim the man. Probably a similar painting of any of one's
friends would be more or less a recognizable portrait, but I doubt if it
would speak so emphatically as did this incomplete sketch. I thought it
all the more significant in this case because Whitman laid such stress
upon the human body in his poems, built so extensively upon it, curiously
identifying it with the soul, and declaring his belief that if he made the
poems of his body and of mortality he would thus supply himself with the
poems of the soul and of immortality. "Behold," he says, "the body
includes and is the meaning, the main concern, and includes and is the
soul; whoever you are, how superb and how divine is your body, or any part
of it!" He runs this physiological thread all through his book, and
strings upon it many valuable lessons and many noble sentiments. Those who
knew him well, I think, will agree with me that his bodily presence was
singularly magnetic, restful, and positive, and that it furnished a
curious and suggestive commentary upon much there is in his poetry.
The Greeks, who made so much more of the human body than we do, seem not
to have carried so much meaning, so much history, in their faces as does
the modern man; the soul was not concentrated here, but was more evenly
distributed over the whole body. Their faces expressed repose, harmony,
power of command. I think Whitman was like the Greeks in this respect. His
face had none of the eagerness, sharpness, nervousness, of the modern
face. It had but few lines, and these were Greek. From the mouth up, the
face was expressive of Greek purity, simplicity, strength, and repose. The
mouth was large and loose, and expressive of another side of his nature.
It was a mouth that required the check and curb of that classic brow.
And the influence of his poems is always on the side of physiological
cleanliness and strength, and severance from all that corrupts and makes
morbid and mean. He says the "expression of a well-made man appears not
only in his face: it is in his limbs and joints also; it is curiously in
the joints of his hips and wrists; it is in his walk, the carriage of his
neck, the flex of his waist and knees; dress does not hide him; the
strong, sweet, supple quality he has strikes through the cotton and
flannel; to see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more.
You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side."
He says he has perceived that to be with those he likes is enough: "To be
surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough,--I
do not ask any more delight; I swim in it, as in a sea. There is something
in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact
and odor of them, that pleases the soul well. All things please the soul,
but these please the soul well." Emerson once asked Whitman what it was he
found in the society of the common people that satisfied him so; for his
part, he could not find anything. The subordination by Whitman of the
purely intellectual to the human and physical, which runs all through his
poems and is one source of their power, Emerson, who was deficient in the
sensuous, probably could not appreciate.
XI
The atmosphere of Whitman personally was that of a large, tolerant,
tender, sympathetic, restful man, easy of approach, indifferent to any
special social or other distinctions and accomplishments that might be
yours, and regarding you from the start for yourself alone.
Children were very fond of him; and women, unless they had been prejudiced
against him, were strongly drawn toward him. His personal magnetism was
very great, and was warming and cheering. He was rich in temperament,
probably beyond any other man of his generation,--rich in all the purely
human and emotional endowments and basic qualities. Then there was a look
about him hard to describe, and which I have seen in no other face,--a
gray, brooding, elemental look, like the granite rock, something primitive
and Adamic that might have belonged to the first man; or was it a
suggestion of the gray, eternal sea that he so loved, near which he was
born, and that had surely set its seal upon him? I know not, but I feel
the man with that look is not of the day merely, but of the centuries. His
eye was not piercing, but absorbing,--"draining" is the word happily used
by William O'Connor; the soul back of it drew things to himself, and
entered and possessed them through sympathy and personal force and
magnetism, rather than through mere intellectual force.
XII
Walt Whitman was of the people, the common people, and always gave out
their quality and atmosphere. His commonness, his nearness, as of the
things you have always known,--the day, the sky, the soil, your own
parents,--were in no way veiled, or kept in abeyance, by his culture or
poetic gifts. He was redolent of the human and the familiar. Though
capable, on occasions, of great pride and hauteur, yet his habitual mood
and presence was that of simple, average, healthful humanity,--the virtue
and flavor of sailors, soldiers, laborers, travelers, or people who live
with real things in the open air. His commonness rose into the uncommon,
the extraordinary, but without any hint of the exclusive or specially
favored. He was indeed "no sentimentalist, no stander above men and women
or apart from them."
The spirit that animates every page of his book, and that it always
effuses, is the spirit of common, universal humanity,--humanity apart from
creeds, schools, conventions, from all special privileges and refinements,
as it is in and of itself in its relations to the whole system of things,
in contradistinction to the literature of culture which effuses the spirit
of the select and exclusive.
His life was the same. Walt Whitman never stood apart from or above any
human being. The common people--workingmen, the poor, the illiterate, the
outcast--saw themselves in him, and he saw himself in them: the attraction
was mutual. He was always content with common, unadorned humanity.
Specially intellectual people rather repelled him; the wit, the scholar,
the poet, must have a rich endowment of the common, universal, human
attributes and qualities to pass current with him. He sought the society
of boatmen, railroad men, farmers, mechanics, printers, teamsters, mothers
of families, etc., rather than the society of professional men or
scholars. Men who had the quality of things in the open air--the virtue of
rocks, trees, hills--drew him most; and it is these qualities and virtues
that he has aimed above all others to put into his poetry, and to put them
there in such a way that he who reads must feel and imbibe them.
The recognized poets put into their pages the virtue and quality of the
fine gentleman, or of the sensitive, artistic nature: this poet of
democracy effuses the atmosphere of fresh, strong Adamic man,--man acted
upon at first hand by the shows and forces of universal nature.
If our poet ever sounds the note of the crude, the loud, the exaggerated,
he is false to himself and to his high aims. I think he may be charged
with having done so a few times, in his earlier work, but not in his
later. In the 1860 edition of his poems stands this portraiture, which may
stand for himself, with one or two features rather overdrawn:--
"His shape arises
Arrogant, masculine, naïve, rowdyish,
Laugher, weeper, worker, idler, citizen, countryman,
Saunterer of woods, stander upon hills, summer swimmer in rivers or by
the sea,
Of pure American breed, of reckless health, his body perfect, free from
taint from top to toe, free forever from headache and dyspepsia,
clean-breathed,
Ample-limbed, a good feeder, weight a hundred and eighty pounds,
full-blooded, six feet high, forty inches round the breast and
back,
Countenance sunburnt, bearded, calm, unrefined,
Reminder of animals, meeter of savage and gentleman on equal terms,
Attitudes lithe and erect, costume free, neck gray and open, of slow
movement on foot,
Passer of his right arm round the shoulders of his friends, companion
of the street,
Persuader always of people to give him their sweetest touches, and never
their meanest.
A Manhattanese bred, fond of Brooklyn, fond of Broadway, fond of the
life of the wharves and the great ferries,
Enterer everywhere, welcomed everywhere, easily understood after all,
Never offering others, always offering himself, corroborating his
phrenology,
Voluptuous, inhabitive, combative, conscientious, alimentive, intuitive,
of copious friendship, sublimity, firmness, self-esteem,
comparison, individuality, form, locality, eventuality,
Avowing by life, manners, words to contribute illustrations of results
of These States,
Teacher of the unquenchable creed namely egotism,
Inviter of others continually henceforth to try their strength against
his."
XIII
Whitman was determined, at whatever risk to his own reputation, to make
the character which he has exploited in his poems a faithful compend of
American humanity, and to do this the rowdy element could not be entirely
ignored. Hence he unflinchingly imputes it to himself, as, for that
matter, he has nearly every sin and dereliction mankind are guilty of.
Whitman developed slowly and late upon the side that related him to social
custom and usage,--to the many fictions, concealments, make-believes, and
subterfuges of the world of parlors and drawing-rooms. He never was an
adept in what is called "good form;" the natural man that he was shows
crude in certain relations. His publication of Emerson's letter with its
magnificent eulogium of "Leaves of Grass" has been much commented upon.
There may be two opinions as to the propriety of his course in this
respect: a letter from a stranger upon a matter of public interest is not
usually looked upon as a private letter. Emerson never spoke with more
felicity and penetration than he does in this letter; but it is for
Whitman's own sake that we would have had him practice self-denial in the
matter; he greatly plumed himself upon Emerson's endorsement, and was
guilty of the very bad taste of printing a sentence from the letter upon
the cover of the next edition of his book. Grant that it showed a certain
crudeness, unripeness, in one side of the man; later in life, he could not
have erred in this way. Ruskin is reported saying that he never in his
life wrote a letter to any human being that he would not be willing should
be posted up in the market-place, or cried by the public crier through the
town. But Emerson was a much more timid and conforming man than Ruskin,
and was much more likely to be shocked by such a circumstance.
It has been said that the publication of this letter much annoyed Emerson,
and that he never forgave Whitman the offense. That he was disturbed by it
and by the storm that arose there can be little doubt; but there is no
evidence that he allowed the fact to interfere with his friendship for the
poet. Charles W. Eldridge, who personally knew of the relations of the two
men, says:--
"There was not a year from 1855 (the date of the Emerson letter and its
publication) down to 1860 (the year Walt came to Boston to supervise the
issue of the Thayer & Eldridge edition of 'Leaves of Grass'), that Emerson
did not personally seek out Walt at his Brooklyn home, usually that they
might have a long symposium together at the Astor House in New York.
Besides that, during these years Emerson sent many of his closest friends,
including Alcott and Thoreau, to see Walt, giving them letters of
introduction to him. This is not the treatment usually accorded a man who
has committed an unpardonable offense.
"I know that afterwards, during Walt's stay in Boston, Emerson frequently
came down from Concord to see him, and that they had many walks and talks
together, these conferences usually ending with a dinner at the American
House, at that time Emerson's favorite Boston hotel. On several occasions
they met by appointment in our counting-room. Their relations were as
cordial and friendly as possible, and it was always Emerson who sought out
Walt, and never the other way, although, of course, Walt appreciated and
enjoyed Emerson's companionship very much. In truth, Walt never sought the
company of notables at all, and was always very shy of purely literary
society. I know that at this time Walt was invited by Emerson to Concord,
but declined to go, probably through his fear that he would see too much
of the literary coterie that then clustered there, chiefly around
Emerson."
XIV
Whitman gave himself to men as men and not as scholars or poets, and gave
himself purely as a man. While not specially averse to meeting people on
literary or intellectual grounds, yet it was more to his taste to meet on
the broadest, commonest, human grounds. What you had seen or felt or
suffered or done was of much more interest to him than what you had read
or thought; your speculation about the soul interested him less than the
last person you had met, or the last chore you had done.
Any glimpse of the farm, the shop, the household--any bit of real life,
anything that carried the flavor and quality of concrete reality--was very
welcome to him; herein, no doubt, showing the healthy, objective, artist
mind. He never tired of hearing me talk about the birds or wild animals,
or my experiences in camp in the woods, the kind of characters I had met
there, and the flavor of the life of remote settlements in Maine or
Canada. His inward, subjective life was ample of itself; he was familiar
with all your thoughts and speculations beforehand: what he craved was
wider experience,--to see what you had seen, and feel what you had felt.
He was fond of talking with returned travelers and explorers, and with
sailors, soldiers, mechanics; much of his vast stores of information upon
all manner of subjects was acquired at firsthand, in the old way, from the
persons who had seen or done or been what they described or related.
He had almost a passion for simple, unlettered humanity,--an attraction
which specially intellectual persons will hardly understand. Schooling and
culture are so often purchased at such an expense to the innate,
fundamental human qualities! Ignorance, with sound instincts and the
quality which converse with real things imparts to men, was more
acceptable to him than so much of our sophisticated knowledge, or our
studied wit, or our artificial poetry.
XV
At the time of Whitman's death, one of our leading literary journals
charged him with having brought on premature decay by leading a riotous
and debauched life. I hardly need say that there was no truth in the
charge. The tremendous emotional strain of writing his "Leaves," followed
by his years of service in the army hospitals, where he contracted
blood-poison, resulted at the age of fifty-four in the rupture of a small
blood-vessel in the brain, which brought on partial paralysis. A sunstroke
during his earlier manhood also played its part in the final break-down.
That, tried by the standard of the lives of our New England poets,
Whitman's life was a blameless one, I do not assert; but that it was a
sane, temperate, manly one, free from excesses, free from the perversions
and morbidities of a mammonish, pampered, over-stimulated age, I do
believe. Indeed, I may say I know. The one impression he never failed to
make--physically, morally, intellectually--on young and old, women and
men, was that of health, sanity, sweetness. This is the impression he
seems to have made upon Mr. Howells, when he met the poet at Pfaff's early
in the sixties.
The critic I have alluded to inferred license in the man from liberty in
the poet. He did not have the gumption to see that Whitman made the
experience of all men his own, and that his scheme included the evil as
well as the good; that especially did he exploit the unloosed, all-loving,
all-accepting natural man,--the man who is done with conventions,
illusions and all morbid pietisms, and who gives himself lavishly to all
that begets and sustains life. Yet not the natural or carnal man for his
own sake, but for the sake of the spiritual meanings and values to which
he is the key. Indeed, Whitman is about the most uncompromising
spiritualist in literature; with him, all things exist by and for the
soul. He felt the tie of universal brotherhood, also, as few have felt it.
It was not a theory with him, but a fact that shaped his life and colored
his poems. "Whoever degrades another degrades me," and the thought fired
his imagination.
XVI
The student of Whitman's life and works will be early struck by three
things,--his sudden burst into song, the maturity of his work from the
first, and his self-knowledge and self-estimate. The fit of inspiration
came upon him suddenly; it was like the flowering of the orchards in
spring; there was little or no hint of it till almost the very hour of
the event. Up to the time of the appearance of the first edition of
"Leaves of Grass," he had produced nothing above mediocrity. A hack writer
on newspapers and magazines, then a carpenter and house-builder in a small
way, then that astounding revelation "Leaves of Grass," the very audacity
of it a gospel in itself. How dare he do it? how could he do it, and not
betray hesitation or self-consciousness? It is one of the exceptional
events in literary history. The main body of his work was produced in five
or six years, or between 1854 and 1859. Of course it was a sudden
flowering, which, consciously or unconsciously, must have been long
preparing in his mind. His work must have had a long foreground, as
Emerson suggested. Dr. Bucke, his biographer, thinks it was a special
inspiration,--something analogous to Paul's conversion, a sudden opening
of what the doctor calls "cosmic consciousness."
Another student and lover of Whitman says: "It is certain that some time
about his thirty-fifth year [probably a little earlier] there came over
him a decided change: he seemed immensely to broaden and deepen; he became
less interested in what are usually regarded as the more practical affairs
of life. He lost what little ambition he ever had for money-making, and
permitted good business opportunities to pass unheeded. He ceased to write
the somewhat interesting but altogether commonplace and respectable
stories and verses which he had been in the habit of contributing to
periodicals. He would take long trips into the country, no one knew where,
and would spend more time in his favorite haunts about the city, or on the
ferries, or the tops of omnibuses, at the theatre and opera, in picture
galleries, and wherever he could observe men and women and art and
nature."
Then the maturity of his work from the first line of it! It seems as if he
came into the full possession of himself and of his material at one
bound,--never had to grope for his way and experiment, as most men do.
What apprenticeship he served, or with whom he served it, we get no hint.
He has come to his own, and is in easy, joyful possession of it, when he
first comes into view. He outlines his scheme in his first poem, "Starting
from Paumanok," and he has kept the letter and the spirit of every promise
therein made. We never see him doubtful or hesitating; we never see him
battling for his territory, and uncertain whether or not he is upon his
own ground. He has an air of contentment, of mastery and triumph, from the
start.
His extraordinary self-estimate and self-awareness are equally noticeable.
We should probably have to go back to sacred history to find a parallel
case. The manner of man he was, his composite character, his relation to
his country and times, his unlikeness to other poets, his affinity to the
common people, how he would puzzle and elude his critics, how his words
would itch at our ears till we understood them, etc.,--how did he know all
this from the first?
HIS RULING IDEAS AND AIMS
I
Let me here summarize some of the ideas and principles in which "Leaves of
Grass" has its root, and from which it starts. A collection of poems in
the usual sense, a variety of themes artistically treated and appealing to
our æsthetic perceptibilities alone, it is not. It has, strictly speaking,
but one theme,--personality, the personality of the poet himself. To
exploit this is always the main purpose, and, in doing so, to make the
book both directly and indirectly a large, impassioned utterance upon all
the main problems of life and of nationality. It is primitive, like the
early literature of a race or people, in that its spirit and purpose are
essentially religious. It is like the primitive literatures also in its
prophetic cry and in its bardic simplicity and homeliness, and unlike them
in its faith and joy and its unconquerable optimism.
It has been not inaptly called the bible of democracy. Its biblical
features are obvious enough with the darker negative traits left out. It
is Israel with science and the modern added.
Whitman was swayed by a few great passions,--the passion for country, the
passion for comrades, the cosmic passion, etc. His first concern seems
always to have been for his country. He has touched no theme, named no
man, not related in some way to America. The thought of it possessed him
as thoroughly as the thought of Israel possessed the old Hebrew prophets.
Indeed, it is the same passion, and flames up with the same vitality and
power,--the same passion for race and nativity enlightened by science and
suffused with the modern humanitarian spirit. Israel was exclusive and
cruel. Democracy, as exemplified in Walt Whitman, is compassionate and
all-inclusive:--
"My spirit has passed in compassion and determination around the whole
earth,
I have looked for equals and lovers, and found them ready for me in all
lands;
I think some divine rapport has equalized me with them.
"O vapors! I think I have risen with you, and moved away to distant
continents, and fallen down there, for reasons,
I think I have blown with you, O winds,
O waters, I have fingered every shore with you."
II
The work springs from the modern democratic conception of society,--of
absolute social equality.
It embodies the modern scientific conception of the universe, as
distinguished from the old theological conception,--namely, that creation
is good and sound in all its parts.
It embodies a conception of evil as a part of the good, of death as the
friend and not the enemy of life.
It places comradeship, manly attachment, above sex love, and indicates it
as the cement of future states and republics.
It makes the woman the equal of the man, his mate and not his toy.
It treats sexuality as a matter too vital and important to be ignored or
trifled with, much less perverted or denied. A full and normal
sexuality,--upon this the race stands. We pervert, we deny, we corrupt sex
at our peril. Its perversions and abnormalities are to be remedied by a
frank and fervent recognition of it, almost a new Priapic cult.
It springs from a conception of poetry quite different from the current
conception. It aims at the poetry of things rather than of words, and
works by suggestion and indirection rather than by elaboration.
It aims to project into literature a conception of the new democratic
man,--a type larger, more copious, more candid, more religious, than we
have been used to. It finds its ideals, not among scholars or in the
parlor or counting-houses, but among workers, doers, farmers, mechanics,
the heroes of land and sea.
Hence the atmosphere which it breathes and effuses is that of real things,
real men and women. It has not the perfume of the distilled and
concentrated, but the all but impalpable odor of the open air, the shore,
the wood, the hilltop. It aims, not to be a book, but to be a man.
Its purpose is to stimulate and arouse, rather than to soothe and satisfy.
It addresses the character, the intuitions, the ego, more than the
intellect or the purely æsthetic faculties. Its end is not taste, but
growth in the manly virtues and powers.
Its religion shows no trace of theology, or the conventional pietism.
It aspires to a candor and a directness like that of Nature herself.
It aims to let Nature speak without check, with original energy. The only
checks are those which health and wholeness demand.
Its standards are those of the natural universal.
Its method is egocentric. The poet never goes out of himself, but draws
everything into himself and makes it all serve to illustrate his
personality.
Its form is not what is called artistic. Its suggestion is to be found in
organic nature, in trees, clouds, and in the vital and flowing currents.
In its composition the author was doubtless greatly influenced by the
opera and the great singers, and the music of the great composers. He
would let himself go in the same manner and seek his effects through
multitude and the quality of the living voice.
Finally, "Leaves of Grass" is an utterance out of the depths of
primordial, aboriginal human nature. It embodies and exploits a character
not rendered anæmic by civilization, but preserving a sweet and sane
savagery, indebted to culture only as a means to escape culture, reaching
back always, through books, art, civilization, to fresh, unsophisticated
nature, and drawing his strength thence.
Another of the ideas that master Whitman and rule him is the idea of
identity,--that you are you and I am I, and that we are henceforth secure
whatever comes or goes. He revels in this idea; it is fruitful with him;
it begets in him the ego-enthusiasm, and is at the bottom of his
unshakable faith in immortality. It leavens all his work. It cannot be too
often said that the book is not merely a collection of pretty poems,
themes elaborated and followed out at long removes from the personality of
the poet, but a series of _sorties_ into the world of materials, the
American world, piercing through the ostensible shows of things to the
interior meanings, and illustrating in a free and large way the genesis
and growth of a man, his free use of the world about him, appropriating it
to himself, seeking his spiritual identity through its various objects and
experiences, and giving in many direct and indirect ways the meaning and
satisfaction of life. There is much in it that is not poetical in the
popular sense, much that is neutral and negative, and yet is an integral
part of the whole, as is the case in the world we inhabit. If it offends,
it is in a wholesome way, like objects in the open air.
III
Whitman rarely celebrates exceptional characters. He loves the common
humanity, and finds his ideals among the masses. It is not difficult to
reconcile his attraction toward the average man, towards workingmen and
"powerful, uneducated persons," with the ideal of a high excellence,
because he finally rests only upon the most elevated and heroic personal
qualities,--elevated but well grounded in the common and universal.
The types upon which he dwells the most fondly are of the common people.
"I knew a man,
He was a common farmer--he was the father of five sons,
And in them were the fathers of sons--and in them were the fathers of
sons.
"This man was of wonderful vigor, calmness, beauty of person,
The shape of his head, the richness and breadth of his manners, the pale
yellow and white of his hair and beard, and the immeasurable
meaning of his black eyes,
These I used to go and visit him to see--he was wise also,
He was six feet tall, he was over eighty years old--his sons were
massive, clean, bearded, tan-faced, handsome,
They and his daughters loved him--all who saw him loved him,
They did not love him by allowance--they loved him with personal love;
He drank water only--the blood showed like scarlet through the
clear-brown skin of his face,
He was a frequent gunner and fisher--he sailed his boat himself--he had
a fine one presented to him by a ship-joiner--he had fowling-pieces
presented to him by men that loved him;
When he went with his five sons and many grandsons to hunt or fish, you
would pick him out as the most beautiful and vigorous of the gang,
You would wish long and long to be with him--you would wish to sit by him
in the boat, that you and he might touch each other."
All the _motifs_ of his work are the near, the vital, the universal;
nothing curious, or subtle, or far-fetched. His working ideas are
democracy, equality, personality, nativity, health, sexuality,
comradeship, self-esteem, the purity of the body, the equality of the
sexes, etc. Out of them his work radiates. They are the eyes with which it
sees, the ears with which it hears, the feet upon which it goes. The poems
are less like a statement, an argument, an elucidation, and more like a
look, a gesture, a tone of voice.
"The word I myself put primarily for the description of them as they stand
at last," says the author, "is the word Suggestiveness."
"Leaves of Grass" requires a large perspective; you must not get your face
too near the book. You must bring to it a magnanimity of spirit,--a
charity and faith equal to its own. Looked at too closely, it often seems
incoherent and meaningless; draw off a little and let the figure come out.
The book is from first to last a most determined attempt, on the part of a
large, reflective, loving, magnetic, rather primitive, thoroughly
imaginative personality, to descend upon the materialism of the nineteenth
century, and especially upon a new democratic nation now in full career
upon this continent, with such poetic fervor and enthusiasm as to lift and
fill it with the deepest meanings of the spirit and disclose the order of
universal nature. The poet has taken shelter behind no precedent, or
criticism, or partiality whatever, but has squarely and lovingly faced the
oceanic amplitude and movement of the life of his times and land, and
fused them in his fervid humanity, and imbued them with deepest poetic
meanings. One of the most striking features of the book is the adequacy
and composure, even joyousness and elation, of the poet in the presence
of the huge materialism and prosaic conditions of our democratic era. He
spreads himself over it all, he accepts and absorbs it all, he rejects no
part; and his quality, his individuality, shines through it all, as the
sun through vapors. The least line, or fragment of a line, is redolent of
Walt Whitman. It is never so much the theme treated as it is the man
exploited and illustrated. Walt Whitman does not write poems, strictly
speaking,--does not take a bit of nature or life or character and chisel
and carve it into a beautiful image or object, or polish and elaborate a
thought, embodying it in pleasing tropes and pictures. His purpose is
rather to show a towering, loving, composite personality moving amid all
sorts of materials, taking them up but for a moment, disclosing new
meanings and suggestions in them, passing on, bestowing himself upon
whoever or whatever will accept him, tossing hints and clues right and
left, provoking and stimulating the thought and imagination of his reader,
but finishing nothing for him, leaving much to be desired, much to be
completed by him in his turn.
IV
The reader who would get at the spirit and meaning of "Leaves of Grass"
must remember that its animating principle, from first to last, is
Democracy,--that it is a work conceived and carried forward in the spirit
of the genius of humanity that is now in full career in the New
World,--and that all things characteristically American (trades, tools,
occupations, productions, characters, scenes) therefore have their places
in it. It is intended to be a complete mirror of the times in which the
life of the poet fell, and to show one master personality accepting,
absorbing all and rising superior to it,--namely, the poet himself. Yet it
is never Whitman that speaks so much as it is Democracy that speaks
through him. He personifies the spirit of universal brotherhood, and in
this character launches forth his "omnivorous words." What would seem
colossal egotism, shameless confessions, or unworthy affiliations with
low, rude persons, what would seem confounding good and bad, virtue and
vice, etc., in Whitman the man, the citizen, but serves to illustrate the
boundless compassion and saving power of Whitman as the spokesman of ideal
Democracy. With this clue in mind, many difficult things are made plain
and easy in the works of this much misunderstood poet.
Perhaps the single poem that throws most light upon his aims and methods,
and the demand he makes upon his reader, is in "Calamus," and is as
follows:--
"Whoever you are holding me now in hand,
Without one thing all will be useless,
I give you fair warning before you attempt me further,
I am not what you suppos'd, but far different.
"Who is he that would become my follower?
Who would sign himself a candidate for my affections?
"The way is suspicious, the result uncertain, perhaps destructive,
You would have to give up all else, I alone would expect to be your
sole and exclusive standard,
Your novitiate would even then be long and exhausting,
The whole past theory of your life and all conformity to the lives
around you would have to be abandon'd,
Therefore release me now before troubling yourself any further, let
go your hand from my shoulders,
Put me down and depart on your way.
"Or else by stealth in some wood for trial,
Or back of a rock in the open air,
(For in any roof'd room of a house I emerge not, nor in company,
And in libraries I lie as one dumb, a gawk, or unborn, or dead,)
But just possibly with you on a high hill, first watching lest any
person for miles around approach unawares,
Or possibly with you sailing at sea, or on the beach of the sea or
some quiet island,
Here to put your lips upon mine I permit you,
With the comrade's long-dwelling kiss or the new husband's kiss,
For I am the new husband and I am the comrade.
"Or, if you will, thrusting me beneath your clothing,
Where I may feel the throbs of your heart or rest upon your hip,
Carry me when you go forth over land or sea;
For thus merely touching you is enough, is best,
And thus touching you would I silently sleep and be carried eternally.
"But these leaves conning you con at peril,
For these leaves and me you will not understand,
They will elude you at first and still more afterward, I will
certainly elude you,
Even while you should think you had unquestionably caught me, behold!
Already you see I have escaped from you.
"For it is not for what I have put into it that I have written this book,
Nor is it by reading it you will acquire it,
Nor do those know me best who admire me and vauntingly praise me,
Nor will the candidates for my love (unless at most a very few) prove
victorious,
Nor will my poems do good only, they will do just as much evil, perhaps
more,
For all is useless without that for which you may guess at many times
and not hit, that which I hinted at,
Therefore release me and depart on your way."
When one has fully mastered this poem he has got a pretty good hold upon
Whitman's spirit and method. His open-air standards, the baffling and
elusive character of his work, the extraordinary demand it makes, its
radical and far-reaching effects upon life, its direct cognizance of evil
as a necessary part of the good (there was a human need of sin, said
Margaret Fuller) its unbookish spirit and affiliations, its indirect and
suggestive method, that it can be fully read only through our acquaintance
with life and real things at first hand, etc.,--all this and more is in
the poem.
HIS SELF-RELIANCE
I
It is over sixty years since Goethe said that to be a German author was to
be a German martyr. I presume things have changed in Germany since those
times, and that the Goethe of to-day does not encounter the jealousy and
hatred the great poet and critic of Weimar seemed to have called forth. In
Walt Whitman we in America have known an American author who was an
American martyr in a more literal sense than any of the men named by the
great German. More than Heine, or Rousseau, or Molière, or Byron, was
Whitman a victim of the literary Philistinism of his country and times;
but, fortunately for himself, his was a nature so large, tolerant, and
self-sufficing that his martyrdom sat very lightly upon him. His
unpopularity was rather a tonic to him than otherwise. It was of a kind
that tries a man's mettle, and brings out his heroic traits if he has any.
One almost envies him his unpopularity. It was of the kind that only the
greatest ones have experienced, and that attests something extraordinary
in the recipient of it. He said he was more resolute because all had
denied him than he ever could have been had all accepted, and he added:--
"I heed not and have never heeded either cautions, majorities, nor
ridicule."
There are no more precious and tonic pages in history than the records of
men who have faced unpopularity, odium, hatred, ridicule, detraction, in
obedience to an inward voice, and never lost courage or good-nature.
Whitman's is the most striking case in our literary annals,--probably the
most striking one in our century outside of politics and religion. The
inward voice alone was the oracle he obeyed: "My commission obeying, to
question it never daring."
The bitter-sweet cup of unpopularity he drained to its dregs, and drained
it cheerfully, as one knowing beforehand that it is preparing for him and
cannot be avoided.
"Have you learn'd lessons only of those who admired you and were tender
with you? and stood aside for you?
Have you not learn'd great lessons from those who reject you, and brace
themselves against you? or who treat you with contempt, or dispute
the passage with you?"
Every man is a partaker in the triumph of him who is always true to
himself and makes no compromises with customs, schools, or opinions.
Whitman's life, underneath its easy tolerance and cheerful good-will, was
heroic. He fought his battle against great odds and he conquered; he had
his own way, he yielded not a hair to the enemy.
The pressure brought to bear upon him by the press, by many of his
friends, and by such a man as Emerson, whom he deeply reverenced, to
change or omit certain passages from his poems, seems only to have served
as the opposing hammer that clinched the nail. The louder the outcry the
more deeply he felt it his duty to stand by his first convictions. The
fierce and scornful opposition to his sex poems, and to his methods and
aims generally, was probably more confirmatory than any approval could
have been. It went to the quick. During a dark period of his life, when no
publisher would touch his book and when its exclusion from the mails was
threatened, and poverty and paralysis were upon him, a wealthy
Philadelphian offered to furnish means for its publication if he would
omit certain poems; but the poet does not seem to have been tempted for
one moment by the offer. He cheerfully chose the heroic part, as he always
did.
Emerson reasoned and remonstrated with him for hours, walking up and down
Boston Common, and after he had finished his argument, says Whitman, which
was unanswerable, "I felt down in my soul the clear and unmistakable
conviction to disobey all, and pursue my own way." He told Emerson so,
whereupon they went and dined together. The independence of the poet
probably impressed Emerson more than his yielding would have done, for had
not he preached the adamantine doctrine of self-trust? "To believe your
own thought," he says, "to believe that what is true for you in your
private heart is true of all men,--that is genius."
In many ways was Whitman, quite unconsciously to himself, the man Emerson
invoked and prayed for,--the absolutely self-reliant man; the man who
should find his own day and land sufficient; who had no desire to be
Greek, or Italian, or French, or English, but only himself; who should
not whine, or apologize, or go abroad; who should not duck, or deprecate,
or borrow; and who could see through the many disguises and debasements of
our times the lineaments of the same gods that so ravished the bards of
old.
The moment a man "acts for himself," says Emerson, "tossing the laws, the
books, idolatries, and customs out of the window, we pity him no more, but
thank and revere him."
Whitman took the philosopher at his word. "Greatness once and forever has
done with opinion," even the opinion of the good Emerson. "Heroism works
in contradiction to the voice of mankind, and in contradiction, for a
time, to the voice of the great and good." "Every heroic act measures
itself by its contempt of some external good,"--popularity, for instance.
"The characteristic of heroism is persistency." "When you have chosen your
part abide by it, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the
world." "Adhere to your act, and congratulate yourself if you have done
something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous
age." Heroism "is the avowal of the unschooled man that he finds a quality
in him that is negligent of expense, of health, of life, of danger, of
hatred, of reproach, and knows that his will is higher and more excellent
than all actual and all possible antagonists." "A man is to carry himself
in the presence of all opposition as if everything were titular and
ephemeral but he." "Great works of art," he again says, "teach us to
abide by our spontaneous impression with good-natured inflexibility, the
more when the whole cry of voices is on the other side."
These brave sayings of Emerson were all illustrated and confirmed by
Whitman's course. The spectacle of this man sitting there by the window of
his little house in Camden, poor and partially paralyzed, and looking out
upon the trite and commonplace scenes and people, or looking athwart the
years and seeing only detraction and denial, yet always serene, cheerful,
charitable, his wisdom and tolerance ripening and mellowing with time, is
something to treasure and profit by. He was a man who needed no
assurances. He had the patience and the leisure of nature. He welcomed
your friendly and sympathetic word, or with equal composure he did without
it.
I remember calling upon him shortly after Swinburne's fierce onslaught
upon him had been published, some time in the latter part of the eighties.
I was curious to see how Whitman took it, but I could not discover either
in word or look that he was disturbed a particle by it. He spoke as kindly
of Swinburne as ever. If he was pained at all, it was on Swinburne's
account and not on his own. It was a sad spectacle to see a man retreat
upon himself as Swinburne had done. In fact I think hostile criticism,
fiercely hostile, gave Whitman nearly as much comfort as any other. Did it
not attest reality? Men do not brace themselves against shadows.
Swinburne's polysyllabic rage showed the force of the current he was
trying to stem. As for Swinburne's hydrocephalic muse, I do not think
Whitman took any interest in it from the first.
Self-reliance, or self-trust, is one of the principles Whitman announces
in his "Laws for Creations." He saw that no first-class work is possible
except it issue from a man's deepest, most radical self.
"What do you suppose creation is?
What do you suppose will satisfy the soul but to walk free and own no
superior?
What do you suppose I would intimate to you in a hundred ways, but that
man or woman is as good as God?
And that there is no God any more divine than yourself?
And that that is what the oldest and newest myths finally mean?
And that you or any one must approach creations through such laws?"
I think it probable that Whitman anticipated a long period of comparative
oblivion for himself and his works. He knew from the first that the public
would not be with him; he knew that the censors of taste, the critics and
literary professors, would not be with him; he knew that the vast army of
Philistia, the respectable, fashionable mammon-worshiping crowd, would not
be with him,--that the timid, the pampered, the prurient, the conforming,
the bourgeoisie spirit, the class spirit, the academic spirit, the
Pharisaic spirit in all its forms, would all work against him; and that,
as in the case of nearly all original, first-class men, he would have to
wait to be understood for the growth of the taste of himself. None knew
more clearly than he did how completely our people were under the
illusion of the genteel and the conventional, and that, even among the
emancipated few, the possession of anything like robust æsthetic
perception was rare enough. America, so bold and original and independent
in the world of practical politics and material endeavor, is, in spiritual
and imaginative regions, timid, conforming, imitative. There is, perhaps,
no civilized country in the world wherein the native, original man, the
real critter, as Whitman loved to say, that underlies all our culture and
conventions, crops out so little in manners, in literature, and in social
usages. The fear of being unconventional is greater with us than the fear
of death. A certain evasiveness, polish, distrust of ourselves, amounting
to insipidity and insincerity, is spoken of by observant foreigners. In
other words, we are perhaps the least like children of any people in the
world. All these things were against Whitman, and will continue to be
against him for a long time. With the first stroke he broke through the
conventional and took his stand upon the natural. With rude hands he tore
away the veils and concealments from the body and from the soul. He
ignored entirely all social and conventional usages and hypocrisies, not
by revolt against them, but by choosing a point of view from which they
disappeared. He embraced the unrefined and the savage as well as the
tender and human. The illusions of the past, the models and standards, he
freed himself of at once, and declared for the beauty and the divinity of
the now and the here. The rude realism of his "Leaves" shocked like a
plunge in the surf, but it invigorated also, if we were strong enough to
stand it.
Out of Whitman's absolute self-trust arose his prophetic egotism,--the
divine fervor and audacity of the simple ego. He shared the conviction of
the old prophets that man is a part of God, and that there is nothing in
the universe any more divine than the individual soul. "I, too," he says,
and this line is the key to much there is in his work--
"I, too, have felt the resistless call of myself."
With the old Biblical writers the motions of their own spirits, their
thoughts, their dreams, were the voice of God. There is something of the
same sort in Whitman. The voice of that inner self was final and
authoritative with him. It was the voice of God. He could drive through
and over all the conventions of the world in obedience to that voice. This
call to him was as a voice from Sinai. One of his mastering thoughts was
the thought of identity,--that you are you, and I am I. This was the final
meaning of things, and the meaning of immortality. "Yourself, _yourself_,
YOURSELF," he says, with swelling vehemence, "forever and ever." To be
compacted and riveted and fortified in yourself, so as to be a law unto
yourself, is the final word of the past and of the present.
II
The shadow of Whitman's self-reliance and heroic self-esteem--the sort of
eddy or back-water--was undoubtedly a childlike fondness for praise and
for seeing his name in print. In his relaxed moments, when the stress of
his task was not upon him, he was indeed in many respects a child. He had
a child's delight in his own picture. He enjoyed hearing himself lauded as
Colonel Ingersoll lauded him in his lecture in Philadelphia, and as his
friends lauded him at his birthday dinner parties during the last two or
three years of his life; he loved to see his name in print, and items
about himself in the newspapers; he sometimes wrote them himself and gave
them to the reporters. And yet nothing is surer than that he shaped his
life and did his work absolutely indifferent to either praise or blame; in
fact, that he deliberately did that which he knew would bring him
dispraise. The candor and openness of the man's nature would not allow him
to conceal or feign anything. If he loved praise, why should he not be
frank about it? Did he not lay claim to the vices and vanities of men
also? At its worst, Whitman's vanity was but the foible of a great nature,
and should count for but little in the final estimate. The common human
nature to which he lay claim will assert itself; it is not always to be
kept up to the heroic pitch.
III
It was difficult to appreciate his liking for the newspaper. But he had
been a newspaper man himself; the printer's ink had struck in; he had many
associations with the press-room and the composing-room; he loved the
common, democratic character of the newspaper; it was the average man's
library. The homely uses to which it was put, and the humble firesides to
which it found its way, endeared it to him, and made him love to see his
name in it.
Whitman's vanity was of the innocent, good-natured kind. He was as
tolerant of your criticism as of your praise. Selfishness, in any unworthy
sense, he had none. Offensive arrogance and self-assertion, in his life
there was none.
His egotism is of the large generous species that never irritates or
pricks into you like that of the merely conceited man. His love, his
candor, his sympathy are on an equal scale.
His egotism comes finally to affect one like the independence and
indifference of natural law. It takes little heed of our opinion, whether
it be for or against, and keeps to its own way whatever befall.
Whitman's absolute faith in himself was a part of his faith in creation.
He felt himself so keenly a part of the whole that he shared its soundness
and excellence; he must be good as it is good.
IV
Whitman showed just enough intention, or premeditation in his life, dress,
manners, attitudes in his pictures, self-portrayals in his poems, etc., to
give rise to the charge that he was a _poseur_. He was a _poseur_ in the
sense, and to the extent, that any man is a _poseur_ who tries to live up
to a certain ideal and to realize it in his outward daily life. It is
clear that he early formed the habit of self-contemplation and of standing
apart and looking upon himself as another person. Hence his extraordinary
self-knowledge, and, we may also say, his extraordinary self-appreciation,
or to use his own words, "the quite changed attitude of the ego, the one
chanting or talking, towards himself." Of course there is danger in this
attitude, but Whitman was large enough and strong enough to escape it. He
saw himself to be the typical inevitable democrat that others have seen
him to be, and with perfect candor and without ever forcing the note, he
portrays himself as such. As his work is confessedly the poem of himself,
himself magnified and projected, as it were, upon the canvas of a great
age and country, all his traits and qualities stand out in heroic
proportions, his pride and egotism as well as his love and tolerance.
"How beautiful is candor," he says. "All faults may be forgiven of him who
has perfect candor." The last thing that could ever be charged of Whitman
is that he lacked openness, or was guilty of any deceit or concealments in
his life or works.
From the studies, notes, and scrap-books which Whitman left, it appears
that he was long preparing and disciplining himself for the work he had in
view. "The long foreground," to which Emerson referred in his letter, was
of course a reality. But this self-consciousness and self-adjustment to a
given end is an element of strength and not of weakness.
In the famous vestless and coatless portrait of himself prefixed to the
first "Leaves of Grass" he assumes an attitude and is in a sense a
_poseur_; but the reader comes finally to wonder at the marvelous
self-knowledge the picture displays, and how strictly typical it is of the
poet's mental and spiritual attitude towards the world,--independent,
unconventional, audacious, yet inquiring and sympathetic in a wonderful
degree. In the same way he posed in other portraits. A favorite with him
is the one in which he sits contemplating a butterfly upon his
forefinger--typical of a man "preoccupied of his own soul." In another he
peers out curiously as from behind a mask. In an earlier one he stands,
hat in hand, in marked _negligé_ costume,--a little too intentional, one
feels. The contempt of the polished ones is probably very strong within
him at this time. I say contempt, though I doubt if Whitman ever felt
contempt for any human being.
V
Then Whitman had a curious habit of standing apart, as it were, and
looking upon himself and his career as of some other person. He was
interested in his own cause, and took a hand in the discussion. From first
to last he had the habit of regarding himself objectively. On his deathbed
he seemed to be a spectator of his own last moments, and was seen to feel
his pulse a few minutes before he breathed his last.
He has recorded this trait in his poems:--
"Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stands amused, complacent, compassionate, idle, waiting,
Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it."
As also in this from "Calamus:"--
"That shadow my likeness that goes to and fro seeking a livelihood,
chattering, chaffering,
How often I find myself standing and looking at it where it flits,
How often I question and doubt whether that is really me;
But among my lovers, and caroling these songs,
Oh, I never doubt whether that is really me."
Whitman always speaks as one having authority and not as a scribe, not as
a mere man of letters. This is the privilege of the divine egoism of the
prophet.
Like the utterances of the biblical writers, without argument, without
elaboration, his mere dictum seems the word of fate. It is not the voice
of a man who has made his way through the world by rejecting and denying,
but by accepting all and rising superior. What the "push of reading" or
the push of argument could not start is often started and clinched by his
mere authoritative "I say."
"I say where liberty draws not the blood out of slavery, there slavery
draws the blood out of liberty,"...
"I say the human shape or face is so great it must never be made
ridiculous;
I say for ornaments nothing outré can be allowed,
And that anything is most beautiful without ornament,
And that exaggerations will be sternly revenged in your own physiology
and in other persons' physiologies also.
"Think of the past;
I warn you that in a little while others will find their past in you and
your times....
Think of spiritual results.
Sure as the earth swims through the heavens, does every one of its
objects pass into spiritual results.
Think of manhood, and you to be a man;
Do you count manhood, and the sweet of manhood, nothing?
Think of womanhood and you to be a woman;
The Creation is womanhood;
Have I not said that womanhood involves all?
Have I not told how the universe has nothing better than the best
womanhood?"
Egotism is usually intolerant, but Whitman was one of the most tolerant of
men.
A craving for sympathy and personal affection he certainly had; to be
valued as a human being was more to him than to be valued as a poet. His
strongest attachments were probably for persons who had no opinion, good
or bad, of his poetry at all.
VI
Under close scrutiny his egotism turns out to be a kind of altru-egotism,
which is vicarious and all-inclusive of his fellows. It is one phase of
his democracy, and is vital and radical in his pages. It is a high,
imperturbable pride in his manhood and in the humanity which he shares
with all. It is the exultant and sometimes almost arrogant expression of
the feeling which underlies and is shaping the whole modern world--the
feeling and conviction that the individual man is above all forms, laws,
institutions, conventions, bibles, religions--that the divinity of kings,
and the sacredness of priests of the old order, pertains to the humblest
person.
It was a passion that united him to his fellows rather than separated him
from them. His pride was not that of a man who sets himself up above
others, or who claims some special advantage or privilege, but that
godlike quality that would make others share its great good-fortune. Hence
we are not at all shocked when the poet, in the fervor of his love for
mankind, determinedly imputes to himself all the sins and vices and
follies of his fellow-men. We rather glory in it. This self-abasement is
the seal of the authenticity of his egotism. Without those things there
might be some ground for the complaint of a Boston critic of Whitman that
his work was not noble, because it celebrated pride, and did not inculcate
the virtues of humility and self-denial. The great lesson of the "Leaves,"
flowing curiously out of its pride and egotism, is the lesson of charity,
of self-surrender, and the free bestowal of yourself upon all hands.
The law of life of great art is the law of life in ethics, and was long
ago announced.
He that would lose his life shall find it; he who gives himself the most
freely shall the most freely receive. Whitman made himself the brother and
equal of all, not in word, but in very deed; he was in himself a compend
of the people for which he spoke, and this breadth of sympathy and free
giving of himself has resulted in an unexpected accession of power.
HIS RELATION TO ART AND LITERATURE
I
Whitman protests against his "Leaves" being judged merely as literature;
but at the same time, if they are not good literature, that of course ends
the matter. Still while the questions of art, of form, of taste, are
paramount in most other poets,--certainly in all third and fourth rate
poets, in Whitman they are swallowed up in other questions and values.
In numerous passages, by various figures and allegories, Whitman indicates
that he would not have his book classed with the order of mere literary
productions.
"Shut not your doors to me, proud libraries," he says in one of the
"Inscriptions,"--
"For that which was lacking in all your well-fill'd shelves, yet needed
most, I bring.
Forth from the war emerging, a book I have made,
The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything,
A book separate, not link'd with the rest nor felt by the intellect,
But you, ye untold latencies will thrill to every page."
Not linked with the studied and scholarly productions, not open to the
mere bookish mind, but more akin to the primitive utterances and oracles
of historic humanity. A literary age like ours lays great stress upon the
savor of books, art, culture, and has little taste for the savor of real
things, the real man, which we get in Whitman.
"It is the true breath of humanity," says Renan, "and not literary merit,
that constitutes the beautiful." An Homeric poem written to-day, he goes
on to say, would not be beautiful, because it would not be true; it would
not contain this breath of a living humanity. "It is not Homer who is
beautiful, it is the Homeric life." The literary spirit begat Tennyson,
begat Browning, begat the New England poets, but it did not in the same
sense beget Whitman, any more than it begat Homer or Job or Isaiah. The
artist may delight in him and find his own ideals there; the critic may
study him and find the poet master of all his weapons; the disciple of
culture will find, as Professor Triggs has well said, that "there is no
body of writings in literature which demands a wider conversancy with the
best that has been thought or said in the world,"--yet the poet escapes
from all hands that would finally hold him and monopolize him. Whitman is
an immense solvent,--forms, theories, rules, criticisms, disappear in his
fluid, teeming pages. Much can be deduced from him, because much went to
the making up of his point of view. He makes no criticism, yet a
far-reaching criticism is implied in the very start of his poems. No
modern poet presupposes so much, or requires so much preliminary study and
reflection. He brings a multitude of questions and problems, and, what is
singular, he brings them in himself; they are implied in his temper, and
in his attitude toward life and reality.
Whitman says he has read his "Leaves" to himself in the open air, that he
has tried himself by the elemental laws; and tells us in many ways, direct
and indirect, that the standards he would be tried by are not those of art
or books, but of absolute nature. He has been laughed at for calling
himself a "Kosmos," but evidently he uses the term to indicate this
elemental, dynamic character of his work,--its escape from indoor,
artificial standards, its aspiration after the "amplitude of the earth,
and the coarseness and sexuality of the earth, and the great charity of
the earth, and the equilibrium also."
II
Unless the poetic perception is fundamental in us, and can grasp the
poetry of things, actions, characters, multitudes, heroisms, we shall read
Whitman with very poor results. Unless America, the contemporary age,
life, nature, are poetical to us, Whitman will not be. He has aimed at the
larger poetry of forces, masses, persons, enthusiasms, rather than at the
poetry of the specially rare and fine. He kindles in me the delight I have
in space, freedom, power, the elements, the cosmic, democracy, and the
great personal qualities of self-reliance, courage, candor, charity.
Always in the literary poets are we impressed with the art of the poet as
something distinct from the poet himself, and more or less put on. The
poet gets himself up for the occasion; he assumes the pose and the
language of the poet, as the priest assumes the pose and the language of
devotion. In Whitman the artist and the man are one. He never gets himself
up for the occasion. Our pleasure in him is rarely or never our pleasure
in the well-dressed, the well-drilled, the cultivated, the refined, the
orderly, but it is more akin to our pleasure in real things, in human
qualities and powers, in freedom, health, development. Yet I never open
his book without being struck afresh with its pictural quality, its grasp
of the concrete, its vivid realism, its intimate sense of things, persons,
truths, qualities, such as only the greatest artists can give us, and such
as we can never get in mere prose. It is as direct as a challenge, as
personal as a handshake, and yet withal how mystical, how elusive, how
incommensurable! To deny that Whitman belongs to the fraternity of great
artists, the shapers and moulders of the ideal,--those who breathe the
breath of life into the clay or stone of common facts and objects, who
make all things plastic and the vehicles of great and human emotions,--is
to read him very inadequately, to say the least. To get at Walt Whitman
you must see through just as much as you do in dealing with nature; you
are to bring the same interpretive imagination. You are not to be balked
by what appears to be the coarse and the familiar, or his rank
contemporaneity; after a time you will surely see the lambent spiritual
flames that play about it all.
"Prophetic spirit of materials shifting and flickering about me,"
and his cosmic splendor, depth, and power. It is not the denial of art, it
is a new affirmation of life. It is one phase of his democracy. It is the
logical conclusion of the vestless and coatless portrait of himself that
appeared in the first edition of his poems. He would give us more of the
man, a fuller measure of personal, concrete, human qualities, than any
poet before him. He strips away the artificial wrappings and illusions
usual in poetry, and relies entirely upon the native and intrinsic. He
will have no curtains, he says,--not the finest,--between himself and his
reader.
"Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of
all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun (there are millions of
suns left),
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look
through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself."
This is a hint of his democracy as applied to literature,--more direct and
immediate contact with the primary and universal, less of the vestments
and trappings of art and more of the push and power of original character
and of nature.
III
It seems to me it is always in order to protest against the narrow and
dogmatic spirit that so often crops out in current criticism touching this
matter of art. "The boundaries of art are jealously guarded," says a
recent authority, as if art had boundaries like a state or province that
had been accurately surveyed and fixed,--as if art was a fact and not a
spirit.
Now I shall deny at the outset that there are any bounds of art, or that
art is in any sense an "enclosure,"--a province fenced off and set apart
from the rest,--any more than religion is an enclosure, though so many
people would like to make it so. Art is commensurate with the human
spirit. I should even deny that there are any principles of art in the
sense that there are principles of mechanics or of mathematics. Art has
but one principle, one aim,--to produce an impression, a powerful
impression, no matter by what means, or if it be by reversing all the
canons of taste and criticism. Name any principle, so called, and some day
a genius shall be born who will produce his effects in defiance of it, or
by appearing to reverse it. Such a man as Turner seemed, at first sight,
to set at defiance all correct notions of art. The same with Wagner in
music, the same with Whitman in poetry. The new man is impossible till he
appears, and, when he appears, in proportion to his originality and power
does it take the world a longer or shorter time to adjust its critical
standards to him. But it is sure to do so at last. There is nothing final
in art: its principles follow and do not lead the creator; they are
deductions from his work, not its inspiration. We demand of the new man,
of the overthrower of our idols, but one thing,--has he authentic
inspiration and power? If he has not, his pretensions are soon exploded.
If he has, we cannot put him down, any more than we can put down a law of
nature, and we very soon find some principle of art that fits his case. Is
there no room for the new man? But the new man makes room for himself, and
if he be of the first order he largely makes the taste by which he is
appreciated, and the rules of art by which he is to be judged.
IV
The trouble with most of us is that we found our taste for poetry upon
particular authors, instead of upon literature as a whole, or, better yet,
upon life and reality. Hence we form standards instead of principles.
Standards are limited, rigid, uncompromising, while principles are
flexible, expansive, creative. If we are wedded to the Miltonic standard
of poetry, the classic standards, we shall have great difficulties with
Whitman; but if we have founded our taste upon natural principles--if we
have learned to approach literature through reality, instead of reality
through literature--we shall not be the victims of any one style or model;
we shall be made free of all. The real test of art, of any art, as Burke
long ago said, and as quoted by Mr. Howells in his trenchant little volume
called "Criticism and Fiction," is to be sought outside of art, namely, in
nature. "I can judge but poorly of anything while I measure it by no other
standard than itself. The true standard of the arts is in every man's
power; and an easy observation of the most common, sometimes of the
meanest, things in nature will give the truest lights." It is thought that
the preëminence of the Greek standards is settled when we say they are
natural. Yes, but Nature is not Greek. She is Asiatic, German, English, as
well.
V
In poetry, in art, a man must sustain a certain vital relation to his
work, and that work must sustain a certain vital relation to the laws of
mind and of life. That is all, and that leaves the doors very wide. We are
not to ask, Is it like this or like that? but, Is it vital, is it real, is
it a consistent, well-organized whole?
The poet must always interpret himself and nature after his own fashion.
Is his fashion adequate? Is the interpretation vivid and real? Do his
lines cut to the quick, and beget heat and joy in the soul? If we cannot
make the poet's ideal our own by sharing his enthusiasm for it, the
trouble is as likely to be in ourselves as in him. In any case he must be
a law unto himself.
The creative artist differs from the mere writer or thinker in this: he
sustains a direct personal relation to his subject through emotion,
intuition, will. The indirect, impersonal relation which works by
reflection, comparison, and analysis is that of the critic and
philosopher. The man is an artist when he gives us a concrete and
immediate impression of reality: from his hands we get the thing itself;
from the critic and thinker we get ideas _about_ the thing. The poet does
not merely say the world is beautiful; he shows it as beautiful: he does
not describe the flower; he places it before us. What are the enemies of
art? Reflection, didacticism, description, the turgid, the obscure. A poet
with a thesis to sustain is more or less barred from the freedom of pure
art. It is by direct and unconsidered expression, says Scherer, that art
communicates with reality. The things that make for art, then, are
feeling, intuition, sentiment, soul, a fresh and vigorous sense of real
things,--in fact, all that makes for life, health, and wholeness. Goethe
is more truly an artist in the first part of Faust than in the second;
Arnold has a more truly artistic mind than Lowell.
The principles of art are always the same in the respect I have indicated,
just as the principles of life are always the same, or of health and
longevity are always the same. No writer is an artist who is related to
his subject simply by mental or logical grip alone: he must have a certain
emotional affiliation and identity with it; he does not so much convey to
us ideas and principles as pictures, parables, impressions,--a lively
sense of real things. When we put Whitman outside the pale of art, we must
show his shortcomings here; we must show that he is not fluid and
generative,--that he paints instead of interprets, that he gives us
reasons instead of impulses, a stone when we ask for bread. "I do not
give a little charity," he says; "when I give, I give myself." This the
artist always does, not his mind merely, but his soul, his personality.
"Leaves of Grass" is as direct an emanation from a central personal force
as any book in literature, and always carries its own test and its own
proof. It never hardens into a system, it never ceases to be penetrated
with will and emotion, it never declines from the order of deeds to the
order of mere thoughts. All is movement, progress, evolution, picture,
parable, impulse.
It is on these grounds that Whitman, first of all, is an artist. He has
the artist temperament. His whole life was that of a man who lives to
ideal ends,--who lived to bestow himself upon others, to extract from life
its meaning and its joy.
VI
Whitman has let himself go, and trusted himself to the informal and
spontaneous, to a degree unprecedented. His course required a
self-reliance of the highest order; it required an innate cohesion and
homogeneity, a firmness and consistency of individual outline, that few
men have. It would seem to be much easier to face the poet's problem in
the old, well-worn forms--forms that are so winsome and authoritative in
themselves--than, to stand upon a basis so individual and intrinsic as
Whitman chose to stand upon. His course goes to the quick at once. How
much of a man are you? How vital and fundamental is your poetic gift? Can
it go alone? Can it face us in undress?
Never did the artist more cunningly conceal himself; never did he so
completely lose himself in the man, identifying himself with the natural
and spontaneous; never emerging and challenging attention on his own
account, denying us when we too literally seek him, mocking us when we
demand his credentials, and revealing himself only when we have come to
him upon his own terms.
The form the poet chose favored this self-revelation; there is nothing, no
outside conscious art, to stand between himself and his reader. "This is
no book," he says: "who touches this touches a man." In one sense Whitman
is without art,--the impression which he always seeks to make is that of
reality itself. He aims to give us reality without the usual literary
veils and illusions,--the least possible amount of the artificial, the
extrinsic, the put-on, between himself and his reader. He banishes from
his work, as far as possible, what others are so intent upon,--all
atmosphere of books and culture, all air of literary intention and
decoration,--and puts his spirit frankly and immediately to his readers.
The verse does not seem to have been shaped; it might have grown: it takes
no apparent heed of externals, but flows on like a brook, irregular,
rhythmical, and always fluid and real. A cry will always be raised against
the producer in any field who discards the authority of the models and
falls back upon simple Nature, or upon himself, as Millet did in painting,
and Wagner in music, and Whitman in poetry.
Whitman's working ideas, the principles that inspired him, are all
directly related to life and the problems of life; they are democracy,
nature, freedom, love, personality, religion: while the ideas from which
our poets in the main draw their inspiration are related to art,--they are
literary ideas, such as lucidity, form, beauty.
VII
Much light is thrown upon Whitman's literary methods and aims by a remark
which he once made in conversation with Dr. Bucke:--
"I have aimed to make the book simple,--tasteless, or with little
taste,--with very little or no perfume. The usual way is for the poet or
writer to put in as much taste, perfume, piquancy, as he can; but this is
not the way of nature, which I take for model. Nature presents us her
productions--her air, earth, waters, even her flowers, grains, meats--with
faint and delicate flavor and fragrance, but these in the long run make
the deepest impression. Man, dealing with natural things, constantly aims
to increase their piquancy. By crossing and selection he deepens and
intensifies the scents and hues of flowers, the tastes of fruits, and so
on. He pursues the same method in poetry,--that is, strives for strong
light or shade, for high color, perfume, pungency, in all ways for the
greatest immediate effect. In so doing he leaves the true way, the way of
Nature, and, in the long run, comes far short of producing her effects."
More light of the same kind is thrown upon his methods by the following
passage from the preface to the first edition of his poems in 1855.
"To speak in literature," he says, "with the perfect rectitude and
insouciance of the movements of animals, and the unimpeachableness of the
sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside, is the flawless
triumph of art." And again: "The great poet has less a marked style, and
is more the channel of thoughts and things without increase or diminution,
and is the free channel of himself. He swears to his art, I will not be
meddlesome; I will not have in my writing any elegance, or effect, or
originality, to hang in the way between me and the rest like curtains. I
will have nothing hang in the way, not the richest curtains. What I tell,
I tell for precisely what it is. Let who may exalt or startle or fascinate
or soothe, I will have purpose, as health or heat or snow has, and be as
regardless of observation. What I experience or portray shall go from my
composition without a shred of my composition. You shall stand by my side
and look in the mirror with me."
VIII
But in view of the profound impression Whitman's work has made upon widely
different types of mind on both sides of the Atlantic, and in view of the
persistent vitality of his fame, the question whether he is inside or
outside the pale of art amounts to very little. I quite agree with the
late Mrs. Gilchrist, that, when "great meanings and great emotions are
expressed with corresponding power, literature has done its best, call it
what you please."
That Whitman has expressed great meanings and great emotions with adequate
power, even his unfriendly critics admit. Thus Professor Wendell, in an
admirable essay on American literature, says that "though Whitman is
uncouth, inarticulate, and lacking in a grotesque degree artistic form,
yet for all that he can make you feel for the moment how even the
ferry-boats plying from New York to Brooklyn are fragments of God's
eternities." In the same way Mr. William Clark, his British critic and
expounder, says that he is wanting in discrimination and art, "flings his
ideas at us in a heap," etc., and yet that the effect of his work is "to
stir our emotions, widen our interests, and rally the forces of our moral
nature."
It seems to me that a man who, through the printed page, can do these
things, must have some kind of art worth considering. If, through his
impassioned treatment of a prosy, commonplace object like a ferry-boat, he
can so dignify and exalt it, and so fill it with the meanings of the
spirit, that it seems like a part of God's eternities, his methods are at
least worth inquiring into.
The truth is, Whitman's art, in its lack of extrinsic form and finish, is
Oriental rather than Occidental, and is an offense to a taste founded upon
the precision and finish of a mechanical age. His verse is like the
irregular, slightly rude coin of the Greeks compared with the exact,
machine-cut dies of our own day, or like the unfinished look of Japanese
pottery beside the less beautiful but more perfect specimens of modern
ceramic art.
For present purposes, we may say there are two phases of art,--formal art
and creative art. By formal art I mean that which makes a direct appeal to
our sense of form,--our sense of the finely carved, the highly wrought,
the deftly planned; and by creative art I mean that quickening,
fructifying power of the masters, that heat and passion that make the
world plastic and submissive to their hands, teeming with new meanings and
thrilling with new life.
Formal art is always in the ascendant. Formal anything--formal dress,
formal manners, formal religion, formal this and that--always counts for
more than the informal, the spontaneous, the original. It is easier, it
can be put off and on.
Formal art is nearly always the gift of the minor poet, and often of the
major poet also. In such a poet as Swinburne, formal art leads by a great
way. The content of his verse,--what is it? In Tennyson as well I should
say formal art is in the ascendant. Creative art is his also; Tennyson
reaches and moves the spirit, yet his skill is more noteworthy than his
power. In Wordsworth, on the other hand, I should say creative art led:
the content of his verse is more than its form; his spiritual and
religious values are greater than his literary and artistic. The same is
true of our own Emerson. Poe, again, is much more as an artist than as a
man or a personality.
I hardly need say that in Whitman formal art, the ostensibly artistic,
counts for but very little. The intentional artist, the professional poet,
is kept entirely in abeyance, or is completely merged and hidden in the
man, more so undoubtedly than in any poet this side the old Oriental
bards. We call him formless, chaotic, amorphous, etc., because he makes no
appeal to our modern highly stimulated sense of art or artificial form. We
must discriminate this from our sense of power, our sense of life, our
sense of beauty, of the sublime, of the all, which clearly Whitman would
reach and move. Whitman certainly has a form of his own: what would a
poet, or any writer or worker in the ideal, do without some kind of form?
some consistent and adequate vehicle of expression? But Whitman's form is
not what is called artistic, because it is not brought within the rules of
the prosodical system, and does not appeal to our sense of the consciously
shaped and cultivated. It is essentially the prose form heightened and
intensified by a deep, strong, lyric and prophetic note.
The bonds and shackles of regular verse-form Whitman threw off. This
course seemed to be demanded by the spirit to which he had dedicated
himself,--the spirit of absolute unconstraint. The restrictions and
hamperings of the scholastic forms did not seem to be consistent with this
spirit, which he identified with democracy and the New World. A poet who
sets out to let down the bars everywhere, to remove veils and
obstructions, to emulate the freedom of the elemental forces, to effuse
always the atmosphere of open-air growths and objects, to be as
"regardless of observation" as the processes of nature, etc., will not be
apt to take kindly to any arbitrary and artificial form of expression. The
essentially prose form which Whitman chose is far more in keeping with the
spirit and aim of his work than any conventional metrical system could
have been. Had he wrought solely as a conscious artist, aiming at the
effect of finely chiseled forms, he would doubtless have chosen a
different medium.
IX
Whitman threw himself with love and enthusiasm upon this great, crude,
seething, materialistic American world. The question is, Did he master it?
Is he adequate to absorb and digest it? Does he make man-stuff of it? Is
it plastic in his hands? Does he stamp it with his own image? I do not
ask, Does he work it up into what are called artistic forms? Does he make
it the quarry from which he carves statues or builds temples? because
evidently he does not do this, or assume to do it. He is content if he
present America and the modern to us as they are inwrought into his own
personality, bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, or as character,
passion, will, motive, conviction. He would show them subjectively and as
living impulses in himself. Of course a great constructive, dramatic poet
like Shakespeare would have solved his problem in a different manner, or
through the objective, artistic portrayal of types and characters. But the
poet and prophet of democracy and of egotism shows us all things in and
through himself.
His egotism, or egocentric method, is the fundamental fact about his work.
It colors all and determines all. The poems are the direct outgrowth of
the personality of the poet; they are born directly upon the ego, as it
were, like the fruit of that tropical tree which grows immediately upon
the trunk. His work is nearer his radical, primary self than that of most
poets. He never leads us away from himself into pleasant paths with
enticing flowers of fancy or forms of art. He carves or shapes nothing for
its own sake; there is little in the work that can stand on independent
grounds as pure art. His work is not material made precious by elaboration
and finish, but by its relation to himself and to the sources of life.
X
Whitman was compelled to this negation of extrinsic art by the problem he
had set before himself,--first, to arouse, to suggest, rather than to
finish or elaborate, less to display any theme or thought than "to bring
the reader into the atmosphere of the theme or thought;" secondly, to make
his own personality the chief factor in the volume, or present it so that
the dominant impression should always be that of the living, breathing
man as we meet him and see him and feel him in life, and never as we see
him and feel him in books or art,--the man in the form and garb of actual,
concrete life, not as poet or artist, but simply as man. This is doubtless
the meaning of the vestless and coatless portrait of himself prefixed to
the first issue of the "Leaves," to which I have referred. This portrait
is symbolical of the whole attitude of the poet toward his task. It was a
hint that we must take this poet with very little literary tailoring; it
was a hint that he belonged to the open air, and came of the people and
spoke in their spirit.
It is never the theme treated, but always the character exploited; never
the structure finished, but always the plan suggested; never the work
accomplished, but always the impulse imparted,--freedom, power, growth.
"Allons! we must not stop here.
However sweet these laid-up stores, however convenient this dwelling,
we cannot remain here,
However sheltered this port, or however calm these waters, we must not
anchor here,
However welcome the hospitality that surrounds us we are permitted to
receive it but a little while.
"Allons! With power, liberty, the earth, the elements!
Health, defiance, gayety, self-esteem, curiosity;
Allons! from all formulas!
From your formulas, O bat-eyed and materialistic priests!"
This magnificent poem, "The Song of the Open Road," is one of the most
significant in Whitman's work. He takes the open road as his type,--not an
end in itself, not a fulfillment, but a start, a journey, a progression.
It teaches him the profound lesson of reception, "no preference nor
denial," and the profounder lesson of liberty and truth:--
"From this hour, freedom!
From this hour I ordain myself loosed of limits and imaginary lines,
Going where I list--my own master, total and absolute,
Listening to others, and considering well what they say,
Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,
Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that
would hold me.
"I inhale great draughts of air,
The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine."
He will not rest with art, he will not rest with books, he will press his
way steadily toward the largest freedom.
"Only the kernel of every object nourishes.
Where is he who tears off the husks for you and me?
Where is he who undoes stratagems and envelopes for you and me?"
Whitman was not a builder. If he had the architectural power which the
great poets have shown, he gave little proof of it. It was not required by
the task he set before himself. His book is not a temple: it is a wood, a
field, a highway; vista, vista, everywhere,--vanishing lights and shades,
truths half disclosed, successions of objects, hints, suggestions, brief
pictures, groups, voices, contrasts, blendings, and, above all, the tonic
quality of the open air. The shorter poems are like bunches of herbs or
leaves, or a handful of sprays gathered in a walk; never a thought
carefully carved, and appealing to our sense of artistic form.
The main poem of the book, "The Song of Myself," is a series of
utterances, ejaculations, apostrophes, enumerations, associations,
pictures, parables, incidents, suggestions, with little or no structural
or logical connection, but all emanating from a personality whose presence
dominates the page, and whose eye is ever upon us. Without this vivid and
intimate sense of the man back of all, of a sane and powerful spirit
sustaining ours, the piece would be wild and inchoate.
XI
The reader will be sure to demand of Whitman ample compensation for the
absence from his work of those things which current poets give us in such
full measure. Whether or not the compensation is ample, whether the music
of his verse as of winds and waves, the long, irregular, dithyrambic
movement, its fluid and tonic character, the vastness of conception, the
large, biblical speech, the surging cosmic emotion, the vivid personal
presence as of the living man looking into your eye or walking by your
side,--whether all these things, the refreshing quality as of "harsh salt
spray" which the poet Lanier found in the "Leaves," the electric currents
which Mrs. Gilchrist found there, the "unexcelled imaginative justice of
language" which Mr. Stevenson at times found, the religious liberation and
faith which Mr. Symonds found, the "incomparable things incomparably well
said" of Emerson, the rifle-bullets of Ruskin, the "supreme words" of
Colonel Ingersoll, etc.,--whether qualities and effects like these, I say,
make up to us for the absence of the traditional poetic graces and
adornments, is a question which will undoubtedly long divide the reading
world.
In the works upon which our poetic taste is founded, artistic form is
paramount; we have never been led to apply to such works open-air
standards,--clouds, trees, rivers, spaces,--but the precision and
definiteness of the cultured and the artificial. If Whitman had aimed at
pure art and had failed, his work would be intolerable. As his French
critic, Gabriel Sarrazin, has well said: "In the large work which Whitman
attempted, there come no rules save those of nobility and strength of
spirit; and these suffice amply to create a most unlooked-for and
grandiose aspect of beauty." "Overcrowded and disorderly" as it may seem,
"if heroic emotion and thought and enthusiasm vitalize it," the poet has
reached his goal.
XII
Sometimes I define Whitman to myself as the poet of the open air,--not
because he sings the praises of these things after the manner of the
so-called nature-poets, but because he has the quality of things in the
open air, the quality of the unhoused, the untamed, the elemental and
aboriginal. He pleases and he offends, the same way things at large do. He
has the brawn, the indifference, the rudeness, the virility, the
coarseness,--something gray, unpronounced, elemental, about him, the
effect of mass, size, distance, flowing, vanishing lines, neutral
spaces,--something informal, multitudinous, and processional,--something
regardless of criticism, that makes no bid for our applause, not
calculated instantly to please, unmindful of details, prosaic if we make
it so, common, near at hand, and yet that provokes thought and stirs our
emotions in an unusual degree. The long lists and catalogues of objects
and scenes in Whitman, that have so excited the mirth of the critics, are
one phase of his out-of-doors character,--a multitude of concrete objects,
a grove, a thicket, a field, a stretch of beach,--every object sharply
defined, but no attempt at logical or artistic sequence, the effect of the
whole informal, multitudinous. It may be objected to these pages that they
consist of a mass of details that do not make a picture. But every line is
a picture of a scene or an object. Whitman always keeps up the movement,
he never pauses to describe; it is all action.
Passing from such a poet as Tennyson to Whitman is like going from a warm,
perfumed interior, with rich hangings, pictures, books, statuary, fine men
and women, out into the street, or upon the beach, or upon the hill, or
under the midnight stars. We lose something certainly, but do we not gain
something also? Do we not gain just what Whitman had in view, namely,
direct contact with the elements in which are the sources of our life and
health? Do we not gain in scope and power what we lose in art and
refinement?
The title, "Leaves of Grass," is full of meaning. What self-knowledge and
self-scrutiny it implies! The grass, perennial sprouting, universal,
formless, common, the always spread feast of the herds, dotted with
flowers, the herbage of the earth, so suggestive of the multitudinous,
loosely aggregated, unelaborated character of the book; the lines
springing directly out of the personality of the poet, the soil of his
life.
"What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest is me,"
says the poet, and this turns out to be the case. We only look to see if
in the common and the cheap he discloses new values and new meanings,--if
his leaves of grass have the old freshness and nutriment, and be not a
mere painted greenness.
"The pure contralto sings in the organ loft,
The carpenter dresses his plank--the tongue of his foreplane whistles
its wild ascending lisp,
The married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving
dinner,
The pilot seizes the king-pin--he heaves down with a strong arm,
The mate stands braced in the whale-boat--lance and harpoon are ready,
The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches,
The deacons are ordained with crossed hands at the altar,
The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel,
The farmer stops by the bars, as he walks on a First Day loafe, and looks
at the oats and rye,
The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum, a confirmed case,
He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother's
bedroom;
The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case,
He turns his quid of tobacco, while his eyes blurr with the manuscript;
The malformed limbs are tied to the anatomist's table,
What is removed drops horribly in a pail;
The quadroon girl is sold at the stand--the drunkard nods by the
bar-room stove,
The machinist rolls up his sleeves--the policeman travels his beat--the
gate-keeper marks who pass,
The young fellow drives the express-wagon--I love him, though I do not
know him,
The half-breed straps on his light boots to compete in the race,
The western turkey-shooting draws old and young--some lean on their
rifles, some sit on logs,
Out from the crowd steps the marksman, takes his position, levels his
piece;
The groups of newly-come emigrants cover the wharf or levee,
As the woolly-pates hoe in the sugar-field, the overseer views them
from his saddle,
The bugle calls in the ball-room, the gentlemen run for their partners,
the dancers bow to each other,
The youth lies awake in the cedar-roofed garret, and harks to the
musical rain,
The Wolverine sets traps on the creek that helps fill the Huron,
The reformer ascends the platform, he spouts with his mouth and nose,
* * * * *
Seasons pursuing each other, the plougher ploughs, the mower mows, and
the winter-grain falls in the ground,
Off on the lakes the pike-fisher watches and waits by the hole in the
frozen surface,
The stumps stand thick round the clearing, the squatter strikes deep
with his axe,
Flatboatmen make fast, towards dusk, near the cotton-wood or pekan-trees,
Coon-seekers go through the regions of the Red River, or through those
drained by the Tennessee, or through those of the Arkansas,
Torches shine in the dark that hangs on the Chattahooche or Altamahaw,
Patriarchs sit at supper with sons and grandsons and great-grandsons
around them,
In walls of adobe, in canvas tents, rest hunters and trappers after their
day's sport,
The city sleeps and the country sleeps,
The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time,
The old husband sleeps by his wife, and the young husband sleeps by his
wife;
And these one and all tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,
And such as it is to be of these, more or less, I am."
What is this but tufts and tussocks of grass; not branching trees, nor yet
something framed and deftly put together, but a succession of simple
things, objects, actions, persons; handfuls of native growths, a stretch
of prairie or savanna; no composition, no artistic wholes, no logical
sequence, yet all vital and real; jets of warm life that shoot and play
over the surface of contemporary America, and that the poet uses as the
stuff out of which to weave the song of himself.
This simple aggregating or cataloguing style as it has been called, and
which often occurs in the "Leaves," has been much criticised, but it seems
to me in perfect keeping in a work that does not aim at total artistic
effects, at finished structural perfection like architecture, but to
picture the elements of a man's life and character in outward scenes and
objects and to show how all nature tends inward to him and he outward to
it. Whitman showers the elements of American life upon his reader until,
so to speak, his mind is drenched with them, but never groups them into
patterns to tickle his sense of form. It is charged that his method is
inartistic, and it is so in a sense, but it is the Whitman art and has its
own value in his work. Only the artist instinct could prompt to this
succession of one line genre word painting.
But this is not the way of the great artists. No, but it is Whitman's way,
and these things have a certain artistic value in his work, a work that
professedly aims to typify his country and times,--the value of multitude,
processions, mass-movements, and the gathering together of elements and
forces from wide areas.
XIII
Whitman's relation to art, then, is primary and fundamental, just as his
relations to religion, to culture, to politics, to democracy, are primary
and fundamental,--through his emotion, his soul, and not merely through
his tools, his intellect. His artistic conscience is quickly revealed to
any searching inquiry. It is seen in his purpose to convey his message by
suggestion and indirection, or as an informing, vitalizing breath and
spirit. His thought and meaning are enveloped in his crowded, concrete,
and often turbulent pages, as science is enveloped in nature. He has a
profound ethic, a profound metaphysic, but they are not formulated; they
are vital in his pages as hearing or eyesight.
Whitman studied effects, and shaped his means to his end, weighing values
and subordinating parts, as only the great artist does. He knew the power
of words as few know them; he knew the value of vista, perspective,
vanishing lights and lines. He knew how to make his words itch at your
ears till you understood them; how to fold up and put away in his
sentences meanings, glimpses, that did not at first reveal themselves. It
is only the work of the great creative artist that is pervaded by will,
and that emanates directly and inevitably from the personality of the man
himself. As a man and an American, Whitman is as closely related to his
work as Æschylus to his, or Dante to his. This is always a supreme
test,--the closeness and vitality of the relation of a man to his work.
Could any one else have done it? Is it the general intelligence that
speaks, the culture and refinement of the age? or have we a new revelation
of life, a new mind and soul? The lesser poets sustain only a secondary
relation to their works. It is other poets, other experiences, the past,
the schools, the forms, that speak through them. In all Whitman's
recitatives, as he calls them, the free-flowing ends of the sentences, the
loose threads of meaning, the unraveled or unknitted threads and fringes,
are all well considered, and are one phase of _his_ art. He seeks his
effects thus.
His method is indirect, allegorical, and elliptical to an unusual degree;
often a curious suspension and withholding in a statement, a suggestive
incompleteness, both ends of his thought, as it were, left in the air;
sometimes the substantive, sometimes the nominative, is wanting, and all
for a purpose. The poet somewhere speaks of his utterance as "prophetic
screams." The prophetic element is rarely absent, the voice of one crying
in the wilderness, only it is a more jocund and reassuring cry than we are
used to in prophecy. The forthrightness of utterance, the projectile
force of expression, the constant appeal to unseen laws and powers of the
great prophetic souls, is here.
Whitman is poetic in the same way in which he is democratic, in the same
way in which he is religious, or American, or modern,--not by word merely,
but by deed; not by the extrinsic, but by the intrinsic; not by art, but
by life.
I am never tired of saying that to put great personal qualities in a poem,
or other literary work, not formulated or didactically stated, but in
tone, manner, attitude, breadth of view, love, charity, good fellowship,
etc., is the great triumph for our day. So put, they are a possession to
the race forever; they grow and bear fruit perennially, like the grass and
the trees. And shall it be said that the poet who does this has no worthy
art?
XIV
Nearly all modern artificial products, when compared with the ancient, are
characterized by greater mechanical finish and precision. Can we say,
therefore, they are more artistic? Is a gold coin of the time of Pericles,
so rude and simple, less artistic than the elaborate coins of our own day?
Is Japanese pottery, the glazing often ragged and uneven, less artistic
than the highly finished work of the moderns?
Are we quite sure, after all, that what we call "artistic form" is in any
high or fundamental sense artistic? Are the precise, the regular, the
measured, the finished, the symmetrical, indispensable to our conception
of art? If regular extrinsic form and measure and proportion are necessary
elements of the artistic, then geometrical flower-beds, and trees set in
rows or trained to some fancy pattern, ought to please the artist. But do
they? If we look for the artistic in these things, then Addison is a
greater artist than Shakespeare. Dr. Johnson says, "Addison speaks the
language of poets, and Shakespeare of men." Which is really the most
artistic? The one is the coin from the die, the other the coin from the
hand.
Tennyson's faultless form and finish are not what stamp him a great
artist. He would no doubt be glad to get rid of them if he could, at least
to keep them in abeyance and make them less obtrusive; he would give
anything for the freedom, raciness, and wildness of Shakespeare. But he is
not equal to these things. The culture, the refinement, the precision of a
correct and mechanical age have sunk too deeply into his soul. He has not
the courage or the spring to let himself go as Shakespeare did. Tennyson,
too, speaks the language of poets, and not of men; he savors of the
flower-garden, and not of the forest. Tennyson knows that he is an artist.
Shakespeare, apparently, never had such a thought; he is intent solely
upon holding the mirror up to nature. The former lived in an age of
criticism, and when the poets loved poetry more than they did life and
things; the latter, in a more virile time, and in "the full stream of the
world."
"Leaves of Grass" is not self-advertised as a work of art. The author had
no thought that you should lay down his book and say, "What a great
artist!" "What a master workman!" He would rather you should say, "What a
great man!" "What a loving comrade!" "What a real democrat!" "What a
healing and helpful force!" He would not have you admire his poetry: he
would have you filled with the breath of a new and larger and saner life;
he would be a teacher and trainer of men.
The love of the precise, the exact, the methodical, is characteristic of
an age of machinery, of a commercial and industrial age like ours. These
things are indispensable in the mill and counting-house, but why should we
insist upon them in poetry? Why should we cling to an arbitrary form like
the sonnet? Why should we insist upon a perfect rhyme, as if it was a cog
in a wheel? Why not allow and even welcome the freedom of half-rhymes, or
suggestive rhymes? Why, anyway, fold back a sentence or idea to get it
into a prescribed arbitrary form? Why should we call this verse-tinkering
and verse-shaping art, when it is only artifice? Why should we call the
man who makes one pretty conceit rhyme with another pretty conceit an
artist, and deny the term to the man whose sentences pair with great laws
and forces?
Of course it is much easier for a poet to use the regular verse-forms and
verse language than it is to dispense with them; that is, a much less
poetic capital is required in the former case than in the latter. The
stock forms and the stock language count for a good deal. A very small
amount of original talent may cut quite an imposing figure in the robes of
the great masters. Require the poet to divest himself of them, and to
speak in the language of men and in the spirit of real things, and see how
he fares.
XV
Whitman was afraid of what he called the beauty disease. He thought a poet
of the first order should be sparing of the direct use of the beautiful,
as Nature herself is. His aim should be larger, and beauty should follow
and not lead. The poet should not say to himself, "Come, I will make
something beautiful," but rather "I will make something true, and
quickening, and powerful. I will not dress my verse up in fine words and
pretty fancies, but I will breathe into it the grit and force and
adhesiveness of real things." Beauty is the flowering of life and
fecundity, and it must have deep root in the non-beautiful.
Beauty, as the master knows it, is a spirit and not an adornment. It is
not merely akin to flowers and gems and rainbows: it is akin to the All.
Looking through his eyes, you shall see it in the rude and the savage
also, in rocks and deserts and mountains, in the common as well as in the
rare, in wrinkled age as well as in rosy youth.
The non-beautiful holds the world together, holds life together and
nourishes it, more than the beautiful. Nature is beautiful because she is
so much else first,--yes, and last, and all the time.
"For the roughness of the earth and of man encloses as much as the
delicates of the earth and of man,
And nothing endures but personal qualities."
Is there not in field, wood, or shore something more precious and tonic
than any special beauties we may chance to find there,--flowers, perfumes,
sunsets,--something that we cannot do without, though we can do without
these? Is it health, life, power, or what is it?
Whatever it is, it is something analogous to this that we get in Whitman.
There is little in his "Leaves" that one would care to quote for its mere
beauty, though this element is there also. One may pluck a flower here and
there in his rugged landscape, as in any other; but the flowers are always
by the way, and never the main matter. We should not miss them if they
were not there. What delights and invigorates us is in the air, and in the
look of things. The flowers are like our wild blossoms growing under great
trees or amid rocks, never the camellia or tuberose of the garden or
hot-house,--something rude and bracing is always present, always a breath
of the untamed and aboriginal.
Whitman's work gives results, and never processes. There is no return of
the mind upon itself; it descends constantly upon things, persons,
realities. It is a rushing stream which will not stop to be analyzed. It
has been urged that Whitman does not give the purely intellectual
satisfaction that would seem to be warranted by his mental grasp and
penetration. No, nor the æsthetic satisfaction warranted by his
essentially artistic habit of mind. Well, he did not promise satisfaction
in anything, but only to put us on the road to satisfaction. His book, he
says, is not a "good lesson," but it lets down the bars to a good lesson,
and that to another, and every one to another still.
Let me repeat that the sharp, distinct intellectual note--the note of
culture, books, clubs, etc., such as we get from so many modern writers,
you will not get from Whitman. In my opinion, the note he sounds is deeper
and better than that. It has been charged by an unfriendly critic that he
strikes lower than the intellect. If it is meant by this that he misses
the intellect, it is not true; he stimulates the intellect as few poets
do. He strikes lower because he strikes farther. He sounds the note of
character, personality, volition, the note of prophecy, of democracy, and
of love. He seems unintellectual to an abnormally intellectual age; he
seems unpoetic to a taste formed upon poetic tidbits; he seems irreligious
to standards founded upon the old models of devotional piety; he seems
disorderly, incoherent to all petty thumb and finger measurements. In his
ideas and convictions, Whitman was a modern of the moderns; yet in his
type, his tastes, his fundamental make-up, he was primitive, of an earlier
race and age,--before, as Emerson suggests, the gods had cut Man up into
men, with special talents of one kind or another.
XVI
Take any of Whitman's irregular-flowing lines, and clip and trim them, and
compress them into artificial verse-forms, and what have we gained to make
up for what we have lost? Take his lines called "Reconciliation," for
instance:--
"Word over all beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly
lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash
again, and ever again, this soil'd world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin--I draw near,
Bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin."
Or take his poem called "Old Ireland:"--
"Far hence amid an isle of wondrous beauty,
Crouching over a grave an ancient sorrowful mother,
Once a queen, now lean and tatter'd, seated on the ground,
Her old white hair drooping, dishevel'd, round her shoulders,
At her feet fallen an unused royal harp,
Long silent, she, too, long silent, mourning her shrouded hope and heir,
Of all the earth her heart most full of sorrow because most full of love.
"Yet a word, ancient mother,
You need crouch there no longer on the cold ground with forehead between
your knees,
Oh, you need not sit there veil'd in your old white hair so dishevel'd,
For know you the one you mourn is not in that grave,
It was an illusion; the son you loved was not really dead,
The Lord is not dead, he is risen again young and strong in another
country.
Even while you wept there by your fal
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