Birds and Poets : with Other Papers Part 14

We have had great help in Emerson in certain ways,--first-cla.s.s service.

He probes the conscience and the moral purpose as few men have done, and gives much needed stimulus there. But, after him, the need is all the more pressing for a broad, powerful, opulent, human personality to absorb these ideals, and to make something more of them than fine sayings. With Emerson alone we are rich in sunlight, but poor in rain and dew,--poor, too, in soil, and in the moist, gestating earth principle. Emerson's tendency is not to broaden and enrich, but to concentrate and refine.

Then, is there not an excessive modesty, without warrant in philosophy or nature, dwindling us in this country, drying us up in the viscera? Is there not a decay--a deliberate, strange abnegation and dread--of sane s.e.xuality, of maternity and paternity, among us, and in our literary ideals and social types of men and women? For myself, I welcome any evidence to the contrary, or any evidence that deeper and counteracting agencies are at work, as unspeakably precious. I do not know where this evidence is furnished in such ample measure as in the pages of Walt Whitman. The great lesson of nature, I take it, is that a sane sensuality must be preserved at all hazards, and this, it seems to me, is also the great lesson of his writings. The point is fully settled in him that, however they may have been held in abeyance or restricted to other channels, there is still sap and fecundity, and depth of virgin soil in the race, sufficient to produce a man of the largest mould and the most audacious and unconquerable egotism, and on a plane the last to be reached by these qualities; a man of antique stature, of Greek fibre and gripe, with science and the modern added, without abating one jot or t.i.ttle of his native force, adhesiveness, Americanism, and democracy.

As I have already hinted, Whitman has met with by far his amplest acceptance and appreciation in Europe. There is good reason for this, though it is not what has been generally claimed, namely, that the cultivated cla.s.ses of Europe are surfeited with respectability, half dead with _ennui_ and routine, and find an agreeable change in the daring unconventionality of the new poet. For the fact is, it is not the old and jaded minds of London, or Paris, or Dublin, or Copenhagen, that have acknowledged him, but the fresh, eager, young minds. Nine tenths of his admirers there are the st.u.r.diest men in the fields of art, science, and literature.

In many respects, as a race, we Americans have been pampered and spoiled; we have been brought up on sweets. I suppose that, speaking literally, no people under the sun consume so much confectionery, so much pastry and cake, or indulge in so many ga.s.sy and sugared drinks.

The soda-fountain, with its syrups, has got into literature, and furnishes the popular standard of poetry. The old heroic stamina of our ancestors, that craved the bitter but nouris.h.i.+ng home-brewed, has died out, and in its place there is a sickly cadaverousness that must be pampered and cosseted. Among educated people here there is a mania for the bleached, the double-refined,--white houses, white china, white marble, and white skins. We take the bone and sinew out of the flour in order to have white bread, and are bolting our literature as fast as possible.

It is for these and kindred reasons that Walt Whitman is more read abroad than in his own country. It is on the rank, human, and emotional side--s.e.x, magnetism, health, physique,--that he is so full. Then his receptivity and a.s.similative powers are enormous, and he demands these in his reader. In fact, his poems are physiological as much as they are intellectual. They radiate from his entire being, and are charged to repletion with that blended quality of mind and body--psychic and physiologic--which the living form and presence send forth. Never before in poetry has the body received such enn.o.blement.

The great theme is IDENt.i.tY, and ident.i.ty comes through the body; and all that pertains to the body, the poet teaches, is entailed upon the spirit. In his rapt gaze, the body and the soul are one, and what debases the one debases the other. Hence he glorifies the body. Not more ardently and purely did the great sculptors of antiquity carve it in the enduring marble than this poet has celebrated it in his masculine and flowing lines. The bearing of his work in this direction is invaluable.

Well has it been said that the man or the woman who has "Leaves of Gra.s.s" for a daily companion will be under the constant, invisible influence of sanity, cleanliness, strength, and a gradual severance from all that corrupts and makes morbid and mean.

In regard to the unity and construction of the poems, the reader sooner or later discovers the true solution to be, that the dependence, cohesion, and final reconciliation of the whole are in the Personality of the poet himself. As in Shakespeare everything is strung upon the plot, the play, and loses when separated from it, so in this poet every line and sentence refers to and necessitates the Personality behind it, and derives its chief significance therefrom. In other words, "Leaves of Gra.s.s" is essentially a dramatic poem, a free representation of man in his relation to the outward world,--the play, the interchanges between him and it, apart from social and artificial considerations,--in which we discern the central purpose or thought to be for every man and woman his or her Individuality, and around that, Nationality. To show rather than to tell,--to body forth as in a play how these arise and blend; how the man is developed and recruited, his spirit's descent; how he walks through materials absorbing and conquering them; how he confronts the immensities of time and s.p.a.ce; where are the true sources of his power, the soul's real riches,--that which "adheres and goes forward and is not dropped by death;" how he is all defined and published and made certain through his body; the value of health and physique; the great solvent, Sympathy,--to show the need of larger and fresher types in art and in life, and then how the state is compacted, and how the democratic idea is ample and composite, and cannot fail us,--to show all this, I say, not as in a lecture or a critique, but suggestively and inferentially,--to work it out freely and picturesquely, with endless variations, with person and picture and parable and adventure, is the lesson and object of "Leaves of Gra.s.s." From the first line, where the poet says,

"I loafe and invite my Soul,"

to the last, all is movement and fusion,--all is clothed in flesh and blood. The scene changes, the curtain rises and falls, but the theme is still Man,--his opportunities, his relations, his past, his future, his s.e.x, his pride in himself, his omnivorousness, his "great hands," his yearning heart, his seething brain, the abysmal depths that underlie him and open from him, all ill.u.s.trated in the poet's own character,--he the chief actor always. His personality directly facing you, and with its eye steadily upon you, runs through every page, spans all the details, and rounds and completes them, and compactly holds them. This gives the form and the art conception, and gives h.o.m.ogeneousness.

When Tennyson sends out a poem, it is perfect, like an apple or a peach; slowly wrought out and dismissed, it drops from his boughs holding a conception or an idea that spheres it and makes it whole. It is completed, distinct, and separate,--might be his, or might be any man's.

It carries his quality, but it is a thing of itself, and centres and depends upon itself. Whether or not the world will hereafter consent, as in the past, to call only beautiful creations of this sort _poems,_ remains to be seen. But this is certainly not what Walt Whitman does, or aims to do, except in a few cases. He completes no poems apart and separate from himself, and his pages abound in hints to that effect:--

"Let others finish specimens--I never finish specimens; I shower them by exhaustless laws, as Nature does, fresh and modern continually."

His lines are pulsations, thrills, waves of force, indefinite dynamics, formless, constantly emanating from the living centre, and they carry the quality of the author's personal presence with them in a way that is unprecedented in literature.

Occasionally there is a poem or a short piece that detaches itself, and a.s.sumes something like ejaculatory and statuesque proportion, as "O Captain, my Captain," "Pioneers," "Beat, Beat, Drums," and others in "Drum-Taps;" but all the great poems, like "Walt Whitman," "Song of the Open Road," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "To Working Men,"

"Sleep-Chasings," etc., are out-flamings, out-rus.h.i.+ngs, of the pent fires of the poet's soul. The first-named poem, which is the seething, dazzling sun of his subsequent poetic system, shoots in rapid succession waves of almost consuming energy. It is indeed a central orb of fiercest light and heat, swept by wild storms of emotion, but at the same time of sane and beneficent potentiality. Neither in it nor in either of the others is there the building-up of a fair verbal structure, a symmetrical piece of mechanism, whose last stone is implied and necessitated in the first.

"The critic's great error," says Heine, "lies in asking, 'What ought the artist to do?' It would be far more correct to ask, 'What does the artist intend?'"

It is probably partly because his field is so large, his demands so exacting, his method so new (necessarily so), and from the whole standard of the poems being what I may call an astronomical one, that the critics complain so generally of want of form in him. And the critics are right enough, as far as their objection goes. There is no deliberate form here, any more than there is in the forces of nature.

Shall we say, then, that nothing but the void exists? The void is filled by a Presence. There is a controlling, directing, overarching will in every page, every verse, that there is no escape from. Design and purpose, natural selection, growth, culmination, are just as p.r.o.nounced as in any poet.

There is a want of form in the unfinished statue, because it is struggling into form; it is nothing without form; but there is no want of form in the elemental laws and effusions,--in fire, or water, or rain, or dew, or the smell of the sh.o.r.e or the plunging waves. And may there not be the a.n.a.logue of this in literature,--a potent, quickening, exhilarating quality in words, apart from and without any consideration of constructive form? Under the influence of the expansive, creative force that plays upon me from these pages, like sunlight or gravitation, the question of form never comes up, because I do not for one moment escape the eye, the source from which the power and action emanate.

I know that Walt Whitman has written many pa.s.sages with reference far more to their position, interpretation, and scanning ages hence, than for current reading. Much of his material is too near us; it needs time.

Seen through the vista of long years, perhaps centuries, it will a.s.sume quite different hues. Perhaps those long lists of trades, tools, and occupations would not be so repellent if we could read them, as we read Homer's catalogue of the s.h.i.+ps, through the retrospect of ages. They are justified in the poem aside from their historic value, because they are alive and full of action,--panoramas of the whole mechanical and industrial life of America, north, east, south, west,--bits of scenery, bird's-eye views, glimpses of moving figures, caught as by a flash, characteristic touches indoors and out, all pa.s.sing in quick succession before you. They have in the fullest measure what Lessing demands in poetry,--the quality of ebbing and flowing action, as distinct from the dead water of description; they are thoroughly dramatic, fused, pliant, and obedient to the poet's will. No glamour is thrown over them, no wash of sentiment; and if they have not the charm of novelty and distance, why, that is an accident that bars them in a measure to us, but not to the future. Very frequently in these lists or enumerations of objects, actions, shows, there are sure to occur lines of perfect description:--

"Where the heifers browse--where geese nip their food with short jerks; Where sun-down shadows lengthen over the limitless and lonesome prairie; Where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles far and near; Where the splash of swimmers and divers cools the warm noon; Where the katydid works her chromatic reed on the walnut-tree over the well."

"Spar-makers in the spar-yard, the swarming row of well-grown apprentices, The swing of their axes on the square-hew'd log, shaping it toward the shape of a mast, The brisk short crackle of the steel driven slantingly into the pine, The b.u.t.ter-color'd chips flying off in great flakes and slivers, The limber motion of brawny young arms and hips in easy costumes."

"Always these compact lands--lands tied at the hips with the belt stringing the huge oval lakes."

"Far breath'd land! Arctic braced! Mexican breez'd!--the diverse!

the compact!"

Tried by the standards of the perfect statuesque poems, these pages will indeed seem strange enough; but viewed as a part of the poetic compend of America, the swift gathering-in, from her wide-spreading, mult.i.tudinous, material life, of traits and points and suggestions that belong here and are characteristic, they have their value. The poet casts his great seine into events and doings and material progress, and these are some of the fish, not all beautiful by any means, but all terribly alive, and all native to these waters.

In the "Carol of Occupations" occur, too, those formidable inventories of the more heavy and coa.r.s.egrained trades and tools that few if any readers have been able to stand before, and that have given the scoffers and caricaturists their favorite weapons. If you detach a page of these and ask, "Is it poetry? have the 'hog-hook,' the 'killing-hammer,' 'the cutter's cleaver,' 'the packer's maul,' met with a change of heart, and been converted into celestial cutlery?" I answer, No, they are as barren of poetry as a desert is of gra.s.s; but in their place in the poem, and in the collection, they serve as ma.s.ses of shade or neutral color in pictures, or in nature, or in character,--a negative service, but still indispensable. The point, the moral of the poem, is really backed up and driven home by this list. The poet is determined there shall be no mistake about it. He will not put in the dainty and pretty things merely,--he will put in the coa.r.s.e and common things also, and he swells the list till even his robust muse begins to look uneasy. Remember, too, that Whitman declaredly writes the lyrics of America, of the ma.s.ses, of democracy, and of the practical labor of mechanics, boatmen, and farmers:--

"The sum of all known reverence I add up in you, whoever you are; All doctrines, all politics and civilization, exude from you; All sculpture and monuments, and anything inscribed anywhere, are tallied in you; The gist of histories and statistics as far back as the records reach, is in you this hour, and myths and tales the same: If you were not breathing and walking here, where would they all be?

The most renown'd poems would be ashes, orations and plays would be vacuums.

"All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it; (Did you think it was in the white or gray stone? or the lines of the arches and cornices?)

"All music is what awakens from you when you are reminded by the instruments; It is not the violins and the cornets--it is not the oboe, nor the beating drums--nor the score of the baritone singer singing his sweet romanza--nor that of the men's chorus, nor that of the women's chorus, It is nearer and farther than they."

Out of this same spirit of reverence for man and all that pertains essentially to him, and the steady ignoring of conventional and social distinctions and prohibitions, and on the same plane as the universal brotherhood of the poems, come those pa.s.sages in "Leaves of Gra.s.s" that have caused so much abuse and fury,--the allusions to s.e.xual acts and organs,--the momentary contemplation of man as the perpetuator of his species. Many good judges, who have followed Whitman thus far, stop here and refuse their concurrence. But if the poet has failed in this part, he has failed in the rest. It is of a piece with the whole. He has felt in his way the same necessity as that which makes the anatomist or the physiologist not pa.s.s by, or neglect, or falsify, the loins of his typical personage. All the pa.s.sages and allusions that come under this head have a scientific coldness and purity, but differ from science, as poetry always must differ, in being alive and sympathetic, instead of dead and a.n.a.lytic. There is nothing of the forbidden here, none of those sweet morsels that we love to roll under the tongue, such as are found in Byron and Shakespeare, and even in austere Dante. If the fact is not lifted up and redeemed by the solemn and far-reaching laws of maternity and paternity, through which the poet alone contemplates it, then it is irredeemable, and one side of our nature is intrinsically vulgar and mean.

Again: Out of all the full-grown, first-cla.s.s poems, no matter what their plot or theme, emerges a sample of Man, each after its kind, its period, its nationality, its antecedents. The vast and c.u.mbrous Hindu epics contribute their special types of both man and woman, impossible except from far-off Asia and Asian antiquity. Out of Homer, after all his gorgeous action and events, the distinct personal ident.i.ty, the heroic and warlike chieftain of h.e.l.las only permanently remains. In the same way, when the fire and fervor of Shakespeare's plots and pa.s.sions subside, the special feudal personality, as lord or gentleman, still towers in undying vitality. Even the Sacred Writings themselves, considered as the first great poems, leave on record, out of all the rest, the portraiture of a characteristic Oriental Man. Far different from these (and yet, as he says, "the same old countenance pensively looking forth," and "the same red running blood"), "Leaves of Gra.s.s"

and "Two Rivulets" also bring their contribution; nay, behind every page _that_ is the main purport,--to outline a New World Man and a New World Woman, modern, complete, democratic, not only fully and n.o.bly intellectual and spiritual, but in the same measure physical, emotional, and even fully and n.o.bly carnal.

An acute person once said to me, "As I read and re-read these poems, I more and more think their inevitable result in time must be to produce

'A race of splendid and savage _old men,_'

of course dominated by moral and spiritual laws, but with volcanoes of force always alive beneath the surface."

And still again: One of the questions to be put to any poem a.s.suming a first-cla.s.s importance among us--and I especially invite this inquiry toward "Leaves of Gra.s.s"--is, How far is this work consistent with, and the outcome of, that something which secures to the race ascendency, empire, and perpetuity? There is in every dominant people a germ, a quality, an expansive force, that, no matter how it is overlaid, gives them their push and their hold upon existence,--writes their history upon the earth, and stamps their imprint upon the age. To what extent is your masterpiece the standard-bearer of this quality,--helping the race to victory? helping me to be more myself than I otherwise would?

III

Not the least of my poet's successes is in his thorough a.s.similation of the modern sciences, trans.m.u.ting them into strong poetic nutriment, and in the extent to which all his main poems are grounded in the deepest principles of modern philosophical inquiry.

Nearly all the old literatures may be said to have been founded upon fable, and upon a basis and even superstructure of ignorance, that, however charming it may be, we have not now got, and could not keep if we had. The b.u.mp of wonder and the feeling of the marvelous,--a kind of half-pleasing fear, like that of children in the dark or in the woods,--were largely operative with the old poets, and I believe are necessary to any eminent success in this field; but they seem nearly to have died out of the modern mind, like organs there is no longer any use for. The poetic temperament has not yet adjusted itself to the new lights, to science, and to the vast fields and expanses opened up in the physical cosmos by astronomy and geology, and in the spiritual or intellectual world by the great German metaphysicians. The staple of a large share of our poetic literature is yet mainly the result of the long age of fable and myth that now lies behind us. "Leaves of Gra.s.s"

is, perhaps, the first serious and large attempt at an expression in poetry of a knowledge of the earth as one of the orbs, and of man as a microcosm of the whole, and to give to the imagination these new and true fields of wonder and romance. In it fable and superst.i.tion are at an end, priestcraft is at an end, skepticism and doubt are at an end, with all the misgivings and dark forebodings that have dogged the human mind since it began to relax its hold upon tradition and the past; and we behold man reconciled, happy, ecstatic, full of reverence, awe, and wonder, reinstated in Paradise,--the paradise of perfect knowledge and unrestricted faith.

It needs but a little pondering to see that the great poet of the future will not be afraid of science, but will rather seek to plant his feet upon it as upon a rock. He knows that, from an enlarged point of view, there is no feud between Science and Poesy, any more than there is between Science and Religion, or between Science and Life. He sees that the poet and the scientist do not travel opposite but parallel roads, that often approach each other very closely, if they do not at times actually join. The poet will always pause when he finds himself in opposition to science; and the scientist is never more worthy the name than when he escapes from a.n.a.lysis into synthesis, and gives us living wholes. And science, in its present bold and receptive mood, may be said to be eminently creative, and to have made every first-cla.s.s thinker and every large worker in any aesthetic or spiritual field immeasurably its debtor. It has dispelled many illusions, but it has more than compensated the imagination by the unbounded vistas it has opened up on every hand. It has added to our knowledge, but it has added to our ignorance in the same measure: the large circle of light only reveals the larger circle of darkness that encompa.s.ses it, and life and being and the orbs are enveloped in a greater mystery to the poet to-day than they were in the times of Homer or Isaiah. Science, therefore, does not restrict the imagination, but often compels it to longer flights.

The conception of the earth as an orb shooting like a midnight meteor through s.p.a.ce, a brand cast by the burning sun with the fire at its heart still unquenched, the sun itself shooting and carrying the whole train of worlds with it, no one knows whither,--what a lift has science given the imagination in this field! Or the tremendous discovery of the correlation and conservation of forces, the ident.i.ty and convertibility of heat and force and motion, and that no ounce of power is lost, but forever pa.s.sed along, changing form but not essence, is a poetic discovery no less than a scientific one. The poets have always felt that it must be so, and, when the fact was authoritatively announced by science, every profound poetic mind must have felt a thrill of pleasure.

Or the nebular hypothesis of the solar system,--it seems the conception of some inspired madman, like William Blake, rather than the cool conclusion of reason, and to carry its own justification, as great power always does. Indeed, our interest in astronomy and geology is essentially a poetic one,--the love of the marvelous, of the sublime, and of grand harmonies. The scientific conception of the sun is strikingly Dantesque, and appalls the imagination. Or the h.e.l.l of fire through which the earth has pa.s.sed, and the aeons of monsters from which its fair forms have emerged,--from which of the seven circles of the Inferno did the scientist get his hint? Indeed, science everywhere reveals a carnival of mightier G.o.ds than those that cut such fantastic tricks in the ancient world. Listen to Tyndall on light, or to Youmans on the chemistry of a sunbeam, and see how fable pales its ineffectual fires, and the boldest dreams of the poets are eclipsed.

The vibratory theory of light and its ident.i.ty with the laws of sound, the laws of the tides and the seasons, the wonders of the spectroscope, the theory of gravitation, of electricity, of chemical affinity, the deep beneath deep of the telescope, the world within world of the microscope,--in these and many other fields it is hard to tell whether it is the scientist or the poet we are listening to. What greater magic than that you can take a colorless ray of light, break it across a prism, and catch upon a screen all the divine hues of the rainbow?

In some respects science has but followed out and confirmed the dim foreshadowings of the human breast. Man in his simplicity has called the sun father and the earth mother. Science shows this to be no fiction, but a reality; that we are really children of the sun, and that every heart-beat, every pound of force we exert, is a solar emanation. The power with which you now move and breathe came from the sun just as literally as the bank-notes in your pocket came from the bank.

The ancients fabled the earth as resting upon the shoulders of Atlas, and Atlas as standing upon a turtle; but what the turtle stood upon was a puzzle. An acute person says that science has but changed the terms of the equation, but that the unknown quant.i.ty is the same as ever. The earth now rests upon the sun,--in his outstretched palm; the sun rests upon some other sun, and that upon some other; but what they all finally rest upon, who can tell? Well may Tennyson speak of the "fairy tales of science," and well may Walt Whitman say:--

"I lie abstracted, and hear beautiful tales of things, and the reasons of things; They are so beautiful, I nudge myself to listen."

But, making all due acknowledgments to science, there is one danger attending it that the poet alone can save us from,--the danger that science, absorbed with its great problems, will forget Man. Hence the especial office of the poet with reference to science is to endow it with a human interest. The heart has been disenchanted by having disclosed to it blind, abstract forces where it had enthroned personal humanistic divinities. In the old time, man was the centre of the system; everything was interested in him, and took sides for or against him. There were nothing but men and G.o.ds in the universe. But in the results of science the world is more and more, and man is less and less. The poet must come to the rescue, and place man again at the top, magnify him, exalt him, reinforce him, and match these wonders from without with equal wonders from within. Welcome to the bard who is not appalled by the task, and who can readily a.s.similate and turn into human emotions these vast deductions of the savants! The minor poets do nothing in this direction; only men of the largest calibre and the most heroic fibre are adequate to the service. Hence one finds in Tennyson a vast deal more science than he would at first suspect; but it is under his feet; it is no longer science, but faith, or reverence, or poetic nutriment. It is in "Locksley Hall," "The Princess," "In Memoriam,"

"Maud," and in others of his poems. Here is a pa.s.sage from "In Memoriam:"--

"They say, The solid earth whereon we tread

"In tracts of fluent heat began, And grew to seeming-random forms, The seeming prey of cyclic storms, Till at the last arose the man;