First of all, Whitman's attitude towards Art.
For the highest art two essentials are required--Sincerity and Beauty.
The tendency of modern literature has been to ignore the first and to
make the second all-sufficient. The efforts of the artist have been
concentrated upon the workmanship, and too often he has been satisfied
with a merely technical excellence.
It is a pleasant and attractive pastime, this playing with words. Grace,
charm, and brilliance are within the reach of the artificer's endeavour.
But a literature which is the outcome of the striving after beauty of
form, without reference to the sincerity of substance, is like a posy of
flowers torn away from their roots. Lacking vitality, it will speedily
perish.
No writer has seen this more clearly than Whitman, and if in his vigorous
allegiance to Sincerity he has seemed oblivious at times to the existence
of Beauty, yet he has chosen the better part. And for this reason.
Beauty will follow in the wake of Sincerity, whether sought for or no,
and the writer whose one passion it is to see things as they are, and to
disentangle from the transient and fleeting the great truths of life,
finds that in achieving a noble sincerity he has also achieved the
highest beauty.
The great utterances of the world are beautiful, because they are true.
Whereas the artist who is determined to attain beauty at all costs will
obtain beauty of a kind--"silver-grey, placid and perfect," as Andrea del
Sarto said, but the highest beauty it will not be, for that is no mere
question of manner, but a perfect blend of manner and matter.
It will no doubt be urged that, despite his sincerity, there is a good
deal in Whitman that is not beautiful. And this must be frankly
conceded. But this will be found only when he has failed to separate the
husk from the kernel. Whitman's sincerity is never in question, but he
does not always appreciate the difference between accuracy and truth,
between the accidental and the essential. For instance, lines like
these--
"The six framing men, two in the middle, and two at each end,
carefully bearing on their shoulders a heavy stick for a cross-beam."
or physiological detail after this fashion:--
"Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaws and the jaw
hinges,
Nose, nostrils of the nose, and the partition,
Cheeks, temples, forehead, chin, throat, back of the neck sheer.
Strong shoulders, manly beard, hind shoulders, and the ample size
round of the chest,
Upper arm, armpit, elbow socket, lower arms, arm sinews, arm bones.
Wrist and wrist joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, forefinger,
finger joints, finger nails, etc., etc."
The vital idea lying beneath these accumulated facts is lost sight of by
the reader who has to wade through so many accurate non-essentials.
It is well, I think, to seize upon the weakness of Whitman's literary
style at the outset, for it explains so much that is irritating and
disconcerting.
_Leaves of Grass_ he called his book, and the name is more significant
than one at first realizes. For there is about it not only the
sweetness, the freshness, the luxuriance of the grass; but its prolific
rankness--the wheat and the tares grow together.
It has, I know, been urged by some of Whitman's admirers that his power
as a writer does not depend upon his artistic methods or non-artistic
methods, and he himself protested against his _Leaves_ being judged
merely as literature. And so there has been a tendency to glorify his
very inadequacies, to hold him up as a poet who has defied successfully
the unwritten laws of Art.
This is to do him an ill service. If Whitman's work be devoid of Art,
then it possesses no durability. Literature is an art just as much as
music, painting, or sculpture. And if a man, however fine, however
inspiring his ideas may be, has no power to shape them--to express them
in colour, in sound, in form, in words--to seize upon the essentials and
use no details save as suffice to illustrate these essentials, then his
work will not last. For it has no vitality.
In other words, Whitman must be judged ultimately as an artist, for Art
alone endures. And on the whole he can certainly bear the test. His art
was not the conventional art of his day, but art it assuredly was.
In his best utterances there are both sincerity and beauty.
Who could deny the title of artist to the man who wrote those noble
verses, "On the Beach at Night"?--
"On the beach at night,
Stands a child with her father,
Watching the east, the autumn sky.
"Up through the darkness,
While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,
Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky,
Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east,
Ascends large and calm the lord-star Jupiter,
And nigh at hand, only a very little above,
Swim the delicate sisters the Pleiades.
"From the beach the child holding the hand of her father,
Those burial clouds that lower victorious soon to devour all
Watching, silently weeps.
"Weep not, child,
Weep not, my darling,
With these kisses let me remove your tears,
The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious,
They shall not long possess the sky, they devour the stars only in
apparition,
Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the
Pleiades shall emerge,
They are immortal, all those stars both silvery and golden shall
shine out again,
The great stars and the little ones shall shine out again, they
endure,
The vast immortal suns and the long-enduring pensive moons shall
again shine.
"Then, dearest child, mournest thou only for Jupiter?
Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars?
"Something there is,
(With my lips soothing thee, adding I whisper,
I give thee the first suggestion, the problem and indirection)
Something there is more immortal even than the stars,
(Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away)
Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter,
Longer than sun or any revolving satellite,
Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades."
or those touching lines, "Reconciliation"?--
"Word over all beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be
utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly
Wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin--
I draw near--
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the
coffin."
Again, take that splendid dirge in memory of President Lincoln, majestic
in its music, spacious and grand in its treatment. It is too long for
quotation, but the opening lines, with their suggestive beauty, and the
Song to Death, may be instanced.
"When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed,
And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night,
I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.
"O powerful western fallen star!
O shades of night--O moody, tearful night!
O great star disappear'd--O the black murk that hides the star!
O cruel hands that hold me powerless--O helpless soul of me!
O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul!
"In the dooryard fronting an old farmhouse near the whitewash'd
palings,
Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich
green,
With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong
I love.
With every leaf a miracle--and from this bush in the dooryard,
With delicate coloured blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich
green,
A sprig with its flower I break.
* * * * *
"Come lovely and soothing death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later delicate death.
"Prais'd be the fathomless universe,
For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,
And for love, sweet love--but praise! praise! praise!
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.
"Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet,
Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?
Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all,
I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come
unfalteringly.
* * * * *
"The night in silence under many a star,
The ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I know,
And the soul-turning to thee, O vast and well-veil'd death,
And the body gratefully nestling close to thee.
"Over the tree-tops I float thee a song,
Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and the
prairies wide,
Over the dense-pack'd cities all and the teeming wharves and ways,
I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee, O death."
This is not only Art, but great Art. So fresh in their power, so
striking in their beauty, are Whitman's utterances on Death that they
take their place in our memories beside the large utterances of
Shakespeare, Milton, and Shelley.
It is a mistake to think that where Whitman fails in expression it is
through carelessness; that he was a great poet by flashes, and that had
he taken more pains he would have been greater still. We have been
assured by those who knew him intimately that he took the greatest care
over his work, and would wait for days until he could get what he felt to
be the right word.
To the student who comes fresh to a study of Whitman it is conceivable
that the rude, strong, nonchalant utterances may seem like the work of an
inspired but careless and impatient artist. It is not so. It is done
deliberately.
"I furnish no specimens," he says; "I shower them by exhaustless laws,
fresh and modern continually, as Nature does."
He is content to be suggestive, to stir your imagination, to awaken your
sympathies. And when he fails, he fails as Wordsworth did, because he
lacked the power of self-criticism, lacked the faculty of humour--that
saving faculty which gives discrimination, and intuitively protects the
artist from confusing pathos with bathos, the grand and the grandiose.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in his treatment of Sex. Frankness,
outspokenness on the primal facts of life are to be welcomed in
literature. All the great masters--Shakespeare, Dante, Dostoievsky,
Tolstoy, have dealt openly and fearlessly with the elemental passions.
There is nothing to deplore in this, and Mr. Swinburne was quite right
when he contended that the domestic circle is not to be for all men and
writers the outer limit of their world of work. So far from regretting
that Whitman claimed right to equal freedom when speaking of the primal
fact of procreation as when speaking of sunrise, sunsetting, and the
primal fact of death, every clean-minded man and woman should rejoice in
the poet's attitude. For he believed and gloried in the separate
personalities of man and woman, claiming manhood and womanhood as the
poet's province, exulting in the potentialities of a healthy sexual life.
He was angry, as well he might be, with the furtive snigger which greets
such matters as motherhood and fatherhood with the prurient
unwholesomeness of a mind that can sigh sentimentally over the "roses and
raptures of Vice" and start away shamefaced from the stark
passions--stripped of all their circumlocutions. He certainly realized
as few have done the truth of that fine saying of Thoreau's, that "for
him to whom sex is impure there are no flowers in Nature."
But at the same time I cannot help feeling that Stevenson was right when
he said that Whitman "loses our sympathy in the character of a poet by
attracting too much of our attention--that of a Bull in a China Shop."
{180}
His aim is right enough; it is to his method one may take objection. Not
on the score of morality. Whitman's treatment of passion is not immoral;
it is simply like Nature herself--unmoral. What shall we say then about
his sex cycle, "Children of Adam"? Whitman, in his anxiety to speak out,
freely, simply, naturally, to vindicate the sanity of coarseness, the
poetry of animalism, seems to me to have bungled rather badly. There are
many fine passages in his "Song of the Body Electric" and "Spontaneous
Me," but much of it impresses me as bad art, and is consequently
ineffectual in its aim. The subject demands a treatment at once strong
and subtle--I do not mean finicking--and subtlety is a quality not
vouchsafed to Whitman. Lacking it, he is often unconsciously comic where
he should be gravely impressive. "A man's body is sacred, and a woman's
body is sacred." True; but the sacredness is not displayed by making out
a tedious inventory of the various parts of the body. Says Whitman in
effect: "The sexual life is to be gloried in, not to be treated as if it
were something shameful." Again true; but is there not a danger of
missing the glory by discoursing noisily on the various physiological
manifestations. Sex is not the more wonderful for being appraised by the
big drum.
The inherent beauty and sanctity of Sex lies surely in its superb
unconsciousness; it is a matter for two human beings drawn towards one
another by an indefinable, world-old attraction; scream about it, caper
over it, and you begin to make it ridiculous, for you make it
self-conscious.
Animalism merely as a scientific fact serves naught to the poet, unless
he can show also what is as undeniable as the bare fact--its poetry, its
coarseness, and its mystery go together. Browning has put it in a
line:--
". . . savage creatures seek
Their loves in wood and plain--_and GOD renews_
_His ancient rapture_."
It is the "rapture" and the mystery which Whitman misses in many of his
songs of Sex.
There is no need to give here any theological significance to the word
"God." Let the phrase stand for the mystic poetry of animalism. Whitman
has no sense of mystery.
I have another objection against "The Children of Adam." The loud,
self-assertive, genial, boastful style of Whitman suits very well many of
his democratic utterances, his sweeping cosmic emotions. But here it
gives one the impression of a kind of showman, who with a flourishing
stick is shouting out to a gaping crowd the excellences of manhood and
womanhood. Deliberately he has refrained from the mood of imaginative
fervour which alone could give a high seriousness to his treatment--a
high seriousness which is really indispensable. And his rough, slangy,
matter-of-fact comments give an atmosphere of unworthy vulgarity to his
subject. Occasionally he is carried away by the sheer imaginative beauty
of the subject, then note how different the effect:--
"Have you ever loved the body of a woman,
Have you ever loved the body of a man,
Do you not see that these are exactly the same to all in all
Nations and times all over the earth?"
"If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred,
And the glory and sweet of a man is the token of manhood untainted,
And in man or woman a clean, strong, firm-fibred body is
More beautiful than the most beautiful face."
If only all had been of this quality. But interspersed with lines of
great force and beauty are cumbrous irrelevancies, wholly superfluous
details.
William Morris has also treated the subject of Sex in a frank, open
fashion. And there is in his work something of the easy, deliberate
spaciousness that we find in Whitman. But Morris was an artist first and
foremost, and he never misses the _poetry_ of animalism; as readers of
the "Earthly Paradise" and the prose romances especially know full well.
It is not then because Whitman treats love as an animal passion that I
take objection to much in his "Children of Adam." There are poets enough
and to spare who sing of the sentimental aspects of love. We need have
no quarrel with Whitman's aim as expressed by Mr. John Burroughs: "To put
in his sex poems a rank and healthy animality, and to make them as frank
as the shedding of pollen by the trees, strong even to the point of
offence." All we ask is for him to do so as a poet, not as a mere
physiologist. And when he speaks one moment as a physiologist, next as a
poet; at one time as a lover, at another as a showman, the result is not
inspiring. "He could not make it pleasing," remarks Mr. Burroughs, "a
sweet morsel to be rolled under the tongue; that would have been levity
and sin, as in Byron and the other poets . . . He would sooner be
bestial than Byronic, he would sooner shock by his frankness than inflame
by his suggestion." This vague linking together of "Byron and the other
poets" is not easy to understand. In the first place, not one of the
moderns has treated love from the same standpoint. Shelley, for
instance, is transcendental, Byron elemental, Tennyson sentimental;
Rossetti looks at the soul through the body, Browning regards the body
through the soul. There is abundant variety in the treatment. Then,
again, why Byron should be singled out especially for opprobrium I fail
to see, for love is to him the fierce elemental passion it is for
Whitman. As for frankness, the episode of Haidee and Don Juan does not
err on the side of reticence. Nor is it pruriently suggestive. It is a
splendid piece of poetic animalism. Let us be fair to Byron. His work
may in places be disfigured by an unworthy cynicism; his treatment of
sexual problems be marred by a shallow flippancy. But no poet had a
finer appreciation of the essential poetry of animalism than he, and much
of his cynicism, after all, is by way of protest against the same narrow
morality at which Whitman girds. To single Byron out as a poet
especially obnoxious in his treatment of love, and to condemn him so
sweepingly, seems to me scarcely defensible. To extol unreservedly the
rankness and coarseness of "The Children of Adam," and to have no word of
commendation, say, for so noble a piece of naturalism as the story of
Haidee, seems to me lacking in fairness. Besides, it suggests that the
_only_ treatment in literature of the sexual life is a coarse, unpleasing
treatment, which I do not suppose Mr. Burroughs really holds. Whitman
has vindicated, and vindicated finely, the inherent truth and beauty of
animalism. But so has William Morris, so has Dante Gabriel Rossetti, so
has poor flouted Byron. And I will go further, and say that these other
poets have succeeded often where Whitman has failed; they have shown the
beauty and cosmic significance, when Whitman has been merely cataloguing
the stark facts.
It may be objected, of course, that Whitman does not aim in his sex poems
at imaginative beauty, that he aims at sanity and wholesomeness; that
what he speaks--however rank--makes for healthy living. May be; I am not
concerned to deny it. What I do deny is the implication that the
wholesomeness of a fact is sufficient justification for its treatment in
literature. There are a good many disagreeable things that are wholesome
enough, there are many functions of the body that are entirely healthy.
But one does not want them enshrined in Art.
To attack Whitman on the score of morality is unjustifiable; his sex
poems are simply unmoral. But had he flouted his art less flagrantly in
them they would have been infinitely more powerful and convincing, and
given the Philistines less opportunity for blaspheming.
I have dwelt at this length upon Whitman's treatment of Sex largely
because it illustrates his strength and weakness as a literary artist.
In some of his poems--those dealing with Democracy, for instance--we have
Whitman at his best. In others, certainly a small proportion, we get
sheer, unillumined doggerel. In his sex poems there are great and fine
ideas, moments of inspiration, flashes of beauty, combined with much that
is trivial and tiresome.
But this I think is the inevitable outcome of his style. The style, like
the man, is large, broad, sweeping, tolerant; the sense of "mass and
multitude" is remarkable; he aims at big effects, and the quality of
vastness in his writings struck John Addington Symonds as his most
remarkable characteristic. {186} This vast, rolling, processional style
is splendidly adapted for dealing with the elemental aspects of life,
with the vital problems of humanity. He sees everything in bulk. His
range of vision is cosmic. The very titles are suggestive of his point
of view--"A Song of the Rolling Earth," "A Song of the Open Road," "A
Song for Occupation," "Gods." There are no detailed effects, no delicate
points of light and shade in his writings, but huge panoramic effects.
It is a great style, it is an impressive style, but it is obviously not a
plastic style, nor a versatile style. Its very merits necessarily carry
with them corresponding defects. The massiveness sometimes proves mere
unwieldiness, the virile strength tends to coarseness, the eye fixed on
certain broad distant effects misses the delicate by-play of colour and
movement in the foreground. The persistent unconventionality of metre
and rhythm becomes in time a mannerism as pronounced as the mannerism of
Tennyson and Swinburne.
I do not urge these things in disparagement of Whitman. No man can take
up a certain line wholeheartedly and uncompromisingly without incurring
the disabilities attaching to all who concentrate on one great issue.
And if sometimes he is ineffectual, if on occasion he is merely strident
in place of authoritative, how often do his utterances carry with them a
superb force and a conviction which compel us to recognize the sagacious
genius of the man.