Sometimes I define Whitman to myself as the poet of the open air,--not
because he sings the praises of these things after the manner of the
so-called nature-poets, but because he has the quality of things in the
open air, the quality of the unhoused, the untamed, the elemental and
aboriginal. He pleases and he offends, the same way things at large do. He
has the brawn, the indifference, the rudeness, the virility, the
coarseness,--something gray, unpronounced, elemental, about him, the
effect of mass, size, distance, flowing, vanishing lines, neutral
spaces,--something informal, multitudinous, and processional,--something
regardless of criticism, that makes no bid for our applause, not
calculated instantly to please, unmindful of details, prosaic if we make
it so, common, near at hand, and yet that provokes thought and stirs our
emotions in an unusual degree. The long lists and catalogues of objects
and scenes in Whitman, that have so excited the mirth of the critics, are
one phase of his out-of-doors character,--a multitude of concrete objects,
a grove, a thicket, a field, a stretch of beach,--every object sharply
defined, but no attempt at logical or artistic sequence, the effect of the
whole informal, multitudinous. It may be objected to these pages that they
consist of a mass of details that do not make a picture. But every line is
a picture of a scene or an object. Whitman always keeps up the movement,
he never pauses to describe; it is all action.
Passing from such a poet as Tennyson to Whitman is like going from a warm,
perfumed interior, with rich hangings, pictures, books, statuary, fine men
and women, out into the street, or upon the beach, or upon the hill, or
under the midnight stars. We lose something certainly, but do we not gain
something also? Do we not gain just what Whitman had in view, namely,
direct contact with the elements in which are the sources of our life and
health? Do we not gain in scope and power what we lose in art and
refinement?
The title, "Leaves of Grass," is full of meaning. What self-knowledge and
self-scrutiny it implies! The grass, perennial sprouting, universal,
formless, common, the always spread feast of the herds, dotted with
flowers, the herbage of the earth, so suggestive of the multitudinous,
loosely aggregated, unelaborated character of the book; the lines
springing directly out of the personality of the poet, the soil of his
life.
"What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest is me,"
says the poet, and this turns out to be the case. We only look to see if
in the common and the cheap he discloses new values and new meanings,--if
his leaves of grass have the old freshness and nutriment, and be not a
mere painted greenness.
"The pure contralto sings in the organ loft,
The carpenter dresses his plank--the tongue of his foreplane whistles
its wild ascending lisp,
The married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving
dinner,
The pilot seizes the king-pin--he heaves down with a strong arm,
The mate stands braced in the whale-boat--lance and harpoon are ready,
The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches,
The deacons are ordained with crossed hands at the altar,
The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel,
The farmer stops by the bars, as he walks on a First Day loafe, and looks
at the oats and rye,
The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum, a confirmed case,
He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother's
bedroom;
The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case,
He turns his quid of tobacco, while his eyes blurr with the manuscript;
The malformed limbs are tied to the anatomist's table,
What is removed drops horribly in a pail;
The quadroon girl is sold at the stand--the drunkard nods by the
bar-room stove,
The machinist rolls up his sleeves--the policeman travels his beat--the
gate-keeper marks who pass,
The young fellow drives the express-wagon--I love him, though I do not
know him,
The half-breed straps on his light boots to compete in the race,
The western turkey-shooting draws old and young--some lean on their
rifles, some sit on logs,
Out from the crowd steps the marksman, takes his position, levels his
piece;
The groups of newly-come emigrants cover the wharf or levee,
As the woolly-pates hoe in the sugar-field, the overseer views them
from his saddle,
The bugle calls in the ball-room, the gentlemen run for their partners,
the dancers bow to each other,
The youth lies awake in the cedar-roofed garret, and harks to the
musical rain,
The Wolverine sets traps on the creek that helps fill the Huron,
The reformer ascends the platform, he spouts with his mouth and nose,
* * * * *
Seasons pursuing each other, the plougher ploughs, the mower mows, and
the winter-grain falls in the ground,
Off on the lakes the pike-fisher watches and waits by the hole in the
frozen surface,
The stumps stand thick round the clearing, the squatter strikes deep
with his axe,
Flatboatmen make fast, towards dusk, near the cotton-wood or pekan-trees,
Coon-seekers go through the regions of the Red River, or through those
drained by the Tennessee, or through those of the Arkansas,
Torches shine in the dark that hangs on the Chattahooche or Altamahaw,
Patriarchs sit at supper with sons and grandsons and great-grandsons
around them,
In walls of adobe, in canvas tents, rest hunters and trappers after their
day's sport,
The city sleeps and the country sleeps,
The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time,
The old husband sleeps by his wife, and the young husband sleeps by his
wife;
And these one and all tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,
And such as it is to be of these, more or less, I am."
What is this but tufts and tussocks of grass; not branching trees, nor yet
something framed and deftly put together, but a succession of simple
things, objects, actions, persons; handfuls of native growths, a stretch
of prairie or savanna; no composition, no artistic wholes, no logical
sequence, yet all vital and real; jets of warm life that shoot and play
over the surface of contemporary America, and that the poet uses as the
stuff out of which to weave the song of himself.
This simple aggregating or cataloguing style as it has been called, and
which often occurs in the "Leaves," has been much criticised, but it seems
to me in perfect keeping in a work that does not aim at total artistic
effects, at finished structural perfection like architecture, but to
picture the elements of a man's life and character in outward scenes and
objects and to show how all nature tends inward to him and he outward to
it. Whitman showers the elements of American life upon his reader until,
so to speak, his mind is drenched with them, but never groups them into
patterns to tickle his sense of form. It is charged that his method is
inartistic, and it is so in a sense, but it is the Whitman art and has its
own value in his work. Only the artist instinct could prompt to this
succession of one line genre word painting.
But this is not the way of the great artists. No, but it is Whitman's way,
and these things have a certain artistic value in his work, a work that
professedly aims to typify his country and times,--the value of multitude,
processions, mass-movements, and the gathering together of elements and
forces from wide areas.