things in that way now. We must all specialise; and if you want to
follow the new aims and ideals of art, you must put aside a great
deal of what is called our common humanity, and you must be content
to follow a very narrow path among the stars. I do not mind
speaking quite frankly. I do not think you understand what art is.
It is essentially a mystery, and the artist is a sort of hermit in
the world. It is not a case of 'joys in widest commonalty spread,'
as Daddy Wordsworth said. That is quite a different affair; but art
has got to withdraw itself, to be content to be misunderstood; and
I think that you have just as much parted company with it as your
old friend the banker."
"Well," I said, "we shall see. Anyhow, I will give your new poets a
careful reading, and I shall be glad if I can really admire them,
because, indeed, I don't want to be stranded on a lee shore."
And so my friend departed; and I began to wonder whether the art of
which he spoke was not, after all, as real a thing as the beauty of
my almond-flower and my mezereons! If so, I should like to be able
to include it and understand it, though I do not want to think that
it is the end.
IV
WALT WHITMAN
1
There come days and hours in the lives of the busiest, most active,
most eager of us, when we suddenly realise with a shock or a
shudder, it may be, or perhaps with a sense of solemn mystery, that
has something vast, inspiring, hopeful about it, the solidity and
the isolation of our own identity. Much of our civilised life is an
attempt, not deliberate but instinctive, to escape from this. We
organise ourselves into nations and parties, into sects and
societies, into families and companies, that we may try to persuade
ourselves that we are not alone; and we get nearest to persuading
ourselves that we are at one, when we enter into the secrets of
love or friendship, and feel that we know as we are known. But even
that vision fades, and we become aware, at sad moments, that the
comradeship is over; the soul that came so close to us, smiled in
our eyes, was clasped to our heart, has left us, has passed into
the darkness, or if it still lives and breathes, has drawn away
into the crowd. And then one sees that no fusion is possible, that
half the secrets of the heart must remain unguessed and untold.
That even if one had the words to do it, one could not express the
sense of our personality, much of which escapes even our own
conscious and critical thought. One has, let us say, a serious
quarrel with a close friend, and one hears him explaining and
protesting, and yet he does not know what has happened, cannot
understand, cannot even perceive where the offence lay; and at such
a moment it may dawn on us that we too do not know what we have
done; we have exhibited some ugly part of ourselves, of which we
are not conscious; we have stricken and wounded another heart, and
we cannot see how it was done. We did not intend to do it, we cry.
Or again we realise that we regard some one with a causeless
aversion, and cannot give any reason for it; or we see that we
ourselves have the same freezing and disconcerting effect upon
another; and so after hundreds of such experiences, we become aware
at last that no real, free, entire communication is possible; that
however eagerly we tell our thoughts and display our temperaments,
there must always remain something which is wrapped in darkness,
the incommunicable essence of ourself that can blend with no other
soul.
But again it is true that all human souls who have an instinct for
expression--writers, painters, musicians--have always been trying
to do this one thing, to make signals, to communicate, to reveal
themselves, to "unpack the heart in words"; and what has often
hindered the process and nullified their efforts has been an uneasy
dignity and vanity, that must try to make out a better case than
the facts justify. For a variety of motives, and indeed for the
best of motives, men and women suppress, exalt, refine the
presentment of themselves, because they desire to be loved, and
think that they must therefore be careful to be admired, just as
the lover adorns himself and puts his best foot forward, and hides
all that may disconcert interest or sympathy. So that it happens in
life that often when we most desire to be real, we are most unreal.
What differentiates Walt Whitman from all other writers that I
know, is that he tried to reveal himself, and on the whole
contrived to do so with less reserve than any other human being.
"I know perfectly well my own egotism," he wrote; "I know my
omnivorous lines, and must not write any less." He was not
disconcerted by any failure of art, or any propriety, or any
apparent discrepancy.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself.
I am large, I contain multitudes.
He had no artistic conscience, as we say.
Easily written, loose-finger'd chords--I feel the thrum of your
climax and close.
In the curious and interesting essay called "A Backward Glance
over Travel's Roads," which he wrote late in life, surveying his
work, he admits that he has not gained acceptance, that his book is
a failure, and has incurred marked anger and contempt; and he good-
humouredly quotes a sentence from a friend's letter, written in
1884, "I find a solid line of enemies to you everywhere." And yet,
he says, for all that, and in spite of everything, he has had "his
say entirely his own way, and put it unerringly on record." It is
simply "a faithful, and doubtless self-willed record," he says.
That then was Walt Whitman's programme, surely in its very scope
and range worthy of some amazement and respect! Because it is not
done insolently or with any braggadocio, in spite of what he calls
"the barbaric yawp." I do not think that anything is more notable
than the good-humour and the equanimity of it all. He is not
interested in himself in a morbid or self-conscious way; he has not
the slightest wish to make himself out to be fine or magnificent or
superior--it is quite the other way. He is merely going to try to
break down the barriers between soul and soul, to let the river of
self ripple and welter and wash among the grasses at the feet of
man. He does not wish you to admire it, though he hopes you may
love it; there are to be no excuses or pretences; he does not wish
to be seen at certain angles or in subdued lights. He casts himself
down in his nakedness, and lets who will observe him; and all this
not because he is either hero or saint; his proudest title is to be
an average man, one of the crowd, with passions, weaknesses,
uglinesses, even deformities. He is there, he is just so, and you
may take it or leave it; but he is not ashamed or sensitive, nor in
any way abashed; he smiles his frank, good-natured smile; and
suddenly one perceives the greatness of it! He is neither fanatic
nor buffoon; he is not performing like the boxer or wrestler, nor
is he sitting mournfully and patiently for the sake of the pence,
like the fat man at the fair; he is merely trying to say what he
thinks and feels, and if he has any aim at all, it is to tempt
others into unabashed sincerity. He cries to man, "If you would
only recognise yourself as you are, without pretences or excuses,
the dignity which your subterfuges are meant to secure would be
yours without question." It is not a question of good, bad, or
indifferent. Everyone has a right to be where he is, and there is a
reason for him and a justification too. That is the gospel of Walt
Whitman; it may be a bad gospel, or an ugly one, or an indecorous
one; but no one can pretend that it is not a big one.
2
One immense and fruitful discovery Walt Whitman made, and yet
one can hardly call it a discovery; it is more perhaps an inspired
doctrine, unsupported by argument, wholly unphilosophical,
proclaimed with a childlike loudness and confidence, but yet
probably true: the doctrine, that is, of the indissoluble union
between body and soul. Indissoluble, one calls it, and yet nothing
is more patent than the fact that it is a union which is invariably
and inevitably dissolved in death; while on the other hand, one
sees in certain physical catastrophes, such as paralysis, brain-
concussion, senile decay, insanity, the soul apparently reduced to
the condition of a sleeping partner, or so far deranged as to be
unable to express anything but some one dominant emotion; or, more
bewildering still, one sees the moral sense seemingly suspended by
a physical disorder. And yet for all that, the doctrine may be
essentially and substantially true; the vitality of the soul may be
bound up with its power of expressing itself in material terms. It
may be that the soul-stuff, which we call life, has an existence
apart from its material manifestation, and that individuality, as
we see it, may be a mere phenomenon of the passage of a force, like
the visibility of electricity under certain conditions; indeed it
seems more probable that matter is a function of thought rather
than thought a function of matter. It is likely enough that animals
have no conscious sense of any division of aims, any antagonism
between physical and mental desires; but as the human race
develops, the imagination, the sense of the opposition between the
reason and the appetite, begins to emerge. Man becomes aware that
his will and his wish may not coincide; and thus develops the
medieval theory of asceticism, the belief that the body is
essentially vile, and suggests base desires to the mind, which the
mind has the power of controlling. That conception fitted closely
to the feudal theory of government, in which the interests of the
ruler and the subject did not necessarily coincide; the ruler
governed with his own interests in view, and coerced his subjects
if he could; but the new theory of government does not separate the
ruler from the state. The government of a state with democratic
institutions is the will of the people taking shape, and the
phenomena of rule are but those of the popular will expressing
itself, the object being that each individual should have his due
preponderance; the ultimate end being as much individual liberty as
is consistent with harmonious co-operation.
That is a rough analogy of the doctrine of Walt Whitman; namely,
that the individual, soul and body, is a polity; and that the true
life is to be found in a harmonious co-operation of body and soul.
The reason is not at liberty to deride or to neglect the bodily
desires, even the meanest and basest of them, because every desire,
whether of soul or body, is the expression of something that exists
in the animating principle. Take, for example, the case of physical
passion. That, in its ultimate analysis, is the instinct for
propagating life, the transmission and continuance of vitality. The
reason must not ignore or deplore it, but direct it into the proper
channels; it may indicate the dangers that it incurs; but merely to
thwart it, to regard it with shame and horror, is to establish an
internecine warfare. The true function is rather to ennoble the
physical desire by the just concurrence of the soul. But the
essence of the situation is co-operation and not coercion; and each
must be ready to compromise. If the physical nature will not
compromise with the reason, the disasters of unbridled passion
follow; if the reason will not co-operate with the physical
desire, the result is a sterile intellectualism, a life of starved
and timid experience. It was here, of course, that Walt Whitman's
view gave offence; he thought of civilisation as a conventional
system, cultivating a false shame and an ignoble reserve about
bodily processes. But the vital truth of his doctrine lies in the
fact that many of our saddest, because most remediable, disasters
are caused by a timid reticence about the strongest force that
animates the world, the force of reproduction. Whitman felt, and
truly felt, that reason and sentiment have outrun discretion. It
may be asked, indeed, how this terror of all outspokenness has
developed in the human race, so that parents cannot bear to speak
to their children about an experience which they will be certain to
make acquaintance with in some far more violent and base form. Does
this shrinking delicacy, this sacred reserve, mean nothing, it may
be asked? Well, it may be said, if this sensitiveness is so
valuable that it must not be required to anticipate tenderly and
faithfully what will be communicated in a grosser form, then
silence is justified, and not otherwise. But to transfer this
reticence about a matter of awful concern to some other region of
morals, what should we think of the parent who so feared to lessen
the affection of a child by rebuking it for a lie or a theft as to
let it go out into the world ignorant that either was reprobated?
Whitman's argument would rather be that a parent should say to a
child, "There is a force within you which will to a large extent
determine the happiness of your life; it must be guarded and
controlled. You will probably not be able to ignore or disregard
it, and you must bring it into harmonious co-operation with mind
and reason and duty. There is nothing that is shameful about its
being there; indeed, it is the dominant force in the world. The
shameful thing is to use it shamelessly." Yet the attitude of
parents too often is to treat the subject, not as if it were
sacred, but as if it were unmentionable; so that the very fact of
the child's own origin would seem to be an essentially shameful
thing.
The Greeks, it is true, had an instinct for the thought of the
vital interdependence of body and soul; but they thought too much
of the glowing manifestation of the health and beauty of youth, and
viewed the decay and deformity of the human frame too much as a
disgrace and an abasement. But here again comes in the largeness of
Whitman's presentment, that whatever disasters befall the body,
whether through drudgery or battle, disease or sin, they are all
parts of a rich and large experience, not necessarily interrupting
the co-operation of mind and matter. This is the strongest proof of
Whitman's faith in the essential brotherhood of man, that such
horrors and wretchednesses do not seem to him to interrupt the
design, or to destroy the possibility of a human sympathy which is
instinctive rather than a matter of devout effort. Whitman is here
on the side of the very greatest and finest human spirits, in that
he is shocked and appalled by nothing. He does not call it the best
of worlds, but it is the only world that he knows; and the glowing
interest, the passionate emotion, the vital rush and current of it,
prove beyond all doubt that we are in touch with something very
splendid and magnificent indeed, and that no misdeed or disaster
forfeits our share in the inheritance. He is utterly at variance
with the hideous Calvinistic theory, that God sent some of His
creatures into the world for their pain and ruin. Whatever happens
to your body or your soul, says Whitman, it is worth your while to
live and to have lived. He adopts no facile system of compensations
and offsets. He rather protests with all his might that, however
broken your body or fatuous your mind, it is a good thing for you
to have taken a hand in the affair; and that the essence of the
whole situation has not been your success, your dignity, your
comfortable obliteration of half your faculties, or on the other
hand your failure, your vileness, or your despair, but that just at
the time and place at which the phenomenon called yourself took
place, that intricate creature, with its bodily needs and desires,
its joys of the senses, its outlook on the strange world, took
shape and made you exactly what you are, and nothing else. As he
says in one of his finest apologues:
Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided,
nothing is scanted.
Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui,
what you are picks its way.
3
Then too Walt Whitman claims to be the poet, not of the past or
even only of the present, but the singer of the future. He says in
The Backward Glance, which I have already quoted, and which must be
carefully read by anyone who wishes to understand his work--at
least in so far as he understood it himself,--"Isolated advantages
in any rank or grace or fortune--the direct or indirect threads of
all the poetry of the past--are in my opinion distasteful to the
republican genius. . . . Established poems, I know, have the very
great advantage of chanting the already performed, so full of
glories, reminiscences dear to the minds of men." And he says too
that, "The educated world seems to have been growing more and more
ennuied for ages, leaving to our time the inheritance of it all."
And he further says: "The ranges of heroism and loftiness with
which Greek and feudal poets endow'd their godlike or lordly born
characters, I was to endow the democratic averages of America. I
was to show that we, here and to-day, are eligible to the grandest
and the best--more eligible now than any times of old were."
This is a lofty claim, boldly advanced and maintained; and here I
am on uncertain ground, because I do not suppose that I can realise
what the democratic spirit of America really is. Granted, however,
that it is a free and a noble spirit, I feel a doubt as to whether
it is possible for any nation, at any time in the world's history,
really to take a new start. The American nation is not a new
nation; it is in a sense a very old' nation. It has had a perfectly
new and magnificent field for its energies, and it has made a sweep
of the old conventions; but it cannot get rid of its inheritance of
temperament; and I think that, so far as I can judge, it is too
anxious to emphasize its sense of revolt, its consciousness of
newness of life. Whitman himself would not be so anxious to declare
the ennui of the old, if he did not feel himself in a way
trammelled by it. The moment that a case is stated with any
vehemence, that moment it is certain that the speaker has
antagonists in his eye. There is a story of Professor Blackie at
Edinburgh making a tirade against the stuffiness of the old English
universities to Jowett, the incisive Master of Balliol. At the end,
he said generously, "I hope you people at Oxford do not think that
we are your enemies up here?" "No," said Jowett drily; "to tell the
truth, we don't think about you at all!" The man who is really
making a new beginning, serenely confident in his strength, does
not, as Professor Blackie did, concern himself with his
predecessors at all. Perhaps, indeed, the democratic spirit of
America may be quietly glorying in its strength, and may be merely
waiting till it suits it to speak. But I do not think it can be
said to have found full expression. It seems to me--I may well be
wrong--that in matters of culture, the American is far more
seriously bent on knowing what has been done in the past even than
the Englishman. The Englishman takes the past for granted; he is
probably more deeply and instinctively penetrated with its
traditions than he knows; but ever since the Romantic movement
began in England, about a century ago, the general tendency is
anarchical and anti-classical. Writers like Wordsworth, Browning,
Carlyle, Ruskin, had very little deference about them. They did not
even trouble to assert their independence; they said what they
thought, and as they thought it. But the spirit of American
literature does not on the whole appear to me to be a democratic
spirit. It has not, except in the case of Walt Whitman himself,
shown any strong tendency to invent new forms or to ventilate new
ideas. It has not broken out into crude, fresh, immature
experiments. It has rather worked as the Romans did, who anxiously
adopted and imitated Greek models, admiring the form but not
comprehending the spirit. A revolt in literary art, such as the
Romantic movement in England, has no time to concern itself with
the old forms and traditions. Writers like Wordsworth, Keats,
Shelley, Byron, Walter Scott, had far too much to say for
themselves to care how the old classical schools had worked. They
used the past as a quarry, not as a model. But the famous American
writers have not originated new forms, or invented a different use
of language; they have widened and freshened traditions, they have
not thrown them overboard. Neither, if I interpret facts rightly,
have the Americans developed a new kind of aristocracy. Whitman's
talk of democratic averages is beside the point. The process of
levelling up and levelling down only produces low standards. What
the world needs, whether in England or America, is a new sort of
aristocracy--simple, disinterested, bold, sympathetic,
enthusiastic men, of clear vision and free thought. And what the
democracy needs is not an envious dislike of all prominence and
greatness, but an eye for all greatness, and an admiration for all
courage and largeness of soul. England suspects, perhaps
erroneously, that America has founded an aristocracy of wealth and
influence and physical prowess, rather than an aristocracy of
simplicity and fearlessness. One believes that the competitive, the
prize-winning spirit, is even more dominant in America than in
England. No one doubts the fierce energy and the aplomb of America;
but can it be said that IDEAS, the existence of which is the
ultimate test of national vigour, are really more prevalent in
America than in England? It all depends, of course, upon whether
one values the Greek or the Roman ideal more highly, the interest,
that is, of life, or the desire to rule and prosper. If the aim of
civilisation is orderliness, then the Roman aim is the better; but
if the aim is spiritual animation, then the Greeks are the winners.
Yet in the last century, England has been more fruitful in ideas
than America, although America is incomparably more interested in
education than England is.
But it is hard to balance these things. What remains is the fact
that Walt Whitman has drawn a fine democratic ideal. His democrat
is essentially a worker, with every sort of vigorous impulse,
living life in an ecstasy of health and comradeship, careless of
money and influence and position, content to live a simple life,
finding beauty, and hope, and love, and labour, enough, in the
spirit of the great dictum of William Morris, that the reward of
labour is life--not success or power or wealth, but the sense of
living fully and freely.
I do not claim that this spirit exists in England yet; but does it
exist in America? What, in fact, constitutes the inspiration of the
average American; what does he expect to find in life, and to make
of life? Whitman has no doubt at all. But in what other American
writer does this ideal find expression?
4
It remains to say a few words about the artistic methods of Walt
Whitman. He himself claims no artistic standard whatever. He says
that he wishes to create an atmosphere; and that his one aim has
been suggestiveness. "I round and finish little, if anything; and
could not consistently with my scheme. The reader will always have
his or her part to do, just as much as I have had mine."
He says that his purpose has been "not to carry out in the approved
style some choice plot of fortune or misfortune, or fancy, or fine
thoughts, or incidents or courtesies--all of which has been done
overwhelmingly and well, probably never to be excelled . . . but to
conform with and build on the concrete realities and theories of
the universe furnished by science, and henceforth the only
irrefragable basis for anything, verse included--to root both
influences in the emotional and imaginative action of the modern
time, and dominate all that precedes or opposes them." He adds, "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."