Birds and Poets : with Other Papers Part 13

I

Whoever has witnessed the flight of any of the great birds, as the eagle, the condor, the sea-gulls, the proud hawks, has perhaps felt that the poetic suggestion of the feathered tribes is not all confined to the sweet and tiny songsters,--the thrushes, canaries, and mockingbirds of the groves and orchards, or of the gilded cage in my lady's chamber.

It is by some such a.n.a.logy that I would indicate the character of the poetry I am about to discuss, compared with that of the more popular and melodious singer,--the poetry of the strong wing and the daring flight.

Well and profoundly has a Danish critic said, in "For Ide og Virkelighed" ("For the Idea and the Reality"), a Copenhagen magazine:--

"It may be candidly admitted that the American poet has not the elegance, special melody, nor _recherche_ aroma of the accepted poets of Europe or his own country; but his compa.s.s and general harmony are infinitely greater. The sweetness and spice, the poetic _ennui,_ the tender longings, the exquisite art-finish of those choice poets are mainly unseen and unmet in him,--perhaps because he cannot achieve them, more likely because he disdains them. But there is an electric _living soul_ in his poetry, far more fermenting and bracing. His wings do not glitter in their movement from rich and varicolored plumage, nor are his notes those of the accustomed song-birds; but his flight is the flight of the eagle."

Yes, there is not only the delighting of the ear with the outpouring of sweetest melody and its lessons, but there is the delighting of the eye and soul through that soaring and circling in the vast empyrean of "a strong bird on pinions free,"--lessons of freedom, power, grace, and spiritual suggestion,--vast, unparalleled, _formless_ lessons.

It is now upwards of twenty years since Walt Whitman printed (in 1855) his first thin beginning volume of "Leaves of Gra.s.s;" and, holding him to the test which he himself early proclaimed, namely, "that the proof of the poet shall be sternly deferred till his country has absorb'd him as affectionately as he has absorb'd it," he is yet on trial, yet makes his appeal to an indifferent or to a scornful audience. That his complete absorption, however, by his own country and by the world, is ultimately to take place, is one of the beliefs that grows stronger and stronger within me as time pa.s.ses, and I suppose it is with a hope to help forward this absorption that I write of him now. Only here and there has he yet effected a lodgment, usually in the younger and more virile minds. But considering the unparalleled audacity of his undertaking, and the absence in most critics and readers of anything like full-grown and robust aesthetic perception, the wonder really is not that he should have made such slow progress, but that he should have gained any foothold at all. The whole literary _technique_ of the race for the last two hundred years has been squarely against him, laying, as it does, the emphasis upon form and scholarly endowments instead of upon aboriginal power and manhood.

My own mastery of the poet, incomplete as it is, has doubtless been much facilitated by contact--talks, meals, and jaunts--with him, stretching through a decade of years, and by seeing how everything in his _personnel_ was resumed and carried forward in his literary expression; in fact, how the one was a living commentary upon the other. After the test of time, nothing goes home like the test of actual intimacy; and to tell me that Whitman is not a large, fine, fresh, magnetic personality, making you love him and want always to be with him, were to tell me that my whole past life is a deception, and all the impression of my perceptive faculties a fraud. I have studied him as I have studied the birds, and have found that the nearer I got to him the more I saw.

Nothing about a first-cla.s.s man can be overlooked; he is to be studied in every feature,--in his physiology and phrenology, in the shape of his head, in his brow, his eye, his glance, his nose, his ear (the ear is as indicative in a man as in a horse), his voice. In Whitman all these things are remarkably striking and suggestive. His face exhibits a rare combination of harmony and sweetness with strength,--strength like the vaults and piers of the Roman architecture. Sculptor never carved a finer ear or a more imaginative brow. Then his heavy-lidded, absorbing eye, his sympathetic voice, and the impression which he makes of starting from the broad bases of the universal human traits. (If Whitman was grand in his physical and perfect health, I think him far more so now (1877), cheerfully mastering paralysis, penury, and old age.) You know, on seeing the man and becoming familiar with his presence, that, if he achieve the height at all, it will be from where every man stands, and not from some special genius, or exceptional and advent.i.tious point. He does not make the impression of the scholar or artist or _litterateur,_ but such as you would imagine the antique heroes to make,--that of a sweet-blooded, receptive, perfectly normal, catholic man, with, further than that, a look about him that is best suggested by the word elemental or cosmical. It was this, doubtless, that led Th.o.r.eau to write, after an hour's interview, that he suggested "something a little more than human." In fact, the main clew to Walt Whitman's life and personality, and the expression of them in his poems, is to be found in about the largest emotional element that has appeared anywhere. This, if not controlled by a potent rational balance, would either have tossed him helplessly forever, or wrecked him as disastrously as ever storm and gale drove ship to ruin. These volcanic emotional fires appear everywhere in his books; and it is really these, aroused to intense activity and unnatural strain during the four years of the war and his persistent labors in the hospitals, that have resulted in his illness and paralysis since.

It has been impossible, I say, to resist these personal impressions and magnetisms, and impossible with me not to follow them up in the poems, in doing which I found that his "Leaves of Gra.s.s" was really the _drama of himself,_ played upon various and successive stages of nature, history, pa.s.sion, experience, patriotism, and that he had not made, nor had he intended to make, mere excellent "poems," tunes, statues, or statuettes, in the ordinary sense.

Before the man's complete acceptance and a.s.similation by America, he may have to be first pa.s.sed down through the minds of critics and commentators, and given to the people with some of his rank new quality taken off,--a quality like that which adheres to objects in the open air, and makes them either forbidding or attractive, as one's mood is healthful and robust or feeble and languid. The processes are silently at work. Already seen from a distance, and from other atmospheres and surroundings, he a.s.sumes magnitude and orbic coherence; for in curious contrast to the general denial of Whitman in this country (though he has more lovers and admirers here than is generally believed) stands the reception accorded him in Europe. The poets there, almost without exception, recognize his transcendent quality, the men of science his thorough scientific basis, the republicans his inborn democracy, and all his towering picturesque personality and modernness. Professor Clifford says he is more thoroughly in harmony with the spirit and letter of advanced scientism than any other living poet. Professor Tyrrell and Mr.

Symonds find him eminently Greek, in the sense in which to be natural and "self-regulated by the law of perfect health" is to be Greek. The French "Revue des Deux Mondes" p.r.o.nounces his war poems the most vivid, the most humanly pa.s.sionate, and the most modern, of all the verse of the nineteenth century. Freiligrath translated him into German, and hailed him as the founder of a new democratic and modern order of poetry, greater than the old. But I do not propose to go over the whole list here; I only wish to indicate that the absorption is well commenced abroad, and that probably her poet will at last reach America by way of those far-off, roundabout channels. The old mother will first masticate and moisten the food which is still too tough for her offspring.

When I first fell in with "Leaves of Gra.s.s," I was taken by isolated pa.s.sages scattered here and there through the poems; these I seized upon, and gave myself no concern about the rest. Single lines in it often went to the bottom of the questions that were vexing me. The following, though less here than when encountered in the frame of mind which the poet begets in you, curiously settled and stratified a certain range of turbid, fluctuating inquiry:--

"There was never any more inception than there is now,-- Nor any more youth or age than there is now; And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or h.e.l.l than there is now."

These lines, also, early had an attraction for me I could not define, and were of great service:--

"Pleasantly and well-suited I walk, Whither I walk I cannot define, but I know it is good, The whole universe indicates that it is good, The past and the present indicate that it is good."

In the following episode, too, there was to me something far deeper than the words or the story:--

"The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside; I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the wood-pile; Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak, And went where he sat on a log, and led him in, and a.s.sured him, And brought water and fill'd a tub for his sweated body and bruis'd feet, And gave him a room that entered from my own, and gave him some coa.r.s.e clean clothes; And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness, And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles: He stayed with me a week before he was recuperated and pa.s.s'd North; (I had him sit next me at table--my firelock lean'd in the corner.)"

But of the book as a whole I could form no adequate conception, and it was not for many years, and after I had known the poet himself, as already stated, that I saw in it a teeming, rushing globe well worthy my best days and strength to surround and comprehend.

One thing that early took me in the poems was (as before alluded to) the tremendous personal force back of them, and felt through them as the sun through vapor; not merely intellectual grasp or push, but a warm, breathing, towering, magnetic Presence that there was no escape from.

Another fact I was quick to perceive, namely, that this man had almost in excess a quality in which every current poet was lacking,--I mean the faculty of being in entire sympathy with actual nature, and the objects; and shows of nature, and of rude, abysmal man; and appalling directness of utterance therefrom, at first hand, without any intermediate agency or modification.

The influence of books and works of art upon an author may be seen in all respectable writers. If knowledge alone made literature, or culture genius, there would be no dearth of these things among the moderns. But I feel bound to say that there is something higher and deeper than the influence or perusal of any or all books, or all other productions of genius,--a quality of information which the masters can never impart, and which all the libraries do not hold. This is the absorption by an author, previous to becoming so, of the spirit of nature, through the visible objects of the universe, and his affiliation with them subjectively and objectively. Not more surely is the blood quickened and purified by contact with the unbreathed air than is the spirit of man vitalized and made strong by intercourse with the real things of the earth. The calm, all-permitting, wordless spirit of nature,--yet so eloquent to him who hath ears to hear! The sunrise, the heaving sea, the woods and mountains, the storm and the whistling winds, the gentle summer day, the winter sights and sounds, the night and the high dome of stars,--to have really perused these, especially from childhood onward, till what there is in them, so impossible to define, finds its full mate and echo in the mind,--this only is the lore which breathes the breath of life into all the rest. Without it, literary productions may have the superb beauty of statues, but with it only can they have the beauty of life.

I was never troubled at all by what the critics called Whitman's want of art, or his violation of art. I saw that he at once designedly swept away all which the said critics have commonly meant by that term. The dominant impression was of the living presence and voice. He would have no curtains, he said, not the finest, between himself and his reader; and in thus bringing me face to face with his subject I perceived he not only did not escape conventional art, but I perceived an enlarged, enfranchised art in this very abnegation of art. "When half-G.o.ds go, whole G.o.ds arrive." It was obvious to me that the new style gained more than it lost, and that in this fullest operatic launching forth of the voice, though it sounded strange at first, and required the ear to get used to it, there might be quite as much science, and a good deal more power, than in the tuneful but constricted measures we were accustomed to.

To the eye the page of the new poet presented about the same contrast with the page of the popular poets that trees and the free, unbidden growths of nature do with a carefully clipped hedge; and to the spirit the contrast was about the same. The hedge is the more studiedly and obviously beautiful, but, ah! there is a kind of beauty and satisfaction in trees that one would not care to lose. There are symmetry and proportion in the sonnet, but to me there is something I would not exchange for them in the wild swing and balance of many free and unrhymed pa.s.sages in Shakespeare; like the one, for instance, in which these lines occur:--

"To be imprisoned in the viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round About the pendent world."

Here is the spontaneous grace and symmetry of a forest tree, or a soughing ma.s.s of foliage.

And this pa.s.sage from my poet I do not think could be improved by the verse-maker's art:--

"This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look'd at the crowded heaven, And I said to my Spirit, _When we become the enfolders of those orbs and the pleasure and knowledge of everything in them, shall we be fill'd and satisfied then?_ And my Spirit said, No, _we but level that lift, to pa.s.s and continue beyond."_

Such breaking with the routine poetic, and with the grammar of verse, was of course a dangerous experiment, and threw the composer absolutely upon his intrinsic merits, upon his innately poetic and rhythmic quality. He must stand or fall by these alone, since he discarded all artificial, all advent.i.tious helps. If interior, spontaneous rhythm could not be relied on, and the natural music and flexibility of language, then there was nothing to shield the ear from the pitiless hail of words,--not one softly padded verse anywhere.

All poets, except those of the very first order, owe immensely to the form, the art, the stereotyped metres, and stock figures they find ready to hand. The form is suggestive,--it invites and aids expression, and lends itself readily, like fashion, to conceal, or extenuate, or eke out poverty of thought and feeling in the verse. The poet can "cut and cover," as the farmer says, in a way the prose-writer never can, nor one whose form is essentially prose, like Whitman's.

I, too, love to see the forms worthily used, as they always are by the master; and I have no expectation that they are going out of fashion right away. A great deal of poetry that serves, and helps sweeten one's cup, would be impossible without them,--would be nothing when separated from them. It is for the ear, and for the sense of tune and of carefully carved and modeled forms, and is not meant to arouse the soul with the taste of power, and to start off on journeys for itself. But the great inspired utterances, like the Bible,--what would they gain by being cast in the moulds of metrical verse? In all that concerns art, viewed from any high standpoint,--proportion, continence, self-control, unfaltering adherence to natural standards, subordination of parts, perfect adjustment of the means to the end, obedience to inward law, no trifling, no levity, no straining after effect, impartially attending to the back and loins as well as to the head, and even holding toward his subject an att.i.tude of perfect acceptance and equality,--principles of art to which alone the great spirits are amenable,--in all these respects, I say, this poet is as true as an orb in astronomy.

To his literary expression pitched on scales of such unprecedented breadth and loftiness, the contrast of his personal life comes in with a foil of curious homeliness and simplicity. Perhaps never before has the absolute and average _commonness of humanity_ been so steadily and unaffectedly adhered to. I give here a glimpse of him in Washington on a Navy Yard horse-car, toward the close of the war, one summer day at sundown. The car is crowded and suffocatingly hot, with many pa.s.sengers on the rear platform, and among them a bearded, florid-faced man, elderly but agile, resting against the dash, by the side of the young conductor, and evidently his intimate friend. The man wears a broad-brim white hat. Among the jam inside, near the door, a young Englishwoman, of the working cla.s.s, with two children, has had trouble all the way with the youngest, a strong, fat, fretful, bright babe of fourteen or fifteen months, who bids fair to worry the mother completely out, besides becoming a howling nuisance to everybody. As the car tugs around Capitol Hill the young one is more demoniac than ever, and the flushed and perspiring mother is just ready to burst into tears with weariness and vexation. The car stops at the top of the hill to let off most of the rear platform pa.s.sengers, and the white-hatted man reaches inside, and, gently but firmly disengaging the babe from its stifling place in the mother's arms, takes it in his own, and out in the air. The astonished and excited child, partly in fear, partly in satisfaction at the change, stops its screaming, and, as the man adjusts it more securely to his breast, plants its chubby hands against him, and, pushing off as far as it can, gives a good long look squarely in his face,--then, as if satisfied, snuggles down with its head on his neck, and in less than a minute is sound and peacefully asleep without another whimper, utterly f.a.gged out. A square or so more and the conductor, who has had an unusually hard and uninterrupted day's work, gets off for his first meal and relief since morning. And now the white-hatted man, holding the slumbering babe, also acts as conductor the rest of the distance, keeping his eye on the pa.s.sengers inside, who have by this time thinned out greatly. He makes a very good conductor, too, pulling the bell to stop or to go on as needed, and seems to enjoy the occupation. The babe meanwhile rests its fat cheeks close on his neck and gray beard, one of his arms vigilantly surrounding it, while the other signals, from time to time, with the strap; and the flushed mother inside has a good half hour to breathe, and to cool and recover herself.

II

No poem of our day dates and locates itself as absolutely as "Leaves of Gra.s.s;" but suppose it had been written three or four centuries ago, and had located itself in mediaeval Europe, and was now first brought to light, together with a history of Walt Whitman's simple and disinterested life, can there be any doubt about the cackling that would at once break out in the whole brood of critics over the golden egg that had been uncovered? This reckon would be a favorite pa.s.sage with all:--

"You sea! I resign myself to you also--I guess what you mean; I behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers; I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me; We must have a turn together--I undress--hurry me out of sight of the land; Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse; Dash me with amorous wet--I can repay you.

"Sea of stretch'd ground-swells!

Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths!

Sea of the brine of life! sea of unshovel'd yet always ready graves!

Howler and scooper of storms! capricious and dainty sea!

I am integral with you--I too am of one phase, and of all phases."

This other pa.s.sage would afford many a text for the moralists and essayists:--

"Of persons arrived at high positions, ceremonies, wealth, scholarship, and the like; To me, all that those persons have arrived at sinks away from them, except as it results to their Bodies and Souls, So that often, to me, they appear gaunt and naked, And often, to me, each one mocks the others, and mocks himself or herself, And of each one, the core of life, namely happiness, is full of the rotten excrement of maggots; And often, to me, those men and women pa.s.s unwittingly the true realities of life, and go toward false realities, And often, to me, they are alive after what custom has served them, but nothing more, And often, to me, they are sad, hasty, unwaked somnambules, walking the dusk."

Ah, Time, you enchantress! what tricks you play with us! The old is already proved,--the past and the distant hold nothing but the beautiful.

Or let us take another view. Suppose Walt Whitman had never existed, and some bold essayist, like Mr. Higginson or Matthew Arnold, had projected him in abstract, outlined him on a scholarly ideal background, formulated and put in harmless critical periods the principles of art which he ill.u.s.trates, and which are the inevitable logic of his poems,--said essayist would have won great applause. "Yes, indeed, that were a poet to cherish; fill those shoes and you have a G.o.d."

How different a critic's account of Shakespeare from Shakespeare himself,--the difference between the hewn or sawed timber and the living tree! A few years ago we had here a lecturer from over seas, who gave to our well-dressed audiences the high, moral, and intellectual statement of the poet Burns. It was very fine, and people were greatly pleased, vastly more so, I fear, than they were with Burns himself. Indeed, I could not help wondering how many of those appreciative listeners had any original satisfaction in the Scotch poet at first hand, or would have accepted him had he been their neighbor and fellow-citizen. But as he filtered through the scholarly mind in trickling drops, oh, he was so sweet!

Everybody stirred with satisfaction as the lecturer said: "When literature becomes dozy, respectable, and goes in the smooth grooves of fashion, and copies and copies again, something must be done; and to give life to that dying literature a man must be found _not educated under its influence."_ I applauded with the rest, for it was a bold saying; but I could not help thinking how that theory, brought home to ourselves and ill.u.s.trated in a living example, would have sent that nodding millinery and faultless tailory flying downstairs, as at an alarm of fire.

One great service of Walt Whitman is that he exerts a tremendous influence to bring the race up on this nether side,--to place the emotional, the a.s.similative, the sympathetic, the spontaneous, intuitive man, the man of the fluids and of the affections, flush with the intellectual man. That we moderns have fallen behind here is unquestionable, and we in this country more than the Old World peoples.

All the works of Whitman, prose and verse, are embosomed in a sea of emotional humanity, and they float deeper than they show; there is far more in what they necessitate and imply than in what they say.

It is not so much of fatty degeneration that we are in danger in America, but of calcareous. The fluids, moral and physical, are evaporating; surfaces are becoming encrusted, there is a deposit of flint in the veins and arteries, outlines are abnormally sharp and hard, nothing is held in solution, all is precipitated in well-defined ideas and opinions.

But when I think of the type of character planted and developed by my poet, I think of a man or a woman rich above all things in the genial human attributes, one "nine times folded" in an atmosphere of tenderest, most considerate humanity,--an atmosphere warm with the breath of a tropic heart, that makes your buds of affection and of genius start and unfold like a south wind in May. Your intercourse with such a character is not merely intellectual; it is deeper and better than that. Walter Scott carried such a fund of sympathy and goodwill that even the animals found fellowship with him, and the pigs understood his great heart.

It was the large endowment of Whitman, in his own character in this respect, that made his services in the army hospitals during the war so ministering and effective, and that renders his "Drum-Taps" the tenderest and most deeply yearning and sorrowful expression of the human heart in poetry that ever war called forth. Indeed, from my own point of view, there is no false or dangerous tendency among us, in life or in letters, that this poet does not offset and correct. Fret and chafe as much as we will, we are bound to gravitate, more or less, toward this mountain, and feel its bracing, rugged air.

Without a certain self-surrender there is no greatness possible in literature, any more than in religion, or in anything else. It is always a trait of the master that he is not afraid of being compromised by the company he keeps. He is the central and main fact in any company.

Nothing so lowly but he will do it reverence; nothing so high but he can stand in its presence. His theme is the river, and he the ample and willing channel. Little natures love to disparage and take down; they do it in self-defense; but the master gives you all, and more than your due. Whitman does not stand aloof, superior, a priest or a critic: he abandons himself to all the strong human currents; he enters into and affiliates with every phase of life; he bestows himself royally upon whoever and whatever will receive him. There is no compet.i.tion between himself and his subject; he is not afraid of over-praising, or making too much of the commonest individual. What exalts others exalts him.