I may here notice two objections to Whitman urged by Mr. Stedman,--a
critic for whose opinion I have great respect, and a man for whom I have a
genuine affection. With all his boasted breadth and tolerance, Whitman,
says my friend, is narrow; and, with all his vaunted escape from the
shackles of verse-form, he is a formalist: his "irregular, manneristic
chant" is as much at the extreme of artificiality as is the sonnet. These
certainly are faults that one does not readily associate with the work of
Whitman. But then I remember that the French critic, Scherer, charges
Carlyle, the apostle of the gospel of sincerity, with being insincere and
guilty of canting about cant. If Carlyle is insincere, I think it very
likely that Whitman may be narrow and hide-bound. These things are so much
a matter of temperament that one cannot judge for another. Yet one ought
not to confound narrowness and breadth, or little and big. All earnest,
uncompromising men are more or less open to the charge of narrowness. A
man is narrow when he concentrates himself upon a point; even a
cannon-shot is. Whitman was narrow in the sense that he was at times
monotonous; that he sought but few effects, that he poured himself out
mainly in one channel, that he struck chiefly the major chords of life.
His "Leaves" do not show a great range of artistic motifs. A versatile,
many-sided nature he certainly was not; a large, broad, tolerant nature
he as certainly was. He does not assume many and diverse forms like a
purely artistic talent, sporting with and masquerading in all the elements
of life, like Shakespeare; but in his own proper form, and in his own
proper person, he gives a sense of vastness and power that are
unapproached in modern literature. He asserts himself uncompromisingly,
but he would have you do the same. "He who spreads a wider breast than my
own proves the width of my own." "He most honors my style who learns under
it to destroy the teacher." His highest hope is to be the soil of superior
poems.
Mr. Stedman thinks he detects in the poet a partiality for the coarser,
commoner elements of our humanity over the finer and choicer,--for the
"rough" over the gentleman. But when all things have been duly considered,
it will be found, I think, that he finally rests only with great personal
qualities and traits. He is drawn by powerful, natural persons, wherever
found,--men and women self-poised, fully equipped on all sides:--
"I announce a great individual, fluid as Nature, chaste, affectionate,
compassionate, fully arm'd,
I announce a life that shall be copious, vehement, spiritual, bold,"--
and much more to the same effect.
"I say nourish a great intellect, a great brain:
If I have said anything to the contrary, I hereby retract it."
Whitman is a formalist, just as every man who has a way of his own of
saying and doing things, no matter how natural, is a formalist; but he is
not a stickler for form of any sort. He has his own proper form, of
course, which he rarely departs from. At one extreme of artificiality Mr.
Stedman apparently places the sonnet. This is an arbitrary form; its rules
are inflexible; it is something cut and shaped and fitted together after a
predetermined pattern, and to this extent is artificial. If Whitman's
irregularity was equally studied; if it gave us the same sense of
something cunningly planned and wrought to a particular end, clipped here,
curbed there, folded back in this line, drawn out in that, and attaining
to a certain mechanical proportion and balance as a whole,--then there
would be good ground for the critic's charge. But such is not the case.
Whitman did not have, nor claim to have, the architectonic power of the
great constructive poets. He did not build the lofty rhyme. He did not
build anything, strictly speaking. He let himself go. He named his book
after the grass, which makes a carpet over the earth, and which is a sign
and a presence rather than a form.