"The friendly and flowing savage, who is he?
Is he waiting for civilization, or is he past it and master of it?"
Do we not, consciously or unconsciously, ask this or a similar question of
every poet or artist whom we pass in review before us? Is he master of his
culture, or does it master him? Does he strike back through it to simple,
original nature, or is he a potted plant? Does he retain the native savage
virtues, or is he entirely built up from the outside? We constantly
mistake culture for mere refinement, which it is not: it is a liberating
process; it is a clearing away of obstructions, and the giving to inherent
virtues a chance to express themselves. It makes savage nature friendly
and considerate. The aim of culture is not to get rid of nature, but to
utilize nature. The great poet is always a "friendly and flowing savage,"
the master and never the slave of the complex elements of our artificial
lives.
Though our progress and civilization are a triumph over nature, yet in an
important sense we never get away from nature or improve upon her. Her
standards are still our standards, her sweetness and excellence are still
our aim. Her health, her fertility, her wholeness, her freshness, her
innocence, her evolution, we would fain copy or reproduce. We would, if we
could, keep the pungency and aroma of her wild fruit in our cultivated
specimens, the virtue and hardiness of the savage in our fine gentlemen,
the joy and spontaneity of her bird-songs in our poetry, the grace and
beauty of her forms in our sculpture and carvings.
A poetic utterance from an original individual standpoint, something
definite and characteristic,--this is always the crying need. What a fine
talent has this or that young British or American poet whom we might name!
But we see that the singer has not yet made this talent his own; it is a
kind of borrowed capital; it is the general taste and intelligence that
speak. When will he redeem all these promises, and become a fixed centre
of thought and emotion in himself? To write poems is no distinction; to be
a poem, to be a fixed point amid the seething chaos, a rock amid the
currents, giving your own form and character to them,--that is something.
It matters little, as Whitman himself says, who contributes the mass of
poetic verbiage upon which any given age feeds.
But for a national first-class poem, or a great work of the imagination of
any sort, the man is everything, because such works finally rest upon
primary human qualities and special individual traits. A richly endowed
personality is always the main dependence in such cases, or, as Goethe
says, "in the great work the great person is always present as the great
factor."
"Leaves of Grass" is as distinctly an emanation from Walt Whitman, from
his quality and equipment as a man apart from anything he owed to books or
to secondary influences, as a tree is an emanation from the soil. It is,
moreover, an emanation from him as an American in the latter half of the
nineteenth century, and as a typical democratic composite man, a man of
the common people, bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh, but with
an extraordinary endowment of spiritual and intellectual power, to which
he has given full swing without abating one jot or tittle the influence of
his heritage of the common stock.
V
There is one important quality that enters into all first-class literary
production and into all art, which is taken little account of in current
criticism: I mean the quality of the manly,--the pulse and pressure of
manly virility and strength. Goethe spoke of it to Eckermann as a certain
urgent power in which the art of his time was lacking. The producers had
taste and skill, but were not masterful as men. Goethe always looked
straight through the work to the man behind it; in art and poetry the
personality was everything. The special talent of one kind or another was
quite secondary. The greatest works are the least literary. To speak in
literature as a man, and not merely as a scholar or professional
litterateur, is always the crying need. The new poet has this or that
gift, but what is the human fund back of all? What is his endowment of the
common universal human traits? How much of a man is he? His measure in
this respect will be the measure of the final value of his contribution.
The decadence of literature sets in when there is more talent than
character in current production; when rare literary and artistic gifts no
longer come wedded to large human and manly gifts; when taste is
fastidious rather than robust and hearty. When was there a man born to
English or American literature with a large endowment of the universal
human qualities, or with those elements that give breadth and power, and
which lead art rather than follow it? We are living in an age of great
purity and refinement of taste in art and letters, but destitute of power.
Goethe spoke of Walter Scott not merely as a great talent, but as a
"comprehensive nature." Without this comprehensive nature as a setting,
his great talent would have amounted to but little. This gives the weight,
the final authority. How little there was on the surface of Scott of the
literary keenness, subtlety, knowingness of later producers, and yet how
far his contribution surpasses theirs in real human pathos and
suggestiveness!
The same might be said of Count Tolstoï, who is also, back of all, a great
loving nature.
One has great joy in Whitman because he is beyond and over all a large and
loving personality; his work is but a thin veil through which a great
nature clearly shows. The urgent power of which Goethe speaks is almost
too strong,--too strong for current taste: we want more art and less man,
more literature and less life. It is not merely a great mind that we feel,
but a great character. It penetrates every line, and indeed makes it true
of the book that whoever "touches this touches a man."
The lesson of the poet is all in the direction of the practical manly and
womanly qualities and virtues,--health, temperance, sanity, power,
endurance, aplomb,--and not at all in the direction of the literary and
artistic qualities or culture.
"To stand the cold or heat, to take good aim with a gun, to sail a boat,
to manage horses, to beget superb children,
To speak readily and clearly, to feel at home among common people,
To hold our own in terrible positions on land and sea."
All his aims, ideas, impulses, aspirations, relate to life, to
personality, and to power to deal with real things; and if we expect from
him only literary ideas--form, beauty, lucidity, proportion--we shall be
disappointed. He seeks to make the impression of concrete forces and
objects, and not of art.
"Not for an embroiderer,
(There will always be plenty of embroiderers--I welcome them also),
But for the fibre of things, and for inherent men and women.
"Not to chisel ornaments,
But to chisel with free stroke the heads and limbs of plenteous Supreme
Gods, that The States may realize them, walking and talking."
His whole work is a radiation from an exemplification of the idea that
there is something better than to be an artist or a poet,--namely, to be a
man. The poet's rapture springs not merely from the contemplation of the
beautiful and the artistic, but from the contemplation of the whole; from
the contemplation of democracy, the common people, workingmen, soldiers,
sailors, his own body, death, sex, manly love, occupations, and the force
and vitality of things. We are to look for the clews to him in the open
air and in natural products, rather than in the traditional art forms and
methods. He declares he will never again mention love or death inside of a
house, and that he will translate himself only to those who privately stay
with him in the open air.
"If you would understand me, go to the heights or water-shore;
The nearest gnat is an explanation, and a drop or motion of waves a key:
The maul, the oar, the handsaw, second my words.
"No shuttered room or school can commune with me,
But roughs and little children better than they.
"The young mechanic is closest to me--he knows me pretty well.
The woodman, that takes his axe and jug with him, shall take me with
him all day;
The farm-boy, ploughing in the field, feels good at the sound of my
voice:
In vessels that sail, my words sail--I go with fishermen and seamen,
and love them.
"My face rubs to the hunter's face when he lies down alone in his
blanket;
The driver, thinking of me, does not mind the jolt of his wagon;
The young mother and old mother comprehend me;
The girl and the wife rest the needle a moment, and forget where
they are:
They and all would resume what I have told them."