And lastly, the Poetry of the Future holds that all modern poetry, Tennyson particularly, is dainty and over-perfumed, and Whitman speaks of it with that contempt which he everywhere affects for the dandy. But what age of time ever yielded such a dandy as the founder of this school, Whitman himself? The simpering beau who is the product of the tailor's art is certainly absurd enough; but what difference is there between that and the other dandy-upside-down who from equal motives of affectation throws away coat and vest, dons a slouch hat, opens his shirt so as to expose his breast, and industriously circulates his portrait, thus taken, in his own books. And this dandyism—the dandyism of the roustabout—I find in Whitman's poetry from beginning to end. Everywhere it is conscious of itself, everywhere it is analysing itself, everywhere it is posing to see if it cannot assume a naive and striking attitude, everywhere it is screwing up its eyes, not into an eyeglass like the conventional dandy, but into an expression supposed to be fearsomely rough and barbaric and frightful to the terror-stricken reader; and it is almost safe to say that one half of Whitman's poetic work has consisted of a detailed description of the song he is going to sing. It is the extreme of sophistication in writing.
But if we must have dandyism in our art, surely the softer sort, which at least leans toward decorum and gentility, is preferable; for that at worst becomes only laughable, while the rude dandyism, when it does acquire a factitious interest by being a blasphemy against real manhood, is simply tiresome.
I have thus dwelt upon these claims of the Whitman school, not so much because of any intrinsic weight they possess, as because they are advanced in such taking and sacred names,—of democracy, of manhood, of freedom, of progress. Upon the most earnest examination, I can find it nothing but wholly undemocratic; not manful, but dandy; not free, because the slave of nature; not progressive, because its whole momentum is derived from the physically-large which ceased to astonish the world ages ago, in comparison with spiritual greatness.
Indeed, this matter has been pushed so far, with the apparent, but wholly unreal sanction of so many influential names, that in speaking to those who may be poets of the future, I cannot close these hasty words upon the Whitman school without a fervent protest, in the name of all art and all artists, against a poetry which has painted a great scrawling picture of the human body, and has written under it: "This is the soul;" which shouts a profession of religion in every line, but of a religion that, when examined, reveals no tenet, no rubric, save that a man must be natural, must abandon himself to every passion; and which constantly roars its belief in God, but with a camerado air as if it were patting the Deity on the back, and bidding Him, Cheer up, and hope for further encouragement.
We are here arrived at a very fitting point to pass on and consider that third misconception of the relation between science and art, which has been recently formulated by M. Emile Zola in his work called Le Roman Expérimental. Zola's name has been so widely associated with a certain class of novels, that I am fortunately under no necessity to describe them, and I need only say that the work in question is a formal reply to a great number of objections which have come from many quarters as to the characters and events which Zola's novels have brought before the public.
His book, though a considerable volume, may be said to consist of two sentences which the author has varied with great adroitness into many forms. These two sentences I may sum up, as follows: (1) every novel must hereafter be the entirely unimaginative record of an experiment in human passion; and (2) every writer of the romantic school in France, particularly Victor Hugo, is an ass.
You are not to suppose that in this last sentiment I have strengthened Zola's expressions. A single quotation will show sufficient authority. As, for example, where M. Zola cries out to those who are criticizing him: "Every one says: 'Ah yes, the naturalists! they are those men with dirty hands who want all novels to be written in slang, and choose the most disgusting subjects.' Not at all! you lie!... Do not say that I am idiot enough to wish to paint nothing but the gutter."
But with this quarrel we are not here concerned; I simply wish to examine in the briefest way Zola's proposition to convert the novel into a work of science. His entire doctrine may be fairly, indeed amply gathered in the following quotations:
"We continue by our observations and experiments the work of the physiologist, who has himself employed that of the physicist and the chemist. We after a fashion pursue scientific psychology in order to complete scientific physiology; and in order to complete the evolution, we need only carry to the study of nature and man the invaluable tool of the experimental method. In a word, we should work upon characters, passions, human and social facts, as the physicist and chemist work with inorganic bodies, as the physiologist works with living organisms. Determinism controls everything.
"This, then, is what constitutes the experimental novel,—to understand the mechanism of human phenomena, to show the machinery of intellectual and emotional manifestations as physiology shall explain them to us under the influence of heredity and surrounding circumstances; then to show man living in the social milieu which he has himself produced, and which he modifies every day, while at the same time experiencing in his turn a continual transformation. So we rest on physiology; we take man isolated from the hands of the physiologist to continue the solution of the problem and to solve scientifically the question, How men live as members of society.—We are, in a word, experimental philosophers, showing by experiment how a passion exhibits itself in certain social surroundings. The day when we shall understand the mechanism of this passion, it may be treated, reduced, made as inoffensive as possible."