III
WALT WHITMAN
Of late years the name of Walt Whitman has been a good deal bandiedabout in books and magazines. It has become familiar both in good andill repute. His works have been largely bespattered with praise by hisadmirers, and cruelly mauled and mangled by irreverent enemies. Now,whether his poetry is good or bad as poetry, is a matter that may admitof a difference of opinion without alienating those who differ. We couldnot keep the peace with a man who should put forward claims to taste andyet depreciate the choruses in "Samson Agonistes"; but, I think, we mayshake hands with one who sees no more in Walt Whitman's volume, from aliterary point of view, than a farrago of incompetent essays in a wrongdirection. That may not be at all our own opinion. We may think that,when a work contains many unforgettable phrases, it cannot be altogetherdevoid of literary merit. We may even see passages of a high poetry hereand there among its eccentric contents. But when all is said, WaltWhitman is neither a Milton nor a Shakespeare; to appreciate his worksis not a condition necessary to salvation; and I would not disinherit ason upon the question, nor even think much the worse of a critic, for Ishould always have an idea what he meant.
What Whitman has to say is another affair from how he says it. It is notpossible to acquit any one of defective intelligence, or else stiffprejudice, who is not interested by Whitman's matter and the spirit itrepresents. Not as a poet, but as what we must call (for lack of a moreexact expression) a prophet, he occupies a curious and prominentposition. Whether he may greatly influence the future or not, he is anotable symptom of the present. As a sign of the times, it would be hardto find his parallel. I should hazard a large wager, for instance, thathe was not unacquainted with the works of Herbert Spencer; and yetwhere, in all the history books, shall we lay our hands on two moreincongruous contemporaries? Mr. Spencer so decorous--I had almost said,so dandy--in dissent; and Whitman, like a large shaggy dog, justunchained, scouring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon. Andwhen was an echo more curiously like a satire, than when Mr. Spencerfound his Synthetic Philosophy reverberated from the other shores of theAtlantic in the "barbaric yawp" of Whitman?
I
Whitman, it cannot be too soon explained, writes up to a system. He wasa theoriser about society before he was a poet. He first perceivedsomething wanting, and then sat down squarely to supply the want. Thereader, running over his works, will find that he takes nearly as muchpleasure in critically expounding his theory of poetry as in makingpoems. This is as far as it can be from the case of the spontaneousvillage minstrel dear to elegy, who has no theory whatever, althoughsometimes he may have fully as much poetry as Whitman. The whole ofWhitman's work is deliberate and preconceived. A man born into a societycomparatively new, full of conflicting elements and interests, could notfail, if he had any thoughts at all, to reflect upon the tendenciesaround him. He saw much good and evil on all sides, not yet settled downinto some more or less unjust compromise as in older nations, but stillin the act of settlement. And he could not but wonder what it would turnout; whether the compromise would be very just or very much the reverse,and give great or little scope for healthy human energies. From idlewonder to active speculation is but a step; and he seems to have beenearly struck with the inefficacy of literature and its extremeunsuitability to the conditions. What he calls "Feudal Literature" couldhave little living action on the tumult of American democracy; what hecalls the "Literature of Woe," meaning the whole tribe of "Werther" andByron, could have no action for good in any time or place. Bothpropositions, if art had none but a direct moral influence, would betrue enough; and as this seems to be Whitman's view, they were trueenough for him. He conceived the idea of a Literature which was toinhere in the life of the present; which was to be, first, human, andnext, American; which was to be brave and cheerful as per contract; togive culture in a popular and poetical presentment; and, in so doing,catch and stereotype some democratic ideal of humanity which should beequally natural to all grades of wealth and education, and suited, inone of his favourite phrases, to "the average man." To the formation ofsome such literature as this his poems are to be regarded as so manycontributions, one sometimes explaining, sometimes superseding, theother: and the whole together not so much a finished work as a body ofsuggestive hints. He does not profess to have built the castle, but hepretends he has traced the lines of the foundation. He has not made thepoetry, but he flatters himself he has done something towards making thepoets.
His notion of the poetic function is ambitious, and coincides roughlywith what Schopenhauer has laid down as the province of themetaphysician. The poet is to gather together for men, and set in order,the materials of their existence. He is "The Answerer"; he is to findsome way of speaking about life that shall satisfy, if only for themoment, man's enduring astonishment at his own position. And besideshaving an answer ready, it is he who shall provoke the question. He mustshake people out of their indifference, and force them to make someelection in this world, instead of sliding dully forward in a dream.Life is a business we are all apt to mismanage; either living recklesslyfrom day to day, or suffering ourselves to be gulled out of our momentsby the inanities of custom. We should despise a man who gave as littleactivity and forethought to the conduct of any other business. But inthis, which is the one thing of all others, since it contains them all,we cannot see the forest for the trees. One brief impression obliteratesanother. There is something stupefying in the recurrence of unimportantthings. And it is only on rare provocations that we can rise to take anoutlook beyond daily concerns, and comprehend the narrow limits andgreat possibilities of our existence. It is the duty of the poet toinduce such moments of clear sight. He is the declared enemy of allliving by reflex action, of all that is done betwixt sleep and waking,of all the pleasureless pleasurings and imaginary duties in which wecoin away our hearts and fritter invaluable years. He has to electrifyhis readers into an instant unflagging activity, founded on a wide andeager observation of the world, and make them direct their ways by asuperior prudence, which has little or nothing in common with the maximsof the copy-book. That many of us lead such lives as they would heartilydisown after two hours' serious reflection on the subject is, I amafraid, a true, and, I am sure, a very galling thought. The EnchantedGround of dead-alive respectability is next, upon the map, to the Beulahof considerate virtue. But there they all slumber and take their rest inthe middle of God's beautiful and wonderful universe; the drowsy headshave nodded together in the same position since first their fathers fellasleep; and not even the sound of the last trumpet can wake them to asingle active thought. The poet has a hard task before him to stir upsuch fellows to a sense of their own and other people's principles inlife.
And it happens that literature is, in some ways, but an indifferentmeans to such an end. Language is but a poor bull's-eye lanternwherewith to show off the vast cathedral of the world; and yet aparticular thing once said in words is so definite and memorable, thatit makes us forget the absence of the many which remain unexpressed;like a bright window in a distant view, which dazzles and confuses oursight of its surroundings. There are not words enough in all Shakespeareto express the merest fraction of a man's experience in an hour. Thespeed of the eyesight and the hearing, and the continual industry of themind, produce, in ten minutes, what it would require a laborious volumeto shadow forth by comparisons and roundabout approaches. If verballogic were sufficient, life would be as plain sailing as a piece ofEuclid. But, as a matter of fact, we make a travesty of the simplestprocess of thought when we put it into words; for the words are allcoloured and forsworn, apply inaccurately, and bring with them, fromformer uses, ideas of praise and blame that have nothing to do with thequestion in hand. So we must always see to it nearly, that we judge bythe realities of life and not by the partial terms that represent themin man's speech; and at times of choice, we must leave words upon oneside, and act upon those brute convictions, unexpressed and perhapsinexpressible, which cannot be flourished in an argument, but which aretruly t
he sum and fruit of our experience. Words are for communication,not for judgment. This is what every thoughtful man knows for himself,for only fools and silly schoolmasters push definitions over far intothe domain of conduct; and the majority of women, not learned in thesescholastic refinements, live all-of-a-piece and unconsciously, as a treegrows, without caring to put a name upon their acts or motives. Hence, anew difficulty for Whitman's scrupulous and argumentative poet: he mustdo more than waken up the sleepers to his words; he must persuade themto look over the book and at life with their own eyes.
This side of truth is very present to Whitman; it is this that he meanswhen he tells us that "To glance with an eye confounds the learning ofall times." But he is not unready. He is never weary of descanting onthe undebatable conviction that is forced upon our minds by the presenceof other men, of animals, or of inanimate things. To glance with an eye,were it only at a chair or a park railing, is by far a more persuasiveprocess, and brings us to a far more exact conclusion than to read theworks of all the logicians extant. If both, by a large allowance, may besaid to end in certainty, the certainty in the one case transcends theother to an incalculable degree. If people see a lion, they run away; ifthey only apprehend a deduction, they keep wandering around in anexperimental humour. Now, how is the poet to convince like nature, andnot like books? Is there no actual piece of nature that he can show theman to his face, as he might show him a tree if they were walkingtogether? Yes, there is one: the man's own thoughts. In fact, if thepoet is to speak efficaciously, he must say what is already in hishearer's mind. That, alone, the hearer will believe; that, alone, hewill be able to apply intelligently to the facts of life. Anyconviction, even if it be a whole system or a whole religion, must passinto the condition of commonplace, or postulate, before it becomes fullyoperative. Strange excursions and high-flying theories may interest, butthey cannot rule behaviour. Our faith is not the highest truth that weperceive, but the highest that we have been able to assimilate into thevery texture and method of our thinking. It is not, therefore, byflashing before a man's eyes the weapons of dialectic; it is not byinduction, deduction, or construction; it is not by forcing him on fromone stage of reasoning to another, that the man will be effectuallyrenewed. He cannot be made to believe anything; but he can be made tosee that he has always believed it. And this is the practical canon. Itis when the reader cries, "Oh, I know!" and is, perhaps, half irritatedto see how nearly the author has forestalled his own thoughts, that heis on the way to what is called in theology a Saving Faith.
Here we have the key to Whitman's attitude. To give a certain unity ofideal to the average population of America--to gather their activitiesabout some conception of humanity that shall be central and normal, ifonly for the moment--the poet must portray that population as it is.Like human law, human poetry is simply declaratory. If any ideal ispossible, it must be already in the thoughts of the people; and, by thesame reason, in the thoughts of the poet, who is one of them. And henceWhitman's own formula: "The poet is individual--he is complete inhimself: the others are as good as he; only he sees it, and they donot." To show them how good they are, the poet must study hisfellow-countrymen and himself somewhat like a traveller on the hunt forhis book of travels. There is a sense, of course, in which all truebooks are books of travel; and all genuine poets must run the risk ofbeing charged with the traveller's exaggeration; for to whom are suchbooks more surprising than to those whose own life is faithfully andsmartly pictured? But this danger is all upon one side; and you mayjudiciously flatter the portrait without any likelihood of the sitter'sdisowning it for a faithful likeness. And so Whitman has reasoned: thatby drawing at first-hand from himself and his neighbours, acceptingwithout shame the inconsistencies and brutalities that go to make upman, and yet treating the whole in a high, magnanimous spirit, he wouldmake sure of belief, and at the same time encourage people forward bythe means of praise.
II
We are accustomed nowadays to a great deal of puling over thecircumstances in which we are placed. The great refinement of manypoetical gentlemen has rendered them practically unfit for the jostlingand ugliness of life, and they record their unfitness at considerablelength. The bold and awful poetry of Job's complaint produces too manyflimsy imitators; for there is always something consolatory in grandeur,but the symphony transposed for the piano becomes hysterically sad. Thisliterature of woe, as Whitman calls it, this _Maladie de Rene_, as welike to call it in Europe, is in many ways a most humiliating and sicklyphenomenon. Young gentlemen with three or four hundred a year of privatemeans look down from a pinnacle of doleful experience on all the grownand hearty men who have dared to say a good word for life since thebeginning of the world. There is no prophet but the melancholy Jacques,and the blue devils dance on all our literary wires.
It would be a poor service to spread culture, if this be its result,among the comparatively innocent and cheerful ranks of men. When ourlittle poets have to be sent to look at the ploughman and learn wisdom,we must be careful how we tamper with our ploughmen. Where a man in notthe best of circumstances preserves composure of mind, and relishes aleand tobacco, and his wife and children, in the intervals of dull andunremunerative labour; where a man in this predicament can afford alesson by the way to what are called his intellectual superiors, thereis plainly something to be lost, as well as something to be gained, byteaching him to think differently. It is better to leave him as he isthan to teach him whining. It is better that he should go without thecheerful lights of culture, if cheerless doubt and paralysingsentimentalism are to be the consequence. Let us, by all means, fightagainst that hidebound stolidity of sensation and sluggishness of mindwhich blurs and decolorises for poor natures the wonderful pageant ofconsciousness; let us teach people, as much as we can, to enjoy, andthey will learn for themselves to sympathise; but let us see to it,above all, that we give these lessons in a brave, vivacious note, andbuild the man up in courage while we demolish its substitute,indifference.
Whitman is alive to all this. He sees that, if the poet is to be of anyhelp, he must testify to the livableness of life. His poems, he tellsus, are to be "hymns of the praise of things." They are to make for acertain high joy in living, or what he calls himself "a brave delightfit for freedom's athletes." And he has had no difficulty in introducinghis optimism: it fitted readily enough with his system; for the averageman is truly a courageous person and truly fond of living. One ofWhitman's remarks upon this head is worth quotation, as he is thereperfectly successful, and does precisely what he designs to dothroughout: Takes ordinary and even commonplace circumstances; throwsthem out, by a happy turn of thinking, into significance and somethinglike beauty; and tacks a hopeful moral lesson to the end.
"The passionate tenacity of hunters, woodmen, early risers, cultivators of gardens and orchards and fields, he says, the love of healthy women for the manly form, seafaring persons, drivers of horses, the passion for light and the open air,--all is an old unvaried sign of the unfailing perception of beauty, and of a residence of the poetic in outdoor people."
There seems to me something truly original in this choice of triteexamples. You will remark how adroitly Whitman begins, hunters andwoodmen being confessedly romantic. And one thing more. If he had said"the love of healthy men for the female form," he would have said almosta silliness; for the thing has never been dissembled out of delicacy,and is so obvious as to be a public nuisance. But by reversing it, hetells us something not unlike news; something that sounds quite freshlyin words; and, if the reader be a man, gives him a moment of greatself-satisfaction and spiritual aggrandisement. In many differentauthors you may find passages more remarkable for grammar, but few of amore ingenious turn, and none that could be more to the point in ourconnection. The tenacity of many ordinary people in ordinary pursuits isa sort of standing challenge to everybody else. If one man can growabsorbed in delving his garden, others may grow absorbed and happy oversomething else. Not to be upsides in this with any groom or gardener isto be
very meanly organised. A man should be ashamed to take his food ifhe has not alchemy enough in his stomach to turn some of it into intenseand enjoyable occupation.
Whitman tries to reinforce this cheerfulness by keeping up a sort ofoutdoor atmosphere of sentiment. His book, he tells us, should be read;"among the cooling influences of external nature"; and thisrecommendation, like that other famous one which Hawthorne prefixed tohis collected tales, is in itself a character of the work. Every one whohas been upon a walking or a boating tour, living in the open air, withthe body in constant exercise and the mind in fallow, knows true easeand quiet. The irritating action of the brain is set at rest; we thinkin a plain, unfeverish temper; little things seem big enough, and greatthings no longer portentous; and the world is smilingly accepted as itis. This is the spirit that Whitman inculcates and parades. He thinksvery ill of the atmosphere of parlours or libraries. Wisdom keeps schooloutdoors. And he has the art to recommend this attitude of mind bysimply pluming himself upon it as a virtue; so that the reader, to keepthe advantage over his author which most readers enjoy, is tricked intoprofessing the same view. And this spirit, as it is his chief lesson, isthe greatest charm of his work. Thence, in spite of an uneven andemphatic key of expression, something trenchant and straightforward,something simple and surprising, distinguishes his poems. He has sayingsthat come home to one like the Bible. We fall upon Whitman, after theworks of so many men who write better, with a sense of relief fromstrain, with a sense of touching nature, as when one passes out of theflaring, noisy thoroughfares of a great city, into what he himself hascalled, with unexcelled imaginative justice of language, "the huge andthoughtful night." And his book in consequence, whatever may be thefinal judgment of its merit, whatever may be its influence on thefuture, should be in the hands of all parents and guardians as aspecific for the distressing malady of being seventeen years old.Green-sickness yields to his treatment as to a charm of magic; and theyouth, after a short course of reading, ceases to carry the universeupon his shoulders.
III
Whitman is not one of those who can be deceived by familiarity. Heconsiders it just as wonderful that there are myriads of stars as thatone man should rise from the dead. He declares "a hair on the back ofhis hand just as curious as any special revelation." His whole life isto him what it was to Sir Thomas Browne,--one perpetual miracle.Everything is strange, everything unaccountable, everything beautiful;from a bug to the moon, from the sight of the eyes to the appetite forfood. He makes it his business to see things as if he saw them for thefirst time, and professes astonishment on principle. But he has noleaning towards mythology; avows his contempt for what he calls"unregenerate poetry"; and does not mean by nature
"the smooth walks, trimmed edges, butterflies, posies, and nightingales of the English poets, but the whole orb, with its geologic history, the Kosmos, carrying fire and snow, that rolls through the illimitable areas, light as a feather though weighing billions of tons."
Nor is this exhaustive; for in his character of idealist allimpressions, all thoughts, trees and people, love and faith, astronomy,history, and religion, enter upon equal terms into his notion of theuniverse. He is not against religion; not, indeed, against any religion.He wishes to drag with a larger net, to make a more comprehensivesynthesis, than any or than all of them put together. In feeling afterthe central type of man, he must embrace all eccentricities; hiscosmology must subsume all cosmologies, and the feelings that gave birthto them; his statement of facts must include all religion and allirreligion, Christ and Boodha, God and the devil. The world as it is,and the whole world as it is, physical, and spiritual, and historical,with its good and bad, with its manifold inconsistencies, is what hewishes to set forth, in strong, picturesque, and popular lineaments, forthe understanding of the average man. One of his favourite endeavours isto get the whole matter into a nutshell; to knock the four corners ofthe universe, one after another, about his readers' ears; to hurry him,in breathless phrases, hither and thither, back and forward, in time andspace; to focus all this about his own momentary personality; and then,drawing the ground from under his feet, as if by some cataclysm ofnature, to plunge him into the unfathomable abyss sown with enormoussuns and systems, and among the inconceivable numbers and magnitudes andvelocities of the heavenly bodies. So that he concludes by striking intous some sense of that disproportion of things which Shelley hasilluminated by the ironical flash of these eight words: The desire ofthe moth for the star.
The same truth, but to what a different purpose! Whitman's moth ismightily at his ease about all the planets in heaven, and cannot thinktoo highly of our sublunary tapers. The universe is so large thatimagination flags in the effort to conceive it; but here, in themeantime, is the world under our feet, a very warm and habitable corner."The earth, that is sufficient; I do not want the constellations anynearer," he remarks. And again: "Let your soul stand cool and composed,"says he, "before a million universes." It is the language of atranscendental common sense, such as Thoreau held and sometimes uttered.But Whitman, who has a somewhat vulgar inclination for technical talkand the jargon of philosophy, is not content with a few pregnant hints;he must put the dots upon his i's; he must corroborate the songs ofApollo by some of the darkest talk of human metaphysic. He tells hisdisciples that they must be ready "to confront the growing arrogance ofRealism." Each person is, for himself, the keystone and the occasion ofthis universal edifice. "Nothing, not God," he says, "is greater to onethan oneself is"; a statement with an irreligious smack at the firstsight; but like most startling sayings, a manifest truism on a second.He will give effect to his own character without apology; he sees "thatthe elementary laws never apologise." "I reckon," he adds, with quaintcolloquial arrogance, "I reckon I behave no prouder than the level Iplant my house by, after all." The level follows the law of its being;so, unrelentingly, will he; everything, every person, is good in his ownplace and way; God is the maker of all, and all are in one design. Forhe believes in God, and that with a sort of blasphemous security. "Noarray of terms," quoth he, "no array of terms can say how much at peaceI am about God and about death." There certainly never was a prophet whocarried things with a higher hand; he gives us less a body of dogmasthan a series of proclamations by the grace of God; and language, youwill observe, positively fails him to express how far he stands abovethe highest human doubts and trepidations.
But next in order of truths to a person's sublime conviction of himself,comes the attraction of one person for another, and all that we mean bythe word love:--
"The dear love of man for his comrade--the attraction of friend for friend, Of the-well-married husband and wife, of children and parents, Of city for city and land for land."
The solitude of the most sublime idealist is broken in upon by otherpeople's faces; he sees a look in their eyes that corresponds tosomething in his own heart; there comes a tone in their voices whichconvicts him of a startling weakness for his fellow-creatures. While heis hymning the _ego_ and commercing with God and the universe, a womangoes below his window; and at the turn of her skirt, or the colour ofher eyes, Icarus is recalled from heaven by the run. Love is sostartlingly real that it takes rank upon an equal footing of realitywith the consciousness of personal existence. We are as heartilypersuaded of the identity of those we love as of our own identity. Andso sympathy pairs with self-assertion, the two gerents of human life onearth; and Whitman's ideal man must not only be strong, free, andself-reliant in himself, but his freedom must be bounded and hisstrength perfected by the most intimate, eager, and long-suffering lovefor others. To some extent this is taking away with the left hand whathas been so generously given with the right. Morality has beenceremoniously extruded from the door only to be brought in again by thewindow. We are told, on one page, to do as we please; and on the next weare sharply upbraided for not having done as the author pleases. We arefirst assured that we are the finest fellows in the world in our ownright; and then it appears that we are only fine fellows in so fa
r as wepractise a most quixotic code of morals. The disciple who saw himself inclear ether a moment before is plunged down again among the fogs andcomplications of duty. And this is all the more overwhelming becauseWhitman insists not only on love between sex and sex, and betweenfriends of the same sex, but in the field of the less intense politicalsympathies; and his ideal man must not only be a generous friend but aconscientious voter into the bargain.
His method somewhat lessens the difficulty. He is not, the reader willremember, to tell us how good we ought to be, but to remind us how goodwe are. He is to encourage us to be free and kind by proving that we arefree and kind already. He passes our corporate life under review, toshow that it is upheld by the very virtues of which he makes himself theadvocate. "There is no object so soft," he says somewhere in his big,plain way, "there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for thewheel'd universe." Rightly understood, it is on the softest of allobjects, the sympathetic heart, that the wheel of society turns easilyand securely as on a perfect axle. There is no room, of course, fordoubt or discussion, about conduct, where every one is to follow thelaw of his being with exact compliance. Whitman hates doubt, deprecatesdiscussion, and discourages to his utmost the craving, carpingsensibilities of the conscience. We are to imitate, to use one of hisabsurd and happy phrases, "the satisfaction and aplomb of animals." Ifhe preaches a sort of ranting Christianity in morals, a fit consequentto the ranting optimism of his cosmology, it is because he declares itto be the original deliverance of the human heart; or at least, for hewould be honestly historical in method, of the human heart as at presentChristianised. His is a morality without a prohibition; his policy isone of encouragement all round. A man must be a born hero to come up toWhitman's standard in the practice of any of the positive virtues; butof a negative virtue, such as temperance or chastity, he has so littleto say, that the reader need not be surprised if he drops a word or twoupon the other side. He would lay down nothing that would be a clog; hewould prescribe nothing that cannot be done ruddily, in a heat. Thegreat point is to get people under way. To the faithful Whitmanite thiswould be justified by the belief that God made all, and that all wasgood; the prophet, in this doctrine, has only to cry "Tally-ho," andmankind will break into a gallop on the road to El Dorado. Perhaps, toanother class of minds, it may look like the result of the somewhatcynical reflection that you will not make a kind man out of one who isunkind by any precepts under heaven; tempered by the belief that, innatural circumstances, the large majority is well disposed. Thence itwould follow, that if you can only get every one to feel more warmly andact more courageously, the balance of results will be for good.
So far, you see, the doctrine is pretty coherent as a doctrine; as apicture of man's life it is incomplete and misleading, althougheminently cheerful. This he is himself the first to acknowledge; for ifhe is prophetic in anything, it is in his noble disregard ofconsistency. "Do I contradict myself?" he asks somewhere; and then patcomes the answer, the best answer ever given in print, worthy of a sage,or rather of a woman: "Very well, then, I contradict myself!" with thisaddition, not so feminine and perhaps not altogether so satisfactory: "Iam large--I contain multitudes." Life, as a matter of fact, partakeslargely of the nature of tragedy. The gospel according to Whitman, evenif it be not so logical, has this advantage over the gospel according toPangloss, that it does not utterly disregard the existence of temporalevil. Whitman accepts the fact of disease and wretchedness like anhonest man; and instead of trying to qualify it in the interest of hisoptimism, sets himself to spur people up to be helpful. He expresses aconviction, indeed, that all will be made up to the victims in the end;that "what is untried and afterward" will fail no one, not even "the oldman who has lived without purpose and feels it with bitterness worsethan gall." But this is not to palliate our sense of what is hard ormelancholy in the present. Pangloss, smarting under one of the worstthings that ever was supposed to come from America, consoled himselfwith the reflection that it was the price we have to pay for cochineal.And with that murderous parody, logical optimism and the praises of thebest of possible worlds went irrevocably out of season, and have been nomore heard of in the mouths of reasonable men. Whitman spares us allallusions to the cochineal; he treats evil and sorrow in a spirit almostas of welcome; as an old sea-dog might have welcomed the sight of theenemy's topsails off the Spanish Main. There, at least, he seems to say,is something obvious to be done. I do not know many better things inliterature than the brief pictures--brief and vivid like things seen bylightning,--with which he tries to stir up the world's heart upon theside of mercy. He braces us, on the one hand, with examples of heroicduty and helpfulness; on the other, he touches us with pitiful instancesof people needing help. He knows how to make the heart beat at a bravestory; to inflame us with just resentment over the hunted slave; to stopour mouths for shame when he tells of the drunken prostitute. For allthe afflicted, all the weak, all the wicked, a good word is said in aspirit which I can only call one of ultra Christianity; and howeverwild, however contradictory, it may be in parts, this at least may besaid for his book, as it may be said of the Christian Gospels, that noone will read it, however respectable, but he gets a knock upon hisconscience; no one however fallen, but he finds a kindly and supportingwelcome.
IV
Nor has he been content with merely blowing the trumpet for the battleof well-doing; he has given to his precepts the authority of his ownbrave example. Naturally a grave, believing man, with little or no senseof humour, he has succeeded as well in life as in his printedperformances. The spirit that was in him has come forth most eloquentlyin his actions. Many who have only read his poetry have been tempted toset him down as an ass, or even as a charlatan; but I never met any onewho had known him personally who did not profess a solid affection andrespect for the man's character. He practises as he professes; he feelsdeeply that Christian love for all men, that toleration, that cheerfuldelight in serving others, which he often celebrates in literature witha doubtful measure of success. And perhaps, out of all his writings, thebest and the most human and convincing passages are to be found in"these soil'd and creased little livraisons, each composed of a sheet ortwo of paper, folded small to carry in the pocket, and fastened with apin," which he scribbled during the war by the bedsides of the woundedor in the excitement of great events. They are hardly literature in theformal meaning of the word; he has left his jottings for the most partas he made them; a homely detail, a word from the lips of a dyingsoldier, a business memorandum, the copy of a letter--short,straightforward to the point, with none of the trappings of composition;but they breathe a profound sentiment, they give us a vivid look at oneof the sides of life, and they make us acquainted with a man whom it isan honour to love.
Whitman's intense Americanism, his unlimited belief in the future ofThese States (as, with reverential capitals, he loves to call them),made the war a period of great trial to his soul. The new virtue,Unionism, of which he is the sole inventor, seemed to have fallen intopremature unpopularity. All that he loved, hoped, or hated, hung in thebalance. And the game of war was not only momentous to him in itsissues; it sublimated his spirit by its heroic displays, and torturedhim intimately by the spectacle of its horrors. It was a theatre, it wasa place of education it was like a season of religious revival. Hewatched Lincoln going daily to his work; he studied and fraternised withyoung soldiery passing to the front; above all, he walked the hospitals,reading the Bible, distributing clean clothes, or apples, or tobacco; apatient, helpful, reverend man, full of kind speeches.
His memoranda of this period are almost bewildering to read. From onepoint of view they seem those of a district visitor; from another, theylook like the formless jottings of an artist in the picturesque. Morethan one woman, on whom I tried the experiment, immediately claimed thewriter for a fellow-woman. More than one literary purist might identifyhim as a shoddy newspaper correspondent without the necessary faculty ofstyle. And yet the story touches home; and if you are of the weepingorder of mankind,
you will certainly find your eyes filled with tears,of which you have no reason to be ashamed. There is only one way tocharacterise a work of this order, and that is to quote. Here is apassage from a letter to a mother, unknown to Whitman, whose son died inhospital:--
"Frank, as far as I saw, had everything requisite in surgical treatment, nursing, etc. He had watches much of the time. He was so good and well-behaved, and affectionate, I myself liked him very much. I was in the habit of coming in afternoons and sitting by him, and he liked to have me--liked to put out his arm and lay his hand on my knee--would keep it so a long while. Toward the last he was more restless and flighty at night--often fancied himself with his regiment--by his talk sometimes seem'd as if his feelings were hurt by being blamed by his officers for something he was entirely innocent of--said 'I never in my life was thought capable of such a thing, and never was.' At other times he would fancy himself talking as it seem'd to children or such like, his relatives, I suppose, and giving them good advice; would talk to them a long while. All the time he was out of his head not one single bad word, or thought, or idea escaped him. It was remark'd that many a man's conversation in his senses was not half so good as Frank's delirium.
"He was perfectly willing to die--he had become very weak, and had suffer'd a good deal, and was perfectly resign'd, poor boy. I do not know his past life, but I feel as if it must have been good. At any rate what I saw of him here, under the most trying circumstances, with a painful wound, and among strangers, I can say that he behaved so brave, so composed, and so sweet and affectionate, it could not be surpassed. And now, like many other noble and good men, after serving his country as a soldier, he has yielded up his young life at the very outset in her service. Such things are gloomy--yet there is a text, 'God doeth all things well,' the meaning of which, after due time, appears to the soul.
"I thought perhaps a few words, though from a stranger, about your son, from one who was with him at the last, might be worth while, for I loved the young man, though I but saw him immediately to lose him."
It is easy enough to pick holes in the grammar of this letter, but whatare we to say of its profound goodness and tenderness? It is written asthough he had the mother's face before his eyes, and saw her wincing inthe flesh at every word. And what, again, are we to say of its sobertruthfulness, not exaggerating, not running to phrases, not seeking tomake a hero out of what was only an ordinary but good and brave youngman? Literary reticence is not Whitman's stronghold; and this reticenceis not literary, but humane; it is not that of a good artist but that ofa good man. He knew that what the mother wished to hear about was Frank;and he told her about her Frank as he was.
V
Something should be said of Whitman's style, for style is of the essenceof thinking. And where a man is so critically deliberate as our author,and goes solemnly about his poetry for an ulterior end, every indicationis worth notice. He has chosen a rough, unrhymed, lyrical verse;sometimes instinct with a fine processional movement; often so ruggedand careless that it can only be described by saying that he has nottaken the trouble to write prose. I believe myself that it was selectedprincipally because it was easy to write, although not withoutrecollections of the marching measures of some of the prose in ourEnglish Old Testament. According to Whitman, on the other hand, "thetime has arrived to essentially break down the barriers of form betweenProse and Poetry ... for the most cogent purposes of those great inlandstates, and for Texas, and California, and Oregon";--a statement whichis among the happiest achievements of American humour. He calls hisverses "recitatives," in easily followed allusion to a musical form."Easily written, loose-fingered chords," he cries, "I feel the thrum ofyour climax and close." Too often, I fear, he is the only one who canperceive the rhythm; and in spite of Mr. Swinburne, a great part of hiswork considered as verses is poor bald stuff. Considered, not as verse,but as speech, a great part of it is full of strange and admirablemerits. The right detail is seized; the right word, bold and trenchant,is thrust into its place. Whitman has small regard to literarydecencies, and is totally free from literary timidities. He is neitherafraid of being slangy nor of being dull; nor, let me add, of beingridiculous. The result is a most surprising compound of plain grandeur,sentimental affectation, and downright nonsense. It would be useless tofollow his detractors and give instances of how bad he can be at hisworst; and perhaps it would be not much wiser to give extractedspecimens of how happily he can write when he is at his best. Thesecome in to most advantage in their own place; owing something, it maybe, to the offset of their curious surroundings. And one thing iscertain, that no one can appreciate Whitman's excellences until he hasgrown accustomed to his faults. Until you are content to pick poetry outof his pages almost as you must pick it out of a Greek play in Bohn'stranslation, your gravity will be continually upset, your earsperpetually disappointed, and the whole book will be no more to you thana particularly flagrant production by the Poet Close.
A writer of this uncertain quality was, perhaps, unfortunate in takingfor thesis the beauty of the world as it now is, not only on thehill-tops but in the factory; not only by the harbour full of statelyships, but in the magazine of the hopelessly prosaic hatter. To showbeauty in common things is the work of the rarest tact. It is not to bedone by the wishing. It is easy to posit as a theory, but to bring ithome to men's minds is the problem of literature, and is onlyaccomplished by rare talent, and in comparatively rare instances. To bidthe whole world stand and deliver, with a dogma in one's right hand byway of pistol; to cover reams of paper in a galloping, headstrong vein;to cry louder and louder over everything as it comes up, and make nodistinction in one's enthusiasm over the most incomparable matters; toprove one's entire want of sympathy for the jaded, literary palate, bycalling, not a spade a spade, but a hatter a hatter, in a lyricalapostrophe;--this, in spite of all the airs of inspiration, is not theway to do it. It may be very wrong, and very wounding to a respectablebranch of industry, but the word "hatter" cannot be used seriously inemotional verse; not to understand this is to have no literary tact; andI would, for his own sake, that this were the only inadmissibleexpression with which Whitman had bedecked his pages. The book teemswith similar comicalities; and, to a reader who is determined to take itfrom that side only, presents a perfect carnival of fun.
A good deal of this is the result of theory playing its usual vile trickupon the artist. It is because he is a Democrat that Whitman must havein the hatter. If you may say Admiral, he reasons, why may you not sayHatter? One man is as good as another, and it is the business of the"great poet" to show poetry in the life of the one as well as the other.A most incontrovertible sentiment, surely, and one which nobody wouldthink of controverting, where--and here is the point--where any beautyhas been shown. But how, where that is not the case? where the hatter issimply introduced, as God made him and as his fellow-men have miscalledhim, at the crisis of a high-flown rhapsody? And what are we to say,where a man of Whitman's notable capacity for putting things in abright, picturesque, and novel way, simply gives up the attempt, andindulges, with apparent exultation, in an inventory of trades orimplements, with no more colour or coherence than so many index-wordsout of a dictionary? I do not know that we can say anything, but that itis a prodigiously amusing exhibition for a line or so. The worst of itis, that Whitman must have known better. The man is a great critic, and,so far as I can make out, a good one; and how much criticism does itrequire to know that capitulation is not description, or that fingeringon a dumb keyboard, with whatever show of sentiment and execution, isnot at all the same thing as discoursing music? I wish I could believehe was quite honest with us; but, indeed, who was ever quite honest whowrote a book for a purpose? It is a flight beyond the reach of humanmagnanimity.
One other point, where his means failed him, must be touched upon,however shortly. In his desire to accept all facts loyally and simply,it fell within his programme to speak at some length and with someplainness on
what is, for I really do not know what reason, the mostdelicate of subjects. Seeing in that one of the most serious andinteresting parts of life, he was aggrieved that it should be lookedupon as ridiculous or shameful. No one speaks of maternity with histongue in his cheek; and Whitman made a bold push to set the sanctity offatherhood beside the sanctity of motherhood, and introduce this alsoamong the things that can be spoken of without either a blush or a wink.But the Philistines have been too strong; and, to say truth, Whitman hadrather played the fool. We may be thoroughly conscious that his end isimproving; that it would be a good thing if a window were opened onthese close privacies of life; that on this subject, as on all others,he now and then lets fall a pregnant saying. But we are not satisfied.We feel that he was not the man for so difficult an enterprise. He losesour sympathy in the character of a poet by attracting too much of ourattention in that of a Bull in a China Shop. And where, by a little moreart, we might have been solemnised ourselves, it is too often Whitmanalone who is solemn in the face of an audience somewhat indecorouslyamused.
VI
Lastly, as most important, after all, to human beings in our disputablestate, what is that higher prudence which was to be the aim and issue ofthese deliberate productions?
Whitman is too clever to slip into a succinct formula. If he could haveadequately said his say in a single proverb, it is to be presumed hewould not have put himself to the trouble of writing several volumes. Itwas his programme to state as much as he could of the world with all itscontradictions, and leave the upshot with God who planned it. What hehas made of the world and the world's meanings is to be found at largein his poems. These altogether give his answers to the problems ofbelief and conduct; in many ways righteous and high-spirited, in someways loose and contradictory. And yet there are two passages from thepreface to the "Leaves of Grass" which do pretty well condense histeaching on all essential points, and yet preserve a measure of hisspirit.
"This is what you shall do," he says in the one, "love the earth, and sun, and animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labour to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men; go freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and mothers of families, read these leaves (his own works) in the open air every season of every year of your life; re-examine all you have been told at school or church, or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul."
"The prudence of the greatest poet," he adds in the other--and the greatest poet is, of course, himself--"knows that the young man who composedly perilled his life and lost it, has done exceeding well for himself; while the man who has not perilled his life, and retains it to old age in riches and ease, has perhaps achieved nothing for himself worth mentioning; and that only that person has no great prudence to learn, who has learnt to prefer real long-lived things, and favours body and soul the same, and perceives the indirect surely following the direct, and what evil or good he does leaping onward and waiting to meet him again, and who in his spirit, in any emergency whatever, neither hurries nor avoids death."
There is much that is Christian in these extracts, startlinglyChristian. Any reader who bears in mind Whitman's own advice and"dismisses whatever insults his own soul" will find plenty that isbracing, brightening, and chastening to reward him for a little patienceat first. It seems hardly possible that any being should get evil fromso healthy a book as the "Leaves of Grass," which is simply comicalwhenever it falls short of nobility; but if there be any such, whocannot both take and leave, who cannot let a single opportunity pass bywithout some unworthy and unmanly thought, I should have as greatdifficulty, and neither more nor less, in recommending the works ofWhitman as in lending them Shakespeare, or letting them go abroadoutside of the grounds of a private asylum.