Part 9
“Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth, And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own, And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own, And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers, And that a kelson of the creation is love.”
IV.
This “love” of Whitman’s is a very personal matter; of an abstract Man, a _solidaire_ Humanity, he never speaks; it does not appear ever to have occurred to him that so extraordinary a conception can be formulated; his relations to men generally spring out of his relations to particular men. He has touched and embraced his fellows’ flesh; he has felt throughout his being the mysterious reverberations of the contact:
“There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact and odour of them, that pleases the soul well, All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.”
This personal and intimate fact is the centre from which the whole of Whitman’s morality radiates. Of an abstract Humanity, it is true, he has never thought; he has no vision of Nature as a spiritual Presence; God is to him a word only, without vitality; to Art he is mostly indifferent; yet there remains this great moral kernel, springing from the sexual impulse, taking practical root in a singularly rich and vivid emotional nature, and bearing within it the promise of a city of lovers and friends.
This moral element is one of the central features in Whitman’s attitude towards sex and the body generally. For the lover there is nothing in the loved one’s body impure or unclean; a breath of passion has passed over it, and all things are sweet. For most of us this influence spreads no farther; for the man of strong moral instinct it covers all human things in infinitely widening circles; his heart goes out to every creature that shares the loved one’s delicious humanity; henceforth there is nothing human that he cannot touch with reverence and love. “Leaves of Grass” is penetrated by this moral element. How curiously far this attitude is from the old Christian way we realize when we turn to those days in which Christianity was at its height, and see how Saint Bernard with his mild and ardent gaze looked out into the world of Nature and saw men as “stinking spawn, sacks of dung, the food of worms.”
But there is another element in Whitman’s attitude--the artistic. It shows itself in a twofold manner. Whitman came of a vigorous Dutch stock; these Van Velsors from Holland have fully as large a part in him as anything his English ancestry gave him, and his Dutch race shows itself chiefly in his artistic manner. The supreme achievement in art of the Dutch is their seventeenth century painting. What marked those Dutch artists was the ineradicable conviction that every action, social or physiological, of the average man, woman, child, around them might be, with love and absolute faithfulness, phlegmatically set forth. In their heroic earthliness they could at no point be repulsed; colour and light may aureole their work, but the most commonplace things of Nature shall have the largest nimbus. That is the temper of Dutch art throughout; no other art in the world has the same characteristics. In the art of Whitman alone do we meet with it again, impatient indeed and broken up into fragments, pierced through with shafts of light from other sources, but still constant and unmistakable. The other artistic element in Whitman’s attitude is modern; it is almost the only artistic element by which, unconsciously perhaps, he allies himself to modern traditions in art instead of breaking through them by his own volcanic energy--a curious research for sexual imagery in Nature, imagery often tinged by bizarre and mystical colour. Rossetti occasionally uses sexual imagery with rare felicity, as in “Nuptial Sleep”:
“And as the last slow sudden drops are shed From sparkling eaves when all the storm has fled, So singly flagged the pulses of each heart.”
With still greater beauty and audacity Whitman, in “I sing the body electric,” celebrates the last abandonment of love:
“Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn, Undulating into the willing and yielding day, Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-fleshed day.”
Or, again, in the marvellously keen “Faces”--so realistic and so imaginative--when the “lily’s face” speaks out her longing to be filled with albescent honey. This man has certainly felt the truth of that deep saying of Thoreau’s, that for him to whom sex is impure there are no flowers in Nature. He cannot help speaking of man’s or woman’s life in terms of Nature’s life, of Nature’s life in terms of man’s; he mingles them together with an admirably balanced rhythm, as in “Spontaneous Me.” All the functions of man’s or woman’s life are sweet to him because they bear about them a savour of the things that are sweet to him anywhere in the world,
“Of the smell of apples and lemons, of the pairing of birds, Of the wet of woods, of the lapping of waves.”
Sometimes when he is on this track he seems to lose himself in mystic obscurity; and the words in which he records his impressions are mere patches of morbid colour.
There is a third element in Whitman’s attitude. It is clear that he had from the outset what may be vaguely called a scientific purpose in that frank grasp of the body, which has a significance to be measured by the fierce opposition it aroused, and by the tenacity with which, in the latest volume of his old age, “November Boughs,” he still insists that the principle of those lines so gives breath to the whole scheme that the bulk of the pieces might as well have been left unwritten were those lines omitted. He has himself admirably set this forth in “A Memorandum at a Venture” in “Specimen Days and Collect.” In religion and politics we have, after a great struggle, gained the priceless possibility of liberty and sincerity. But the region of sex is still, like our moral and social life generally, to a large extent unreclaimed; there still exist barbarous traditions which mediæval Christianity has helped to perpetuate, so that the words of Pliny regarding the contaminating touch of a woman, who has always been regarded as in a peculiar manner the symbol of sex--“Nihil facile reperiabatur mulierum profluvio magis monstrificum”--are not even yet meaningless. Why should the sweetening breath of science be guarded from this spot? Why should not “freedom and faith and earnestness” be introduced here? Our attitude towards this part of life affects profoundly our attitude towards life altogether. To realize this, read Swift’s “Strephon and Chloe,” which enshrines, vividly and unshrinkingly, in a classic form, a certain emotional way of approaching the body. It narrates the very trivial experiences of a man and woman on their bridal night. The incidents are nothing; they are perfectly innocent; the interesting fact about them is the general attitude which they enfold. The unquestioning faith of the man is that in setting down the simple daily facts of human life he has drowned the possibilities of love in filth. And Swift here represents, in an unflinchingly logical fashion, the opinions, more or less realized, more or less disguised, of most people even to-day. Cannot these facts of our physical nature be otherwise set down? Why may we not “keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart?” That is, in effect, the question which, in “A Memorandum at a Venture,” Whitman tells us that he undertook to answer. This statement of it was probably an afterthought; else he would have carried out his attempt more thoroughly and more uncompromisingly.
For I doubt if even Whitman has fully realized the beauty and purity of organic life; the scientific element in him was less strong than the moral, or even the artistic. While his genial poetic manner of grasping things is of prime importance, the new conceptions of purity are founded on a scientific basis which must be deeply understood. Swift’s morbid and exaggerated spiritualism, a legacy of mediævalism--and the ordinary “common-sense” view is but the unconscious shadow of mediæval spiritualism--is really founded on ignorance, in other words, on the traditional religious conceptions of an antique but still surviving barbarism.
From our modern standpoint of science, opening its eyes anew, the wonderful cycles of normal life are for ever clean and pure, the loathsomeness, if indeed anywhere, lies in the conceptions of hypertrophied and hyperæsthetic brains. Some who have striven to find a vital natural meaning in the central sacrament of Christianity have thought that the Last Supper was an attempt to reveal the divine mystery of food, to consecrate the loveliness of the mere daily bread and wine which becomes the life of man. Such sacraments of Nature are everywhere subtly woven into the texture of men’s bodies. All loveliness of the body is the outward sign of some vital use.
Doubtless these relationships have been sometimes perceived and their meaning realized by a sort of mystical intuition, but it is only of recent years that science has furnished them with a rational basis. The chief and central function of life--the omnipresent process of sex, ever wonderful, ever lovely, as it is woven into the whole texture of our man’s or woman’s body--is the pattern of all the process of our life. At whatever point touched, the reverberation, multiplexly charged with uses, meanings, and emotional associations of infinite charm, to the sensitive individual more or less conscious, spreads throughout the entire organism. We can no longer intrude our crude distinctions of high and low. We cannot now step in and say that this link in the chain is eternally ugly and that is eternally beautiful. For irrational disgust, the varying outcome of individual idiosyncrasy, there is doubtless still room; it is incalculable, and cannot be reached. But that rational disgust which was once held to be common property has received from science its death-blow. In the growth of the sense of purity, which Whitman, not alone, has annunciated, lies one of our chief hopes for morals, as well as for art.
V.
Behind “Leaves of Grass” stands the personality of the man Walt Whitman; that is the charm of the book and its power. It is, in his own words, the record of a _Person_. A man has here sought to give a fresh and frank representation of his nature--physical, intellectual, moral, æsthetic--as he received it, and as it grew in the great field of the world. Sometimes there is an element in this record which, while perhaps very American, reminds one of the great Frenchman who shouted so lustily through his huge brass trumpet, seated on the apex of the universe in the Avenue d’Eylau. The noble lines to “You felons on trial in Courts” accompany “To him that was crucified.” Such rhetorical flourishes do not impair the value of this revelation. The self-revelation of a human personality is the one supremely precious and enduring thing. All art is the search for it. The strongest and most successful of religions were avowedly founded on personalities, more or less dimly seen. The intimate and candid record of personality alone gives quickening energy to books. Herein is the might of “Leaves of Grass.”
In our overstrained civilization the tendency in literature--and in life as it acts on literature and is again reacted on by it--is, on the one hand, towards an artificial mode of presentment, that is, a divorce between the actual and the alleged, a divorce which, in the language of satire, is often called hypocrisy. On the other hand, the tendency is towards a singleness of aim and ideal indeed, but a thin, narrow, super-refined ideal, at the same time rather hysterical and rather prim. In youth we cannot see through these Tartuffes and _Précieuses_; when we become grown men and women we feel a great thirst for Nature, for reality in literature, and we slake it at such fountains as this of “Leaves of Grass.” Like Antæus of old we bow down to touch the earth, to come in contact with the great primal energies of Nature, and to grow strong. We realize that the structure of the world is indeed built most gloriously on the immense pillars of Hunger and Love, and we will not seek to deny or to attenuate its foundations. Presenting a truth so abstract in fresh and living concrete language, this man, as an Adam in a new Paradise, which is the very world itself, walks again upon the earth, sometimes with calm complaisance, sometimes “deliriating” wildly:
“Behold me where I pass, hear my voice, approach, Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass, Be not afraid of my body.”
He has tossed “a new gladness and roughness” among men and women. He has opened a fresh channel of Nature’s force into human life--the largest since Wordsworth, and more fit for human use--“the amplitude of the earth, and the coarseness and sexuality of the earth, and the great charity of the earth, and the equilibrium also.” And in his vigorous masculine love, asserting his own personality he has asserted that of all--“By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.” Charging himself in every place with contentment and triumph, he embraces all men, as St. Francis in his sweet, humble, Christian way also embraced them, in the spirit of audacity, and rankness, and pride. So that all he has written is summed up in one ejaculation: “How vast, how eligible, how joyful, how real is a human being, himself or herself!”
IBSEN.
The Scandinavian peoples hold to-day a position not unlike that held at the beginning of the century by Germany. They speak, in various modified forms, a language which the rest of the world have regarded as little more than barbarous, and are looked upon generally as an innocent and primitive folk. Yet they contain centres of intense literary activity; they have produced novels of a peculiarly fresh and penetrating realism; and they possess, moreover, a stage on which great literary works may be performed, and the burning questions of the modern world be scenically resolved. It is natural that Norway, with its historical past and literary traditions, should be the chief centre of this activity, and that a Norwegian should stand forth to-day as the chief figure of European significance that has appeared in the Teutonic world of art since Goethe.
To understand Norwegian art--whether in its popular music, with its extremes of melancholy or hilarity, or in its highly-developed literature--we must understand the peculiar character of the land which has produced this people. It is a land having, in its most characteristic regions, a year of but one day and night--the summer a perpetual warm sunlit day filled with the aroma of trees and plants, and the rest of the year a night of darkness and horror; a land which is the extreme northern limit of European civilization, on the outskirts of which the great primitive gods still dwell; and where elves and fairies and mermaids are still regarded, according to the expression of Jonas Lie, as tame domestic animals. Such an environment must work mightily on the spirit and temper of the race. As one of the persons in Björnson’s “Over Ævne” observes--“There is something in Nature here which challenges whatever is extraordinary in us. Nature herself here goes beyond all ordinary measure. We have night nearly all the winter; we have day nearly all the summer, with the sun by day and by night above the horizon. You have seen it at night half-veiled by the mists from the sea; it often looks three, even four, times larger than usual. And then the play of colours on sky, sea, and rock, from the most glowing red to the softest and most delicate yellow and white! And then the colours of the Northern Lights on the winter sky, with their more suppressed kind of wild pictures, yet full of unrest and forever changing! Then the other wonders of Nature! These millions of sea-birds, and the wandering processions of fish, stretching for miles! These perpendicular cliffs that rise directly out of the sea! They are not like other mountains, and the Atlantic roars round their feet. And the ideas of the people are correspondingly unmeasured. Listen to their legends and stories.”
So striking are the contrasts in the Norwegian character that they have been supposed to be due to the mingling of races; the fair-haired, blue-eyed Norwegian of the old Sagas, silent and deep-natured, being modified, now (especially in the north) by the darker, brown-eyed Lapp, with his weakness of character, vivid imagination, and tendency to natural mysticism, and, again (especially in the east), by the daring, practical, energetic Finn.
However this may be, among the Norwegian poets and novelists various qualities often meet together in striking opposition; wild and fantastic imagination stands beside an exact realism and a loving grasp of nature; a tendency to mysticism and symbol beside a healthy naturalism. We find these characteristics variously combined in Ibsen; in Björnson, with his virile strength and generous emotions, amid which a mystic influence now and then appears; in Jonas Lie, with his subtle and delicate spirit, so intimately national; in Kielland, a realistic novelist of most dainty and delicate art, beneath which may be heard the sombre undertone of his sympathy with the weak and the oppressed. Of these writers, and others only less remarkable, one alone is at all well known in England, and even he is known exclusively by his early work, especially by that most delightful of peasant stories, “Arne.” In Germany the Scandinavian novelists and dramatists have received much attention, and are widely known through excellent and easily accessible translations. Yet our English race and speech are even more closely allied to the northern; our land is studded with easily recognizable Scandinavian place-names and Scandinavian colonies, whose dialects are full of genuine Scandinavian words unknown to literary English. It is not likely that this indifference to the social, political, and literary history of our northern kinsmen can last much longer.
About 1720 a Danish skipper, one Peter Ibsen, came over from Moen[8] to Bergen and settled there. He married the daughter of a German who had likewise emigrated from his own country: these were the poet’s great-great-grandparents. Peter Ibsen had a son, Henrik Petersen Ibsen, who was also a ship’s captain. He married a lady whose name is given as Wenche Dischington, the daughter of a Scotchman naturalized in Norway. This Henrik Ibsen settled in Skien, and had a son of the same name who married a German wife. All these Ibsens were sailors. Henrik Ibsen’s son, Knud Ibsen, the dramatist’s father, like his father married a wife of German extraction, Maria Cornelia Altenburg, the daughter of a merchant who had begun life as a sailor.
[8] This island, I may note in passing, is the home of a black-haired race, very unlike the typical Norsemen, and which has been identified with those “black strangers” spoken of by the Irish chroniclers who described the Viking invasions.
This ancestry is very significant. It will be seen that Ibsen is on both sides predominantly German, and that in his German and Danish blood there is an interesting Scotch strain. The tendency to philosophic abstraction and the strenuous earnestness, mingling with the more characteristically northern imaginative influences, are explained by this German and Scotch ancestry; it explains also the peculiarly isolated and yet cosmopolitan attitude which marks Ibsen--why it is that his works have been so enthusiastically received and so easily naturalized in Germany, and why, now that they are beginning to be known, they promise to make so deep an impression in our own land.
Ibsen’s mother possessed a shy, silent, and solitary nature, which she imparted to her son. One of her daughters thus describes her: “She was a quiet, lovable woman, the soul of the house, devoted to her husband and children. She was always sacrificing herself. There was no bitterness or reproach in her.” The father was of cheerful disposition, a man of sociable tastes, popular in his circle, but also feared, for he had a keen wit, and, like his son, he could use it unmercifully.
Knud Ibsen’s eldest son, Henrik,[9] was born at Skien, a busy little town of some 3,000 inhabitants occupied in the timber trade, on the 20th March, 1828. “I was born,” the dramatist writes in some reminiscences published by Mr. Jaeger for the first time, “in a house in the market-place, Stockmann’s house it was then called. The house lay right opposite the church with its high steps and large tower. To the right, in front of the church, stood the town pillory, and to the left the town-hall, the lock-up, and the ‘madhouse.’ The fourth side of the market-place was occupied by the Latin school and the town school. The church lay free in the middle. This prospect was the first view of the earth that presented itself to my eyes. All buildings; no green, no rural open landscape.” It was in the church tower that the baby Henrik received his first conscious and deep impression. The nursemaid took him up and held him out (to the horror of his mother below), and he never forgot that new and strange vision of the world from above. Ibsen goes on to describe the attractions which were held for him in the gloomy town-hall and the pillory, unused for many years, a red-brown post of about a man’s height, with a great round knob which had originally been painted black, but which then looked like a human face. In front of the post hung an iron chain, and in that an iron ring which seemed like two small arms ready to clasp the child’s neck on the least provocation. And then there was the town-hall. That, too, had high steps like the church, and underneath it was the gaol with its barred windows: “inside the bars I have seen many pale and dark faces.” And then there was the “madhouse,” which in its time had really been used to confine lunatics. That also was barred, but inside the bars the little window was filled by a massive iron plate with small round holes like a sieve. This place was said to have been the abode of a famous criminal who had been branded.
[9] Many books and pamphlets dealing with his life and works have appeared in Denmark, Sweden and Germany. The chief of these are Vasenius’s “Henrik Ibsen, ett Skaldeporträtt,” Stockholm, 1882; Passarge’s “Henrik Ibsen: Ein Beitrag zur neusten Geschichte der norwegischen Nationalliteratur,” Leipsic, 1883; and H. Jaeger’s “Henrik Ibsen, 1828-1888,” Copenhagen. The last-named, now translated, is by far the best.
These early impressions of the dramatist--the church tower, the pillory, the barred windows, the pale criminals--are of no little interest. They help to explain for us the sombre and tragic cast, purely human and reflective, of Ibsen’s character. They explain, too, the absence in his work of the sea and the forest, of those things which give such a sweet, wild aroma, now and again, to the work of Björnson and Lie. The little town, with its active commercial life and its equally active religious life--for Skien was a centre of pietistic influence--was such a place as is brought before us in “De Unges Forbund” and in “Samfundets Stötter,” and it was a fit birthplace for the author of “Brand.”