THE
GOOD GRAY POET.
A VINDICATION.
* * * * *
NEW YORK:
BUNCE & HUNTINGTON, 459, BROOME STREET.
1866.
THE GOOD GRAY POET.
A VINDICATION.
* * * * *
WASHINGTON, D. C., _September 2, 1865_.
Nine weeks have elapsed since the commission of an outrage, to which I
have not till now been able to give my attention, but which, in the
interest of the sacred cause of free letters, and in that alone, I never
meant should pass without its proper and enduring brand.
For years past, thousands of people in New York, in Brooklyn, in Boston,
in New Orleans, and latterly in Washington, have seen, even as I saw two
hours ago, tallying, one might say, the streets of our American cities,
and fit to have for his background and accessories, their streaming
populations and ample and rich façades, a man of striking masculine
beauty—a poet—powerful and venerable in appearance; large, calm,
superbly formed; oftenest clad in the careless, rough, and always
picturesque costume of the common people; resembling, and generally
taken by strangers for, some great mechanic, or stevedore, or seaman, or
grand laborer of one kind or another; and passing slowly in this guise,
with nonchalant and haughty step along the pavement, with the sunlight
and shadows falling around him. The dark sombrero he usually wears was,
when I saw him just now, the day being warm, held for the moment in his
hand; rich light an artist would have chosen, lay upon his uncovered
head, majestic, large, Homeric, and set upon his strong shoulders with
the grandeur of ancient sculpture; I marked the countenance, serene,
proud, cheerful, florid, grave; the brow seamed with noble wrinkles; the
features, massive and handsome, with firm blue eyes; the eyebrows and
eyelids especially showing that fullness of arch seldom seen save in the
antique busts; the flowing hair and fleecy beard, both very gray, and
tempering with a look of age the youthful aspect of one who is but
forty-five; the simplicity and purity of his dress, cheap and plain, but
spotless, from snowy falling collar to burnished boot, and exhaling
faint fragrance; the whole form surrounded with manliness, as with a
nimbus, and breathing, in its perfect health and vigor, the august charm
of the strong. We who have looked upon this figure, or listened to that
clear, cheerful, vibrating voice, might thrill to think, could we but
transcend our age, that we had been thus near to one of the greatest of
the sons of men. But Dante stirs no deep pulse, unless it be of hate, as
he walks the streets of Florence; that shabby, one-armed soldier, just
out of jail and hardly noticed, though he has amused Europe, is Michael
Cervantes; that son of a vine-dresser, whom Athens laughs at as an
eccentric genius, before it is thought worth while to roar him into
exile, is the century-shaking Æschylus; that phantom whom the wits of
the seventeenth century think not worth extraordinary notice, and the
wits of the eighteenth century, spluttering with laughter, call a
barbarian, is Shakespeare; that earth-soiled, vice-stained ploughman,
with the noble heart and sweet, bright eyes, whom the good abominate and
the gentry patronize—subject now of anniversary banquets by gentlemen
who, could they wander backward from those annual hiccups into Time,
would never help his life or keep his company—is Robert Burns; and this
man, whose grave, perhaps, the next century will cover with passionate
and splendid honors, goes regarded with careless curiosity or phlegmatic
composure by his own age. Yet, perhaps, in a few hearts he has waked
that deep thrill due to the passage of the sublime. I heard lately, with
sad pleasure, of the letter introducing a friend, filled with noble
courtesy, and dictated by the reverence for genius, which a
distinguished English nobleman, a stranger, sent to this American bard.
Nothing deepens my respect for the beautiful intellect of the scholar
Alcott, like the bold sentence, “Greater than Plato,” which he once
uttered upon him. I hold it the surest proof of Thoreau’s insight, that
after a conversation, seeing how he incarnated the immense and new
spirit of the age, and was the compend of America, he came away to speak
the electric sentence, “He is Democracy!” I treasure to my latest hour,
with swelling heart and springing tears, the remembrance that Abraham
Lincoln, seeing him for the first time from the window of the East Room
of the White House as he passed slowly by, and gazing at him long with
that deep eye which read men, said, in the quaint, sweet tone which
those who have spoken with him will remember, and with a significant
emphasis which the type can hardly convey—“Well, _he_ looks like A
MAN!” Sublime tributes, great words; but none too high for their object,
the author of _Leaves of Grass_, Walt Whitman, of Brooklyn.
On the 30th of June last, this true American man and author was
dismissed, under circumstances of peculiar wrong, from a clerkship he
had held for six months in the Department of the Interior. His dismissal
was the act of the Hon. James Harlan, the Secretary of the Department,
formerly a Methodist clergyman, and President of a Western college.
Upon the interrogation of an eminent officer of the Government, at whose
instance the appointment had, under a former Secretary, been made, Mr.
Harlan averred that Walt Whitman had been in no way remiss in the
discharge of his duties, but that, on the contrary, so far as he could
learn, his conduct had been most exemplary. Indeed, during the few
months of his tenure of office, he had been promoted. The sole and only
cause of his dismissal, Mr. Harlan said, was that he had written the
book of poetry entitled _Leaves of Grass_. This book Mr. Harlan
characterized as “full of indecent passages.” The author, he said, was
“a very bad man,” a “Free-Lover.” Argument being had upon these
propositions, Mr. Harlan was, as regards the book, utterly unable to
maintain his assertions; and, as regards the author, was forced to own
that his opinion of him had been changed. Nevertheless, after this
substantial admission of his injustice, he absolutely refused to revoke
his action. Of course, under no circumstances would Walt Whitman, the
proudest man that lives, have consented to again enter into office under
Mr. Harlan: but the demand for his reinstatement was as honorable to the
gentleman who made it, as the refusal to accede to it was discreditable
to the Secretary.
The closing feature of this transaction, and one which was a direct
consequence of Mr. Harlan’s course, was its remission to the scurrilous,
and in some instances libellous, comment of a portion of the press. To
sum up, an author, solely and only for the publication, ten years ago,
of an honest book, which no intelligent and candid person can regard as
hurtful to morality, was expelled from office by the Secretary, and held
up to public contumely by the newspapers. It remains only to be added
here, that the Hon. James Harlan is the gentleman who, upon assuming the
control of the Department, published a manifesto, announcing that it was
thenceforth to be governed upon the principles of Christian
civilization.
This act of expulsion, and all that it encloses, is the outrage to which
I referred in the opening sentence of this letter.
I have had the honor, which I esteem a very high one, to know Walt
Whitman intimately for several years, and am perfectly conversant with
the details of his life and history. Scores and scores of persons, who
know him well, can confirm my own report of him, and I have therefore no
hesitation in saying that the scandalous assertions of Mr. Harlan,
derived from whom I know not, as to his being a bad man, a Free-Lover,
&c., belong to the category of those calumnies at which, as Napoleon
said, innocence itself is confounded. A better man in all respects, or
one more irreproachable in his relations to the other sex, lives not
upon this earth. His is the great goodness, the great chastity of
spiritual strength and sanity. I do not believe that from the hour of
his infancy, when Lafayette held him in his arms, to the present hour,
in which he bends over the last wounded and dying of the war, that any
one can say aught of him that does not consort with the largest and
truest manliness. I am perfectly aware of the miserable lies which have
been put into circulation respecting him, of which the story of his
dishonoring an invitation to dine with Emerson, by appearing at the
table of the Astor House in a red shirt, and with the manners of a
rowdy, is a mild specimen. I know, too, the inferences drawn by wretched
fools, who, because they have seen him riding upon the top of an
omnibus; or at Pfaff’s restaurant; or dressed in rough clothes suitable
for his purposes, and only remarkable because the wearer was a man of
genius; or mixing freely and lovingly, like Lucretius, like Rabelais,
like Francis Bacon, like Rembrandt, like all great students of the
world, with low and equivocal and dissolute persons, as well as with
those of a different character, must needs set him down as a brute, a
scallawag, and a criminal. Mr. Harlan’s allegations are of a piece with
these. If I could associate the title with a really great person, or if
the name of man were not radically superior, I should say that for solid
nobleness of character, for native elegance and delicacy of soul, for a
courtesy which is the very passion of thoughtful kindness and
forbearance, for his tender and paternal respect and manly honor for
woman, for love and heroism carried into the pettiest details of life,
and for a large and homely beauty of manners, which makes the civilities
of parlors fantastic and puerile in comparison, Walt Whitman deserves to
be considered the grandest gentleman that treads this continent. I know
well the habits and tendencies of his life. They are all simple, sane,
domestic; worthy of him as one of an estimable family and a member of
society. He is a tender and faithful son, a good brother, a loyal
friend, an ardent and devoted citizen. He has been a laborer, working
successively as a farmer, a carpenter, a printer. He has been a stalwart
editor of the Republican party, and often, in that powerful and nervous
prose of which he is master, done yeoman’s service for the great cause
of human liberty and the imperial conception of the indivisible Union.
He has been a visitor of prisons; a protector of fugitive slaves; a
constant voluntary nurse, night and day, at the hospitals, from the
beginning of the war to the present time; a brother and friend through
life to the neglected and the forgotten, the poor, the degraded, the
criminal, the outcast; turning away from no man for his guilt, nor woman
for her vileness. His is the strongest and truest compassion I have ever
known. I remember here the anecdote told me by a witness, of his meeting
in a by-street in Boston a poor ruffian, one whom he had known well as
an innocent child, now a full-grown youth, vicious far beyond his years,
flying to Canada from the pursuit of the police, his sin-trampled
features bearing marks of the recent bloody brawl in New York in which,
as he supposed, he had killed some one; and having heard his hurried
story, freely confided to him, Walt Whitman, separated not from the bad
even by his own goodness, with well I know what tender and tranquil
feeling for this ruined being, and with a love which makes me think of
that love of God which deserts not any creature, quietly at parting,
after assisting him from his means, held him for a moment, with his arm
around his neck, and, bending to the face, horrible and battered and
prematurely old, kissed him on the cheek; and the poor hunted wretch,
perhaps for the first time in his low life, receiving a token of love
and compassion like a touch from beyond the sun, hastened away in deep
dejection, sobbing and in tears. It reminds me of the anecdotes Victor
Hugo, in his portraiture of Bishop Myriel, tells, under a thin veil of
fiction, of Charles Miolles, the good Bishop of Rennes.—I know not what
talisman Walt Whitman carries, unless it be an unexcluding friendliness
and goodness which is felt upon his approach like magnetism; but I know
that in the subterranean life of cities, among the worst roughs, he goes
safely; and I could recite instances where hands that, in mere
wantonness of ferocity, assault anybody, raised against him, have of
their own accord been lowered almost as quickly, or, in some cases, been
dragged promptly down by others; this, too, I mean, when he and the
assaulting gang were mutual strangers. I have seen singular evidence of
the mysterious quality which not only guards him, but draws to him with
intuition, rapid as light, simple and rude people, as to their natural
mate and friend. I remember, as I passed the White House with him one
evening, the startled feeling with which I saw the soldier on guard
there—a stranger to us both, and with something in his action that
curiously proved that he was a stranger—suddenly bring his musket to
the “present,” in military salute to him, quickly mingling with this
respect due to his colonel, a gesture of greeting with the right hand as
to a comrade; grinning, meanwhile, good fellow, with shy, spontaneous
affection and deference; his ruddy, broad face glowing in the flare of
the lampions. I remember, on another occasion, as I crossed the street
with him, the driver of a street car, a stranger, stopping the
conveyance, and inviting him to get on and ride with him. Adventures of
this kind are frequent, and, “I took a fancy to you,” or, “You look like
one of my style,” is the common explanation he gets upon their
occurrence. It would be impossible to exaggerate the personal adhesion
and strong, simple affection given him, in numerous instances on sight,
by multitudes of plain persons—sailors, mechanics, drivers, soldiers,
farmers, sempstresses, old people of the past generation, mothers of
families—those powerful, unlettered persons, among whom, as he says in
his book, he has gone freely, and who never in most cases even suspect
as an author him whom they love as a man, and who loves them in
return.—His intellectual influence upon many young men and
women—spirits of the morning sort, not willing to belong to that
intellectual colony of Great Britain which our literary classes compose,
nor helplessly tied like them to the old forms—I note as kindred to
that of Socrates upon the youth of ancient Attica, or Raleigh upon the
gallant young England of his day. It is a power at once liberating,
instructing, and inspiring.—His conversation is a university. Those who
have heard him in some roused hour, when the full afflatus of his spirit
moved him, will agree with me that the grandeur of talk was
accomplished. He is known as a passionate lover and powerful critic of
the great music and of art. He is deeply cultured by some of the best
books, especially the Bible, which he prefers above all other great
literature; but principally by contact and communion with things
themselves, which literature can only mirror and celebrate. He has
travelled through most of the United States, intent on comprehending and
absorbing the genius and meaning of his country, that he might do his
best to start a literature worthy of her, sprung from her own polity,
and tallying her own unexampled magnificence among the nations. To the
same end, he has been a long, patient, and laborious student of life,
mixing intimately with all varieties of experience and men, with
curiosity and with love. He has given his thought, his life, to this
beautiful ambition, and, still young, he has grown gray in its service.
He has never married; like Giordano Bruno, he has made Thought in the
service of his fellow-creatures his _bella donna_, his best beloved, his
bride. His patriotism is boundless. It is no intellectual sentiment; it
is a personal passion. He performs with scrupulous fidelity and zeal,
the duties of a citizen. For eighteen years, not missing once, his
ballot has dropped on every national and local election day, and his
influence has been ardently given, for the good cause. Of all men I
know, his life is most in the life of the nation. I remember, when the
first draft was ordered, at a time when he was already performing an
arduous and perilous duty as a volunteer attendant upon the wounded in
the field—a duty which cost him the only illness he ever had in his
life, and a very severe and dangerous illness it was, the result of
poison absorbed in his devotion to the worst cases of the hospital
gangrene; and when it would have been the easiest thing in the world to
evade duty, for though then only forty-two or three years old, and
subject to the draft, he looked a hale sixty, and no enrolling officer
would have paused for an instant before his gray hair—I remember, I
say, how anxious and careful he was to get his name put on the
enrollment lists, that he might stand his chance for martial service.
This, too, at a time when so many gentlemen were skulking, dodging,
agonizing for substitutes, and practising every conceivable device to
escape military duty. What music of speech, though Cicero’s own—what
scarlet and gold superlatives could adorn or dignify this simple antique
trait of private heroism?—I recall his love for little children, for
the young, and for very old persons, as if the dawn and the evening
twilight of life awakened his deepest tenderness. I recall the affection
for him of numbers of young men, and invariably of all good women. Who,
knowing him, does not regard him as a man of the highest spiritual
culture? I have never known one of greater and deeper religious feeling.
To call one like him good, seems an impertinence. In our sweet country
phrase, he is one of God’s men. And as I write these hurried and broken
memoranda—as his strength and sweetness of nature, his moral health,
his rich humor, his gentleness, his serenity, his charity, his
simple-heartedness, his courage, his deep and varied knowledge of life
and men, his calm wisdom, his singular and beautiful boy-innocence, his
personal majesty, his rough scorn of mean actions, his magnetic and
exterminating anger on due occasions—all that I have seen and heard of
him, the testimony of associates, the anecdotes of friends, the
remembrance of hours with him that should be immortal, the traits,
lineaments, incidents of his life and being—as they come crowding into
memory—his seems to me a character which only the heroic pen of
Plutarch could record, and which Socrates himself might emulate or envy.
This is the man whom Mr. Harlan charges with having written a bad book.
I might ask, How long is it since bad books have been the flower of good
lives? How long is it since grape-vines produced thorns or fig-trees
thistles? But Mr. Harlan says the book is bad because it is “full of
indecent passages.” This allegation has been brought against _Leaves of
Grass_ before. It has been sounded loud and strong by many of the
literary journals of both continents. As criticism it is legitimate. I
may contemn the mind or deplore the moral life in which such a criticism
has its source; still, as criticism it has a right to existence. But Mr.
Harlan, passing the limits of opinion, inaugurates punishment. He joins
the band of the hostile verdict; he incarnates their judgment; then,
detaching himself, he proceeds to a solitary and signal vengeance. As
far as he can have it so, this author, for having written his book shall
starve. He shall starve, and his name shall receive a brand. This is the
essence of Mr. Harlan’s action. It is a dark and serious step to take.
Upon what grounds is it taken?
I have carefully counted out from Walt Whitman’s poetry the lines,
perfectly moral to me, whether viewed in themselves or in the light of
their sublime intentions and purport, but upon which ignorant and
indecent persons of respectability base their sweeping condemnation of
the whole work. Taking _Leaves of Grass_, and the recent small volume,
_Drum-Taps_ (which was in Mr. Harlan’s possession), there are in the
whole about nine thousand lines or verses. From these, including matter
which I can hardly imagine objectionable to any one, but counting every
thing which the most malignant virtue could shrink from, I have culled
eighty lines. Eighty lines out of nine thousand! It is a less proportion
than one finds in Shakespeare. Upon this so slender basis, rests the
whole crazy fabric of American and European slander, and the brutal
lever of the Secretary.
Now, what by competent authority is the admitted character of the book
in which these lines occur? For, though it is more than probable that
Mr. Harlan never heard of the work till the hour of his explorations in
the Department, the intellectual hemispheres of Great Britain and
America have rung with it from side to side. It has received as
extensive a critical notice, I suppose, as has ever been given to a
volume. Had it been received only with indifference or derision, I
should not have been surprised. In an age in which few breathe the
atmosphere of the grand literature—which forgets the superb books and
thinks Bulwer moral, and Dickens great, and Thackeray a real
satirist—which gives to Macaulay the laurel due to Herodotus, and to
Tennyson the crown reserved for Homer, and in which the chairs of
criticism seem abandoned to squirts and pedagogues and monks—a mighty
poet has little to expect from the literary press save unconcern and
mockery. But even under these hard conditions, the tremendous force of
this poet has achieved a relative conquest, and the tone of the press
denotes his book as not merely great, but illustrious. Even the copious
torrents of abuse which have been lavished upon it, have in numerous
instances taken the form of tribute to its august and mysterious power,
being in fact identical with that still vomited upon Montaigne and
Juvenal. On the other hand, eulogy, very lofty and from the highest
sources, has spanned it with sunbows. Emerson, our noblest scholar, a
name to which Christendom does reverence, a critic of piercing insight
and full comprehension, has pronounced it “the most extraordinary piece
of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.” How that austere
and rare spirit, Thoreau, regarded it, may be partly seen by his last
posthumous volume. He thought of it, I have heard, with measureless
esteem, ranking it with the vast and gorgeous conceptions of the
Oriental bards. It has been reported to me, that unpublished letters,
received in this country from some of Europe’s greatest, announce a
similar verdict. The _North American Quarterly Review_, unquestionably
the highest organ of American letters, in the course of a eulogistic
notice of the work, remarking upon the passages which Mr. Harlan has
treated as if they were novel in literature, observes: “There is not
anything, perhaps (in the book), which modern usage would stamp as more
indelicate than are some passages in Homer. There is not a word in it
meant to attract readers by its grossness, as there is in half the
literature of the last century, which holds its place unchallenged on
the tables of our drawing-rooms.” The London _Dispatch_, in a review
written by the Rev. W. J. Fox, one of the most distinguished clergymen
in England, after commending the poems for “their strength of
expression, their fervor, their hearty wholesomeness, their originality
and freshness, their singular harmony,” &c., says that, “in the
unhesitating frankness of a man who dares to call simplest things by
their plain names, conveying also a large sense of the beautiful,” there
is involved “a clearer conception of what manly modesty really is, than
in any thing we have in all conventional forms of word, deed, or act, so
far known of;” and concludes by declaring that “the author will soon
make his way into the confidence of his readers, and his poems in time
will become a pregnant text-book, from which quotations as sterling as
the minted gold will be taken and applied to every form of the inner and
the outer life.” The London _Leader_, one of the foremost of the British
literary journals, in a review which more nearly approaches perception
of the true character and purport of the book, than any I have seen, has
the following sentences: “Mr. Emerson recognized the first issue of the
_Leaves_, and hastened to welcome the author, then totally unknown.
Among other things, said Emerson to the new avatar, ‘I greet you at the
beginning of a great career, which yet _must have had a long foreground
somewhere for such a start_.’ The last clause was, however, overlooked
entirely by the critics, who treated the new author as one
self-educated, yet in the rough, unpolished, and owing nothing to
instruction. The authority for so treating the author was derived from
himself, who thus described, in one of his poems, his person, character,
and name, having omitted the last from the title-page:—
‘Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,
Disorderly, fleshly, and sensual,’—
and in various other passages, confessed to all the vices, as well as
the virtues of man. All this, with intentional wrong-headedness, was
attributed by the sapient reviewers to the individual writer, and not to
the subjective-hero supposed to be writing. Notwithstanding the word
‘kosmos,’ the writer was taken to be an ignorant man. Emerson perceived
at once that there had been a long foreground somewhere or somehow;—not
so they. Every page teems with knowledge, with information; but they saw
it not, because it did not answer their purpose to see it. . . . . . The
poem in which the word ‘kosmos’ appears explains in fact the whole
mystery—nay, the word itself explains it. The poem is nominally upon
himself, but really includes everybody. It begins:—
‘I celebrate myself;
And what I assume, you shall assume;
For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.’
In a word, WALT WHITMAN _represents the Kosmical man—he is the_ ADAMUS
_of the nineteenth century—not an individual, but_ MANKIND. As such, in
celebrating himself, he proceeds to celebrate universal humanity in its
attributes, and accordingly commences his dithyramb with the five
senses, beginning with that of smell. Afterwards, he deals with the
intellectual, rational, and moral powers, showing throughout his
treatment an intimate acquaintance with Kant’s transcendental method,
and perhaps including in his development the whole of the German school,
down to Hegel—at any rate, as interpreted by Cousin and others in
France, and Emerson in the United States. He certainly includes Fichte,
for he mentions the Egotist as the only true philosopher, and
consistently identifies himself not only with every man, but with the
universe and its Maker; and it is in doing so that the strength of his
description consists. It is from such an ideal elevation that he looks
down on Good and Evil, regards them as equal, and extends to them the
like measure of equity. . . . . Instead, therefore, of regarding these
_Leaves of Grass_ as a marvel, they seem to us as the most natural
product of the American soil. They are certainly filled with an American
spirit, breathe the American air, and assert the fullest American
freedom.” The passages characterized by the Secretary as “indecent” are,
adds the _Leader_, “only so many instances adduced in support of a
philosophical principle; not meant for obscenity, but for scientific
examples, introduced as they might be in any legal, medical, or
philosophical book, for the purpose of instruction.”
I could multiply these excerpts; but here are sufficient specimens of
the competent judgments of eminent scholars and divines, testifying to
the intellectual and moral grandeur of this work. Let it be remembered
that there is nothing in the book that in one form or another is not
contained in all great poetic or universal literature. It has nothing
either in quantity or quality so offensive as everybody knows is in
Shakespeare. All that this poet has done is to mention, without levity,
without low language, very seriously, often devoutly, always simply,
certain facts in the natural history of man and of life; and sometimes,
assuming their sanctity, to use them in illustration or imagery. Far
more questionable mention and use of these facts are common to the
greatest literature. Shall the presence in a book of eighty lines,
similar in character to what every great and noble poetic book contains,
be sufficient to shove it below even the lewd writings of Petronius
Arbiter, the dirty dramas of Shirley, or the scrofulous fiction of
Louvet de Couvray—to lump it in with the anonymous lascivious trash
spawned in holes and sold in corners, too witless and disgusting for any
notice but that of the police—and to entitle its author to treatment
such as only the nameless wretches of the very sewers of authorship
ought to receive?
If, rising to the utmost cruelty of conception, I can dare add to the
calamities of genius a misery so degrading and extreme as to imagine the
great authors of the world condemned to clerkships under Mr. Harlan, I
can at least mitigate that dream of wretchedness and insult by adding
the fancy of their fate under the action of his principles. Let me
suppose them there, and he still magnifying the calling of the Secretary
into that of the literary headsman. He opens the great book of
_Genesis_. Everywhere “indecent passages.” The mother hushes the child,
and bids him skip as he reads aloud that first great history. It cannot
be read aloud in “drawing-rooms” by “gentlemen” and “ladies.” The freest
use of language, the plainest terms, frank mention of forbidden
subjects; the story of Onan; of Hagar and Sarai; of Lot and his
daughters; of Isaac, Rebekah, and Abimelech; of Jacob and Leah; of
Reuben and Bilhah; of Potiphar’s wife and Joseph; tabooed allusion and
statement everywhere; no veils, no euphemism, no delicacy, no meal in
the mouth anywhere. Out with Moses! The cloven splendor on that awful
brow shall not save him.—Mr. Harlan takes up the _Iliad_ and the
_Odyssey_. The loves of Jupiter and Juno; the dalliance of Achilles and
Patroclus with their women; the perfectly frank, undraped reality of
Greek life and manners naïvely shown without regard to the feelings of
Christian civilizees—horrible! Out with Homer!—Here is Lucretius: Mr.
Harlan opens the _De Rerum Natura_, and reads the vast, benign, majestic
lines, sad with the shadow of the unintelligible universe upon them;
sublime with the tragic problems of the Infinite; august with their
noble love and compassion for mankind. But what is this? “_Ut quasi
transactis sœpe omnibus rebus_,” &c. And this: “_Morè ferarum,
quadrupedumque magis ritu_,” &c. And this: “_Nam mulier prohibet se
concipere atque repugnat_,” &c. And this: “_Quod petiere, premunt arcte,
faciuntque dolorem_,” &c. Enough. Fine language, fine illustrations,
fine precepts, pretty decency! Out with Lucretius! Out with the chief
poet of the Tiber side!—Here is Æschylus: a dark magnificence of cloud,
all rough with burning gold, which thunders and drips blood! The Greek
Shakespeare. The gorgeous and terrible Æschylus! What is this in the
_Prometheus_ about Jove and Iö? What sort of detail is that which, at
the distance of ten years, I remember amazed Mr. Buckley as he
translated the _Agamemnon_? What kind of talk is this in the _Chœphori_,
in _The Suppliants_, and in the fragments of the comic drama of _The
Argians_? Out with Æschylus!—Here is the sublime book of Ezekiel. All
the Hebrew grandeur at its fullest is there. But look at this blurt of
coarse words, hurled direct as the prophet-mouth can hurl them—this
familiar reference to functions and organs voted out of language—this
bread for human lips baked with ordure—these details of the scortatory
loves of Aholah and Aholibamah. Enough. Dismiss this dreadful majesty of
Hebrew poetry. He has no “taste.” He is “indecent.” Out with
Ezekiel!—Here is Dante. Open the tremendous pages of the _Inferno_.
What is this about the she-wolf Can Grande will kill? What picture is
this of strumpet Thais?—ending with the lines—
“Taida è, la puttana che rispose
Al drudo suo, quando disse: Ho io grazie
Grandi appo te? Anzi meravigliose.”
What is this, also, in the eighteenth canto?—
“Quivi venimmo, e quindi giù nel fosso
Vidi gente attuffata in uno sterco,
Che dagli uman privati parea mosso:
E mentre ch’ ìo là giù con l’occhio cerco,
Vìdi un col capo sì di merda lordo,
Che non parea s’era laico o cherco.”
What is this line at the end of the twenty-first canto, which even John
Carlyle flinches from translating, but which Dante did not flinch from
writing?—
“Ed egli avea del cul fatto trombetta.”
And look at these lines in the twenty-eighth canto:—
“Già reggia, per mezzul perdere o lulla
Com’ io vidi un, cosi non si pertugia,
Rotto dal mento insin dove si trulla.”
That will do. Dante, too, has “indecent passages.” Out with Dante!—Here
is the book of Job: the vast Arabian landscape, the picturesque pastoral
details of Arabian life, the last tragic immensity of Oriental sorrow,
the whole overarching sky of Oriental piety, are here. But here also the
inevitable “indecency.” Instead of the virtuous fiction of the
tansy-bed, Job actually has the indelicacy to state how man is
born—even mentions the belly; talks about the gendering of bulls and
the miscarriage of cows; uses rank idioms; and in the thirty-first
chapter especially, indulges in a strain of thought and expression which
it is amazing does not bring down upon him, even at this late date, the
avalanches of our lofty and pure Reviews. Here is certainly “an immoral
poet.” Out with Job!—Here is Plutarch, prince of biographers, and
Herodotus, flower of historians. What have we now? Traits of character
not to be mentioned, incidents of conduct, accounts of manners, minute
details of customs, which our modern historical dandies would never
venture upon recording. Out with Plutarch and Herodotus!—Here is
Tacitus. What statement of crimes that ought not to be hinted! Does the
man gloat over such things? What dreadful kisses are these of Agrippina
to Nero—the mother to the son! Out with Tacitus!—and since there are
books that ought to be publicly burned, by all means let the stern
grandeur of that rhetoric be lost in flame.—Here is Shakespeare:
“indecent passages” everywhere—every drama, every poem thickly inlaid
with them; all that men do displayed; sexual acts treated lightly,
jested about, mentioned obscenely; the language never bolted; slang,
gross puns, lewd words, in profusion. Out with Shakespeare!—Here is the
_Canticle of Canticles_: beautiful, voluptuous poem of love literally,
whatever be its mystic significance; glowing with the color, odorous
with the spices, melodious with the voices of the East; sacred and
exquisite and pure with the burning chastity of passion which completes
and exceeds the snowy chastity of virgins. This to me, but what to the
Secretary? Can he endure that the female form should stand thus in a
poem, disrobed, unveiled, bathed in erotic splendor? Look at these
voluptuous details, this expression of desire, this amorous tone and
glow, this consecration and perfume lavished upon the sensual. No! Out
with Solomon!—Here is Isaiah. The grand thunder-roll of that
righteousness, like the eternal roar of God above the guilty world,
utters coarse words. Amidst the bolted lightnings of that sublime
denunciation, coarse thoughts, indelicate figures, indecent allusion,
flash upon the sight, like gross imagery in a midnight landscape. Out
with Isaiah!—Here is Montaigne. Open those great, those virtuous pages
of the unflinching reporter of Man; the soul all truth and daylight, all
candor, probity, sincerity, reality, eyesight. A few glances will
suffice. Cant and vice and sniffle have groaned over these pages before.
Out with Montaigne!—Here is Hafiz, the Anacreon of Persia, but more: a
banquet of wine in a garden of roses, the nightingales singing, the
laughing revellers high with festal joy; but a heavenly flame burns on
every brow; a tone not of this sphere is in all the music, all the
laughter, all the songs; a light of the Infinite trembles over every
chalice and rests on every flower; and all the garden is divine. Still,
when Hafiz cries out, “Bring me wine, and bring the famed veiled beauty,
the Princess of the brothel,” &c., or issues similar orders, Mr. Harlan,
whose virtue does not understand or endure such metaphors, must deal
sternly with this kosmic man of Persia. Out with Hafiz!—Here is Virgil,
ornate and splendid poet of old Rome; a master with a greater pupil,
Alighieri! a bard above whose ashes Boccaccio kneels a trader, and
arises a soldier of mankind; but he must lose those fadeless chaplets,
the undying green of a noble fame; for here in the _Æneid_ is “_Dixerat;
et niveis hinc atque hinc Diva lacertis_,” &c., and here in the
_Georgics_ is “_Quo rapiat sitiens Venerem, interiusque recondat_,” &c.,
and there are other verses like these. Out with Virgil!—Here is
Swedenborg. Open this poem in prose, the _Conjugial Love_—to me, a
temple, though in ruins; the sacred fane, clothed in mist, filled with
moonlight, of a great though broken mind. What spittle of critic
epithets stains all here? “Lewd,” “sensual,” “lecherous,” “coarse,”
“licentious,” &c. Of course these judgments are final. There is no
appeal from the tobacco-juice of an expectorating and disdainful virtue.
Out with Swedenborg!—Here is Goethe: the horrified squealing of prudes
is not yet silent over pages of _Wilhelm Meister_; that high and chaste
hook, the _Elective Affinities_, still pumps up oaths from clergymen;
Walpurgis has hardly ceased its uproar over _Faust_. Out with
Goethe!—Here is Byron: grand, dark poet; a great spirit—a soul like
the ocean; generous lover of America; fiery trumpet of liberty; a sword
for the human cause in Greece; a torch for the human mind in _Cain_; a
life that redeemed its every fault by taking a side, which was the human
side; tempest of scorn in his first poem, tempest of scorn and laughter
in his last poem, only against the things that wrong man; vast bud of
the Infinite that Death alone prevented from its vaster flower; immense,
seminal, electrical, dazzling Byron.—But _Beppo_—O! But _Don Juan_—O
fie! Not to mention the Countess Guiccioli—ah, me! Prepare quickly the
yellow envelope, and out with Byron!—Here is Cervantes: open _Don
Quixote_, paragon of romances, highest result of Spain, best and
sufficient reason for her life among the nations, a laughing novel which
is a weeping poem. But talk such as this of Sancho Panza and Tummas
Cecial under the cork-trees, and these coarse stories and bawdy words
and this free and gross comedy—is it to be endured? Out with
Cervantes!—Here is another, a sun of literature, moving in a vast orbit
with dazzling plenitudes of power and beauty; the one only modern
European poet and novelist worthy to rank with the first; permanent
among the fleeting; a demigod of letters among the pigmies; a soul of
the antique strength and sadness, worthy to stand as the representative
of the high thought and hopes of the nineteenth century—Victor Hugo!
Now open _Les Misérables_. See the great passages which the American
translator softens and the English translator tears away. Open this
other book of his, _William Shakespeare_, a book with only one grave
fault, the omission of the words “A Poem” from the title-page; a book
which is the courageous arch, the comprehending sky of criticism, but
which no American publisher will dare to issue, or, if he does, will
expurgate. Out with Hugo, of course!—Here is Juvenal, terrible and
splendid fountain of all satire; inspiration of all just censure;
exemplar of all noble rage at baseness; satirist and moralist sublimed
into the poet; the scowl of the unclouded noon above the low streets of
folly and of sin. But what he withers, he also shows. The sun-stroke of
his poetry reveals what it kills. Juvenal tells all. His fidelity of
exposure is frightful. Mr. Harlan would make short work of him. Out with
Juvenal!—Open the divine _Apocalypse_. What words are these among the
thunderings and lightnings and voices? Is this a poem to be read aloud
in parlors (for such appears to be the test of propriety and purity)? At
least, John might have been a little more choice in language. Some of
these texts are “indecent.” Yes, indeed! John must go.—Here is Spenser.
Encyclopædic poet of the visioned chivalry. It is all there. Amadis,
Esplandian, Tirante the White, Palmerin of England, all those Paladin
romances were but the leaves: this is the flower. A lost dream of valor,
chastity, courtesy, glory—a dream that marks an age of human
history—glimmers here, far in these depths, and makes this unexplored
obscurity divine. “But is the _Faëry Queen_ such a book as you would
wish to put into the hands of a lady?” What a question! Has it not been
expurgated? Out with Spenser!—Here is another, a true soldier of the
human emancipation; one who smites amidst uproars of laughter; the
master of Titanic farce; a whirlwind and earthquake of
derision—Rabelais. A nice one for Mr. Harlan! One glimpse at the
chapter which explains why the miles lengthen as you leave Paris, or at
the details of the birth and nurture of Gargantua, will suffice. Out
with Rabelais—out with the great jester of France, as Lord Bacon calls
him!—And here is Lord Bacon himself, in one of whose pages you may
read, done from the Latin by Spedding into a magnificent golden thunder
of English, the absolute defence of the free spirit of the great
authors, coupled with stern rebuke to the spirit that would pick and
choose, as dastard and effeminate. Out with Lord Bacon! Not him only,
not these only, not only the writers are under the ban. Here is Phidias,
gorgeous sculptor in gold and ivory, giant dreamer of the Infinite in
marble; but he will not use the fig-leaf. Here is Rembrandt, who paints
the Holland landscape, the Jew, the beggar, the burgher, in lights and
glooms of Eternity; and his pictures have been called “indecent.” Here
is Mozart, his music rich with the sumptuous color of all sunsets; and
it has been called “sensual.” Here is Michael Angelo, who makes art
tremble with a new and strange afflatus, and gives Europe novel and
sublime forms that tower above the centuries, and accost the Greek; and
his works have been called “bestial.” Out with them all!—Now, except
Virgil for vassalage to literary models, and for grave and sad falsehood
to liberty; except Goethe for his lack of the final ecstasy of
self-surrender which completes a poet, and for coldness to the great
mother—one’s country; except Spenser for his remoteness, and Byron for
his immaturity, and there is not one of those I have named that does not
belong to the first order of human intellect. But no need to make
discriminations here; they are all great; they have all striven; they
have all served. Moses, Homer, Lucretius, Æschylus, Ezekiel, Dante, Job,
Plutarch, Herodotus, Tacitus, Shakespeare, Solomon, Isaiah, Montaigne,
Hafiz, Virgil, Swedenborg, Goethe, Byron, Cervantes, Hugo, Juvenal,
John, Spenser, Rabelais, Bacon, Phidias, Rembrandt, Mozart,
Angelo:—these are among the demi-gods of human thought; the souls that
have loved and suffered for the race; the light-bringers, the teachers,
the lawgivers, the consolers, the liberators, the inspired inspirers of
mankind; the noble and gracious beings who, in the service of humanity,
have borne every cross and earned every crown. There is not one of them
that is not sacred in the eyes of thoughtful men. But not one of them
does the rotten taste and morals of the nineteenth century spare! Not
one of them is qualified to render work for bread under this Secretary!
Do I err? Do I exaggerate? I write without access to the books I
mention—(it is fitting that this piece of insolent barbarism should
have been committed in almost the only important American city which is
without a public library!)—with the exception of three or four volumes
which I happen to have by me, I am obliged to rely for my statements on
the memory of youthful readings, eight or ten years ago; but name me one
book of the first order in which such passages as I refer to do not
occur! Tell me who can—what poet of the first grade escapes this brand,
“immoral,” or this spittle, “indecent”! If the great books are not, in
the point under consideration, in the same moral category as _Leaves of
Grass_, then why, either in translation or in the originals, either by a
bold softening which dissolves the author’s meaning, or by absolute
excision, are they nearly all expurgated? Answer me that. By one process
or the other, Brizeux, Cary, Wright, Cayley, Carlyle, everybody,
expurgates Dante; Langhorne and others expurgate Plutarch; Potter and
others expurgate Æschylus; Gifford, Anthon, and others expurgate
Juvenal; Creech, Watson, and others expurgate Lucretius; Bowdler and
others expurgate Shakespeare; Nott (I believe it is) expurgates Hafiz;
Wraxall and Wilbour expurgate Hugo; Kirkland, Hart, and others expurgate
Spenser; somebody expurgates Virgil; somebody expurgates Byron; the
Oxford scholars dilute Tacitus; Lord Derby expurgates Homer, besides
making him as ridiculous as the plucked cock of Diogenes in translation;
several hands expurgate Goethe; and Archbishop Tillotson in design
expurgates Moses, Ezekiel, Solomon, Isaiah, St. John, and all the
others—a job which Dr. Noah Webster executes, but, thank God, cannot
popularize. What book is spared? Nothing but a chain of circumstance,
which seems divinely ordained, saves us the unmutilated Bible. Nearly
every other great book bleeds. When one is not expurgated, the balance
is restored by its being cordially abused. Thanks to the splendid
conscience and courage of Mr. Wight, we can read Montaigne in English
without the omission of a single word! Thanks also to Motteux and
others, Cervantes has gone untouched, and we have not as yet a family
Rabelais. Neither have we as yet a family Mankind nor a family Universe;
but this is an oversight which will, doubtless, be repaired in time. God
will also, doubtless, be expurgated whenever it is possible. Why not?
One step to this end is taken in the expurgation of genius, which is His
second manifestation, as Nature is His first! Go on, gentlemen! You will
yet have things as “moral” as you desire!