It would be an ill turn for an essay-writer to destroy Walt
Whitman,--for he was discovered by the essayists, and but for them his
notoriety would have been postponed for fifty years. He is the mare's
nest of "American Literature," and scarce a contributor to The Saturday
Review but has at one time or another raised a flag over him.
The history of these chronic discoveries of Whitman as a poet, as a
force, as a something or a somebody, would write up into the best
possible monograph on the incompetency of the Anglo-Saxon in matters of
criticism.
English literature is the literature of genius, and the Englishman is
the great creator. His work outshines the genius of Greece. His wealth
outvalues the combined wealth of all modern Europe. The English mind is
the only unconscious mind the world has ever seen. And for this reason
the English mind is incapable of criticism. There has never been an
English critic of the first rank, hardly a critic of any rank; and the
critical work of England consists either of an academical bandying of a
few old canons and shibboleths out of Horace or Aristotle, or else of
the merest impressionism, and wordy struggle to convey the sentiment
awakened by the thing studied.
Now, true criticism means an attempt to find out what something is, not
for the purpose of judging it, or of imitating it, nor for the purpose
of illustrating something else, nor for any other ulterior purpose
whatever.
The so-called canons of criticism are of about as much service to a
student of literature as the Nicene Creed and the Lord's Prayer are to
the student of church history. They are a part of his subject, of
course, but if he insists upon using them as a tape measure and a
divining-rod he will produce a judgment of no possible value to any one,
and interesting only as a record of a most complex state of mind.
The educated gentlemen of England have surveyed literature with these
time-honored old instruments, and hordes of them long ago rushed to
America with their theodolites and their quadrants in their hands. They
sized us up and they sized us down, and they never could find greatness
in literature among us till Walt Whitman appeared and satisfied the
astrologers.
Here was a comet, a man of the people, a new man, who spoke no known
language, who was very uncouth and insulting, who proclaimed himself a
"barbaric yawp," and who corresponded to the English imagination with
the unpleasant and rampant wildness of everything in America,--with
Mormonism and car factories, steamboat explosions, strikes, repudiation,
and whiskey; whose form violated every one of their minor canons as
America violated every one of their social ideas.
Then, too, Whitman arose out of the war, as Shakespeare arose out of the
destruction of the Armada, as the Greek poets arose out of the repulse
of the Persians. It was impossible, it was unprecedented, that a
national revulsion should not produce national poetry--and lo! here was
Whitman.
It may safely be said that the discovery of Whitman as a poet caused
many a hard-thinking Oxford man to sleep quietly at night. America was
solved.
The Englishman travels, but he travels after his mind has been burnished
by the university, and at an age when the best he can do in the line of
thought is to make an intelligent manipulation of the few notions he
leaves home with. He departs an educated gentleman, taking with him his
portmanteau and his ideas. He returns a travelled gentleman, bringing
with him his ideas and his portmanteau. He would as soon think of
getting his coats from Kansas as his thoughts from travel. And therefore
every impression of America which the travelling Englishman experienced
confirmed his theory of Whitman. Even Rudyard Kipling, who does not in
any sense fall under the above description, has enough Anglo-Saxon blood
in him to see in this country only the fulfilment of the fantastic
notions of his childhood.
But imagine an Oxford man who had eyes in his head, and who should come
to this country, never having heard of Whitman. He would see an
industrious and narrow-minded population, commonplace and monotonous, so
uniform that one man can hardly be distinguished from another,
law-abiding, timid, and traditional; a community where the individual is
suppressed by law, custom, and instinct, and in which, by consequence,
there are few or no great men, even counting those men thrust by
necessary operation of the laws of trade into commercial prominence,
and who claim scientific rather than personal notice.
The culture of this people, its architecture, letters, drama, etc., he
would find were, of necessity, drawn from European models; and in its
poetry, so far as poetry existed, he would recognize a somewhat feeble
imitation of English poetry. The newspaper verses very fairly represent
the average talent for poetry and average appreciation of it, and the
newspaper verse of the United States is precisely what one would expect
from a decorous and unimaginative population,--intelligent,
conservative, and uninspired.
Above the newspaper versifiers float the minor poets, and above these
soar the greater poets; and the characteristics of the whole hierarchy
are the same as those of the humblest acolyte,--intelligence,
conservatism, conventional morality.
Above the atmosphere they live in, above the heads of all the American
poets, and between them and the sky, float the Constitution of the
United States and the traditions and forms of English literature.
This whole culture is secondary and tertiary, and it truly represents
the respectable mediocrity from which it emanates. Whittier and
Longfellow have been much read in their day,--read by mill-hands and
clerks and school-teachers, by lawyers and doctors and divines, by the
reading classes of the republic, whose ideals they truly spoke for,
whose yearnings and spiritual life they truly expressed.
Now, the Oxford traveller would not have found Whitman at all. He would
never have met a man who had heard of him, nor seen a man like him.
The traveller, as he opened his Saturday Review upon his return to
London, and read the current essay on Whitman, would have been faced by
a problem fit to puzzle Montesquieu, a problem to floor Goethe.
And yet Whitman is representative. He is a real product, he has a real
and most interesting place in the history of literature, and he speaks
for a class and type of human nature whose interest is more than local,
whose prevalence is admitted,--a type which is one of the products of
the civilization of the century, perhaps of all centuries, and which has
a positively planetary significance.
There are, in every country, individuals who, after a sincere attempt to
take a place in organized society, revolt from the drudgery of it,
content themselves with the simplest satisfactions of the grossest need
of nature, so far as subsistence is concerned, and rediscover the
infinite pleasures of life in the open air.
If the roadside, the sky, the distant town, the soft buffeting of the
winds of heaven, are a joy to the aesthetic part of man, the freedom
from all responsibility and accountability is Nirvana to his moral
nature. A man who has once tasted these two joys together, the joy of
being in the open air and the joy of being disreputable and unashamed,
has touched an experience which the most close-knit and determined
nature might well dread. Life has no terrors for such a man. Society has
no hold on him. The trifling inconveniences of the mode of life are as
nothing compared with its satisfactions. The worm that never dies is
dead in him. The great mystery of consciousness and of effort is quietly
dissolved into the vacant happiness of sensation,--not base sensation,
but the sensation of the dawn and the sunset, of the mart and the
theatre, and the stars, the panorama of the universe.
To the moral man, to the philosopher or the business man, to any one who
is a cog in the wheel of some republic, all these things exist for the
sake of something else. He must explain or make use of them, or define
his relation to them. He spends the whole agony of his existence in an
endeavor to docket them and deal with them. Hampered as he is by all
that has been said and done before, he yet feels himself driven on to
summarize, and wreak himself upon the impossible task of grasping this
cosmos with his mind, of holding it in his hand, of subordinating it to
his purpose.
The tramp is freed from all this. By an act as simple as death, he has
put off effort and lives in peace.
It is no wonder that every country in Europe shows myriads of these men,
as it shows myriads of suicides annually. It is no wonder, though the
sociologists have been late in noting it, that specimens of the type are
strikingly identical in feature in every country of the globe.
The habits, the physique, the tone of mind, even the sign-language and
some of the catch-words, of tramps are the same everywhere. The men are
not natally outcasts. They have always tried civilized life. Their early
training, at least their early attitude of mind towards life, has
generally been respectable. That they should be criminally inclined
goes without saying, because their minds have been freed from the
sanctions which enforce law. But their general innocence is, under the
circumstances, very remarkable, and distinguishes them from the criminal
classes.
When we see one of these men sitting on a gate, or sauntering down a
city street, how often have we wondered how life appeared to him; what
solace and what problems it presented. How often have we longed to know
the history of such a soul, told, not by the police-blotter, but by the
poet or novelist in the heart of the man!
Walt Whitman has given utterance to the soul of the tramp. A man of
genius has passed sincerely and normally through this entire experience,
himself unconscious of what he was, and has left a record of it to
enlighten and bewilder the literary world.
In Whitman's works the elemental parts of a man's mind and the fragments
of imperfect education may be seen merging together, floating and
sinking in a sea of insensate egotism and rhapsody, repellent, divine,
disgusting, extraordinary.
Our inability to place the man intellectually, and find a type and
reason for his intellectual state, comes from this: that the revolt he
represents is not an intellectual revolt. Ideas are not at the bottom of
it. It is a revolt from drudgery. It is the revolt of laziness.
There is no intellectual coherence in his talk, but merely pathological
coherence. Can the insulting jumble of ignorance and effrontery, of
scientific phrase and French paraphrase, of slang and inspired
adjective, which he puts forward with the pretence that it represents
thought, be regarded, from any possible point of view, as a philosophy,
or a system, or a belief? Is it individualism of any statable kind? Do
the thoughts and phrases which float about in it have a meaning which
bears any relation to the meaning they bear in the language of thinkers?
Certainly not. Does all the patriotic talk, the talk about the United
States and its future, have any significance as patriotism? Does it
poetically represent the state of feeling of any class of American
citizens towards their country? Or would you find the nearest equivalent
to this emotion in the breast of the educated tramp of France, or
Germany, or England? The speech of Whitman is English, and his metaphors
and catch-words are apparently American, but the emotional content is
cosmic. He put off patriotism when he took to the road.
The attraction exercised by his writings is due to their flashes of
reality. Of course the man was a poseur, a most horrid mountebank and
ego-maniac. His tawdry scraps of misused idea, of literary smartness, of
dog-eared and greasy reminiscence, repel us. The world of men remained
for him as his audience, and he did to civilized society the continuous
compliment of an insane self-consciousness in its presence.
Perhaps this egotism and posturing is the revenge of a stilled
conscience, and we ought to read in it the inversion of the social
instincts. Perhaps all tramps are poseurs. But there is this to be said
for Whitman, that whether or not his posing was an accident of a
personal nature, or an organic result of his life, he was himself an
authentic creature. He did not sit in a study and throw off his saga of
balderdash, but he lived a life, and it is by his authenticity, and not
by his poses, that he has survived.
The descriptions of nature, the visual observation of life, are
first-hand and wonderful. It was no false light that led the Oxonians to
call some of his phrases Homeric. The pundits were right in their
curiosity over him; they went astray only in their attempt at
classification.
It is a pity that truth and beauty turn to cant on the second delivery,
for it makes poetry, as a profession, impossible. The lyric poets have
always spent most of their time in trying to write lyric poetry, and the
very attempt disqualifies them.
A poet who discovers his mission is already half done for; and even
Wordsworth, great genius though he was, succeeded in half drowning his
talents in his parochial theories, in his own self-consciousness and
self-conceit.
Walt Whitman thought he had a mission. He was a professional poet. He
had purposes and theories about poetry which he started out to enforce
and illustrate. He is as didactic as Wordsworth, and is thinking of
himself the whole time. He belonged, moreover, to that class of
professionals who are always particularly self-centred, autocratic,
vain, and florid,--the class of quacks. There are, throughout society,
men, and they are generally men of unusual natural powers, who, after
gaining a little unassimilated education, launch out for themselves and
set up as authorities on their own account. They are, perhaps, the
successors of the old astrologers, in that what they seek to establish
is some personal professorship or predominance. The old occultism and
mystery was resorted to as the most obvious device for increasing the
personal importance of the magician; and the chief difference to-day
between a regular physician and a quack is, that the quack pretends to
know it all.
Brigham Young and Joseph Smith were men of phenomenal capacity, who
actually invented a religion and created a community by the apparent
establishment of supernatural and occult powers. The phrenologists, the
venders of patent medicine, the Christian Scientists, the single-taxers,
and all who proclaim panaceas and nostrums make the same majestic and
pontifical appeal to human nature. It is this mystical power, this
religious element, which floats them, sells the drugs, cures the sick,
and packs the meetings.
By temperament and education Walt Whitman was fitted to be a prophet of
this kind. He became a quack poet, and hampered his talents by the
imposition of a monstrous parade of rattletrap theories and professions.
If he had not been endowed with a perfectly marvellous capacity, a
wealth of nature beyond the reach and plumb of his rodomontade, he
would have been ruined from the start. As it is, he has filled his work
with grimace and vulgarity. He writes a few lines of epic directness and
cyclopean vigor and naturalness, and then obtrudes himself and his
mission.
He has the bad taste bred in the bone of all missionaries and palmists,
the sign-manual of a true quack. This bad taste is nothing more than the
offensive intrusion of himself and his mission into the matter in hand.
As for his real merits and his true mission, too much can hardly be said
in his favor. The field of his experience was narrow, and not in the
least intellectual. It was narrow because of his isolation from human
life. A poet like Browning, or Heine, or Alfred de Musset deals
constantly with the problems and struggles that arise in civilized life
out of the close relationships, the ties, the duties and desires of the
human heart. He explains life on its social side. He gives us some more
or less coherent view of an infinitely complicated matter. He is a
guide-book or a note-book, a highly trained and intelligent companion.
Walt Whitman has no interest in any of these things. He was fortunately
so very ignorant and untrained that his mind was utterly incoherent and
unintellectual. His mind seems to be submerged and to have become almost
a part of his body. The utter lack of concentration which resulted from
living his whole life in the open air has left him spontaneous and
unaccountable. And the great value of his work is, that it represents
the spontaneous and unaccountable functioning of the mind and body in
health.
It is doubtful whether a man ever enjoyed life more intensely than Walt
Whitman, or expressed the physical joy of mere living more completely.
He is robust, all tingling with health and the sensations of health. All
that is best in his poetry is the expression of bodily well-being.
A man who leaves his office and gets into a canoe on a Canadian river,
sure of ten days' release from the cares of business and housekeeping,
has a thrill of joy such as Walt Whitman has here and there thrown into
his poetry. One might say that to have done this is the greatest
accomplishment in literature. Walt Whitman, in some of his lines, breaks
the frame of poetry and gives us life in the throb.
It is the throb of the whole physical system of a man who breathes the
open air and feels the sky over him. "When lilacs last in the dooryard
bloomed" is a great lyric. Here is a whole poem without a trace of
self-consciousness. It is little more than a description of nature. The
allusions to Lincoln and to the funeral are but a word or two--merest
suggestions of the tragedy. But grief, overwhelming grief, is in every
line of it, the grief which has been transmuted into this sensitiveness
to the landscape, to the song of the thrush, to the lilac's bloom, and
the sunset.
Here is truth to life of the kind to be found in King Lear or Guy
Mannering, in Æschylus or Burns.
Walt Whitman himself could not have told you why the poem was good. Had
he had any intimation of the true reason, he would have spoiled the
poem. The recurrence and antiphony of the thrush, the lilac, the thought
of death, the beauty of nature, are in a balance and dream of natural
symmetry such as no cunning could come at, no conscious art could do
other than spoil.
It is ungrateful to note Whitman's limitations, his lack of human
passion, the falseness of many of his notions about the American people.
The man knew the world merely as an observer, he was never a living part
of it, and no mere observer can understand the life about him. Even his
work during the war was mainly the work of an observer, and his poems
and notes upon the period are picturesque. As to his talk about comrades
and Manhattanese car-drivers, and brass-founders displaying their brawny
arms round each other's brawny necks, all this gush and sentiment in
Whitman's poetry is false to life. It has a lyrical value, as
representing Whitman's personal feelings, but no one else in the country
was ever found who felt or acted like this.
In fact, in all that concerns the human relations Walt Whitman is as
unreal as, let us say, William Morris, and the American mechanic would
probably prefer Sigurd the Volsung, and understand it better than
Whitman's poetry.
This falseness to the sentiment of the American is interwoven with such
wonderful descriptions of American sights and scenery, of ferryboats,
thoroughfares, cataracts, and machine-shops that it is not strange the
foreigners should have accepted the gospel.
On the whole, Whitman, though he solves none of the problems of life and
throws no light on American civilization, is a delightful appearance,
and a strange creature to come out of our beehive. This man committed
every unpardonable sin against our conventions, and his whole life was
an outrage. He was neither chaste, nor industrious, nor religious. He
patiently lived upon cold pie and tramped the earth in triumph.
He did really live the life he liked to live, in defiance of all men,
and this is a great desert, a most stirring merit. And he gave, in his
writings, a true picture of himself and of that life,--a picture which
the world had never seen before, and which it is probable the world will
not soon cease to wonder at.
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