Of late years the name of Walt Whitman has been a good deal bandied
about in books and magazines. It has become familiar both in good and
ill repute. His works have been largely bespattered with praise by his
admirers, and cruelly mauled and mangled by irreverent enemies. Now,
whether his poetry is good or bad as poetry, is a matter that may admit
of a difference of opinion without alienating those who differ. We could
not keep the peace with a man who should put forward claims to taste and
yet depreciate the choruses in "Samson Agonistes"; but, I think, we may
shake hands with one who sees no more in Walt Whitman's volume, from a
literary point of view, than a farrago of incompetent essays in a wrong
direction. That may not be at all our own opinion. We may think that,
when a work contains many unforgettable phrases, it cannot be altogether
devoid of literary merit. We may even see passages of a high poetry here
and there among its eccentric contents. But when all is said, Walt
Whitman is neither a Milton nor a Shakespeare; to appreciate his works
is not a condition necessary to salvation; and I would not disinherit a
son upon the question, nor even think much the worse of a critic, for I
should always have an idea what he meant.
What Whitman has to say is another affair from how he says it. It is not
possible to acquit any one of defective intelligence, or else stiff
prejudice, who is not interested by Whitman's matter and the spirit it
represents. Not as a poet, but as what we must call (for lack of a more
exact expression) a prophet, he occupies a curious and prominent
position. Whether he may greatly influence the future or not, he is a
notable symptom of the present. As a sign of the times, it would be hard
to find his parallel. I should hazard a large wager, for instance, that
he was not unacquainted with the works of Herbert Spencer; and yet
where, in all the history books, shall we lay our hands on two more
incongruous contemporaries? Mr. Spencer so decorous--I had almost said,
so dandy--in dissent; and Whitman, like a large shaggy dog, just
unchained, scouring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon. And
when was an echo more curiously like a satire, than when Mr. Spencer
found his Synthetic Philosophy reverberated from the other shores of the
Atlantic in the "barbaric yawp" of Whitman?
I
Whitman, it cannot be too soon explained, writes up to a system. He was
a theoriser about society before he was a poet. He first perceived
something wanting, and then sat down squarely to supply the want. The
reader, running over his works, will find that he takes nearly as much
pleasure in critically expounding his theory of poetry as in making
poems. This is as far as it can be from the case of the spontaneous
village minstrel dear to elegy, who has no theory whatever, although
sometimes he may have fully as much poetry as Whitman. The whole of
Whitman's work is deliberate and preconceived. A man born into a society
comparatively new, full of conflicting elements and interests, could not
fail, if he had any thoughts at all, to reflect upon the tendencies
around him. He saw much good and evil on all sides, not yet settled down
into some more or less unjust compromise as in older nations, but still
in the act of settlement. And he could not but wonder what it would turn
out; whether the compromise would be very just or very much the reverse,
and give great or little scope for healthy human energies. From idle
wonder to active speculation is but a step; and he seems to have been
early struck with the inefficacy of literature and its extreme
unsuitability to the conditions. What he calls "Feudal Literature" could
have little living action on the tumult of American democracy; what he
calls the "Literature of Woe," meaning the whole tribe of "Werther" and
Byron, could have no action for good in any time or place. Both
propositions, if art had none but a direct moral influence, would be
true enough; and as this seems to be Whitman's view, they were true
enough for him. He conceived the idea of a Literature which was to
inhere in the life of the present; which was to be, first, human, and
next, American; which was to be brave and cheerful as per contract; to
give culture in a popular and poetical presentment; and, in so doing,
catch and stereotype some democratic ideal of humanity which should be
equally natural to all grades of wealth and education, and suited, in
one of his favourite phrases, to "the average man." To the formation of
some such literature as this his poems are to be regarded as so many
contributions, one sometimes explaining, sometimes superseding, the
other: and the whole together not so much a finished work as a body of
suggestive hints. He does not profess to have built the castle, but he
pretends he has traced the lines of the foundation. He has not made the
poetry, but he flatters himself he has done something towards making the
poets.
His notion of the poetic function is ambitious, and coincides roughly
with what Schopenhauer has laid down as the province of the
metaphysician. The poet is to gather together for men, and set in order,
the materials of their existence. He is "The Answerer"; he is to find
some way of speaking about life that shall satisfy, if only for the
moment, man's enduring astonishment at his own position. And besides
having an answer ready, it is he who shall provoke the question. He must
shake people out of their indifference, and force them to make some
election in this world, instead of sliding dully forward in a dream.
Life is a business we are all apt to mismanage; either living recklessly
from day to day, or suffering ourselves to be gulled out of our moments
by the inanities of custom. We should despise a man who gave as little
activity and forethought to the conduct of any other business. But in
this, which is the one thing of all others, since it contains them all,
we cannot see the forest for the trees. One brief impression obliterates
another. There is something stupefying in the recurrence of unimportant
things. And it is only on rare provocations that we can rise to take an
outlook beyond daily concerns, and comprehend the narrow limits and
great possibilities of our existence. It is the duty of the poet to
induce such moments of clear sight. He is the declared enemy of all
living by reflex action, of all that is done betwixt sleep and waking,
of all the pleasureless pleasurings and imaginary duties in which we
coin away our hearts and fritter invaluable years. He has to electrify
his readers into an instant unflagging activity, founded on a wide and
eager observation of the world, and make them direct their ways by a
superior prudence, which has little or nothing in common with the maxims
of the copy-book. That many of us lead such lives as they would heartily
disown after two hours' serious reflection on the subject is, I am
afraid, a true, and, I am sure, a very galling thought. The Enchanted
Ground of dead-alive respectability is next, upon the map, to the Beulah
of considerate virtue. But there they all slumber and take their rest in
the middle of God's beautiful and wonderful universe; the drowsy heads
have nodded together in the same position since first their fathers fell
asleep; and not even the sound of the last trumpet can wake them to a
single active thought. The poet has a hard task before him to stir up
such fellows to a sense of their own and other people's principles in
life.
And it happens that literature is, in some ways, but an indifferent
means to such an end. Language is but a poor bull's-eye lantern
wherewith to show off the vast cathedral of the world; and yet a
particular thing once said in words is so definite and memorable, that
it makes us forget the absence of the many which remain unexpressed;
like a bright window in a distant view, which dazzles and confuses our
sight of its surroundings. There are not words enough in all Shakespeare
to express the merest fraction of a man's experience in an hour. The
speed of the eyesight and the hearing, and the continual industry of the
mind, produce, in ten minutes, what it would require a laborious volume
to shadow forth by comparisons and roundabout approaches. If verbal
logic were sufficient, life would be as plain sailing as a piece of
Euclid. But, as a matter of fact, we make a travesty of the simplest
process of thought when we put it into words; for the words are all
coloured and forsworn, apply inaccurately, and bring with them, from
former uses, ideas of praise and blame that have nothing to do with the
question in hand. So we must always see to it nearly, that we judge by
the realities of life and not by the partial terms that represent them
in man's speech; and at times of choice, we must leave words upon one
side, and act upon those brute convictions, unexpressed and perhaps
inexpressible, which cannot be flourished in an argument, but which are
truly the sum and fruit of our experience. Words are for communication,
not for judgment. This is what every thoughtful man knows for himself,
for only fools and silly schoolmasters push definitions over far into
the domain of conduct; and the majority of women, not learned in these
scholastic refinements, live all-of-a-piece and unconsciously, as a tree
grows, without caring to put a name upon their acts or motives. Hence, a
new difficulty for Whitman's scrupulous and argumentative poet: he must
do more than waken up the sleepers to his words; he must persuade them
to look over the book and at life with their own eyes.
This side of truth is very present to Whitman; it is this that he means
when he tells us that "To glance with an eye confounds the learning of
all times." But he is not unready. He is never weary of descanting on
the undebatable conviction that is forced upon our minds by the presence
of other men, of animals, or of inanimate things. To glance with an eye,
were it only at a chair or a park railing, is by far a more persuasive
process, and brings us to a far more exact conclusion than to read the
works of all the logicians extant. If both, by a large allowance, may be
said to end in certainty, the certainty in the one case transcends the
other to an incalculable degree. If people see a lion, they run away; if
they only apprehend a deduction, they keep wandering around in an
experimental humour. Now, how is the poet to convince like nature, and
not like books? Is there no actual piece of nature that he can show the
man to his face, as he might show him a tree if they were walking
together? Yes, there is one: the man's own thoughts. In fact, if the
poet is to speak efficaciously, he must say what is already in his
hearer's mind. That, alone, the hearer will believe; that, alone, he
will be able to apply intelligently to the facts of life. Any
conviction, even if it be a whole system or a whole religion, must pass
into the condition of commonplace, or postulate, before it becomes fully
operative. Strange excursions and high-flying theories may interest, but
they cannot rule behaviour. Our faith is not the highest truth that we
perceive, but the highest that we have been able to assimilate into the
very texture and method of our thinking. It is not, therefore, by
flashing before a man's eyes the weapons of dialectic; it is not by
induction, deduction, or construction; it is not by forcing him on from
one stage of reasoning to another, that the man will be effectually
renewed. He cannot be made to believe anything; but he can be made to
see that he has always believed it. And this is the practical canon. It
is when the reader cries, "Oh, I know!" and is, perhaps, half irritated
to see how nearly the author has forestalled his own thoughts, that he
is on the way to what is called in theology a Saving Faith.
Here we have the key to Whitman's attitude. To give a certain unity of
ideal to the average population of America--to gather their activities
about some conception of humanity that shall be central and normal, if
only for the moment--the poet must portray that population as it is.
Like human law, human poetry is simply declaratory. If any ideal is
possible, it must be already in the thoughts of the people; and, by the
same reason, in the thoughts of the poet, who is one of them. And hence
Whitman's own formula: "The poet is individual--he is complete in
himself: the others are as good as he; only he sees it, and they do
not." To show them how good they are, the poet must study his
fellow-countrymen and himself somewhat like a traveller on the hunt for
his book of travels. There is a sense, of course, in which all true
books are books of travel; and all genuine poets must run the risk of
being charged with the traveller's exaggeration; for to whom are such
books more surprising than to those whose own life is faithfully and
smartly pictured? But this danger is all upon one side; and you may
judiciously flatter the portrait without any likelihood of the sitter's
disowning it for a faithful likeness. And so Whitman has reasoned: that
by drawing at first-hand from himself and his neighbours, accepting
without shame the inconsistencies and brutalities that go to make up
man, and yet treating the whole in a high, magnanimous spirit, he would
make sure of belief, and at the same time encourage people forward by
the means of praise.