Chapter 2

"Here is Goethe: the horrified squealing of prudes is not yet silent over pages of Wilhelm Meister: that high and chaste book, the Elective Affinities, still pumps up oaths from clergymen. Walpurgis has hardly ceased its uproar over Faust. Out with Goethe!

"Here is Cervantes: open Don Quixote, paragon of romances, highest result of Spain, best and sufficient reason for her life among the nations, a laughing novel which is a weeping poem. But talk such as this of Sancho Panza and Tummas Cecial under the cork trees, and these coarse stories and bawdy words, and this free and gross comedy--is it to be endured? Out with Cervantes!

"And here is Lord Bacon himself, in one of whose pages you may read, done from the Latin by Spedding into a magnificent golden thunder of English, the absolute defense of the free spirit of the great authors, coupled with stern rebuke to the spirit that would pick and choose, as dastard and effeminate. Out with Lord Bacon!

"Not him only, not these only, not only the writers are under the ban. Here is Phidias, gorgeous sculptor in gold and ivory, giant dreamer of the Infinite in marble; but he will not use the fig-leaf. Here is Rembrandt, who paints the Holland landscape, the Jew, the beggar, the burgher, in lights and glooms of Eternity; and his pictures have been called 'indecent,' Here is Mozart, his music rich with the sumptuous color of all sunsets; and it has been called 'sensual.' Here is Michael Angelo, who makes art tremble with a new and strange afflatus, and gives Europe novel and sublime forms that tower above the centuries, and accost the Greek; and his works have been called 'bestial.' Out with them all!"

In his summing up, stirred to wrath by the low tone of contemporary comment, O'Connor proceeded to expound the philosophy of literary ideals:

"The level of the great books is the Infinite, the Absolute. To contain all, by containing the premise, the truth, the idea and feeling of all, to tally the universe by profusion, variety, reality, mystery, enclosure, power, terror, beauty, service; to be great to the utmost conceivability of greatness--what higher level than this can literature spring to? Up on the highest summit stand such works, never to be surpassed, never to be supplanted. Their indecency is not that of the vulgar; their vulgarity is not that of the low. Their evil, if it be evil, is not there for nothing--it serves; at the base of it is Love. Every poet of the highest quality is, in the masterly coinage of the author of Leaves of Grass, a kosmos. His work, like himself, is a second world, full of contrarieties, strangely harmonized, and moral indeed, but only as the world is moral. Shakespeare is all good, Rabelais is all good, Montaigne is all good, not because all the thoughts, the words, the manifestations are so, but because at the core, and permeating all, is an ethic intention--a love which, through mysterious, indirect, subtle, seemingly absurd, often terrible and repulsive, means, seeks to uplift, and never to degrade. It is the spirit in which authorship is pursued, as Augustus Schlegel has said, that makes it either an infamy or a virtue; and the spirit of the great authors, no matter what their letter, is one with that which pervades the Creation. In mighty love, with implements of pain and pleasure, of good and evil, Nature develops man; genius also, in mighty love, with implements of pain and pleasure, of good and evil, develops man; no matter what the means, that is the end.

"Tell me not, then, of the indecent passages of the great poets. The world, which is the poem of God, is full of indecent passages! 'Shall there be evil in a city and the Lord hath not done it?' shouts Amos. 'I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil; I, the Lord, do all these things,' thunders Isaiah. 'This,' says Coleridge, 'is the deep abyss of the mystery of God.' Ay, and the profound of the mystery of genius also! Evil is part of the economy of genius, as it is part of the economy of Deity. Gentle reviewers endeavor to find excuses for the freedoms of geniuses. 'It is to prove that they were above conventionalities.' 'It is referable to the age.' Oh, Ossa on Pelion, mount piled on mount, of error and folly! What has genius, spirit of the absolute and the eternal, to do with the definitions of position, or conventionalities, or the age? Genius puts indecencies into its works, because God puts them into His world. Whatever the special reason in each case, this is the general reason in all cases. They are here, because they are there. That is the eternal why. No; Alphonso of Castile thought that, if he had been consulted at the Creation, he could have given a few hints to the Almighty. Not I. I play Alphonso neither to genius nor to God.

"What is this poem, for the giving of which to America and the world, and for that alone, its author has been dismissed with ignominy from a Government office? It is a poem which Schiller might have hailed as the noblest specimen of native literature, worthy of a place beside Homer. It is, in the first place, a work purely and entirely American, autochthonic, sprung from our own soil; no savor of Europe nor the past, nor of any other literature in it; a vast carol of our own land, and of its Present and Future; the strong and haughty psalm of the Republic. There is not one other book, I care not whose, of which this can be said. I weigh my words and have considered well. Every other book by an American author implies, both in form and substance, I cannot even say the European, but the British mind. The shadow of Temple Bar and Arthur's Seat lies dark on all our letters. Intellectually we are still a dependency of Great Britain, and one word--colonial--comprehends and stamps our literature. In no literary form, except our newspapers, has there been anything distinctively American. I note our best books--the works of Jefferson, the romances of Brockden Brown, the speeches of Webster, Everett's rhetoric, the divinity of Channing, some of Cooper's novels, the writings of Theodore Parker, the poetry of Bryant, the masterly law arguments of Lysander Spooner, the miscellanies of Margaret Fuller, the histories of Hildreth, Bancroft and Motley, Ticknor's History of Spanish Literature, Judd's Margaret, the political treatises of Calhoun, the rich, benignant poems of Longfellow, the ballads of Whittier, the delicate songs of Philip Pendleton Cooke, the weird poetry of Edgar Poe, the wizard tales of Hawthorne, Irving's Knickerbocker, Delia Bacon's splendid sibyllic book on Shakespeare, the political economy of Carey, the prison letters and immortal speech of John Brown, the lofty patrician eloquence of Wendell Phillips, and those diamonds of the first water, the great clear essays and greater poems of Emerson. This literature has often commanding merits, and much of it is very precious to me; but in respect to its national character, all that can be said is that it is tinged, more or less deeply, with America; and the foreign model, the foreign standards, the foreign ideas, dominate over it all.

"At most, our best books were but struggling beams; behold in Leaves of Grass the immense and absolute sunrise! It is all our own! The nation is in it! In form a series of chants, in substance it is an epic of America. It is distinctively and utterly American. Without model, without imitation, without reminiscence, it is evolved entirely from our own polity and popular life. Look at what it celebrates and contains! hardly to be enumerated without sometimes using the powerful, wondrous phrases of its author, so indissoluble are they with the things described. The essences, the events, the objects of America; the myriad, varied landscapes; the teeming and giant cities; the generous and turbulent populations; the prairie solitudes, the vast pastoral plateaus; the Mississippi; the land dense with villages and farms; the habits, manners, customs; the enormous diversity of temperatures; the immense geography; the red aborigines passing away, 'charging the water and the land with names'; the early settlements; the sudden uprising and defiance of the Revolution; the august figure of Washington; the formation and sacredness of the Constitution; the pouring in of the emigrants; the million-masted harbors; the general opulence and comfort; the fisheries, and whaling, and gold-digging, and manufactures, and agriculture; the dazzling movement of new States, rushing to be great; Nevada rising, Dakota rising, Colorado rising; the tumultuous civilization around and beyond the Rocky Mountains, thundering and spreading; the Union impregnable; feudalism in all its forms forever tracked and assaulted; liberty deathless on these shores; the noble and free character of the people; the equality of male and female; the ardor, the fierceness, the friendship, the dignity, the enterprise, the affection, the courage, the love of music, the passion for personal freedom; the mercy and justice and compassion of the people; the popular faults and vices and crimes; the deference of the President to the private citizen; the image of Christ forever deepening in the public mind as the brother of despised and rejected persons; the promise and wild song of the future; the vision of the Federal Mother, seated with more than antique majesty in the midst of her many children; the pouring glories of the hereafter; the vistas of splendor, incessant and branching, the tremendous elements, breeds, adjustments of America--with all these, with more, with everything transcendent, amazing and new, undimmed by the pale cast of thought, and with the very color and brawn of actual life, the whole gigantic epic of our continental being unwinds in all its magnificent reality in these pages. To understand Greece, study the Iliad and the Odyssey; study Leaves of Grass to understand America. Her democracy is there. Would you have a text-book of democracy? The writings of Jefferson are good; De Tocqueville is better; but the great poet always contains historian and philosopher--and to know the comprehending spirit of this country, you shall question these insulted pages."

IV

It would be wearisome to refer in detail to the numerous estimates of Leaves of Grass which have found print since 1870. The increasing literature about Whitman bespeaks interest, and the kindly tenor of most commentators testifies to the enlarging appreciation of the Good Gray Poet. Within the past decade there have appeared seven biographies of him, all but one of them wholly and frankly lavish in his praise, and that one not unfriendly in criticism. Numerous book chapters have dealt with him in recognition of his genius, and only here and there have there been suggestions of earlier absolute condemnation. Among the biographers have been, in chronological sequence, Richard Maurice Bucke, John Burroughs, John Addington Symonds, Isaac Hull Platt, Geo. R. Carpenter, Bliss Perry, Henry Bryan Binns. Among the notable contributors of book chapters on Whitman may be mentioned from a list of two score or more, Robert Louis Stevenson, in his Studies of Men and Books; A. T. Quiller-Couch, in his Adventures in Criticism; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in his Contemporaries; Havelock Ellis, in The New Spirit; Edward Dowden, in his Studies in Literature; Edmund Gosse, in his Critical Kit-Kats; Hamilton Mabie, in his Backgrounds of Literature; Brander Matthews, in his Aspects of Fiction; Edmund Clarence Stedman, in his Poets of America; George Santayana, in The Poetry of Barbarism; and Algernon Charles Swinburne, in his Studies in Prose and Poetry. These have been mentioned specifically because they average the good and the bad rather than join in a chorus of indiscriminate praise. Indeed, the two last mentioned are distinctly hostile in tone. Swinburne, who in his earlier volume Songs before Sunrise, addressed a long poem, To Walt Whitman in America, fervent in praise,

"Send but a song oversea for us, Heart of their hearts who are free, Heart of their singer to be for us More than our singing can be,"

revoked all his former words of sympathetic admiration and in his later volume, printed in 1894, vehemently fell upon Whitman in this strain:

"There is no subject which may not be treated with success (I do not say there are no subjects which on other than artistic grounds it may not be as well to avoid, it may not be better to pass by) if the poet, by instinct or by training, knows exactly how to handle it aright, to present it without danger of just or rational offense. For evidence of this truth we need look no further than the pastorals of Virgil and Theocritus. But under the dirty clumsy paws of a harper whose plectrum is a muck-rake any tune will become a chaos of discords, though the motive of the tune should be the first principle of nature--the passion of man for woman or the passion of woman for man. And the unhealthily demonstrative and obtrusive animalism of the Whitmaniad is as unnatural, as incompatible with the wholesome instincts of human passion, as even the filthy and inhuman asceticism of SS. Macarius and Simeon Stylites. If anything can justify the serious and deliberate display of merely physical emotion in literature or in art, it must be one of two things; intense depth of feeling expressed with inspired perfection of simplicity, with divine sublimity of fascination, as by Sappho; or transcendent supremacy of actual and irresistible beauty in such revelation of naked nature as was possible to Titian. But Mr. Whitman's Eve is a drunken apple-woman, indecently sprawling in the slush and garbage of the gutter amid the rotten refuse of her overturned fruit-stall: but Mr. Whitman's Venus is a Hottentot wench under the influence of cantharides and adulterated rum."

Weighing the good and the bad, Robert Louis Stevenson in his essay does not stint admiration nor withhold blame:

"He has chosen a rough, unrhymed, lyrical verse; sometimes instinct with a fine processional movement; often so rugged and careless that it can only be described by saying that he has not taken the trouble to write prose * * * and one thing is certain, that no one can appreciate Whitman's excellences until he has grown accustomed to his faults."

Indicating the attitude of his partisans, John Burroughs' summing up is fairly representative:

"Just as ripe, mellowed, storied, ivy-towered, velvet-turfed England lies back of Tennyson, and is vocal through him; just as canny, covenanting, conscience-burdened, craggy, sharp-tongued Scotland lies back of Carlyle; just as thrifty, well-schooled, well-housed, prudent and moral New England lies back of her group of poets, and is voiced by them--so America as a whole, our turbulent democracy, our self-glorification, our faith in the future, our huge mass-movements, our continental spirit, our sprawling, sublime and unkempt nature lie back of Whitman, and are implied by his work."

It is not the purpose of this book to interpret Whitman either as a prophet or a poet, except inferentially as the words of his critics may carry distinct impressions. After all, the justest estimate of Whitman and his book is his own. Whitman's puzzling characteristics are best understood if we realize that Leaves of Grass is an autobiography--and an extraordinarily candid one--of a man whose peculiar temperament found expression in prose-verse. His gentleness, his brusqueness, his egotism, his humility, his grossness, his finer nature, his crudeness, his eloquence, are all here. To him they were the attributes of all mankind.

"I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise; Regardless of others, ever regardful of others, Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man, Stuff'd with the stuff that is coarse, and stuff'd with the stuff that is fine."

In his virile young manhood he announced with gusto: "I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world."

In his serene old age he said: "Over the tree-tops I float thee a song."

And this was his conclusion: "I call to the world to distrust the accounts of my friends, but listen to my enemies as I myself do. I charge you forever reject those who would expound me, for I cannot expound myself."

Whoso challenges Whitman's gift of song may not at any rate deny to him the note of melody. This quality is strong in his titles particularly:

Rise O days from your fathomless deeps. In cabin'd ships at sea. Out of the cradle endlessly rocking. Sands at seventy. The sobbing of the bells. Soon shall the winter's foil be here. Thou mother with thy equal brood. To the leaven'd soil they trod. Yon tides with ceaseless swell. When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed. Sparkles from the wheel. Brother of all with generous hand. As a strong bird on pinions free.

For a just estimate of Whitman, as for a clear comprehension of the symbolism contained in Leaves of Grass, a few blades of the latter will not suffice. It must be all, or none. The two poems here given should be taken, therefore, not as representative of the whole, but as types of two widely variant moods:

Of olden time, when it came to pass That the beautiful god, Jesus, should finish his work on earth, Then went Judas, and sold the divine youth, And took pay for his body.

Curst was the deed, even before the sweat of the clutching hand grew dry; And darkness frown'd upon the seller of the like of God, Where, as though earth lifted her breast to throw him from her, and heaven refus'd him, He hung in the air, self-slaughter'd.

The cycles, with their long shadows, have stalked silently forward Since those days--many a pouch enwrapping meanwhile Its fee, like that paid for the son of Mary.

And still goes one, saying, "What will ye give me, and I will deliver this man unto you?" And they make the covenant, and pay the pieces of silver.

Look forth, deliverer, Look forth, first-born of the dead, Over the tree-tops of Paradise; See thyself in yet-continued bonds, Toilsome and poor, thou bear'st man's form again, Thou art reviled, scourged, put into prison, Hunted from the arrogant equality of the rest; With staves and swords throng the willing servants of authority, Again they surround thee, mad with devilish spite; Toward thee stretch the hands of a multitude, like vultures' talons, The nearest spit in thy face, they smite thee with their palms; Bruised, bloody, and pinion'd is thy body, More sorrowful than death is thy soul.

Witness of anguish, brother of slaves, Not with thy price closed the price of thine image: And still Iscariot plies his trade.

I

The soul, Forever and forever--longer than soil is brown and solid--longer than water ebbs and flows.

II

Each is not for its own sake, I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky are for religion's sake.

III

In this broad earth of ours, Amid the measureless grossness and the slag, Enclosed and safe within its central heart, Nestles the seed perfection. By every life a share or more or less, None born but it is born, conceal'd or unconceal'd the seed is waiting.

IV

Do you not see O my brothers and sisters? It is not chaos or death--it is form, union, plan--it is eternal life--it is Happiness.

V

The song is to the singer, and comes back most to him, The love is to the lover, and comes back most to him--it cannot fail.

VI

I see Hermes, unsuspected, dying, well-beloved, saying to the people _Do not weep for me, This is not my true country, I have lived banish'd from my true country, I now go back there, I return to the celestial sphere where every one goes in his turn._

* * * * *

This is an attempt, incomplete but fairly representative as to sources, to trace the changing view during half a century of Leaves of Grass and its author.

V

Sonnets and apostrophes in large number addressed to Walt Whitman during the later years of his life, and since his passing away, have appeared in fugitive form in widely separated sources. A selection of these may prove of interest by reason of the names attached, as well as because of the subject:

"The good gray poet" gone! Brave hopeful Walt! He might not be a singer without fault, And his large rough-hewn rhythm did not chime With dulcet daintiness of time and rhyme. He was no neater than wide Nature's wild, More metrical than sea winds. Culture's child, Lapped in luxurious laws of line and lilt, Shrank from him shuddering, who was roughly built As cyclopean temples. Yet there rang True music through his rhapsodies, as he sang Of brotherhood, and freedom, love and hope, With strong, wide sympathy which dared to cope With all life's phases, and call nought unclean. Whilst hearts are generous, and whilst woods are green, He shall find hearers, who in a slack time Of puny bards and pessimistic rhyme, Dared to bid men adventure and rejoice. His "yawp barbaric" was a human voice; The singer was a man. America Is poorer by a stalwart soul today, And may feel pride that she hath given birth To this stout laureate of old Mother Earth. --_Punch_

Good-bye, Walt! Good-bye from all you loved of Earth-- Rock, tree, dumb creature, man and woman-- To you their comrade human. The last assault Ends now, and now in some great world has birth A minstrel, whose strong soul finds broader wings, More brave imaginings. Stars crown the hill-top where your dust shall lie, Even as we say good-bye, Good-bye, old Walt! --_Edmund Clarence Stedman_

He was in love with truth and knew her near-- Her comrade, not her suppliant on the knee: She gave him wild melodious words to be Made music that should haunt the atmosphere. She drew him to her bosom, day-long dear, And pointed to the stars and to the sea, And taught him miracles and mystery, And made him master of the rounded year. Yet one gift did she keep. He looked in vain, Brow-shaded, through the darkness of the mist, Marking a beauty like a wandering breath That beckoned, yet denied his soul a tryst: He sang a passion, yet he saw not plain Till kind earth held him and he spake with death. --_Harrison S. Morris_

Some find thee foul and rank and fetid, Walt, Who cannot tell Arabia from a sty. Thou followeth Truth, nor feareth, nor doth halt; Truth: and the sole uncleanness is a lie. --_William Watson_

Presage of strength yet to be, voice of the youngest of Time, Singer of the golden dawn, From thy great message must come light for the bettering days, Joy to the hands that toil, Might to the hopes that droop, Power to the Nation reborn, Poet and master and seer, helper and friend unto men, Truth that shall pass into the life of us all! --_Louis J. Block_