The trouble with most of us is that we found our taste for poetry upon
particular authors, instead of upon literature as a whole, or, better yet,
upon life and reality. Hence we form standards instead of principles.
Standards are limited, rigid, uncompromising, while principles are
flexible, expansive, creative. If we are wedded to the Miltonic standard
of poetry, the classic standards, we shall have great difficulties with
Whitman; but if we have founded our taste upon natural principles--if we
have learned to approach literature through reality, instead of reality
through literature--we shall not be the victims of any one style or model;
we shall be made free of all. The real test of art, of any art, as Burke
long ago said, and as quoted by Mr. Howells in his trenchant little volume
called "Criticism and Fiction," is to be sought outside of art, namely, in
nature. "I can judge but poorly of anything while I measure it by no other
standard than itself. The true standard of the arts is in every man's
power; and an easy observation of the most common, sometimes of the
meanest, things in nature will give the truest lights." It is thought that
the preëminence of the Greek standards is settled when we say they are
natural. Yes, but Nature is not Greek. She is Asiatic, German, English, as
well.
V
In poetry, in art, a man must sustain a certain vital relation to his
work, and that work must sustain a certain vital relation to the laws of
mind and of life. That is all, and that leaves the doors very wide. We are
not to ask, Is it like this or like that? but, Is it vital, is it real, is
it a consistent, well-organized whole?
The poet must always interpret himself and nature after his own fashion.
Is his fashion adequate? Is the interpretation vivid and real? Do his
lines cut to the quick, and beget heat and joy in the soul? If we cannot
make the poet's ideal our own by sharing his enthusiasm for it, the
trouble is as likely to be in ourselves as in him. In any case he must be
a law unto himself.
The creative artist differs from the mere writer or thinker in this: he
sustains a direct personal relation to his subject through emotion,
intuition, will. The indirect, impersonal relation which works by
reflection, comparison, and analysis is that of the critic and
philosopher. The man is an artist when he gives us a concrete and
immediate impression of reality: from his hands we get the thing itself;
from the critic and thinker we get ideas _about_ the thing. The poet does
not merely say the world is beautiful; he shows it as beautiful: he does
not describe the flower; he places it before us. What are the enemies of
art? Reflection, didacticism, description, the turgid, the obscure. A poet
with a thesis to sustain is more or less barred from the freedom of pure
art. It is by direct and unconsidered expression, says Scherer, that art
communicates with reality. The things that make for art, then, are
feeling, intuition, sentiment, soul, a fresh and vigorous sense of real
things,--in fact, all that makes for life, health, and wholeness. Goethe
is more truly an artist in the first part of Faust than in the second;
Arnold has a more truly artistic mind than Lowell.
The principles of art are always the same in the respect I have indicated,
just as the principles of life are always the same, or of health and
longevity are always the same. No writer is an artist who is related to
his subject simply by mental or logical grip alone: he must have a certain
emotional affiliation and identity with it; he does not so much convey to
us ideas and principles as pictures, parables, impressions,--a lively
sense of real things. When we put Whitman outside the pale of art, we must
show his shortcomings here; we must show that he is not fluid and
generative,--that he paints instead of interprets, that he gives us
reasons instead of impulses, a stone when we ask for bread. "I do not
give a little charity," he says; "when I give, I give myself." This the
artist always does, not his mind merely, but his soul, his personality.
"Leaves of Grass" is as direct an emanation from a central personal force
as any book in literature, and always carries its own test and its own
proof. It never hardens into a system, it never ceases to be penetrated
with will and emotion, it never declines from the order of deeds to the
order of mere thoughts. All is movement, progress, evolution, picture,
parable, impulse.
It is on these grounds that Whitman, first of all, is an artist. He has
the artist temperament. His whole life was that of a man who lives to
ideal ends,--who lived to bestow himself upon others, to extract from life
its meaning and its joy.