I
I have divided my subject into many chapters, and given to each a separate
heading, yet I am aware that they are all but slight variations of a
single theme,--viz., Whitman's reliance upon absolute nature. That there
might be no mistake about it, and that his reader might at once be put in
possession of his point of view, the poet declared at the outset of his
career that at every hazard he should let nature speak.
"Creeds and schools in abeyance
Retiring back awhile, sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad,
I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check, with original energy."
The hazard of letting nature speak will, of course, be great,--the hazard
of gross misapprehension on the part of the public, and of hesitancy and
inadequacy on the part of the poet. The latter danger, I think, was safely
passed; Whitman never flinched or wavered for a moment, and that his
criticism is adequate seems to me equally obvious. But the former
contingency--the gross misapprehension of the public, even the wiser
public--has been astounding. He has been read in a narrow, literal,
bourgeois spirit. The personal pronoun, which he uses so freely, has been
taken to stand for the private individual Walt Whitman, so that he has
been looked upon as a compound of egotism and licentiousness. His
character has been traduced, and his purpose in the "Leaves" entirely
misunderstood.
We see at a glance that his attitude towards nature, towards God, towards
the body and the soul, reverses many of the old ascetic theological
conceptions.
All is good, all is as it should be; to abase the body is to abase the
soul. Man is divine inside and out, and is no more divine about the head
than about the loins. It is from this point of view that he has launched
his work. He believed the time had come for an utterance out of radical,
uncompromising human nature; let conventions and refinements stand back,
let nature, let the soul, let the elemental forces speak; let the body,
the passions, sex, be exalted; the stone rejected by the builders shall be
the chief stone in the corner. Evil shall be shown to be a part of the
good, and death shall be welcomed as joyously as life.
Whitman says his poems will do just as much evil as good, and perhaps
more. To many readers this confession of itself would be his condemnation.
To others it would be an evidence of his candor and breadth of view. I
suppose all great vital forces, whether embodied in a man or in a book,
work evil as well as good. If they do not, they only tickle the surface
of things. Has not the Bible worked evil also? Some think more evil than
good. The dews and the rains and the sunshine work evil.
From Whitman's point of view, there is no good without evil; evil is an
unripe kind of good. There is no light without darkness, no life without
death, no growth without pain and struggle. Beware the emasculated good,
the good by exclusion rather than by victory. "Leaves of Grass" will work
evil on evil minds,--on narrow, unbalanced minds. It is not a guide, but
an inspiration; not a remedy, but health and strength. Art does not preach
directly, but indirectly; it is moral by its spirit, and the mood and
temper it begets.
Whitman, in celebrating manly pride, self-reliance, the deliciousness of
sex; in glorifying the body, the natural passions and appetites, nativity;
in identifying himself with criminals and low or lewd persons; in frankly
imputing to himself all sins men are guilty of, runs the risk, of course,
of being read in a spirit less generous and redemptive than his own.
The charity of the poet may stimulate the license of the libertine; the
optimism of the seer may confirm the evil-doer; the equality of the
democrat may foster the insolence of the rowdy. This is our lookout and
not the poet's. We take the same chances with him that we do with nature;
we are to trim our sails to the breeze he brings; we are to sow wheat and
not tares for his rains to water.
Whitman's glorification of the body has led some critics to say that he is
the poet of the body only. But it is just as true to say he is the poet of
the soul only. He always seeks the spiritual through the material. He
treats the body and the soul as one, and he treats all things as having
reference to the soul.
"I will not make a poem, nor the least part, of a poem, but has
reference to the soul,
Because, having look'd at the objects of the universe, I find there
is no one, nor any particle of one, but has reference to the soul."
The curious physiological strain which runs through the poems is to be
considered in the light of this idea. He exalts the body because in doing
so he exalts the soul.
"Sure as the earth swims through the heavens, does every one of its
objects pass into spiritual results."