Whitman's relation to art, then, is primary and fundamental, just as his
relations to religion, to culture, to politics, to democracy, are primary
and fundamental,--through his emotion, his soul, and not merely through
his tools, his intellect. His artistic conscience is quickly revealed to
any searching inquiry. It is seen in his purpose to convey his message by
suggestion and indirection, or as an informing, vitalizing breath and
spirit. His thought and meaning are enveloped in his crowded, concrete,
and often turbulent pages, as science is enveloped in nature. He has a
profound ethic, a profound metaphysic, but they are not formulated; they
are vital in his pages as hearing or eyesight.
Whitman studied effects, and shaped his means to his end, weighing values
and subordinating parts, as only the great artist does. He knew the power
of words as few know them; he knew the value of vista, perspective,
vanishing lights and lines. He knew how to make his words itch at your
ears till you understood them; how to fold up and put away in his
sentences meanings, glimpses, that did not at first reveal themselves. It
is only the work of the great creative artist that is pervaded by will,
and that emanates directly and inevitably from the personality of the man
himself. As a man and an American, Whitman is as closely related to his
work as Æschylus to his, or Dante to his. This is always a supreme
test,--the closeness and vitality of the relation of a man to his work.
Could any one else have done it? Is it the general intelligence that
speaks, the culture and refinement of the age? or have we a new revelation
of life, a new mind and soul? The lesser poets sustain only a secondary
relation to their works. It is other poets, other experiences, the past,
the schools, the forms, that speak through them. In all Whitman's
recitatives, as he calls them, the free-flowing ends of the sentences, the
loose threads of meaning, the unraveled or unknitted threads and fringes,
are all well considered, and are one phase of _his_ art. He seeks his
effects thus.
His method is indirect, allegorical, and elliptical to an unusual degree;
often a curious suspension and withholding in a statement, a suggestive
incompleteness, both ends of his thought, as it were, left in the air;
sometimes the substantive, sometimes the nominative, is wanting, and all
for a purpose. The poet somewhere speaks of his utterance as "prophetic
screams." The prophetic element is rarely absent, the voice of one crying
in the wilderness, only it is a more jocund and reassuring cry than we are
used to in prophecy. The forthrightness of utterance, the projectile
force of expression, the constant appeal to unseen laws and powers of the
great prophetic souls, is here.
Whitman is poetic in the same way in which he is democratic, in the same
way in which he is religious, or American, or modern,--not by word merely,
but by deed; not by the extrinsic, but by the intrinsic; not by art, but
by life.
I am never tired of saying that to put great personal qualities in a poem,
or other literary work, not formulated or didactically stated, but in
tone, manner, attitude, breadth of view, love, charity, good fellowship,
etc., is the great triumph for our day. So put, they are a possession to
the race forever; they grow and bear fruit perennially, like the grass and
the trees. And shall it be said that the poet who does this has no worthy
art?