We are accustomed nowadays to a great deal of puling over the
circumstances in which we are placed. The great refinement of many
poetical gentlemen has rendered them practically unfit for the jostling
and ugliness of life, and they record their unfitness at considerable
length. The bold and awful poetry of Job’s complaint produces too many
flimsy imitators; for there is always something consolatory in grandeur,
but the symphony transposed for the piano becomes hysterically sad. This
literature of woe, as Whitman calls it, this _Maladie de René_, as we
like to call it in Europe, is in many ways a most humiliating and sickly
phenomenon. Young gentlemen with three or four hundred a year of private
means look down from a pinnacle of doleful experience on all the grown
and hearty men who have dared to say a good word for life since the
beginning 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 our
little 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 not
the best of circumstances preserves composure of mind, and relishes ale
and tobacco, and his wife and children, in the intervals of dull and
unremunerative labour; where a man in this predicament can afford a
lesson by the way to what are called his intellectual superiors, there is
plainly something to be lost, as well as something to be gained, by
teaching him to think differently. It is better to leave him as he is
than to teach him whining. It is better that he should go without the
cheerful lights of culture, if cheerless doubt and paralysing
sentimentalism are to be the consequence. Let us, by all means, fight
against that hide-bound stolidity of sensation and sluggishness of mind
which blurs and decolorises for poor natures the wonderful pageant of
consciousness; let us teach people, as much as we can, to enjoy, and they
will learn for themselves to sympathise; but let us see to it, above all,
that we give these lessons in a brave, vivacious note, and build 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 any
help, he must testify to the livableness of life. His poems, he tells
us, are to be “hymns of the praise of things.” They are to make for a
certain high joy in living, or what he calls himself “a brave delight fit
for freedom’s athletes.” And he has had no difficulty in introducing his
optimism: it fitted readily enough with his system; for the average man
is truly a courageous person and truly fond of living. One of Whitman’s
remarks upon this head is worth quotation, as he is there perfectly
successful, and does precisely what he designs to do throughout: Takes
ordinary and even commonplace circumstances; throws them out, by a happy
turn of thinking, into significance and something like 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 trite
examples. You will remark how adroitly Whitman begins, hunters and
woodmen being confessedly romantic. And one thing more. If he had said
“the love of healthy men for the female form,” he would have said almost
a 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, he tells
us something not unlike news; something that sounds quite freshly in
words; and, if the reader be a man, gives him a moment of great
self-satisfaction and spiritual aggrandisement. In many different
authors you may find passages more remarkable for grammar, but few of a
more ingenious turn, and none that could be more to the point in our
connection. The tenacity of many ordinary people in ordinary pursuits is
a sort of standing challenge to everybody else. If one man can grow
absorbed in delving his garden, others may grow absorbed and happy over
something else. Not to be upsides in this with any groom or gardener, is
to be very meanly organised. A man should be ashamed to take his food if
he has not alchemy enough in his stomach to turn some of it into intense
and enjoyable occupation.
Whitman tries to reinforce this cheerfulness by keeping up a sort of
outdoor atmosphere of sentiment. His book, he tells us, should be read
“among the cooling influences of external nature;” and this
recommendation, like that other famous one which Hawthorne prefixed to
his collected tales, is in itself a character of the work. Every one who
has been upon a walking or a boating tour, living in the open air, with
the body in constant exercise and the mind in fallow, knows true ease and
quiet. The irritating action of the brain is set at rest; we think in a
plain, unfeverish temper; little things seem big enough, and great things
no longer portentous; and the world is smilingly accepted as it is. This
is the spirit that Whitman inculcates and parades. He thinks very ill of
the atmosphere of parlours or libraries. Wisdom keeps school outdoors.
And he has the art to recommend this attitude of mind by simply pluming
himself upon it as a virtue; so that the reader, to keep the advantage
over his author which most readers enjoy, is tricked into professing the
same view. And this spirit, as it is his chief lesson, is the greatest
charm of his work. Thence, in spite of an uneven and emphatic key of
expression, something trenchant and straightforward, something simple and
surprising, distinguishes his poems. He has sayings that come home to
one like the Bible. We fall upon Whitman, after the works of so many men
who write better, with a sense of relief from strain, with a sense of
touching nature, as when one passes out of the flaring, noisy
thoroughfares of a great city into what he himself has called, with
unexcelled imaginative justice of language, “the huge and thoughtful
night.” And his book in consequence, whatever may be the final judgment
of its merit, whatever may be its influence on the future, should be in
the hands of all parents and guardians as a specific for the distressing
malady of being seventeen years old. Green-sickness yields to his
treatment as to a charm of magic; and the youth, after a short course of
reading, ceases to carry the universe upon his shoulders.