The Vagabond in Literature Part 16

It is a great style, it is an impressive style, but it is obviously not a plastic style, nor a versatile style. Its very merits necessarily carry with them corresponding defects. The ma.s.siveness sometimes proves mere unwieldiness, the virile strength tends to coa.r.s.eness, the eye fixed on certain broad distant effects misses the delicate by-play of colour and movement in the foreground. The persistent unconventionality of metre and rhythm becomes in time a mannerism as p.r.o.nounced as the mannerism of Tennyson and Swinburne.

I do not urge these things in disparagement of Whitman. No man can take up a certain line wholeheartedly and uncompromisingly without incurring the disabilities attaching to all who concentrate on one great issue.

And if sometimes he is ineffectual, if on occasion he is merely strident in place of authoritative, how often do his utterances carry with them a superb force and a conviction which compel us to recognize the sagacious genius of the man.

III

Indeed, it is when we examine Whitman's att.i.tude towards Humanity that we realize best his strength and courage. For it is here that his qualities find their fittest artistic expression. Nothing in Whitman's view is common or unclean. All things in the Universe, rightly considered, are sweet and good. Carrying this view into social politics, Whitman declares for absolute social equality. And this is done in no doctrinaire spirit, but because of Whitman's absolute faith and trust in man and woman-not the man and woman overridden by the artifices of convention, but the "powerful uneducated person." Whitman finds his ideal not in Society (with a capital S), but in artisans and mechanics.

He took to his heart the mean, the vulgar, the coa.r.s.e, not idealizing their weaknesses, but imbuing them with his own strength and vigour.

"I am enamoured of growth out of doors, Of men that live among cattle, or taste of the ocean or woods, Of the builder and steerers of s.h.i.+ps, and the wielders of axes, and The drivers of horses.

I can eat and sleep with them week in week out."

Such are his comrades. And well he knows them. For many years of his life he was roving through country and city, coming into daily contact with the men and women about whom he has sung. Walt Whitman-farm boy, school teacher, printer, editor, traveller, mechanic, nurse in the army hospital, Government clerk. Truly our poet has graduated as few have done in the school of Life. No writer of our age has better claims to be considered the Poet of Democracy.

But he was no sentimentalist. More tolerant and pa.s.sive in disposition than Victor Hugo, he had the same far-seeing vision when dealing with the people. He recognized their capacity for good, their unconquerable faith, their aspirations, their fine instincts; but he recognized also their brutality and fierceness. He would have agreed with Spencer's significant words: "There is no alchemy by which you can get golden conduct out of leaden instincts"; but he would have denied Spencer's implication that leaden instincts ruled the Democracy. And he was right.

There is more real knowledge of men and women in _Leaves of Gra.s.s_ and _Les Miserables_ than in all the volumes of the Synthetic Philosophy.

Thus Whitman announces his theme:-

"Of Life immense in pa.s.sion, pulse, and power, Cheerful, for freest action formed under the laws divine.

The modern man I sing."

"Whitman," wrote the late Mr. William Clarke, in his stimulating study of the Poet, {188} "sings of the Modern Man as workman, friend, citizen, brother, comrade, as pioneer of a new social order, as both material and spiritual, final and most subtle, compound of spirit and nature, firmly planted on this rolling earth, and yet 'moving about in worlds not realized.' As representative democratic bard Whitman exhibits complete freedom from unconventionality, a very deep human love for all, faith in the rationality of the world, courage, energy, and the instincts of solidarity."

In the introductory essay to this volume some remarks were made about the affections of the literary Vagabond in general and of Whitman in particular, which call now for an ampler treatment, especially as on this point I find myself, apparently, at issue with so many able and discerning critics of Whitman. I say apparently because a consideration of the subject may show that the difference, though real, is not so fundamental as it appears to be.

That Whitman entertained a genuine affection for men and women is, of course, too obvious to be gainsaid. His n.o.ble work in the hospitals, his tenderness towards criminals and outcasts-made known to us through the testimony of friends-show him to be a man of comprehensive sympathies.

No man of a chill and calculating nature could have written as he did, and, although his writings are not free of affectation, the strenuous, fundamental sincerity of the man impresses every line.

But was it, to quote William Clarke, "a _very deep_ human love"? This seems to me a point of psychological interest. A man may exhibit kindliness and tenderness towards his fellow-creatures without showing any deep personal attachment. In fact, the wider a man's sympathies are the less room is there for any strong individual feeling. His friend, Mr. Donaldson, has told us that he never remembers Whitman shedding a tear of grief over the death of any friend. Tears of joy he shed often; but no tear of sorrow, of personal regret. It is true that Mr. Donaldson draws no particular inference from this fact. It seems to me highly significant. The absence of intense emotion is no argument truly for insensibility; but to a man of large, sweeping sympathies such as Whitman the loss of a particular friend did not strike home as it would do in men of subtler temperaments.

Cosmic emotions leave no room for those special manifestations of concentrated feeling in individual instances which men with a narrower range of sympathies frequently show.

For in denying that Whitman was a man capable of "a very deep human love," no moral censure is implied. If not deep, it was certainly comprehensive; and rarely, if ever, do the two qualities coexist. Depth of feeling is not to be found in men of the tolerant, pa.s.sive type; it is the intolerant, comparatively narrow-minded man who loves deeply; the man of few friends, not the man who takes the whole human race to his heart in one colossal embrace. Narrowness may exist, of course, without intensity. But intensity of temperament always carries with it a certain forceful narrowness. Such a man, strongly idiosyncratic, with his sympathies running in a special groove, is capable of one or two affections that absorb his entire nature. Those whom he cares for are so subtly bound up with the peculiarities of his temperament that they become a part of his very life. And if they go, so interwoven are their personalities with the fibres of his being, that part of his life goes with them. To such the death of an intimate friend is a blow that shatters them beyond recovery. Courage and endurance, indeed, they may show, and the undiscerning may never note how fell the blow has been.

But though the healing finger of Time will a.s.suage the wound, the scars they will carry to their dying day.

As a rule, such men, lovable as they may be to the few, are not of the stuff of which social reformers are made. They feel too keenly, too sensitively, are guided too much by individual temperamental preferences.

It is of no use for any man who has to deal with coa.r.s.e-grained humanity, with all sorts and conditions of men, to be fastidious in his tastes. A certain bluntness, a certain rude hardiness, a certain evenness of disposition is absolutely necessary. We are told of Whitman by one of his most ardent admirers that his life was "a pleased, uninterested saunter through the world-no hurry, no fever, no strife, hence no bitterness, no depression, no wasted energies . . . in all his tastes and attractions always aiming to live thoroughly in the free nonchalant spirit of the day."

Yes; this is the type of man wanted as a social pioneer, as a poet of the people. A man who felt more acutely, for whom the world was far too terrible a place for sauntering, would be quite unfitted for Whitman's task. It was essential that he should have lacked deep individual affection. Something had to be sacrificed for the work he had before him, and we need not lament that he had no predilection for those intimate personal ties that mean so much to some.

A man who has to speak a word of cheer to so many can ill afford to linger with the few. He is not even concerned to convert you to his way of thinking. He throws out a hint, a suggestion, the rest you must do for yourself.

"I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a casual look upon you, and then averts his face. Leaving you to prove and define it. Expecting the main things from you."

Nowhere are Whitman's qualities more admirably shown than in his att.i.tude towards the average human being. As a rule the ordinary man is not a person whom the Poet delights to honour. He is concerned with the exceptional, the extraordinary type. Whitman's att.i.tude then is of special interest.

"I will leave all and come and make the hymns of you; None has understood you, but I understand you; None has done justice to you-you have not done justice to yourself.

None but has found you imperfect; I only find no imperfection in you.

None but would subordinate you; I only am he who will never consent to subordinate you."

"Painters have painted their swarming groups, and the centre figure of all; From the head of the centre figure, spreading a nimbus of gold-coloured light.

But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of gold-coloured light.

From My hand, from the brain of every man and woman it streams effulgently flowing for ever.

O! I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you!

You have not known what you are; you have slumbered upon yourself all your time. . . ."

And so on, in a vein of courageous cheer, spoken with the big, obtrusive, genial egotism that always meets us in Whitman's writings. Whitman's egotism proves very exasperating to some readers, but I do not think it should trouble us much. After all it is the egotism of a simple, natural, sincere nature; there is no self-satisfied smirk about it, no arrogance. He is conscious of his powers, and is quite frank in letting you know this. Perhaps his boisterous delight in his own prowess may jar occasionally on the nerves; but how much better than the affected humility of some writers. And the more you study his writings the less does this egotism affect even the susceptible. Your ears get attuned to the pitch of the voice, you realize that the big drum is beaten with a purpose. For it must be remembered that it is an egotism entirely emptied of condescension. He is vain certainly, but mainly because he glories in the common heritage, because he feels he is one of the common people. He is proud a.s.suredly, but it is pride that exults in traits that he shares in common with the artist, the soldier, and the sailor.

He is no writer who plays down to the ma.s.ses, who will prophesy fair things-like the mere demagogue-in order to win their favour. And it is a proof of his plain speaking, of his fearless candour, that for the most part the very men for whom he wrote care little for him.

Conventionality rules every cla.s.s in the community. Whitman's gospel of social equality is not altogether welcome to the average man. One remembers Mr. Barrie's pleasant satire of social distinction in _The Admirable Crichton_, where the butler resents his radical master's suggestion that no real difference separates employer and employed. He thinks it quite in keeping with the eternal fitness of things that his master should a.s.sert the prerogative of "Upper Dog," and points out how that there are many social grades below stairs, and that an elaborate hierarchy separates the butler at one end from the "odds and ends" at the other.

In like manner the ordinary citizen resents Whitman's genuine democratic spirit, greatly preferring the sentimental Whiggism of Tennyson.

Whitman reminds us by his treatment of the vulgar, the ordinary, the commonplace, that he signalizes a new departure in literature. Of poets about the people there have been many, but he is the first genuine Poet _of_ the People.

Art is in its essence aristocratic, it strives after selectness, eschews the trivial and the trite. There is, therefore, in literature always a tendency towards conservatism; the literary artist grows more and more fastidious in his choice of words; the cheap and vulgar must be rigorously excluded, and only those words carrying with them stately and beautiful a.s.sociations are to be countenanced. Thus Cla.s.sicism in Art constantly needs the freshening, broadening influence of Romanticism.

What Conservatism and Liberalism are to Politics Cla.s.sicism and Romanticism are to Art. Romantic revolutions have swept over literature before the nineteenth century, and Shakespeare was the first of our great Romantics. Then with the reaction Formalism and Conservatism crept in again. But the Romantic Revival at the beginning of the nineteenth century went much further than previous ones. Out of the throes of the Industrial Revolution had been born a l.u.s.ty, clamorous infant that demanded recognition-the new Demos. And it claimed not only recognition in politics, but recognition in literature. Wordsworth and Sh.e.l.ley essayed to speak for it with varying success; but Wordsworth was too exclusive, and Sh.e.l.ley-the most sympathetic of all our poets till the coming of Browning-was too ethereal in his manner. Like his own skylark, he sang to us poised midway between earth and heaven; a more emphatically flesh and blood personage was wanted.

Here and there a writer of genuine democratic feeling, like Ebenezer Elliott, voiced the aspirations of the people, but only on one side.

Thomas Hood and Mrs. Browning sounded a deeper note; but the huge, clamorous populace needed a yet fuller note, a more penetrating insight, a more forceful utterance. And in America, with its seething democracy-a democracy more urgent, more insistent than our own-it found its spokesman. That it did not recognize him, and is only just beginning to do so, is not remarkable. It did not recognize him, for it had scarcely recognized itself. Only dimly did it realize its wants and aspirations.

Whitman divined them; he is the Demos made articulate.

And not only did he sweep away the Conservative traditions and conventions of literature, he endeavoured to overthrow the aristocratic principle that underlies it. Selectness he would replace with simplicity. No doubt he went too far. That is of small moment.

Exaggeration and over-emphasis have their place in the scheme of things.

A thunderstorm may be wanted to clear the air, and if it does incidentally some slight damage to crops and trees it is of no use grumbling.

But in the main Whitman's theory of Art was very true and finely suggestive, and is certainly not the view of a man who cares for nothing but the wild and barbaric.

"The art of Art, the glory of expression, and the suns.h.i.+ne of the light of letters is simplicity. Nothing is better than simplicity, nothing can make up for excess or for the lack of definiteness. To carry on the heave of impulse, and pierce intellectual depths, and give all subjects their articulations, are powers neither common nor very uncommon. But to speak in literature with the perfect rect.i.tude and insouciance of the movements of animals and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees in the woods, and gra.s.s by the woodside, is the flawless triumph of Art."

A fitting att.i.tude for a Poet of Democracy, one likely to bring him into direct contact with the broad, variegated stream of human life.

What perhaps he did not realize so clearly is that Nature, no less than Art, exercises the selective facility, and corrects her own riotous extravagance. And thus on occasion he falls into the very indefiniteness, the very excess he deprecates.

The way in which his Art and democratic spirit correspond suggests another, though less unconventional poet of the Democracy-William Morris.

The s.p.a.ciousness the directness, the tolerance that characterise Whitman's work are to be found to Morris. Morris had no eclectic preferences either in Art or Nature. A wall paper, a tapestry, an epic were equally agreeable tasks; and a blade of gra.s.s delighted him as fully as a sunset. So with men. He loved many, but no one especially.

Catholicity rather than intensity characterised his friends.h.i.+ps. And, like Whitman, he could get on cheerfully enough with surprisingly unpleasant people, provided they were working for the cause in which he was interested. {197} That is the secret. Whitman and Morris loved the Cause. They looked at things in the ma.s.s, at people in the ma.s.s. This is the true democratic spirit. They had no time, nor must it be confessed any special interest-in the individual as such. What I have said about Whitman's affection being comprehensive rather than intense applies equally to Morris. Why? Because it is the way of the Democrat and the Social Reformer. To such the individual suggests a whole cla.s.s, a cla.s.s suggests the race. Whitman is always speaking to man as man, rarely does he touch on individual men. If he does so, it is only to pa.s.s on to some cosmic thoughts suggested by the particular instance.

Perhaps the most inspiring thing about Whitman's att.i.tude towards humanity is his thorough understanding of the working cla.s.ses, and his quick discernment of the healthy naturalism that animates them. He neither patronizes them nor idealizes them; he sees their faults, which are obvious enough; but he also sees, what is not so obvious, their fine independence of spirit, their eager thirst for improvement, for ampler knowledge, for larger opportunities, and their latent idealism.

No doubt there is more independence, greater vigour, less servility, in America than in England; but the men he especially delights in, the artisan or mechanic, represent the best of the working cla.s.ses in either country.