The Vagabond in Literature Part 14

What Borrow achieved for the stirring life of the road, Jefferies has done for the brooding life of the fields. What Th.o.r.eau did for the woods at Maine and the waters of Merrimac, Jefferies did for the Wilts.h.i.+re streams and the Suss.e.x hedgerows. He has invested the familiar scenery of Southern England with a new glamour, a tenderer sanct.i.ty; has arrested our indifferent vision, our careless hearing, turned our languid appreciation into a comprehending affection.

Ardent, shy, impressionable, proud, stout-hearted pagan and wistful idealist; one of the most pathetic and most interesting figures in modern literature.

VII WALT WHITMAN

"So will I sing on, fast as fancies come; Rudely the verse being as the mood it paints."

ROBERT BROWNING.

"A man he seems of cheerful yesterdays And confident to-morrows."

WORDSWORTH.

I

The "good gray poet" is the supreme example of the Vagabond in literature. It is quite possible for one not drawn towards the Vagabond temperament to admire Stevenson, for Stevenson was a fine artist; to take delight in the vigorous "John Bullism" of _Lavengro_; to sympathize with the natural mysticism of Jefferies; the Puritan austerity of Th.o.r.eau. In short, there are aspects in the writings of the other "Vagabonds" in this volume which command attention quite apart from the characteristics specifically belonging to the literary Vagabond.

But it is not possible to view Whitman apart from his Vagabondage. He is proud of it, glories in it, and flings it in your face. Others, whatever strain of wildness they may have had, whatever sympathies they may have felt for the rough sweetness of the earth, however unconventional their habits, accepted at any rate the recognized conventions of literature.

As men, as thinkers, they were unconventional; as artists conventional.

They retained at any rate the literary garments of civilized society.

Not so Whitman. He is the Orson of literature. Unconventionality he carries out to its logical conclusion, and strides stark naked among our academies of learning. A strange, uncouth, surprising figure, it is impossible to ignore him however much he may shock our susceptibilities.

Many years ago Mr. Swinburne greeted him as "a strong-winged soul with prophetic wings"; subsequently he referred to him as a "drunken apple-woman reeling in a gutter." For this right-about-face he has been upbraided by Whitman's admirers. Certainly it is unusual to find any reader starting out to bless and ending with a curse. Usually it is the precedent of Balaam that is followed. But Mr. Swinburne's mingled feelings typify the att.i.tude of every one who approaches the poet, though few of us can express ourselves so resourcefully as the author of _Poems and Ballads_.

There may be some students who accept Whitman without demur at the outset on his own terms. All I can say is that I never heard of one. However broad-minded you may consider yourself, however catholic in your sympathies, Whitman is bound to get athwart some pet prejudice, to discover some shred of conventionality. Gaily, heedlessly, you start out to explore his writings, just as you might start on a walking tour. He is in touch with the primal forces of Nature, you hear. "So much the better," say you; "civilization has ceased to charm." "You are enamoured of wildness." Thus men talk before camping out, captivated by the picturesque and healthy possibilities, and oblivious to the inconveniences of roughing it.

But just as some amount of training is wanted before a walking tour, or a period of camping out, so is it necessary to prepare yourself for a course of Whitman. And this, not because there is any exotic mystery about Whitman, not because there are any intellectual subtleties about his work, as there are in Browning, but because he is the pioneer of a new order, and the pioneer always challenges the old order; our tastes require adjusting before they can value it properly.

There is no question about a "Return to Nature" with Whitman. He never left it. Th.o.r.eau quitted the Emersonian study to get fresh inspiration from the woods. Even Jefferies, bred up in the country, carried about with him the delicate susceptibilities of the neurotic modern. Borrow retained a firm grip-hold of many conventions of the city. But Whitman?

It was no case with him of a sojourn in the woods, or a ramble on the heath. He was a spiritual native of the woods and heath; not, as some seem to think, because he was a kind of wild barbarian who loved the rough and uncouth, and could be found only in unfrequented parts, but because he was in touch with the elemental everywhere. The wildness of Whitman, the barbarian aspects of the man, have been overrated. He is wild only in so far as he is cosmic, and the greater contains the less.

He loves the rough and the smooth, not merely the rough. His songs are no mere paeans of rustic solitudes; they are songs of the crowded streets, as well of the country roads; of men and women-of every type-no less than of the fields and the streams. In fact, he seeks the elemental everywhere. Th.o.r.eau found it in the Indian, Borrow in the gypsies, Whitman, with a finer comprehensiveness, finds it in the mult.i.tude. His business is to bring it to the surface, to make men and women rejoice in-not shrink from-the great primal forces of life. But he is not for moralizing-

"I give nothing as duties, What others give as duties I give as loving impulses.

(Shall I give the heart's action as a duty?)"

He has no quarrel with civilization as such. The teeming life of the town is as wonderful to him as the big solitude of the Earth. Carlyle's pleasantry about the communistic experiments of the American Transcendentalists would have no application for him. "A return to Acorns and expecting the Golden Age to arrive."

Here is no exclusive child of Nature:-

"I tramp a perpetual journey, . . .

My signs are a rainproof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods . . .

I have no chair, no church, no philosophy."

People talk of Whitman as if he relied entirely on the "staff cut from the woods"; they forget his rainproof coat and good shoes. a.s.suredly he has no mind to cut himself adrift from the advantages of civilization.

The rainproof coat, indeed, reminds one of Borrow's green gamp, which caused such distress to his friends and raised doubts in the minds of Mr.

Watts-Dunton and Dr. Hake as to whether he was a genuine child of [Picture: Walt Whitman] the open air. {173} No one would cavil at that term as applied to Whitman-yet one must not forget the "rainproof coat."

In regarding the work of Whitman there are three aspects which strike one especially. His att.i.tude towards Art, towards Humanity, towards Life.

II

First of all, Whitman's att.i.tude towards Art.

For the highest art two essentials are required-Sincerity and Beauty.

The tendency of modern literature has been to ignore the first and to make the second all-sufficient. The efforts of the artist have been concentrated upon the workmans.h.i.+p, and too often he has been satisfied with a merely technical excellence.

It is a pleasant and attractive pastime, this playing with words. Grace, charm, and brilliance are within the reach of the artificer's endeavour.

But a literature which is the outcome of the striving after beauty of form, without reference to the sincerity of substance, is like a posy of flowers torn away from their roots. Lacking vitality, it will speedily perish.

No writer has seen this more clearly than Whitman, and if in his vigorous allegiance to Sincerity he has seemed oblivious at times to the existence of Beauty, yet he has chosen the better part. And for this reason.

Beauty will follow in the wake of Sincerity, whether sought for or no, and the writer whose one pa.s.sion it is to see things as they are, and to disentangle from the transient and fleeting the great truths of life, finds that in achieving a n.o.ble sincerity he has also achieved the highest beauty.

The great utterances of the world are beautiful, because they are true.

Whereas the artist who is determined to attain beauty at all costs will obtain beauty of a kind-"silver-grey, placid and perfect," as Andrea del Sarto said, but the highest beauty it will not be, for that is no mere question of manner, but a perfect blend of manner and matter.

It will no doubt be urged that, despite his sincerity, there is a good deal in Whitman that is not beautiful. And this must be frankly conceded. But this will be found only when he has failed to separate the husk from the kernel. Whitman's sincerity is never in question, but he does not always appreciate the difference between accuracy and truth, between the accidental and the essential. For instance, lines like these-

"The six framing men, two in the middle, and two at each end, carefully bearing on their shoulders a heavy stick for a cross-beam."

or physiological detail after this fas.h.i.+on:-

"Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaws and the jaw hinges, Nose, nostrils of the nose, and the part.i.tion, Cheeks, temples, forehead, chin, throat, back of the neck sheer.

Strong shoulders, manly beard, hind shoulders, and the ample size round of the chest, Upper arm, armpit, elbow socket, lower arms, arm sinews, arm bones.

Wrist and wrist joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, forefinger, finger joints, finger nails, etc., etc."

The vital idea lying beneath these acc.u.mulated facts is lost sight of by the reader who has to wade through so many accurate non-essentials.

It is well, I think, to seize upon the weakness of Whitman's literary style at the outset, for it explains so much that is irritating and disconcerting.

_Leaves of Gra.s.s_ he called his book, and the name is more significant than one at first realizes. For there is about it not only the sweetness, the freshness, the luxuriance of the gra.s.s; but its prolific rankness-the wheat and the tares grow together.

It has, I know, been urged by some of Whitman's admirers that his power as a writer does not depend upon his artistic methods or non-artistic methods, and he himself protested against his _Leaves_ being judged merely as literature. And so there has been a tendency to glorify his very inadequacies, to hold him up as a poet who has defied successfully the unwritten laws of Art.

This is to do him an ill service. If Whitman's work be devoid of Art, then it possesses no durability. Literature is an art just as much as music, painting, or sculpture. And if a man, however fine, however inspiring his ideas may be, has no power to shape them-to express them in colour, in sound, in form, in words-to seize upon the essentials and use no details save as suffice to ill.u.s.trate these essentials, then his work will not last. For it has no vitality.

In other words, Whitman must be judged ultimately as an artist, for Art alone endures. And on the whole he can certainly bear the test. His art was not the conventional art of his day, but art it a.s.suredly was.