as the bare fact—its poetry, its coarseness, and its mystery go together. Browning has put it in a line:—
“. . . savage creatures seek
Their loves in wood and plain—and God renews
His ancient rapture.”
It is the “rapture” and the mystery which Whitman misses in many of his songs of Sex.
There is no need to give here any theological significance to the word “God.” Let the phrase stand for the mystic poetry of animalism. Whitman has no sense of mystery.
I have another objection against “The Children of Adam.” The loud, self-assertive, genial, boastful style of Whitman suits very well many of his democratic utterances, his sweeping cosmic emotions. But here it gives one the impression of a kind of showman, who with a flourishing stick is shouting out to a gaping crowd the excellences of manhood and womanhood. Deliberately he has refrained from the mood of imaginative fervour which alone could give a high seriousness to his treatment—a high seriousness which is really indispensable. And his rough, slangy, matter-of-fact comments give an atmosphere of unworthy vulgarity to his subject. Occasionally he is carried away by the sheer imaginative beauty of the subject, then note how different the effect:—
“Have you ever loved the body of a woman,
Have you ever loved the body of a man,
Do you not see that these are exactly the same to all in all
Nations and times all over the earth?”“If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred,
And the glory and sweet of a man is the token of manhood untainted,
And in man or woman a clean, strong, firm-fibred body is
More beautiful than the most beautiful face.”
If only all had been of this quality. But interspersed with lines of great force and beauty are cumbrous irrelevancies, wholly superfluous details.
William Morris has also treated the subject of Sex in a frank, open fashion. And there is in his work something of the easy, deliberate spaciousness that we find in Whitman. But Morris was an artist first and foremost, and he never misses the poetry of animalism; as readers of the “Earthly Paradise” and the prose romances especially know full well.
It is not then because Whitman treats love as an animal passion that I take objection to much in his “Children of Adam.” There are poets enough and to spare who sing of the sentimental aspects of love. We need have no quarrel with Whitman’s aim as expressed by Mr. John Burroughs: “To put in his sex poems a rank and healthy animality, and to make them as frank as the shedding of pollen by the trees, strong even to the point of offence.” All we ask is for him to do so as a poet, not as a mere physiologist. And when he speaks one moment as a physiologist, next as a poet; at one time as a lover, at another as a showman, the result is not inspiring. “He could not make it pleasing,” remarks Mr. Burroughs, “a sweet morsel to be rolled under the tongue; that would have been levity and sin, as in Byron and the other poets . . . He would sooner be
bestial than Byronic, he would sooner shock by his frankness than inflame by his suggestion.” This vague linking together of “Byron and the other poets” is not easy to understand. In the first place, not one of the moderns has treated love from the same standpoint. Shelley, for instance, is transcendental, Byron elemental, Tennyson sentimental; Rossetti looks at the soul through the body, Browning regards the body through the soul. There is abundant variety in the treatment. Then, again, why Byron should be singled out especially for opprobrium I fail to see, for love is to him the fierce elemental passion it is for Whitman. As for frankness, the episode of Haidee and Don Juan does not err on the side of reticence. Nor is it pruriently suggestive. It is a splendid piece of poetic animalism. Let us be fair to Byron. His work may in places be disfigured by an unworthy cynicism; his treatment of sexual problems be marred by a shallow flippancy. But no poet had a finer appreciation of the essential poetry of animalism than he, and much of his cynicism, after all, is by way of protest against the same narrow morality at which Whitman girds. To single Byron out as a poet especially obnoxious in his treatment of love, and to condemn him so sweepingly, seems to me scarcely defensible. To extol unreservedly the rankness and coarseness of “The Children of Adam,” and to have no word of commendation, say, for so noble a piece of naturalism as the story of Haidee, seems to me lacking in fairness. Besides, it suggests that the only treatment in literature of the sexual life is a coarse, unpleasing treatment, which I do not suppose Mr. Burroughs