Something should be said of Whitman’s style, for style is of the essence
of thinking. And where a man is so critically deliberate as our author,
and goes solemnly about his poetry for an ulterior end, every indication
is worth notice. He has chosen a rough, unrhymed, lyrical verse;
sometimes instinct with a fine processional movement; often so rugged and
careless that it can only be described by saying that he has not taken
the trouble to write prose. I believe myself that it was selected
principally because it was easy to write, although not without
recollections of the marching measures of some of the prose in our
English Old Testament. According to Whitman, on the other hand, “the
time has arrived to essentially break down the barriers of form between
Prose and Poetry . . . for the most cogent purposes of those great inland
states, and for Texas, and California, and Oregon;”—a statement which is
among the happiest achievements of American humour. He calls his verses
“recitatives,” in easily followed allusion to a musical form.
“Easily-written, loose-fingered chords,” he cries, “I feel the thrum of
your climax and close.” Too often, I fear, he is the only one who can
perceive the rhythm; and in spite of Mr. Swinburne, a great part of his
work considered as verses is poor bald stuff. Considered, not as verse,
but as speech, a great part of it is full of strange and admirable
merits. The right detail is seized; the right word, bold and trenchant,
is thrust into its place. Whitman has small regard to literary
decencies, and is totally free from literary timidities. He is neither
afraid of being slangy nor of being dull; nor, let me add, of being
ridiculous. The result is a most surprising compound of plain grandeur,
sentimental affectation, and downright nonsense. It would be useless to
follow his detractors and give instances of how bad he can be at his
worst; and perhaps it would be not much wiser to give extracted specimens
of how happily he can write when he is at his best. These come in to
most advantage in their own place; owing something, it may be, to the
offset of their curious surroundings. And one thing is certain, that no
one can appreciate Whitman’s excellences until he has grown accustomed to
his faults. Until you are content to pick poetry out of his pages almost
as you must pick it out of a Greek play in Bohn’s translation, your
gravity will be continually upset, your ears perpetually disappointed,
and the whole book will be no more to you than a particularly flagrant
production by the Poet Close.
A writer of this uncertain quality was, perhaps, unfortunate in taking
for thesis the beauty of the world as it now is, not only on the
hill-tops but in the factory; not only by the harbour full of stately
ships, but in the magazine of the hopelessly prosaic hatter. To show
beauty in common things is the work of the rarest tact. It is not to be
done by the wishing. It is easy to posit as a theory, but to bring it
home to men’s minds is the problem of literature, and is only
accomplished by rare talent, and in comparatively rare instances. To bid
the whole world stand and deliver, with a dogma in one’s right hand by
way 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 no
distinction in one’s enthusiasm over the most incomparable matters; to
prove one’s entire want of sympathy for the jaded, literary palate, by
calling, not a spade a spade, but a hatter a hatter, in a lyrical
apostrophe;—this, in spite of all the airs of inspiration, is not the way
to do it. It may be very wrong, and very wounding to a respectable
branch of industry, but the word “hatter” cannot be used seriously in
emotional verse; not to understand this, is to have no literary tact; and
I would, for his own sake, that this were the only inadmissible
expression with which Whitman had bedecked his pages. The book teems
with similar comicalities; and, to a reader who is determined to take it
from that side only, presents a perfect carnival of fun.
A good deal of this is the result of theory playing its usual vile trick
upon the artist. It is because he is a Democrat that Whitman must have
in the hatter. If you may say Admiral, he reasons, why may you not say
Hatter? 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 would
think of controverting, where—and here is the point—where any beauty has
been shown. But how, where that is not the case? where the hatter is
simply introduced, as God made him and as his fellow-men have miscalled
him, 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 a bright,
picturesque, and novel way, simply gives up the attempt, and indulges,
with apparent exultation, in an inventory of trades or implements, with
no more colour or coherence than so many index-words out of a dictionary?
I do not know that we can say anything, but that it is a prodigiously
amusing exhibition for a line or so. The worst of it is, 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 it require to know that
capitulation is not description, or that fingering on a dumb keyboard,
with whatever show of sentiment and execution, is not at all the same
thing as discoursing music? I wish I could believe he was quite honest
with us; but, indeed, who was ever quite honest who wrote a book for a
purpose? It is a flight beyond the reach of human magnanimity.
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 some
plainness on what is, for I really do not know what reason, the most
delicate of subjects. Seeing in that one of the most serious and
interesting parts of life, he was aggrieved that it should be looked upon
as ridiculous or shameful. No one speaks of maternity with his tongue in
his cheek; and Whitman made a bold push to set the sanctity of fatherhood
beside the sanctity of motherhood, and introduce this also among 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 has rather
played the fool. We may be thoroughly conscious that his end is
improving; that it would be a good thing if a window were opened on these
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 loses our
sympathy in the character of a poet by attracting too much of our
attention in that of a Bull in a China Shop. And where, by a little more
art, we might have been solemnised ourselves, it is too often Whitman
alone who is solemn in the face of an audience somewhat indecorously
amused.