Whitman was afraid of what he called the beauty disease. He thought a poet
of the first order should be sparing of the direct use of the beautiful,
as Nature herself is. His aim should be larger, and beauty should follow
and not lead. The poet should not say to himself, "Come, I will make
something beautiful," but rather "I will make something true, and
quickening, and powerful. I will not dress my verse up in fine words and
pretty fancies, but I will breathe into it the grit and force and
adhesiveness of real things." Beauty is the flowering of life and
fecundity, and it must have deep root in the non-beautiful.
Beauty, as the master knows it, is a spirit and not an adornment. It is
not merely akin to flowers and gems and rainbows: it is akin to the All.
Looking through his eyes, you shall see it in the rude and the savage
also, in rocks and deserts and mountains, in the common as well as in the
rare, in wrinkled age as well as in rosy youth.
The non-beautiful holds the world together, holds life together and
nourishes it, more than the beautiful. Nature is beautiful because she is
so much else first,--yes, and last, and all the time.
"For the roughness of the earth and of man encloses as much as the
delicates of the earth and of man,
And nothing endures but personal qualities."
Is there not in field, wood, or shore something more precious and tonic
than any special beauties we may chance to find there,--flowers, perfumes,
sunsets,--something that we cannot do without, though we can do without
these? Is it health, life, power, or what is it?
Whatever it is, it is something analogous to this that we get in Whitman.
There is little in his "Leaves" that one would care to quote for its mere
beauty, though this element is there also. One may pluck a flower here and
there in his rugged landscape, as in any other; but the flowers are always
by the way, and never the main matter. We should not miss them if they
were not there. What delights and invigorates us is in the air, and in the
look of things. The flowers are like our wild blossoms growing under great
trees or amid rocks, never the camellia or tuberose of the garden or
hot-house,--something rude and bracing is always present, always a breath
of the untamed and aboriginal.
Whitman's work gives results, and never processes. There is no return of
the mind upon itself; it descends constantly upon things, persons,
realities. It is a rushing stream which will not stop to be analyzed. It
has been urged that Whitman does not give the purely intellectual
satisfaction that would seem to be warranted by his mental grasp and
penetration. No, nor the æsthetic satisfaction warranted by his
essentially artistic habit of mind. Well, he did not promise satisfaction
in anything, but only to put us on the road to satisfaction. His book, he
says, is not a "good lesson," but it lets down the bars to a good lesson,
and that to another, and every one to another still.
Let me repeat that the sharp, distinct intellectual note--the note of
culture, books, clubs, etc., such as we get from so many modern writers,
you will not get from Whitman. In my opinion, the note he sounds is deeper
and better than that. It has been charged by an unfriendly critic that he
strikes lower than the intellect. If it is meant by this that he misses
the intellect, it is not true; he stimulates the intellect as few poets
do. He strikes lower because he strikes farther. He sounds the note of
character, personality, volition, the note of prophecy, of democracy, and
of love. He seems unintellectual to an abnormally intellectual age; he
seems unpoetic to a taste formed upon poetic tidbits; he seems irreligious
to standards founded upon the old models of devotional piety; he seems
disorderly, incoherent to all petty thumb and finger measurements. In his
ideas and convictions, Whitman was a modern of the moderns; yet in his
type, his tastes, his fundamental make-up, he was primitive, of an earlier
race and age,--before, as Emerson suggests, the gods had cut Man up into
men, with special talents of one kind or another.