Chapter 13

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.

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.