The Good Gray Poet, A Vindication

by William Douglas O'Connor

Vìdi un col capo sì di merda lordo,

Che non parea s’era laico o cherco.”

What is this line at the end of the twenty-first canto, which even John Carlyle flinches from translating, but which Dante did not flinch from writing?—

“Ed egli avea del cul fatto trombetta.”

And look at these lines in the twenty-eighth canto:—

“Già reggia, per mezzul perdere o lulla

Com’ io vidi un, cosi non si pertugia,

Rotto dal mento insin dove si trulla.”

That will do. Dante, too, has “indecent passages.” Out with Dante!—Here is the book of Job: the vast Arabian landscape, the picturesque pastoral details of Arabian life, the last tragic immensity of Oriental sorrow, the whole overarching sky of Oriental piety, are here. But here also the inevitable “indecency.” Instead of the virtuous fiction of the tansy-bed, Job actually has the indelicacy to state how man is born—even mentions the belly; talks about the gendering of bulls and the miscarriage of cows; uses rank idioms; and in the thirty-first chapter especially, indulges in a strain of thought and expression which it is amazing does not bring down upon him, even at this late date, the avalanches of our lofty and pure Reviews. Here is certainly “an immoral poet.” Out with Job!—Here is Plutarch, prince of biographers, and Herodotus, flower of historians. What have we now? Traits of character not to be mentioned, incidents of conduct, accounts of manners, minute details of customs, which our modern historical dandies would never venture upon recording. Out with Plutarch and Herodotus!—Here is Tacitus. What statement of crimes that ought not to be hinted! Does the man gloat over such things? What dreadful kisses are these of Agrippina to Nero—the mother to the son! Out with Tacitus!—and since there are books that ought to be publicly burned, by all means let the stern grandeur of that rhetoric be lost in flame.—Here is Shakespeare: “indecent passages” everywhere—every drama, every poem thickly inlaid with them; all that men do displayed; sexual acts treated lightly, jested about, mentioned obscenely; the language never bolted; slang, gross puns, lewd words, in profusion. Out with Shakespeare!—Here is the Canticle of Canticles: beautiful, voluptuous poem of love literally, whatever be its mystic significance; glowing with the color, odorous with the spices, melodious with the voices of the East; sacred and exquisite and pure with the burning chastity of passion which completes and exceeds the snowy chastity of virgins. This to me, but what to the Secretary? Can he endure that the female form should stand thus in a poem, disrobed, unveiled, bathed in erotic splendor? Look at these voluptuous details, this expression of desire, this amorous tone and glow, this consecration and perfume lavished upon the sensual. No! Out with Solomon!—Here is Isaiah. The grand thunder-roll of that righteousness, like the eternal roar of God above the guilty world, utters coarse words. Amidst the bolted lightnings of that sublime denunciation, coarse thoughts, indelicate figures, indecent allusion, flash upon the sight, like gross imagery in a midnight landscape. Out with Isaiah!—Here is Montaigne. Open those great, those virtuous pages of the unflinching reporter of Man; the soul all truth and daylight, all candor, probity, sincerity, reality, eyesight. A few glances will suffice. Cant and vice and sniffle have groaned over these pages before. Out with Montaigne!—Here is Hafiz, the Anacreon of Persia, but more: a banquet of wine in a garden of roses, the nightingales singing, the laughing revellers high with festal joy; but a heavenly flame burns on every brow; a tone not of this sphere is in all the music, all the laughter, all the songs; a light of the Infinite trembles over every chalice and rests on every flower; and all the garden is divine. Still, when Hafiz cries out, “Bring me wine, and bring the famed veiled beauty, the Princess of the brothel,” &c., or issues similar orders, Mr. Harlan, whose virtue does not understand or endure such metaphors, must deal sternly with this kosmic man of Persia. Out with Hafiz!—Here is Virgil, ornate and splendid poet of old Rome; a master with a greater pupil, Alighieri! a bard above whose ashes Boccaccio kneels a trader, and arises a soldier of mankind; but he must lose those fadeless chaplets, the undying green of a noble fame; for here in the Æneid is “Dixerat; et niveis hinc atque hinc Diva lacertis,” &c., and here in the Georgics is “Quo rapiat sitiens Venerem, interiusque recondat,” &c., and there are other verses like these. Out with Virgil!—Here is Swedenborg. Open this poem in prose, the Conjugial Love—to me, a temple, though in ruins; the sacred fane, clothed in mist, filled with moonlight, of a great though broken mind. What spittle of critic epithets stains all here? “Lewd,” “sensual,” “lecherous,” “coarse,” “licentious,” &c. Of course these judgments are final. There is no appeal from the tobacco-juice of an expectorating and disdainful virtue. Out with Swedenborg!—Here is Goethe: the horrified squealing of prudes is not yet silent over pages of Wilhelm Meister; that high and chaste hook, the Elective Affinities, still pumps up oaths from clergymen; Walpurgis has hardly ceased its uproar over Faust. Out with Goethe!—Here is Byron: grand, dark poet; a great spirit—a soul like the ocean; generous lover of America; fiery trumpet of liberty; a sword for the human cause in Greece; a torch for the human mind in Cain; a life that redeemed its every fault by taking a side, which was the human side; tempest of scorn in his first poem, tempest of scorn and laughter in his last poem, only against the things that wrong man; vast bud of the Infinite that Death alone prevented from its vaster flower; immense, seminal, electrical, dazzling Byron.—But Beppo—O! But Don Juan—O fie! Not to mention the Countess Guiccioli—ah, me! Prepare quickly the yellow envelope, and out with Byron!—Here is Cervantes: open Don Quixote, paragon of romances, highest result of Spain, best and sufficient reason for her life among the nations, a laughing novel which is a weeping poem. But talk such as this of Sancho Panza and Tummas Cecial under the cork-trees, and these coarse stories and bawdy words and this free and gross comedy—is it to be endured? Out with Cervantes!—Here is another, a sun of literature, moving in a vast orbit with dazzling plenitudes of power and beauty; the one only modern European poet and novelist worthy to rank with the first; permanent among the fleeting; a demigod of letters among the pigmies; a soul of the antique strength and sadness, worthy to stand as the representative of the high thought and hopes of the nineteenth century—Victor Hugo! Now open Les Misérables. See the great passages which the American translator softens and the English translator tears away. Open this other book of his, William Shakespeare, a book with only one grave fault, the omission of the words “A Poem” from the title-page; a book which is the courageous arch, the comprehending sky of criticism, but which no American publisher will dare to issue, or, if he does, will expurgate. Out with Hugo, of course!—Here is Juvenal, terrible and splendid fountain of all satire; inspiration of all just censure; exemplar of all noble rage at baseness; satirist and moralist sublimed into the poet; the scowl of the unclouded noon above the low streets of folly and of sin. But what he withers, he also shows. The sun-stroke of his poetry reveals what it kills. Juvenal tells all. His fidelity of exposure is frightful. Mr. Harlan would make short work of him. Out with Juvenal!—Open the divine Apocalypse. What words are these among the thunderings and lightnings and voices? Is this a poem to be read aloud in parlors (for such appears to be the test of propriety and purity)? At least, John might have been a little more choice in language. Some of these texts are “indecent.” Yes, indeed! John must go.—Here is Spenser. Encyclopædic poet of the visioned chivalry. It is all there. Amadis, Esplandian, Tirante the White, Palmerin of England, all those Paladin romances were but the leaves: this is the flower. A lost dream of valor, chastity, courtesy, glory—a dream that marks an age of human history—glimmers here, far in these depths, and makes this unexplored obscurity divine. “But is the Faëry Queen such a book as you would wish to put into the hands of a lady?” What a question! Has it not been expurgated? Out with Spenser!—Here is another, a true soldier of the human emancipation; one who smites amidst uproars of laughter; the master of Titanic farce; a whirlwind and earthquake of derision—Rabelais. A nice one for Mr. Harlan! One glimpse at the chapter which explains why the miles lengthen as you leave Paris, or at the details of the birth and nurture of Gargantua, will suffice. Out with Rabelais—out with the great jester of France, as Lord Bacon calls him!—And here is Lord Bacon himself, in one of whose pages you may read, done from the Latin by Spedding into a magnificent golden thunder of English, the absolute defence of the free spirit of the great authors, coupled with stern rebuke to the spirit that would pick and choose, as dastard and effeminate. Out with Lord Bacon! Not him only, not these only, not only the writers are under the ban. Here is Phidias, gorgeous sculptor in gold and ivory, giant dreamer of the Infinite in marble; but he will not use the fig-leaf. Here is Rembrandt, who paints the Holland landscape, the Jew, the beggar, the burgher, in lights and glooms of Eternity; and his pictures have been called “indecent.” Here is Mozart, his music rich with the sumptuous color of all sunsets; and it has been called “sensual.” Here is Michael Angelo, who makes art tremble with a new and strange afflatus, and gives Europe novel and sublime forms that tower above the centuries, and accost the Greek; and his works have been called “bestial.” Out with them all!—Now, except Virgil for vassalage to literary models, and for grave and sad falsehood to liberty; except Goethe for his lack of the final ecstasy of self-surrender which completes a poet, and for coldness to the great mother—one’s country; except Spenser for his remoteness, and Byron for his immaturity, and there is not one of those I have named that does not belong to the first order of human intellect. But no need to make discriminations here; they are all great; they have all striven; they have all served. Moses, Homer, Lucretius, Æschylus, Ezekiel, Dante, Job, Plutarch, Herodotus, Tacitus, Shakespeare, Solomon, Isaiah, Montaigne, Hafiz, Virgil, Swedenborg, Goethe, Byron, Cervantes, Hugo, Juvenal, John, Spenser, Rabelais, Bacon, Phidias, Rembrandt, Mozart, Angelo:—these are among the demi-gods of human thought; the souls that have loved and suffered for the race; the light-bringers, the teachers, the lawgivers, the consolers, the liberators, the inspired inspirers of mankind; the noble and gracious beings who, in the service of humanity, have borne every cross and earned every crown. There is not one of them that is not sacred in the eyes of thoughtful men. But not one of them does the rotten taste and morals of the nineteenth century spare! Not one of them is qualified to render work for bread under this Secretary! Do I err? Do I exaggerate? I write without access to the books I mention—(it is fitting that this piece of insolent barbarism should have been committed in almost the only important American city which is without a public library!)—with the exception of three or four volumes which I happen to have by me, I am obliged to rely for my statements on the memory of youthful readings, eight or ten years ago; but name me one book of the first order in which such passages as I refer to do not occur! Tell me who can—what poet of the first grade escapes this brand, “immoral,” or this spittle, “indecent”! If the great books are not, in the point under consideration, in the same moral category as Leaves of Grass, then why, either in translation or in the originals, either by a bold softening which dissolves the author’s meaning, or by absolute excision, are they nearly all expurgated? Answer me that. By one process or the other, Brizeux, Cary, Wright, Cayley, Carlyle, everybody, expurgates Dante; Langhorne and others expurgate Plutarch; Potter and others expurgate Æschylus; Gifford, Anthon, and others expurgate Juvenal; Creech, Watson, and others expurgate Lucretius; Bowdler and others expurgate Shakespeare; Nott (I believe it is) expurgates Hafiz; Wraxall and Wilbour expurgate Hugo; Kirkland, Hart, and others expurgate Spenser; somebody expurgates Virgil; somebody expurgates Byron; the Oxford scholars dilute Tacitus; Lord Derby expurgates Homer, besides making him as ridiculous as the plucked cock of Diogenes in translation; several hands expurgate Goethe; and Archbishop Tillotson in design expurgates Moses, Ezekiel, Solomon, Isaiah, St. John, and all the others—a job which Dr. Noah Webster executes, but, thank God, cannot popularize. What book is spared? Nothing but a chain of circumstance, which seems divinely ordained, saves us the unmutilated Bible. Nearly every other great book bleeds. When one is not expurgated, the balance is restored by its being cordially abused. Thanks to the splendid conscience and courage of Mr. Wight, we can read Montaigne in English without the omission of a single word! Thanks also to Motteux and others, Cervantes has gone untouched, and we have not as yet a family Rabelais. Neither have we as yet a family Mankind nor a family Universe; but this is an oversight which will, doubtless, be repaired in time. God will also, doubtless, be expurgated whenever it is possible. Why not? One step to this end is taken in the expurgation of genius, which is His second manifestation, as Nature is His first! Go on, gentlemen! You will yet have things as “moral” as you desire!

I am aware that so far as his opinion, not his act, is concerned, Mr. Harlan, however unintelligently, represents to some extent the shallow conclusions of his age; and I know it will be said, that if the great books contain these passages, they ought to be expurgated. It is not my design to endeavor to put a quart into people who only hold a gill, nor would I waste time in endeavoring to convert a large class of persons whom I once heard Walt Whitman describe, with his usual Titanic richness and strength of phrase, as “the immutable granitic pudding-heads of the world.” But there is a better class than these; and I am filled with measureless amazement, that persons of high intelligence, living to the age of maturity, do not perceive, at least, the immense and priceless scientific and human uses of such passages, and the consequent necessity, transcending and quashing all minor considerations, of having them where they are. But look at these sad sentences—a complete and felicitous statement of the whole modern doctrine—in the pages of a man I love and revere: “The literature of three centuries ago is not decent to be read; we expurgate it. Within a hundred years, woman has become a reader, and for that reason, as much or more than any thing else, literature has sprung to a higher level. No need now to expurgate all you read.” He goes on to argue that literature in the next century will be richer than in the classic epochs, because woman will contribute to it as an author—her contribution, I infer, to be of the kind that will not need expurgating. These, I repeat, are sad sentences. If they are true, Bowdler is right to expurgate Shakespeare, and Noah Webster the Bible. But no, they are not true! I welcome woman into art; but when she comes there grandly, she will not come either as expurgator or creator of emasculate or partial forms. Woman, grand in art, is Rosa Bonheur, painting with fearless pencil the surly, sublime Jovian bull, equipped for masculine use; painting the powerful, ramping stallion in his amorous pride; not weakly or meanly flinching from the full celebration of what God has made. Woman, grand in art, will come creating in forms, however novel, the absolute, the permanent, the real, the evil and the good, as Æschylus, as Cervantes, as Shakespeare before her; with sex, with truth, with universality, without omissions or concealments. And woman, as the ideal reader of literature, is not the indelicate prude, flushing and squealing over some frank page; it is that high and beautiful soul, Marie de Gournay, devoutly absorbing the work of her master, Montaigne; finding it all great; greatly comprehending, greatly accepting it all; fronting its license and grossness without any of the livid shuddering of Puritans; and looking on the book in the same universal and kindly spirit as its author looked upon the world. Woman reading otherwise than thus—shrinking from Apuleius, from Rabelais, from Aristophanes, from Shakespeare, from even Wycherley, or Petronius, or Aretin, or Shirley—is less than man, is not ideal, not strong, not nobly good, but petty, and effeminate, and mean. And not for her, nor by her, nor by man, do I assent to the expurgation of the great books. Literature cannot spring to a higher level than theirs. Alas! it has sprung to a lower. The level of the great books is the Infinite, the Absolute. To contain all, by containing the premise, the truth, the idea and feeling of all; to tally the universe by profusion, variety, reality, mystery, enclosure, power, terror, beauty, service; to be great to the utmost conceivability of greatness—what higher level than this can literature spring to? Up, on the highest summit, stand such works, never to be surpassed, never to be supplanted. Their indecency is not that of the vulgar; their vulgarity is not that of the low. Their evil, if it be evil, is not there for nothing—it serves; at the base of it is Love.—Every poet of the highest quality is, in the masterly coinage of the author of Leaves of Grass, a kosmos. His work, like himself, is a second world, full of contrarieties, strangely harmonized, and moral indeed, but only as the world is moral. Shakespeare is all good, Rabelais is all good, Montaigne is all good; not because all the thoughts, the words, the manifestations are so, but because at the core, and permeating all, is an ethic intention—a love which, through mysterious, indirect, subtle, seemingly absurd, often terrible and repulsive means, seeks to uplift, and never to degrade. It is the spirit in which authorship is pursued, as Augustus Schlegel has said, that makes it either an infamy or a virtue; and the spirit of the great authors, no matter what their letter, is one with that which pervades the creation. In mighty love, with implements of pain and pleasure, of good and evil, Nature develops man; genius also, in mighty love, with implements of pain and pleasure, of good and evil, develops man; no matter what the means, that is the end. Tell me not, then, of the indecent passages of the great poets! The world, which is the poem of God, is full of indecent passages! “Shall there be evil in a city and the Lord hath not done it?” shouts Amos. “I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil; I, the Lord, do all these things,” thunders Isaiah. “This,” says Coleridge, “is the deep abyss of the mystery of God.” Yes, and it is the profound of the mystery of genius also! Evil is part of the economy of genius, as it is part of the economy of God.—Gentle reviewers endeavor to find excuses for the freedoms of geniuses. “It is to prove that they were above conventionalities.” “It is referable to the age.” “The age permitted a degree of coarseness,” &c. “Shakespeare’s indecencies are the result of his age.” O Ossa on Pelion, mount piled on mount, of error and folly! What has genius, spirit of the absolute and the eternal, to do with definitions of position, or conventionalities, or the age? Genius puts indecencies into its works, because God puts them into His world. Whatever the special reason in each case, this is the general reason in all cases. They are here, because they are there. That is the eternal why.—No; Alphonso of Castile thought, that if he had been consulted at the Creation, he could have given a few hints to the Almighty. Not I. I play Alphonso neither to genius nor to God.