No critic of repute has been more puzzled and misled by this unwrought
character of our poet's verse than Mr. Edmund Gosse, the London poet and
essayist. Mr. Gosse finds Whitman only a potential or possible poet; his
work is literature in the condition of protoplasm. He is a maker of poems
in solution; the structural change which should have crystallized his
fluid and teeming pages into forms of art never came. It does not occur to
Mr. Gosse to inquire whether or not something like this may not have been
the poet's intention. Perhaps this is the secret of the vitality of his
work, which, as Mr. Gosse says, now, after forty years, shows no sign of
declining. Perhaps it was a large, fresh supply of poetic yeast that the
poet really sought to bring us. Undoubtedly Whitman aimed to give his work
just this fluid, generative quality, to put into it the very basic
elements of life itself. He feared the "structural change" to which Mr.
Gosse refers; he knew it was more or less a change from life to death: the
cell and not the crystal; the leaf of grass, and not the gem, is the type
of his sentences. He sacrificed fixed form; above all, did he stop short
of that conscious intellectual elaboration so characteristic of later
poetry, the better to give the impression and the stimulus of creative
elemental power. It is not to the point to urge that this is not the
method or aim of other poets; that others have used the fixed forms, and
found them plastic and vital in their hands. It was Whitman's aim; these
were the effects he sought. I think beyond doubt that he gives us the
impression of something dynamic, something akin to the vital forces of the
organic world, much more distinctly and fully than any other poet who has
lived.
Whitman always aimed to make his reader an active partner with him in his
poetic enterprise. "I seek less," he says, "to state or display any theme
or thought, and more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere of the
theme or thought, there to pursue your own flight." This trait is brought
out by Mr. Gosse in a little allegory. "Every reader who comes to
Whitman," he says, "starts upon an expedition to the virgin forest. He
must take his conveniences with him. He will make of the excursion what
his own spirit dictates. [We generally do, in such cases, Mr. Gosse.]
There are solitudes, fresh air, rough landscape, and a well of water, but
if he wishes to enjoy the latter he must bring his own cup with him." This
phase of Whitman's work has never been more clearly defined. Mr. Gosse
utters it as an adverse criticism. It is true exposition, however we take
it, what we get out of Whitman depends so largely upon what we bring to
him. Readers will not all get the same. We do not all get the same out of
a walk or a mountain climb. We get out of him in proportion to the
sympathetic and interpretative power of our own spirits. Have you the
brooding, warming, vivifying mother-mind? That vague, elusive,
incommensurable something in the "Leaves" that led Symonds to say that
talking about Whitman was like talking about the universe,--that seems to
challenge our pursuit and definition, that takes on so many different
aspects to so many different minds,--it seems to be this that has led Mr.
Gosse to persuade himself that there is no real Walt Whitman, no man whom
we can take, as we take any other figure in literature, as an "entity of
positive value and definite characteristics," but a mere mass of literary
protoplasm that takes the instant impression of whatever mood approaches
it. Stevenson finds a Stevenson in it, Mr. Symonds finds a Symonds,
Emerson finds an Emerson, etc. Truly may our poet say, "I contain
multitudes." In what other poet do these men, or others like them, find
themselves?
Whitman was a powerful solvent undoubtedly. He never hardens into anything
like a system, or into mere intellectual propositions. One of his own
phrases, "the fluid and swallowing soul," is descriptive of this trait of
him. One source of his charm is, that we each see some phase of ourselves
in him, as Mr. Gosse suggests. Above all things is he potential and
indicative, bard of "flowing mouth and indicative hand." In his
"Inscriptions" he says:--
"I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a casual
look upon you and then averts his face,
Leaving it to you to prove and define it,
Expecting the main things from you."
This withholding and half-averted glancing, then, on the part of the poet,
is deliberate and enters into the scheme of the work. Mr. Gosse would have
shown himself a sounder critic had he penetrated the poet's purpose in
this respect, and shown whether or not he had violated the canons he had
set up for his own guidance. We do not condemn a creative work when it
departs from some rule or precedent, but when it violates its own
principle, when it is not consistent with itself, when it hath not eyes to
see, or ears to hear, or hands to reach what lies within its own sphere.
Art, in the plastic realms of written language, may set its mind upon
elaboration, upon structural finish and proportion, upon exact forms and
compensations, as in architecture, or it may set its mind upon
suggestion, indirection, and the flowing, changing forms of organic
nature. It is as much art in the one case as in the other. To get rid of
all visible artifice is, of course, the great thing in both cases. There
is so little apparent artifice in Whitman's case that he has been accused
of being entirely without art, and of throwing his matter together in a
haphazard way,--"without thought, without selection," without
"composition, evolution, vertebration of style," says Mr. Gosse. Yet his
work more than holds its own in a field where these things alone are
supposed to insure success. Whitman covers up his processes well, and
knows how to hit his mark without seeming to take aim. The verdicts upon
him are mainly contradictory, because each critic only takes in a part of
his scheme. Mr. Stedman finds him a formalist. Mr. Gosse finds in him a
negation of all form. The London critic says he is without thought. A
Boston critic speaks of what he happily calls the "waves of thought" in
his work,--vast mind-impulses that lift and sway great masses of concrete
facts and incidents. Whitman knew from the start that he would puzzle and
baffle his critics, and would escape from them like air when they felt
most sure they had him in their verbal nets. So it has been from the
first, and so it continues to be. Without one thing, he says, it is
useless to read him; and of what that one thing needful is, he gives only
the vaguest hint, only a "significant look."