Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today Part 2

"What is this poem, for the giving of which to America and the world, and for that alone, its author has been dismissed with ignominy from a Government office? It is a poem which Schiller might have hailed as the n.o.blest specimen of native literature, worthy of a place beside Homer. It is, in the first place, a work purely and entirely American, autochthonic, sprung from our own soil; no savor of Europe nor the past, nor of any other literature in it; a vast carol of our own land, and of its Present and Future; the strong and haughty psalm of the Republic. There is not one other book, I care not whose, of which this can be said. I weigh my words and have considered well. Every other book by an American author implies, both in form and substance, I cannot even say the European, but the British mind. The shadow of Temple Bar and Arthur's Seat lies dark on all our letters. Intellectually we are still a dependency of Great Britain, and one word--colonial--comprehends and stamps our literature. In no literary form, except our newspapers, has there been anything distinctively American. I note our best books--the works of Jefferson, the romances of Brockden Brown, the speeches of Webster, Everett's rhetoric, the divinity of Channing, some of Cooper's novels, the writings of Theodore Parker, the poetry of Bryant, the masterly law arguments of Lysander Spooner, the miscellanies of Margaret Fuller, the histories of Hildreth, Bancroft and Motley, Ticknor's History of Spanish Literature, Judd's Margaret, the political treatises of Calhoun, the rich, benignant poems of Longfellow, the ballads of Whittier, the delicate songs of Philip Pendleton Cooke, the weird poetry of Edgar Poe, the wizard tales of Hawthorne, Irving's Knickerbocker, Delia Bacon's splendid sibyllic book on Shakespeare, the political economy of Carey, the prison letters and immortal speech of John Brown, the lofty patrician eloquence of Wendell Phillips, and those diamonds of the first water, the great clear essays and greater poems of Emerson.

This literature has often commanding merits, and much of it is very precious to me; but in respect to its national character, all that can be said is that it is tinged, more or less deeply, with America; and the foreign model, the foreign standards, the foreign ideas, dominate over it all.

"At most, our best books were but struggling beams; behold in Leaves of Gra.s.s the immense and absolute sunrise! It is all our own! The nation is in it! In form a series of chants, in substance it is an epic of America. It is distinctively and utterly American. Without model, without imitation, without reminiscence, it is evolved entirely from our own polity and popular life. Look at what it celebrates and contains! hardly to be enumerated without sometimes using the powerful, wondrous phrases of its author, so indissoluble are they with the things described. The essences, the events, the objects of America; the myriad, varied landscapes; the teeming and giant cities; the generous and turbulent populations; the prairie solitudes, the vast pastoral plateaus; the Mississippi; the land dense with villages and farms; the habits, manners, customs; the enormous diversity of temperatures; the immense geography; the red aborigines pa.s.sing away, 'charging the water and the land with names'; the early settlements; the sudden uprising and defiance of the Revolution; the august figure of Washington; the formation and sacredness of the Const.i.tution; the pouring in of the emigrants; the million-masted harbors; the general opulence and comfort; the fisheries, and whaling, and gold-digging, and manufactures, and agriculture; the dazzling movement of new States, rushing to be great; Nevada rising, Dakota rising, Colorado rising; the tumultuous civilization around and beyond the Rocky Mountains, thundering and spreading; the Union impregnable; feudalism in all its forms forever tracked and a.s.saulted; liberty deathless on these sh.o.r.es; the n.o.ble and free character of the people; the equality of male and female; the ardor, the fierceness, the friendship, the dignity, the enterprise, the affection, the courage, the love of music, the pa.s.sion for personal freedom; the mercy and justice and compa.s.sion of the people; the popular faults and vices and crimes; the deference of the President to the private citizen; the image of Christ forever deepening in the public mind as the brother of despised and rejected persons; the promise and wild song of the future; the vision of the Federal Mother, seated with more than antique majesty in the midst of her many children; the pouring glories of the hereafter; the vistas of splendor, incessant and branching, the tremendous elements, breeds, adjustments of America--with all these, with more, with everything transcendent, amazing and new, undimmed by the pale cast of thought, and with the very color and brawn of actual life, the whole gigantic epic of our continental being unwinds in all its magnificent reality in these pages. To understand Greece, study the Iliad and the Odyssey; study Leaves of Gra.s.s to understand America. Her democracy is there.

Would you have a text-book of democracy? The writings of Jefferson are good; De Tocqueville is better; but the great poet always contains historian and philosopher--and to know the comprehending spirit of this country, you shall question these insulted pages."

IV

It would be wearisome to refer in detail to the numerous estimates of Leaves of Gra.s.s which have found print since 1870. The increasing literature about Whitman bespeaks interest, and the kindly tenor of most commentators testifies to the enlarging appreciation of the Good Gray Poet. Within the past decade there have appeared seven biographies of him, all but one of them wholly and frankly lavish in his praise, and that one not unfriendly in criticism. Numerous book chapters have dealt with him in recognition of his genius, and only here and there have there been suggestions of earlier absolute condemnation. Among the biographers have been, in chronological sequence, Richard Maurice Bucke, John Burroughs, John Addington Symonds, Isaac Hull Platt, Geo. R. Carpenter, Bliss Perry, Henry Bryan Binns. Among the notable contributors of book chapters on Whitman may be mentioned from a list of two score or more, Robert Louis Stevenson, in his Studies of Men and Books; A. T. Quiller-Couch, in his Adventures in Criticism; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in his Contemporaries; Havelock Ellis, in The New Spirit; Edward Dowden, in his Studies in Literature; Edmund Gosse, in his Critical Kit-Kats; Hamilton Mabie, in his Backgrounds of Literature; Brander Matthews, in his Aspects of Fiction; Edmund Clarence Stedman, in his Poets of America; George Santayana, in The Poetry of Barbarism; and Algernon Charles Swinburne, in his Studies in Prose and Poetry. These have been mentioned specifically because they average the good and the bad rather than join in a chorus of indiscriminate praise. Indeed, the two last mentioned are distinctly hostile in tone. Swinburne, who in his earlier volume Songs before Sunrise, addressed a long poem, To Walt Whitman in America, fervent in praise,

"Send but a song oversea for us, Heart of their hearts who are free, Heart of their singer to be for us More than our singing can be,"

revoked all his former words of sympathetic admiration and in his later volume, printed in 1894, vehemently fell upon Whitman in this strain:

"There is no subject which may not be treated with success (I do not say there are no subjects which on other than artistic grounds it may not be as well to avoid, it may not be better to pa.s.s by) if the poet, by instinct or by training, knows exactly how to handle it aright, to present it without danger of just or rational offense. For evidence of this truth we need look no further than the pastorals of Virgil and Theocritus. But under the dirty clumsy paws of a harper whose plectrum is a muck-rake any tune will become a chaos of discords, though the motive of the tune should be the first principle of nature--the pa.s.sion of man for woman or the pa.s.sion of woman for man. And the unhealthily demonstrative and obtrusive animalism of the Whitmaniad is as unnatural, as incompatible with the wholesome instincts of human pa.s.sion, as even the filthy and inhuman asceticism of SS. Macarius and Simeon Stylites. If anything can justify the serious and deliberate display of merely physical emotion in literature or in art, it must be one of two things; intense depth of feeling expressed with inspired perfection of simplicity, with divine sublimity of fascination, as by Sappho; or transcendent supremacy of actual and irresistible beauty in such revelation of naked nature as was possible to t.i.tian. But Mr. Whitman's Eve is a drunken apple-woman, indecently sprawling in the slush and garbage of the gutter amid the rotten refuse of her overturned fruit-stall: but Mr. Whitman's Venus is a Hottentot wench under the influence of cantharides and adulterated rum."

Weighing the good and the bad, Robert Louis Stevenson in his essay does not stint admiration nor withhold blame:

"He has chosen a rough, unrhymed, lyrical verse; sometimes instinct with a fine processional movement; often so rugged and careless that it can only be described by saying that he has not taken the trouble to write prose * * * and one thing is certain, that no one can appreciate Whitman's excellences until he has grown accustomed to his faults."

Indicating the att.i.tude of his partisans, John Burroughs' summing up is fairly representative:

"Just as ripe, mellowed, storied, ivy-towered, velvet-turfed England lies back of Tennyson, and is vocal through him; just as canny, covenanting, conscience-burdened, craggy, sharp-tongued Scotland lies back of Carlyle; just as thrifty, well-schooled, well-housed, prudent and moral New England lies back of her group of poets, and is voiced by them--so America as a whole, our turbulent democracy, our self-glorification, our faith in the future, our huge ma.s.s-movements, our continental spirit, our sprawling, sublime and unkempt nature lie back of Whitman, and are implied by his work."

It is not the purpose of this book to interpret Whitman either as a prophet or a poet, except inferentially as the words of his critics may carry distinct impressions. After all, the justest estimate of Whitman and his book is his own. Whitman's puzzling characteristics are best understood if we realize that Leaves of Gra.s.s is an autobiography--and an extraordinarily candid one--of a man whose peculiar temperament found expression in prose-verse. His gentleness, his brusqueness, his egotism, his humility, his grossness, his finer nature, his crudeness, his eloquence, are all here. To him they were the attributes of all mankind.

"I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise; Regardless of others, ever regardful of others, Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man, Stuff'd with the stuff that is coa.r.s.e, and stuff'd with the stuff that is fine."

In his virile young manhood he announced with gusto: "I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world."

In his serene old age he said: "Over the tree-tops I float thee a song."

And this was his conclusion: "I call to the world to distrust the accounts of my friends, but listen to my enemies as I myself do. I charge you forever reject those who would expound me, for I cannot expound myself."

Whoso challenges Whitman's gift of song may not at any rate deny to him the note of melody. This quality is strong in his t.i.tles particularly:

Rise O days from your fathomless deeps.

In cabin'd ships at sea.

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking.

Sands at seventy.

The sobbing of the bells.

Soon shall the winter's foil be here.

Thou mother with thy equal brood.

To the leaven'd soil they trod.

Yon tides with ceaseless swell.

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed.

Sparkles from the wheel.

Brother of all with generous hand.

As a strong bird on pinions free.

For a just estimate of Whitman, as for a clear comprehension of the symbolism contained in Leaves of Gra.s.s, a few blades of the latter will not suffice. It must be all, or none. The two poems here given should be taken, therefore, not as representative of the whole, but as types of two widely variant moods:

Of olden time, when it came to pa.s.s That the beautiful G.o.d, Jesus, should finish his work on earth, Then went Judas, and sold the divine youth, And took pay for his body.

Curst was the deed, even before the sweat of the clutching hand grew dry; And darkness frown'd upon the seller of the like of G.o.d, Where, as though earth lifted her breast to throw him from her, and heaven refus'd him, He hung in the air, self-slaughter'd.

The cycles, with their long shadows, have stalked silently forward Since those days--many a pouch enwrapping meanwhile Its fee, like that paid for the son of Mary.

And still goes one, saying, "What will ye give me, and I will deliver this man unto you?"

And they make the covenant, and pay the pieces of silver.

Look forth, deliverer, Look forth, first-born of the dead, Over the tree-tops of Paradise; See thyself in yet-continued bonds, Toilsome and poor, thou bear'st man's form again, Thou art reviled, scourged, put into prison, Hunted from the arrogant equality of the rest; With staves and swords throng the willing servants of authority, Again they surround thee, mad with devilish spite; Toward thee stretch the hands of a mult.i.tude, like vultures' talons, The nearest spit in thy face, they smite thee with their palms; Bruised, b.l.o.o.d.y, and pinion'd is thy body, More sorrowful than death is thy soul.

Witness of anguish, brother of slaves, Not with thy price closed the price of thine image: And still Iscariot plies his trade.

I

The soul, Forever and forever--longer than soil is brown and solid--longer than water ebbs and flows.

II

Each is not for its own sake, I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky are for religion's sake.

III

In this broad earth of ours, Amid the measureless grossness and the slag, Enclosed and safe within its central heart, Nestles the seed perfection.

By every life a share or more or less, None born but it is born, conceal'd or unconceal'd the seed is waiting.

IV

Do you not see O my brothers and sisters?

It is not chaos or death--it is form, union, plan--it is eternal life--it is Happiness.

V

The song is to the singer, and comes back most to him, The love is to the lover, and comes back most to him--it cannot fail.

VI

I see Hermes, unsuspected, dying, well-beloved, saying to the people _Do not weep for me, This is not my true country, I have lived banish'd from my true country, I now go back there, I return to the celestial sphere where every one goes in his turn._