Chapter 8
But in view of the profound impression Whitman's work has made upon widely different types of mind on both sides of the Atlantic, and in view of the persistent vitality of his fame, the question whether he is inside or outside the pale of art amounts to very little. I quite agree with the late Mrs. Gilchrist, that, when "great meanings and great emotions are expressed with corresponding power, literature has done its best, call it what you please."
That Whitman has expressed great meanings and great emotions with adequate power, even his unfriendly critics admit. Thus Professor Wendell, in an admirable essay on American literature, says that "though Whitman is uncouth, inarticulate, and lacking in a grotesque degree artistic form, yet for all that he can make you feel for the moment how even the ferry-boats plying from New York to Brooklyn are fragments of God's eternities." In the same way Mr. William Clark, his British critic and expounder, says that he is wanting in discrimination and art, "flings his ideas at us in a heap," etc., and yet that the effect of his work is "to stir our emotions, widen our interests, and rally the forces of our moral nature."
It seems to me that a man who, through the printed page, can do these things, must have some kind of art worth considering. If, through his impassioned treatment of a prosy, commonplace object like a ferry-boat, he can so dignify and exalt it, and so fill it with the meanings of the spirit, that it seems like a part of God's eternities, his methods are at least worth inquiring into.
The truth is, Whitman's art, in its lack of extrinsic form and finish, is Oriental rather than Occidental, and is an offense to a taste founded upon the precision and finish of a mechanical age. His verse is like the irregular, slightly rude coin of the Greeks compared with the exact, machine-cut dies of our own day, or like the unfinished look of Japanese pottery beside the less beautiful but more perfect specimens of modern ceramic art.
For present purposes, we may say there are two phases of art,--formal art and creative art. By formal art I mean that which makes a direct appeal to our sense of form,--our sense of the finely carved, the highly wrought, the deftly planned; and by creative art I mean that quickening, fructifying power of the masters, that heat and passion that make the world plastic and submissive to their hands, teeming with new meanings and thrilling with new life.
Formal art is always in the ascendant. Formal anything--formal dress, formal manners, formal religion, formal this and that--always counts for more than the informal, the spontaneous, the original. It is easier, it can be put off and on.
Formal art is nearly always the gift of the minor poet, and often of the major poet also. In such a poet as Swinburne, formal art leads by a great way. The content of his verse,--what is it? In Tennyson as well I should say formal art is in the ascendant. Creative art is his also; Tennyson reaches and moves the spirit, yet his skill is more noteworthy than his power. In Wordsworth, on the other hand, I should say creative art led: the content of his verse is more than its form; his spiritual and religious values are greater than his literary and artistic. The same is true of our own Emerson. Poe, again, is much more as an artist than as a man or a personality.
I hardly need say that in Whitman formal art, the ostensibly artistic, counts for but very little. The intentional artist, the professional poet, is kept entirely in abeyance, or is completely merged and hidden in the man, more so undoubtedly than in any poet this side the old Oriental bards. We call him formless, chaotic, amorphous, etc., because he makes no appeal to our modern highly stimulated sense of art or artificial form. We must discriminate this from our sense of power, our sense of life, our sense of beauty, of the sublime, of the all, which clearly Whitman would reach and move. Whitman certainly has a form of his own: what would a poet, or any writer or worker in the ideal, do without some kind of form? some consistent and adequate vehicle of expression? But Whitman's form is not what is called artistic, because it is not brought within the rules of the prosodical system, and does not appeal to our sense of the consciously shaped and cultivated. It is essentially the prose form heightened and intensified by a deep, strong, lyric and prophetic note.
The bonds and shackles of regular verse-form Whitman threw off. This course seemed to be demanded by the spirit to which he had dedicated himself,--the spirit of absolute unconstraint. The restrictions and hamperings of the scholastic forms did not seem to be consistent with this spirit, which he identified with democracy and the New World. A poet who sets out to let down the bars everywhere, to remove veils and obstructions, to emulate the freedom of the elemental forces, to effuse always the atmosphere of open-air growths and objects, to be as "regardless of observation" as the processes of nature, etc., will not be apt to take kindly to any arbitrary and artificial form of expression. The essentially prose form which Whitman chose is far more in keeping with the spirit and aim of his work than any conventional metrical system could have been. Had he wrought solely as a conscious artist, aiming at the effect of finely chiseled forms, he would doubtless have chosen a different medium.
IX
Whitman threw himself with love and enthusiasm upon this great, crude, seething, materialistic American world. The question is, Did he master it? Is he adequate to absorb and digest it? Does he make man-stuff of it? Is it plastic in his hands? Does he stamp it with his own image? I do not ask, Does he work it up into what are called artistic forms? Does he make it the quarry from which he carves statues or builds temples? because evidently he does not do this, or assume to do it. He is content if he present America and the modern to us as they are inwrought into his own personality, bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, or as character, passion, will, motive, conviction. He would show them subjectively and as living impulses in himself. Of course a great constructive, dramatic poet like Shakespeare would have solved his problem in a different manner, or through the objective, artistic portrayal of types and characters. But the poet and prophet of democracy and of egotism shows us all things in and through himself.
His egotism, or egocentric method, is the fundamental fact about his work. It colors all and determines all. The poems are the direct outgrowth of the personality of the poet; they are born directly upon the ego, as it were, like the fruit of that tropical tree which grows immediately upon the trunk. His work is nearer his radical, primary self than that of most poets. He never leads us away from himself into pleasant paths with enticing flowers of fancy or forms of art. He carves or shapes nothing for its own sake; there is little in the work that can stand on independent grounds as pure art. His work is not material made precious by elaboration and finish, but by its relation to himself and to the sources of life.
X
Whitman was compelled to this negation of extrinsic art by the problem he had set before himself,--first, to arouse, to suggest, rather than to finish or elaborate, less to display any theme or thought than "to bring the reader into the atmosphere of the theme or thought;" secondly, to make his own personality the chief factor in the volume, or present it so that the dominant impression should always be that of the living, breathing man as we meet him and see him and feel him in life, and never as we see him and feel him in books or art,--the man in the form and garb of actual, concrete life, not as poet or artist, but simply as man. This is doubtless the meaning of the vestless and coatless portrait of himself prefixed to the first issue of the "Leaves," to which I have referred. This portrait is symbolical of the whole attitude of the poet toward his task. It was a hint that we must take this poet with very little literary tailoring; it was a hint that he belonged to the open air, and came of the people and spoke in their spirit.
It is never the theme treated, but always the character exploited; never the structure finished, but always the plan suggested; never the work accomplished, but always the impulse imparted,--freedom, power, growth.
"Allons! we must not stop here. However sweet these laid-up stores, however convenient this dwelling, we cannot remain here, However sheltered this port, or however calm these waters, we must not anchor here, However welcome the hospitality that surrounds us we are permitted to receive it but a little while.
"Allons! With power, liberty, the earth, the elements! Health, defiance, gayety, self-esteem, curiosity; Allons! from all formulas! From your formulas, O bat-eyed and materialistic priests!"
This magnificent poem, "The Song of the Open Road," is one of the most significant in Whitman's work. He takes the open road as his type,--not an end in itself, not a fulfillment, but a start, a journey, a progression. It teaches him the profound lesson of reception, "no preference nor denial," and the profounder lesson of liberty and truth:--
"From this hour, freedom! From this hour I ordain myself loosed of limits and imaginary lines, Going where I list--my own master, total and absolute, Listening to others, and considering well what they say, Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating, Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.
"I inhale great draughts of air, The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine."
He will not rest with art, he will not rest with books, he will press his way steadily toward the largest freedom.
"Only the kernel of every object nourishes. Where is he who tears off the husks for you and me? Where is he who undoes stratagems and envelopes for you and me?"
Whitman was not a builder. If he had the architectural power which the great poets have shown, he gave little proof of it. It was not required by the task he set before himself. His book is not a temple: it is a wood, a field, a highway; vista, vista, everywhere,--vanishing lights and shades, truths half disclosed, successions of objects, hints, suggestions, brief pictures, groups, voices, contrasts, blendings, and, above all, the tonic quality of the open air. The shorter poems are like bunches of herbs or leaves, or a handful of sprays gathered in a walk; never a thought carefully carved, and appealing to our sense of artistic form.
The main poem of the book, "The Song of Myself," is a series of utterances, ejaculations, apostrophes, enumerations, associations, pictures, parables, incidents, suggestions, with little or no structural or logical connection, but all emanating from a personality whose presence dominates the page, and whose eye is ever upon us. Without this vivid and intimate sense of the man back of all, of a sane and powerful spirit sustaining ours, the piece would be wild and inchoate.
XI
The reader will be sure to demand of Whitman ample compensation for the absence from his work of those things which current poets give us in such full measure. Whether or not the compensation is ample, whether the music of his verse as of winds and waves, the long, irregular, dithyrambic movement, its fluid and tonic character, the vastness of conception, the large, biblical speech, the surging cosmic emotion, the vivid personal presence as of the living man looking into your eye or walking by your side,--whether all these things, the refreshing quality as of "harsh salt spray" which the poet Lanier found in the "Leaves," the electric currents which Mrs. Gilchrist found there, the "unexcelled imaginative justice of language" which Mr. Stevenson at times found, the religious liberation and faith which Mr. Symonds found, the "incomparable things incomparably well said" of Emerson, the rifle-bullets of Ruskin, the "supreme words" of Colonel Ingersoll, etc.,--whether qualities and effects like these, I say, make up to us for the absence of the traditional poetic graces and adornments, is a question which will undoubtedly long divide the reading world.
In the works upon which our poetic taste is founded, artistic form is paramount; we have never been led to apply to such works open-air standards,--clouds, trees, rivers, spaces,--but the precision and definiteness of the cultured and the artificial. If Whitman had aimed at pure art and had failed, his work would be intolerable. As his French critic, Gabriel Sarrazin, has well said: "In the large work which Whitman attempted, there come no rules save those of nobility and strength of spirit; and these suffice amply to create a most unlooked-for and grandiose aspect of beauty." "Overcrowded and disorderly" as it may seem, "if heroic emotion and thought and enthusiasm vitalize it," the poet has reached his goal.
XII
Sometimes I define Whitman to myself as the poet of the open air,--not because he sings the praises of these things after the manner of the so-called nature-poets, but because he has the quality of things in the open air, the quality of the unhoused, the untamed, the elemental and aboriginal. He pleases and he offends, the same way things at large do. He has the brawn, the indifference, the rudeness, the virility, the coarseness,--something gray, unpronounced, elemental, about him, the effect of mass, size, distance, flowing, vanishing lines, neutral spaces,--something informal, multitudinous, and processional,--something regardless of criticism, that makes no bid for our applause, not calculated instantly to please, unmindful of details, prosaic if we make it so, common, near at hand, and yet that provokes thought and stirs our emotions in an unusual degree. The long lists and catalogues of objects and scenes in Whitman, that have so excited the mirth of the critics, are one phase of his out-of-doors character,--a multitude of concrete objects, a grove, a thicket, a field, a stretch of beach,--every object sharply defined, but no attempt at logical or artistic sequence, the effect of the whole informal, multitudinous. It may be objected to these pages that they consist of a mass of details that do not make a picture. But every line is a picture of a scene or an object. Whitman always keeps up the movement, he never pauses to describe; it is all action.
Passing from such a poet as Tennyson to Whitman is like going from a warm, perfumed interior, with rich hangings, pictures, books, statuary, fine men and women, out into the street, or upon the beach, or upon the hill, or under the midnight stars. We lose something certainly, but do we not gain something also? Do we not gain just what Whitman had in view, namely, direct contact with the elements in which are the sources of our life and health? Do we not gain in scope and power what we lose in art and refinement?
The title, "Leaves of Grass," is full of meaning. What self-knowledge and self-scrutiny it implies! The grass, perennial sprouting, universal, formless, common, the always spread feast of the herds, dotted with flowers, the herbage of the earth, so suggestive of the multitudinous, loosely aggregated, unelaborated character of the book; the lines springing directly out of the personality of the poet, the soil of his life.
"What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest is me,"
says the poet, and this turns out to be the case. We only look to see if in the common and the cheap he discloses new values and new meanings,--if his leaves of grass have the old freshness and nutriment, and be not a mere painted greenness.
"The pure contralto sings in the organ loft, The carpenter dresses his plank--the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp, The married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving dinner, The pilot seizes the king-pin--he heaves down with a strong arm, The mate stands braced in the whale-boat--lance and harpoon are ready, The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches, The deacons are ordained with crossed hands at the altar, The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel, The farmer stops by the bars, as he walks on a First Day loafe, and looks at the oats and rye, The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum, a confirmed case, He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother's bedroom; The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case, He turns his quid of tobacco, while his eyes blurr with the manuscript; The malformed limbs are tied to the anatomist's table, What is removed drops horribly in a pail; The quadroon girl is sold at the stand--the drunkard nods by the bar-room stove, The machinist rolls up his sleeves--the policeman travels his beat--the gate-keeper marks who pass, The young fellow drives the express-wagon--I love him, though I do not know him, The half-breed straps on his light boots to compete in the race, The western turkey-shooting draws old and young--some lean on their rifles, some sit on logs, Out from the crowd steps the marksman, takes his position, levels his piece; The groups of newly-come emigrants cover the wharf or levee, As the woolly-pates hoe in the sugar-field, the overseer views them from his saddle, The bugle calls in the ball-room, the gentlemen run for their partners, the dancers bow to each other, The youth lies awake in the cedar-roofed garret, and harks to the musical rain, The Wolverine sets traps on the creek that helps fill the Huron, The reformer ascends the platform, he spouts with his mouth and nose,
* * * * *
Seasons pursuing each other, the plougher ploughs, the mower mows, and the winter-grain falls in the ground, Off on the lakes the pike-fisher watches and waits by the hole in the frozen surface, The stumps stand thick round the clearing, the squatter strikes deep with his axe, Flatboatmen make fast, towards dusk, near the cotton-wood or pekan-trees, Coon-seekers go through the regions of the Red River, or through those drained by the Tennessee, or through those of the Arkansas, Torches shine in the dark that hangs on the Chattahooche or Altamahaw, Patriarchs sit at supper with sons and grandsons and great-grandsons around them, In walls of adobe, in canvas tents, rest hunters and trappers after their day's sport, The city sleeps and the country sleeps, The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time, The old husband sleeps by his wife, and the young husband sleeps by his wife; And these one and all tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them, And such as it is to be of these, more or less, I am."
What is this but tufts and tussocks of grass; not branching trees, nor yet something framed and deftly put together, but a succession of simple things, objects, actions, persons; handfuls of native growths, a stretch of prairie or savanna; no composition, no artistic wholes, no logical sequence, yet all vital and real; jets of warm life that shoot and play over the surface of contemporary America, and that the poet uses as the stuff out of which to weave the song of himself.
This simple aggregating or cataloguing style as it has been called, and which often occurs in the "Leaves," has been much criticised, but it seems to me in perfect keeping in a work that does not aim at total artistic effects, at finished structural perfection like architecture, but to picture the elements of a man's life and character in outward scenes and objects and to show how all nature tends inward to him and he outward to it. Whitman showers the elements of American life upon his reader until, so to speak, his mind is drenched with them, but never groups them into patterns to tickle his sense of form. It is charged that his method is inartistic, and it is so in a sense, but it is the Whitman art and has its own value in his work. Only the artist instinct could prompt to this succession of one line genre word painting.
But this is not the way of the great artists. No, but it is Whitman's way, and these things have a certain artistic value in his work, a work that professedly aims to typify his country and times,--the value of multitude, processions, mass-movements, and the gathering together of elements and forces from wide areas.
XIII
Whitman's relation to art, then, is primary and fundamental, just as his relations to religion, to culture, to politics, to democracy, are primary and fundamental,--through his emotion, his soul, and not merely through his tools, his intellect. His artistic conscience is quickly revealed to any searching inquiry. It is seen in his purpose to convey his message by suggestion and indirection, or as an informing, vitalizing breath and spirit. His thought and meaning are enveloped in his crowded, concrete, and often turbulent pages, as science is enveloped in nature. He has a profound ethic, a profound metaphysic, but they are not formulated; they are vital in his pages as hearing or eyesight.
Whitman studied effects, and shaped his means to his end, weighing values and subordinating parts, as only the great artist does. He knew the power of words as few know them; he knew the value of vista, perspective, vanishing lights and lines. He knew how to make his words itch at your ears till you understood them; how to fold up and put away in his sentences meanings, glimpses, that did not at first reveal themselves. It is only the work of the great creative artist that is pervaded by will, and that emanates directly and inevitably from the personality of the man himself. As a man and an American, Whitman is as closely related to his work as Æschylus to his, or Dante to his. This is always a supreme test,--the closeness and vitality of the relation of a man to his work. Could any one else have done it? Is it the general intelligence that speaks, the culture and refinement of the age? or have we a new revelation of life, a new mind and soul? The lesser poets sustain only a secondary relation to their works. It is other poets, other experiences, the past, the schools, the forms, that speak through them. In all Whitman's recitatives, as he calls them, the free-flowing ends of the sentences, the loose threads of meaning, the unraveled or unknitted threads and fringes, are all well considered, and are one phase of _his_ art. He seeks his effects thus.
His method is indirect, allegorical, and elliptical to an unusual degree; often a curious suspension and withholding in a statement, a suggestive incompleteness, both ends of his thought, as it were, left in the air; sometimes the substantive, sometimes the nominative, is wanting, and all for a purpose. The poet somewhere speaks of his utterance as "prophetic screams." The prophetic element is rarely absent, the voice of one crying in the wilderness, only it is a more jocund and reassuring cry than we are used to in prophecy. The forthrightness of utterance, the projectile force of expression, the constant appeal to unseen laws and powers of the great prophetic souls, is here.
Whitman is poetic in the same way in which he is democratic, in the same way in which he is religious, or American, or modern,--not by word merely, but by deed; not by the extrinsic, but by the intrinsic; not by art, but by life.