I want to approach this great Soothsayer from the angle least of all
profaned by popular verdicts. I mean from the angle of his poetry.
We all know what a splendid heroic Anarchist he was. We all know
with what rude zest he gave himself up to that "Cosmic Emotion," to
which in these days the world does respectful, if distant, reverence.
We know his mania for the word "en masse," for the words
"ensemble," "democracy" and "libertad." We know his defiant
celebrations of Sex, of amorousness, of maternity; of that Love of
Comrades which "passeth the love of women." We know the world-shaking
effort he made--and to have made it at all, quite apart from
its success, marks him a unique genius!--to write poetry about every
mortal thing that exists, and to bring the whole breathing palpable
world into his Gargantuan Catalogues. It is absurd to grumble at
these Inventories of the Round Earth. They may not all move to
Dorian flutes, but they form a background--like the lists of the Kings
in the Bible and the lists of the Ships in Homer--against which, as
against the great blank spaces of Life itself, "the writing upon the
wall" may make itself visible.
What seems much less universally realized is the extraordinary
genius for sheer "poetry" which this Prophet of Optimism possessed.
I agree that Walt Whitman's Optimism is the only kind, of that sort
of thing, that one can submit to without a blush. At least it is not
indecent, bourgeois, and ill-bred, like the fourth-hand Protestantism
that Browning dishes up, for the delectation of Ethical Societies. It is
the optimism of a person who has seen the American Civil War. It is
the optimism of a man who knows "the Bowery" and "the road," and
has had queer friends in his mortal pilgrimage.
It is an interesting psychological point, this difference between the
"marching breast-forward" of Mrs. Browning's energetic husband,
and the "taking to the open road" of Whitman. In some curious way
the former gets upon one's nerves where the latter does not. Perhaps
it is that the boisterous animal-spirits which one appreciates in the
open air become vulgar and irritating when they are practised within
the walls of a house. A Satyr who stretches his hairy shanks in the
open forest is a pleasant thing to see; but a gentleman, with
lavender-colored gloves, putting his feet on the chimney-piece is not
so appealing. No doubt it is precisely for these Domestic Exercises
that Mr. Chesterton, let us say, would have us love Browning. Well!
It is a matter of taste.
But it is not of Walt Whitman's Optimism that I want to speak; it is
of his poetry.
To grasp the full importance of what this great man did in this
sphere one has only to read modern "libre vers." After Walt
Whitman, Paul Fort, for instance, seems simply an eloquent prose
writer. And none of them can get the trick of it. None of them!
Somewhere, once, I heard a voice that approached it; a voice
murmuring of
"Those that sleep upon the wind,
And those that lie along in the rain,
Cursing Egypt--"
But that voice went its way; and for the rest--what banalities! What
ineptitudes! They make the mistake, our modern free-versifiers, of
thinking that Art can be founded on the Negation of Form. Art can
be founded on every other Negation. But not on that one--never on
that one! Certainly they have a right to experiment; to invent--if they
can--new forms. But they must invent them. They must not just
arrange their lines _to look like poetry,_ and leave it at that.
Walt Whitman's New Form of Verse was, as all such things must be,
as Mr. Hardy's strange poetry, for instance, is, a deliberate and
laborious struggle--ending in what is a struggle no more--to express
his own personality in a unique and recognisable manner. This is the
secret of all "style" in poetry. And it is the absence of this labour, of
this premeditated concentration, which leads to the curious result we
see on all sides of us, the fact, namely, that all young modern poets
_write alike._ They write alike, and they _are_ alike--just as all men
are like all other men, and all women like all other women, when,
without the "art" of clothing, or the "art" of flesh and blood, they lie
down side by side in the free cemetery. The old poetic forms will
always have their place. They can never grow old-fashioned; any
more than Pisanello, or El Greco, or Botticelli, or Scopas, or any
ancient Chinese Painter, can grow old-fashioned. But when a
modern artist or poet sets to work to create a new form, let him
remember what he is doing! It is not the pastime of an hour, this. It
is not the casual gesture of a mad iconoclast breaking Classic
Statues into mud, out of which to make goblins. It is the fierce,
tenacious, patient, constructive work of a lifetime, based upon
a tremendous and overpowering Vision! Such a vision Walt
Whitman had, and to such constant inspired labour he gave his
life--notwithstanding his talk about "loafing and inviting his soul"!
The "free" poetry of Walt Whitman obeys inflexible, occult laws,
the laws commanded unto it by his own creative instinct. We need,
as Nietzsche says, to learn the art of "commands" of this kind!
Transvaluers of old values do not spend all their time sipping
absinthe. Is it a secret still, then, the magical unity of rhythm, which
Walt Whitman has conveyed to the words he uses? Those long,
plangent, wailing lines, broken by little gurgling gasps and sobs;
those sudden thrilling apostrophes and recognitions; those far-drawn
flute-notes; those resounding sea-trumpets; all such effects have
their place in the great orchestral symphony he conducts!
Take that little poem--quite spoiled before the end by a horrible bit
of democratic vulgarity--which begins:
"Come, I will build a Continent indissoluble;
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon--"
Is it possible to miss the hidden spheric law which governs such a
challenge? Take the poem which begins:
"In the growths, by the margins of pond-waters--"
Do you not divine, delicate reader, the peculiar subtlety of that
reference to the rank, rain-drenched _anonymous weeds,_ which
every day we pass in our walks inland? A botanical name would
have driven the magic of it quite away.
Walt Whitman, more than anyone, is able to convey to us that sense
of the unclassified pell-mell, of weeds and stones and rubble and
wreckage, of vast, desolate spaces, and spaces full of debris and
litter, which is most of all characteristic of your melancholy
American landscape, but which those who love England know
where to find, even among our trim gardens! No one like Walt
Whitman can convey to us the magical _ugliness_ of certain aspects
of Nature--the bleak, stunted, God-forsaken things; the murky pools
where the grey leaves fall; the dead reeds where the wind whistles
no sweet fairy tunes; the unspeakable margins of murderous floods;
the tangled sea-drift, scurfed with scum; the black sea-winrow of
broken shells and dead fishes' scales; the roots of willow trees in
moonlit places crying out for demon-lovers; the long, moaning grass
that grows outside the walls of prisons; the leprous mosses that
cover paupers' graves; the mountainous wastes and blighted
marshlands which only unknown wild-birds ever touch with their
flying wings, and of which madmen dream--these are the things, the
ugly, terrible things, that this great optimist turns into poetry. "Yo
honk!" cries the wild goose, as it crosses the midnight sky. Others
may miss that mad-tossed shadow, that heartbreaking defiance--but
from amid the drift of leaves by the roadside, this bearded Fakir of
Outcasts has caught its meaning; has heard, and given it its answer.
Ah, gentle and tender reader; thou whose heart, it may be has never
cried all night for what it must not name, did you think Swinburne
or Byron were the poets of "love"? Perhaps you do not know that the
only "short story" on the title-page of which Guy de Maupassant
found it in him to write _that word_ is a story about the wild things
we go out to kill?
Walt Whitman, too, does not confine his notions of love to normal
human coquetries. The most devastating love-cry ever uttered,
except that of King David over his friend, is the cry this American
poet dares to put into the heart of "a wild-bird from Alabama" that
has lost its mate. I wonder if critics have done justice to the
incredible genius of this man who can find words for that aching of
the soul we do not confess even to our dearest? The sudden words
he makes use of, in certain connections, awe us, hush us, confound
us, take our breath,--as some of Shakespeare's do--with their
mysterious congruity. Has my reader ever read the little poem called
"Tears"? And what _purity_ in the truest, deepest sense, lies behind
his pity for such tragic craving; his understanding of what
love-stricken, banished ones feel. I do not speak now of his happily
amorous verses. They have their place. I speak of those desperate
lines that come, here and there, throughout his work, where, with his
huge, Titanic back set against the world-wall, and his wild-tossed
beard streaming in the wind, he seems _to hold open_ by main,
gigantic force that door of hope which Fate and God and Man and
the Laws of Nature are all endeavoring to close! _And he holds it
open!_ And it is open still. It is for this reason--let the profane hold
their peace!--that I do not hesitate to understand very clearly why he
addresses a certain poem to the Lord Christ! Whether it be true or
not that the Pure in Heart see God, it is certainly true that they have
a power of saving us from God's Law of Cause and Effect!
According to this Law, we all "have our reward" and reap what we
have sown. But sometimes, like a deep-sea murmur, there rises from
the poetry of Walt Whitman a Protest that _must_ be heard! Then it
is that the Tetrarchs of Science forbid in vain "that one should raise
the Dead." For the Dead are raised up, and come forth, even in the
likeness wherein we loved them! If words, my friends; if the use of
words in poetry can convey such intimations as these to such a
generation as ours, can anyone deny that Walt Whitman is a great
poet?
Deny it, who may or will. There will always gather round him--as he
predicted--out of City-Tenements and Artist-Studios and Factory-Shops
and Ware-Houses and Bordelloes--aye! and, it may be, out of
the purlieus of Palaces themselves--a strange, mad, heart-broken
company of life-defeated derelicts, who come, not for Cosmic
Emotion or Democracy or Anarchy or Amorousness, or even
"Comradeship," but for that touch, that whisper, that word, that hand
outstretched in the darkness, which makes them _know_--against
reason and argument and all evidence--that they may hope still--_for
the Impossible is true!_