Whitman loved the word "unrefined." It was one of the words he would have
us apply to himself. He was unrefined, as the air, the soil, the water,
and all sweet natural things are unrefined (fine but not _re_fined). He
applies the word to himself two or three times in the course of his poems.
He loved the words sun-tan, air-sweetness, brawn, etc. He speaks of his
"savage song," not to call forth the bards of the past, he says, but to
invoke the bards of the future.
"Have I sung so capricious and loud my savage songs?"
The thought that his poems might help contribute to the production of a
"race of splendid and savage old men" was dear to him. He feared the
depleting and emasculating effects of our culture and conventions. The
decay of maternity and paternity in this country, the falling off of the
native populations, were facts full of evil omen. His ideal of manly or
womanly character is rich in all the purely human qualities and
attributes; rich in sex, in sympathy, in temperament; physiologically
sound and clean, as well as mentally and morally so.
"Fear grace, fear delicatesse;
Fear the mellow-sweet, the sucking of honey-juice:
Beware the advancing mortal ripening of nature!
Beware what precedes the decay of the ruggedness of states and men."
He was himself the savage old man he invoked. It was no part of his plan
to preach, in refined and euphonious terms, hygiene and the value of the
natural man, but to project into literature the thing itself, to exploit a
character coarse as well as fine, and to imbue his poems with a
physiological quality as well as a psychological and intellectual.
"I will scatter the new roughness and gladness among them."
He says to the pale, impotent victim of over-refinement, with intentional
rudeness,
"Open your scarf'd chops till I blow grit within you."
X
One of the key-words to Whitman both as a man and a poet is the word
"composite." He was probably the most composite man this century has
produced, and in this respect at least is representative of the American
of the future, who must be the result of the blending of more diverse
racial elements than any man of history. He seems to have had an
intuition of his composite character when he said in his first poem:--
"I am large,--I contain multitudes."
The London correspondent of the "New York Tribune," in reluctantly
conceding at the time of the poet's death something to the British
admiration of him, said he was "rich in temperament." The phrase is well
chosen. An English expert on the subject of temperament, who visited
Whitman some years ago, said he had all four temperaments, the sanguine,
the nervous, the melancholic, and the lymphatic, while most persons have
but two temperaments, and rarely three.
It was probably the composite character of Whitman that caused him to
attract such diverse and opposite types of men,--scholars and workingmen,
lawyers, doctors, scientists, and men of the world,--and that made him
personally such a puzzle to most people,--so impossible to classify. On
the street the promenaders would turn and look after him, and I have often
heard them ask each other, "What man was that?" He has often been taken
for a doctor, and during his services in the army hospitals various myths
were floating about concerning him. Now he was a benevolent Catholic
priest,--then some unknown army general, or retired sea captain; at one
time he was reputed to be one of the owners of the Cunard line of
steamers. To be taken for a Californian was common. One recalls the
composite character of the poet whom he outlines in his poems (see
quotation, page 159).
The book is as composite as the man. It is all things to all men; it lends
itself to a multitude of interpretations. Every earnest reader of it will
find some clew or suggestion by the aid of which he fancies he can unlock
the whole book, but in the end he will be pretty sure to discover that one
key is not enough. To one critic, his book is the "hoarse song of a man,"
its manly and masculine element attracts him; to another he is the poet of
joy, to another the poet of health, to still another he is the bard of
personality; others read him as the poet of nature, or the poet of
democracy. His French critic, Gabriel Sarrazin, calls him an apostle,--the
apostle of the idea that man is an indivisible fragment of the universal
Divinity.