Part 5

Here, then, is a great stalwart man, in perfect health, all brawn and rude muscle, set up before us as the ideal of strength. Let us examine this strength a little. For one, I declare that I do not find it impressive. Yonder, in a counting-room--alas, in how many counting-rooms!--a young man with weak eyes bends over a ledger, and painfully casts up the figures day by day, on pitiful wages, to support his mother, or to send his younger brother to school, or some such matter. If we watch the young man when he takes down his hat, lays off his ink-splotched office-coat, and starts home for dinner, we perceive that he is in every respect the opposite of the stalwart Whitman ideal; his chest is not huge, his legs are inclined to be pipe-stems, and his dress is like that of any other book-keeper. Yet the weak-eyed pipe-stem-legged young man impresses me as more of a man, more of a democratic man, than the tallest of Whitman's roughs; to the eye of my spirit there is more strength in this man's daily endurance of petty care and small weariness for love; more of the sort of stuff which makes a real democracy and a sound republic, than in an army of Whitman's unshaven loafers.

I know--and count it among the privileges of my life that I do--a woman who has spent her whole life in bed for twenty years past, confined by a curious form of spinal disease which prevents locomotion and which in spite of constant pain and disturbance leaves the system long unworn. Day by day she lies helpless, at the mercy of all those tyrannical small needs which become so large under such circumstances; every meal must be brought to her, a drink of water must be handed; and she is not rich, to command service. Withal her nature is of the brightest and most energetic sort. Yet, surrounded by these unspeakable pettinesses, enclosed in this cage of contradictions, the woman has made herself the centre of an adoring circle of the brightest people; her room is called "Sunnyside;" when brawny men are tired they go to her for rest, when people in the rudest physical health are sick of life they go to her for the curative virtue of her smiles. Now this woman has not so much rude muscle in her whole body as Whitman's man has in his little finger: she is so fragile that long ago some one called her "White Flower," and by this name she is much known; it costs her as much labor to press a friend's hand as it costs Whitman's rough to fell a tree; regarded from the point of view of brawn and sinew, she is simply absurd; yet to the eye of my spirit there is more manfulness in one moment of her loving and self-sacrificing existence than in an aeon of muscle-growth and sinew-breeding; and hers is the manfulness which is the only solution of a true democrat, hers is the manfulness of which only can a republic be built. A republic is the government of the spirit; a republic depends upon the self-control of each member: you cannot make a republic out of muscles and prairies and Rocky mountains; republics are made of the spirit.

Nay, when we think of it, how little is it a matter of the future, how entirely is it a matter of the past, when people come running at us with rude muscle and great mountain, and such matters of purely physical bigness to shake our souls? How long ago is it that they began to put great bearskin caps on soldiers with a view to make them look grisly and formidable when advancing on the enemy? It is so long ago that the practice has survived mainly as ceremonial, and the little boys on the streets now laugh at this ferociousness when the sappers and miners come by who affect this costume.

Yet, here in the nineteenth century we behold artists purposely setting bearskin caps upon their poetry to make it effective. This sort of thing never yet succeeded as against Anglo-Saxon people. I cannot help thinking here of old Lord Berners' account translated from Froissart, of how the Genoese cross-bowmen attempted to frighten the English warriors at the battle of Crecy. "Whan the Genowayes were assembled togayder, and beganne to aproche, they made a great leape and crye, to abasshe thenglysshmen, but they stode styll, and styredde not for all that; thane the Genowayes agayne the seconde tyme made another leape, and a fell crye, and stepped forward a lytell, and thenglysshmen remeved not one fote; thirdly, agayne they leapt and cryed, and went forthe tyll they come within shotte; thane shot feersley with their crosbowes; than thenglysshe archers stept forthe one pase, and lette fly their arowes so hotly, and so thycke, that it semed snowe; when the Genowayes felt the arowes persynge through heedes, armes, and brestes, many of them cast downe their crosbowes, and dyde cutte their strynges, and retourned dysconfited."

And so the Poetry of the Future has advanced upon us with a great leap and a fell cry, relying upon its loud, ill-pitched voice, but the democracy has stirred not for all that. Perhaps we may fairly say, gentlemen, it is five hundred years too late to attempt to capture Englishmen with a yell.

I think it interesting to compare Whitman's often expressed contempt for poetic beauty--he taunts the young magazine writers of the present time with having the beauty disease--with some utterances of one who praised the true function of ruggedness in works the world will not soon forget. I mean Thomas Carlyle, who has so recently passed into the Place where the strong and the virtuous and the beautiful souls assemble themselves. In one of Carlyle's essays he speaks as follows of Poetic Beauty. These words scarcely sound as if they came from the lover of Danton and Mirabeau:

"It dwells and is born in the inmost Spirit of Man, united to all love of Virtue, to all true belief in God; or rather, it is one with this love and this belief, another phase of the same highest principle in the mysterious infinitude of the human Soul. To apprehend this beauty of poetry, in its full and purest brightness, is not easy, but difficult; thousands on thousands eagerly read poems, and attain not the smallest taste of it; yet to all uncorrupted hearts, some effulgences of this heavenly glory are here and there revealed; and to apprehend it clearly and wholly, to require and maintain a sense of heart that sees and worships it, is the last perfection of all humane culture."

In the name of all really manful democracy, in the name of the true strength that only can make our republic reputable among the nations, let us repudiate the strength that is no stronger than a human biceps; let us repudiate the manfulness that averages no more than six feet high. My democrat, the democrat whom I contemplate with pleasure; the democrat who is to write or to read the poetry of the future, may have a mere thread for his biceps, yet he shall be strong enough to handle hell, he shall play ball with the earth, and albeit his stature may be no more than a boy's, he shall still be taller than the great redwoods of California; his height shall be the height of great resolution, and love and faith and beauty and knowledge and subtle meditation; his head shall be forever among the stars.

But here we are met with the cry of freedom. This poetry is free, it is asserted, because it is independent of form. But this claim is also too late. It should have been made at least before the French Revolution. We all know what that freedom means in politics which is independent of form, of law. It means myriad-fold slavery to a mob. As in politics, so in art. Once for all, in art, to be free is not to be independent of any form, it is to be master of many forms. Does the young versifier of the Whitman school fancy that he is free because under the fond belief that he is yielding himself to nature, stopping not the words lest he may fail to make what Whitman proudly calls "a savage song," he allows himself to be blown about by every wind of passion? Is a ship free because, without rudder or sail, it is turned loose to the winds, and has no master but nature? Nature is the tyrant of tyrants. Now, just as that freedom of the ship on the sea means shipwreck, so independence of form in art means death. Here one recurs with pleasure to the aphorism cited in the last lecture; in art, as elsewhere, "he who will not answer to the rudder shall answer to the rocks." I find all the great artists of time striving after this same freedom; but it is not by destroying, it is by extending the forms of art, that all sane and sober souls hope to attain. In a letter of Beethoven's to the Arch-duke Rudolph, written in 1819, I find him declaring "But freedom and progress are our true aim in the world of art, just as in the great creation at large."

We have seen how in the creation at large progress is effected by the continual multiplication of new forms. It was this advance which Beethoven wished: to become master of new and more beautiful forms, not to abolish form. In a letter of his to Matthisson, as early as 1800 accompanying a copy of _Adelaide_, we may instructively gather what he thought of this matter: "Indeed even now I send you _Adelaide_ with a feeling of timidity. You know yourself what changes the lapse of some years brings forth in an artist who continues to make progress; the greater the advances we make in art the less we are satisfied with our works of an early date." This unstudied declaration becomes full of significance when we remember that this same _Adelaide_ is still held, by the common consent of all musicians, to be the most perfect song-form in music; and it is given to young composers as a type and model from which all other forms are to be developed. We may sum up the whole matter by applying to these persons who desire formlessness, words which were written of those who have been said to desire death:

Whatever crazy Sorrow saith, No life that breathes with human breath Has ever truly longed for death.

'Tis life whereof our nerves are scant, O life, not death, for which we pant; More life, and fuller, that I want.

In art, form and chaos are so nearly what life and death are in nature, that we do not greatly change this stanza if we read:

'Tis form whereof our art is scant, O form, not chaos, for which we pant, More form, and fuller, that I want.

I find some deliverances in Epictetus which speak so closely to more than one of the points just discussed that I must quote a sentence or two. "What then", he says--in the chapter "About Freedom" "is that which makes a man free from hindrance and makes him his own master? For wealth does not do it, nor consulship, nor provincial government, nor royal power; but something else must be discovered. What then is that which when we write makes us free from hindrance and unimpeded. The knowledge of the art of writing. What then is it (which gives freedom) in playing the lute? The science of playing the lute." If Whitman's doctrine is true, the proper method of acquiring freedom on the lute is to bring lute-music to that point where the loud jangling chord produced by a big hand sweeping at random across the strings is to take the place of the finical tunes and harmonies now held in esteem. "Therefore" continues Epictetus, "in life, also, it is the science of life.... When you wish the body to be sound, is it in your power or not?--It is not. When you wish it to be healthy? Neither is this in my power." (I complain of Whitman's democracy that it has no provision for sick, or small, or puny, or plain-featured, or hump-backed, or any deformed people, and that his democracy is really the worst kind of aristocracy, being an aristocracy of nature's favorites in the matter of muscle.) And so of estate, house, horses, life and death, Epictetus continues; these are not in our power, they cannot make us free. So that, in another chapter, he cries: This is the true athlete, the man who exercises himself against such appearances. Stay, wretch, do not be carried away. Great is the combat, divine is the work: it is for kingship, for freedom, for happiness.

And lastly, the Poetry of the Future holds that all modern poetry, Tennyson particularly, is dainty and over-perfumed, and Whitman speaks of it with that contempt which he everywhere affects for the dandy. But what age of time ever yielded such a dandy as the founder of this school, Whitman himself? The simpering beau who is the product of the tailor's art is certainly absurd enough; but what difference is there between that and the other dandy-upside-down who from equal motives of affectation throws away coat and vest, dons a slouch hat, opens his shirt so as to expose his breast, and industriously circulates his portrait, thus taken, in his own books. And this dandyism--the dandyism of the roustabout--I find in Whitman's poetry from beginning to end. Everywhere it is conscious of itself, everywhere it is analysing itself, everywhere it is posing to see if it cannot assume a naive and striking attitude, everywhere it is screwing up its eyes, not into an eyeglass like the conventional dandy, but into an expression supposed to be fearsomely rough and barbaric and frightful to the terror-stricken reader; and it is almost safe to say that one half of Whitman's poetic work has consisted of a detailed description of the song he is going to sing. It is the extreme of sophistication in writing.

But if we must have dandyism in our art, surely the softer sort, which at least leans toward decorum and gentility, is preferable; for that at worst becomes only laughable, while the rude dandyism, when it does acquire a factitious interest by being a blasphemy against real manhood, is simply tiresome.

I have thus dwelt upon these claims of the Whitman school, not so much because of any intrinsic weight they possess, as because they are advanced in such taking and sacred names,--of democracy, of manhood, of freedom, of progress. Upon the most earnest examination, I can find it nothing but wholly undemocratic; not manful, but dandy; not free, because the slave of nature; not progressive, because its whole momentum is derived from the physically-large which ceased to astonish the world ages ago, in comparison with spiritual greatness.

Indeed, this matter has been pushed so far, with the apparent, but wholly unreal sanction of so many influential names, that in speaking to those who may be poets of the future, I cannot close these hasty words upon the Whitman school without a fervent protest, in the name of all art and all artists, against a poetry which has painted a great scrawling picture of the human body, and has written under it: "_This is the soul_;" which shouts a profession of religion in every line, but of a religion that, when examined, reveals no tenet, no rubric, save that a man must be natural, must abandon himself to every passion; and which constantly roars its belief in God, but with a camerado air as if it were patting the Deity on the back, and bidding Him, _Cheer up_, and hope for further encouragement.

We are here arrived at a very fitting point to pass on and consider that third misconception of the relation between science and art, which has been recently formulated by M. Emile Zola in his work called _Le Roman Experimental_. Zola's name has been so widely associated with a certain class of novels, that I am fortunately under no necessity to describe them, and I need only say that the work in question is a formal reply to a great number of objections which have come from many quarters as to the characters and events which Zola's novels have brought before the public.

His book, though a considerable volume, may be said to consist of two sentences which the author has varied with great adroitness into many forms. These two sentences I may sum up, as follows: (1) every novel must hereafter be the entirely unimaginative record of an experiment in human passion; and (2) every writer of the romantic school in France, particularly Victor Hugo, is an ass.

You are not to suppose that in this last sentiment I have strengthened Zola's expressions. A single quotation will show sufficient authority. As, for example, where M. Zola cries out to those who are criticizing him: "Every one says: 'Ah yes, the naturalists! they are those men with dirty hands who want all novels to be written in slang, and choose the most disgusting subjects.' Not at all! you lie!... Do not say that I am idiot enough to wish to paint nothing but the gutter."

But with this quarrel we are not here concerned; I simply wish to examine in the briefest way Zola's proposition to convert the novel into a work of science. His entire doctrine may be fairly, indeed amply gathered in the following quotations:

"We continue by our observations and experiments the work of the physiologist, who has himself employed that of the physicist and the chemist. We after a fashion pursue scientific psychology in order to complete scientific physiology; and in order to complete the evolution, we need only carry to the study of nature and man the invaluable tool of the experimental method. In a word, we should work upon characters, passions, human and social facts, as the physicist and chemist work with inorganic bodies, as the physiologist works with living organisms. Determinism controls everything.

"This, then, is what constitutes the experimental novel,--to understand the mechanism of human phenomena, to show the machinery of intellectual and emotional manifestations as physiology shall explain them to us under the influence of heredity and surrounding circumstances; then to show man living in the social _milieu_ which he has himself produced, and which he modifies every day, while at the same time experiencing in his turn a continual transformation. So we rest on physiology; we take man isolated from the hands of the physiologist to continue the solution of the problem and to solve scientifically the question, How men live as members of society.--We are, in a word, experimental philosophers, showing by experiment how a passion exhibits itself in certain social surroundings. The day when we shall understand the mechanism of this passion, it may be treated, reduced, made as inoffensive as possible."

These propositions need not detain us long. In the first place, let us leave the vagueness of abstract assertions and, coming down to the concrete, let us ask who is to make the experiment recorded in the novel? Zola says, "We (the novelists) are experimental philosophers, showing by experiment how a passion exhibits itself in certain social surroundings." Very well; in one of Zola's most popular novels, the heroine Nana, after a remarkable career, dies of small-pox; and a great naturalistic ado is made over this death. A correspondent of the _Herald_, writing from Paris, says: "In a very few days we are to be treated to the stage version of _Nana_, at the Ambigu. Nana, it will be remembered, dies at the end of the story of small-pox. We are to be given every incident of the agony, every mark of the small-pox. Pretty Mlle. Massin (who is to play this death-scene) is to be the crowning attraction of this new play.... We shall be shown a real death of small-pox, or the nearest possible approach to it. Mlle. Massin, who is to sustain the pleasing part of the "heroine," will make her pretty face hideous for the occasion. At half past 11 every evening she will issue from behind the drapery of a bed, clad only in the most indispensable of nightly raiment--and that "in most admired disorder"--her neck, cheeks and forehead disfigured, changed and unrecognizable for simulated pustules. At twenty minutes to 12 the pustules will be too much for her, and she will expire. At a quarter to 12 the deafening applause of the public will call her to life again, and she will bow her acknowledgments."

Applying Zola's theory, sociology is to find here a very instructive record of how a woman such as Nana would comport herself when dying of small-pox; and furthermore, his description of it must be an exact record of an experiment in death from small-pox conducted by M. Zola in person. But now recurring to our question, let us ask, how could M. Zola conduct this experiment? It would certainly be inconvenient for him to catch the small-pox and die, with a view to recording his sensations; and yet it is perfectly apparent that the conditions of scientific experiment could not be satisfied in any other way. M. Zola would probably reply with effusion, that he had taken pains to go to a small-pox hospital and to study with great care the behavior of a patient dying with that disease. But, we immediately rejoin, this is very far from what his theory bound him to show us; his theory bound him to show us not some person, any person, dying of small-pox, but Nana with all her individuality derived from heredity and from her own spontaneous variation--it was Nana dying of small-pox that he must set before us; one person dies one way and another person dies another way, even of the same disease; Smith, a very tragic person, would make a death-scene full of tragic message and gesture; Brown might close his eyes and pass without a word; Nana, particularly, with her peculiar career and striking individuality, would naturally make a peculiar and striking death. Now since Nana is purely a creation of Zola, (unless indeed the novel is a biography, which is not pretended) Zola is the only person in the world who understands Nana's feelings in death or on any occasion; and this being so, it is simply impossible that Zola could make a scientific experiment of Nana's death from small-pox without dying himself. This seems so absurd that one goes back to _Le Roman Experimental_ to see if Zola's idea of a scientific experiment has not something peculiar about it; and one quickly finds that it has. It is in fact interesting to observe that though Zola has this word experiment continually on his lips, yet he never means that the novelist is to conduct a real, gross, downright, actual brute of an experiment; and the word with him is wholly Pickwickian, signifying no more than that the novelist, availing himself of such realistic helps as he can find in hospitals and the like, is to evolve therefrom something which he believes to be the natural course of things. Examine the book wherever you may, the boasted experiment, the pivot of the whole system, fades into this.