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,