III.
Of art, in the conventional sense of the word, there is not much in Whitman. If we wish to approach him as an artist, J. F. Millet probably helps us to understand him, more than any other artist in foreign fields and lands. Millet has a deep and close relationship to Whitman. At first sight, their work is curiously unlike: Whitman, in a great new country, delighting in every manifestation of joy and youth and hope; Millet, the child of an older and colder country, in love with age and suffering and toil. Yet in essentials it is identical. Even personally, it is said, Millet recalled Whitman.[6] Judging from the representations of him, Millet, in his prime, was a colossal image of manly beauty—deep-chested, muscular, erect, the quiet, penetrating blue eyes, the delicately expressive eyelids, the large nose and dilating sensitive nostrils, the firm mouth and jaw, the thick and dark brown beard. The consumptive artist—a Keats or a Thoreau—craves for health and loveliness; he turns shuddering from all that is not pleasant. It is only these men, heroic incarnations of health, who are strong enough to look sanely upon age and toil and suffering, and equal to the prodigious expense of spirit of writing “Leaves of Grass” with a heart laden with memories of Washington hospitals.
Millet and Whitman have, each in his own domain, made the most earnest, thorough, and successful attempts of modern times to bring the Greek spirit into art, the same attempt which Jan Steen, a great artist whom we scarcely yet rate at his proper value, made in seventeenth century Holland. It is not by the smooth nudities of a Bouguereau or a Leighton that we reach Hellenism. The Greek spirit is the simple, natural, beautiful interpretation of the life of the artist’s own age and people under his own sky, as shown especially in the human body. It cannot be the same in two ages or in two lands. One little incident mentioned by Madame Millet to a friend is suggestive, “of Millet compelling her to wear the same shirt for an uncomfortably long time; not to paint the dirt, as his early critics would have us believe, but that the rough linen should simplify its folds and take the form of the body, that he might give a fresher and stronger accent to those qualities he so loved, the garment becoming, as it were, a part of the body, and expressing, as he has said, even more than the nude, the larger and simpler forms of Nature.” There is the genuine Hellenic spirit, working in a different age and under a different sky. Millet felt that for him it was not true to paint the naked body, and at the same time that the body alone was the supremely interesting thing to paint. In the “Sower” we see this spirit expressed in the highest form which Millet ever reached—the grace of natural beauty and strength, in no remote discobolus or gladiator, but in the man of his own country and clime, a peasant like himself, whose form he had studied from his own in the mirror in his own studio. The coarse clothes and rough sabots play the same part in Millet’s work as the bizarre, uncouth words and varied technical phraseology in Whitman’s; one may call them accidental, but they are inevitable and necessary accidents. “One must be able,” Millet said, “to make use of the trivial for the expression of the sublime.” They both insisted that the artist must deal with the average and typical, not with the exceptional. They both tried to bring the largeness and simplicity of Nature into their work, and to suggest more than they expressed. They both refused to believe any part of Nature could be other than lovely. “The man who finds any phase or effect in Nature not beautiful,” said Millet sternly, “the lack is in his own heart.”
It is not as an artist that Whitman is chiefly interesting to us. It is true that he has written “Out of the Cradle endlessly rocking,” “When Lilacs last in the Dooryard bloomed,” “This Compost,” and other fragments from which may be gained a simple and pure æsthetic joy. Frequently, also, we come across phrases which reveal a keen perception of the strangeness and beauty of things, lines that possess a simplicity and grandeur scarcely less than Homeric; thus, “the noiseless splash of sunrise;” or of the young men bathing, who “float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun.” But such results are accidental, and outside the main purpose. For that very reason they have at times something of the divine felicity, unforeseen and incalculable, of Nature; yet always, according to a rough but convenient distinction, it is the poetry of energy rather than the poetry of art. When Whitman speaks prose, the language of science, he is frequently incoherent, emotional, unbalanced, with no very just and precise sense of the meaning or words or the structure of reasoned language.[7] It is clear that in this man the moral in its largest sense—that is to say, the personality and its personal relations—is more developed than the scientific; and that on the æsthetic side the artist is merged in the mystic, wrapt in emotional contemplation of a cosmic whole. What we see, therefore, is a manifold personality seeking expression for itself in a peculiarly flexible and responsive medium. It is a deep as well as a superficial resemblance that these chants bear to the Scriptures of the old Hebrews—as Isaiah or the Book of Job—wherein also the writer becomes an artist, and also absorbs all available science, but where his purpose is the personal expression of a moral and religious conception of life and the world. Whitman has invented a name for the person who occupies this rare and, in the highest degree, significant position; he calls him the “Answerer.” It is not the function of answerers, like that of philosophers, to arrange the order and limits of ideas, for they have to settle what ideas are or are not to exist; nor is it theirs, like the singers, to celebrate the ostensible things of the world, or to seek out imaginative forms, for they are “not followers of beauty, but the august masters of beauty.” The answerer is, in short, the maker of ideals.
Whitman will not minimize the importance of the answerer’s mission. “I, too,” he exclaims, “following many and followed by many, inaugurate a religion.” If we wish to understand Walt Whitman, we must have some conception of this religion. We shall find that two great and contradictory conceptions dominate his work; although in his thoughts, as in his modes of expression, it is not possible to find any strongly marked progression.
The “Song of Myself” is the most complete utterance of Whitman’s first great conception of life.
“I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul;
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is.”
The absolute unity of matter and spirit, and all which that unity involves, is the dominant conception of this first and most characteristic period. “If the body were not the soul,” he asks, “what is the soul?” This is Whitman’s naturalism; it is the re-assertion of the Greek attitude on a new and larger foundation. “Let it stand as an indubitable truth, which no inquiries can shake, that the mind of man is so entirely alienated from the righteousness of God, that he cannot conceive, desire, or design anything but what is wicked, distorted, foul, impure and iniquitous; that his heart is so thoroughly environed by sin that it can breathe out nothing but corruption and rottenness.” That is the fundamental thought of Christian tradition set down in the “Institutes,” clearly and logically, by the genius of Calvin. It is the polar opposite of Whitman’s thought, and therefore for Whitman the moral conception of duty has ceased to exist.
“I give nothing as duties,
What others give as duties I give as living impulses.
(Shall I give the heart’s action as a duty?)”
Morality is thus the normal activity of a healthy nature, not the product either of tradition or of rationalism.
“Whatever tastes sweet to the most perfect person, that is finally right”—this, it has been said, is the maxim on which Whitman’s morality is founded, and it is the morality of Aristotle. But no Greek ever asserted and illustrated it with such emphatic iteration.
From the days when the Greek spirit found its last embodiment in the brief songs, keen or sweet, of the “Anthology,” the attitude which Whitman represents in the “Song of Myself” has never lacked representatives. Throughout the Middle Ages those strange haunting echoes to the perpetual chant of litany and psalm, the Latin student-songs, float across all Europe with their profane and gay paganism, their fresh erotic grace, their “In taberna quando sumus,” their “Ludo cum Cæcilia,” their “Gaudeamus igitur.” In the sane and lofty sensuality of Boccaccio, as it found expression in the history of Alaciel and many another wonderful story, and in Gottfried of Strasburg’s assertion of human pride and passion in “Tristan and Isolde,” the same strain changed to a stronger and nobler key. Then came the great wave of the Renaissance through Italy and France and England, filling art and philosophy with an exaltation of physical life, and again later, in the movements that centre around the French Revolution, an exaltation of arrogant and independent intellectual life. But all these manifestations were sometimes partial, sometimes extravagant; they were impulses of the natural man surging up in rebellion against the dominant Christian temper; they were, for the most part consciously, of the nature of reactions. We feel that there is a fatal lack about them which Christianity would have filled; only in Goethe is the antagonism to some extent reconciled. Beneath the vast growth of Christianity, for ever exalting the unseen by the easy method of pouring contempt on the seen, and still ever producing some strange and exquisite flower of ascêsis—some Francis or Theresa or Fénelon—a slow force was working underground. A tendency was making itself felt to find in the theoretically despised physical—in those everyday stones which the builders of the Church had rejected—the very foundation of the mysteries of life; if not the basis for a new vision of the unseen, yet for a more assured vision of the seen.
No one in the last century expressed this tendency more impressively and thoroughly, with a certain insane energy, than William Blake—the great chained spirit whom we see looking out between the bars of his prison-house with those wonderful eyes. Especially in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” in which he seems to gaze most clearly “through narrow chinks of his cavern,” he has set forth his conviction that “first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged,” and that “if the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man, as it is, infinite.” This most extraordinary book is, in his own phraseology, the Bible of Hell.
Whitman appeared at a time when this stream of influence, grown mighty, had boldly emerged. At the time that “Leaves of Grass” sought the light Tourgueneff was embodying in the typical figure of Bassaroff the modern militant spirit of science, positive and audacious—a spirit marked also, as Hinton pointed out, by a new form of asceticism, which lay in the denial of emotion. Whitman, one of the very greatest emotional forces of modern times, who had grown up apart from the rigid and technical methods of science, face to face with a new world and a new civilization, which he had eagerly absorbed so far as it lay open to him, had the good inspiration to fling himself into the scientific current, and so to justify the demands of his emotional nature; to represent himself as the inhabitant of a vast and co-ordinated cosmos, tenoned and mortised in granite:
“All forces have been steadily employed to complete and delight me,
Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul.”
That Whitman possessed no trained scientific instinct is unquestionably true, but it is impossible to estimate his significance without understanding what he owes to science. Something, indeed, he had gained from the philosophy of Hegel—with its conception of the universe as a single process of evolution, in which vice and disease are but transient perturbations—with which he had a second-hand acquaintance, that has left distinct, but not always well assimilated marks on his work; but, above all, he was indebted to those scientific conceptions which, like Emerson, he had absorbed or divined. It is these that lie behind “Children of Adam.”
This mood of sane and cheerful sensuality, rejoicing with a joy as massive and calm-eyed as Boccaccio’s, a moral-fibred joy that Boccaccio never knew, in all the manifestations of the flesh and blood of the world—saying, not: “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” but, with Clifford: “Let us take hands and help, for this day we are alive together”—is certainly Whitman’s most significant and impressive mood. Nothing so much reveals its depth and sincerity as his never-changing attitude towards death. We know the “fearful thing” that Claudio, in Shakespeare’s play, knew as death:
“to die and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
... to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and uncertain thoughts
Imagine howling!”
And all the Elizabethans in that age of splendid and daring life—even Raleigh and Bacon—felt that same shudder at the horror and mystery of death. Always they felt behind them some vast mediæval charnel-house, gloomy and awful, and the sunniest spirits of the English Renaissance quail when they think of it. There was in this horror something of the child’s vast and unreasoned dread of darkness and mystery, and it scarcely survived the scientific and philosophic developments of the seventeenth century. Whitman’s attitude is not the less deep-rooted and original. For he is not content to argue, haughtily indifferent, with Epicurus and Epictetus, that death can be nothing to us, because it is no evil to lose what we shall never miss. Whitman will reveal the loveliness of death. We feel constantly in “Leaves of Grass” as to some extent we feel before the “Love and Death” and some other pictures of one of the greatest of English artists. “I will show,” he announces, “that nothing can happen more beautiful than death.” It must not be forgotten that Whitman speaks not merely from the standpoint of the most intense and vivid delight in the actual world, but that he possessed a practical familiarity with disease and death which has perhaps never before fallen to the lot of a great writer. At the end of the “Song of Myself” he bequeaths himself to the dust, to grow from the grass he loves:
“If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles,
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.”
And to any who find that dust but a poor immortality, he would say with Schopenhauer, “Oho! do you know, then, what dust is?” The vast chemistry of the earth, the sweetness that is rooted in what we call corruption, the life that is but the leavings of many deaths, is nobly uttered in “This Compost,” in which he reaches beyond the corpse that is good manure to sweet-scented roses, to the polished breasts of melons; or again, in the noble elegy, “Pensive on her dead gazing,” on those who died during the war. In his most perfectly lyrical poem, “Out of the Cradle endlessly rocking,” Whitman has celebrated death—“that strong and delicious word”—with strange tenderness; and never has the loveliness of death been sung in a more sane and virile song than the solemn death-carol in “When Lilacs last in the Dooryard bloomed”:
“Dark mother, always gliding near with soft feet,
Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?
Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all,
I bring thee a song, that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly.
“Over the tree-tops I float thee a song,
Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and the prairies wide,
Over the dense-packed cities all and the teeming wharves and ways,
I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee, O Death.”
Whitman’s second great thought on life lies in his egoism. His intense sense of individuality was marked from the first; it is emphatically asserted in the “Song of Myself”—
“And nothing, not God, is Greater to one than one’s self is”—
where it lies side by side with his first great thought. But even in the “Song of Myself” it asserts a separate existence:
“This day before dawn I ascended a hill and looked at the crowded heaven,
And I said to my spirit, When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of everything in them, shall we be filled and satisfied then?
And my spirit said, No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond.”
In the end he once, at least, altogether denies his first thought; he alludes to that body which he had called the equal of the soul, or even the soul itself, as excrement:
“Myself discharging my excrementitious body to be burned, or reduced to powder, or buried,
My real body doubtless left to me for other spheres.”
The first great utterance was naturalistic; this egoism is spiritualistic. It is the sublime apotheosis of Yankee self-reliance. “I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself.” This became the dominant conception in Whitman’s later work, and fills his universe at length. Of a God, although he sometimes uses the word to obtain emphasis, he at no time had any definite idea. Nature, also, was never a living vascular personality for him; when it is not a mere aggregate of things, it is an order, sometimes a moral order. Also he wisely refuses with unswerving consistency to admit an abstract Humanity; of “man” he has nothing to say; there is nothing anywhere in the universe for him but individuals, undying, everlastingly aggrandizing individuals. This egoism is practical, strenuous, moral; it cannot be described as religious. Whitman is lacking—and in this respect he comes nearer to Goethe than to any other great modern man—in what may be possibly the disease of “soul,” the disease that was so bitterly bewailed by Heine. Whitman was congenitally deficient in “soul;” he is a kind of Titanic Undine. “I never had any particular religious experiences,” he told Bucke, “never felt the need of spiritual regeneration;” and although he describes himself as “pleased with the earnest words of the sweating Methodist preacher, impressed seriously at the camp-meeting,” we know what weight to give to this utterance when we read elsewhere, of animals:
“They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.”
We may detect this lack of “soul” in his attitude towards music; for, in its highest development, music is the special exponent of the modern soul in its complexity, its passive resignation, its restless mystical ardours. That Whitman delighted in music is clear; it is equally clear, from the testimony of his writings and of witnesses, that the music he delighted in was simple and joyous melody as in Rossini’s operas; he alludes vaguely to symphonies, but
“when it is a grand opera,
Ah! this indeed is music—this suits me.”
That Whitman could have truly appreciated Beethoven, or understood Wagner’s “Tannhäuser,” is not conceivable.
With Whitman’s egoism is connected his strenuousness. There is a stirring sound of trumpets always among these “Leaves of Grass.” This man may have come, as he tells us, to inaugurate a new religion, but he has few or no marks upon him of that mysticism—that Eastern spirit of glad renunciation of the self in a larger self—which is of the essence of religion. He is at the head of a band of sinewy and tan-faced pioneers, with pistols in their belts and sharp-edged axes in their hands:
“And he going with me leaves peace and routine behind him,
And stakes his life to be lost at any moment.”
This strenuousness finds expression in the hurried jolt and bustle of the lines, always alert, unresting, ever starting afresh. Passages of sweet and peaceful flow are hard to find in “Leaves of Grass,” and the more precious when found. Whitman hardly succeeds in the expression of joy; to feel exquisitely the pulse of gladness a more passive and feminine sensibility is needed, like that we meet with in “Towards Democracy;” we must not come to this focus of radiant energy for repose or consolation.
This egoism, this strenuousness, reaches at the end to heights of sublime audacity. When we read certain portions of “Leaves of Grass” we seem to see a vast phalanx of Great Companions passing for ever along the cosmic roads, stalwart Pioneers of the Universe. There are superb young men, athletic girls, splendid and savage old men—for the weak seem to have perished by the roadside—and they radiate an infinite energy, an infinite joy. It is truly a tremendous diastole of life to which the crude and colossal extravagance of this vision bears witness; we weary soon of its strenuous vitality, and crave for the systole of life, for peace and repose. It is not strange that the immense faith of the prophet himself grows hesitant and silent at times before “all the meanness and agony without end,” and doubts that it is an illusion and “that may-be identity beyond the grave a beautiful fable only.” Here and again we meet this access of doubt, and even amid the faith of the “Prayer of Columbus” there is a tremulous, pathetic note of sadness.
Yet there is one keen sword with which Whitman is always able to cut the knot of this doubt—the sword of love. He has but to grasp love and comradeship, and he grows indifferent to the problem of identity beyond the grave. “He a-hold of my hand has completely satisfied me.” He discovers at last that love and comradeship—adhesiveness—is, after all, the main thing, “base and finale, too, for all metaphysics;” deeper than religion, underneath Socrates and underneath Christ. With a sound insight he finds the roots of the most universal love in the intimate and physical love of comrades and lovers.
“I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,
And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet.
“Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love.”