really holds. Whitman has vindicated, and vindicated finely, the inherent truth and beauty of animalism. But so has William Morris, so has Dante Gabriel Rossetti, so has poor flouted Byron. And I will go further, and say that these other poets have succeeded often where Whitman has failed; they have shown the beauty and cosmic significance, when Whitman has been merely cataloguing the stark facts.
It may be objected, of course, that Whitman does not aim in his sex poems at imaginative beauty, that he aims at sanity and wholesomeness; that what he speaks—however rank—makes for healthy living. May be; I am not concerned to deny it. What I do deny is the implication that the wholesomeness of a fact is sufficient justification for its treatment in literature. There are a good many disagreeable things that are wholesome enough, there are many functions of the body that are entirely healthy. But one does not want them enshrined in Art.
To attack Whitman on the score of morality is unjustifiable; his sex poems are simply unmoral. But had he flouted his art less flagrantly in them they would have been infinitely more powerful and convincing, and given the Philistines less opportunity for blaspheming.
I have dwelt at this length upon Whitman’s treatment of Sex largely because it illustrates his strength and weakness as a literary artist. In some of his poems—those dealing with Democracy, for instance—we have Whitman at his best. In others, certainly a small proportion, we get sheer, unillumined doggerel. In his sex poems there are great and fine ideas, moments of inspiration,
flashes of beauty, combined with much that is trivial and tiresome.
But this I think is the inevitable outcome of his style. The style, like the man, is large, broad, sweeping, tolerant; the sense of “mass and multitude” is remarkable; he aims at big effects, and the quality of vastness in his writings struck John Addington Symonds as his most remarkable characteristic. [186] This vast, rolling, processional style is splendidly adapted for dealing with the elemental aspects of life, with the vital problems of humanity. He sees everything in bulk. His range of vision is cosmic. The very titles are suggestive of his point of view—“A Song of the Rolling Earth,” “A Song of the Open Road,” “A Song for Occupation,” “Gods.” There are no detailed effects, no delicate points of light and shade in his writings, but huge panoramic effects. It is a great style, it is an impressive style, but it is obviously not a plastic style, nor a versatile style. Its very merits necessarily carry with them corresponding defects. The massiveness sometimes proves mere unwieldiness, the virile strength tends to coarseness, the eye fixed on certain broad distant effects misses the delicate by-play of colour and movement in the foreground. The persistent unconventionality of metre and rhythm becomes in time a mannerism as pronounced as the mannerism of Tennyson and Swinburne.
I do not urge these things in disparagement of Whitman. No man can take up a certain line wholeheartedly and uncompromisingly without incurring the disabilities attaching to all who concentrate on one great issue.
And if sometimes he is ineffectual, if on occasion he is merely strident in place of authoritative, how often do his utterances carry with them a superb force and a conviction which compel us to recognize the sagacious genius of the man.
III
Indeed, it is when we examine Whitman’s attitude towards Humanity that we realize best his strength and courage. For it is here that his qualities find their fittest artistic expression. Nothing in Whitman’s view is common or unclean. All things in the Universe, rightly considered, are sweet and good. Carrying this view into social politics, Whitman declares for absolute social equality. And this is done in no doctrinaire spirit, but because of Whitman’s absolute faith and trust in man and woman—not the man and woman overridden by the artifices of convention, but the “powerful uneducated person.” Whitman finds his ideal not in Society (with a capital S), but in artisans and mechanics. He took to his heart the mean, the vulgar, the coarse, not idealizing their weaknesses, but imbuing them with his own strength and vigour.