Harlan, however unintelligently, represents to some extent the shallow
conclusions of his age; and I know it will be said, that if the great
books contain these passages, they ought to be expurgated. It is not my
design to endeavor to put a quart into people who only hold a gill, nor
would I waste time in endeavoring to convert a large class of persons
whom I once heard Walt Whitman describe, with his usual Titanic richness
and strength of phrase, as “the immutable granitic pudding-heads of the
world.” But there is a better class than these; and I am filled with
measureless amazement, that persons of high intelligence, living to the
age of maturity, do not perceive, at least, the immense and priceless
scientific and human _uses_ of such passages, and the consequent
necessity, transcending and quashing all minor considerations, of having
them where they are. But look at these sad sentences—a complete and
felicitous statement of the whole modern doctrine—in the pages of a man
I love and revere: “The literature of three centuries ago is not decent
to be read; we expurgate it. Within a hundred years, woman has become a
reader, and for that reason, as much or more than any thing else,
literature has sprung to a higher level. No need now to expurgate all
you read.” He goes on to argue that literature in the next century will
be richer than in the classic epochs, because woman will contribute to
it as an author—her contribution, I infer, to be of the kind that will
not need expurgating. These, I repeat, are sad sentences. If they are
true, Bowdler is right to expurgate Shakespeare, and Noah Webster the
Bible. But no, they are not true! I welcome woman into art; but when she
comes there grandly, she will not come either as expurgator or creator
of emasculate or partial forms. Woman, grand in art, is Rosa Bonheur,
painting with fearless pencil the surly, sublime Jovian bull, equipped
for masculine use; painting the powerful, ramping stallion in his
amorous pride; not weakly or meanly flinching from the full celebration
of what God has made. Woman, grand in art, will come creating in forms,
however novel, the absolute, the permanent, the real, the evil and the
good, as Æschylus, as Cervantes, as Shakespeare before her; with sex,
with truth, with universality, without omissions or concealments. And
woman, as the ideal reader of literature, is not the indelicate prude,
flushing and squealing over some frank page; it is that high and
beautiful soul, Marie de Gournay, devoutly absorbing the work of her
master, Montaigne; finding it all great; greatly comprehending, greatly
accepting it all; fronting its license and grossness without any of the
livid shuddering of Puritans; and looking on the book in the same
universal and kindly spirit as its author looked upon the world. Woman
reading otherwise than thus—shrinking from Apuleius, from Rabelais,
from Aristophanes, from Shakespeare, from even Wycherley, or Petronius,
or Aretin, or Shirley—is less than man, is not ideal, not strong, not
nobly good, but petty, and effeminate, and mean. And not for her, nor by
her, nor by man, do I assent to the expurgation of the great books.
Literature cannot spring to a higher level than theirs. Alas! it has
sprung to a lower. The level of the great books is the Infinite, the
Absolute. To contain all, by containing the premise, the truth, the idea
and feeling of all; to tally the universe by profusion, variety,
reality, mystery, enclosure, power, terror, beauty, service; to be great
to the utmost conceivability of greatness—what higher level than this
can literature spring to? Up, on the highest summit, stand such works,
never to be surpassed, never to be supplanted. Their indecency is not
that of the vulgar; their vulgarity is not that of the low. Their evil,
if it be evil, is not there for nothing—it serves; at the base of it is
Love.—Every poet of the highest quality is, in the masterly coinage of
the author of _Leaves of Grass_, a kosmos. His work, like himself, is a
second world, full of contrarieties, strangely harmonized, and moral
indeed, but only as the world is moral. Shakespeare is all good,
Rabelais is all good, Montaigne is all good; not because all the
thoughts, the words, the manifestations are so, but because at the core,
and permeating all, is an ethic intention—a love which, through
mysterious, indirect, subtle, seemingly absurd, often terrible and
repulsive means, seeks to uplift, and never to degrade. It is the spirit
in which authorship is pursued, as Augustus Schlegel has said, that
makes it either an infamy or a virtue; and the spirit of the great
authors, no matter what their letter, is one with that which pervades
the creation. In mighty love, with implements of pain and pleasure, of
good and evil, Nature develops man; genius also, in mighty love, with
implements of pain and pleasure, of good and evil, develops man; no
matter what the means, that is the end. Tell me not, then, of the
indecent passages of the great poets! The world, which is the poem of
God, is full of indecent passages! “Shall there be evil in a city and
the Lord hath not done it?” shouts Amos. “I form the light, and create
darkness; I make peace, and create evil; I, the Lord, do all these
things,” thunders Isaiah. “This,” says Coleridge, “is the deep abyss of
the mystery of God.” Yes, and it is the profound of the mystery of
genius also! Evil is part of the economy of genius, as it is part of the
economy of God.—Gentle reviewers endeavor to find excuses for the
freedoms of geniuses. “It is to prove that they were above
conventionalities.” “It is referable to the age.” “The age permitted a
degree of coarseness,” &c. “Shakespeare’s indecencies are the result of
his age.” O Ossa on Pelion, mount piled on mount, of error and folly!
What has genius, spirit of the absolute and the eternal, to do with
definitions of position, or conventionalities, or the age? Genius puts
indecencies into its works, because God puts them into His world.
Whatever the special reason in each case, this is the general reason in
all cases. They are here, because they are there. That is the eternal
why.—No; Alphonso of Castile thought, that if he had been consulted at
the Creation, he could have given a few hints to the Almighty. Not I. I
play Alphonso neither to genius nor to God.
* * * * *
——What is this poem, for the giving of which to America and the world,
and for that alone, its author has been dismissed with ignominy from a
Government office? It is a poem which Schiller might have hailed as the
noblest specimen of naïve literature, worthy of a place beside Homer. It
is, in the first place, a work purely and entirely American,
autochthonic, sprung from our own soil; no savor of Europe nor of the
past, nor of any other literature in it; a vast carol of our own land,
and of its Present and Future; the strong and haughty psalm of the
Republic. There is not one other book, I care not whose, of which this
can be said. I weigh my words, and have considered well. Every other
book by an American author implies, both in form and substance, I cannot
even say the European, but the British mind. The shadow of Temple Bar
and Arthur’s Seat lies dark on all our letters. Intellectually, we are
still a dependency of Great Britain, and one word—colonial—comprehends
and stamps our literature. In no literary form, except our newspapers,
has there been any thing distinctively American. I note our best
books—the works of Jefferson, the romances of Brockden Brown, the
speeches of Webster, Everett’s rhetoric, the divinity of Channing, some
of Cooper’s novels, the writings of Theodore Parker, the poetry of
Bryant, the masterly law arguments of Lysander Spooner, the miscellanies
of Margaret Fuller, the histories of Hildreth, Bancroft and Motley,
Ticknor’s _History of Spanish Literature_, Judd’s _Margaret_, the
political treatises of Calhoun, the rich, benignant poems of Longfellow,
the ballads of Whittier, the delicate songs of Philip Pendleton Cooke,
the weird poetry of Edgar Poe, the wizard tales of Hawthorne, Irving’s
_Knickerbocker_, Delia Bacon’s splendid sibyllic book on Shakespeare,
the political economy of Carey, the prison letters and immortal speech
of John Brown, the lofty patrician eloquence of Wendell Phillips, and
those diamonds of the first water, the great clear essays and greater
poems of Emerson. This literature has often commanding merits, and much
of it is very precious to me; but in respect to its national character,
all that can be said is that it is tinged, more or less deeply, with
America; and the foreign model, the foreign standards, the foreign
culture, the foreign ideas, dominate over it all. At most, our best
books were but struggling beams; behold in _Leaves of Grass_ the immense
and absolute sunrise! It is all our own! The nation is in it! In form a
series of chants, in substance it is an epic of America. It is
distinctively and utterly American. Without model, without imitation,
without reminiscence, it is evolved entirely from our own polity and
popular life. Look at what it celebrates and contains!—hardly to be
enumerated without sometimes using the powerful, wondrous phrases of its
author, so indissoluble are they with the things described. The
essences, the events, the objects of America; the myriad varied
landscapes; the teeming and giant cities; the generous and turbulent
populations; the prairie solitudes; the vast pastoral plateaus; the
Mississippi; the land dense with villages and farms; the habits,
manners, customs; the enormous diversity of temperatures; the immense
geography; the red aborigines passing away, “charging the water and the
land with names;” the early settlements; the sudden uprising and
defiance of the Revolution; the august figure of Washington; the
formation and sacredness of the Constitution; the pouring in of the
emigrants; the million-masted harbors; the general opulence and comfort;
the fisheries, and whaling, and gold-digging, and manufactures, and
agriculture; the dazzling movement of new States, rushing to be great;
Nevada rising, Dakota rising, Colorado rising; the tumultuous
civilization around and beyond the Rocky Mountains thundering and
spreading; the Union impregnable; feudalism in all its forms forever
tracked and assaulted; liberty deathless on these shores; the noble and
free character of the people; the equality of male and female; the
ardor, the fierceness, the friendship, the dignity, the enterprise, the
affection, the courage, the love of music, the passion for personal
freedom; the mercy and justice and compassion of the people; the popular
faults and vices and crimes; the deference of the President to the
private citizen; the image of Christ forever deepening in the public
mind as the brother of despised and rejected persons; the promise and
wild song of the future; the vision of the Federal mother, seated with
more than antique majesty in the midst of her many children; the pouring
glories of the hereafter; the vistas of splendor, incessant and
branching; the tremendous elements, breeds, adjustments of America—with
all these, with more, with every thing transcendent, amazing, and new,
undimmed by the pale cast of thought, and with the very color and brawn
of actual life, the whole gigantic epic of our continental being unwinds
in all its magnificent reality in these pages. To understand Greece,
study the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_; study _Leaves of Grass_ to understand
America. Her Democracy is there. Would you have a text-book of
Democracy? The writings of Jefferson are good; De Tocqueville is better;
but the great poet always contains historian and philosopher—and to
know the comprehending spirit of this country, you shall question these
insulted pages. Yet this vast and patriotic celebration and presentation
of all that is our own, is but a part of this tremendous volume. Here in
addition is thrown in poetic form, a philosophy of life, rich, subtle,
composite, ample, adequate to these great shores. Here are presented
superb types of models of manly and womanly character for the future of
this country, athletic, large, naïve, free, dauntless, haughty, loving,
nobly carnal, nobly spiritual, equal in body and soul, acceptive and
tolerant as Nature, generous, cosmopolitan, above all, religious. Here
are erected standards, drawn from the circumstances of our case, by
which not merely our literature, but all our performance, our politics,
art, behavior, love, conversation, dress, society, every thing belonging
to our lives and their conduct, will be shaped and recreated. A powerful
afflatus from the Infinite has given this book life. A voice which is
the manliest of human voices sounds through it all. In it is the strong
spirit which will surely mould our future. Mark my words: its sentences
will yet clinch the arguments of statesmen; its precepts will be the
laws of the people! From the beams of this seminal sun will be
generated, with tropical luxuriance, the myriad new forms of thought and
life in America. And in view of the national character and national
purpose of this work—in view of its vigorous re-enforcement and service
to all that we hold most precious—I make the claim here, that so far
from defaming and persecuting its author, the attitude of an American
statesman or public officer toward him should be to the highest degree
friendly and sustaining.
Beyond his country, too, this poet serves the world. He refutes by his
example the saying of Goethe, one of those which stain that noble fame
with baseness, that a great poet cannot be patriotic; and he dilates to
a universal use which redoubles the splendors of his volume, and makes
it dear to all that is human. I am not its authorized interpreter, and
can only state, at the risk of imperfect expression, and perhaps error,
what its meanings and purpose seem to me. But I see that, in his general
intention, the author has aimed to express that most common but wondrous
thing—that strange assemblage of soul, body, intellect—beautiful,
mystical, terrible, limited, boundless, ill-assorted, contradictory, yet
singularly harmonized—a Human Being, a single separate Identity, a
Man,—himself; but himself typically, and in his universal being. This
he has done with perfect candor, including the bodily attributes and
organs, as necessary component parts of the creation. Every thinking
person should see the value and use of such a presentation of human
nature as this. I also see—and it is from these parts of the book that
much of the misunderstanding and offence arises—that this poet seeks in
subtle ways to rescue from the keeping of blackguards and debauchees, to
which it has been abandoned, and to redeem to noble thought and use, the
great element of amativeness or sexuality, with all its acts and organs.
Sometimes by direct assertion, sometimes by implication, he rejects the
prevailing admission that this element is vile; declares its natural or
normal manifestation to be sacred and unworthy shame; awards it an equal
but not superior sanctity with the other elements that compose man; and
illustrates his doctrine and sets his example, by applying this element,
with all that appertains to it, to use as part of the imagery of poetry.
Then, besides, diffused like an atmosphere throughout the poem,
tincturing all its quality, and giving it that sacerdotal and prophetic
character which makes it a sort of American Bible, is the pronounced and
ever-recurring assertion of the divinity of all things. In a spirit like
that of the Egyptian priesthood, who wore the dung-beetle in gold on
their crests, perhaps as a symbol of the sacredness of even the lowest
forms of life, the poet celebrates all the creation as noble and
holy—the meanest and lowest parts of it, as well as the most lofty; all
equally projections of the Infinite; all emanations of the creative life
of God. Perpetual hymns break from him in praise of the divineness of
the universe: he sees a halo around every shape, however low; and life
in all its forms inspires a rapture of worship.
How some persons can think a book of this sort bad, is clearer to me
than it used to be. Swedenborg says that to the devils, perfumes are
stinks. I happen to know that some of the vilest abuse that it has
received, has come from men of the lowest possible moral life. It is not
so easy to understand how some persons of culture and judgment can fail
to perceive its literary greatness. Making fair allowance for faults,
which no great work, from _Hamlet_ to the world itself, is perhaps
without, the book, in form as in substance, seems to me a masterpiece.
Never in literature has there been more absolute conceptive or
presentative power. The forms and shows of things are bodied forth so
that one may say they become visible, and are alive. Here, in its
grandest, freest use, is the English language, from its lowest compass
to the top of the key; from the powerful, rank idiom of the streets and
fields, to the last subtlety of academic speech—ample, various,
telling, luxuriant, pictorial, final, conquering; absorbing from other
languages to its own purposes their choicest terms; its rich and daring
composite defying grammar; its most incontestable and splendid triumphs
achieved, as Jefferson notes of the superb Latin of Tacitus, in haughty
scorn of the rules of grammarians. Another singular excellence is the
metre—entirely novel, free, flexible, melodious, corresponsive to the
thought; its noble proportions and cadences reminding of winds and
waves, and the vast elemental sounds and motions of Nature, and having
an equal variety and liberty. I have heard this brought into disparaging
comparison with the metres of Tennyson; the poetry also disparaged in
the same connection. I hardly know what to think of people who can talk
in this way. To say nothing of the preference, the mere parallel is only
less ludicrous and arbitrary than would be one between Moore and Isaiah.
Tennyson is an exquisite and sumptuous poet of the third, perhaps the
fourth order; as certainly below Milton and Virgil as Milton and Virgil
are certainly below Æschylus and Homer. His full-fluted verbal music,
which is one of his chief merits, is of an extraordinary beauty. But in
this respect the comparison between him and Walt Whitman is that between
melody and harmony—between a song by Franz Abt or Schubert and a
symphony by Beethoven. Speaking generally, and not with exact justice to
either, the words of Tennyson, irrespective of their sense, make music
to the ear; while the sense of Walt Whitman’s words makes a loftier
music in the mind. For a music, perfect and vast, subtle and more than
auricular—woven not alone from the verbal sounds and rhythmic cadences,
but educed by the thought and feeling of the verse from the reader’s
soul, by the power of a spell few hold—I know of nothing superior to
“By the bivouac’s fitful flame,” the “Hymn of Dead Soldiers,” the
“Spirit whose work is done,” the “Arming of Mannahatta,” or that most
mournful and noble of all love songs, “Out of the rolling ocean, the
crowd,” in _Drum-Taps_; or the “Word out of the Sea,” the “Elemental
Drifts,” the entire section entitled “Walt Whitman,” the hymn commencing
“Splendor of falling day,” or the great salute to the French Revolution
of ’93, entitled “France,” in _Leaves of Grass_. If these are not
examples of great structural harmony as well as of the highest poetry,
there are none in literature. And if all these were wanting, there is a
single poem in the late volume, _Drum-Taps_, which, if the author had
never written another line, would be sufficient to place him among the
chief poets of the world. I do not refer to “Chanting the Square
Deific”—though that also would be sufficient, in its incomparable
breadth and grandeur of conception and execution, to establish the
highest poetic reputation—but to the strain commemorating the death of
the beloved President, commencing, “When lilacs last in the door-yard
bloomed”—a poem whose rich and sacred beauty and rapture of tender
religious passion, spreading aloft into the sublime, leave it unique and
solitary in literature, and will make it the chosen and immortal hymn of
Death forever. Emperors might well elect to die, could their memories be
surrounded with such a requiem, which, next to the grief and love of the
people, is the grandest and the only grand funeral music poured around
Lincoln’s bier. In the face of works like these, testimony of the
presence on earth of a mighty soul, I am thunderstruck at the low tone
of the current criticism. Even from eminent persons, who ought to know
how to measure literature, and who are friendly to this author, I hear,
mingled with inadequate praise, the self-same censures—the very
epithets, even, which Voltaire, not more ridiculously, passed upon
Shakespeare. Take care, gentlemen! What you, like Voltaire, take for
rudeness, chaos, barbarism, lack of form, may be the sacred and
magnificent wildness of a virgin world of poetry, all unlike these fine
and ordered Tennysonian rose-gardens which are your ideal, but excelling
these as the globe excels the parterre. I, at any rate, am not deceived.
I see how swiftly the smart, bright, conventional standards of modern
criticism would assign Isaiah or Ezekiel to the limbo of abortions. I
see of how limited worth are the wit and scholarship of these _Saturday
Reviews_ and _London Examiners_, with their _doppelgangers_ on this side
of the Atlantic, by the treatment some poetic masterpiece of China or
Hindustan receives when it falls into their hands for judgment. Any
thing not cast in modern conventional forms, any novel or amazing
beauty, strikes them as comic. Read Mr. Buckley’s notes, even at this
late day, on a poet so incredibly great as Æschylus. Read an Æschylus
illustrated by reference to Nicholas Nickleby, Mrs. Bombazine, and
Mantalini, and censured in contemptuous, jocular, or flippant
annotations—this, too, by an Oxford scholar of rank and merit! No
wonder _Leaves of Grass_ goes underrated or unperceived. Modern
criticism is Voltaire estimating the _Apocalypse_ as “dirt” and roaring
with laughter over the leaves of Ezekiel. Why? Because this poetry has
not the court tread, the perfume, the royal purple of Racine—only its
own wild and formless incomparable sublimity. Voltaire was an immense
and noble person; only it was not part of his greatness to be able to
see that other greatness which transcends common-sense as the Infinite
transcends the Finite. These children of Voltaire, also, who make the
choirs of modern criticism, have great merits. But to justly estimate
poetry of the first order, is not one of them. “Shakespeare’s _Tempest_,
or the _Midsummer Night’s Dream_, or any such damned nonsense as that,”
said one of this school to me a month ago. “Look at that perpendicular
grocery sign-board: the letters all fantastic and reading from top to
bottom: a mere oddity; that is _Leaves of Grass_,” said another, a
person of eminence. No, gentlemen! you and I differ. I see, very
clearly, the nature of a work like this, the warmest praise of which,
not to mention your blame, has been meagre and insufficient to the last
degree, and which centuries must ponder before they can sufficiently
honor. You have had your say; let me have at least the beginning of
mine: Nothing that America had before in literature, rose above
construction: this is a creation. Idle, and worse than idle, is any
attempt to place this author either among or below the poets of the day.
They are but singers; he is a bard. In him you have one of that mighty
brotherhood who, more than statesmen, mould the future: who, as Fletcher
of Saltoun said, when they make the songs of a nation, it matters not
who make the laws. I class him boldly, and the future will confirm my
judgment, among the great creative minds of the world. By a quality
almost incommunicable, which makes its possessor, no matter what his
diversity or imperfections, equal with the Supremes of art, and by the
very structure of his mind, he belongs there. His place is beside
Shakespeare, Æschylus, Cervantes, Dante, Homer, Isaiah—the bards of the
last ascent, the brothers of the radiant summit. And if any man think
this estimate extravagant, I leave him, as Lord Bacon says, to the
gravity of that judgment and pass on. Enough for me to pronounce this
book grandly good and supremely great. Clamor, on the score of its
morality, is nothing but a form of turpitude; denial of its greatness is
nothing but an insanity; and the roar of Sodom and the laughter of
Bedlam shall not, by a hair’s breadth, swerve my verdict.