attempts to seize the eternal morphology of reality and describe
its unchanging constitution. The imagination was summoned thereby
to contemplate the highest objects, and the essence of things
being thus described, their insignificant variations could retain
little importance and the study of these variations might well seem
superficial. Mechanical science, the science of causes, was accordingly
neglected, while the science of values, with the arts that express
these values, was exclusively pursued. The reverse has now occurred
and the spirit of life, innocent of any rationalizing discipline
and deprived of an authoritative and adequate method of expression,
has relapsed into miscellaneous and shallow exuberance. Religion
and art have become short-winded. They have forgotten the old maxim
that we should copy in order to be copied and remember in order to
be remembered. It is true that the multiplicity of these incompetent
efforts seems to many a compensation for their ill success, or even a
ground for asserting their absolute superiority. Incompetence, when
it flatters the passions, can always find a greater incompetence to
approve of it. Indeed, some people would have regarded the Tower of
Babel as the best academy of eloquence on account of the variety of
oratorical methods prevailing there.
It is thus that the imagination of our time has relapsed into
barbarism. But discipline of the heart and fancy is always so rare
a thing that the neglect of it need not be supposed to involve any
very terrible or obvious loss. The triumphs of reason have been few
and partial at any time, and perfect works of art are almost unknown.
The failure of art and reason, because their principle is ignored, is
therefore hardly more conspicuous than it was when their principle,
although perhaps acknowledged, was misunderstood or disobeyed. Indeed,
to one who fixes his eye on the ideal goal, the greatest art often
seems the greatest failure, because it alone reminds him of what it
should have been. Trivial stimulations coming from vulgar objects, on
the contrary, by making us forget altogether the possibility of a deep
satisfaction, often succeed in interesting and in winning applause.
The pleasure they give us is so brief and superficial that the wave of
essential disappointment which would ultimately drown it has not time
to rise from the heart.
The poetry of barbarism is not without its charm. It can play with
sense and passion the more readily and freely in that it does not
aspire to subordinate them to a clear thought or a tenable attitude of
the will. It can impart the transitive emotions which it expresses; it
can find many partial harmonies of mood and fancy; it can, by virtue
of its red-hot irrationality, utter wilder cries, surrender itself
and us to more absolute passion, and heap up a more indiscriminate
wealth of images than belong to poets of seasoned experience or of
heavenly inspiration. Irrational stimulation may tire us in the end,
but it excites us in the beginning; and how many conventional poets,
tender and prolix, have there not been, who tire us now without ever
having excited anybody? The power to stimulate is the beginning of
greatness, and when the barbarous poet has genius, as he well may
have, he stimulates all the more powerfully on account of the crudity
of his methods and the recklessness of his emotions. The defects
of such art--lack of distinction, absence of beauty, confusion of
ideas, incapacity permanently to please--will hardly be felt by the
contemporary public, if once its attention is arrested; for no poet
is so undisciplined that he will not find many readers, if he finds
readers at all, less disciplined than himself.
These considerations may perhaps be best enforced by applying them to
two writers of great influence over the present generation who seem to
illustrate them on different planes--Robert Browning and Walt Whitman.
They are both analytic poets--poets who seek to reveal and express
the elemental as opposed to the conventional; but the dissolution
has progressed much farther in Whitman than in Browning, doubtless
because Whitman began at a much lower stage of moral and intellectual
organization; for the good will to be radical was present in both.
The elements to which Browning reduces experience are still passions,
characters, persons; Whitman carries the disintegration further and
knows nothing but moods and particular images. The world of Browning
is a world of history with civilization for its setting and with the
conventional passions for its motive forces. The world of Whitman
is innocent of these things and contains only far simpler and more
chaotic elements. In him the barbarism is much more pronounced; it is,
indeed, avowed, and the "barbaric yawp" is sent "over the roofs of the
world" in full consciousness of its inarticulate character; but in
Browning the barbarism is no less real though disguised by a literary
and scientific language, since the passions of civilized life with
which he deals are treated as so many "barbaric yawps," complex indeed
in their conditions, puffings of an intricate engine, but aimless in
their vehemence and mere ebullitions of lustiness in adventurous and
profoundly ungoverned souls.
Irrationality on this level is viewed by Browning with the same
satisfaction with which, on a lower level, it is viewed by Whitman;
and the admirers of each hail it as the secret of a new poetry
which pierces to the quick and awakens the imagination to a new and
genuine vitality. It is in the rebellion against discipline, in the
abandonment of the ideals of classic and Christian tradition, that this
rejuvenation is found. Both poets represent, therefore, and are admired
for representing, what may be called the poetry of barbarism in the
most accurate and descriptive sense of this word. For the barbarian
is the man who regards his passions as their own excuse for being;
who does not domesticate them either by understanding their cause or
by conceiving their ideal goal. He is the man who does not know his
derivations nor perceive his tendencies, but who merely feels and acts,
valuing in his life its force and its filling, but being careless of
its purpose and its form. His delight is in abundance and vehemence;
his art, like his life, shows an exclusive respect for quantity and
splendour of materials. His scorn for what is poorer and weaker than
himself is only surpassed by his ignorance of what is higher.
II
WALT WHITMAN
The works of Walt Whitman offer an extreme illustration of this
phase of genius, both by their form, and by their substance. It was
the singularity of his literary form--the challenge it threw to
the conventions of verse and of language--that first gave Whitman
notoriety: but this notoriety has become fame, because those
incapacities and solecisms which glare at us from his pages are only
the obverse of a profound inspiration and of a genuine courage.
Even the idiosyncrasies of his style have a side which is not mere
perversity or affectation; the order of his words, the procession of
his images, reproduce the method of a rich, spontaneous, absolutely
lazy fancy. In most poets such a natural order is modified by various
governing motives--the thought, the metrical form, the echo of other
poems in the memory. By Walt Whitman these conventional influences are
resolutely banished. We find the swarms of men and objects rendered
as they might strike the retina in a sort of waking dream. It is
the most sincere possible confession of the lowest--I mean the most
primitive--type of perception. All ancient poets are sophisticated in
comparison and give proof of longer intellectual and moral training.
Walt Whitman has gone back to the innocent style of Adam, when the
animals filed before him one by one and he called each of them by its
name.
In fact, the influences to which Walt Whitman was subject were as
favourable as possible to the imaginary experiment of beginning the
world over again. Liberalism and transcendentalism both harboured
some illusions on that score; and they were in the air which our
poet breathed. Moreover he breathed this air in America, where the
newness of the material environment made it easier to ignore the
fatal antiquity of human nature. When he afterward became aware that
there was or had been a world with a history, he studied that world
with curiosity and spoke of it not without a certain shrewdness. But
he still regarded it as a foreign world and imagined, as not a few
Americans have done, that his own world was a fresh creation, not
amenable to the same laws as the old. The difference in the conditions
blinded him, in his merely sensuous apprehension, to the identity of
the principles.
His parents were farmers in central Long Island and his early years
were spent in that district. The family seems to have been not too
prosperous and somewhat nomadic; Whitman himself drifted through
boyhood without much guidance. We find him now at school, now helping
the labourers at the farms, now wandering along the beaches of Long
Island, finally at Brooklyn working in an apparently desultory way as
a printer and sometimes as a writer for a local newspaper. He must
have read or heard something, at this early period, of the English
classics; his style often betrays the deep effect made upon him by the
grandiloquence of the Bible, of Shakespeare, and of Milton. But his
chief interest, if we may trust his account, was already in his own
sensations. The aspects of Nature, the forms and habits of animals,
the sights of cities, the movement and talk of common people, were his
constant delight. His mind was flooded with these images, keenly felt
and afterward to be vividly rendered with bold strokes of realism and
imagination.
Many poets have had this faculty to seize the elementary aspects of
things, but none has had it so exclusively; with Whitman the surface
is absolutely all and the underlying structure is without interest and
almost without existence. He had had no education and his natural
delight in imbibing sensations had not been trained to the uses of
practical or theoretical intelligence. He basked in the sunshine of
perception and wallowed in the stream of his own sensibility, as later
at Camden in the shallows of his favourite brook. Even during the civil
war, when he heard the drum-taps so clearly, he could only gaze at the
picturesque and terrible aspects of the struggle, and linger among the
wounded day after day with a canine devotion; he could not be aroused
either to clear thought or to positive action. So also in his poems; a
multiplicity of images pass before him and he yields himself to each
in turn with absolute passivity. The world has no inside; it is a
phantasmagoria of continuous visions, vivid, impressive, but monotonous
and hard to distinguish in memory, like the waves of the sea or the
decorations of some barbarous temple, sublime only by the infinite
aggregation of parts.
This abundance of detail without organization, this wealth of
perception without intelligence and of imagination without taste, makes
the singularity of Whitman's genius. Full of sympathy and receptivity,
with a wonderful gift of graphic characterization and an occasional
rare grandeur of diction, he fills us with a sense of the individuality
and the universality of what he describes--it is a drop in itself yet a
drop in the ocean. The absence of any principle of selection or of a
sustained style enables him to render aspects of things and of emotion
which would have eluded a trained writer. He is, therefore, interesting
even where he is grotesque or perverse. He has accomplished, by the
sacrifice of almost every other good quality, something never so well
done before. He has approached common life without bringing in his
mind any higher standard by which to criticise it; he has seen it,
not in contrast with an ideal, but as the expression of forces more
indeterminate and elementary than itself; and the vulgar, in this
cosmic setting, has appeared to him sublime.
There is clearly some analogy between a mass of images without
structure and the notion of an absolute democracy. Whitman, inclined
by his genius and habits to see life without relief or organization,
believed that his inclination in this respect corresponded with the
spirit of his age and country, and that Nature and society, at least
in the United States, were constituted after the fashion of his own
mind. Being the poet of the average man, he wished, all men to be
specimens of that average, and being the poet of a fluid Nature, he
believed that Nature was or should be a formless flux. This personal
bias of Whitman's was further encouraged by the actual absence of
distinction in his immediate environment. Surrounded by ugly things
and common people, he felt himself happy, ecstatic, overflowing with a
kind of patriarchal love. He accordingly came to think that there was
a spirit of the New World which he embodied, and which was in complete
opposition to that of the Old, and that a literature upon novel
principles was needed to express and strengthen this American spirit.
Democracy was not to be merely a constitutional device for the better
government of given nations, not merely a movement for the material
improvement of the lot of the poorer classes. It was to be a social
and a moral democracy and to involve an actual equality among all
men. Whatever kept them apart and made it impossible for them to be
messmates together was to be discarded. The literature of democracy
was to ignore all extraordinary gifts of genius or virtue, all
distinction drawn even from great passions or romantic adventures. In
Whitman's works, in which this new literature is foreshadowed, there
is accordingly not a single character nor a single story. His only
hero is Myself, the "single separate person," endowed with the primary
impulses, with health, and with sensitiveness to the elementary aspects
of Nature. The perfect man of the future, the prolific begetter of
other perfect men, is to work with his hands, chanting the poems of
some future Walt, some ideally democratic bard. Women are to have
as nearly as possible the same character as men: the emphasis is to
pass from family life and local ties to the friendship of comrades and
the general brotherhood of man. Men are to be vigorous, comfortable,
sentimental, and irresponsible.
This dream is, of course, unrealized and unrealizable, in America as
elsewhere. Undeniably there are in America many suggestions of such
a society and such a national character. But the growing complexity
and fixity of institutions necessarily tends to obscure these traits
of a primitive and crude democracy. What Whitman seized upon as the
promise of the future was in reality the survival of the past. He
sings the song of pioneers, but it is in the nature of the pioneer
that the greater his success the quicker must be his transformation
into something different. When Whitman made the initial and amorphous
phase of society his ideal, he became the prophet of a lost cause.
That cause was lost, not merely when wealth and intelligence began
to take shape in the American Commonwealth, but it was lost at the
very foundation of the world, when those laws of evolution were
established which Whitman, like Rousseau, failed to understand. If we
may trust Mr. Herbert Spencer, these laws involve a passage from the
homogeneous to the heterogeneous, and a constant progress at once in
differentiation and in organization--all, in a word, that Whitman
systematically deprecated or ignored. He is surely not the spokesman
of the tendencies of his country, although he describes some aspects
of its past and present condition: nor does he appeal to those whom he
describes, but rather to the _dilettanti_ he despises. He is regarded
as representative chiefly by foreigners, who look for some grotesque
expression of the genius of so young and prodigious a people.
Whitman, it is true, loved and comprehended men; but this love and
comprehension had the same limits as his love and comprehension of
Nature. He observed truly and responded to his observation with genuine
and pervasive emotion. A great gregariousness, an innocent tolerance of
moral weakness, a genuine admiration for bodily health and strength,
made him bubble over with affection for the generic human creature.
Incapable of an ideal passion, he was full of the milk of human
kindness. Yet, for all his acquaintance with the ways and thoughts of
the common man of his choice, he did not truly understand him. For to
understand people is to go much deeper than they go themselves; to
penetrate to their characters and disentangle their inmost ideals.
Whitman's insight into man did not go beyond a sensuous sympathy;
it consisted in a vicarious satisfaction in their pleasures, and an
instinctive love of their persons. It never approached a scientific or
imaginative knowledge of their hearts.
Therefore Whitman failed radically in his dearest ambition: he can
never be a poet of the people. For the people, like the early races
whose poetry was ideal, are natural believers in perfection. They
have no doubts about the absolute desirability of wealth and learning
and power, none about the worth of pure goodness and pure love. Their
chosen poets, if they have any, will be always those who have known how
to paint these ideals in lively even if in gaudy colours. Nothing is
farther from the common people than the corrupt desire to be primitive.
They instinctively look toward a more exalted life, which they imagine
to be full of distinction and pleasure, and the idea of that brighter
existence fills them with hope or with envy or with humble admiration.
If the people are ever won over to hostility to such ideals, it is
only because they are cheated by demagogues who tell them that if
all the flowers of civilization were destroyed its fruits would
become more abundant. A greater share of happiness, people think,
would fall to their lot could they destroy everything beyond their
own possible possessions. But they are made thus envious and ignoble
only by a deception: what they really desire is an ideal good for
themselves which they are told they may secure by depriving others of
their preeminence. Their hope is always to enjoy perfect satisfaction
themselves; and therefore a poet who loves the picturesque aspects of
labour and vagrancy will hardly be the poet of the poor. He may have
described their figure and occupation, in neither of which they are
much interested; he will not have read their souls. They will prefer
to him any sentimental story-teller, any sensational dramatist, any
moralizing poet; for they are hero-worshippers by temperament, and are
too wise or too unfortunate to be much enamoured of themselves or of
the conditions of their existence.
Fortunately, the political theory that makes Whitman's principle of
literary prophecy and criticism does not always inspire his chants, nor
is it presented, even in his prose works, quite bare and unadorned.
In "Democratic Vistas" we find it clothed with something of the same
poetic passion and lighted up with the same flashes of intuition which
we admire in the poems. Even there the temperament is finer than
the ideas and the poet wiser than the thinker. His ultimate appeal
is really to something more primitive and general than any social
aspirations, to something more elementary than an ideal of any kind. He
speaks to those minds and to those moods in which sensuality is touched
with mysticism. When the intellect is in abeyance, when we would "turn
and live with the animals, they are so placid and self-contained,"
when we are weary of conscience and of ambition, and would yield
ourselves for a while to the dream of sense, Walt Whitman is a welcome
companion. The images he arouses in us, fresh, full of light and health
and of a kind of frankness and beauty, are prized all the more at such
a time because they are not choice, but drawn perhaps from a hideous
and sordid environment. For this circumstance makes them a better means
of escape from convention and from that fatigue and despair which
lurk not far beneath the surface of conventional life. In casting off
with self-assurance and a sense of fresh vitality the distinctions of
tradition and reason a man may feel, as he sinks back comfortably to
a lower level of sense and instinct, that he is returning to Nature
or escaping into the infinite. Mysticism makes us proud and happy to
renounce the work of intelligence, both in thought and in life, and
persuades us that we become divine by remaining imperfectly human. Walt
Whitman gives a new expression to this ancient and multiform tendency.
He feels his own cosmic justification and he would lend the sanction
of his inspiration to all loafers and holiday-makers. He would be the
congenial patron of farmers and factory hands in their crude pleasures
and pieties, as Pan was the patron of the shepherds of Arcadia: for
he is sure that in spite of his hairiness and animality, the gods
will acknowledge him as one of themselves and smile upon him from the
serenity of Olympus.
III
ROBERT BROWNING
If we would do justice to Browning's work as a human document, and
at the same time perceive its relation to the rational ideals of
the imagination and to that poetry which passes into religion, we
must keep, as in the case of Whitman, two things in mind. One is the
genuineness of the achievement, the sterling quality of the vision and
inspiration; these are their own justification when we approach them
from below and regard them as manifesting a more direct or impassioned
grasp of experience than is given to mildly blatant, convention-ridden
minds. The other thing to remember is the short distance to which this
comprehension is carried, its failure to approach any finality, or to
achieve a recognition even of the traditional ideals of poetry and
religion.
In the case of Walt Whitman such a failure will be generally felt;
it is obvious that both his music and his philosophy are those of
a barbarian, nay, almost of a savage. Accordingly there is need of
dwelling rather on the veracity and simple dignity of his thought and
art, on their expression of an order of ideas latent in all better
experience. But in the case of Browning it is the success that is
obvious to most people. Apart from a certain superficial grotesqueness
to which we are soon accustomed, he easily arouses and engages the
reader by the pithiness of his phrase, the volume of his passion, the
vigour of his moral judgment, the liveliness of his historical fancy.
It is obvious that we are in the presence of a great writer, of a great
imaginative force, of a master in the expression of emotion. What
is perhaps not so obvious, but no less true, is that we are in the
presence of a barbaric genius, of a truncated imagination, of a thought
and an art inchoate and ill-digested, of a volcanic eruption that
tosses itself quite blindly and ineffectually into the sky.
The points of comparison by which this becomes clear are perhaps
not in every one's mind, although they are merely the elements of
traditional culture, æsthetic and moral. Yet even without reference
to ultimate ideals, one may notice in Browning many superficial signs
of that deepest of all failures, the failure in rationality and the
indifference to perfection. Such a sign is the turgid style, weighty
without nobility, pointed without naturalness or precision. Another
sign is the "realism" of the personages, who, quite like men and women
in actual life, are always displaying traits of character and never
attaining character as a whole. Other hints might be found in the
structure of the poems, where the dramatic substance does not achieve
a dramatic form; in the metaphysical discussion, with its confused
prolixity and absence of result; in the moral ideal, where all energies
figure without their ultimate purposes; in the religion, which breaks
off the expression of this life in the middle, and finds in that
suspense an argument for immortality. In all this, and much more that
might be recalled, a person coming to Browning with the habits of a
cultivated mind might see evidence of some profound incapacity in
the poet; but more careful reflection is necessary to understand the
nature of this incapacity, its cause, and the peculiar accent which its
presence gives to those ideas and impulses which Browning stimulates in
us.