WHITMAN'S MANIFESTO
It is time that we ourselves took a view of the book, for we must see
what Whitman had actually done during these last months, and gather
what further indications we may as to his general notions of himself
and of the world.
The volume consists of a long preface or manifesto[168] of the New
Poetry, and of twelve poems by way of example. The preface commences
with a description of America, the greatest of poems, the largest and
most stirring of all the doings of men. "Here is action untied from
strings, necessarily blind to particulars and details, magnificently
moving in masses!" Here is a nation, hospitable, spacious, prolific; a
nation whose common people is a larger race than hitherto, demanding a
larger poetry.
He describes the American poet, who is coming to awaken men from their
nightmare of shame to his own faith and joy. That poet is the lover of
the universe, who beholds with sure and mystic sight the perfection
that underlies all imperfection, for he sees the Whole of things. Past
and future are present to him; and with them is the eternal soul. "The
greatest poet does not moralise or make applications of morals--he
knows the soul." His readers become loving, generous, democratic,
proud, sociable, healthy, by beholding in his poems the beauty of these
qualities.
"Seer as he is, the poet," continues Whitman, "is no dreamer. He sees
and creates actual forms.... To speak in literature with the perfect
rectitude and insouciance of animals, and the unimpeachableness of
the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside is the
flawless triumph of art. If you have looked on him who has achieved it,
you have looked on one of the masters of the artists of all nations and
times. You shall not contemplate the flight of the grey gull over the
bay, or the mettlesome action of the blood horse, or the tall leaning
of sunflowers on their stalk, or the appearance of the sun journeying
through heaven, or the appearance of the moon afterward, with any more
satisfaction than you shall contemplate him. The great poet has less a
marked style, and is more the channel of thoughts and things without
increase or diminution, and is the free channel of himself. He swears
to his art, I will not be meddlesome, I will not have in my writing any
elegance or effect, or originality, to hang in the way between me and
the rest like curtains.... I will have purposes as health or heat or
snow has, and be as regardless of observation.... You shall stand by my
side and look in the mirror with me."[169]
His words never pose before the reader for ornament, they are living
things. And for this very reason, he follows no models; his thought
is living and original; it must find a new form for its perfect
expression, as a new seed would find new growth and leafage.
The poet appeals to every reader as to an equal, because in every
reader he appeals to the Supreme Soul. Many may not hear him, but he
appeals to all, and not to a coterie.
Whitman then proceeds to the praise of science. Knowledge, bringing
back the mind from the supernatural to the actual, brings faith with
it; and the soul is the divinest thing that science discovers in the
universe. He turns to philosophy, and bids her deal candidly with
whatsoever is real, recognise the eternal tendency of all things
toward happiness, and cease to describe God as contending against some
other principle.
The poet deals with truth and with the actual. All else is but a sham
and impotent. For everywhere and always, the soul which is the one
permanent reality, loves truth and responds to it.
The poet is by nature prudent, as one who knows the real purpose of
the soul and of the universe, and would act in accordance with that
knowledge. He accepts the impulses of the soul as the only final
arguments; and only the deeds which it dictates appear to him to be
profitable. Living in his age, and becoming its embodiment, he is
therewithal a citizen of eternity. The future shall be his proof: will
his song remain at her heart? Will it awaken, century after century,
the divine unrest, and as it were, create new souls forever?
As for the priests and their work, they are done. The American poets
shall fill their place, and the whole world shall answer to their
message. Their words shall be in the English tongue--the language of
"all who aspire"--but they shall be the very words of the people of
America; they shall be native to the soil, and redolent of the air of
the Republic. Such poets shall be America's own, and in them she will
welcome her most illustrious visitors. They are her equals; for the
soul of a man is as supreme as the soul of a nation. And America shall
absorb them as affectionately as they have absorbed her.
Such is the gist of Whitman's manifesto. Nature the Soul and Freedom;
Simplicity and Originality of Expression--these, its dominant notes,
recall at once Rousseau, Wordsworth and Shelley, with many another;
while certain passages remind the reader that _The Germ_ was but
recently published across the sea, the manifesto of another movement
associated with the names of the Rossetti family and with the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. But whatever the reminiscences it awakens,
Whitman's preface is his own. The thoughts were not all originally his.
But they had shaped themselves newly in his brain and under his pen,
and every line bears the stamp of originality.
* * * * *
Without staying to discuss the preface let us proceed to a rapid survey
of the remaining pages. They are written, it would seem, for measured
declamation, in a sort of free chant, which is neither prose nor verse,
but whose lines coincide in length with natural pauses in the thought.
Whitman himself spoke very deliberately, in a half drawl; he had a
melodious baritone voice of considerable range and power, and one can
well imagine how he would recite, when alone or with some intimate
friend, the first lines, beginning:--
I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.[170]
The lines are quite simple and direct; they are intended to place
the reader at once in relation with the actual idler who recites
them in the summer fields. He is an out-of-doors fellow, who lives
whole-heartedly in the present, rejoicing in the world and observing
it. He and his soul--he distinguishes decisively between the temporal
and the eternal elements in himself whose equal balance, neither
abdicating its place nor contesting that of the other, makes the
harmony of his life--he and his soul commune together, and discover
that the world means Love, and that the very grass is full of
suggestions of immortality.
Everything indeed has its word for Walt Whitman; he understands what
the streets are unconsciously saying; the animals of the country-side,
the working men, the youths and the women, each and all are teaching
him something of himself. All life appeals to him; he recognises
himself in each of its myriad forms. And his thoughts are the
half-conscious thoughts which lie in the minds of all. It is not only
the happy and prosperous whom he represents, but the defeated also,
and the outcast.
All things have their mystical meanings; but especially are manhood and
womanhood divine. There is nothing more divine than they. As for him,
he is proud, satisfied, august. He has no sympathy with whimperings,
or conformity to the ideas of others. Is not he himself the fellow and
equal of the supreme Beings, of the Night, the Earth, and the Sea?
He has faith in the issue of time; he fully accepts all reality as a
part of the whole purpose. He at least will be fearless and frank, and
conceal nothing; all desires shall be expressed by him.
And to him all the bodily functions are wonderful. His whole life
is a wonder and delight, beyond the power of words to utter. Sounds
especially he enjoys; alluding to the passionate emotions aroused
in him by the opera, and adding an obscure, erotic dithyramb on the
ecstasy of touch, the proof of reality, for we understand everything
through touch.
Everything is seen by him to be full of meaning, because he himself
is a microcosm and summary of the universe "stuccoed with quadrupeds
and birds all over". He feels so vividly his personal kinship with the
animals which are never pre-occupied about religion or property, that
he thinks he must have passed through their present experience "huge
times ago," to include it now in his own.[171] Forthwith, he strings
together in a rapid succession of dazzling miniatures, some of the
contents of his personal memory; pictures out of his experience or his
imagination, that remain vivid and significant to him. His sympathy
makes them actually real to him; the figures in them are each a part of
himself. "I am the man," he cries, "I suffered, I was there."[172]
But he has his own distinct personality. He is the friendly and flowing
savage, full of magnetism, health and power--
Wherever he goes men and women accept and desire him,
They desire he should like them, and touch them, and speak to them,
and stay with them.
Behaviour lawless as snow-flakes, words simple as grass, uncombed
head, and laughter, and naïveté,
Slow-stepping feet, and the common features, and the common modes
and emanations....
He sees the divine that is in men, and how all the gods are latent in
the race, and with them ever more besides. Even in the midst of their
absurd littleness, which he fully recognises, he calls men to the
reality of themselves, away from the religions of the priests to their
own souls. He understands doubt very well, but he has faith, faith in
an ultimate happiness for each and all.
* * * * *
He endeavours to express his sense of eternity, and of the friendliness
of the world to him:--
Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me,
Afar down I see the huge first Nothing--the vapour from the
Nostrils of Death--I know I was even there,
I waited unseen and always, and slept while God carried me through
the lethargic mist,
And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon.
Long I was hugged close--long and long.
Immense have been the preparations for me,
Faithful and friendly the arms that have helped me.
Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen,
For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings,
They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.
Before I was born out of my mother, generations guided me,
My embryo has never been torpid--nothing could overlay it.
For it the nebula cohered to an orb,
The long slow strata piled to rest it on,
Vast vegetables gave it sustenance,
Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths, and deposited it
with care.
All forces have been steadily employed to complete and delight me,
Now I stand on this spot with my Soul.[173]
Thus it seems to him that he has existed potentially from the beginning;
that all the ages in succession have cared for him, and that now the
whole world is full of his kin and lovers. He beholds the universe
as gloriously infinite in its assured purpose: God has appointed a
meeting-place where He waits for every soul. The way of the soul is
eternal progress, and each one must follow that road. My pupils, he
exclaims, shall become masters and excel me! They shall be wholesome,
hearty, natural fellows, attracted to me because I neither write for
money nor indoors.[174]
My religion is the worship of the soul. I am calm and composed, and
satisfied about God, whom I do not in the least understand. Death
and decay seem wholesome to him; they are the way of life by which
he himself came to the present hour, wherein he realises the mystic
reality, the life eternal, and the ineffable idea of happiness as the
central purpose of the Universe:--
Do you see, O my brothers and sisters?
It is not chaos or death--it is form, union, plan--it is eternal
life, it is happiness.[175]
With an enigmatical farewell, he resumes his place in the life of the
world, awaiting such of his readers as belong to him:--
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you, nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged,
Missing me one place, search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.[176]
The other poems are pendants to the first, offering further
exemplifications of the precepts of the preface. He appeals, for
example,[177] to his fellow workmen and workwomen, that they realise
their own greatness and immortality, their own individual destiny; for
nothing can ever be so worthy of their reverence as their own soul.
He bids them employ and enjoy this hour to the full,[178] for death
comes, and it will not be the same as life. Yet death also will be good
to the soul--all the signs assure the soul that it will be satisfied;
and there is nothing which does not share in the soul-life.
In dreams[179] he recognises some free utterances of the soul, and in
sleep, the great equaliser of men. As he watches them asleep all become
beautiful to him with the beauty of the soul, which men also call
Heaven. Diseased or vile they may be, but their souls forever urge them
along the appointed way towards the goal. He seems to see all souls
meeting together in sleep, mysteriously to circle the earth, hand in
hand. He entrusts himself to sleep with the same security as to Death
and Birth.
At the sight and touch of the human body,[180] he kindles with the
delight of a Renaissance painter, a Botticelli or a Michael Angelo. The
very soul loves the flesh, and the contact of flesh with flesh rejoices
it. He writes of the magic force of attraction embodied in a woman; nor
of attraction only, but of emancipation. He extols the strength and
joy which is embodied in a man. The body of every man and woman, says
he, should be as sacred to you as your own, for the body is almost the
soul, and to desecrate the bodies of the dead is a little thing beside
the shame that we put upon the bodies of the living.
If life and the soul are sacred, the human body is sacred,
And the glory and sweet of a man, is the token of manhood untainted,
And in man or woman, a clean, strong, firm-fibred body,
Is beautiful as the most beautiful face.[181]
He fills a page[182] with quick Hogarthian sketches of the lower types
of faces, and then, turning about, acclaims the souls behind them as
his equals. They too will duly come to themselves, following towards
the light, after the Lord.
He loves thus to enlarge upon the poet's office as the Answerer[183]
or sympathiser with all men, and how he should be welcome and familiar
to each. In the poet's company, the soul of each one quickens. And yet
the poet is no greater than the least; his verses are not nobler than
the kindly deed of any poor old woman.
He writes of 1848, the year of Revolutions,[184] somewhat in the style
of "Blood Money," and probably this page is one of the earliest of
the fragments, and may date back to the year which it celebrates. In
spite of the successes of tyranny, and the failures of the young men of
Europe, he sees that Liberty herself is never foiled.
By way of sharp contrast[185] he directs a mocking and colloquial page
of satire against the 'cute Bostonians of 1854. Whitman's dislike of
Boston is never for a moment concealed; Jonathan the Yankee he detests.
And now he brings home to him the profits of his bargaining; he has
dethroned King George only to set up in his place this Republican
President, Pierce of New Hampshire, who in these loud-echoing streets
employs the strength of America upon the capture of a fugitive slave.
Sometimes he is autobiographical.[186] "There was a child went
forth,"--he recites--a country boy who, at West Hills and in Brooklyn,
absorbed all the sights and sounds of his world into himself; till
the early lilacs, the morning-glories, and the orchard blossom, the
quarrelsome and the friendly boys and the bare-footed negro-children
all became a part of him. His parents, too, in the daily life of the
home as well as by heredity, entered into his make-up; the mother,
wholesome, quiet and gentle, the father, virile and hot-tempered, with
a streak of craft and astuteness running through him. And as they
became a part of me, he says, so now they shall become a part of you
that read this page.
Or at his naïvest, we see him standing open-mouthed and amazed, like
a very child, before the sheer naked facts of his own story from the
date of his birth to the present hour;[187] and endeavouring to evoke
a similar naïve attitude in the reader, not indeed towards the date of
Whitman's birth, but towards that of his own.
Upon a kindred note we turn the last page also[188]--for it is a
proclamation of reverence, reverence for all the old myths; reverence
for the high ideals; reverence too for Youth and for Age, for Speech
and Silence, for true Wealth and true Poverty, always with stress upon
the last member of each pair; for America, too, and for the Earth with
its ineffable future; for Truth, for Justice, for Goodness--ay, and,
he adds with conscious paradox, for Wickedness as well; above all for
Life, but not less for Death. Great is Life, he concludes:--
Great is Life, real and mystical wherever and whoever:
Great is Death:--sure as Life holds all parts together, Death holds
all parts together:
Sure as the stars return again after they merge in the light, Death
is great as Life.
How are we to sum up these pages, and figure out what it is they come
to? No summary is likely to do justice to a book of poetry, which
demonstrates itself by wholly other methods than argument, and it would
be foolish for me to attempt it. But there is one point with which I
must make shift to deal.
Beginning with a forecast of the New Poetry, as of something which
should be in its essence indigenous to America, the natural expression
of a new spirit and race and of its attitude towards the Self and the
Universe, Whitman has boldly given examples to show what it was he
meant. What are we to say of these? Do they give us a new art-form? or,
if you will, a new kind of poetry? Do they bring us material for some
new law of rhythm or metre?
These are deep questions, and dangerous to answer. For myself, I
can but give an affirmative to them, accepting the smiles of the
incredulous. And I must do so without a discussion which would here be
tedious, even if I were able to make it profitable.
There is a simple test of the whole matter which one may oneself
apply: Does Whitman's method of writing arouse, in those who can read
it with enjoyment, an emotion distinct in character from that aroused
by the methods of all other poets? Does _Leaves of Grass_ awake some
quality of the Soul which answers neither to the words of Tennyson nor
Browning, Emerson nor Carlyle? The proof by emotional reaction requires
some skill in self-observation and more impartiality; but, on the
whole, I think those who have tried it fairly seem to take my part, and
to answer emphatically in the affirmative.
What then is this emotion which Whitman alone, or in special measure,
evokes? It is a further hard but fair question, for it involves
Whitman's personality, and this book is an attempt to answer it.
Briefly, it is the complex but harmonious emotion which possesses a
sane full-blooded man of fully awakened soul, when he realises the
presence of the Eternal and Universal incarnate in some "spear of
summer grass". One may call it the religious emotion; but it is not
the emotion of any other religious poetry, saving perhaps some of the
Hebrew prophets: and every prophet has his own cry. It is the emotion
of a religion which is as large as the largest conceptions which man
has yet formed of life; for Whitman, apart from any limitations in his
thought, appears to have lived more fully and with fuller conscious
purpose than did other men.
In order to make oneself understood at all one speaks in hyperbole, and
doubtless I exaggerate. Whitman was, of course, no God among men, nor
was he greater than other poets; in a sense he was even less than the
least of them, so subjective was his genius; but since he consciously
evokes a new emotion, he has his place among true artists, for Art
is the power of evoking the emotion in others which one intends. And
since the new emotion seems to be altogether ennobling when it is fully
realised, being at once enlarging and integrating to the soul, we ought
the more gladly to hail and acknowledge him.
I say a new emotion, not meaning, of course, that he is alone in
calling up the soul, for no great poetry can leave the soul unstirred;
but that no poetry of modern times stirs the soul in the same manner as
does that of this full-natured man. So far, I think, we may acknowledge
Whitman's success as a poet, and I am not concerned to urge it further.
There are many who do not respond to his writings in the way I have
indicated, and they naturally refuse him the title. There are others
who do, and who accord it to him; and I confess I am of the latter.
* * * * *
The only American poet who approaches him in sentiment is Emerson.
Poems like "Each and All," with its motive of the cosmic unity, "The
perfect Whole," or "Brahma," with its reconciling all-inclusiveness,
are very near in thought to Whitman; so again is "Merlin" with its
Great is the art,
Great be the manners of the bard;
He shall not his brain encumber
With the coil of rhyme and number,--
or "Woodnotes"--"God hid the whole world in thy heart"--or the
exclamation "When worlds of lovers hem thee in" of the "Threnody"; or
his "Test," when he hangs his verses in the wind. The inspiration of
the two men made them akin; but it was far from identical. There are
sides of _Leaves of Grass_ which are absent from Emerson's writings,
just as there are phases of Emerson's thought which are never really
touched by Whitman. But above all, while the works of both are
exhilarating to the soul, the emotional reactions from them are quite
distinct.
Considering Emerson's influence at the time upon all that was most
virile in American thought, we might feel certain that some part at
least of his teaching had illuminated Whitman's mind, and there is
sufficient evidence in his own writings to prove it.[189] He said
indeed, that it was Emerson who led him to a spiritual understanding
of America, and who finally brought his simmering ideas to the
boil.[190] But he also vehemently asserted the independence of _Leaves
of Grass_ from any direct Emersonian or other literary influence; and
in this the internal evidence of his book supports him. It is really
impossible to confuse the flavours of Whitman and of Emerson.
* * * * *
One more comparison, and I will pursue the story. There is much which
Whitman obviously shares with Shelley. Their kinship of inspiration is
too significant for a passing note, and might well be followed over
many pages. The writer of _Leaves of Grass_, and the youthful author of
_Queen Mab_, had drunk at the same fountain of love and wonder.[191]
Shelley's _Defence of Poetry_ should be read alongside of the Preface
of 1855. In it also you will find it stated that the poet lives in the
consciousness of the whole; that he is not to be bound by metrical
custom, the distinction between poets and prose-writers being but
a vulgar error; it is sufficient if his periods are harmonious and
rhythmical. Poetry is therein discovered as the great instrument of
morality, for it exercises and therefore strengthens the imagination,
which is the organ of love--that going-out of a man from himself to
others, in which morality finds the final expression.
Here, as in Whitman's pages, the permanence of poetry is asserted; its
significance is not to be exhausted by the generation in which it found
expression. Poetry is the motive power of action and creates utilities.
It is the root and blossom of science and philosophy. Poetry is the
interpenetration of a diviner nature with our own; it turns all things
to loveliness, and strips off that film of use and wont which holds
our eyes from the vision of wonder. The great poets are men of supreme
virtue and consummate prudence. They are the world's law-givers.
It must be enough for us to have noted the parallel, which might easily
be pressed too far. There are regions of thought and expression in
which their opposition would, of course, appear even more striking;
we need not pursue the subject, remembering that much of what they
share derives from the influence which we associate with the works of
Rousseau.
* * * * *
Whatever our opinion of Whitman's astonishing "piece of wit and
wisdom," we cannot be surprised that in some quarters it was received
with contemptuous silence, and in others with prompt and frank abuse.
The _Boston Intelligencer_,[192] for instance, credited it to some
escaped lunatic; the _Criterion_[193] to a man possessed of the soul
of a sentimental donkey that had died of disappointed love; while the
_London Critic_,[194] comparing him to Caliban, declared he should be
whipped by the public executioner.
It is, perhaps, more astonishing that some of the leading journals and
reviews of America--the _North American Review_, _Putnam's Monthly_,
and the _New York Tribune_[195]--for example, noticed the book at some
length and with friendly forbearance, if not with actual acclamation.
The first of these gave the book, in its January issue (1856), three
pages of discriminating welcome from the pen of Edward E. Hale, a
religious minister of liberal mind and warm heart, whose own inner
experience was not without resemblance to Whitman's in its harmonious
development and absence of spiritual conflict.[196]
Whitman was probably prepared for the abuse; it was the indifference of
the public which astonished him. At first, it would seem, there was no
sale whatever for the book;[197] and Emerson was the only one of its
readers who found it specially significant.
Having spent the summer months in solitude in the country,[198]
Whitman decided upon a somewhat questionable method of advertisement:
he contributed unsigned notices of his book to the _Brooklyn
Times_,[199] with which he appears to have been connected,[200] and
to a phrenological sheet issued by Fowler and Wells, his agents on
Broadway. He fortified himself[201] for his task by observing that
Leigh Hunt had written for the Press upon his own work, and even
claimed the high example of Dante.
These articles, whose anonymity seems to infringe on the impartiality
of the Press, and to be in some sense a breach of journalistic honour,
are not a little astonishing. That in the phrenological journal
may, perhaps, be dismissed as a mere publishers' circular or puff,
contributed, as such things frequently are, by the writer. As to the
other, Whitman was for a while the editor of the _Brooklyn Times_, and
may have written on himself while serving in this capacity, or perhaps
at the request of the actual editor, doubtless his personal friend. Or,
again, if we would excuse, or rather explain, his action, we may regard
the reviews as his own attempt to look impersonally at his work.
Whatever we may think of the moral aspect of the notices, or
however we may account for them, they have considerable interest as
further expositions of his purpose, re-inforcing the Preface after
an interval of meditation. As such, and as a corrective of popular
misapprehensions, he doubtless intended them. In these pages he lays
special emphasis on the American character of his work. He notes his
studied avoidance of all foreign similes and classical allusions. He
compares himself with Tennyson and other poets, only to declare that
he is alone in understanding the new poetry, which will not aim at
external completeness and finish, but at infinite suggestion; which
will be an infallible and unforgettable hint--a living seed, not merely
of thought, but of that emotional force which is of the Soul and alone
can mould personality.
FOOTNOTES:
[168] This is given in full in O. L. Trigg's _Selections_; parts only,
in _Comp. Prose_, 256.
[169] _Comp. Prose_, 261.
[170] _L. of G._, 29.
[171] _L. of G._, 54.
[172] _Ib._, 59.
[173] _L. of G._, 55.
[174] _L. of G._, 75.
[175] _Ib._, 78.
[176] _Ib._, 79.
[177] _Ib._, 169.
[178] _L. of G._, 333.
[179] _Ib._, 325.
[180] _Ib._, 81.
[181] _Ib._ (1855).
[182] _Ib._, 353.
[183] _L. of G._, 134.
[184] _Ib._, 211.
[185] _Ib._, 209.
[186] _Ib._, 282.
[187] _L. of G._, 304.
[188] _Ib._ (ed. 1855).
[189] Camden, ix., 160; notes to mag. art. of May, 1847.
[190] Letter in Appendix to _L. of G._ (1856) and Trowbridge, _op. cit._
[191] It is interesting to recall that _Prometheus Unbound_ was written
in the year of Whitman's birth.
[192] Bucke, 198.
[193] _Ib._, 197.
[194] _Ib._, 196; _In re_, 60.
[195] _N. A. R._, January, 1856; _Trib._, 23rd July, 1855.
[196] W. James, _Var. of Relig. Experience_, 82-83.
[197] Bucke, 138; Burroughs, etc.
[198] Bucke, 26.
[199] _In re_, 13, 32; Bucke, 195.
[200] _Atlantic Monthly_, xcii., 679.
[201] Camden, ix., 119.