It is a mistake to think that where Whitman fails in expression it is through carelessness; that he was a great poet by flashes, and that had he taken more pains he would have been greater still. We have been assured by those who knew him intimately that he took the greatest care over his work, and would wait for days until he could get what he felt to be the right word.
To the student who comes fresh to a study of Whitman it is conceivable that the rude, strong, nonchalant utterances may seem like the work of an inspired but careless and impatient artist. It is not so. It is done deliberately.
“I furnish no specimens,” he says; “I shower them by exhaustless laws, fresh and modern continually, as Nature does.”
He is content to be suggestive, to stir your imagination, to awaken your sympathies. And when he fails, he fails as Wordsworth did, because he lacked the power of self-criticism, lacked the faculty of humour—that saving faculty which gives discrimination, and intuitively protects the artist from confusing pathos with bathos, the grand and the grandiose. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his treatment of Sex. Frankness, outspokenness on the primal facts of life are to be welcomed in literature. All the great masters—
Shakespeare, Dante, Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, have dealt openly and fearlessly with the elemental passions. There is nothing to deplore in this, and Mr. Swinburne was quite right when he contended that the domestic circle is not to be for all men and writers the outer limit of their world of work. So far from regretting that Whitman claimed right to equal freedom when speaking of the primal fact of procreation as when speaking of sunrise, sunsetting, and the primal fact of death, every clean-minded man and woman should rejoice in the poet’s attitude. For he believed and gloried in the separate personalities of man and woman, claiming manhood and womanhood as the poet’s province, exulting in the potentialities of a healthy sexual life. He was angry, as well he might be, with the furtive snigger which greets such matters as motherhood and fatherhood with the prurient unwholesomeness of a mind that can sigh sentimentally over the “roses and raptures of Vice” and start away shamefaced from the stark passions—stripped of all their circumlocutions. He certainly realized as few have done the truth of that fine saying of Thoreau’s, that “for him to whom sex is impure there are no flowers in Nature.”
But at the same time I cannot help feeling that Stevenson was right when he said that Whitman “loses our sympathy in the character of a poet by attracting too much of our attention—that of a Bull in a China Shop.” [180]
His aim is right enough; it is to his method one may take objection. Not on the score of morality. Whitman’s
treatment of passion is not immoral; it is simply like Nature herself—unmoral. What shall we say then about his sex cycle, “Children of Adam”? Whitman, in his anxiety to speak out, freely, simply, naturally, to vindicate the sanity of coarseness, the poetry of animalism, seems to me to have bungled rather badly. There are many fine passages in his “Song of the Body Electric” and “Spontaneous Me,” but much of it impresses me as bad art, and is consequently ineffectual in its aim. The subject demands a treatment at once strong and subtle—I do not mean finicking—and subtlety is a quality not vouchsafed to Whitman. Lacking it, he is often unconsciously comic where he should be gravely impressive. “A man’s body is sacred, and a woman’s body is sacred.” True; but the sacredness is not displayed by making out a tedious inventory of the various parts of the body. Says Whitman in effect: “The sexual life is to be gloried in, not to be treated as if it were something shameful.” Again true; but is there not a danger of missing the glory by discoursing noisily on the various physiological manifestations. Sex is not the more wonderful for being appraised by the big drum.
The inherent beauty and sanctity of Sex lies surely in its superb unconsciousness; it is a matter for two human beings drawn towards one another by an indefinable, world-old attraction; scream about it, caper over it, and you begin to make it ridiculous, for you make it self-conscious.
Animalism merely as a scientific fact serves naught to the poet, unless he can show also what is as undeniable