Part 12

His aim is right enough; it is to his method one may take objection. Not on the score of morality. Whitman's treatment of passion is not immoral; it is simply like Nature herself--unmoral. What shall we say then about his sex cycle, "Children of Adam"? Whitman, in his anxiety to speak out, freely, simply, naturally, to vindicate the sanity of coarseness, the poetry of animalism, seems to me to have bungled rather badly. There are many fine passages in his "Song of the Body Electric" and "Spontaneous Me," but much of it impresses me as bad art, and is consequently ineffectual in its aim. The subject demands a treatment at once strong and subtle--I do not mean finicking--and subtlety is a quality not vouchsafed to Whitman. Lacking it, he is often unconsciously comic where he should be gravely impressive. "A man's body is sacred, and a woman's body is sacred." True; but the sacredness is not displayed by making out a tedious inventory of the various parts of the body. Says Whitman in effect: "The sexual life is to be gloried in, not to be treated as if it were something shameful." Again true; but is there not a danger of missing the glory by discoursing noisily on the various physiological manifestations. Sex is not the more wonderful for being appraised by the big drum.

The inherent beauty and sanctity of Sex lies surely in its superb unconsciousness; it is a matter for two human beings drawn towards one another by an indefinable, world-old attraction; scream about it, caper over it, and you begin to make it ridiculous, for you make it self-conscious.

Animalism merely as a scientific fact serves naught to the poet, unless he can show also what is as undeniable as the bare fact--its poetry, its coarseness, and its mystery go together. Browning has put it in a line:--

". . . savage creatures seek Their loves in wood and plain--_and GOD renews_ _His ancient rapture_."

It is the "rapture" and the mystery which Whitman misses in many of his songs of Sex.

There is no need to give here any theological significance to the word "God." Let the phrase stand for the mystic poetry of animalism. Whitman has no sense of mystery.

I have another objection against "The Children of Adam." The loud, self-assertive, genial, boastful style of Whitman suits very well many of his democratic utterances, his sweeping cosmic emotions. But here it gives one the impression of a kind of showman, who with a flourishing stick is shouting out to a gaping crowd the excellences of manhood and womanhood. Deliberately he has refrained from the mood of imaginative fervour which alone could give a high seriousness to his treatment--a high seriousness which is really indispensable. And his rough, slangy, matter-of-fact comments give an atmosphere of unworthy vulgarity to his subject. Occasionally he is carried away by the sheer imaginative beauty of the subject, then note how different the effect:--

"Have you ever loved the body of a woman, Have you ever loved the body of a man, Do you not see that these are exactly the same to all in all Nations and times all over the earth?"

"If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred, And the glory and sweet of a man is the token of manhood untainted, And in man or woman a clean, strong, firm-fibred body is More beautiful than the most beautiful face."

If only all had been of this quality. But interspersed with lines of great force and beauty are cumbrous irrelevancies, wholly superfluous details.

William Morris has also treated the subject of Sex in a frank, open fashion. And there is in his work something of the easy, deliberate spaciousness that we find in Whitman. But Morris was an artist first and foremost, and he never misses the _poetry_ of animalism; as readers of the "Earthly Paradise" and the prose romances especially know full well.

It is not then because Whitman treats love as an animal passion that I take objection to much in his "Children of Adam." There are poets enough and to spare who sing of the sentimental aspects of love. We need have no quarrel with Whitman's aim as expressed by Mr. John Burroughs: "To put in his sex poems a rank and healthy animality, and to make them as frank as the shedding of pollen by the trees, strong even to the point of offence." All we ask is for him to do so as a poet, not as a mere physiologist. And when he speaks one moment as a physiologist, next as a poet; at one time as a lover, at another as a showman, the result is not inspiring. "He could not make it pleasing," remarks Mr. Burroughs, "a sweet morsel to be rolled under the tongue; that would have been levity and sin, as in Byron and the other poets . . . He would sooner be bestial than Byronic, he would sooner shock by his frankness than inflame by his suggestion." This vague linking together of "Byron and the other poets" is not easy to understand. In the first place, not one of the moderns has treated love from the same standpoint. Shelley, for instance, is transcendental, Byron elemental, Tennyson sentimental; Rossetti looks at the soul through the body, Browning regards the body through the soul. There is abundant variety in the treatment. Then, again, why Byron should be singled out especially for opprobrium I fail to see, for love is to him the fierce elemental passion it is for Whitman. As for frankness, the episode of Haidee and Don Juan does not err on the side of reticence. Nor is it pruriently suggestive. It is a splendid piece of poetic animalism. Let us be fair to Byron. His work may in places be disfigured by an unworthy cynicism; his treatment of sexual problems be marred by a shallow flippancy. But no poet had a finer appreciation of the essential poetry of animalism than he, and much of his cynicism, after all, is by way of protest against the same narrow morality at which Whitman girds. To single Byron out as a poet especially obnoxious in his treatment of love, and to condemn him so sweepingly, seems to me scarcely defensible. To extol unreservedly the rankness and coarseness of "The Children of Adam," and to have no word of commendation, say, for so noble a piece of naturalism as the story of Haidee, seems to me lacking in fairness. Besides, it suggests that the _only_ treatment in literature of the sexual life is a coarse, unpleasing treatment, which I do not suppose Mr. Burroughs really holds. Whitman has vindicated, and vindicated finely, the inherent truth and beauty of animalism. But so has William Morris, so has Dante Gabriel Rossetti, so has poor flouted Byron. And I will go further, and say that these other poets have succeeded often where Whitman has failed; they have shown the beauty and cosmic significance, when Whitman has been merely cataloguing the stark facts.

It may be objected, of course, that Whitman does not aim in his sex poems at imaginative beauty, that he aims at sanity and wholesomeness; that what he speaks--however rank--makes for healthy living. May be; I am not concerned to deny it. What I do deny is the implication that the wholesomeness of a fact is sufficient justification for its treatment in literature. There are a good many disagreeable things that are wholesome enough, there are many functions of the body that are entirely healthy. But one does not want them enshrined in Art.

To attack Whitman on the score of morality is unjustifiable; his sex poems are simply unmoral. But had he flouted his art less flagrantly in them they would have been infinitely more powerful and convincing, and given the Philistines less opportunity for blaspheming.

I have dwelt at this length upon Whitman's treatment of Sex largely because it illustrates his strength and weakness as a literary artist. In some of his poems--those dealing with Democracy, for instance--we have Whitman at his best. In others, certainly a small proportion, we get sheer, unillumined doggerel. In his sex poems there are great and fine ideas, moments of inspiration, flashes of beauty, combined with much that is trivial and tiresome.

But this I think is the inevitable outcome of his style. The style, like the man, is large, broad, sweeping, tolerant; the sense of "mass and multitude" is remarkable; he aims at big effects, and the quality of vastness in his writings struck John Addington Symonds as his most remarkable characteristic. {186} This vast, rolling, processional style is splendidly adapted for dealing with the elemental aspects of life, with the vital problems of humanity. He sees everything in bulk. His range of vision is cosmic. The very titles are suggestive of his point of view--"A Song of the Rolling Earth," "A Song of the Open Road," "A Song for Occupation," "Gods." There are no detailed effects, no delicate points of light and shade in his writings, but huge panoramic effects. It is a great style, it is an impressive style, but it is obviously not a plastic style, nor a versatile style. Its very merits necessarily carry with them corresponding defects. The massiveness sometimes proves mere unwieldiness, the virile strength tends to coarseness, the eye fixed on certain broad distant effects misses the delicate by-play of colour and movement in the foreground. The persistent unconventionality of metre and rhythm becomes in time a mannerism as pronounced as the mannerism of Tennyson and Swinburne.

I do not urge these things in disparagement of Whitman. No man can take up a certain line wholeheartedly and uncompromisingly without incurring the disabilities attaching to all who concentrate on one great issue.

And if sometimes he is ineffectual, if on occasion he is merely strident in place of authoritative, how often do his utterances carry with them a superb force and a conviction which compel us to recognize the sagacious genius of the man.

III

Indeed, it is when we examine Whitman's attitude towards Humanity that we realize best his strength and courage. For it is here that his qualities find their fittest artistic expression. Nothing in Whitman's view is common or unclean. All things in the Universe, rightly considered, are sweet and good. Carrying this view into social politics, Whitman declares for absolute social equality. And this is done in no doctrinaire spirit, but because of Whitman's absolute faith and trust in man and woman--not the man and woman overridden by the artifices of convention, but the "powerful uneducated person." Whitman finds his ideal not in Society (with a capital S), but in artisans and mechanics. He took to his heart the mean, the vulgar, the coarse, not idealizing their weaknesses, but imbuing them with his own strength and vigour.

"I am enamoured of growth out of doors, Of men that live among cattle, or taste of the ocean or woods, Of the builder and steerers of ships, and the wielders of axes, and The drivers of horses. I can eat and sleep with them week in week out."

Such are his comrades. And well he knows them. For many years of his life he was roving through country and city, coming into daily contact with the men and women about whom he has sung. Walt Whitman--farm boy, school teacher, printer, editor, traveller, mechanic, nurse in the army hospital, Government clerk. Truly our poet has graduated as few have done in the school of Life. No writer of our age has better claims to be considered the Poet of Democracy.

But he was no sentimentalist. More tolerant and passive in disposition than Victor Hugo, he had the same far-seeing vision when dealing with the people. He recognized their capacity for good, their unconquerable faith, their aspirations, their fine instincts; but he recognized also their brutality and fierceness. He would have agreed with Spencer's significant words: "There is no alchemy by which you can get golden conduct out of leaden instincts"; but he would have denied Spencer's implication that leaden instincts ruled the Democracy. And he was right. There is more real knowledge of men and women in _Leaves of Grass_ and _Les Miserables_ than in all the volumes of the Synthetic Philosophy. Thus Whitman announces his theme:--

"Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power, Cheerful, for freest action formed under the laws divine. The modern man I sing."

"Whitman," wrote the late Mr. William Clarke, in his stimulating study of the Poet, {188} "sings of the Modern Man as workman, friend, citizen, brother, comrade, as pioneer of a new social order, as both material and spiritual, final and most subtle, compound of spirit and nature, firmly planted on this rolling earth, and yet 'moving about in worlds not realized.' As representative democratic bard Whitman exhibits complete freedom from unconventionality, a very deep human love for all, faith in the rationality of the world, courage, energy, and the instincts of solidarity."

In the introductory essay to this volume some remarks were made about the affections of the literary Vagabond in general and of Whitman in particular, which call now for an ampler treatment, especially as on this point I find myself, apparently, at issue with so many able and discerning critics of Whitman. I say apparently because a consideration of the subject may show that the difference, though real, is not so fundamental as it appears to be.

That Whitman entertained a genuine affection for men and women is, of course, too obvious to be gainsaid. His noble work in the hospitals, his tenderness towards criminals and outcasts--made known to us through the testimony of friends--show him to be a man of comprehensive sympathies. No man of a chill and calculating nature could have written as he did, and, although his writings are not free of affectation, the strenuous, fundamental sincerity of the man impresses every line.

But was it, to quote William Clarke, "a _very deep_ human love"? This seems to me a point of psychological interest. A man may exhibit kindliness and tenderness towards his fellow-creatures without showing any deep personal attachment. In fact, the wider a man's sympathies are the less room is there for any strong individual feeling. His friend, Mr. Donaldson, has told us that he never remembers Whitman shedding a tear of grief over the death of any friend. Tears of joy he shed often; but no tear of sorrow, of personal regret. It is true that Mr. Donaldson draws no particular inference from this fact. It seems to me highly significant. The absence of intense emotion is no argument truly for insensibility; but to a man of large, sweeping sympathies such as Whitman the loss of a particular friend did not strike home as it would do in men of subtler temperaments.

Cosmic emotions leave no room for those special manifestations of concentrated feeling in individual instances which men with a narrower range of sympathies frequently show.

For in denying that Whitman was a man capable of "a very deep human love," no moral censure is implied. If not deep, it was certainly comprehensive; and rarely, if ever, do the two qualities coexist. Depth of feeling is not to be found in men of the tolerant, passive type; it is the intolerant, comparatively narrow-minded man who loves deeply; the man of few friends, not the man who takes the whole human race to his heart in one colossal embrace. Narrowness may exist, of course, without intensity. But intensity of temperament always carries with it a certain forceful narrowness. Such a man, strongly idiosyncratic, with his sympathies running in a special groove, is capable of one or two affections that absorb his entire nature. Those whom he cares for are so subtly bound up with the peculiarities of his temperament that they become a part of his very life. And if they go, so interwoven are their personalities with the fibres of his being, that part of his life goes with them. To such the death of an intimate friend is a blow that shatters them beyond recovery. Courage and endurance, indeed, they may show, and the undiscerning may never note how fell the blow has been. But though the healing finger of Time will assuage the wound, the scars they will carry to their dying day.

As a rule, such men, lovable as they may be to the few, are not of the stuff of which social reformers are made. They feel too keenly, too sensitively, are guided too much by individual temperamental preferences. It is of no use for any man who has to deal with coarse-grained humanity, with all sorts and conditions of men, to be fastidious in his tastes. A certain bluntness, a certain rude hardiness, a certain evenness of disposition is absolutely necessary. We are told of Whitman by one of his most ardent admirers that his life was "a pleased, uninterested saunter through the world--no hurry, no fever, no strife, hence no bitterness, no depression, no wasted energies . . . in all his tastes and attractions always aiming to live thoroughly in the free nonchalant spirit of the day."

Yes; this is the type of man wanted as a social pioneer, as a poet of the people. A man who felt more acutely, for whom the world was far too terrible a place for sauntering, would be quite unfitted for Whitman's task. It was essential that he should have lacked deep individual affection. Something had to be sacrificed for the work he had before him, and we need not lament that he had no predilection for those intimate personal ties that mean so much to some.

A man who has to speak a word of cheer to so many can ill afford to linger with the few. He is not even concerned to convert you to his way of thinking. He throws out a hint, a suggestion, the rest you must do for yourself.

"I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a casual look upon you, and then averts his face. Leaving you to prove and define it. Expecting the main things from you."

Nowhere are Whitman's qualities more admirably shown than in his attitude towards the average human being. As a rule the ordinary man is not a person whom the Poet delights to honour. He is concerned with the exceptional, the extraordinary type. Whitman's attitude then is of special interest.

"I will leave all and come and make the hymns of you; None has understood you, but I understand you; None has done justice to you--you have not done justice to yourself. None but has found you imperfect; I only find no imperfection in you. None but would subordinate you; I only am he who will never consent to subordinate you."

* * * * *

"Painters have painted their swarming groups, and the centre figure of all; From the head of the centre figure, spreading a nimbus of gold-coloured light. But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of gold-coloured light. From My hand, from the brain of every man and woman it streams effulgently flowing for ever. O! I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you! You have not known what you are; you have slumbered upon yourself all your time. . . ."

And so on, in a vein of courageous cheer, spoken with the big, obtrusive, genial egotism that always meets us in Whitman's writings. Whitman's egotism proves very exasperating to some readers, but I do not think it should trouble us much. After all it is the egotism of a simple, natural, sincere nature; there is no self-satisfied smirk about it, no arrogance. He is conscious of his powers, and is quite frank in letting you know this. Perhaps his boisterous delight in his own prowess may jar occasionally on the nerves; but how much better than the affected humility of some writers. And the more you study his writings the less does this egotism affect even the susceptible. Your ears get attuned to the pitch of the voice, you realize that the big drum is beaten with a purpose. For it must be remembered that it is an egotism entirely emptied of condescension. He is vain certainly, but mainly because he glories in the common heritage, because he feels he is one of the common people. He is proud assuredly, but it is pride that exults in traits that he shares in common with the artist, the soldier, and the sailor. He is no writer who plays down to the masses, who will prophesy fair things--like the mere demagogue--in order to win their favour. And it is a proof of his plain speaking, of his fearless candour, that for the most part the very men for whom he wrote care little for him.

Conventionality rules every class in the community. Whitman's gospel of social equality is not altogether welcome to the average man. One remembers Mr. Barrie's pleasant satire of social distinction in _The Admirable Crichton_, where the butler resents his radical master's suggestion that no real difference separates employer and employed. He thinks it quite in keeping with the eternal fitness of things that his master should assert the prerogative of "Upper Dog," and points out how that there are many social grades below stairs, and that an elaborate hierarchy separates the butler at one end from the "odds and ends" at the other.

In like manner the ordinary citizen resents Whitman's genuine democratic spirit, greatly preferring the sentimental Whiggism of Tennyson.

Whitman reminds us by his treatment of the vulgar, the ordinary, the commonplace, that he signalizes a new departure in literature. Of poets about the people there have been many, but he is the first genuine Poet _of_ the People.

Art is in its essence aristocratic, it strives after selectness, eschews the trivial and the trite. There is, therefore, in literature always a tendency towards conservatism; the literary artist grows more and more fastidious in his choice of words; the cheap and vulgar must be rigorously excluded, and only those words carrying with them stately and beautiful associations are to be countenanced. Thus Classicism in Art constantly needs the freshening, broadening influence of Romanticism.

What Conservatism and Liberalism are to Politics Classicism and Romanticism are to Art. Romantic revolutions have swept over literature before the nineteenth century, and Shakespeare was the first of our great Romantics. Then with the reaction Formalism and Conservatism crept in again. But the Romantic Revival at the beginning of the nineteenth century went much further than previous ones. Out of the throes of the Industrial Revolution had been born a lusty, clamorous infant that demanded recognition--the new Demos. And it claimed not only recognition in politics, but recognition in literature. Wordsworth and Shelley essayed to speak for it with varying success; but Wordsworth was too exclusive, and Shelley--the most sympathetic of all our poets till the coming of Browning--was too ethereal in his manner. Like his own skylark, he sang to us poised midway between earth and heaven; a more emphatically flesh and blood personage was wanted.

Here and there a writer of genuine democratic feeling, like Ebenezer Elliott, voiced the aspirations of the people, but only on one side. Thomas Hood and Mrs. Browning sounded a deeper note; but the huge, clamorous populace needed a yet fuller note, a more penetrating insight, a more forceful utterance. And in America, with its seething democracy--a democracy more urgent, more insistent than our own--it found its spokesman. That it did not recognize him, and is only just beginning to do so, is not remarkable. It did not recognize him, for it had scarcely recognized itself. Only dimly did it realize its wants and aspirations. Whitman divined them; he is the Demos made articulate.