So far as literature is a luxury, and for the cultured, privileged few,
its interests are not in Whitman; so far as poetry represents the weakness
of man rather than his strength; so far as it expresses a shrinking from
reality and a refuge in sentimentalism; so far as it is aristocratic as in
Tennyson, or mocking and rebellious as in Byron, or erotic and mephitic as
in Swinburne, or regretful and reminiscent as in Arnold, or a melodious
baying of the moon as in Shelley, or the outcome of mere scholarly and
technical acquirements as in so many of our younger poets,--so far as
literature or poetry, I say, stand for these things, there is little of
either in Whitman. Whitman stands for the primary and essential; he stands
for that which makes the body as well as the mind, which makes life sane
and joyous and masterful. Everything that tends to depletion, satiety, the
abnormal, the erotic and exotic, that induces the stress and fever of
life, is foreign to his spirit. He is less beautiful than the popular
poets, yet more beautiful. He will have to do only with the inevitable
beauty, the beauty that comes unsought, that resides in the interior
meanings and affiliations,--the beauty that dare turn its back upon the
beautiful.
Whitman has escaped entirely the literary disease, the characteristic
symptoms of which, according to Renan, is that people love less things
themselves than the literary effects which they produce. He has escaped
the art disease which makes art all in all; the religious disease, which
runs to maudlin piety and seeks to win heaven by denying earth; the beauty
disease, which would make of poesy a conventional flower-garden. He brings
heroic remedies for our morbid sex-consciousness, and for all the
pathological conditions brought about by our excess of refinement, and the
dyspeptic depletions of our indoor artificial lives. Whitman withstood the
æsthetic temptation, as Amiel calls it, to which most of our poets fall a
victim,--the lust for the merely beautiful, the epicureanism of the
literary faculties. We can make little of him if we are in quest of
æsthetic pleasures alone. "In order to establish those literary
authorities which are called classic centuries," says Renan, "something
healthy and solid is necessary. Common household bread is of more value
here than pastry." But the vast majority of literary producers aim at
pastry, or, worse yet, confectionery,--something especially delightful and
titivating to the taste. No doubt Renan himself was something of a
literary epicure, but then he imposed upon himself large and serious
tasks, and his work as a whole is solid and nourishing; his charm of style
does not blind and seduce us. It makes all the difference in the world
whether we seek the beautiful through the true, or the true through the
beautiful. Seek ye the kingdom of truth first and all things shall be
added. The novice aims to write beautifully, but the master aims to see
truly and to feel vitally. Beauty follows him, and is never followed by
him.
Nature is beautiful because she is something else first, yes, and last,
too, and all the while. Whitman's work is baptized in the spirit of the
whole, and its health and sweetness in this respect, when compared with
the over-refined artistic works, is like that of a laborer in the fields
compared with the pale dyspeptic ennuyé.