massive and calm-eyed as Boccaccio’s, a moral-fibred joy that Boccaccio
never knew, in all the manifestations of the flesh and blood of the
world--saying, not: “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” but,
with Clifford: “Let us take hands and help, for this day we are alive
together”--is certainly Whitman’s most significant and impressive mood.
Nothing so much reveals its depth and sincerity as his never-changing
attitude towards death. We know the “fearful thing” that Claudio, in
Shakespeare’s play, knew as death:
“to die and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
... to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and uncertain thoughts
Imagine howling!”
And all the Elizabethans in that age of splendid and daring life--even
Raleigh and Bacon--felt that same shudder at the horror and mystery of
death. Always they felt behind them some vast mediæval charnel-house,
gloomy and awful, and the sunniest spirits of the English Renaissance
quail when they think of it. There was in this horror something of
the child’s vast and unreasoned dread of darkness and mystery, and it
scarcely survived the scientific and philosophic developments of the
seventeenth century. Whitman’s attitude is not the less deep-rooted
and original. For he is not content to argue, haughtily indifferent,
with Epicurus and Epictetus, that death can be nothing to us, because
it is no evil to lose what we shall never miss. Whitman will reveal
the loveliness of death. We feel constantly in “Leaves of Grass” as
to some extent we feel before the “Love and Death” and some other
pictures of one of the greatest of English artists. “I will show,” he
announces, “that nothing can happen more beautiful than death.” It must
not be forgotten that Whitman speaks not merely from the standpoint
of the most intense and vivid delight in the actual world, but that
he possessed a practical familiarity with disease and death which has
perhaps never before fallen to the lot of a great writer. At the end of
the “Song of Myself” he bequeaths himself to the dust, to grow from the
grass he loves:
“If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles,
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.”
And to any who find that dust but a poor immortality, he would say
with Schopenhauer, “Oho! do you know, then, what dust is?” The vast
chemistry of the earth, the sweetness that is rooted in what we call
corruption, the life that is but the leavings of many deaths, is nobly
uttered in “This Compost,” in which he reaches beyond the corpse that
is good manure to sweet-scented roses, to the polished breasts of
melons; or again, in the noble elegy, “Pensive on her dead gazing,” on
those who died during the war. In his most perfectly lyrical poem, “Out
of the Cradle endlessly rocking,” Whitman has celebrated death--“that
strong and delicious word”--with strange tenderness; and never has the
loveliness of death been sung in a more sane and virile song than the
solemn death-carol in “When Lilacs last in the Dooryard bloomed”:
“Dark mother, always gliding near with soft feet,
Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?
Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all,
I bring thee a song, that when thou must indeed come, come
unfalteringly.
* * * * *
“Over the tree-tops I float thee a song,
Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and the
prairies wide,
Over the dense-packed cities all and the teeming wharves and ways,
I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee, O Death.”
Whitman’s second great thought on life lies in his egoism. His intense
sense of individuality was marked from the first; it is emphatically
asserted in the “Song of Myself”--
“And nothing, not God, is Greater to one than one’s self is”--
where it lies side by side with his first great thought. But even in
the “Song of Myself” it asserts a separate existence:
“This day before dawn I ascended a hill and looked at the crowded
heaven,
And I said to my spirit, _When we become the enfolders of those orbs,
and the pleasure and knowledge of everything in them, shall we
be filled and satisfied then?_
And my spirit said, _No, we but level that lift to pass and continue
beyond._”
In the end he once, at least, altogether denies his first thought; he
alludes to that body which he had called the equal of the soul, or even
the soul itself, as excrement:
“Myself discharging my excrementitious body to be burned, or reduced
to powder, or buried,
My real body doubtless left to me for other spheres.”
The first great utterance was naturalistic; this egoism is
spiritualistic. It is the sublime apotheosis of Yankee self-reliance.
“I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God,
beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself.” This became the dominant
conception in Whitman’s later work, and fills his universe at length.
Of a God, although he sometimes uses the word to obtain emphasis, he
at no time had any definite idea. Nature, also, was never a living
vascular personality for him; when it is not a mere aggregate of
things, it is an order, sometimes a moral order. Also he wisely refuses
with unswerving consistency to admit an abstract Humanity; of “man”
he has nothing to say; there is nothing anywhere in the universe for
him but individuals, undying, everlastingly aggrandizing individuals.
This egoism is practical, strenuous, moral; it cannot be described as
religious. Whitman is lacking--and in this respect he comes nearer to
Goethe than to any other great modern man--in what may be possibly the
disease of “soul,” the disease that was so bitterly bewailed by Heine.
Whitman was congenitally deficient in “soul;” he is a kind of Titanic
Undine. “I never had any particular religious experiences,” he told
Bucke, “never felt the need of spiritual regeneration;” and although he
describes himself as “pleased with the earnest words of the sweating
Methodist preacher, impressed seriously at the camp-meeting,” we
know what weight to give to this utterance when we read elsewhere, of
animals:
“They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning
things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of
years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.”
We may detect this lack of “soul” in his attitude towards music; for,
in its highest development, music is the special exponent of the modern
soul in its complexity, its passive resignation, its restless mystical
ardours. That Whitman delighted in music is clear; it is equally clear,
from the testimony of his writings and of witnesses, that the music he
delighted in was simple and joyous melody as in Rossini’s operas; he
alludes vaguely to symphonies, but
“when it is a grand opera,
Ah! this indeed is music--this suits me.”
That Whitman could have truly appreciated Beethoven, or understood
Wagner’s “Tannhäuser,” is not conceivable.
With Whitman’s egoism is connected his strenuousness. There is a
stirring sound of trumpets always among these “Leaves of Grass.” This
man may have come, as he tells us, to inaugurate a new religion, but he
has few or no marks upon him of that mysticism--that Eastern spirit of
glad renunciation of the self in a larger self--which is of the essence
of religion. He is at the head of a band of sinewy and tan-faced
pioneers, with pistols in their belts and sharp-edged axes in their
hands:
“And he going with me leaves peace and routine behind him,
And stakes his life to be lost at any moment.”
This strenuousness finds expression in the hurried jolt and bustle of
the lines, always alert, unresting, ever starting afresh. Passages of
sweet and peaceful flow are hard to find in “Leaves of Grass,” and the
more precious when found. Whitman hardly succeeds in the expression
of joy; to feel exquisitely the pulse of gladness a more passive and
feminine sensibility is needed, like that we meet with in “Towards
Democracy;” we must not come to this focus of radiant energy for repose
or consolation.
This egoism, this strenuousness, reaches at the end to heights of
sublime audacity. When we read certain portions of “Leaves of Grass” we
seem to see a vast phalanx of Great Companions passing for ever along
the cosmic roads, stalwart Pioneers of the Universe. There are superb
young men, athletic girls, splendid and savage old men--for the weak
seem to have perished by the roadside--and they radiate an infinite
energy, an infinite joy. It is truly a tremendous diastole of life to
which the crude and colossal extravagance of this vision bears witness;
we weary soon of its strenuous vitality, and crave for the systole of
life, for peace and repose. It is not strange that the immense faith of
the prophet himself grows hesitant and silent at times before “all the
meanness and agony without end,” and doubts that it is an illusion and
“that may-be identity beyond the grave a beautiful fable only.” Here
and again we meet this access of doubt, and even amid the faith of the
“Prayer of Columbus” there is a tremulous, pathetic note of sadness.
Yet there is one keen sword with which Whitman is always able to cut
the knot of this doubt--the sword of love. He has but to grasp love
and comradeship, and he grows indifferent to the problem of identity
beyond the grave. “He a-hold of my hand has completely satisfied me.”
He discovers at last that love and comradeship--adhesiveness--is, after
all, the main thing, “base and finale, too, for all metaphysics;”
deeper than religion, underneath Socrates and underneath Christ. With
a sound insight he finds the roots of the most universal love in the
intimate and physical love of comrades and lovers.
“I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over
upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to
my bare-stript heart,
And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet.
“Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass
all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my
sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love.”
IV.
This “love” of Whitman’s is a very personal matter; of an abstract
Man, a _solidaire_ Humanity, he never speaks; it does not appear ever
to have occurred to him that so extraordinary a conception can be
formulated; his relations to men generally spring out of his relations
to particular men. He has touched and embraced his fellows’ flesh; he
has felt throughout his being the mysterious reverberations of the
contact:
“There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on
them, and in the contact and odour of them, that pleases the soul
well,
All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.”
This personal and intimate fact is the centre from which the whole of
Whitman’s morality radiates. Of an abstract Humanity, it is true, he
has never thought; he has no vision of Nature as a spiritual Presence;
God is to him a word only, without vitality; to Art he is mostly
indifferent; yet there remains this great moral kernel, springing from
the sexual impulse, taking practical root in a singularly rich and
vivid emotional nature, and bearing within it the promise of a city of
lovers and friends.
This moral element is one of the central features in Whitman’s attitude
towards sex and the body generally. For the lover there is nothing
in the loved one’s body impure or unclean; a breath of passion has
passed over it, and all things are sweet. For most of us this influence
spreads no farther; for the man of strong moral instinct it covers
all human things in infinitely widening circles; his heart goes out
to every creature that shares the loved one’s delicious humanity;
henceforth there is nothing human that he cannot touch with reverence
and love. “Leaves of Grass” is penetrated by this moral element. How
curiously far this attitude is from the old Christian way we realize
when we turn to those days in which Christianity was at its height, and
see how Saint Bernard with his mild and ardent gaze looked out into
the world of Nature and saw men as “stinking spawn, sacks of dung, the
food of worms.”
But there is another element in Whitman’s attitude--the artistic. It
shows itself in a twofold manner. Whitman came of a vigorous Dutch
stock; these Van Velsors from Holland have fully as large a part in him
as anything his English ancestry gave him, and his Dutch race shows
itself chiefly in his artistic manner. The supreme achievement in art
of the Dutch is their seventeenth century painting. What marked those
Dutch artists was the ineradicable conviction that every action, social
or physiological, of the average man, woman, child, around them might
be, with love and absolute faithfulness, phlegmatically set forth. In
their heroic earthliness they could at no point be repulsed; colour
and light may aureole their work, but the most commonplace things of
Nature shall have the largest nimbus. That is the temper of Dutch art
throughout; no other art in the world has the same characteristics. In
the art of Whitman alone do we meet with it again, impatient indeed and
broken up into fragments, pierced through with shafts of light from
other sources, but still constant and unmistakable. The other artistic
element in Whitman’s attitude is modern; it is almost the only artistic
element by which, unconsciously perhaps, he allies himself to modern
traditions in art instead of breaking through them by his own volcanic
energy--a curious research for sexual imagery in Nature, imagery often
tinged by bizarre and mystical colour. Rossetti occasionally uses
sexual imagery with rare felicity, as in “Nuptial Sleep”:
“And as the last slow sudden drops are shed
From sparkling eaves when all the storm has fled,
So singly flagged the pulses of each heart.”
With still greater beauty and audacity Whitman, in “I sing the body
electric,” celebrates the last abandonment of love:
“Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate
dawn,
Undulating into the willing and yielding day,
Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-fleshed day.”
Or, again, in the marvellously keen “Faces”--so realistic and so
imaginative--when the “lily’s face” speaks out her longing to be filled
with albescent honey. This man has certainly felt the truth of that
deep saying of Thoreau’s, that for him to whom sex is impure there
are no flowers in Nature. He cannot help speaking of man’s or woman’s
life in terms of Nature’s life, of Nature’s life in terms of man’s;
he mingles them together with an admirably balanced rhythm, as in
“Spontaneous Me.” All the functions of man’s or woman’s life are sweet
to him because they bear about them a savour of the things that are
sweet to him anywhere in the world,
“Of the smell of apples and lemons, of the pairing of birds,
Of the wet of woods, of the lapping of waves.”
Sometimes when he is on this track he seems to lose himself in mystic
obscurity; and the words in which he records his impressions are mere
patches of morbid colour.
There is a third element in Whitman’s attitude. It is clear that he
had from the outset what may be vaguely called a scientific purpose
in that frank grasp of the body, which has a significance to be
measured by the fierce opposition it aroused, and by the tenacity
with which, in the latest volume of his old age, “November Boughs,”
he still insists that the principle of those lines so gives breath to
the whole scheme that the bulk of the pieces might as well have been
left unwritten were those lines omitted. He has himself admirably
set this forth in “A Memorandum at a Venture” in “Specimen Days and
Collect.” In religion and politics we have, after a great struggle,
gained the priceless possibility of liberty and sincerity. But the
region of sex is still, like our moral and social life generally, to
a large extent unreclaimed; there still exist barbarous traditions
which mediæval Christianity has helped to perpetuate, so that the
words of Pliny regarding the contaminating touch of a woman, who has
always been regarded as in a peculiar manner the symbol of sex--“Nihil
facile reperiabatur mulierum profluvio magis monstrificum”--are not
even yet meaningless. Why should the sweetening breath of science
be guarded from this spot? Why should not “freedom and faith and
earnestness” be introduced here? Our attitude towards this part of
life affects profoundly our attitude towards life altogether. To
realize this, read Swift’s “Strephon and Chloe,” which enshrines,
vividly and unshrinkingly, in a classic form, a certain emotional way
of approaching the body. It narrates the very trivial experiences of a
man and woman on their bridal night. The incidents are nothing; they
are perfectly innocent; the interesting fact about them is the general
attitude which they enfold. The unquestioning faith of the man is that
in setting down the simple daily facts of human life he has drowned
the possibilities of love in filth. And Swift here represents, in an
unflinchingly logical fashion, the opinions, more or less realized,
more or less disguised, of most people even to-day. Cannot these facts
of our physical nature be otherwise set down? Why may we not “keep
as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart?” That
is, in effect, the question which, in “A Memorandum at a Venture,”
Whitman tells us that he undertook to answer. This statement of it was
probably an afterthought; else he would have carried out his attempt
more thoroughly and more uncompromisingly.
For I doubt if even Whitman has fully realized the beauty and purity of
organic life; the scientific element in him was less strong than the
moral, or even the artistic. While his genial poetic manner of grasping
things is of prime importance, the new conceptions of purity are
founded on a scientific basis which must be deeply understood. Swift’s
morbid and exaggerated spiritualism, a legacy of mediævalism--and the
ordinary “common-sense” view is but the unconscious shadow of mediæval
spiritualism--is really founded on ignorance, in other words, on the
traditional religious conceptions of an antique but still surviving
barbarism.
From our modern standpoint of science, opening its eyes anew, the
wonderful cycles of normal life are for ever clean and pure, the
loathsomeness, if indeed anywhere, lies in the conceptions of
hypertrophied and hyperæsthetic brains. Some who have striven to find
a vital natural meaning in the central sacrament of Christianity have
thought that the Last Supper was an attempt to reveal the divine
mystery of food, to consecrate the loveliness of the mere daily bread
and wine which becomes the life of man. Such sacraments of Nature
are everywhere subtly woven into the texture of men’s bodies. All
loveliness of the body is the outward sign of some vital use.
Doubtless these relationships have been sometimes perceived and their
meaning realized by a sort of mystical intuition, but it is only of
recent years that science has furnished them with a rational basis. The
chief and central function of life--the omnipresent process of sex,
ever wonderful, ever lovely, as it is woven into the whole texture of
our man’s or woman’s body--is the pattern of all the process of our
life. At whatever point touched, the reverberation, multiplexly charged
with uses, meanings, and emotional associations of infinite charm, to
the sensitive individual more or less conscious, spreads throughout
the entire organism. We can no longer intrude our crude distinctions
of high and low. We cannot now step in and say that this link in the
chain is eternally ugly and that is eternally beautiful. For irrational
disgust, the varying outcome of individual idiosyncrasy, there is
doubtless still room; it is incalculable, and cannot be reached. But
that rational disgust which was once held to be common property has
received from science its death-blow. In the growth of the sense of
purity, which Whitman, not alone, has annunciated, lies one of our
chief hopes for morals, as well as for art.
V.
Behind “Leaves of Grass” stands the personality of the man Walt
Whitman; that is the charm of the book and its power. It is, in his
own words, the record of a _Person_. A man has here sought to give a
fresh and frank representation of his nature--physical, intellectual,
moral, æsthetic--as he received it, and as it grew in the great field
of the world. Sometimes there is an element in this record which,
while perhaps very American, reminds one of the great Frenchman who
shouted so lustily through his huge brass trumpet, seated on the
apex of the universe in the Avenue d’Eylau. The noble lines to “You
felons on trial in Courts” accompany “To him that was crucified.” Such
rhetorical flourishes do not impair the value of this revelation. The
self-revelation of a human personality is the one supremely precious
and enduring thing. All art is the search for it. The strongest and
most successful of religions were avowedly founded on personalities,
more or less dimly seen. The intimate and candid record of personality
alone gives quickening energy to books. Herein is the might of “Leaves
of Grass.”
In our overstrained civilization the tendency in literature--and in
life as it acts on literature and is again reacted on by it--is, on
the one hand, towards an artificial mode of presentment, that is, a
divorce between the actual and the alleged, a divorce which, in the
language of satire, is often called hypocrisy. On the other hand,
the tendency is towards a singleness of aim and ideal indeed, but a
thin, narrow, super-refined ideal, at the same time rather hysterical
and rather prim. In youth we cannot see through these Tartuffes and
_Précieuses_; when we become grown men and women we feel a great
thirst for Nature, for reality in literature, and we slake it at such
fountains as this of “Leaves of Grass.” Like Antæus of old we bow down
to touch the earth, to come in contact with the great primal energies
of Nature, and to grow strong. We realize that the structure of the
world is indeed built most gloriously on the immense pillars of Hunger
and Love, and we will not seek to deny or to attenuate its foundations.
Presenting a truth so abstract in fresh and living concrete language,
this man, as an Adam in a new Paradise, which is the very world itself,
walks again upon the earth, sometimes with calm complaisance, sometimes
“deliriating” wildly:
“Behold me where I pass, hear my voice, approach,
Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass,
Be not afraid of my body.”
He has tossed “a new gladness and roughness” among men and women. He
has opened a fresh channel of Nature’s force into human life--the
largest since Wordsworth, and more fit for human use--“the amplitude
of the earth, and the coarseness and sexuality of the earth, and the
great charity of the earth, and the equilibrium also.” And in his
vigorous masculine love, asserting his own personality he has asserted
that of all--“By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their
counterpart of on the same terms.” Charging himself in every place
with contentment and triumph, he embraces all men, as St. Francis in
his sweet, humble, Christian way also embraced them, in the spirit of
audacity, and rankness, and pride. So that all he has written is summed
up in one ejaculation: “How vast, how eligible, how joyful, how real is
a human being, himself or herself!”
IBSEN.