Whitman Part 7

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 a.s.sert 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 a.s.sociations 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-a.s.sertion, in his life there was none.

His egotism is of the large generous species that never irritates or p.r.i.c.ks 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, att.i.tudes 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 att.i.tude of the ego, the one chanting or talking, towards himself." Of course there is danger in this att.i.tude, 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 sc.r.a.p-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 Gra.s.s" he a.s.sumes an att.i.tude 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 att.i.tude 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 b.u.t.terfly 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 _neglige_ 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, compa.s.sionate, 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 outre 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 pa.s.s 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, inst.i.tutions, 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 pa.s.sion 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 G.o.dlike 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-abas.e.m.e.nt 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 n.o.ble, 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 pa.s.sages, by various figures and allegories, Whitman indicates that he would not have his book cla.s.sed 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 const.i.tutes 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 mult.i.tude of questions and problems, and, what is singular, he brings them in himself; they are implied in his temper, and in his att.i.tude 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 coa.r.s.eness and s.e.xuality of the earth, and the great charity of the earth, and the equilibrium also."

II