II

No poem of our day dates and locates itself as absolutely as "Leaves of

Grass;" but suppose it had been written three or four centuries ago,

and had located itself in mediaeval Europe, and was now first brought

to light, together with a history of Walt Whitman's simple and

disinterested life, can there be any doubt about the cackling that would

at once break out in the whole brood of critics over the golden egg that

had been uncovered? This reckon would be a favorite passage with all:--

"You sea! I resign myself to you also--I guess what you mean;

I behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers;

I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me;

We must have a turn together--I undress--hurry me out of sight of

the land;

Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse;

Dash me with amorous wet--I can repay you.

"Sea of stretch'd ground-swells!

Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths!

Sea of the brine of life! sea of unshovel'd yet always ready graves!

Howler and scooper of storms! capricious and dainty sea!

I am integral with you--I too am of one phase, and of all phases."

This other passage would afford many a text for the moralists and

essayists:--

"Of persons arrived at high positions, ceremonies, wealth, scholarship,

and the like;

To me, all that those persons have arrived at sinks away from them,

except as it results to their Bodies and Souls,

So that often, to me, they appear gaunt and naked,

And often, to me, each one mocks the others, and mocks himself

or herself,

And of each one, the core of life, namely happiness, is full of

the rotten excrement of maggots;

And often, to me, those men and women pass unwittingly the true

realities of life, and go toward false realities,

And often, to me, they are alive after what custom has served

them, but nothing more,

And often, to me, they are sad, hasty, unwaked somnambules,

walking the dusk."

Ah, Time, you enchantress! what tricks you play with us! The old

is already proved,--the past and the distant hold nothing but the

beautiful.

Or let us take another view. Suppose Walt Whitman had never existed, and

some bold essayist, like Mr. Higginson or Matthew Arnold, had projected

him in abstract, outlined him on a scholarly ideal background,

formulated and put in harmless critical periods the principles of art

which he illustrates, and which are the inevitable logic of his

poems,--said essayist would have won great applause. "Yes, indeed, that

were a poet to cherish; fill those shoes and you have a god."

How different a critic's account of Shakespeare from Shakespeare

himself,--the difference between the hewn or sawed timber and the living

tree! A few years ago we had here a lecturer from over seas, who gave to

our well-dressed audiences the high, moral, and intellectual statement

of the poet Burns. It was very fine, and people were greatly pleased,

vastly more so, I fear, than they were with Burns himself. Indeed, I

could not help wondering how many of those appreciative listeners had

any original satisfaction in the Scotch poet at first hand, or would

have accepted him had he been their neighbor and fellow-citizen. But as

he filtered through the scholarly mind in trickling drops, oh, he was so

sweet!

Everybody stirred with satisfaction as the lecturer said: "When

literature becomes dozy, respectable, and goes in the smooth grooves

of fashion, and copies and copies again, something must be done; and

to give life to that dying literature a man must be found _not educated

under its influence."_ I applauded with the rest, for it was a bold

saying; but I could not help thinking how that theory, brought home

to ourselves and illustrated in a living example, would have sent that

nodding millinery and faultless tailory flying downstairs, as at an

alarm of fire.

One great service of Walt Whitman is that he exerts a tremendous

influence to bring the race up on this nether side,--to place the

emotional, the assimilative, the sympathetic, the spontaneous, intuitive

man, the man of the fluids and of the affections, flush with

the intellectual man. That we moderns have fallen behind here is

unquestionable, and we in this country more than the Old World peoples.

All the works of Whitman, prose and verse, are embosomed in a sea of

emotional humanity, and they float deeper than they show; there is far

more in what they necessitate and imply than in what they say.

It is not so much of fatty degeneration that we are in danger in

America, but of calcareous. The fluids, moral and physical, are

evaporating; surfaces are becoming encrusted, there is a deposit of

flint in the veins and arteries, outlines are abnormally sharp and hard,

nothing is held in solution, all is precipitated in well-defined ideas

and opinions.

But when I think of the type of character planted and developed by my

poet, I think of a man or a woman rich above all things in the genial

human attributes, one "nine times folded" in an atmosphere of tenderest,

most considerate humanity,--an atmosphere warm with the breath of a

tropic heart, that makes your buds of affection and of genius start and

unfold like a south wind in May. Your intercourse with such a character

is not merely intellectual; it is deeper and better than that. Walter

Scott carried such a fund of sympathy and goodwill that even the animals

found fellowship with him, and the pigs understood his great heart.

It was the large endowment of Whitman, in his own character in this

respect, that made his services in the army hospitals during the war

so ministering and effective, and that renders his "Drum-Taps" the

tenderest and most deeply yearning and sorrowful expression of the human

heart in poetry that ever war called forth. Indeed, from my own point

of view, there is no false or dangerous tendency among us, in life or in

letters, that this poet does not offset and correct. Fret and chafe as

much as we will, we are bound to gravitate, more or less, toward this

mountain, and feel its bracing, rugged air.

Without a certain self-surrender there is no greatness possible in

literature, any more than in religion, or in anything else. It is always

a trait of the master that he is not afraid of being compromised by

the company he keeps. He is the central and main fact in any company.

Nothing so lowly but he will do it reverence; nothing so high but he

can stand in its presence. His theme is the river, and he the ample and

willing channel. Little natures love to disparage and take down; they

do it in self-defense; but the master gives you all, and more than your

due. Whitman does not stand aloof, superior, a priest or a critic: he

abandons himself to all the strong human currents; he enters into and

affiliates with every phase of life; he bestows himself royally upon

whoever and whatever will receive him. There is no competition between

himself and his subject; he is not afraid of over-praising, or making

too much of the commonest individual. What exalts others exalts him.

We have had great help in Emerson in certain ways,--first-class service.

He probes the conscience and the moral purpose as few men have done, and

gives much needed stimulus there. But, after him, the need is all the

more pressing for a broad, powerful, opulent, human personality to

absorb these ideals, and to make something more of them than fine

sayings. With Emerson alone we are rich in sunlight, but poor in

rain and dew,--poor, too, in soil, and in the moist, gestating earth

principle. Emerson's tendency is not to broaden and enrich, but to

concentrate and refine.

Then, is there not an excessive modesty, without warrant in philosophy

or nature, dwindling us in this country, drying us up in the viscera? Is

there not a decay--a deliberate, strange abnegation and dread--of sane

sexuality, of maternity and paternity, among us, and in our literary

ideals and social types of men and women? For myself, I welcome any

evidence to the contrary, or any evidence that deeper and counteracting

agencies are at work, as unspeakably precious. I do not know where this

evidence is furnished in such ample measure as in the pages of

Walt Whitman. The great lesson of nature, I take it, is that a sane

sensuality must be preserved at all hazards, and this, it seems to me,

is also the great lesson of his writings. The point is fully settled in

him that, however they may have been held in abeyance or restricted to

other channels, there is still sap and fecundity, and depth of virgin

soil in the race, sufficient to produce a man of the largest mould and

the most audacious and unconquerable egotism, and on a plane the last to

be reached by these qualities; a man of antique stature, of Greek fibre

and gripe, with science and the modern added, without abating one jot or

tittle of his native force, adhesiveness, Americanism, and democracy.

As I have already hinted, Whitman has met with by far his amplest

acceptance and appreciation in Europe. There is good reason for this,

though it is not what has been generally claimed, namely, that the

cultivated classes of Europe are surfeited with respectability, half

dead with _ennui_ and routine, and find an agreeable change in the

daring unconventionality of the new poet. For the fact is, it is not the

old and jaded minds of London, or Paris, or Dublin, or Copenhagen, that

have acknowledged him, but the fresh, eager, young minds. Nine tenths of

his admirers there are the sturdiest men in the fields of art, science,

and literature.

In many respects, as a race, we Americans have been pampered and

spoiled; we have been brought up on sweets. I suppose that, speaking

literally, no people under the sun consume so much confectionery, so

much pastry and cake, or indulge in so many gassy and sugared drinks.

The soda-fountain, with its syrups, has got into literature, and

furnishes the popular standard of poetry. The old heroic stamina of our

ancestors, that craved the bitter but nourishing home-brewed, has died

out, and in its place there is a sickly cadaverousness that must be

pampered and cosseted. Among educated people here there is a mania for

the bleached, the double-refined,--white houses, white china, white

marble, and white skins. We take the bone and sinew out of the flour

in order to have white bread, and are bolting our literature as fast as

possible.

It is for these and kindred reasons that Walt Whitman is more read

abroad than in his own country. It is on the rank, human, and

emotional side--sex, magnetism, health, physique,--that he is so

full. Then his receptivity and assimilative powers are enormous, and

he demands these in his reader. In fact, his poems are physiological as

much as they are intellectual. They radiate from his entire being,

and are charged to repletion with that blended quality of mind and

body--psychic and physiologic--which the living form and presence send

forth. Never before in poetry has the body received such ennoblement.

The great theme is IDENTITY, and identity comes through the body; and

all that pertains to the body, the poet teaches, is entailed upon

the spirit. In his rapt gaze, the body and the soul are one, and what

debases the one debases the other. Hence he glorifies the body. Not more

ardently and purely did the great sculptors of antiquity carve it in the

enduring marble than this poet has celebrated it in his masculine and

flowing lines. The bearing of his work in this direction is invaluable.

Well has it been said that the man or the woman who has "Leaves of

Grass" for a daily companion will be under the constant, invisible

influence of sanity, cleanliness, strength, and a gradual severance from

all that corrupts and makes morbid and mean.

In regard to the unity and construction of the poems, the reader

sooner or later discovers the true solution to be, that the dependence,

cohesion, and final reconciliation of the whole are in the Personality

of the poet himself. As in Shakespeare everything is strung upon the

plot, the play, and loses when separated from it, so in this poet every

line and sentence refers to and necessitates the Personality behind it,

and derives its chief significance therefrom. In other words, "Leaves of

Grass" is essentially a dramatic poem, a free representation of man in

his relation to the outward world,--the play, the interchanges between

him and it, apart from social and artificial considerations,--in which

we discern the central purpose or thought to be for every man and woman

his or her Individuality, and around that, Nationality. To show rather

than to tell,--to body forth as in a play how these arise and blend; how

the man is developed and recruited, his spirit's descent; how he walks

through materials absorbing and conquering them; how he confronts the

immensities of time and space; where are the true sources of his power,

the soul's real riches,--that which "adheres and goes forward and is not

dropped by death;" how he is all defined and published and made certain

through his body; the value of health and physique; the great solvent,

Sympathy,--to show the need of larger and fresher types in art and in

life, and then how the state is compacted, and how the democratic idea

is ample and composite, and cannot fail us,--to show all this, I

say, not as in a lecture or a critique, but suggestively and

inferentially,--to work it out freely and picturesquely, with endless

variations, with person and picture and parable and adventure, is the

lesson and object of "Leaves of Grass." From the first line, where the

poet says,

"I loafe and invite my Soul,"

to the last, all is movement and fusion,--all is clothed in flesh and

blood. The scene changes, the curtain rises and falls, but the theme is

still Man,--his opportunities, his relations, his past, his future, his

sex, his pride in himself, his omnivorousness, his "great hands," his

yearning heart, his seething brain, the abysmal depths that underlie him

and open from him, all illustrated in the poet's own character,--he the

chief actor always. His personality directly facing you, and with its

eye steadily upon you, runs through every page, spans all the details,

and rounds and completes them, and compactly holds them. This gives the

form and the art conception, and gives homogeneousness.

When Tennyson sends out a poem, it is perfect, like an apple or a peach;

slowly wrought out and dismissed, it drops from his boughs holding

a conception or an idea that spheres it and makes it whole. It is

completed, distinct, and separate,--might be his, or might be any man's.

It carries his quality, but it is a thing of itself, and centres and

depends upon itself. Whether or not the world will hereafter consent,

as in the past, to call only beautiful creations of this sort _poems,_

remains to be seen. But this is certainly not what Walt Whitman does,

or aims to do, except in a few cases. He completes no poems apart and

separate from himself, and his pages abound in hints to that effect:--

"Let others finish specimens--I never finish specimens;

I shower them by exhaustless laws, as Nature does, fresh

and modern continually."

His lines are pulsations, thrills, waves of force, indefinite dynamics,

formless, constantly emanating from the living centre, and they carry

the quality of the author's personal presence with them in a way that is

unprecedented in literature.

Occasionally there is a poem or a short piece that detaches itself,

and assumes something like ejaculatory and statuesque proportion, as

"O Captain, my Captain," "Pioneers," "Beat, Beat, Drums," and others in

"Drum-Taps;" but all the great poems, like "Walt Whitman," "Song of

the Open Road," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "To Working Men,"

"Sleep-Chasings," etc., are out-flamings, out-rushings, of the pent

fires of the poet's soul. The first-named poem, which is the seething,

dazzling sun of his subsequent poetic system, shoots in rapid succession

waves of almost consuming energy. It is indeed a central orb of fiercest

light and heat, swept by wild storms of emotion, but at the same time

of sane and beneficent potentiality. Neither in it nor in either of

the others is there the building-up of a fair verbal structure,

a symmetrical piece of mechanism, whose last stone is implied and

necessitated in the first.

"The critic's great error," says Heine, "lies in asking, 'What ought

the artist to do?' It would be far more correct to ask, 'What does the

artist intend?'"

It is probably partly because his field is so large, his demands

so exacting, his method so new (necessarily so), and from the whole

standard of the poems being what I may call an astronomical one, that

the critics complain so generally of want of form in him. And the

critics are right enough, as far as their objection goes. There is no

deliberate form here, any more than there is in the forces of nature.

Shall we say, then, that nothing but the void exists? The void is filled

by a Presence. There is a controlling, directing, overarching will

in every page, every verse, that there is no escape from. Design and

purpose, natural selection, growth, culmination, are just as pronounced

as in any poet.

There is a want of form in the unfinished statue, because it is

struggling into form; it is nothing without form; but there is no want

of form in the elemental laws and effusions,--in fire, or water, or

rain, or dew, or the smell of the shore or the plunging waves. And may

there not be the analogue of this in literature,--a potent, quickening,

exhilarating quality in words, apart from and without any consideration

of constructive form? Under the influence of the expansive, creative

force that plays upon me from these pages, like sunlight or gravitation,

the question of form never comes up, because I do not for one moment

escape the eye, the source from which the power and action emanate.

I know that Walt Whitman has written many passages with reference far

more to their position, interpretation, and scanning ages hence, than

for current reading. Much of his material is too near us; it needs time.

Seen through the vista of long years, perhaps centuries, it will assume

quite different hues. Perhaps those long lists of trades, tools, and

occupations would not be so repellent if we could read them, as we read

Homer's catalogue of the ships, through the retrospect of ages. They are

justified in the poem aside from their historic value, because they

are alive and full of action,--panoramas of the whole mechanical and

industrial life of America, north, east, south, west,--bits of scenery,

bird's-eye views, glimpses of moving figures, caught as by a flash,

characteristic touches indoors and out, all passing in quick succession

before you. They have in the fullest measure what Lessing demands in

poetry,--the quality of ebbing and flowing action, as distinct from the

dead water of description; they are thoroughly dramatic, fused, pliant,

and obedient to the poet's will. No glamour is thrown over them, no wash

of sentiment; and if they have not the charm of novelty and distance,

why, that is an accident that bars them in a measure to us, but not to

the future. Very frequently in these lists or enumerations of objects,

actions, shows, there are sure to occur lines of perfect description:--

"Where the heifers browse--where geese nip their food with short

jerks;

Where sun-down shadows lengthen over the limitless and lonesome

prairie;

Where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles

far and near;

Where the splash of swimmers and divers cools the warm noon;

Where the katydid works her chromatic reed on the walnut-tree

over the well."

"Spar-makers in the spar-yard, the swarming row of well-grown

apprentices,

The swing of their axes on the square-hew'd log, shaping it toward

the shape of a mast,

The brisk short crackle of the steel driven slantingly into the pine,

The butter-color'd chips flying off in great flakes and slivers,

The limber motion of brawny young arms and hips in easy costumes."

"Always these compact lands--lands tied at the hips with the belt

stringing the huge oval lakes."

"Far breath'd land! Arctic braced! Mexican breez'd!--the diverse!

the compact!"

Tried by the standards of the perfect statuesque poems, these pages will

indeed seem strange enough; but viewed as a part of the poetic

compend of America, the swift gathering-in, from her wide-spreading,

multitudinous, material life, of traits and points and suggestions that

belong here and are characteristic, they have their value. The poet

casts his great seine into events and doings and material progress,

and these are some of the fish, not all beautiful by any means, but all

terribly alive, and all native to these waters.

In the "Carol of Occupations" occur, too, those formidable inventories

of the more heavy and coarsegrained trades and tools that few if any

readers have been able to stand before, and that have given the scoffers

and caricaturists their favorite weapons. If you detach a page of these

and ask, "Is it poetry? have the 'hog-hook,' the 'killing-hammer,' 'the

cutter's cleaver,' 'the packer's maul,' met with a change of heart, and

been converted into celestial cutlery?" I answer, No, they are as barren

of poetry as a desert is of grass; but in their place in the poem, and

in the collection, they serve as masses of shade or neutral color in

pictures, or in nature, or in character,--a negative service, but still

indispensable. The point, the moral of the poem, is really backed up

and driven home by this list. The poet is determined there shall be

no mistake about it. He will not put in the dainty and pretty things

merely,--he will put in the coarse and common things also, and he swells

the list till even his robust muse begins to look uneasy. Remember, too,

that Whitman declaredly writes the lyrics of America, of the masses,

of democracy, and of the practical labor of mechanics, boatmen, and

farmers:--

"The sum of all known reverence I add up in you, whoever you are;

All doctrines, all politics and civilization, exude from you;

All sculpture and monuments, and anything inscribed anywhere, are

tallied in you;

The gist of histories and statistics as far back as the records

reach, is in you this hour, and myths and tales the same:

If you were not breathing and walking here, where would they

all be?

The most renown'd poems would be ashes, orations and plays would

be vacuums.

"All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it;

(Did you think it was in the white or gray stone? or the lines of

the arches and cornices?)

"All music is what awakens from you when you are reminded by the

instruments;

It is not the violins and the cornets--it is not the oboe, nor

the beating drums--nor the score of the baritone singer singing

his sweet romanza--nor that of the men's chorus, nor that of

the women's chorus,

It is nearer and farther than they."

Out of this same spirit of reverence for man and all that pertains

essentially to him, and the steady ignoring of conventional and social

distinctions and prohibitions, and on the same plane as the universal

brotherhood of the poems, come those passages in "Leaves of Grass" that

have caused so much abuse and fury,--the allusions to sexual acts and

organs,--the momentary contemplation of man as the perpetuator of his

species. Many good judges, who have followed Whitman thus far, stop here

and refuse their concurrence. But if the poet has failed in this part,

he has failed in the rest. It is of a piece with the whole. He has felt

in his way the same necessity as that which makes the anatomist or

the physiologist not pass by, or neglect, or falsify, the loins of his

typical personage. All the passages and allusions that come under this

head have a scientific coldness and purity, but differ from science, as

poetry always must differ, in being alive and sympathetic, instead of

dead and analytic. There is nothing of the forbidden here, none of those

sweet morsels that we love to roll under the tongue, such as are found

in Byron and Shakespeare, and even in austere Dante. If the fact is not

lifted up and redeemed by the solemn and far-reaching laws of maternity

and paternity, through which the poet alone contemplates it, then it

is irredeemable, and one side of our nature is intrinsically vulgar and

mean.

Again: Out of all the full-grown, first-class poems, no matter what

their plot or theme, emerges a sample of Man, each after its kind, its

period, its nationality, its antecedents. The vast and cumbrous Hindu

epics contribute their special types of both man and woman, impossible

except from far-off Asia and Asian antiquity. Out of Homer, after all

his gorgeous action and events, the distinct personal identity, the

heroic and warlike chieftain of Hellas only permanently remains. In the

same way, when the fire and fervor of Shakespeare's plots and passions

subside, the special feudal personality, as lord or gentleman, still

towers in undying vitality. Even the Sacred Writings themselves,

considered as the first great poems, leave on record, out of all the

rest, the portraiture of a characteristic Oriental Man. Far different

from these (and yet, as he says, "the same old countenance pensively

looking forth," and "the same red running blood"), "Leaves of Grass"

and "Two Rivulets" also bring their contribution; nay, behind every page

_that_ is the main purport,--to outline a New World Man and a New

World Woman, modern, complete, democratic, not only fully and nobly

intellectual and spiritual, but in the same measure physical, emotional,

and even fully and nobly carnal.

An acute person once said to me, "As I read and re-read these poems, I

more and more think their inevitable result in time must be to produce

'A race of splendid and savage _old men,_'

of course dominated by moral and spiritual laws, but with volcanoes of

force always alive beneath the surface."

And still again: One of the questions to be put to any poem assuming a

first-class importance among us--and I especially invite this inquiry

toward "Leaves of Grass"--is, How far is this work consistent with, and

the outcome of, that something which secures to the race ascendency,

empire, and perpetuity? There is in every dominant people a germ, a

quality, an expansive force, that, no matter how it is overlaid, gives

them their push and their hold upon existence,--writes their history

upon the earth, and stamps their imprint upon the age. To what extent is

your masterpiece the standard-bearer of this quality,--helping the race

to victory? helping me to be more myself than I otherwise would?