The Vagabond in Literature Part 15

In his best utterances there are both sincerity and beauty.

Who could deny the t.i.tle of artist to the man who wrote those n.o.ble verses, "On the Beach at Night"?-

"On the beach at night, Stands a child with her father, Watching the east, the autumn sky.

"Up through the darkness, While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black ma.s.ses spreading, Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky, Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east, Ascends large and calm the lord-star Jupiter, And nigh at hand, only a very little above, Swim the delicate sisters the Pleiades.

"From the beach the child holding the hand of her father, Those burial clouds that lower victorious soon to devour all Watching, silently weeps.

"Weep not, child, Weep not, my darling, With these kisses let me remove your tears, The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious, They shall not long possess the sky, they devour the stars only in apparition, Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the Pleiades shall emerge, They are immortal, all those stars both silvery and golden shall s.h.i.+ne out again, The great stars and the little ones shall s.h.i.+ne out again, they endure, The vast immortal suns and the long-enduring pensive moons shall again s.h.i.+ne.

"Then, dearest child, mournest thou only for Jupiter?

Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars?

"Something there is, (With my lips soothing thee, adding I whisper, I give thee the first suggestion, the problem and indirection) Something there is more immortal even than the stars, (Many the burials, many the days and nights, pa.s.sing away) Something that shall endure longer even than l.u.s.trous Jupiter, Longer than sun or any revolving satellite, Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades."

or those touching lines, "Reconciliation"?-

"Word over all beautiful as the sky, Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost, That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly Wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world; For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead, I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin- I draw near- Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin."

Again, take that splendid dirge in memory of President Lincoln, majestic in its music, s.p.a.cious and grand in its treatment. It is too long for quotation, but the opening lines, with their suggestive beauty, and the Song to Death, may be instanced.

"When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed, And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night, I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west, And thought of him I love.

"O powerful western fallen star!

O shades of night-O moody, tearful night!

O great star disappear'd-O the black murk that hides the star!

O cruel hands that hold me powerless-O helpless soul of me!

O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul!

"In the dooryard fronting an old farmhouse near the whitewash'd palings, Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich green, With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong I love.

With every leaf a miracle-and from this bush in the dooryard, With delicate coloured blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich green, A sprig with its flower I break.

"Come lovely and soothing death, Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving, In the day, in the night, to all, to each, Sooner or later delicate death.

"Prais'd be the fathomless universe, For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious, And for love, sweet love-but praise! praise! praise!

For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.

"Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet, Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?

Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all, I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly.

"The night in silence under many a star, The ocean sh.o.r.e and the husky whispering wave whose voice I know, And the soul-turning to thee, O vast and well-veil'd death, And the body gratefully nestling close to thee.

"Over the tree-tops I float thee a song, Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and the prairies wide, Over the dense-pack'd cities all and the teeming wharves and ways, I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee, O death."

This is not only Art, but great Art. So fresh in their power, so striking in their beauty, are Whitman's utterances on Death that they take their place in our memories beside the large utterances of Shakespeare, Milton, and Sh.e.l.ley.

It is a mistake to think that where Whitman fails in expression it is through carelessness; that he was a great poet by flashes, and that had he taken more pains he would have been greater still. We have been a.s.sured by those who knew him intimately that he took the greatest care over his work, and would wait for days until he could get what he felt to be the right word.

To the student who comes fresh to a study of Whitman it is conceivable that the rude, strong, nonchalant utterances may seem like the work of an inspired but careless and impatient artist. It is not so. It is done deliberately.

"I furnish no specimens," he says; "I shower them by exhaustless laws, fresh and modern continually, as Nature does."

He is content to be suggestive, to stir your imagination, to awaken your sympathies. And when he fails, he fails as Wordsworth did, because he lacked the power of self-criticism, lacked the faculty of humour-that saving faculty which gives discrimination, and intuitively protects the artist from confusing pathos with bathos, the grand and the grandiose.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in his treatment of s.e.x. Frankness, outspokenness on the primal facts of life are to be welcomed in literature. All the great masters-Shakespeare, Dante, Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, have dealt openly and fearlessly with the elemental pa.s.sions.

There is nothing to deplore in this, and Mr. Swinburne was quite right when he contended that the domestic circle is not to be for all men and writers the outer limit of their world of work. So far from regretting that Whitman claimed right to equal freedom when speaking of the primal fact of procreation as when speaking of sunrise, sunsetting, and the primal fact of death, every clean-minded man and woman should rejoice in the poet's att.i.tude. For he believed and gloried in the separate personalities of man and woman, claiming manhood and womanhood as the poet's province, exulting in the potentialities of a healthy s.e.xual life.

He was angry, as well he might be, with the furtive sn.i.g.g.e.r which greets such matters as motherhood and fatherhood with the prurient unwholesomeness of a mind that can sigh sentimentally over the "roses and raptures of Vice" and start away shamefaced from the stark pa.s.sions-stripped of all their circ.u.mlocutions. He certainly realized as few have done the truth of that fine saying of Th.o.r.eau's, that "for him to whom s.e.x is impure there are no flowers in Nature."

But at the same time I cannot help feeling that Stevenson was right when he said that Whitman "loses our sympathy in the character of a poet by attracting too much of our attention-that of a Bull in a China Shop."

{180}

His aim is right enough; it is to his method one may take objection. Not on the score of morality. Whitman's treatment of pa.s.sion is not immoral; it is simply like Nature herself-unmoral. What shall we say then about his s.e.x cycle, "Children of Adam"? Whitman, in his anxiety to speak out, freely, simply, naturally, to vindicate the sanity of coa.r.s.eness, the poetry of animalism, seems to me to have bungled rather badly. There are many fine pa.s.sages in his "Song of the Body Electric" and "Spontaneous Me," but much of it impresses me as bad art, and is consequently ineffectual in its aim. The subject demands a treatment at once strong and subtle-I do not mean finicking-and subtlety is a quality not vouchsafed to Whitman. Lacking it, he is often unconsciously comic where he should be gravely impressive. "A man's body is sacred, and a woman's body is sacred." True; but the sacredness is not displayed by making out a tedious inventory of the various parts of the body. Says Whitman in effect: "The s.e.xual life is to be gloried in, not to be treated as if it were something shameful." Again true; but is there not a danger of missing the glory by discoursing noisily on the various physiological manifestations. s.e.x is not the more wonderful for being appraised by the big drum.

The inherent beauty and sanct.i.ty of s.e.x lies surely in its superb unconsciousness; it is a matter for two human beings drawn towards one another by an indefinable, world-old attraction; scream about it, caper over it, and you begin to make it ridiculous, for you make it self-conscious.

Animalism merely as a scientific fact serves naught to the poet, unless he can show also what is as undeniable as the bare fact-its poetry, its coa.r.s.eness, and its mystery go together. Browning has put it in a line:-

". . . savage creatures seek Their loves in wood and plain-_and G.o.d renews_ _His ancient rapture_."

It is the "rapture" and the mystery which Whitman misses in many of his songs of s.e.x.

There is no need to give here any theological significance to the word "G.o.d." Let the phrase stand for the mystic poetry of animalism. Whitman has no sense of mystery.

I have another objection against "The Children of Adam." The loud, self-a.s.sertive, genial, boastful style of Whitman suits very well many of his democratic utterances, his sweeping cosmic emotions. But here it gives one the impression of a kind of showman, who with a flouris.h.i.+ng stick is shouting out to a gaping crowd the excellences of manhood and womanhood. Deliberately he has refrained from the mood of imaginative fervour which alone could give a high seriousness to his treatment-a high seriousness which is really indispensable. And his rough, slangy, matter-of-fact comments give an atmosphere of unworthy vulgarity to his subject. Occasionally he is carried away by the sheer imaginative beauty of the subject, then note how different the effect:-

"Have you ever loved the body of a woman, Have you ever loved the body of a man, Do you not see that these are exactly the same to all in all Nations and times all over the earth?"

"If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred, And the glory and sweet of a man is the token of manhood untainted, And in man or woman a clean, strong, firm-fibred body is More beautiful than the most beautiful face."

If only all had been of this quality. But interspersed with lines of great force and beauty are c.u.mbrous irrelevancies, wholly superfluous details.

William Morris has also treated the subject of s.e.x in a frank, open fas.h.i.+on. And there is in his work something of the easy, deliberate s.p.a.ciousness that we find in Whitman. But Morris was an artist first and foremost, and he never misses the _poetry_ of animalism; as readers of the "Earthly Paradise" and the prose romances especially know full well.

It is not then because Whitman treats love as an animal pa.s.sion that I take objection to much in his "Children of Adam." There are poets enough and to spare who sing of the sentimental aspects of love. We need have no quarrel with Whitman's aim as expressed by Mr. John Burroughs: "To put in his s.e.x poems a rank and healthy animality, and to make them as frank as the shedding of pollen by the trees, strong even to the point of offence." All we ask is for him to do so as a poet, not as a mere physiologist. And when he speaks one moment as a physiologist, next as a poet; at one time as a lover, at another as a showman, the result is not inspiring. "He could not make it pleasing," remarks Mr. Burroughs, "a sweet morsel to be rolled under the tongue; that would have been levity and sin, as in Byron and the other poets . . . He would sooner be b.e.s.t.i.a.l than Byronic, he would sooner shock by his frankness than inflame by his suggestion." This vague linking together of "Byron and the other poets" is not easy to understand. In the first place, not one of the moderns has treated love from the same standpoint. Sh.e.l.ley, for instance, is transcendental, Byron elemental, Tennyson sentimental; Rossetti looks at the soul through the body, Browning regards the body through the soul. There is abundant variety in the treatment. Then, again, why Byron should be singled out especially for opprobrium I fail to see, for love is to him the fierce elemental pa.s.sion it is for Whitman. As for frankness, the episode of Haidee and Don Juan does not err on the side of reticence. Nor is it pruriently suggestive. It is a splendid piece of poetic animalism. Let us be fair to Byron. His work may in places be disfigured by an unworthy cynicism; his treatment of s.e.xual problems be marred by a shallow flippancy. But no poet had a finer appreciation of the essential poetry of animalism than he, and much of his cynicism, after all, is by way of protest against the same narrow morality at which Whitman girds. To single Byron out as a poet especially obnoxious in his treatment of love, and to condemn him so sweepingly, seems to me scarcely defensible. To extol unreservedly the rankness and coa.r.s.eness of "The Children of Adam," and to have no word of commendation, say, for so n.o.ble a piece of naturalism as the story of Haidee, seems to me lacking in fairness. Besides, it suggests that the _only_ treatment in literature of the s.e.xual life is a coa.r.s.e, unpleasing treatment, which I do not suppose Mr. Burroughs really holds. Whitman has vindicated, and vindicated finely, the inherent truth and beauty of animalism. But so has William Morris, so has Dante Gabriel Rossetti, so has poor flouted Byron. And I will go further, and say that these other poets have succeeded often where Whitman has failed; they have shown the beauty and cosmic significance, when Whitman has been merely cataloguing the stark facts.

It may be objected, of course, that Whitman does not aim in his s.e.x poems at imaginative beauty, that he aims at sanity and wholesomeness; that what he speaks-however rank-makes for healthy living. May be; I am not concerned to deny it. What I do deny is the implication that the wholesomeness of a fact is sufficient justification for its treatment in literature. There are a good many disagreeable things that are wholesome enough, there are many functions of the body that are entirely healthy.

But one does not want them enshrined in Art.

To attack Whitman on the score of morality is unjustifiable; his s.e.x poems are simply unmoral. But had he flouted his art less flagrantly in them they would have been infinitely more powerful and convincing, and given the Philistines less opportunity for blaspheming.

I have dwelt at this length upon Whitman's treatment of s.e.x largely because it ill.u.s.trates his strength and weakness as a literary artist.

In some of his poems-those dealing with Democracy, for instance-we have Whitman at his best. In others, certainly a small proportion, we get sheer, unillumined doggerel. In his s.e.x poems there are great and fine ideas, moments of inspiration, flashes of beauty, combined with much that is trivial and tiresome.

But this I think is the inevitable outcome of his style. The style, like the man, is large, broad, sweeping, tolerant; the sense of "ma.s.s and mult.i.tude" is remarkable; he aims at big effects, and the quality of vastness in his writings struck John Addington Symonds as his most remarkable characteristic. {186} This vast, rolling, processional style is splendidly adapted for dealing with the elemental aspects of life, with the vital problems of humanity. He sees everything in bulk. His range of vision is cosmic. The very t.i.tles are suggestive of his point of view-"A Song of the Rolling Earth," "A Song of the Open Road," "A Song for Occupation," "G.o.ds." There are no detailed effects, no delicate points of light and shade in his writings, but huge panoramic effects.