The critics have by now got used to Whitman’s honesty about sex; the only stumbling block is his long catalogues of things. He will sing the human body, and give you a list of the parts thereof: and can that be poetry? But you must bear in mind that Whitman is more a seer than a poet. “Sermons in stones,” said Shakespeare; and if the stones had names, Whitman would call the roll of them, and each would be a mystic symbol, and the total effect would be a hypnotic spell. It is an old trick of those who appeal to the subconscious mind; in the English Prayer-Book, for example, there is a chant: “O, all ye Works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him forever.” The hymn goes on to name all the various aspects of nature: “O, all ye Showers and Dew ... O, all ye Fire and Heat ... Ye Lightnings and Clouds ... Ye Mountains and Hills ... Ye Seas and Floods ... Ye Fowls of the Air ... Ye Beasts and Cattle.” ... and so on through the many Works of the Lord which are invited to praise Him and magnify Him forever. So, if you are a mystic, you may contemplate with awe each separate miraculous product of that mysterious organizing force which has created a living human body.
The mystical life has its dangers, and also, alas! its boredoms. I have stated in the chapter on Emerson that there is no absolute which is not equally as false as it is true. Whitman has raised up a host of imitators, and I have read their alleged “free verse,” and record the fact that it was surely a waste of my time, and apparently a waste of theirs. Also, I have known many followers of Walt Whitman, the greater number of whom have chosen to follow the poet’s eccentricities, rather than his virtues. You see, it is so much easier to leave off a necktie and “loaf,” than it is to have genius and create a new art form! Whitman is not alone in suffering through his disciples; Jesus had that tragic fate, and Nietzsche, and Tolstoi, and many another major prophet!
CHAPTER LXXXI
CABBAGE SOUP
We have been following the fortunes of a pioneer people breaking into the field of world culture. Let us now travel part way round the earth in either direction, and watch another pioneer people doing the same thing.
The differences between America and Russia are many and striking, and before we enter upon a study of Russian literature we must understand Russian life. Voltaire tells us that virtue and vice are products like vinegar, and we shall find this applies also to the Russian soul with its mysticism and melancholy. When the sun almost disappears for six months at a time, and icy blizzards rage, human beings have a tendency to stay by the fire and develop their inner natures; also they develop congested livers, and brood upon the futility of life.
Says Mrs. Ogi: “Don’t forget that it often gets cold in New England.”
“Yes, and there is both mysticism and melancholy in New England art. But the difference is that the people of New England escaped from the cradle of despotism in Asia many centuries earlier than the Russians. So the brooding of the New England colonist took the form of calling a town meeting to plan for the building of a new road in the spring. But the Russian could not do things for himself; he had to get the permission of officials. If he tried to act for himself, they would strip him and beat him with knouts until he swooned. So the Russian’s brooding turned to despair, and he got drunk, and got into a fight and killed his neighbor, and then tried to make up his mind whether God would forgive him, or damn him to hell fire forever; he fretted over this problem until he went insane or wrote a novel—”
“Or both,” says Mrs. Ogi.
The dominant fact in Russian art of the nineteenth century was despotism. Here was a vast empire of a hundred million people, energetic and aspiring; and the ruling class dreamed that they could introduce modern material civilization, while keeping out the modern mind and soul. Young Russians travelled, and learned to think as the rest of Europe thought; then they came home, to find that the slightest attempt to teach or to organize was met by imprisonment, torture, exile, hard labor, or the scaffold. Wave after wave of rebellion swept Russia, to be met by wave after wave of repression. Intellectual activity which New England honored was in Russia a secret and criminal conspiracy; the youth of the country was broken in a torture chamber; and so we have the misery and distortion and impotence which we regard as characteristic Slavic qualities.
The Russian was supposed to be incapable of action, incapable of keeping an appointment on time, incapable of doing anything but drinking a hundred cups of tea and shedding tears over the fate of man. But now comes the revolution, and in a flash we discover that all that was buncombe. The Russians begin to act precisely like other men; they cease to get drunk, they learn to keep appointments, they discover a sudden admiration for those qualities we call Yankee—hustle and efficiency, the adjusting of one’s desires to what can be immediately accomplished. The Russian peasant, supposed to be a grown-up and bearded cherub, lifting his eyes in adoration to his Little Father in the Winter Palace and his Big Father in Heaven, is discovered to have precisely the same desires as every other farmer in the world—that is to say, more land, and fewer tax-collectors.