Chapter 7

Then Whitman had a curious habit of standing apart, as it were, and looking upon himself and his career as of some other person. He was interested in his own cause, and took a hand in the discussion. From first to last he had the habit of regarding himself objectively. On his deathbed he seemed to be a spectator of his own last moments, and was seen to feel his pulse a few minutes before he breathed his last.

He has recorded this trait in his poems:--

"Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am, Stands amused, complacent, compassionate, idle, waiting, Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next, Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it."

As also in this from "Calamus:"--

"That shadow my likeness that goes to and fro seeking a livelihood, chattering, chaffering, How often I find myself standing and looking at it where it flits, How often I question and doubt whether that is really me; But among my lovers, and caroling these songs, Oh, I never doubt whether that is really me."

Whitman always speaks as one having authority and not as a scribe, not as a mere man of letters. This is the privilege of the divine egoism of the prophet.

Like the utterances of the biblical writers, without argument, without elaboration, his mere dictum seems the word of fate. It is not the voice of a man who has made his way through the world by rejecting and denying, but by accepting all and rising superior. What the "push of reading" or the push of argument could not start is often started and clinched by his mere authoritative "I say."

"I say where liberty draws not the blood out of slavery, there slavery draws the blood out of liberty,"... "I say the human shape or face is so great it must never be made ridiculous; I say for ornaments nothing outré can be allowed, And that anything is most beautiful without ornament, And that exaggerations will be sternly revenged in your own physiology and in other persons' physiologies also.

"Think of the past; I warn you that in a little while others will find their past in you and your times.... Think of spiritual results. Sure as the earth swims through the heavens, does every one of its objects pass into spiritual results. Think of manhood, and you to be a man; Do you count manhood, and the sweet of manhood, nothing? Think of womanhood and you to be a woman; The Creation is womanhood; Have I not said that womanhood involves all? Have I not told how the universe has nothing better than the best womanhood?"

Egotism is usually intolerant, but Whitman was one of the most tolerant of men.

A craving for sympathy and personal affection he certainly had; to be valued as a human being was more to him than to be valued as a poet. His strongest attachments were probably for persons who had no opinion, good or bad, of his poetry at all.

VI

Under close scrutiny his egotism turns out to be a kind of altru-egotism, which is vicarious and all-inclusive of his fellows. It is one phase of his democracy, and is vital and radical in his pages. It is a high, imperturbable pride in his manhood and in the humanity which he shares with all. It is the exultant and sometimes almost arrogant expression of the feeling which underlies and is shaping the whole modern world--the feeling and conviction that the individual man is above all forms, laws, institutions, conventions, bibles, religions--that the divinity of kings, and the sacredness of priests of the old order, pertains to the humblest person.

It was a passion that united him to his fellows rather than separated him from them. His pride was not that of a man who sets himself up above others, or who claims some special advantage or privilege, but that godlike quality that would make others share its great good-fortune. Hence we are not at all shocked when the poet, in the fervor of his love for mankind, determinedly imputes to himself all the sins and vices and follies of his fellow-men. We rather glory in it. This self-abasement is the seal of the authenticity of his egotism. Without those things there might be some ground for the complaint of a Boston critic of Whitman that his work was not noble, because it celebrated pride, and did not inculcate the virtues of humility and self-denial. The great lesson of the "Leaves," flowing curiously out of its pride and egotism, is the lesson of charity, of self-surrender, and the free bestowal of yourself upon all hands.

The law of life of great art is the law of life in ethics, and was long ago announced.

He that would lose his life shall find it; he who gives himself the most freely shall the most freely receive. Whitman made himself the brother and equal of all, not in word, but in very deed; he was in himself a compend of the people for which he spoke, and this breadth of sympathy and free giving of himself has resulted in an unexpected accession of power.

HIS RELATION TO ART AND LITERATURE

I

Whitman protests against his "Leaves" being judged merely as literature; but at the same time, if they are not good literature, that of course ends the matter. Still while the questions of art, of form, of taste, are paramount in most other poets,--certainly in all third and fourth rate poets, in Whitman they are swallowed up in other questions and values.

In numerous passages, by various figures and allegories, Whitman indicates that he would not have his book classed with the order of mere literary productions.

"Shut not your doors to me, proud libraries," he says in one of the "Inscriptions,"--

"For that which was lacking in all your well-fill'd shelves, yet needed most, I bring. Forth from the war emerging, a book I have made, The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything, A book separate, not link'd with the rest nor felt by the intellect, But you, ye untold latencies will thrill to every page."

Not linked with the studied and scholarly productions, not open to the mere bookish mind, but more akin to the primitive utterances and oracles of historic humanity. A literary age like ours lays great stress upon the savor of books, art, culture, and has little taste for the savor of real things, the real man, which we get in Whitman.

"It is the true breath of humanity," says Renan, "and not literary merit, that constitutes the beautiful." An Homeric poem written to-day, he goes on to say, would not be beautiful, because it would not be true; it would not contain this breath of a living humanity. "It is not Homer who is beautiful, it is the Homeric life." The literary spirit begat Tennyson, begat Browning, begat the New England poets, but it did not in the same sense beget Whitman, any more than it begat Homer or Job or Isaiah. The artist may delight in him and find his own ideals there; the critic may study him and find the poet master of all his weapons; the disciple of culture will find, as Professor Triggs has well said, that "there is no body of writings in literature which demands a wider conversancy with the best that has been thought or said in the world,"--yet the poet escapes from all hands that would finally hold him and monopolize him. Whitman is an immense solvent,--forms, theories, rules, criticisms, disappear in his fluid, teeming pages. Much can be deduced from him, because much went to the making up of his point of view. He makes no criticism, yet a far-reaching criticism is implied in the very start of his poems. No modern poet presupposes so much, or requires so much preliminary study and reflection. He brings a multitude of questions and problems, and, what is singular, he brings them in himself; they are implied in his temper, and in his attitude toward life and reality.

Whitman says he has read his "Leaves" to himself in the open air, that he has tried himself by the elemental laws; and tells us in many ways, direct and indirect, that the standards he would be tried by are not those of art or books, but of absolute nature. He has been laughed at for calling himself a "Kosmos," but evidently he uses the term to indicate this elemental, dynamic character of his work,--its escape from indoor, artificial standards, its aspiration after the "amplitude of the earth, and the coarseness and sexuality of the earth, and the great charity of the earth, and the equilibrium also."

II

Unless the poetic perception is fundamental in us, and can grasp the poetry of things, actions, characters, multitudes, heroisms, we shall read Whitman with very poor results. Unless America, the contemporary age, life, nature, are poetical to us, Whitman will not be. He has aimed at the larger poetry of forces, masses, persons, enthusiasms, rather than at the poetry of the specially rare and fine. He kindles in me the delight I have in space, freedom, power, the elements, the cosmic, democracy, and the great personal qualities of self-reliance, courage, candor, charity.

Always in the literary poets are we impressed with the art of the poet as something distinct from the poet himself, and more or less put on. The poet gets himself up for the occasion; he assumes the pose and the language of the poet, as the priest assumes the pose and the language of devotion. In Whitman the artist and the man are one. He never gets himself up for the occasion. Our pleasure in him is rarely or never our pleasure in the well-dressed, the well-drilled, the cultivated, the refined, the orderly, but it is more akin to our pleasure in real things, in human qualities and powers, in freedom, health, development. Yet I never open his book without being struck afresh with its pictural quality, its grasp of the concrete, its vivid realism, its intimate sense of things, persons, truths, qualities, such as only the greatest artists can give us, and such as we can never get in mere prose. It is as direct as a challenge, as personal as a handshake, and yet withal how mystical, how elusive, how incommensurable! To deny that Whitman belongs to the fraternity of great artists, the shapers and moulders of the ideal,--those who breathe the breath of life into the clay or stone of common facts and objects, who make all things plastic and the vehicles of great and human emotions,--is to read him very inadequately, to say the least. To get at Walt Whitman you must see through just as much as you do in dealing with nature; you are to bring the same interpretive imagination. You are not to be balked by what appears to be the coarse and the familiar, or his rank contemporaneity; after a time you will surely see the lambent spiritual flames that play about it all.

"Prophetic spirit of materials shifting and flickering about me,"

and his cosmic splendor, depth, and power. It is not the denial of art, it is a new affirmation of life. It is one phase of his democracy. It is the logical conclusion of the vestless and coatless portrait of himself that appeared in the first edition of his poems. He would give us more of the man, a fuller measure of personal, concrete, human qualities, than any poet before him. He strips away the artificial wrappings and illusions usual in poetry, and relies entirely upon the native and intrinsic. He will have no curtains, he says,--not the finest,--between himself and his reader.

"Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems, You shall possess the good of the earth and sun (there are millions of suns left), You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books, You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself."

This is a hint of his democracy as applied to literature,--more direct and immediate contact with the primary and universal, less of the vestments and trappings of art and more of the push and power of original character and of nature.

III

It seems to me it is always in order to protest against the narrow and dogmatic spirit that so often crops out in current criticism touching this matter of art. "The boundaries of art are jealously guarded," says a recent authority, as if art had boundaries like a state or province that had been accurately surveyed and fixed,--as if art was a fact and not a spirit.

Now I shall deny at the outset that there are any bounds of art, or that art is in any sense an "enclosure,"--a province fenced off and set apart from the rest,--any more than religion is an enclosure, though so many people would like to make it so. Art is commensurate with the human spirit. I should even deny that there are any principles of art in the sense that there are principles of mechanics or of mathematics. Art has but one principle, one aim,--to produce an impression, a powerful impression, no matter by what means, or if it be by reversing all the canons of taste and criticism. Name any principle, so called, and some day a genius shall be born who will produce his effects in defiance of it, or by appearing to reverse it. Such a man as Turner seemed, at first sight, to set at defiance all correct notions of art. The same with Wagner in music, the same with Whitman in poetry. The new man is impossible till he appears, and, when he appears, in proportion to his originality and power does it take the world a longer or shorter time to adjust its critical standards to him. But it is sure to do so at last. There is nothing final in art: its principles follow and do not lead the creator; they are deductions from his work, not its inspiration. We demand of the new man, of the overthrower of our idols, but one thing,--has he authentic inspiration and power? If he has not, his pretensions are soon exploded. If he has, we cannot put him down, any more than we can put down a law of nature, and we very soon find some principle of art that fits his case. Is there no room for the new man? But the new man makes room for himself, and if he be of the first order he largely makes the taste by which he is appreciated, and the rules of art by which he is to be judged.

IV

The trouble with most of us is that we found our taste for poetry upon particular authors, instead of upon literature as a whole, or, better yet, upon life and reality. Hence we form standards instead of principles. Standards are limited, rigid, uncompromising, while principles are flexible, expansive, creative. If we are wedded to the Miltonic standard of poetry, the classic standards, we shall have great difficulties with Whitman; but if we have founded our taste upon natural principles--if we have learned to approach literature through reality, instead of reality through literature--we shall not be the victims of any one style or model; we shall be made free of all. The real test of art, of any art, as Burke long ago said, and as quoted by Mr. Howells in his trenchant little volume called "Criticism and Fiction," is to be sought outside of art, namely, in nature. "I can judge but poorly of anything while I measure it by no other standard than itself. The true standard of the arts is in every man's power; and an easy observation of the most common, sometimes of the meanest, things in nature will give the truest lights." It is thought that the preëminence of the Greek standards is settled when we say they are natural. Yes, but Nature is not Greek. She is Asiatic, German, English, as well.

V

In poetry, in art, a man must sustain a certain vital relation to his work, and that work must sustain a certain vital relation to the laws of mind and of life. That is all, and that leaves the doors very wide. We are not to ask, Is it like this or like that? but, Is it vital, is it real, is it a consistent, well-organized whole?

The poet must always interpret himself and nature after his own fashion. Is his fashion adequate? Is the interpretation vivid and real? Do his lines cut to the quick, and beget heat and joy in the soul? If we cannot make the poet's ideal our own by sharing his enthusiasm for it, the trouble is as likely to be in ourselves as in him. In any case he must be a law unto himself.

The creative artist differs from the mere writer or thinker in this: he sustains a direct personal relation to his subject through emotion, intuition, will. The indirect, impersonal relation which works by reflection, comparison, and analysis is that of the critic and philosopher. The man is an artist when he gives us a concrete and immediate impression of reality: from his hands we get the thing itself; from the critic and thinker we get ideas _about_ the thing. The poet does not merely say the world is beautiful; he shows it as beautiful: he does not describe the flower; he places it before us. What are the enemies of art? Reflection, didacticism, description, the turgid, the obscure. A poet with a thesis to sustain is more or less barred from the freedom of pure art. It is by direct and unconsidered expression, says Scherer, that art communicates with reality. The things that make for art, then, are feeling, intuition, sentiment, soul, a fresh and vigorous sense of real things,--in fact, all that makes for life, health, and wholeness. Goethe is more truly an artist in the first part of Faust than in the second; Arnold has a more truly artistic mind than Lowell.

The principles of art are always the same in the respect I have indicated, just as the principles of life are always the same, or of health and longevity are always the same. No writer is an artist who is related to his subject simply by mental or logical grip alone: he must have a certain emotional affiliation and identity with it; he does not so much convey to us ideas and principles as pictures, parables, impressions,--a lively sense of real things. When we put Whitman outside the pale of art, we must show his shortcomings here; we must show that he is not fluid and generative,--that he paints instead of interprets, that he gives us reasons instead of impulses, a stone when we ask for bread. "I do not give a little charity," he says; "when I give, I give myself." This the artist always does, not his mind merely, but his soul, his personality. "Leaves of Grass" is as direct an emanation from a central personal force as any book in literature, and always carries its own test and its own proof. It never hardens into a system, it never ceases to be penetrated with will and emotion, it never declines from the order of deeds to the order of mere thoughts. All is movement, progress, evolution, picture, parable, impulse.

It is on these grounds that Whitman, first of all, is an artist. He has the artist temperament. His whole life was that of a man who lives to ideal ends,--who lived to bestow himself upon others, to extract from life its meaning and its joy.

VI

Whitman has let himself go, and trusted himself to the informal and spontaneous, to a degree unprecedented. His course required a self-reliance of the highest order; it required an innate cohesion and homogeneity, a firmness and consistency of individual outline, that few men have. It would seem to be much easier to face the poet's problem in the old, well-worn forms--forms that are so winsome and authoritative in themselves--than, to stand upon a basis so individual and intrinsic as Whitman chose to stand upon. His course goes to the quick at once. How much of a man are you? How vital and fundamental is your poetic gift? Can it go alone? Can it face us in undress?

Never did the artist more cunningly conceal himself; never did he so completely lose himself in the man, identifying himself with the natural and spontaneous; never emerging and challenging attention on his own account, denying us when we too literally seek him, mocking us when we demand his credentials, and revealing himself only when we have come to him upon his own terms.

The form the poet chose favored this self-revelation; there is nothing, no outside conscious art, to stand between himself and his reader. "This is no book," he says: "who touches this touches a man." In one sense Whitman is without art,--the impression which he always seeks to make is that of reality itself. He aims to give us reality without the usual literary veils and illusions,--the least possible amount of the artificial, the extrinsic, the put-on, between himself and his reader. He banishes from his work, as far as possible, what others are so intent upon,--all atmosphere of books and culture, all air of literary intention and decoration,--and puts his spirit frankly and immediately to his readers. The verse does not seem to have been shaped; it might have grown: it takes no apparent heed of externals, but flows on like a brook, irregular, rhythmical, and always fluid and real. A cry will always be raised against the producer in any field who discards the authority of the models and falls back upon simple Nature, or upon himself, as Millet did in painting, and Wagner in music, and Whitman in poetry.

Whitman's working ideas, the principles that inspired him, are all directly related to life and the problems of life; they are democracy, nature, freedom, love, personality, religion: while the ideas from which our poets in the main draw their inspiration are related to art,--they are literary ideas, such as lucidity, form, beauty.

VII

Much light is thrown upon Whitman's literary methods and aims by a remark which he once made in conversation with Dr. Bucke:--

"I have aimed to make the book simple,--tasteless, or with little taste,--with very little or no perfume. The usual way is for the poet or writer to put in as much taste, perfume, piquancy, as he can; but this is not the way of nature, which I take for model. Nature presents us her productions--her air, earth, waters, even her flowers, grains, meats--with faint and delicate flavor and fragrance, but these in the long run make the deepest impression. Man, dealing with natural things, constantly aims to increase their piquancy. By crossing and selection he deepens and intensifies the scents and hues of flowers, the tastes of fruits, and so on. He pursues the same method in poetry,--that is, strives for strong light or shade, for high color, perfume, pungency, in all ways for the greatest immediate effect. In so doing he leaves the true way, the way of Nature, and, in the long run, comes far short of producing her effects."

More light of the same kind is thrown upon his methods by the following passage from the preface to the first edition of his poems in 1855.

"To speak in literature," he says, "with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movements of animals, and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside, is the flawless triumph of art." And again: "The great poet has less a marked style, and is more the channel of thoughts and things without increase or diminution, and is the free channel of himself. He swears to his art, I will not be meddlesome; I will not have in my writing any elegance, or effect, or originality, to hang in the way between me and the rest like curtains. I will have nothing hang in the way, not the richest curtains. What I tell, I tell for precisely what it is. Let who may exalt or startle or fascinate or soothe, I will have purpose, as health or heat or snow has, and be as regardless of observation. What I experience or portray shall go from my composition without a shred of my composition. You shall stand by my side and look in the mirror with me."

VIII