"'I, thirty-six years old, in perfect health, begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.'"
CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.
"They say that thou art sick, art growing old,
Thou Poet of unconquerable health,
With youth far-stretching, through the golden wealth
Of autumn, to Death's frostful, friendly cold.
The never-blenching eyes, that did behold
Life's fair and foul, with measureless content,
And gaze ne'er sated, saddened as they bent
Over the dying soldier in the fold
Of thy large comrade love;--then broke the tear!
War-dream, field-vigil, the bequeathed kiss,
Have brought old age to thee; yet, Master, now,
Cease not thy song to us; lest we should miss
A death-chant of indomitable cheer,
Blown as a gale from God;--oh sing it thou!"
ARRAN LEIGH (England).
I
Whoever has witnessed the flight of any of the great birds, as the
eagle, the condor, the sea-gulls, the proud hawks, has perhaps felt that
the poetic suggestion of the feathered tribes is not all confined to the
sweet and tiny songsters,--the thrushes, canaries, and mockingbirds of
the groves and orchards, or of the gilded cage in my lady's chamber.
It is by some such analogy that I would indicate the character of the
poetry I am about to discuss, compared with that of the more popular and
melodious singer,--the poetry of the strong wing and the daring flight.
Well and profoundly has a Danish critic said, in "For Ide og
Virkelighed" ("For the Idea and the Reality"), a Copenhagen magazine:--
"It may be candidly admitted that the American poet has not the
elegance, special melody, nor _recherche_ aroma of the accepted poets
of Europe or his own country; but his compass and general harmony are
infinitely greater. The sweetness and spice, the poetic _ennui,_ the
tender longings, the exquisite art-finish of those choice poets are
mainly unseen and unmet in him,--perhaps because he cannot achieve them,
more likely because he disdains them. But there is an electric _living
soul_ in his poetry, far more fermenting and bracing. His wings do not
glitter in their movement from rich and varicolored plumage, nor are his
notes those of the accustomed song-birds; but his flight is the flight
of the eagle."
Yes, there is not only the delighting of the ear with the outpouring of
sweetest melody and its lessons, but there is the delighting of the eye
and soul through that soaring and circling in the vast empyrean of "a
strong bird on pinions free,"--lessons of freedom, power, grace, and
spiritual suggestion,--vast, unparalleled, _formless_ lessons.
It is now upwards of twenty years since Walt Whitman printed (in 1855)
his first thin beginning volume of "Leaves of Grass;" and, holding him
to the test which he himself early proclaimed, namely, "that the proof
of the poet shall be sternly deferred till his country has absorb'd him
as affectionately as he has absorb'd it," he is yet on trial, yet
makes his appeal to an indifferent or to a scornful audience. That his
complete absorption, however, by his own country and by the world, is
ultimately to take place, is one of the beliefs that grows stronger and
stronger within me as time passes, and I suppose it is with a hope to
help forward this absorption that I write of him now. Only here and
there has he yet effected a lodgment, usually in the younger and
more virile minds. But considering the unparalleled audacity of his
undertaking, and the absence in most critics and readers of anything
like full-grown and robust aesthetic perception, the wonder really is
not that he should have made such slow progress, but that he should have
gained any foothold at all. The whole literary _technique_ of the race
for the last two hundred years has been squarely against him, laying, as
it does, the emphasis upon form and scholarly endowments instead of upon
aboriginal power and manhood.
My own mastery of the poet, incomplete as it is, has doubtless been much
facilitated by contact--talks, meals, and jaunts--with him, stretching
through a decade of years, and by seeing how everything in his
_personnel_ was resumed and carried forward in his literary expression;
in fact, how the one was a living commentary upon the other. After the
test of time, nothing goes home like the test of actual intimacy; and to
tell me that Whitman is not a large, fine, fresh, magnetic personality,
making you love him and want always to be with him, were to tell me
that my whole past life is a deception, and all the impression of my
perceptive faculties a fraud. I have studied him as I have studied
the birds, and have found that the nearer I got to him the more I saw.
Nothing about a first-class man can be overlooked; he is to be studied
in every feature,--in his physiology and phrenology, in the shape of his
head, in his brow, his eye, his glance, his nose, his ear (the ear is
as indicative in a man as in a horse), his voice. In Whitman all these
things are remarkably striking and suggestive. His face exhibits a rare
combination of harmony and sweetness with strength,--strength like the
vaults and piers of the Roman architecture. Sculptor never carved a
finer ear or a more imaginative brow. Then his heavy-lidded, absorbing
eye, his sympathetic voice, and the impression which he makes of
starting from the broad bases of the universal human traits. (If Whitman
was grand in his physical and perfect health, I think him far more so
now (1877), cheerfully mastering paralysis, penury, and old age.) You
know, on seeing the man and becoming familiar with his presence, that,
if he achieve the height at all, it will be from where every man stands,
and not from some special genius, or exceptional and adventitious
point. He does not make the impression of the scholar or artist or
_litterateur,_ but such as you would imagine the antique heroes to
make,--that of a sweet-blooded, receptive, perfectly normal, catholic
man, with, further than that, a look about him that is best suggested by
the word elemental or cosmical. It was this, doubtless, that led Thoreau
to write, after an hour's interview, that he suggested "something a
little more than human." In fact, the main clew to Walt Whitman's life
and personality, and the expression of them in his poems, is to be found
in about the largest emotional element that has appeared anywhere. This,
if not controlled by a potent rational balance, would either have tossed
him helplessly forever, or wrecked him as disastrously as ever storm
and gale drove ship to ruin. These volcanic emotional fires appear
everywhere in his books; and it is really these, aroused to intense
activity and unnatural strain during the four years of the war and his
persistent labors in the hospitals, that have resulted in his illness
and paralysis since.
It has been impossible, I say, to resist these personal impressions and
magnetisms, and impossible with me not to follow them up in the poems,
in doing which I found that his "Leaves of Grass" was really the _drama
of himself,_ played upon various and successive stages of nature,
history, passion, experience, patriotism, and that he had not made,
nor had he intended to make, mere excellent "poems," tunes, statues, or
statuettes, in the ordinary sense.
Before the man's complete acceptance and assimilation by America, he
may have to be first passed down through the minds of critics and
commentators, and given to the people with some of his rank new quality
taken off,--a quality like that which adheres to objects in the open
air, and makes them either forbidding or attractive, as one's mood is
healthful and robust or feeble and languid. The processes are silently
at work. Already seen from a distance, and from other atmospheres and
surroundings, he assumes magnitude and orbic coherence; for in curious
contrast to the general denial of Whitman in this country (though he
has more lovers and admirers here than is generally believed) stands
the reception accorded him in Europe. The poets there, almost without
exception, recognize his transcendent quality, the men of science his
thorough scientific basis, the republicans his inborn democracy, and all
his towering picturesque personality and modernness. Professor Clifford
says he is more thoroughly in harmony with the spirit and letter of
advanced scientism than any other living poet. Professor Tyrrell and Mr.
Symonds find him eminently Greek, in the sense in which to be natural
and "self-regulated by the law of perfect health" is to be Greek. The
French "Revue des Deux Mondes" pronounces his war poems the most vivid,
the most humanly passionate, and the most modern, of all the verse of
the nineteenth century. Freiligrath translated him into German, and
hailed him as the founder of a new democratic and modern order of
poetry, greater than the old. But I do not propose to go over the whole
list here; I only wish to indicate that the absorption is well commenced
abroad, and that probably her poet will at last reach America by way of
those far-off, roundabout channels. The old mother will first masticate
and moisten the food which is still too tough for her offspring.
When I first fell in with "Leaves of Grass," I was taken by isolated
passages scattered here and there through the poems; these I seized
upon, and gave myself no concern about the rest. Single lines in it
often went to the bottom of the questions that were vexing me. The
following, though less here than when encountered in the frame of mind
which the poet begets in you, curiously settled and stratified a certain
range of turbid, fluctuating inquiry:--
"There was never any more inception than there is now,--
Nor any more youth or age than there is now;
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now."
These lines, also, early had an attraction for me I could not define,
and were of great service:--
"Pleasantly and well-suited I walk,
Whither I walk I cannot define, but I know it is good,
The whole universe indicates that it is good,
The past and the present indicate that it is good."
In the following episode, too, there was to me something far deeper than
the words or the story:--
"The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside;
I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the wood-pile;
Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak,
And went where he sat on a log, and led him in, and assured him,
And brought water and fill'd a tub for his sweated body and
bruis'd feet,
And gave him a room that entered from my own, and gave him some
coarse clean clothes;
And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness,
And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles:
He stayed with me a week before he was recuperated and pass'd North;
(I had him sit next me at table--my firelock lean'd in the corner.)"
But of the book as a whole I could form no adequate conception, and
it was not for many years, and after I had known the poet himself, as
already stated, that I saw in it a teeming, rushing globe well worthy my
best days and strength to surround and comprehend.
One thing that early took me in the poems was (as before alluded to) the
tremendous personal force back of them, and felt through them as the
sun through vapor; not merely intellectual grasp or push, but a warm,
breathing, towering, magnetic Presence that there was no escape from.
Another fact I was quick to perceive, namely, that this man had almost
in excess a quality in which every current poet was lacking,--I mean the
faculty of being in entire sympathy with actual nature, and the objects;
and shows of nature, and of rude, abysmal man; and appalling directness
of utterance therefrom, at first hand, without any intermediate agency
or modification.
The influence of books and works of art upon an author may be seen in
all respectable writers. If knowledge alone made literature, or culture
genius, there would be no dearth of these things among the moderns. But
I feel bound to say that there is something higher and deeper than the
influence or perusal of any or all books, or all other productions of
genius,--a quality of information which the masters can never impart,
and which all the libraries do not hold. This is the absorption by an
author, previous to becoming so, of the spirit of nature, through
the visible objects of the universe, and his affiliation with them
subjectively and objectively. Not more surely is the blood quickened and
purified by contact with the unbreathed air than is the spirit of man
vitalized and made strong by intercourse with the real things of the
earth. The calm, all-permitting, wordless spirit of nature,--yet so
eloquent to him who hath ears to hear! The sunrise, the heaving sea,
the woods and mountains, the storm and the whistling winds, the gentle
summer day, the winter sights and sounds, the night and the high dome of
stars,--to have really perused these, especially from childhood onward,
till what there is in them, so impossible to define, finds its full mate
and echo in the mind,--this only is the lore which breathes the breath
of life into all the rest. Without it, literary productions may have the
superb beauty of statues, but with it only can they have the beauty of
life.
I was never troubled at all by what the critics called Whitman's want
of art, or his violation of art. I saw that he at once designedly swept
away all which the said critics have commonly meant by that term. The
dominant impression was of the living presence and voice. He would have
no curtains, he said, not the finest, between himself and his reader;
and in thus bringing me face to face with his subject I perceived he
not only did not escape conventional art, but I perceived an enlarged,
enfranchised art in this very abnegation of art. "When half-gods go,
whole gods arrive." It was obvious to me that the new style gained more
than it lost, and that in this fullest operatic launching forth of the
voice, though it sounded strange at first, and required the ear to get
used to it, there might be quite as much science, and a good deal more
power, than in the tuneful but constricted measures we were accustomed
to.
To the eye the page of the new poet presented about the same contrast
with the page of the popular poets that trees and the free, unbidden
growths of nature do with a carefully clipped hedge; and to the spirit
the contrast was about the same. The hedge is the more studiedly and
obviously beautiful, but, ah! there is a kind of beauty and satisfaction
in trees that one would not care to lose. There are symmetry and
proportion in the sonnet, but to me there is something I would not
exchange for them in the wild swing and balance of many free and
unrhymed passages in Shakespeare; like the one, for instance, in which
these lines occur:--
"To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round
About the pendent world."
Here is the spontaneous grace and symmetry of a forest tree, or a
soughing mass of foliage.
And this passage from my poet I do not think could be improved by the
verse-maker's art:--
"This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look'd 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
fill'd and satisfied then?_
And my Spirit said, No, _we but level that lift, to pass and continue
beyond."_
Such breaking with the routine poetic, and with the grammar of verse,
was of course a dangerous experiment, and threw the composer absolutely
upon his intrinsic merits, upon his innately poetic and rhythmic
quality. He must stand or fall by these alone, since he discarded all
artificial, all adventitious helps. If interior, spontaneous rhythm
could not be relied on, and the natural music and flexibility of
language, then there was nothing to shield the ear from the pitiless
hail of words,--not one softly padded verse anywhere.
All poets, except those of the very first order, owe immensely to the
form, the art, the stereotyped metres, and stock figures they find ready
to hand. The form is suggestive,--it invites and aids expression, and
lends itself readily, like fashion, to conceal, or extenuate, or eke
out poverty of thought and feeling in the verse. The poet can "cut and
cover," as the farmer says, in a way the prose-writer never can, nor one
whose form is essentially prose, like Whitman's.
I, too, love to see the forms worthily used, as they always are by the
master; and I have no expectation that they are going out of fashion
right away. A great deal of poetry that serves, and helps sweeten one's
cup, would be impossible without them,--would be nothing when separated
from them. It is for the ear, and for the sense of tune and of carefully
carved and modeled forms, and is not meant to arouse the soul with the
taste of power, and to start off on journeys for itself. But the great
inspired utterances, like the Bible,--what would they gain by being cast
in the moulds of metrical verse? In all that concerns art, viewed from
any high standpoint,--proportion, continence, self-control, unfaltering
adherence to natural standards, subordination of parts, perfect
adjustment of the means to the end, obedience to inward law, no
trifling, no levity, no straining after effect, impartially attending to
the back and loins as well as to the head, and even holding toward his
subject an attitude of perfect acceptance and equality,--principles
of art to which alone the great spirits are amenable,--in all these
respects, I say, this poet is as true as an orb in astronomy.
To his literary expression pitched on scales of such unprecedented
breadth and loftiness, the contrast of his personal life comes in with a
foil of curious homeliness and simplicity. Perhaps never before has
the absolute and average _commonness of humanity_ been so steadily and
unaffectedly adhered to. I give here a glimpse of him in Washington on
a Navy Yard horse-car, toward the close of the war, one summer day at
sundown. The car is crowded and suffocatingly hot, with many passengers
on the rear platform, and among them a bearded, florid-faced man,
elderly but agile, resting against the dash, by the side of the young
conductor, and evidently his intimate friend. The man wears a broad-brim
white hat. Among the jam inside, near the door, a young Englishwoman, of
the working class, with two children, has had trouble all the way with
the youngest, a strong, fat, fretful, bright babe of fourteen or fifteen
months, who bids fair to worry the mother completely out, besides
becoming a howling nuisance to everybody. As the car tugs around Capitol
Hill the young one is more demoniac than ever, and the flushed and
perspiring mother is just ready to burst into tears with weariness and
vexation. The car stops at the top of the hill to let off most of the
rear platform passengers, and the white-hatted man reaches inside, and,
gently but firmly disengaging the babe from its stifling place in the
mother's arms, takes it in his own, and out in the air. The astonished
and excited child, partly in fear, partly in satisfaction at the change,
stops its screaming, and, as the man adjusts it more securely to his
breast, plants its chubby hands against him, and, pushing off as far
as it can, gives a good long look squarely in his face,--then, as if
satisfied, snuggles down with its head on his neck, and in less than a
minute is sound and peacefully asleep without another whimper, utterly
fagged out. A square or so more and the conductor, who has had an
unusually hard and uninterrupted day's work, gets off for his first
meal and relief since morning. And now the white-hatted man, holding
the slumbering babe, also acts as conductor the rest of the distance,
keeping his eye on the passengers inside, who have by this time thinned
out greatly. He makes a very good conductor, too, pulling the bell to
stop or to go on as needed, and seems to enjoy the occupation. The babe
meanwhile rests its fat cheeks close on his neck and gray beard, one of
his arms vigilantly surrounding it, while the other signals, from time
to time, with the strap; and the flushed mother inside has a good half
hour to breathe, and to cool and recover herself.