Whitman Part 12

"Of these States the poet is the equable man, Not in him but off from him things are grotesque, eccentric, fail of their full returns, Nothing out of its place is good, nothing in its place is bad, He bestows on every object or quality its fit proportion, neither more nor less, He is the arbiter of the diverse, he is the key, He is the equalizer of his age and land, He supplies what wants supplying, he checks what wants checking, In peace out of him speaks the spirit of peace, large, rich, thrifty, building populous towns, encouraging agriculture, arts, commerce, lighting the study of man, the soul, health, immortality, government, In war he is the best backer of the war, he fetches artillery as good as the engineer's, he can make every word he speaks draw blood, The years straying toward infidelity he withholds by his steady faith, He is no arguer, he is judgment (nature accepts him absolutely), He judges not as the judge judges, but as the sun falling round a helpless thing, As he sees the farthest he has the most faith, His thoughts are the hymns of the praise of things, In the dispute on G.o.d and eternity he is silent, He sees eternity less like a play with a prologue and denouement, He sees eternity in men and women, he does not see men and omen as dreams or dots.

"Rhymes and rhymers pa.s.s away, poems distill'd from other poems pa.s.s away, The swarms of reflectors and the polite pa.s.s, and leave ashes, Admirers, impostors, obedient persons, make but the soil of literature."

Folded up in these sentences, often many times folded up, is Whitman's idea of the poet, the begetter, the reconciler; not the priest of the beautiful, but the master of the All, who does not appear once in centuries.

We hear nothing of the popular conception of the poet, well reflected in these lines of Tennyson:--

"The poet in a golden clime was born, with golden stars above."

"Golden stars" and "golden climes" do not figure at all in Whitman's pages; the spirit of romance is sternly excluded.

Whitman's ideal poet is the most composite man, rich in temperament, rank in the human attributes, embracing races and eras in himself. All men see themselves in him:--

"The mechanic takes him for a mechanic, And the soldier supposes him to be a soldier, and the sailor that he has followed the sea, And the authors take him for an author, and the artists for an artist, And the laborers perceive he could labor with them and love them, No matter what the work is, that he is the one to follow it, or has followed it, No matter what the nation, that he might find his brothers and sisters there.

"The gentleman of perfect blood acknowledges his perfect blood, The insulter, the prost.i.tute, the angry person, the beggar, see themselves in the ways of him, he strangely trans.m.u.tes them, They are not vile any more, they hardly know themselves they are so grown."

Let us hold the poet to his own ideals, and not condemn him because he has not aimed at something foreign to himself.

The questions which Whitman puts to him who would be an American poet may fairly be put to himself.

"Are you faithful to things? Do you teach what the land and sea, the bodies of men, womanhood, amativeness, heroic angers, teach?

Have you sped through fleeting customs, popularities?

Can you hold your hand against all seductions, follies, whirls, fierce contentions? are you very strong? are you really of the whole people?

Are you not of some coterie? some school, or mere religion?

Are you done with reviews and criticisms of life? animating now to life itself?

Have you vivified yourself from the maternity of these States?

Have you, too, the old, ever-fresh forbearance and impartiality?

What is this you bring my America?

Is it uniform with my country?

Is it not something that has been better done or told before?

Have you not imported this or the spirit of it in some ship?

Is it not a mere tale? a rhyme? a pettiness?--is the good old cause in it?

Has it not dangled long at the heels of the poets, politicians, literats of enemies' lands?

Does it not a.s.sume that what is notoriously gone is still here?

Does it answer universal needs? will it improve manners?

Can your performance face the open fields and the seaside?

Will it absorb into me as I absorb food, air, to appear again in my strength, gait, face?

Have real employments contributed to it? Original makers, not mere amanuenses?

So far as Whitman's poetry falls within any of the old divisions it is lyrical,--a personal and individual utterance. Open the book anywhere and you are face to face with a man. His eye is fixed upon you. It is a man's voice you hear, and it is directed to _you_. He is not elaborating a theme: he is suggesting a relation or hinting a meaning. He is not chiseling, or carving a work of art: he is roughly outlining a man; he is planting a seed, or tilling a field.

XXV

I believe it was the lamented Professor Clifford who first used the term "cosmic emotion" in connection with "Leaves of Gra.s.s." Whitman's atmosphere is so distinctly outside of and above that which ministers to our social and domestic wants,--the confined and perfumed air of an indoor life; his mood and temper are so habitually begotten by the contemplation of the orbs and the laws and processes of universal nature, that the phrase often comes to mind in considering him. He is not in any sense, except perhaps in a few minor pieces, a domestic and fireside poet,--a solace to our social instincts and cultivated ideals. He is too large, too aboriginal, too elemental, too strong for that. I seem to understand and appreciate him best when I keep in mind the earth as a whole, and its relation to the system. Any large view or thought, or survey of life or mankind, is a preparation for him. He demands the outdoor temper and habit, he demands a sense of s.p.a.ce and power, he demands above all things a feeling for reality. "Vastness" is a word that applies to him; abysmal man, cosmic consciousness, the standards of the natural universal,--all hint some phase of his genius. His survey of life and duty is from a point not included in any four walls, or in any school or convention. It is a survey from out the depths of being; the breath of worlds and systems is in these utterances. His treatment of s.e.x, of comradeship, of death, of democracy, of religion, of art, of immortality, is in the spirit of the great out-of-doors of the universe; the point of view is cosmic rather than personal or philanthropic. What charity is this!--the charity of sunlight that spares nothing and turns away from nothing. What "heroic nudity"! like the nakedness of rocks and winter trees. What s.e.xuality!

like the l.u.s.t of spring or the push of tides. What welcome to death, as only the night which proves the day!

XXVI

This...o...b..c nature which so thrills and fills Whitman is not at all akin to that which we get in the so-called nature-poets of Wordsworth and his school,--the charm of privacy, of the sequestered, the cosy,--qualities that belong to the art of a domestic, home-loving race, and to lovers of solitude. Tennyson's poetry abounds in these qualities; so does Wordsworth's. There is less of them in Browning, and more of them in the younger poets. That communing with nature, those dear friendships with birds and flowers, that gentle wooing of the wild and sylvan, that flavor of the rural, the bucolic,--all these are important features in the current popular poetry, but they are not to any marked extent characteristic of Whitman. The sentiment of domesticity, love as a sentiment; the attraction of children, home and fireside; the attraction of books, art, travel; our pleasure in the choice, the refined, the artificial,--these are not the things you are to demand of Whitman. You do not demand them of Homer or Dante or the Biblical writers. We are to demand of him the major things, primary things; the lift of great emotions; the cosmic, the universal; the joy of health, of selfhood; the stimulus of the real, the modern, the American; always the large, the virile; always perfect acceptance and triumph.

Whitman's free use of the speech of the common people is doubtless offensive to a fastidious literary taste. Such phrases as "I will be even with you," "what would it amount to," "give in," "not one jot less;"

"young fellows," "old fellows," "stuck up," "every bit as much," "week in and week out," and a thousand others, would jar on the page of any other poet more than on his.

XXVII

William Rossetti says his language has a certain ultimate quality. Another critic speaks of his absolute use of language. Colonel Ingersoll credits him with more supreme words than have been uttered by any other man of our time.

The power to use words was in Whitman's eyes a divine power, and was bought with a price:--

"For only at last after many years, after chast.i.ty, friendship, procreation, prudence, and nakedness, After treading ground, and breasting river and lake, After a loosen'd throat, after absorbing eras, temperaments, races, after knowledge, freedom, crimes, After complete faith, after clarifying elevations and removing obstructions, After these and more, it is just possible there comes to a man, a woman, the divine power to speak words."

Whitman's sense of composition and his rare artistic faculty of using language are seen, as John Addington Symonds says, in the "countless clear and perfect phrases" "which are hung, like golden medals of consummate workmanship and incised form, in rich cl.u.s.ters over every poem he produced. And, what he aimed at above all, these phrases are redolent of the very spirit of the emotions they suggest, communicate the breadth and largeness of the natural things they indicate, embody the essence of realities in living words which palpitate and burn forever."

The great poet is always more or less the original, the abysmal man. He is face to face with universal laws and conditions. He speaks out of a greater exaltation of sentiment than the prose-writer. He takes liberties; he speaks for all men; he is a bird on "pinions free."

XXVIII

In saying or implying that Whitman's aim was not primarily literary or artistic, I am liable to be misunderstood; and when Whitman himself says, "No one will get at my verses who insists upon viewing them as a literary performance, or attempt at such performance, or as aiming mainly toward art or aestheticism," he exposes himself to the same misconception. It is the literary and poetic value of his verses alone that can save them.

Their philosophy, their democracy, their vehement patriotism, their religious ardor, their spirit of comradeship, or what not, will not alone suffice. All depends upon the manner in which these things are presented to us. Do we get the reality, or words about the reality? No matter what the content of the verse, unless into the whole is breathed the breath of the true creative artist they will surely perish. Oblivion awaits every utterance not touched with the life of the spirit. Whitman was as essentially an artist as was Shakespeare or Dante; his work shows the same fusion of imagination, will, emotion, personality; it carries the same quality of real things,--not the same shaping, constructive power, but the same quickening, stimulating power, the same magic use of words. The artist in him is less conscious of itself, is less differentiated from the man, than in the other poets. He objected to having his work estimated for its literary value alone, but in so doing he used the word in a narrow sense.

After all these ages of the a.s.siduous cultivation of literature, there has grown up in men a kind of l.u.s.t of the mere art of writing, just as, after so many generations of religious training, there has grown up a pa.s.sion for religious forms and observances. "Mere literature" has come to be a current phrase in criticism, meaning, I suppose, that the production to which it is applied is notable only for good craftsmanship. In the same spirit one speaks of mere scholarship, or of a certain type of man as a mere gentleman. It was mere literature that Whitman was afraid of, the aesthetic disease, the pa.s.sion for letters, for poetry, divorced from love of life and of things. None knew better than he that the ultimate value of any imaginative and emotional work, even of the Bible, is its literary value. Its spiritual and religious value is inseparably connected with its literary value.

"Leaves of Gra.s.s" is not bookish; it is always the voice of a man, and not of a scholar or conventional poet, that addresses us. We all imbue words more or less with meanings of our own; but, from the point of view I am now essaying, literature is the largest fact, and embraces all inspired utterances. The hymn-book seeks to embody or awaken religious emotion alone; would its religious value be less if its poetic value were more? I think not. The best of the Psalms of David, from the religious point of view, are the best from the literary point of view. What reaches and thrills the soul,--that is great art. What arouses the pa.s.sions--mirth, anger, indignation, pity--may or may not be true art. No one, for instance, can read "Uncle Tom's Cabin" without tears, laughter, anger; but no one, I fancy, could ever get from it that deep, tranquil pleasure and edification that the great imaginative works impart. Keble's poetry is more obviously religious than Wordsworth's or Arnold's, but how short-lived, because it is not embalmed in the true artistic spirit! In all the great poems, there is something as deep and calm as the light and the sky, and as common and universal. I find this something in Whitman. In saying, therefore, that his aim was ulterior to that of art, that he was not begotten by the literary spirit, I only mean that his aim was that of the largest art, and of the most vital and comprehensive literature. We should have heard the last of his "Leaves" long ago had they not possessed unmistakably the vitality of true literature, "incomparable things, incomparably well said," as Emerson remarked.

A scientific or philosophical work lives independently of its literary merit, but an emotional and imaginative work lives only by virtue of its literary merit. Different meanings may be attached to these words "literary merit" by different persons. I use them as meaning that vital and imaginative use of language which is the characteristic of all true literature. The most effective way of saying a thing in the region of the sentiments and emotions,--that is the true literary way.

HIS RELATION TO LIFE AND MORALS

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