"All must have reference to the ensemble of the world, and the
compact truth of the world,
There shall be no subject too pronounced--All works shall illustrate
the divine law of indirections."
Indeed, the earth ever floats in this poet's mind as his mightiest
symbol,--his type of completeness and power. It is the armory from which
he draws his most potent weapons. See, especially, "To the Sayers of
Words," "This Compost," "The Song of the Open Road," and "Pensive on her
Dead gazing I heard the Mother of all."
The poet holds essentially the same attitude toward cosmic humanity,
well illustrated in "Salut au Monde:"--
"My spirit has pass'd in compassion and determination around the
whole earth;
I have look'd for equals and lovers, and found them ready for me
in all lands;
I think some divine rapport has equalized me with them.
"O vapors! I think I have risen with you and moved away to distant
continents, and fallen down there for reasons;
I think I have blown with you, O winds;
O waters, I have finger'd every shore with you."
Indeed, the whole book is leavened with vehement Comradeship. Not only
in the relations of individuals to each other shall loving good-will
exist and be cultivated,--not only between the different towns and
cities, and all the States of this indissoluble, compacted Union,--but
it shall make a tie of fraternity and fusion holding all the races and
peoples and countries of the whole earth.
Then the National question. As Whitman's completed works now stand, in
their two volumes, it is certain they could only have grown out of the
Secession War; and they will probably go to future ages as in literature
the most characteristic identification of that war,--risen from
and portraying it, representing its sea of passions and progresses,
partaking of all its fierce movements and perturbed emotions, and yet
sinking the mere military parts of that war, great as those were, below
and with matters far greater, deeper, more human, more expanding, and
more enduring.
I must not close this paper without some reference to Walt Whitman's
prose writings, which are scarcely less important than his poems. Never
has Patriotism, never has the antique Love of Country, with even
doubled passion and strength, been more fully expressed than in these
contributions. They comprise two thin volumes,--now included in "Two
Rivulets,"--called "Democratic Vistas" and "Memoranda during the War;"
the former exhibiting the personality of the poet in more vehement
and sweeping action even than do the poems, and affording specimens of
soaring vaticination and impassioned appeal impossible to match in the
literature of our time. The only living author suggested is Carlyle; but
so much is added, the _presence_ is so much more vascular and human, and
the whole page so saturated with faith and love and democracy, that even
the great Scotchman is overborne. Whitman, too, radiates belief, while
at the core of Carlyle's utterances is despair. The style here is
eruptive and complex, or what Jeremy Taylor calls _agglomerative,_ and
puts the Addisonian models utterly to rout,--a style such as only the
largest and most Titanic workman could effectively use. A sensitive lady
of my acquaintance says reading the "Vistas" is like being exposed to
a pouring hailstorm,--the words fairly bruise her mind. In its literary
construction the book is indeed a shower, or a succession of showers,
multitudinous, wide-stretching, down-pouring,--the wrathful bolt and the
quick veins of poetic fire lighting up the page from time to time. I
can easily conceive how certain minds must be swayed and bent by some
of these long, involved, but firm and vehement passages. I cannot deny
myself the pleasure of quoting one or two pages. The writer is referring
to the great literary relics of past times:--
"For us, along the great highways of time, those monuments stand,--those
forms of majesty and beauty. For us those beacons burn through all the
nights. Unknown Egyptians, graving hieroglyphs; Hindus, with hymn and
apothegm and endless epic; Hebrew prophet, with spirituality, as in
flames of lightning, conscience like red-hot iron, plaintive songs and
screams of vengeance for tyrannies and enslavement; Christ, with bent
head, brooding love and peace, like a dove; Greek, creating eternal
shapes of physical and aesthetic proportion; Roman, lord of satire, the
sword, and the codex,--of the figures, some far off and veiled, others
near and visible; Dante, stalking with lean form, nothing but fibre,
not a grain of superfluous flesh; Angelo, and the great painters,
architects, musicians; rich Shakespeare, luxuriant as the sun, artist
and singer of Feudalism in its sunset, with all the gorgeous colors,
owner thereof, and using them at will;--and so to such as German Kant
and Hegel, where they, though near us, leaping over the ages, sit again,
impassive, imperturbable, like the Egyptian gods. Of these, and the like
of these, is it too much, indeed, to return to our favorite figure,
and view them as orbs, moving in free paths in the spaces of that other
heaven, the cosmic intellect, the Soul?
"Ye powerful and resplendent ones! ye were, in your atmospheres, grown
not for America, but rather for her foes, the Feudal and the old--while
our genius is democratic and modern. Yet could ye, indeed, but breathe
your breath of life into our New World's nostrils--not to enslave us as
now, but, for our needs, to breed a spirit like your own--perhaps (dare
we to say it?) to dominate, even destroy what you yourselves have left!
On your plane, and no less, but even higher and wider, will I mete and
measure for our wants to-day and here. I demand races of orbic bards,
with unconditional, uncompromising sway. Come forth, sweet democratic
despots of the west!"
Here is another passage of a political cast, but showing the same great
pinions and lofty flight:--
"It seems as if the Almighty had spread before this nation charts of
imperial destinies, dazzling as the sun, yet with lines of blood, and
many a deep intestine difficulty, and human aggregate of cankerous
imperfection,--saying, Lo! the roads, the only plans of development,
long, and varied with all terrible balks and ebullitions. You said in
your soul, I will be empire of empires, overshadowing all else, past and
present, putting the history of Old World dynasties, conquests, behind
me as of no account,--making a new history, the history of Democracy,
making old history a dwarf,--I alone inaugurating largeness, culminating
time. If these, O lands of America, are indeed the prizes, the
determinations of your Soul, be it so. But behold the cost, and already
specimens of the cost. Behold the anguish of suspense, existence itself
wavering in the balance, uncertain whether to rise or fall; already,
close behind you and around you, thick winrows of corpses on
battlefields, countless maimed and sick in hospitals, treachery among
Generals, folly in the Executive and Legislative departments, schemers,
thieves everywhere,--cant, credulity, make-believe everywhere. Thought
you greatness was to ripen for you, like a pear? If you would have
greatness, know that you must conquer it through ages, centuries,--must
pay for it with a proportionate price. For you, too, as for all lands,
the struggle, the traitor, the wily person in office, scrofulous wealth,
the surfeit of prosperity, the demonism of greed, the hell of passion,
the decay of faith, the long postponement, the fossil-like lethargy, the
ceaseless need of revolutions, prophets, thunder-storms, deaths, births,
new projections, and invigorations of ideas and men."
The "Memoranda during the War" is mainly a record of personal
experiences, nursing the sick and wounded soldiers in the hospitals:
most of it is in a low key, simple, unwrought, like a diary kept for
one's self; but it reveals the large, tender, sympathetic soul of the
poet even more than his elaborate works, and puts in practical form that
unprecedented and fervid comradeship which is his leading element. It is
printed almost verbatim, just as the notes were jotted down at the time
and on the spot. It is impossible to read it without the feeling of
tears, while there is elsewhere no such portrayal of the common soldier,
and such appreciation of him, as is contained in its pages. It is
heart's blood, every word of it, and along with "Drum-Taps" is the only
literature of the war thus far entirely characteristic and worthy of
serious mention. There are in particular two passages in the "Memoranda"
that have amazing dramatic power, vividness, and rapid action, like some
quick painter covering a large canvas. I refer to the account of
the assassination of President Lincoln, and to that of the scenes in
Washington after the first battle of Bull Run. What may be called
the mass-movement of Whitman's prose style--the rapid marshaling
and grouping together of many facts and details, gathering up, and
recruiting, and expanding as the sentences move along, till the force
and momentum become like a rolling flood, or an army in echelon on the
charge--is here displayed with wonderful effect.
Noting and studying what forces move the world, the only sane
explanation that comes to me of the fact that such writing as these
little volumes contain has not, in this country especially, met with its
due recognition and approval, is that, like all Whitman's works, they
have really never yet been published at all in the true sense,--have
never entered the arena where the great laurels are won. They have been
printed by the author, and a few readers have found them out, but to all
intents and purposes they are unknown.
I have not dwelt on Whitman's personal circumstances, his age (he is
now, 1877, entering his fifty-ninth year), paralysis, seclusion, and the
treatment of him by certain portions of the literary classes, although
these have all been made the subjects of wide discussion of late, both
in America and Great Britain, and have, I think, a bearing under the
circumstances on his character and genius. It is an unwritten tragedy
that will doubtless always remain unwritten. I will but mention an
eloquent appeal of the Scotch poet, Robert Buchanan, published in London
in March, 1876, eulogizing and defending the American bard, in his
old age, illness, and poverty, from the swarms of maligners who still
continue to assail him. The appeal has this fine passage:--
"He who wanders through the solitudes of far-off Uist or lonely Donegal
may often behold the Golden Eagle sick to death, worn with age or
famine, or with both, passing with weary waft of wing from promontory
to promontory, from peak to peak, pursued by a crowd of rooks and crows,
which fall back screaming whenever the noble bird turns his indignant
head, and which follow frantically once more, hooting behind him,
whenever he wends again upon his way."
Skipping many things I should yet like to touch upon,--for this paper is
already too long,--I will say in conclusion that, if any reader of mine
is moved by what I have here written to undertake the perusal of "Leaves
of Grass," or the later volume, "Two Rivulets," let me yet warn him
that he little suspects what is before him. Poetry in the Virgilian,
Tennysonian, or Lowellian sense it certainly is not. Just as the living
form of man in its ordinary garb is less beautiful (yet more beautiful)
than the marble statue; just as the living woman and child that may have
sat for the model is less beautiful (yet more so) than one of Raphael's
finest Madonnas, or just as a forest of trees addresses itself less
directly to the feeling of what is called art and form than the house or
other edifice built from them; just as you, and the whole spirit of our
current times, have been trained to feed on and enjoy, not Nature or
Man, or the aboriginal forces, or the actual, but pictures, books, art,
and the selected and refined,--just so these poems will doubtless first
shock and disappoint you. Your admiration for the beautiful is never the
feeling directly and chiefly addressed in them, but your love for the
breathing flesh, the concrete reality, the moving forms and shows of the
universe. A man reaches and moves you, not an artist. Doubtless, too, a
certain withholding and repugnance has first to be overcome, analogous
to a cold sea plunge; and it is not till you experience the reaction,
the after-glow, and feel the swing and surge of the strong waves,
that you know what Walt Whitman's pages really are. They don't give
themselves at first,--like the real landscape and the sea, they are all
indirections. You may have to try them many times; there is something
of Nature's rudeness and forbiddingness, not only at the first, but
probably always. But after you have mastered them by resigning yourself
to them, there is nothing like them anywhere in literature for vital
help and meaning. The poet says:--
"The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections,
That scorn the best I can do to relate them."
And the press of your mind to these pages will certainly start new and
countless problems that poetry and art have never before touched, and
that afford a perpetual stimulus and delight.
It has been said that the object of poetry and the higher forms of
literature is to escape from the tyranny of the real into the freedom of
the ideal; but what is the ideal unless ballasted and weighted with the
real? All these poems have a lofty ideal background; the great laws
and harmonies stretch unerringly above them, and give their vista
and perspective. It is because Whitman's ideal is clothed with rank
materiality, as the soul is clothed with the carnal body, that his poems
beget such warmth and desire in the mind, and are the reservoirs of so
much power. No one can feel more than I how absolutely necessary it is
that the facts of nature and experience be born again in the heart
of the bard, and receive the baptism of the true fire before they be
counted poetical; and I have no trouble on this score with the author
of "Leaves of Grass." He never fails to ascend into spiritual meanings.
Indeed, the spirituality of Walt Whitman is the chief fact after all,
and dominates every page he has written.
Observe that this singer and artist makes no _direct_ attempt to be
poetical, any more than he does to be melodious or rhythmical. He
approaches these qualities and results as it were from beneath, and
always indirectly; they are drawn to him, not he to them; and if they
appear absent from his page at first, it is because we have been looking
for them in the customary places on the outside, where he never puts
them, and have not yet penetrated the interiors. As many of the fowls
hide their eggs by a sort of intuitive prudery and secretiveness,
Whitman always half hides, or more than half hides, his thought, his
glow, his magnetism, his most golden and orbic treasures.
Finally, as those men and women respect and love Walt Whitman best who
have known him longest and closest personally, the same rule will apply
to "Leaves of Grass" and the later volume, "Two Rivulets." It is indeed
neither the first surface reading of those books, nor perhaps even the
second or third, that will any more than prepare the student for the
full assimilation of the poems. Like Nature, and like the Sciences, they
suggest endless suites of chambers opening and expanding more and more
and continually.