“Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn,
Undulating into the willing and yielding day,
Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-fleshed day.”
Or, again, in the marvellously keen “Faces”—so realistic and so imaginative—when the “lily’s face” speaks out her longing to be filled with albescent honey. This man has certainly felt the truth of that deep saying of Thoreau’s, that for him to whom sex is impure there are no flowers in Nature. He cannot help speaking of man’s or woman’s life in terms of Nature’s life, of Nature’s life in terms of man’s; he mingles them together with an admirably balanced rhythm, as in “Spontaneous Me.” All the functions of man’s or woman’s life are sweet to him because they bear about them a savour of the things that are sweet to him anywhere in the world,
“Of the smell of apples and lemons, of the pairing of birds,
Of the wet of woods, of the lapping of waves.”
Sometimes when he is on this track he seems to lose himself in mystic obscurity; and the words in which he records his impressions are mere patches of morbid colour.
There is a third element in Whitman’s attitude. It is clear that he had from the outset what may be vaguely called a scientific purpose in that frank grasp of the body, which has a significance to be measured by the fierce opposition it aroused, and by the tenacity with which, in the latest volume of his old age, “November Boughs,” he still insists that the principle of those lines so gives breath to the whole scheme that the bulk of the pieces might as well have been left unwritten were those lines omitted. He has himself admirably set this forth in “A Memorandum at a Venture” in “Specimen Days and Collect.” In religion and politics we have, after a great struggle, gained the priceless possibility of liberty and sincerity. But the region of sex is still, like our moral and social life generally, to a large extent unreclaimed; there still exist barbarous traditions which mediæval Christianity has helped to perpetuate, so that the words of Pliny regarding the contaminating touch of a woman, who has always been regarded as in a peculiar manner the symbol of sex—“Nihil facile reperiabatur mulierum profluvio magis monstrificum”—are not even yet meaningless. Why should the sweetening breath of science be guarded from this spot? Why should not “freedom and faith and earnestness” be introduced here? Our attitude towards this part of life affects profoundly our attitude towards life altogether. To realize this, read Swift’s “Strephon and Chloe,” which enshrines, vividly and unshrinkingly, in a classic form, a certain emotional way of approaching the body. It narrates the very trivial experiences of a man and woman on their bridal night. The incidents are nothing; they are perfectly innocent; the interesting fact about them is the general attitude which they enfold. The unquestioning faith of the man is that in setting down the simple daily facts of human life he has drowned the possibilities of love in filth. And Swift here represents, in an unflinchingly logical fashion, the opinions, more or less realized, more or less disguised, of most people even to-day. Cannot these facts of our physical nature be otherwise set down? Why may we not “keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart?” That is, in effect, the question which, in “A Memorandum at a Venture,” Whitman tells us that he undertook to answer. This statement of it was probably an afterthought; else he would have carried out his attempt more thoroughly and more uncompromisingly.
For I doubt if even Whitman has fully realized the beauty and purity of organic life; the scientific element in him was less strong than the moral, or even the artistic. While his genial poetic manner of grasping things is of prime importance, the new conceptions of purity are founded on a scientific basis which must be deeply understood. Swift’s morbid and exaggerated spiritualism, a legacy of mediævalism—and the ordinary “common-sense” view is but the unconscious shadow of mediæval spiritualism—is really founded on ignorance, in other words, on the traditional religious conceptions of an antique but still surviving barbarism.
From our modern standpoint of science, opening its eyes anew, the wonderful cycles of normal life are for ever clean and pure, the loathsomeness, if indeed anywhere, lies in the conceptions of hypertrophied and hyperæsthetic brains. Some who have striven to find a vital natural meaning in the central sacrament of Christianity have thought that the Last Supper was an attempt to reveal the divine mystery of food, to consecrate the loveliness of the mere daily bread and wine which becomes the life of man. Such sacraments of Nature are everywhere subtly woven into the texture of men’s bodies. All loveliness of the body is the outward sign of some vital use.