Part 11

Then the aesthetic Idealism which dominated him made for melancholy, as it invariably does. The Worshipper at the shrine of Beauty is always conscious that

". . . . In the very temple of Delight Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine."

He realizes the tragic ineffectuality of his aspiration--

"The desire of the moth for the star,"

as Shelley expresses it, and in this line of poetry the mood finds imperishable expression.

But the melancholy that visits the Idealist--the Worshipper of Beauty--is not by any means a mood of despair. The moth may not attain the star, but it feels there is a star to be attained. In other words, an intimate sense of the beauty of the world carries within it, however faintly, however overlaid with sick longing, a secret hope that some day things will shape themselves all right.

And thus it is that every Idealist, bleak and wintry as his mood may be, is conscious of the latency of spring. Every Idealist, like the man in the immortal allegory of Bunyan, has a key in his bosom called Promise. This it is that keeps from madness. And so while Jefferies will exclaim:--

"The whole and the worst the pessimist can say is far beneath the least particle of the truth, so immense is the misery of man." He will also declare, "There lives on in me an impenetrable belief, thought burning like the sun, that there is yet something to be found, something real, something to give each separate personality sunshine and flowers in its own existence now."

It is a mistake to attach much importance to Jefferies' attempts to systematize his views on life. He lacked the power of co-ordinating his impressions, and is at his best when giving free play to the instinctive life within him. No Vagabond writer can excel him in the expression of feeling; and yet perhaps no writer is less able than he to account for, to give a rational explanation of his feelings. He is rarely satisfactory when he begins to explain. Thoreau's lines about himself seem to me peculiarly applicable to Jefferies:--

"I am a parcel of vain strivings tied By a chance bond together, Dangling this way and that, their links Were made so loose and wide Methinks For milder weather.

"A bunch of violets without their roots And sorrel intermixed, Encircled by a wisp of straw Once coiled about their shoots, The law By which I'm fixed.

"Some tender buds were left upon my stem In mimicry of life, But ah, the children will not know Till Time has withered them, The woe With which they're rife."

Jefferies was a brave man, with a rare supply of resolution and patience. His life was one long struggle against overwhelming odds. "Three great giants," as he puts it--"disease, despair, and poverty." Not only was his physical health against him, but his very idiosyncrasies all conspired to hinder his success. His pride and reserve would not permit him to take help from his friends. He even shrank from their sympathy. His years of isolation, voluntary isolation, put him out of touch with human society. His socialistic tendencies never made him social. His was a kind of abstract humanitarianism. A man may feel tenderly, sympathize towards humanity, yet shrink from human beings. Misanthropy did not inspire him; he did not dislike his fellow-men; it was simply that they bewildered and puzzled him; he could not get on with them. So it will be seen that he had not the consolation some men take in the sympathy and co-operation of their fellows. After all, this is more a defect of temperament than a fault of character, and he had to pay the penalty. Realizing this, it is impossible to withhold admiration for the pluck and courage of the man. As a lover of Nature, and an artist in prose, he needs no encomium to-day. In his eloquent "Eulogy" Sir Walter Besant gave fitting expression to the debt of gratitude we owe this poet-naturalist--this passionate interpreter of English country life.

What Borrow achieved for the stirring life of the road, Jefferies has done for the brooding life of the fields. What Thoreau did for the woods at Maine and the waters of Merrimac, Jefferies did for the Wiltshire streams and the Sussex hedgerows. He has invested the familiar scenery of Southern England with a new glamour, a tenderer sanctity; has arrested our indifferent vision, our careless hearing, turned our languid appreciation into a comprehending affection.

Ardent, shy, impressionable, proud, stout-hearted pagan and wistful idealist; one of the most pathetic and most interesting figures in modern literature.

VII WALT WHITMAN

"So will I sing on, fast as fancies come; Rudely the verse being as the mood it paints."

ROBERT BROWNING.

"A man he seems of cheerful yesterdays And confident to-morrows."

WORDSWORTH.

I

The "good gray poet" is the supreme example of the Vagabond in literature. It is quite possible for one not drawn towards the Vagabond temperament to admire Stevenson, for Stevenson was a fine artist; to take delight in the vigorous "John Bullism" of _Lavengro_; to sympathize with the natural mysticism of Jefferies; the Puritan austerity of Thoreau. In short, there are aspects in the writings of the other "Vagabonds" in this volume which command attention quite apart from the characteristics specifically belonging to the literary Vagabond.

But it is not possible to view Whitman apart from his Vagabondage. He is proud of it, glories in it, and flings it in your face. Others, whatever strain of wildness they may have had, whatever sympathies they may have felt for the rough sweetness of the earth, however unconventional their habits, accepted at any rate the recognized conventions of literature. As men, as thinkers, they were unconventional; as artists conventional. They retained at any rate the literary garments of civilized society.

Not so Whitman. He is the Orson of literature. Unconventionality he carries out to its logical conclusion, and strides stark naked among our academies of learning. A strange, uncouth, surprising figure, it is impossible to ignore him however much he may shock our susceptibilities.

Many years ago Mr. Swinburne greeted him as "a strong-winged soul with prophetic wings"; subsequently he referred to him as a "drunken apple-woman reeling in a gutter." For this right-about-face he has been upbraided by Whitman's admirers. Certainly it is unusual to find any reader starting out to bless and ending with a curse. Usually it is the precedent of Balaam that is followed. But Mr. Swinburne's mingled feelings typify the attitude of every one who approaches the poet, though few of us can express ourselves so resourcefully as the author of _Poems and Ballads_.

There may be some students who accept Whitman without demur at the outset on his own terms. All I can say is that I never heard of one. However broad-minded you may consider yourself, however catholic in your sympathies, Whitman is bound to get athwart some pet prejudice, to discover some shred of conventionality. Gaily, heedlessly, you start out to explore his writings, just as you might start on a walking tour. He is in touch with the primal forces of Nature, you hear. "So much the better," say you; "civilization has ceased to charm." "You are enamoured of wildness." Thus men talk before camping out, captivated by the picturesque and healthy possibilities, and oblivious to the inconveniences of roughing it.

But just as some amount of training is wanted before a walking tour, or a period of camping out, so is it necessary to prepare yourself for a course of Whitman. And this, not because there is any exotic mystery about Whitman, not because there are any intellectual subtleties about his work, as there are in Browning, but because he is the pioneer of a new order, and the pioneer always challenges the old order; our tastes require adjusting before they can value it properly.

There is no question about a "Return to Nature" with Whitman. He never left it. Thoreau quitted the Emersonian study to get fresh inspiration from the woods. Even Jefferies, bred up in the country, carried about with him the delicate susceptibilities of the neurotic modern. Borrow retained a firm grip-hold of many conventions of the city. But Whitman? It was no case with him of a sojourn in the woods, or a ramble on the heath. He was a spiritual native of the woods and heath; not, as some seem to think, because he was a kind of wild barbarian who loved the rough and uncouth, and could be found only in unfrequented parts, but because he was in touch with the elemental everywhere. The wildness of Whitman, the barbarian aspects of the man, have been overrated. He is wild only in so far as he is cosmic, and the greater contains the less. He loves the rough and the smooth, not merely the rough. His songs are no mere paeans of rustic solitudes; they are songs of the crowded streets, as well of the country roads; of men and women--of every type--no less than of the fields and the streams. In fact, he seeks the elemental everywhere. Thoreau found it in the Indian, Borrow in the gypsies, Whitman, with a finer comprehensiveness, finds it in the multitude. His business is to bring it to the surface, to make men and women rejoice in--not shrink from--the great primal forces of life. But he is not for moralizing--

"I give nothing as duties, What others give as duties I give as loving impulses. (Shall I give the heart's action as a duty?)"

He has no quarrel with civilization as such. The teeming life of the town is as wonderful to him as the big solitude of the Earth. Carlyle's pleasantry about the communistic experiments of the American Transcendentalists would have no application for him. "A return to Acorns and expecting the Golden Age to arrive."

Here is no exclusive child of Nature:--

"I tramp a perpetual journey, . . . My signs are a rainproof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods . . . I have no chair, no church, no philosophy."

People talk of Whitman as if he relied entirely on the "staff cut from the woods"; they forget his rainproof coat and good shoes. Assuredly he has no mind to cut himself adrift from the advantages of civilization.

The rainproof coat, indeed, reminds one of Borrow's green gamp, which caused such distress to his friends and raised doubts in the minds of Mr. Watts-Dunton and Dr. Hake as to whether he was a genuine child of [Picture: Walt Whitman] the open air. {173} No one would cavil at that term as applied to Whitman--yet one must not forget the "rainproof coat."

In regarding the work of Whitman there are three aspects which strike one especially. His attitude towards Art, towards Humanity, towards Life.

II

First of all, Whitman's attitude towards Art.

For the highest art two essentials are required--Sincerity and Beauty. The tendency of modern literature has been to ignore the first and to make the second all-sufficient. The efforts of the artist have been concentrated upon the workmanship, and too often he has been satisfied with a merely technical excellence.

It is a pleasant and attractive pastime, this playing with words. Grace, charm, and brilliance are within the reach of the artificer's endeavour. But a literature which is the outcome of the striving after beauty of form, without reference to the sincerity of substance, is like a posy of flowers torn away from their roots. Lacking vitality, it will speedily perish.

No writer has seen this more clearly than Whitman, and if in his vigorous allegiance to Sincerity he has seemed oblivious at times to the existence of Beauty, yet he has chosen the better part. And for this reason. Beauty will follow in the wake of Sincerity, whether sought for or no, and the writer whose one passion it is to see things as they are, and to disentangle from the transient and fleeting the great truths of life, finds that in achieving a noble sincerity he has also achieved the highest beauty.

The great utterances of the world are beautiful, because they are true. Whereas the artist who is determined to attain beauty at all costs will obtain beauty of a kind--"silver-grey, placid and perfect," as Andrea del Sarto said, but the highest beauty it will not be, for that is no mere question of manner, but a perfect blend of manner and matter.

It will no doubt be urged that, despite his sincerity, there is a good deal in Whitman that is not beautiful. And this must be frankly conceded. But this will be found only when he has failed to separate the husk from the kernel. Whitman's sincerity is never in question, but he does not always appreciate the difference between accuracy and truth, between the accidental and the essential. For instance, lines like these--

"The six framing men, two in the middle, and two at each end, carefully bearing on their shoulders a heavy stick for a cross-beam."

or physiological detail after this fashion:--

"Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaws and the jaw hinges, Nose, nostrils of the nose, and the partition, Cheeks, temples, forehead, chin, throat, back of the neck sheer. Strong shoulders, manly beard, hind shoulders, and the ample size round of the chest, Upper arm, armpit, elbow socket, lower arms, arm sinews, arm bones. Wrist and wrist joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, forefinger, finger joints, finger nails, etc., etc."

The vital idea lying beneath these accumulated facts is lost sight of by the reader who has to wade through so many accurate non-essentials.

It is well, I think, to seize upon the weakness of Whitman's literary style at the outset, for it explains so much that is irritating and disconcerting.

_Leaves of Grass_ he called his book, and the name is more significant than one at first realizes. For there is about it not only the sweetness, the freshness, the luxuriance of the grass; but its prolific rankness--the wheat and the tares grow together.

It has, I know, been urged by some of Whitman's admirers that his power as a writer does not depend upon his artistic methods or non-artistic methods, and he himself protested against his _Leaves_ being judged merely as literature. And so there has been a tendency to glorify his very inadequacies, to hold him up as a poet who has defied successfully the unwritten laws of Art.

This is to do him an ill service. If Whitman's work be devoid of Art, then it possesses no durability. Literature is an art just as much as music, painting, or sculpture. And if a man, however fine, however inspiring his ideas may be, has no power to shape them--to express them in colour, in sound, in form, in words--to seize upon the essentials and use no details save as suffice to illustrate these essentials, then his work will not last. For it has no vitality.

In other words, Whitman must be judged ultimately as an artist, for Art alone endures. And on the whole he can certainly bear the test. His art was not the conventional art of his day, but art it assuredly was.

In his best utterances there are both sincerity and beauty.

Who could deny the title of artist to the man who wrote those noble verses, "On the Beach at Night"?--

"On the beach at night, Stands a child with her father, Watching the east, the autumn sky.

"Up through the darkness, While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading, Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky, Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east, Ascends large and calm the lord-star Jupiter, And nigh at hand, only a very little above, Swim the delicate sisters the Pleiades.

"From the beach the child holding the hand of her father, Those burial clouds that lower victorious soon to devour all Watching, silently weeps.

"Weep not, child, Weep not, my darling, With these kisses let me remove your tears, The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious, They shall not long possess the sky, they devour the stars only in apparition, Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the Pleiades shall emerge, They are immortal, all those stars both silvery and golden shall shine out again, The great stars and the little ones shall shine out again, they endure, The vast immortal suns and the long-enduring pensive moons shall again shine.

"Then, dearest child, mournest thou only for Jupiter? Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars?

"Something there is, (With my lips soothing thee, adding I whisper, I give thee the first suggestion, the problem and indirection) Something there is more immortal even than the stars, (Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away) Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter, Longer than sun or any revolving satellite, Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades."

or those touching lines, "Reconciliation"?--

"Word over all beautiful as the sky, Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost, That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly Wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world; For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead, I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin-- I draw near-- Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin."

Again, take that splendid dirge in memory of President Lincoln, majestic in its music, spacious and grand in its treatment. It is too long for quotation, but the opening lines, with their suggestive beauty, and the Song to Death, may be instanced.

"When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed, And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night, I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring. Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west, And thought of him I love.

"O powerful western fallen star! O shades of night--O moody, tearful night! O great star disappear'd--O the black murk that hides the star! O cruel hands that hold me powerless--O helpless soul of me! O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul!

"In the dooryard fronting an old farmhouse near the whitewash'd palings, Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich green, With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong I love. With every leaf a miracle--and from this bush in the dooryard, With delicate coloured blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich green, A sprig with its flower I break.

* * * * *

"Come lovely and soothing death, Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving, In the day, in the night, to all, to each, Sooner or later delicate death.

"Prais'd be the fathomless universe, For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious, And for love, sweet love--but praise! praise! praise! For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.

"Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet, Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome? Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all, I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly.

* * * * *

"The night in silence under many a star, The ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I know, And the soul-turning to thee, O vast and well-veil'd death, And the body gratefully nestling close to thee.

"Over the tree-tops I float thee a song, Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and the prairies wide, Over the dense-pack'd cities all and the teeming wharves and ways, I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee, O death."

This is not only Art, but great Art. So fresh in their power, so striking in their beauty, are Whitman's utterances on Death that they take their place in our memories beside the large utterances of Shakespeare, Milton, and Shelley.

It is a mistake to think that where Whitman fails in expression it is through carelessness; that he was a great poet by flashes, and that had he taken more pains he would have been greater still. We have been assured by those who knew him intimately that he took the greatest care over his work, and would wait for days until he could get what he felt to be the right word.

To the student who comes fresh to a study of Whitman it is conceivable that the rude, strong, nonchalant utterances may seem like the work of an inspired but careless and impatient artist. It is not so. It is done deliberately.

"I furnish no specimens," he says; "I shower them by exhaustless laws, fresh and modern continually, as Nature does."

He is content to be suggestive, to stir your imagination, to awaken your sympathies. And when he fails, he fails as Wordsworth did, because he lacked the power of self-criticism, lacked the faculty of humour--that saving faculty which gives discrimination, and intuitively protects the artist from confusing pathos with bathos, the grand and the grandiose. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his treatment of Sex. Frankness, outspokenness on the primal facts of life are to be welcomed in literature. All the great masters--Shakespeare, Dante, Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, have dealt openly and fearlessly with the elemental passions. There is nothing to deplore in this, and Mr. Swinburne was quite right when he contended that the domestic circle is not to be for all men and writers the outer limit of their world of work. So far from regretting that Whitman claimed right to equal freedom when speaking of the primal fact of procreation as when speaking of sunrise, sunsetting, and the primal fact of death, every clean-minded man and woman should rejoice in the poet's attitude. For he believed and gloried in the separate personalities of man and woman, claiming manhood and womanhood as the poet's province, exulting in the potentialities of a healthy sexual life. He was angry, as well he might be, with the furtive snigger which greets such matters as motherhood and fatherhood with the prurient unwholesomeness of a mind that can sigh sentimentally over the "roses and raptures of Vice" and start away shamefaced from the stark passions--stripped of all their circumlocutions. He certainly realized as few have done the truth of that fine saying of Thoreau's, that "for him to whom sex is impure there are no flowers in Nature."

But at the same time I cannot help feeling that Stevenson was right when he said that Whitman "loses our sympathy in the character of a poet by attracting too much of our attention--that of a Bull in a China Shop." {180}