Part 2

Now, what by competent authority is the admitted character of the book in which these lines occur? For, though it is more than probable that Mr. Harlan never heard of the work till the hour of his explorations in the Department, the intellectual hemispheres of Great Britain and America have rung with it from side to side. It has received as extensive a critical notice, I suppose, as has ever been given to a volume. Had it been received only with indifference or derision, I should not have been surprised. In an age in which few breathe the atmosphere of the grand literature—which forgets the superb books and thinks Bulwer moral, and Dickens great, and Thackeray a real satirist—which gives to Macaulay the laurel due to Herodotus, and to Tennyson the crown reserved for Homer, and in which the chairs of criticism seem abandoned to squirts and pedagogues and monks—a mighty poet has little to expect from the literary press save unconcern and mockery. But even under these hard conditions, the tremendous force of this poet has achieved a relative conquest, and the tone of the press denotes his book as not merely great, but illustrious. Even the copious torrents of abuse which have been lavished upon it, have in numerous instances taken the form of tribute to its august and mysterious power, being in fact identical with that still vomited upon Montaigne and Juvenal. On the other hand, eulogy, very lofty and from the highest sources, has spanned it with sunbows. Emerson, our noblest scholar, a name to which Christendom does reverence, a critic of piercing insight and full comprehension, has pronounced it “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.” How that austere and rare spirit, Thoreau, regarded it, may be partly seen by his last posthumous volume. He thought of it, I have heard, with measureless esteem, ranking it with the vast and gorgeous conceptions of the Oriental bards. It has been reported to me, that unpublished letters, received in this country from some of Europe’s greatest, announce a similar verdict. The _North American Quarterly Review_, unquestionably the highest organ of American letters, in the course of a eulogistic notice of the work, remarking upon the passages which Mr. Harlan has treated as if they were novel in literature, observes: “There is not anything, perhaps (in the book), which modern usage would stamp as more indelicate than are some passages in Homer. There is not a word in it meant to attract readers by its grossness, as there is in half the literature of the last century, which holds its place unchallenged on the tables of our drawing-rooms.” The London _Dispatch_, in a review written by the Rev. W. J. Fox, one of the most distinguished clergymen in England, after commending the poems for “their strength of expression, their fervor, their hearty wholesomeness, their originality and freshness, their singular harmony,” &c., says that, “in the unhesitating frankness of a man who dares to call simplest things by their plain names, conveying also a large sense of the beautiful,” there is involved “a clearer conception of what manly modesty really is, than in any thing we have in all conventional forms of word, deed, or act, so far known of;” and concludes by declaring that “the author will soon make his way into the confidence of his readers, and his poems in time will become a pregnant text-book, from which quotations as sterling as the minted gold will be taken and applied to every form of the inner and the outer life.” The London _Leader_, one of the foremost of the British literary journals, in a review which more nearly approaches perception of the true character and purport of the book, than any I have seen, has the following sentences: “Mr. Emerson recognized the first issue of the _Leaves_, and hastened to welcome the author, then totally unknown. Among other things, said Emerson to the new avatar, ‘I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet _must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start_.’ The last clause was, however, overlooked entirely by the critics, who treated the new author as one self-educated, yet in the rough, unpolished, and owing nothing to instruction. The authority for so treating the author was derived from himself, who thus described, in one of his poems, his person, character, and name, having omitted the last from the title-page:—

‘Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, Disorderly, fleshly, and sensual,’—

and in various other passages, confessed to all the vices, as well as the virtues of man. All this, with intentional wrong-headedness, was attributed by the sapient reviewers to the individual writer, and not to the subjective-hero supposed to be writing. Notwithstanding the word ‘kosmos,’ the writer was taken to be an ignorant man. Emerson perceived at once that there had been a long foreground somewhere or somehow;—not so they. Every page teems with knowledge, with information; but they saw it not, because it did not answer their purpose to see it. . . . . . The poem in which the word ‘kosmos’ appears explains in fact the whole mystery—nay, the word itself explains it. The poem is nominally upon himself, but really includes everybody. It begins:—

‘I celebrate myself; And what I assume, you shall assume; For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.’

In a word, WALT WHITMAN _represents the Kosmical man—he is the_ ADAMUS _of the nineteenth century—not an individual, but_ MANKIND. As such, in celebrating himself, he proceeds to celebrate universal humanity in its attributes, and accordingly commences his dithyramb with the five senses, beginning with that of smell. Afterwards, he deals with the intellectual, rational, and moral powers, showing throughout his treatment an intimate acquaintance with Kant’s transcendental method, and perhaps including in his development the whole of the German school, down to Hegel—at any rate, as interpreted by Cousin and others in France, and Emerson in the United States. He certainly includes Fichte, for he mentions the Egotist as the only true philosopher, and consistently identifies himself not only with every man, but with the universe and its Maker; and it is in doing so that the strength of his description consists. It is from such an ideal elevation that he looks down on Good and Evil, regards them as equal, and extends to them the like measure of equity. . . . . Instead, therefore, of regarding these _Leaves of Grass_ as a marvel, they seem to us as the most natural product of the American soil. They are certainly filled with an American spirit, breathe the American air, and assert the fullest American freedom.” The passages characterized by the Secretary as “indecent” are, adds the _Leader_, “only so many instances adduced in support of a philosophical principle; not meant for obscenity, but for scientific examples, introduced as they might be in any legal, medical, or philosophical book, for the purpose of instruction.”

I could multiply these excerpts; but here are sufficient specimens of the competent judgments of eminent scholars and divines, testifying to the intellectual and moral grandeur of this work. Let it be remembered that there is nothing in the book that in one form or another is not contained in all great poetic or universal literature. It has nothing either in quantity or quality so offensive as everybody knows is in Shakespeare. All that this poet has done is to mention, without levity, without low language, very seriously, often devoutly, always simply, certain facts in the natural history of man and of life; and sometimes, assuming their sanctity, to use them in illustration or imagery. Far more questionable mention and use of these facts are common to the greatest literature. Shall the presence in a book of eighty lines, similar in character to what every great and noble poetic book contains, be sufficient to shove it below even the lewd writings of Petronius Arbiter, the dirty dramas of Shirley, or the scrofulous fiction of Louvet de Couvray—to lump it in with the anonymous lascivious trash spawned in holes and sold in corners, too witless and disgusting for any notice but that of the police—and to entitle its author to treatment such as only the nameless wretches of the very sewers of authorship ought to receive?

If, rising to the utmost cruelty of conception, I can dare add to the calamities of genius a misery so degrading and extreme as to imagine the great authors of the world condemned to clerkships under Mr. Harlan, I can at least mitigate that dream of wretchedness and insult by adding the fancy of their fate under the action of his principles. Let me suppose them there, and he still magnifying the calling of the Secretary into that of the literary headsman. He opens the great book of _Genesis_. Everywhere “indecent passages.” The mother hushes the child, and bids him skip as he reads aloud that first great history. It cannot be read aloud in “drawing-rooms” by “gentlemen” and “ladies.” The freest use of language, the plainest terms, frank mention of forbidden subjects; the story of Onan; of Hagar and Sarai; of Lot and his daughters; of Isaac, Rebekah, and Abimelech; of Jacob and Leah; of Reuben and Bilhah; of Potiphar’s wife and Joseph; tabooed allusion and statement everywhere; no veils, no euphemism, no delicacy, no meal in the mouth anywhere. Out with Moses! The cloven splendor on that awful brow shall not save him.—Mr. Harlan takes up the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_. The loves of Jupiter and Juno; the dalliance of Achilles and Patroclus with their women; the perfectly frank, undraped reality of Greek life and manners naïvely shown without regard to the feelings of Christian civilizees—horrible! Out with Homer!—Here is Lucretius: Mr. Harlan opens the _De Rerum Natura_, and reads the vast, benign, majestic lines, sad with the shadow of the unintelligible universe upon them; sublime with the tragic problems of the Infinite; august with their noble love and compassion for mankind. But what is this? “_Ut quasi transactis sœpe omnibus rebus_,” &c. And this: “_Morè ferarum, quadrupedumque magis ritu_,” &c. And this: “_Nam mulier prohibet se concipere atque repugnat_,” &c. And this: “_Quod petiere, premunt arcte, faciuntque dolorem_,” &c. Enough. Fine language, fine illustrations, fine precepts, pretty decency! Out with Lucretius! Out with the chief poet of the Tiber side!—Here is Æschylus: a dark magnificence of cloud, all rough with burning gold, which thunders and drips blood! The Greek Shakespeare. The gorgeous and terrible Æschylus! What is this in the _Prometheus_ about Jove and Iö? What sort of detail is that which, at the distance of ten years, I remember amazed Mr. Buckley as he translated the _Agamemnon_? What kind of talk is this in the _Chœphori_, in _The Suppliants_, and in the fragments of the comic drama of _The Argians_? Out with Æschylus!—Here is the sublime book of Ezekiel. All the Hebrew grandeur at its fullest is there. But look at this blurt of coarse words, hurled direct as the prophet-mouth can hurl them—this familiar reference to functions and organs voted out of language—this bread for human lips baked with ordure—these details of the scortatory loves of Aholah and Aholibamah. Enough. Dismiss this dreadful majesty of Hebrew poetry. He has no “taste.” He is “indecent.” Out with Ezekiel!—Here is Dante. Open the tremendous pages of the _Inferno_. What is this about the she-wolf Can Grande will kill? What picture is this of strumpet Thais?—ending with the lines—

“Taida è, la puttana che rispose Al drudo suo, quando disse: Ho io grazie Grandi appo te? Anzi meravigliose.”

What is this, also, in the eighteenth canto?—

“Quivi venimmo, e quindi giù nel fosso Vidi gente attuffata in uno sterco, Che dagli uman privati parea mosso: E mentre ch’ ìo là giù con l’occhio cerco, Vìdi un col capo sì di merda lordo, Che non parea s’era laico o cherco.”

What is this line at the end of the twenty-first canto, which even John Carlyle flinches from translating, but which Dante did not flinch from writing?—

“Ed egli avea del cul fatto trombetta.”

And look at these lines in the twenty-eighth canto:—

“Già reggia, per mezzul perdere o lulla Com’ io vidi un, cosi non si pertugia, Rotto dal mento insin dove si trulla.”