Chapter 4

"Yes, I prefer honey," I said, "but you seem to me to be in search of what I called LITERARY poetry. That is what I am afraid of. I don't want the work of a mind fed on words, and valuing ideas the more that they are uncommon. I hate what is called 'strong' poetry; that seems to me to be generally the coarsest kind of romanticism-- melodrama in fact. I want to have in poetry what we are getting in fiction--the best sort of realism. Realism is now abjuring the heroic theory; it has thrown over the old conventions, the felicitous coincidences, life arranged on ideal lines; and it has gone straight to life itself, strong, full-blooded, eager life, full of mistakes and blunders and failures and sharp disasters and fears. Life goes shambling along like a big dog, but it has got its nose on the scent of something. It is a much more mysterious and prodigious affair than life rearranged upon romantic lines. It means something very vast indeed, though it splashes through mud and scrambles through hedges. You may laugh at what you call ethics, but that is only a name for one of many kinds of collisions. It is the fact that we are always colliding with something, always coming unpleasant croppers, that is the exciting thing. I want the poet to tell me what the obscure winged thing is that we are following; and if he can't explain it to me, I want to be made to feel that it is worth while following. I don't say that all life is poetical material. I don't think that it is; but there is a thing called beauty which seems to me the most maddeningly perfect thing in the world. I see it everywhere, in the dawn, in the far-off landscape, with all its rolling lines of wood and field, in the faces and gestures of people, in their words and deeds. That is a clue, a golden thread, a line of scent, and I shall be more than content if I am encouraged to follow that."

"Ah," he said, "now I partly agree with you. It is precisely that which the new men are after; they take the pure gold of life and just coin it into word and phrase, and it is that which I discern in them."

"Yes," I said, "but I want something a great deal bigger than that. I want to see it everywhere and in everything. I don't want to have to wall in a little space and make it silent and beautiful, and forget what is happening outside. I want a poet to tell me what it is that leaps in the eyes and beckons in the smiles of people whom I meet--people whom often enough I could not live with,--the more's the pity,--but whom I want to be friends with, all the same. I want the common joys and hopes and visions to be put into music. And when I find a man, like Walt Whitman, who does show me the beauty and wonder and the strong affections and joys of simple hearts, so that I feel sure that we are all desiring the same thing, though we cannot tell each other what it is, then I feel I am in the presence of a poet indeed."

My young friend shut up the little book which he had been holding in his hand.

"Yes," he said, "that would be a great thing; but one can't get at things in that way now. We must all specialise; and if you want to follow the new aims and ideals of art, you must put aside a great deal of what is called our common humanity, and you must be content to follow a very narrow path among the stars. I do not mind speaking quite frankly. I do not think you understand what art is. It is essentially a mystery, and the artist is a sort of hermit in the world. It is not a case of 'joys in widest commonalty spread,' as Daddy Wordsworth said. That is quite a different affair; but art has got to withdraw itself, to be content to be misunderstood; and I think that you have just as much parted company with it as your old friend the banker."

"Well," I said, "we shall see. Anyhow, I will give your new poets a careful reading, and I shall be glad if I can really admire them, because, indeed, I don't want to be stranded on a lee shore."

And so my friend departed; and I began to wonder whether the art of which he spoke was not, after all, as real a thing as the beauty of my almond-flower and my mezereons! If so, I should like to be able to include it and understand it, though I do not want to think that it is the end.

IV

WALT WHITMAN

1

There come days and hours in the lives of the busiest, most active, most eager of us, when we suddenly realise with a shock or a shudder, it may be, or perhaps with a sense of solemn mystery, that has something vast, inspiring, hopeful about it, the solidity and the isolation of our own identity. Much of our civilised life is an attempt, not deliberate but instinctive, to escape from this. We organise ourselves into nations and parties, into sects and societies, into families and companies, that we may try to persuade ourselves that we are not alone; and we get nearest to persuading ourselves that we are at one, when we enter into the secrets of love or friendship, and feel that we know as we are known. But even that vision fades, and we become aware, at sad moments, that the comradeship is over; the soul that came so close to us, smiled in our eyes, was clasped to our heart, has left us, has passed into the darkness, or if it still lives and breathes, has drawn away into the crowd. And then one sees that no fusion is possible, that half the secrets of the heart must remain unguessed and untold. That even if one had the words to do it, one could not express the sense of our personality, much of which escapes even our own conscious and critical thought. One has, let us say, a serious quarrel with a close friend, and one hears him explaining and protesting, and yet he does not know what has happened, cannot understand, cannot even perceive where the offence lay; and at such a moment it may dawn on us that we too do not know what we have done; we have exhibited some ugly part of ourselves, of which we are not conscious; we have stricken and wounded another heart, and we cannot see how it was done. We did not intend to do it, we cry. Or again we realise that we regard some one with a causeless aversion, and cannot give any reason for it; or we see that we ourselves have the same freezing and disconcerting effect upon another; and so after hundreds of such experiences, we become aware at last that no real, free, entire communication is possible; that however eagerly we tell our thoughts and display our temperaments, there must always remain something which is wrapped in darkness, the incommunicable essence of ourself that can blend with no other soul.

But again it is true that all human souls who have an instinct for expression--writers, painters, musicians--have always been trying to do this one thing, to make signals, to communicate, to reveal themselves, to "unpack the heart in words"; and what has often hindered the process and nullified their efforts has been an uneasy dignity and vanity, that must try to make out a better case than the facts justify. For a variety of motives, and indeed for the best of motives, men and women suppress, exalt, refine the presentment of themselves, because they desire to be loved, and think that they must therefore be careful to be admired, just as the lover adorns himself and puts his best foot forward, and hides all that may disconcert interest or sympathy. So that it happens in life that often when we most desire to be real, we are most unreal.

What differentiates Walt Whitman from all other writers that I know, is that he tried to reveal himself, and on the whole contrived to do so with less reserve than any other human being.

"I know perfectly well my own egotism," he wrote; "I know my omnivorous lines, and must not write any less." He was not disconcerted by any failure of art, or any propriety, or any apparent discrepancy.

Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.

He had no artistic conscience, as we say.

Easily written, loose-finger'd chords--I feel the thrum of your climax and close.

In the curious and interesting essay called "A Backward Glance over Travel's Roads," which he wrote late in life, surveying his work, he admits that he has not gained acceptance, that his book is a failure, and has incurred marked anger and contempt; and he good- humouredly quotes a sentence from a friend's letter, written in 1884, "I find a solid line of enemies to you everywhere." And yet, he says, for all that, and in spite of everything, he has had "his say entirely his own way, and put it unerringly on record." It is simply "a faithful, and doubtless self-willed record," he says.

That then was Walt Whitman's programme, surely in its very scope and range worthy of some amazement and respect! Because it is not done insolently or with any braggadocio, in spite of what he calls "the barbaric yawp." I do not think that anything is more notable than the good-humour and the equanimity of it all. He is not interested in himself in a morbid or self-conscious way; he has not the slightest wish to make himself out to be fine or magnificent or superior--it is quite the other way. He is merely going to try to break down the barriers between soul and soul, to let the river of self ripple and welter and wash among the grasses at the feet of man. He does not wish you to admire it, though he hopes you may love it; there are to be no excuses or pretences; he does not wish to be seen at certain angles or in subdued lights. He casts himself down in his nakedness, and lets who will observe him; and all this not because he is either hero or saint; his proudest title is to be an average man, one of the crowd, with passions, weaknesses, uglinesses, even deformities. He is there, he is just so, and you may take it or leave it; but he is not ashamed or sensitive, nor in any way abashed; he smiles his frank, good-natured smile; and suddenly one perceives the greatness of it! He is neither fanatic nor buffoon; he is not performing like the boxer or wrestler, nor is he sitting mournfully and patiently for the sake of the pence, like the fat man at the fair; he is merely trying to say what he thinks and feels, and if he has any aim at all, it is to tempt others into unabashed sincerity. He cries to man, "If you would only recognise yourself as you are, without pretences or excuses, the dignity which your subterfuges are meant to secure would be yours without question." It is not a question of good, bad, or indifferent. Everyone has a right to be where he is, and there is a reason for him and a justification too. That is the gospel of Walt Whitman; it may be a bad gospel, or an ugly one, or an indecorous one; but no one can pretend that it is not a big one.

2

One immense and fruitful discovery Walt Whitman made, and yet one can hardly call it a discovery; it is more perhaps an inspired doctrine, unsupported by argument, wholly unphilosophical, proclaimed with a childlike loudness and confidence, but yet probably true: the doctrine, that is, of the indissoluble union between body and soul. Indissoluble, one calls it, and yet nothing is more patent than the fact that it is a union which is invariably and inevitably dissolved in death; while on the other hand, one sees in certain physical catastrophes, such as paralysis, brain- concussion, senile decay, insanity, the soul apparently reduced to the condition of a sleeping partner, or so far deranged as to be unable to express anything but some one dominant emotion; or, more bewildering still, one sees the moral sense seemingly suspended by a physical disorder. And yet for all that, the doctrine may be essentially and substantially true; the vitality of the soul may be bound up with its power of expressing itself in material terms. It may be that the soul-stuff, which we call life, has an existence apart from its material manifestation, and that individuality, as we see it, may be a mere phenomenon of the passage of a force, like the visibility of electricity under certain conditions; indeed it seems more probable that matter is a function of thought rather than thought a function of matter. It is likely enough that animals have no conscious sense of any division of aims, any antagonism between physical and mental desires; but as the human race develops, the imagination, the sense of the opposition between the reason and the appetite, begins to emerge. Man becomes aware that his will and his wish may not coincide; and thus develops the medieval theory of asceticism, the belief that the body is essentially vile, and suggests base desires to the mind, which the mind has the power of controlling. That conception fitted closely to the feudal theory of government, in which the interests of the ruler and the subject did not necessarily coincide; the ruler governed with his own interests in view, and coerced his subjects if he could; but the new theory of government does not separate the ruler from the state. The government of a state with democratic institutions is the will of the people taking shape, and the phenomena of rule are but those of the popular will expressing itself, the object being that each individual should have his due preponderance; the ultimate end being as much individual liberty as is consistent with harmonious co-operation.

That is a rough analogy of the doctrine of Walt Whitman; namely, that the individual, soul and body, is a polity; and that the true life is to be found in a harmonious co-operation of body and soul. The reason is not at liberty to deride or to neglect the bodily desires, even the meanest and basest of them, because every desire, whether of soul or body, is the expression of something that exists in the animating principle. Take, for example, the case of physical passion. That, in its ultimate analysis, is the instinct for propagating life, the transmission and continuance of vitality. The reason must not ignore or deplore it, but direct it into the proper channels; it may indicate the dangers that it incurs; but merely to thwart it, to regard it with shame and horror, is to establish an internecine warfare. The true function is rather to ennoble the physical desire by the just concurrence of the soul. But the essence of the situation is co-operation and not coercion; and each must be ready to compromise. If the physical nature will not compromise with the reason, the disasters of unbridled passion follow; if the reason will not co-operate with the physical desire, the result is a sterile intellectualism, a life of starved and timid experience. It was here, of course, that Walt Whitman's view gave offence; he thought of civilisation as a conventional system, cultivating a false shame and an ignoble reserve about bodily processes. But the vital truth of his doctrine lies in the fact that many of our saddest, because most remediable, disasters are caused by a timid reticence about the strongest force that animates the world, the force of reproduction. Whitman felt, and truly felt, that reason and sentiment have outrun discretion. It may be asked, indeed, how this terror of all outspokenness has developed in the human race, so that parents cannot bear to speak to their children about an experience which they will be certain to make acquaintance with in some far more violent and base form. Does this shrinking delicacy, this sacred reserve, mean nothing, it may be asked? Well, it may be said, if this sensitiveness is so valuable that it must not be required to anticipate tenderly and faithfully what will be communicated in a grosser form, then silence is justified, and not otherwise. But to transfer this reticence about a matter of awful concern to some other region of morals, what should we think of the parent who so feared to lessen the affection of a child by rebuking it for a lie or a theft as to let it go out into the world ignorant that either was reprobated? Whitman's argument would rather be that a parent should say to a child, "There is a force within you which will to a large extent determine the happiness of your life; it must be guarded and controlled. You will probably not be able to ignore or disregard it, and you must bring it into harmonious co-operation with mind and reason and duty. There is nothing that is shameful about its being there; indeed, it is the dominant force in the world. The shameful thing is to use it shamelessly." Yet the attitude of parents too often is to treat the subject, not as if it were sacred, but as if it were unmentionable; so that the very fact of the child's own origin would seem to be an essentially shameful thing.

The Greeks, it is true, had an instinct for the thought of the vital interdependence of body and soul; but they thought too much of the glowing manifestation of the health and beauty of youth, and viewed the decay and deformity of the human frame too much as a disgrace and an abasement. But here again comes in the largeness of Whitman's presentment, that whatever disasters befall the body, whether through drudgery or battle, disease or sin, they are all parts of a rich and large experience, not necessarily interrupting the co-operation of mind and matter. This is the strongest proof of Whitman's faith in the essential brotherhood of man, that such horrors and wretchednesses do not seem to him to interrupt the design, or to destroy the possibility of a human sympathy which is instinctive rather than a matter of devout effort. Whitman is here on the side of the very greatest and finest human spirits, in that he is shocked and appalled by nothing. He does not call it the best of worlds, but it is the only world that he knows; and the glowing interest, the passionate emotion, the vital rush and current of it, prove beyond all doubt that we are in touch with something very splendid and magnificent indeed, and that no misdeed or disaster forfeits our share in the inheritance. He is utterly at variance with the hideous Calvinistic theory, that God sent some of His creatures into the world for their pain and ruin. Whatever happens to your body or your soul, says Whitman, it is worth your while to live and to have lived. He adopts no facile system of compensations and offsets. He rather protests with all his might that, however broken your body or fatuous your mind, it is a good thing for you to have taken a hand in the affair; and that the essence of the whole situation has not been your success, your dignity, your comfortable obliteration of half your faculties, or on the other hand your failure, your vileness, or your despair, but that just at the time and place at which the phenomenon called yourself took place, that intricate creature, with its bodily needs and desires, its joys of the senses, its outlook on the strange world, took shape and made you exactly what you are, and nothing else. As he says in one of his finest apologues:

Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided, nothing is scanted.

Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what you are picks its way.

3

Then too Walt Whitman claims to be the poet, not of the past or even only of the present, but the singer of the future. He says in The Backward Glance, which I have already quoted, and which must be carefully read by anyone who wishes to understand his work--at least in so far as he understood it himself,--"Isolated advantages in any rank or grace or fortune--the direct or indirect threads of all the poetry of the past--are in my opinion distasteful to the republican genius. . . . Established poems, I know, have the very great advantage of chanting the already performed, so full of glories, reminiscences dear to the minds of men." And he says too that, "The educated world seems to have been growing more and more ennuied for ages, leaving to our time the inheritance of it all." And he further says: "The ranges of heroism and loftiness with which Greek and feudal poets endow'd their godlike or lordly born characters, I was to endow the democratic averages of America. I was to show that we, here and to-day, are eligible to the grandest and the best--more eligible now than any times of old were."