But in view of the profound impression Whitman's work has made upon widely
different types of mind on both sides of the Atlantic, and in view of the
persistent vitality of his fame, the question whether he is inside or
outside the pale of art amounts to very little. I quite agree with the
late Mrs. Gilchrist, that, when "great meanings and great emotions are
expressed with corresponding power, literature has done its best, call it
what you please."
That Whitman has expressed great meanings and great emotions with adequate
power, even his unfriendly critics admit. Thus Professor Wendell, in an
admirable essay on American literature, says that "though Whitman is
uncouth, inarticulate, and lacking in a grotesque degree artistic form,
yet for all that he can make you feel for the moment how even the
ferry-boats plying from New York to Brooklyn are fragments of God's
eternities." In the same way Mr. William Clark, his British critic and
expounder, says that he is wanting in discrimination and art, "flings his
ideas at us in a heap," etc., and yet that the effect of his work is "to
stir our emotions, widen our interests, and rally the forces of our moral
nature."
It seems to me that a man who, through the printed page, can do these
things, must have some kind of art worth considering. If, through his
impassioned treatment of a prosy, commonplace object like a ferry-boat, he
can so dignify and exalt it, and so fill it with the meanings of the
spirit, that it seems like a part of God's eternities, his methods are at
least worth inquiring into.
The truth is, Whitman's art, in its lack of extrinsic form and finish, is
Oriental rather than Occidental, and is an offense to a taste founded upon
the precision and finish of a mechanical age. His verse is like the
irregular, slightly rude coin of the Greeks compared with the exact,
machine-cut dies of our own day, or like the unfinished look of Japanese
pottery beside the less beautiful but more perfect specimens of modern
ceramic art.
For present purposes, we may say there are two phases of art,--formal art
and creative art. By formal art I mean that which makes a direct appeal to
our sense of form,--our sense of the finely carved, the highly wrought,
the deftly planned; and by creative art I mean that quickening,
fructifying power of the masters, that heat and passion that make the
world plastic and submissive to their hands, teeming with new meanings and
thrilling with new life.
Formal art is always in the ascendant. Formal anything--formal dress,
formal manners, formal religion, formal this and that--always counts for
more than the informal, the spontaneous, the original. It is easier, it
can be put off and on.
Formal art is nearly always the gift of the minor poet, and often of the
major poet also. In such a poet as Swinburne, formal art leads by a great
way. The content of his verse,--what is it? In Tennyson as well I should
say formal art is in the ascendant. Creative art is his also; Tennyson
reaches and moves the spirit, yet his skill is more noteworthy than his
power. In Wordsworth, on the other hand, I should say creative art led:
the content of his verse is more than its form; his spiritual and
religious values are greater than his literary and artistic. The same is
true of our own Emerson. Poe, again, is much more as an artist than as a
man or a personality.
I hardly need say that in Whitman formal art, the ostensibly artistic,
counts for but very little. The intentional artist, the professional poet,
is kept entirely in abeyance, or is completely merged and hidden in the
man, more so undoubtedly than in any poet this side the old Oriental
bards. We call him formless, chaotic, amorphous, etc., because he makes no
appeal to our modern highly stimulated sense of art or artificial form. We
must discriminate this from our sense of power, our sense of life, our
sense of beauty, of the sublime, of the all, which clearly Whitman would
reach and move. Whitman certainly has a form of his own: what would a
poet, or any writer or worker in the ideal, do without some kind of form?
some consistent and adequate vehicle of expression? But Whitman's form is
not what is called artistic, because it is not brought within the rules of
the prosodical system, and does not appeal to our sense of the consciously
shaped and cultivated. It is essentially the prose form heightened and
intensified by a deep, strong, lyric and prophetic note.
The bonds and shackles of regular verse-form Whitman threw off. This
course seemed to be demanded by the spirit to which he had dedicated
himself,--the spirit of absolute unconstraint. The restrictions and
hamperings of the scholastic forms did not seem to be consistent with this
spirit, which he identified with democracy and the New World. A poet who
sets out to let down the bars everywhere, to remove veils and
obstructions, to emulate the freedom of the elemental forces, to effuse
always the atmosphere of open-air growths and objects, to be as
"regardless of observation" as the processes of nature, etc., will not be
apt to take kindly to any arbitrary and artificial form of expression. The
essentially prose form which Whitman chose is far more in keeping with the
spirit and aim of his work than any conventional metrical system could
have been. Had he wrought solely as a conscious artist, aiming at the
effect of finely chiseled forms, he would doubtless have chosen a
different medium.