Birds and Poets : with Other Papers Part 15

"Who throve and branch'd from clime to clime, The herald of a higher race, And of himself in higher place If so he type this work of time

"Within himself, from more to more; Or, crown'd with attributes of woe, Like glories, move his course, and show That life is not as idle ore,

"But iron dug from central gloom, And heated hot with burning fears, And dipt in baths of hissing tears, And batter'd with the shocks of doom

"To shape and use. Arise and fly The reeling Faun, the sensual feast; Move upward, working out the beast, And let the ape and tiger die."

Or in this stanza behold how the science is disguised or turned into the sweetest music:--

"Move eastward, happy earth, and leave Yon orange sunset waning slow; From fringes of the faded eve, O happy planet, eastward go; Till over thy dark shoulder glow Thy silver sister-world, and rise To gla.s.s herself in dewy eyes That watch me from the glen below."

A recognition of the planetary system, and of the great fact that the earth moves eastward through the heavens, in a soft and tender love-song!

But in Walt Whitman alone do we find the full, practical absorption, and re-departure therefrom, of the astounding idea that the earth is a star in the heavens like the rest, and that man, as the crown and finish, carries in his moral consciousness the flower, the outcome, of all this wide field of turbulent unconscious nature. Of course in his handling it is no longer science, or rather it is science dissolved in the fervent heat of the poet's heart, and charged with emotion. "The words of true poems," he says, "are the tufts and final applause of science." Before Darwin or Spencer he proclaimed the doctrine of evolution:--

"I am stuccoed with quadrupeds and birds all over, And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons, And call anything close again when I desire it.

"In vain the speeding and shyness; In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my approach; In vain the mastodon retreats beneath his own powder'd bones; In vain objects stand leagues off, and a.s.sume manifold shapes; In vain the ocean settling in hollows, and the great monsters lying low."

In the following pa.s.sage the idea is more fully carried out, and man is viewed through a vista which science alone has laid open; yet how absolutely a work of the creative imagination is revealed:--

"I am an acme of things accomplish'd, and I am incloser of things to be.

My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs; On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the steps; All below duly travel'd, and still I mount and mount.

"Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me; Afar down I see the huge first Nothing--I know I was even there; I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist, And took my time, and took no hurt from the foetid carbon.

"Long I was hugg'd close--long and long, Immense have been the preparations for me, Faithful and friendly the arms that have help'd me, Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen; For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings; They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.

"Before I was born out of my mother, generations guided me; My embryo has never been torpid--nothing could overlay it, For it the nebula cohered to an orb, The long low strata piled to rest it on, Vast vegetables gave it sustenance, Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths, and deposited it with care; All forces have been steadily employ'd to complete and delight me: Now on this spot I stand with my robust Soul."

I recall no single line of poetry in the language that fills my imagination like that beginning the second stanza:--

"Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me."

One seems to see those huge Brocken shadows of the past sinking and dropping below the horizon like mountain peaks, as he presses onward on his journey. Akin to this absorption of science is another quality in my poet not found in the rest, except perhaps a mere hint of it now and then in Lucretius,--a quality easier felt than described. It is a tidal wave of emotion running all through the poems, which is now and then crested with such pa.s.sages as this:--

"I am he that walks with the tender and growing night; I call to the earth and sea, half held by the night.

"Press close, bare-bosom'd night! Press close, magnetic, nourishing night!

Night of south winds! night of the large, few stars!

Still, nodding night! mad, naked, summer night.

"Smile, O voluptuous, cool-breath'd earth!

Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!

Earth of departed sunset! Earth of the mountains, misty topt!

Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon, just tinged with blue!

Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river!

Earth of the limpid gray of clouds, brighter and clearer for my sake!

Far-swooping, elbow'd earth! rich, apple-blossom'd earth!

Smile, for your lover comes!"

Professor Clifford calls it "cosmic emotion,"--a poetic thrill and rhapsody in contemplating the earth as a whole,--its chemistry and vitality, its bounty, its beauty, its power, and the applicability of its laws and principles to human, aesthetic, and art products. It affords the key to the theory of art upon which Whitman's poems are projected, and accounts for what several critics call their sense of magnitude,--"something of the vastness of the succession of objects in Nature."

"I swear there is no greatness or power that does not emulate those of the earth!

I swear there can be no theory of any account, unless it corroborate the theory of the earth!

No politics, art, religion, behavior, or what not, is of account, unless it compare with the amplitude of the earth, Unless it face the exactness, vitality, impartiality, rect.i.tude of the earth."

Or again, in his "Laws for Creation:"--

"All must have reference to the ensemble of the world, and the compact truth of the world, There shall be no subject too p.r.o.nounced--All works shall ill.u.s.trate the divine law of indirections."

Indeed, the earth ever floats in this poet's mind as his mightiest symbol,--his type of completeness and power. It is the armory from which he draws his most potent weapons. See, especially, "To the Sayers of Words," "This Compost," "The Song of the Open Road," and "Pensive on her Dead gazing I heard the Mother of all."

The poet holds essentially the same att.i.tude toward cosmic humanity, well ill.u.s.trated in "Salut au Monde:"--

"My spirit has pa.s.s'd in compa.s.sion and determination around the whole earth; I have look'd 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 finger'd every sh.o.r.e with you."

Indeed, the whole book is leavened with vehement Comradeship. Not only in the relations of individuals to each other shall loving good-will exist and be cultivated,--not only between the different towns and cities, and all the States of this indissoluble, compacted Union,--but it shall make a tie of fraternity and fusion holding all the races and peoples and countries of the whole earth.

Then the National question. As Whitman's completed works now stand, in their two volumes, it is certain they could only have grown out of the Secession War; and they will probably go to future ages as in literature the most characteristic identification of that war,--risen from and portraying it, representing its sea of pa.s.sions and progresses, partaking of all its fierce movements and perturbed emotions, and yet sinking the mere military parts of that war, great as those were, below and with matters far greater, deeper, more human, more expanding, and more enduring.

I must not close this paper without some reference to Walt Whitman's prose writings, which are scarcely less important than his poems. Never has Patriotism, never has the antique Love of Country, with even doubled pa.s.sion and strength, been more fully expressed than in these contributions. They comprise two thin volumes,--now included in "Two Rivulets,"--called "Democratic Vistas" and "Memoranda during the War;"

the former exhibiting the personality of the poet in more vehement and sweeping action even than do the poems, and affording specimens of soaring vaticination and impa.s.sioned appeal impossible to match in the literature of our time. The only living author suggested is Carlyle; but so much is added, the _presence_ is so much more vascular and human, and the whole page so saturated with faith and love and democracy, that even the great Scotchman is overborne. Whitman, too, radiates belief, while at the core of Carlyle's utterances is despair. The style here is eruptive and complex, or what Jeremy Taylor calls _agglomerative,_ and puts the Addisonian models utterly to rout,--a style such as only the largest and most t.i.tanic workman could effectively use. A sensitive lady of my acquaintance says reading the "Vistas" is like being exposed to a pouring hailstorm,--the words fairly bruise her mind. In its literary construction the book is indeed a shower, or a succession of showers, mult.i.tudinous, wide-stretching, down-pouring,--the wrathful bolt and the quick veins of poetic fire lighting up the page from time to time. I can easily conceive how certain minds must be swayed and bent by some of these long, involved, but firm and vehement pa.s.sages. I cannot deny myself the pleasure of quoting one or two pages. The writer is referring to the great literary relics of past times:--

"For us, along the great highways of time, those monuments stand,--those forms of majesty and beauty. For us those beacons burn through all the nights. Unknown Egyptians, graving hieroglyphs; Hindus, with hymn and apothegm and endless epic; Hebrew prophet, with spirituality, as in flames of lightning, conscience like red-hot iron, plaintive songs and screams of vengeance for tyrannies and enslavement; Christ, with bent head, brooding love and peace, like a dove; Greek, creating eternal shapes of physical and aesthetic proportion; Roman, lord of satire, the sword, and the codex,--of the figures, some far off and veiled, others near and visible; Dante, stalking with lean form, nothing but fibre, not a grain of superfluous flesh; Angelo, and the great painters, architects, musicians; rich Shakespeare, luxuriant as the sun, artist and singer of Feudalism in its sunset, with all the gorgeous colors, owner thereof, and using them at will;--and so to such as German Kant and Hegel, where they, though near us, leaping over the ages, sit again, impa.s.sive, imperturbable, like the Egyptian G.o.ds. Of these, and the like of these, is it too much, indeed, to return to our favorite figure, and view them as...o...b.., moving in free paths in the s.p.a.ces of that other heaven, the cosmic intellect, the Soul?

"Ye powerful and resplendent ones! ye were, in your atmospheres, grown not for America, but rather for her foes, the Feudal and the old--while our genius is democratic and modern. Yet could ye, indeed, but breathe your breath of life into our New World's nostrils--not to enslave us as now, but, for our needs, to breed a spirit like your own--perhaps (dare we to say it?) to dominate, even destroy what you yourselves have left!

On your plane, and no less, but even higher and wider, will I mete and measure for our wants to-day and here. I demand races of orbic bards, with unconditional, uncompromising sway. Come forth, sweet democratic despots of the west!"

Here is another pa.s.sage of a political cast, but showing the same great pinions and lofty flight:--

"It seems as if the Almighty had spread before this nation charts of imperial destinies, dazzling as the sun, yet with lines of blood, and many a deep intestine difficulty, and human aggregate of cankerous imperfection,--saying, Lo! the roads, the only plans of development, long, and varied with all terrible balks and ebullitions. You said in your soul, I will be empire of empires, overshadowing all else, past and present, putting the history of Old World dynasties, conquests, behind me as of no account,--making a new history, the history of Democracy, making old history a dwarf,--I alone inaugurating largeness, culminating time. If these, O lands of America, are indeed the prizes, the determinations of your Soul, be it so. But behold the cost, and already specimens of the cost. Behold the anguish of suspense, existence itself wavering in the balance, uncertain whether to rise or fall; already, close behind you and around you, thick winrows of corpses on battlefields, countless maimed and sick in hospitals, treachery among Generals, folly in the Executive and Legislative departments, schemers, thieves everywhere,--cant, credulity, make-believe everywhere. Thought you greatness was to ripen for you, like a pear? If you would have greatness, know that you must conquer it through ages, centuries,--must pay for it with a proportionate price. For you, too, as for all lands, the struggle, the traitor, the wily person in office, scrofulous wealth, the surfeit of prosperity, the demonism of greed, the h.e.l.l of pa.s.sion, the decay of faith, the long postponement, the fossil-like lethargy, the ceaseless need of revolutions, prophets, thunder-storms, deaths, births, new projections, and invigorations of ideas and men."

The "Memoranda during the War" is mainly a record of personal experiences, nursing the sick and wounded soldiers in the hospitals: most of it is in a low key, simple, unwrought, like a diary kept for one's self; but it reveals the large, tender, sympathetic soul of the poet even more than his elaborate works, and puts in practical form that unprecedented and fervid comradeship which is his leading element. It is printed almost verbatim, just as the notes were jotted down at the time and on the spot. It is impossible to read it without the feeling of tears, while there is elsewhere no such portrayal of the common soldier, and such appreciation of him, as is contained in its pages. It is heart's blood, every word of it, and along with "Drum-Taps" is the only literature of the war thus far entirely characteristic and worthy of serious mention. There are in particular two pa.s.sages in the "Memoranda"

that have amazing dramatic power, vividness, and rapid action, like some quick painter covering a large canvas. I refer to the account of the a.s.sa.s.sination of President Lincoln, and to that of the scenes in Washington after the first battle of Bull Run. What may be called the ma.s.s-movement of Whitman's prose style--the rapid marshaling and grouping together of many facts and details, gathering up, and recruiting, and expanding as the sentences move along, till the force and momentum become like a rolling flood, or an army in echelon on the charge--is here displayed with wonderful effect.

Noting and studying what forces move the world, the only sane explanation that comes to me of the fact that such writing as these little volumes contain has not, in this country especially, met with its due recognition and approval, is that, like all Whitman's works, they have really never yet been published at all in the true sense,--have never entered the arena where the great laurels are won. They have been printed by the author, and a few readers have found them out, but to all intents and purposes they are unknown.

I have not dwelt on Whitman's personal circ.u.mstances, his age (he is now, 1877, entering his fifty-ninth year), paralysis, seclusion, and the treatment of him by certain portions of the literary cla.s.ses, although these have all been made the subjects of wide discussion of late, both in America and Great Britain, and have, I think, a bearing under the circ.u.mstances on his character and genius. It is an unwritten tragedy that will doubtless always remain unwritten. I will but mention an eloquent appeal of the Scotch poet, Robert Buchanan, published in London in March, 1876, eulogizing and defending the American bard, in his old age, illness, and poverty, from the swarms of maligners who still continue to a.s.sail him. The appeal has this fine pa.s.sage:--

"He who wanders through the solitudes of far-off Uist or lonely Donegal may often behold the Golden Eagle sick to death, worn with age or famine, or with both, pa.s.sing with weary waft of wing from promontory to promontory, from peak to peak, pursued by a crowd of rooks and crows, which fall back screaming whenever the n.o.ble bird turns his indignant head, and which follow frantically once more, hooting behind him, whenever he wends again upon his way."

Skipping many things I should yet like to touch upon,--for this paper is already too long,--I will say in conclusion that, if any reader of mine is moved by what I have here written to undertake the perusal of "Leaves of Gra.s.s," or the later volume, "Two Rivulets," let me yet warn him that he little suspects what is before him. Poetry in the Virgilian, Tennysonian, or Lowellian sense it certainly is not. Just as the living form of man in its ordinary garb is less beautiful (yet more beautiful) than the marble statue; just as the living woman and child that may have sat for the model is less beautiful (yet more so) than one of Raphael's finest Madonnas, or just as a forest of trees addresses itself less directly to the feeling of what is called art and form than the house or other edifice built from them; just as you, and the whole spirit of our current times, have been trained to feed on and enjoy, not Nature or Man, or the aboriginal forces, or the actual, but pictures, books, art, and the selected and refined,--just so these poems will doubtless first shock and disappoint you. Your admiration for the beautiful is never the feeling directly and chiefly addressed in them, but your love for the breathing flesh, the concrete reality, the moving forms and shows of the universe. A man reaches and moves you, not an artist. Doubtless, too, a certain withholding and repugnance has first to be overcome, a.n.a.logous to a cold sea plunge; and it is not till you experience the reaction, the after-glow, and feel the swing and surge of the strong waves, that you know what Walt Whitman's pages really are. They don't give themselves at first,--like the real landscape and the sea, they are all indirections. You may have to try them many times; there is something of Nature's rudeness and forbiddingness, not only at the first, but probably always. But after you have mastered them by resigning yourself to them, there is nothing like them anywhere in literature for vital help and meaning. The poet says:--

"The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections, That scorn the best I can do to relate them."