may be that the elements that went to make up the harmony were few.
The austerity and exhilaration and simple paganism of his art were
at one with his morality. He was, at the very core, a preacher; the
morality that he preached, interesting in itself, is, for us, the
most significant thing about him. Thoreau was, in the noblest sense
of the word, a Cynic. The school of Antisthenes is not the least
interesting of the Socratic schools, and Thoreau is perhaps the
finest flower that that school has ever yielded. He may not have been
aware of his affinities, but it will help us if we bear them in mind.
The charm that Diogenes exercised over men seems to have consisted
in his peculiarly fresh and original intellect, his extravagant
independence and self-control, his coarse and effective wit. Thoreau
sat in his jar at Walden with the same originality, independence, and
sublime contentment; but his wisdom was suave and his wit was never
coarse--exalted, rather, into a perennial humour, flashing now and
then into divine epigram. A life in harmony with Nature, the culture
of joyous simplicity, the subordination of science to ethics--these
were the principles of Cynicism, and to these Thoreau was always true.
“Every day is a festival,” said Diogenes, and Metrocles rejoiced that
he was happier than the Persian king. “I would rather sit on a pumpkin
and have it all to myself,” said Thoreau, “than be crowded on a velvet
cushion.” “Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage.... It is
life near the bone, where it is sweetest.... Money is not required to
buy one necessary of the soul.” He had “travelled much in Concord.”
“Methinks I should be content to sit at the back-door in Concord under
the poplar tree for ever.” Such utterances as these strewn throughout
Thoreau’s pages--and the saying in the last days of the dying man to
the youth who would talk to him about a future world, “One world at
a time”--are full, in the uncorrupted sense, of the finest cynicism.
Diogenes, seeing a boy drink out of his hand, threw away his cup;
Thoreau had an interesting mineral specimen as a parlour ornament, but
it needed dusting every day, and he threw it away: it was not worth
its keep. The Cynics seem to have been the first among the Greeks to
declare that slavery is opposed to nature. Thoreau not only carried his
independence so far as to go to prison rather than pay taxes to Church
or State--“the only government that I recognize is the power that
establishes justice in the land”--but in 1859, when John Brown lay in
prison in Virginia, Thoreau was the one man in America to recognize the
greatness of the occasion and to stand up publicly on his side: “Think
of him!--of his rare qualities!--such a man as it takes ages to make,
and ages to understand; no mock hero, nor the representative of any
party. A man such as the sun may not rise upon again in this benighted
land. To whose making went the costliest material, the finest adamant;
sent to be the redeemer of those in captivity; and the only use to
which you can put him is to hang him at the end of a rope!”
Every true Cynic is, above all, a moralist and a preacher. Thoreau
could never be anything else; that was, in the end, his greatest
weakness. This unfailing ethereality, this perpetual challenge of
the acridity and simplicity of Nature, becomes at last hypernatural.
Thoreau breakfasts on the dawn: it is well; but he dines on the rainbow
and sups on the Aurora borealis. Of Nature’s treasure more than half is
man. Thoreau, with his noble Cynicism, had, as he thought, driven life
into a corner, but he had to confess that of all phenomena his own race
was to him the most mysterious and undiscoverable. He writes finely:
“The whole duty of man may be expressed in one line: Make to yourself a
perfect body;” but this appears to be a purely intellectual intuition.
He had a fine insight into the purity of sex and of all natural animal
functions, from which we excuse ourselves of speaking by falsely saying
they are trifles. “We are so degraded that we cannot speak simply of
the necessary functions of human nature;” but he is not bold to justify
his insight. He welcomed Walt Whitman, at the very first, as the
greatest democrat the world had seen, but he himself remained a natural
aristocrat. “He was a man devoid of compassion,” remarks Mr. Burroughs,
“devoid of sympathy, devoid of generosity, devoid of patriotism, as
those words are generally understood.” He had learnt something of the
mystery of Nature, but the price of his knowledge was ignorance of his
fellows. The chief part of life he left untouched.
Yet all that he had to give he gave fully and ungrudgingly; and it was
of the best and rarest. We shall not easily exhaust the exhilaration
of it. “We need the tonic of wildness.” Thoreau has heightened for us
the wildness of Nature, and his work--all written, as we need not be
told, in the open air--is full of this tonicity; it is a sort of moral
quinine, and, like quinine under certain circumstances, it leaves a
sweet taste behind.
II.
Whitman has achieved the rarest of all distinctions: he has been placed
while yet alive by the side of the world’s greatest moral teachers,
beside Jesus and Socrates--
“the latter Socrates,
Greek to the core, yet Yankee too.”
And his biographer records briefly his conviction that this man was
“perhaps the most advanced nature the world has yet produced.” Yet the
facts of his life are few and simple. He was born in May, 1819, on the
shores of the great south bay of Long Island. Like Bret Harte, who has
given classic expression to the young life of Western America, Whitman
is half Dutch, and this ancestral fact is significant. The well-known
portrait prefixed to “Leaves of Grass” shows him with an expression
like his father’s; in later life he bears a singular resemblance to
his mother as she is represented in Bucke’s book. He himself, we are
told, makes much of the women of his ancestry. “I estimate three
leading sources and formative stamps of my own character,”--in his
own words--“the maternal nativity-stock brought hither from far-away
Netherlands, for one (doubtless the best); the subterranean tenacity
and central bony structure (obstinacy, wilfulness) which I get from my
paternal English elements, for another; and the Long Island birth-spot,
sea-shores, childhood’s scenes, absorptions, with teeming Brooklyn and
New York--with, I suppose, my experiences afterwards in the Secession
outbreak--for third.” His mother, he wrote, was to him “the ideal
woman, practical, spiritual, of all of earth, life, love, to me the
best.”
For thirty years the youth set himself to learn the nature of the
world. There could be no better education; he has described its
elementary stages, by barnyard and roadside, in “There was a child went
forth.” The same large receptiveness still went with him, as he was by
turn teacher, printer, journalist, government clerk, and always, and
above all, loafer. He loafed year after year in Broadway, on Fulton
Ferry, on the omnibuses talking to the drivers, in the workshops
talking to the artisans. His physical health was perfect; he earned
enough to live on; he felt himself the equal of highest or lowest; he
drank of the great variegated stream of life before him from every
cup. His culture was, in its own way, as large and as sincere as
Goethe’s. Of books, indeed, he knew little; he was equally ignorant
of science, of philosophy, of the fine arts; he appears to have been
content--for his own ends wisely content--with elemental and mostly
ancient utterances of the race, as the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare, the
Nibelungenlied. And by-and-by, in 1855, when this new personality, with
its wide and deep roots, had become organized, Walt Whitman, at the
age of thirty-six, himself printed and published a little book called
“Leaves of Grass.”
After this there was but one fresh formative influence in Whitman’s
life, but without it his life and his work would both have suffered an
immense lack. What had chiefly characterized him so far had been his
audacious _nonchalance_, the frank and absolute egotism of a healthy
Olympian schoolboy. In 1860 the Civil War began; from 1862 to 1865
Whitman nursed the sick and wounded at Washington. During that period
of three years (broken by an attack of hospital malaria, the first
illness of his life, contracted in the discharge of these self-imposed
duties) he visited and tended nearly 100,000 men, and the personal
presence of the man, his inexhaustible love and sympathy, were of even
more worth than the manifold small but precious services that he was
enabled to render. He has himself given a simple and noble record of
his work in the “Memoranda” included in “Specimen Days and Collect,”
and in “Drum Taps,” a still more precious and intimate record of his
experiences. From this period a deep tenderness, a divine compassion
for all things human, is never absent from Whitman’s work; it becomes
more predominant than even his superb egotism. It is this element in
his large emotional nature, brought to full maturity by these war
experiences, which so many persons have felt thrilling through the
man’s whole personality, and which probably explains in some measure
the devotion he has inspired. Whitman went to Washington young, in
the perfection of virile physical energy (“He is a _Man_,” said the
shrewd Lincoln, to whom Whitman was unknown, as he chanced to see
him through a window once); he came away old and enfeebled, having
touched the height of life, to walk henceforth a downward path.
Physically impressive, however, at that time and always, he remained.
He is described, after this time (chiefly by Dr. Bucke), as six feet
in height, weighing nearly two hundred pounds; with eyebrows highly
arched; eyes light blue, rather small, dull and heavy (this point is
of some interest, bearing in mind that with exceptional creative
imagination large bright eyes are associated); full-sized mouth, with
full lips; large handsome ears, and senses exceptionally acute. The
peculiar complexion of his face, Bucke described as a bright maroon
tint; that of his body “a delicate but well-marked rose colour,”
unlike the English or Teutonic stock; his gait an elephantine roll.
“No description,” his Boswellian biographer, Dr. Bucke, again speaks
(and Mr. Kennedy, a later and equally Boswellian biographer, supplies
confirmatory details), “can give any idea of the extraordinary
physical attractiveness of the man,” even upon those who came in
contact with him for a moment. In 1873 he had a stroke of paralysis
(left hemiplegia), and for three years there seemed little promise of
recovery. The return to health was slow and incomplete. In those years
he spent much time bathing, or naked in the open air--“hanging clothes
on a rail near by, keeping old broad-brim straw on head and easy shoes
on feet”--and considered that that counted for much in his restoration
to health. “Perhaps,” he adds, “he or she to whom the free exhilarating
ecstasy of nakedness in nature has never been eligible, has not really
known what purity is--nor what faith or art or health really is.”
It is not possible to apprehend this man’s work unless the man’s
personality is apprehended. Every great book contains the precious
life-blood of a master-spirit, and no book throbs with a more vivid
personal life than “Leaves of Grass.” It is the whole outcome of
a whole man, audacious and unrepentant, who has here set down the
emotional reverberations of a manifold life. “For only,” according to
his own large saying,
“For only at last, after many years, after chastity, friendship,
procreation, prudence and nakedness,
After treading ground and breasting river and lake,
After a loosened throat, after absorbing eras, temperaments, races,
after knowledge, freedom, crimes,
After complete faith, after clarifyings, elevations, and removing
obstructions,
After these and more, it is just possible there comes to a man,
a woman, the divine power to speak words.”
III.
Of art, in the conventional sense of the word, there is not much in
Whitman. If we wish to approach him as an artist, J. F. Millet probably
helps us to understand him, more than any other artist in foreign
fields and lands. Millet has a deep and close relationship to Whitman.
At first sight, their work is curiously unlike: Whitman, in a great
new country, delighting in every manifestation of joy and youth and
hope; Millet, the child of an older and colder country, in love with
age and suffering and toil. Yet in essentials it is identical. Even
personally, it is said, Millet recalled Whitman.[6] Judging from the
representations of him, Millet, in his prime, was a colossal image of
manly beauty--deep-chested, muscular, erect, the quiet, penetrating
blue eyes, the delicately expressive eyelids, the large nose and
dilating sensitive nostrils, the firm mouth and jaw, the thick and
dark brown beard. The consumptive artist--a Keats or a Thoreau--craves
for health and loveliness; he turns shuddering from all that is not
pleasant. It is only these men, heroic incarnations of health, who are
strong enough to look sanely upon age and toil and suffering, and equal
to the prodigious expense of spirit of writing “Leaves of Grass” with a
heart laden with memories of Washington hospitals.
[6] See an interesting paper of “Recollections of J. F. Millet” in
the “Century,” May, 1889, to which I am indebted for several of the
painter’s utterances here quoted.
Millet and Whitman have, each in his own domain, made the most earnest,
thorough, and successful attempts of modern times to bring the Greek
spirit into art, the same attempt which Jan Steen, a great artist whom
we scarcely yet rate at his proper value, made in seventeenth century
Holland. It is not by the smooth nudities of a Bouguereau or a Leighton
that we reach Hellenism. The Greek spirit is the simple, natural,
beautiful interpretation of the life of the artist’s own age and people
under his own sky, as shown especially in the human body. It cannot be
the same in two ages or in two lands. One little incident mentioned
by Madame Millet to a friend is suggestive, “of Millet compelling her
to wear the same shirt for an uncomfortably long time; not to paint
the dirt, as his early critics would have us believe, but that the
rough linen should simplify its folds and take the form of the body,
that he might give a fresher and stronger accent to those qualities he
so loved, the garment becoming, as it were, a part of the body, and
expressing, as he has said, even more than the nude, the larger and
simpler forms of Nature.” There is the genuine Hellenic spirit, working
in a different age and under a different sky. Millet felt that for him
it was not true to paint the naked body, and at the same time that
the body alone was the supremely interesting thing to paint. In the
“Sower” we see this spirit expressed in the highest form which Millet
ever reached--the grace of natural beauty and strength, in no remote
discobolus or gladiator, but in the man of his own country and clime,
a peasant like himself, whose form he had studied from his own in the
mirror in his own studio. The coarse clothes and rough _sabots_ play
the same part in Millet’s work as the bizarre, uncouth words and varied
technical phraseology in Whitman’s; one may call them accidental,
but they are inevitable and necessary accidents. “One must be able,”
Millet said, “to make use of the trivial for the expression of the
sublime.” They both insisted that the artist must deal with the average
and typical, not with the exceptional. They both tried to bring the
largeness and simplicity of Nature into their work, and to suggest more
than they expressed. They both refused to believe any part of Nature
could be other than lovely. “The man who finds any phase or effect in
Nature not beautiful,” said Millet sternly, “the lack is in his own
heart.”
It is not as an artist that Whitman is chiefly interesting to us. It
is true that he has written “Out of the Cradle endlessly rocking,”
“When Lilacs last in the Dooryard bloomed,” “This Compost,” and
other fragments from which may be gained a simple and pure æsthetic
joy. Frequently, also, we come across phrases which reveal a keen
perception of the strangeness and beauty of things, lines that
possess a simplicity and grandeur scarcely less than Homeric; thus,
“the noiseless splash of sunrise;” or of the young men bathing, who
“float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun.” But such
results are accidental, and outside the main purpose. For that very
reason they have at times something of the divine felicity, unforeseen
and incalculable, of Nature; yet always, according to a rough but
convenient distinction, it is the poetry of energy rather than the
poetry of art. When Whitman speaks prose, the language of science, he
is frequently incoherent, emotional, unbalanced, with no very just and
precise sense of the meaning or words or the structure of reasoned
language.[7] It is clear that in this man the moral in its largest
sense--that is to say, the personality and its personal relations--is
more developed than the scientific; and that on the æsthetic side the
artist is merged in the mystic, wrapt in emotional contemplation of a
cosmic whole. What we see, therefore, is a manifold personality seeking
expression for itself in a peculiarly flexible and responsive medium.
It is a deep as well as a superficial resemblance that these chants
bear to the Scriptures of the old Hebrews--as Isaiah or the Book of
Job--wherein also the writer becomes an artist, and also absorbs all
available science, but where his purpose is the personal expression
of a moral and religious conception of life and the world. Whitman
has invented a name for the person who occupies this rare and, in the
highest degree, significant position; he calls him the “Answerer.” It
is not the function of answerers, like that of philosophers, to arrange
the order and limits of ideas, for they have to settle what ideas are
or are not to exist; nor is it theirs, like the singers, to celebrate
the ostensible things of the world, or to seek out imaginative forms,
for they are “not followers of beauty, but the august masters of
beauty.” The answerer is, in short, the maker of ideals.
[7] I think this defective scientific perception is perhaps as
responsible as any failure of moral insight for the vigorous manner in
which an element of “manly love” flourishes in “Calamus” and elsewhere.
Whitman is hardy enough to assert that he expects it will to a large
extent take the place of love between the sexes. “Manly love,” even in
its extreme form, is certainly Greek, as is the degradation of women
with which it is always correlated; yet the much slighter degradation
of women in modern times Whitman sincerely laments.
Whitman will not minimize the importance of the answerer’s mission. “I,
too,” he exclaims, “following many and followed by many, inaugurate
a religion.” If we wish to understand Walt Whitman, we must have
some conception of this religion. We shall find that two great and
contradictory conceptions dominate his work; although in his thoughts,
as in his modes of expression, it is not possible to find any strongly
marked progression.
The “Song of Myself” is the most complete utterance of Whitman’s first
great conception of life.
“I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul;
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is.”
The absolute unity of matter and spirit, and all which that unity
involves, is the dominant conception of this first and most
characteristic period. “If the body were not the soul,” he asks, “what
is the soul?” This is Whitman’s naturalism; it is the re-assertion of
the Greek attitude on a new and larger foundation. “Let it stand as an
indubitable truth, which no inquiries can shake, that the mind of man
is so entirely alienated from the righteousness of God, that he cannot
conceive, desire, or design anything but what is wicked, distorted,
foul, impure and iniquitous; that his heart is so thoroughly environed
by sin that it can breathe out nothing but corruption and rottenness.”
That is the fundamental thought of Christian tradition set down in the
“Institutes,” clearly and logically, by the genius of Calvin. It is
the polar opposite of Whitman’s thought, and therefore for Whitman the
moral conception of duty has ceased to exist.
“I give nothing as duties,
What others give as duties I give as living impulses.
(Shall I give the heart’s action as a duty?)”
Morality is thus the normal activity of a healthy nature, not the
product either of tradition or of rationalism.
“Whatever tastes sweet to the most perfect person, that is finally
right”--this, it has been said, is the maxim on which Whitman’s
morality is founded, and it is the morality of Aristotle. But no Greek
ever asserted and illustrated it with such emphatic iteration.
From the days when the Greek spirit found its last embodiment in
the brief songs, keen or sweet, of the “Anthology,” the attitude
which Whitman represents in the “Song of Myself” has never lacked
representatives. Throughout the Middle Ages those strange haunting
echoes to the perpetual chant of litany and psalm, the Latin
student-songs, float across all Europe with their profane and gay
paganism, their fresh erotic grace, their “In taberna quando sumus,”
their “Ludo cum Cæcilia,” their “Gaudeamus igitur.” In the sane and
lofty sensuality of Boccaccio, as it found expression in the history
of Alaciel and many another wonderful story, and in Gottfried of
Strasburg’s assertion of human pride and passion in “Tristan and
Isolde,” the same strain changed to a stronger and nobler key. Then
came the great wave of the Renaissance through Italy and France and
England, filling art and philosophy with an exaltation of physical
life, and again later, in the movements that centre around the French
Revolution, an exaltation of arrogant and independent intellectual
life. But all these manifestations were sometimes partial, sometimes
extravagant; they were impulses of the natural man surging up in
rebellion against the dominant Christian temper; they were, for the
most part consciously, of the nature of reactions. We feel that there
is a fatal lack about them which Christianity would have filled; only
in Goethe is the antagonism to some extent reconciled. Beneath the
vast growth of Christianity, for ever exalting the unseen by the easy
method of pouring contempt on the seen, and still ever producing some
strange and exquisite flower of _ascêsis_--some Francis or Theresa or
Fénelon--a slow force was working underground. A tendency was making
itself felt to find in the theoretically despised physical--in those
everyday stones which the builders of the Church had rejected--the very
foundation of the mysteries of life; if not the basis for a new vision
of the unseen, yet for a more assured vision of the seen.
No one in the last century expressed this tendency more impressively
and thoroughly, with a certain insane energy, than William Blake--the
great chained spirit whom we see looking out between the bars of his
prison-house with those wonderful eyes. Especially in “The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell,” in which he seems to gaze most clearly “through
narrow chinks of his cavern,” he has set forth his conviction that
“first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to
be expunged,” and that “if the doors of perception were cleansed,
everything would appear to man, as it is, infinite.” This most
extraordinary book is, in his own phraseology, the Bible of Hell.
Whitman appeared at a time when this stream of influence, grown mighty,
had boldly emerged. At the time that “Leaves of Grass” sought the light
Tourgueneff was embodying in the typical figure of Bassaroff the modern
militant spirit of science, positive and audacious--a spirit marked
also, as Hinton pointed out, by a new form of asceticism, which lay
in the denial of emotion. Whitman, one of the very greatest emotional
forces of modern times, who had grown up apart from the rigid and
technical methods of science, face to face with a new world and a new
civilization, which he had eagerly absorbed so far as it lay open to
him, had the good inspiration to fling himself into the scientific
current, and so to justify the demands of his emotional nature; to
represent himself as the inhabitant of a vast and co-ordinated cosmos,
tenoned and mortised in granite:
“All forces have been steadily employed to complete and delight me,
Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul.”
That Whitman possessed no trained scientific instinct is unquestionably
true, but it is impossible to estimate his significance without
understanding what he owes to science. Something, indeed, he had gained
from the philosophy of Hegel--with its conception of the universe
as a single process of evolution, in which vice and disease are but
transient perturbations--with which he had a second-hand acquaintance,
that has left distinct, but not always well assimilated marks on his
work; but, above all, he was indebted to those scientific conceptions
which, like Emerson, he had absorbed or divined. It is these that lie
behind “Children of Adam.”