America has produced three men of world-wide significance

The New Spirit by Havelock Ellis is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. WHITMAN

WHITMAN.

I.

If we put aside imaginative writers—Hawthorne, Poe, Bret Harte, and Mark Twain—America has produced three men of world-wide significance. These three belong to the same corner of the continent; they form a culminating series, and at the same time they complement each other. It is difficult to consider one of them without throwing a glance at the others.

Emerson comes first. In Emerson, after two hundred years, Puritanism seems, for the first time, to have found voice. The men of Banbury and Amsterdam were too much distracted by the outer world to succeed in finding adequate artistic expression for the joys that satisfied them and the spirit that so powerfully moved them. They have been the sport of their enemies, and have come down to us in literature as a set of sour fanatics. It was not until the seed was carried over sea, to germinate slowly and peacefully in New England, that at length it broke into flower, and that we know clearly that union of robust freedom and mystic exaltation which lies at the heart of Puritanism. In his calm and austere manner—born of the blood that had passed through the veins of six generations of Puritan ministers—Emerson overturned the whole of tradition. “A world in the hand,” he said, with cheery, genial scepticism, “is worth two in the bush.” With gentle composure, with serene hilarity, perhaps with an allusion to the roses that “make no mention of former roses,” he posited the absolute right of the individual to adjudicate in religion, in marriage, in the State. Even he himself, while able, like Spinoza and Goethe, to live by self-regulating laws that are death to men of less sanity, could not always in his peaceful haunts at Concord recognize or allow the fruits of his doctrines.

Emerson was a man of the study; he seems to have known the world as in a camera obscura spread out before him on a table. He never seems to come, or to be capable of coming, into direct relations with other men or with Nature. Thoreau, an original and solitary spirit, born amid the same influences as Emerson, but of different temperament, resolved to go out into the world, to absorb Nature and the health of Nature: “I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could[91] not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner and reduce it to its lowest terms.” So he went into Walden Woods and built himself a hut, and sowed beans, and grew strangely familiar with the lives of plants and trees, of birds and beasts and fishes, and with much else besides. This period of self-dependent residence by Walden Pond has usually been regarded as the chief episode in Thoreau’s life. Doubtless it was, in the case of a man who spent his whole life in a small New England town, and made the very moderate living that he needed by intermittent work at pencil-making, teaching, land-surveying, magazine-writing, fence-building, or whitewashing. Certainly it was this experience which gave form and character to the activities of his life, and the book in which he recorded his experiences created his fame. But in the experience itself there was nothing of heroic achievement. One would rather say that in the Walden episode Thoreau has vindicated the place of such an experience in all education. Every one, for some brief period in early[92] life, should be thrown on his own resources in the solitudes of Nature, to enter into harmonious relations with himself, and to realize the full scope of self-reliance. For the man or woman to whom this experience has never been given, the world must hold many needless mysteries and not a few needless miseries.

There was in this man a curious mingling of wildness and austerity, which Mr. Burroughs, in the most discriminating estimate of him yet made, traces to his ancestry. On the paternal side he was French; his privateering grandfather came from Jersey: “that wild revolutionary cry of his, and that sort of restrained ferocity and hirsuteness are French.” But on the mother’s side he was of Scotch and New English Puritan stock. In person he was rather undersized, with “huge Emersonian nose,” and deep-set bluish-grey eyes beneath large overhanging brows; prominent pursed-up lips, a weak receding chin, “a ruddy weather-beaten face, which reminds one of some shrewd and honest animal’s.” He was a vigorous pedestrian; he had sloping shoulders, long arms, short legs, large hands and feet—the characteristics, for the most part, of an anthropoid ape. His hands were frequently clenched, and there was an air of concentrated energy about him; otherwise nothing specially notable, and he was frequently supposed “a pedlar of small wares.” He possessed,[93] as his friend Emerson remarked, powers of observation which seemed to indicate additional senses: “he saw as with microscope, heard as with ear-trumpet, and his memory was a photographic register of all he saw and heard.”

It has been claimed for Thoreau by some of his admirers, never by himself, that he was a man of science, a naturalist. Certainly, in some respects, he had in him the material for an almost ideal naturalist. His peculiar powers of observation, and habits of noting and recording natural facts, his patience, his taste for spending his days and nights in the open air, seem to furnish everything that is required. Nor would his morbid dislike of dissection have been any serious bar, for the least worked but by no means the least important portion of natural history is the study of living forms, and for this Thoreau seems to have been peculiarly adapted; he had acquired one of the rarest of arts, that of approaching birds, beasts and fishes, and exciting no fear. There are all sorts of profoundly interesting investigations which only such a man can profitably undertake. But that right question which is at least the half of knowledge was hidden from Thoreau; he seems to have been absolutely deficient in scientific sense. His bare, impersonal records of observations are always dull and unprofitable reading; occasionally he stumbles on a good observation, but, not realizing its sig[94]nificance, he never verifies it or follows it up. His science is that of a fairly intelligent schoolboy—a counting of birds’ eggs and a running after squirrels. Of the vital and organic relationships of facts, or even of the existence of such relationships, he seems to have no perception. Compare any of his books with, for instance, Belt’s “Naturalist in Nicaragua,” or any of Wallace’s books: for the men of science, in their spirit of illuminating inquisitiveness, all facts are instructive; in Thoreau’s hands they are all dead. He was not a naturalist: he was an artist and a moralist.

He was born into an atmosphere of literary culture, and the great art he cultivated was that of framing sentences. He desired to make sentences which would “suggest far more than they say,” which would “lie like boulders on the page, up and down or across, not mere repetition, but creation, and which a man might sell his ground or cattle to build,” sentences “as durable as a Roman aqueduct.” Undoubtedly he succeeded; his sentences frequently have all the massive and elemental qualities that he desired. They have more; if he knew little of the architectonic qualities of style, there is a keen exhilarating breeze blowing about these boulders, and when we look at them they have the grace and audacity, the happy, natural extravagance of fragments of the finest Decorated Gothic on the site of a[95] fourteenth century abbey. He was in love with the things that are wildest and most untamable in Nature, and of these his sentences often seem to be a solid artistic embodiment, the mountain side, “its sublime gray mass, that antique, brownish-gray, Ararat colour,” or the “ancient, familiar, immortal cricket sound,” the thrush’s song, his ranz des vâches, or the song that of all seemed to rejoice him most, the clear, exhilarating, braggart, clarion-crow of the cock. Thoreau’s favourite reading was among the Greeks, Pindar, Simonides, the Greek Anthology, especially Æschylus, and a later ancient, Milton. There is something of his paganism in all this, his cult of the aboriginal health-bearing forces of Nature. His paganism, however unobtrusive, was radical and genuine. It was a paganism much earlier than Plato, and which had never heard of Christ.

Thoreau was of a piece; he was at harmony with himself, though it may be that the elements that went to make up the harmony were few. The austerity and exhilaration and simple paganism of his art were at one with his morality. He was, at the very core, a preacher; the morality that he preached, interesting in itself, is, for us, the most significant thing about him. Thoreau was, in the noblest sense of the word, a Cynic. The school of Antisthenes is not the least interesting of the Socratic[96] schools, and Thoreau is perhaps the finest flower that that school has ever yielded. He may not have been aware of his affinities, but it will help us if we bear them in mind. The charm that Diogenes exercised over men seems to have consisted in his peculiarly fresh and original intellect, his extravagant independence and self-control, his coarse and effective wit. Thoreau sat in his jar at Walden with the same originality, independence, and sublime contentment; but his wisdom was suave and his wit was never coarse—exalted, rather, into a perennial humour, flashing now and then into divine epigram. A life in harmony with Nature, the culture of joyous simplicity, the subordination of science to ethics—these were the principles of Cynicism, and to these Thoreau was always true. “Every day is a festival,” said Diogenes, and Metrocles rejoiced that he was happier than the Persian king. “I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself,” said Thoreau, “than be crowded on a velvet cushion.” “Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage.... It is life near the bone, where it is sweetest.... Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.” He had “travelled much in Concord.” “Methinks I should be content to sit at the back-door in Concord under the poplar tree for ever.” Such utterances as these strewn throughout Thoreau’s pages—and the saying in the last days of the[97] dying man to the youth who would talk to him about a future world, “One world at a time”—are full, in the uncorrupted sense, of the finest cynicism. Diogenes, seeing a boy drink out of his hand, threw away his cup; Thoreau had an interesting mineral specimen as a parlour ornament, but it needed dusting every day, and he threw it away: it was not worth its keep. The Cynics seem to have been the first among the Greeks to declare that slavery is opposed to nature. Thoreau not only carried his independence so far as to go to prison rather than pay taxes to Church or State—“the only government that I recognize is the power that establishes justice in the land”—but in 1859, when John Brown lay in prison in Virginia, Thoreau was the one man in America to recognize the greatness of the occasion and to stand up publicly on his side: “Think of him!—of his rare qualities!—such a man as it takes ages to make, and ages to understand; no mock hero, nor the representative of any party. A man such as the sun may not rise upon again in this benighted land. To whose making went the costliest material, the finest adamant; sent to be the redeemer of those in captivity; and the only use to which you can put him is to hang him at the end of a rope!”

Every true Cynic is, above all, a moralist and a preacher. Thoreau could never be anything[98] else; that was, in the end, his greatest weakness. This unfailing ethereality, this perpetual challenge of the acridity and simplicity of Nature, becomes at last hypernatural. Thoreau breakfasts on the dawn: it is well; but he dines on the rainbow and sups on the Aurora borealis. Of Nature’s treasure more than half is man. Thoreau, with his noble Cynicism, had, as he thought, driven life into a corner, but he had to confess that of all phenomena his own race was to him the most mysterious and undiscoverable. He writes finely: “The whole duty of man may be expressed in one line: Make to yourself a perfect body;” but this appears to be a purely intellectual intuition. He had a fine insight into the purity of sex and of all natural animal functions, from which we excuse ourselves of speaking by falsely saying they are trifles. “We are so degraded that we cannot speak simply of the necessary functions of human nature;” but he is not bold to justify his insight. He welcomed Walt Whitman, at the very first, as the greatest democrat the world had seen, but he himself remained a natural aristocrat. “He was a man devoid of compassion,” remarks Mr. Burroughs, “devoid of sympathy, devoid of generosity, devoid of patriotism, as those words are generally understood.” He had learnt something of the mystery of Nature, but the price of his know[99]ledge was ignorance of his fellows. The chief part of life he left untouched.

Yet all that he had to give he gave fully and ungrudgingly; and it was of the best and rarest. We shall not easily exhaust the exhilaration of it. “We need the tonic of wildness.” Thoreau has heightened for us the wildness of Nature, and his work—all written, as we need not be told, in the open air—is full of this tonicity; it is a sort of moral quinine, and, like quinine under certain circumstances, it leaves a sweet taste behind.

II.

Whitman has achieved the rarest of all distinctions: he has been placed while yet alive by the side of the world’s greatest moral teachers, beside Jesus and Socrates—

“the latter Socrates,

Greek to the core, yet Yankee too.”

And his biographer records briefly his conviction that this man was “perhaps the most advanced nature the world has yet produced.” Yet the facts of his life are few and simple. He was born in May, 1819, on the shores of the great south bay of Long Island. Like Bret Harte, who has given classic expression to the young life of Western America, Whitman is half Dutch, and this ancestral fact is significant. The well-known[100] portrait prefixed to “Leaves of Grass” shows him with an expression like his father’s; in later life he bears a singular resemblance to his mother as she is represented in Bucke’s book. He himself, we are told, makes much of the women of his ancestry. “I estimate three leading sources and formative stamps of my own character,”—in his own words—“the maternal nativity-stock brought hither from far-away Netherlands, for one (doubtless the best); the subterranean tenacity and central bony structure (obstinacy, wilfulness) which I get from my paternal English elements, for another; and the Long Island birth-spot, sea-shores, childhood’s scenes, absorptions, with teeming Brooklyn and New York—with, I suppose, my experiences afterwards in the Secession outbreak—for third.” His mother, he wrote, was to him “the ideal woman, practical, spiritual, of all of earth, life, love, to me the best.”

For thirty years the youth set himself to learn the nature of the world. There could be no better education; he has described its elementary stages, by barnyard and roadside, in “There was a child went forth.” The same large receptiveness still went with him, as he was by turn teacher, printer, journalist, government clerk, and always, and above all, loafer. He loafed year after year in Broadway, on Fulton Ferry, on the omnibuses talking to the drivers, in the workshops[101] talking to the artisans. His physical health was perfect; he earned enough to live on; he felt himself the equal of highest or lowest; he drank of the great variegated stream of life before him from every cup. His culture was, in its own way, as large and as sincere as Goethe’s. Of books, indeed, he knew little; he was equally ignorant of science, of philosophy, of the fine arts; he appears to have been content—for his own ends wisely content—with elemental and mostly ancient utterances of the race, as the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare, the Nibelungenlied. And by-and-by, in 1855, when this new personality, with its wide and deep roots, had become organized, Walt Whitman, at the age of thirty-six, himself printed and published a little book called “Leaves of Grass.”

After this there was but one fresh formative influence in Whitman’s life, but without it his life and his work would both have suffered an immense lack. What had chiefly characterized him so far had been his audacious nonchalance, the frank and absolute egotism of a healthy Olympian schoolboy. In 1860 the Civil War began; from 1862 to 1865 Whitman nursed the sick and wounded at Washington. During that period of three years (broken by an attack of hospital malaria, the first illness of his life, contracted in the discharge of these self-imposed duties) he visited and tended nearly 100,000 men,[102] and the personal presence of the man, his inexhaustible love and sympathy, were of even more worth than the manifold small but precious services that he was enabled to render. He has himself given a simple and noble record of his work in the “Memoranda” included in “Specimen Days and Collect,” and in “Drum Taps,” a still more precious and intimate record of his experiences. From this period a deep tenderness, a divine compassion for all things human, is never absent from Whitman’s work; it becomes more predominant than even his superb egotism. It is this element in his large emotional nature, brought to full maturity by these war experiences, which so many persons have felt thrilling through the man’s whole personality, and which probably explains in some measure the devotion he has inspired. Whitman went to Washington young, in the perfection of virile physical energy (“He is a Man,” said the shrewd Lincoln, to whom Whitman was unknown, as he chanced to see him through a window once); he came away old and enfeebled, having touched the height of life, to walk henceforth a downward path. Physically impressive, however, at that time and always, he remained. He is described, after this time (chiefly by Dr. Bucke), as six feet in height, weighing nearly two hundred pounds; with eyebrows highly arched; eyes light blue, rather small, dull and heavy (this point is of some[103] interest, bearing in mind that with exceptional creative imagination large bright eyes are associated); full-sized mouth, with full lips; large handsome ears, and senses exceptionally acute. The peculiar complexion of his face, Bucke described as a bright maroon tint; that of his body “a delicate but well-marked rose colour,” unlike the English or Teutonic stock; his gait an elephantine roll. “No description,” his Boswellian biographer, Dr. Bucke, again speaks (and Mr. Kennedy, a later and equally Boswellian biographer, supplies confirmatory details), “can give any idea of the extraordinary physical attractiveness of the man,” even upon those who came in contact with him for a moment. In 1873 he had a stroke of paralysis (left hemiplegia), and for three years there seemed little promise of recovery. The return to health was slow and incomplete. In those years he spent much time bathing, or naked in the open air—“hanging clothes on a rail near by, keeping old broad-brim straw on head and easy shoes on feet”—and considered that that counted for much in his restoration to health. “Perhaps,” he adds, “he or she to whom the free exhilarating ecstasy of nakedness in nature has never been eligible, has not really known what purity is—nor what faith or art or health really is.”

It is not possible to apprehend this man’s work unless the man’s personality is appre[104]hended. Every great book contains the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, and no book throbs with a more vivid personal life than “Leaves of Grass.” It is the whole outcome of a whole man, audacious and unrepentant, who has here set down the emotional reverberations of a manifold life. “For only,” according to his own large saying,

“For only at last, after many years, after chastity, friendship, procreation, prudence and nakedness,After treading ground and breasting river and lake,After a loosened throat, after absorbing eras, temperaments, races, after knowledge, freedom, crimes,After complete faith, after clarifyings, elevations, and removing obstructions,After these and more, it is just possible there comes to a man, a woman, the divine power to speak words.”

III.

Of art, in the conventional sense of the word, there is not much in Whitman. If we wish to approach him as an artist, J. F. Millet probably helps us to understand him, more than any other artist in foreign fields and lands. Millet has a deep and close relationship to Whitman. At first sight, their work is curiously unlike: Whitman, in a great new country, delighting in every manifestation of joy and youth and hope; Millet, the child of an older and colder country,[105] in love with age and suffering and toil. Yet in essentials it is identical. Even personally, it is said, Millet recalled Whitman.[6] Judging from the representations of him, Millet, in his prime, was a colossal image of manly beauty—deep-chested, muscular, erect, the quiet, penetrating blue eyes, the delicately expressive eyelids, the large nose and dilating sensitive nostrils, the firm mouth and jaw, the thick and dark brown beard. The consumptive artist—a Keats or a Thoreau—craves for health and loveliness; he turns shuddering from all that is not pleasant. It is only these men, heroic incarnations of health, who are strong enough to look sanely upon age and toil and suffering, and equal to the prodigious expense of spirit of writing “Leaves of Grass” with a heart laden with memories of Washington hospitals.

Millet and Whitman have, each in his own domain, made the most earnest, thorough, and successful attempts of modern times to bring the Greek spirit into art, the same attempt which Jan Steen, a great artist whom we scarcely yet rate at his proper value, made in seventeenth century Holland. It is not by the smooth nudities of a Bouguereau or a Leighton that we reach Hellenism. The Greek spirit is the simple,[106] natural, beautiful interpretation of the life of the artist’s own age and people under his own sky, as shown especially in the human body. It cannot be the same in two ages or in two lands. One little incident mentioned by Madame Millet to a friend is suggestive, “of Millet compelling her to wear the same shirt for an uncomfortably long time; not to paint the dirt, as his early critics would have us believe, but that the rough linen should simplify its folds and take the form of the body, that he might give a fresher and stronger accent to those qualities he so loved, the garment becoming, as it were, a part of the body, and expressing, as he has said, even more than the nude, the larger and simpler forms of Nature.” There is the genuine Hellenic spirit, working in a different age and under a different sky. Millet felt that for him it was not true to paint the naked body, and at the same time that the body alone was the supremely interesting thing to paint. In the “Sower” we see this spirit expressed in the highest form which Millet ever reached—the grace of natural beauty and strength, in no remote discobolus or gladiator, but in the man of his own country and clime, a peasant like himself, whose form he had studied from his own in the mirror in his own studio. The coarse clothes and rough sabots play the same part in Millet’s work as the bizarre, uncouth words and varied technical phraseology in[107] Whitman’s; one may call them accidental, but they are inevitable and necessary accidents. “One must be able,” Millet said, “to make use of the trivial for the expression of the sublime.” They both insisted that the artist must deal with the average and typical, not with the exceptional. They both tried to bring the largeness and simplicity of Nature into their work, and to suggest more than they expressed. They both refused to believe any part of Nature could be other than lovely. “The man who finds any phase or effect in Nature not beautiful,” said Millet sternly, “the lack is in his own heart.”

It is not as an artist that Whitman is chiefly interesting to us. It is true that he has written “Out of the Cradle endlessly rocking,” “When Lilacs last in the Dooryard bloomed,” “This Compost,” and other fragments from which may be gained a simple and pure æsthetic joy. Frequently, also, we come across phrases which reveal a keen perception of the strangeness and beauty of things, lines that possess a simplicity and grandeur scarcely less than Homeric; thus, “the noiseless splash of sunrise;” or of the young men bathing, who “float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun.” But such results are accidental, and outside the main purpose. For that very reason they have at times something of the divine felicity, unforeseen and[108] incalculable, of Nature; yet always, according to a rough but convenient distinction, it is the poetry of energy rather than the poetry of art. When Whitman speaks prose, the language of science, he is frequently incoherent, emotional, unbalanced, with no very just and precise sense of the meaning or words or the structure of reasoned language.[7] It is clear that in this man the moral in its largest sense—that is to say, the personality and its personal relations—is more developed than the scientific; and that on the æsthetic side the artist is merged in the mystic, wrapt in emotional contemplation of a cosmic whole. What we see, therefore, is a manifold personality seeking expression for itself in a peculiarly flexible and responsive medium. It is a deep as well as a superficial resemblance that these chants bear to the Scriptures of the old Hebrews—as Isaiah or the Book of Job—wherein also the writer becomes an artist, and also absorbs all available science, but where his purpose is the[109] personal expression of a moral and religious conception of life and the world. Whitman has invented a name for the person who occupies this rare and, in the highest degree, significant position; he calls him the “Answerer.” It is not the function of answerers, like that of philosophers, to arrange the order and limits of ideas, for they have to settle what ideas are or are not to exist; nor is it theirs, like the singers, to celebrate the ostensible things of the world, or to seek out imaginative forms, for they are “not followers of beauty, but the august masters of beauty.” The answerer is, in short, the maker of ideals.

Whitman will not minimize the importance of the answerer’s mission. “I, too,” he exclaims, “following many and followed by many, inaugurate a religion.” If we wish to understand Walt Whitman, we must have some conception of this religion. We shall find that two great and contradictory conceptions dominate his work; although in his thoughts, as in his modes of expression, it is not possible to find any strongly marked progression.

The “Song of Myself” is the most complete utterance of Whitman’s first great conception of life.

“I have said that the soul is not more than the body,

And I have said that the body is not more than the soul;

And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is.”

The absolute unity of matter and spirit, and all which that unity involves, is the dominant conception of this first and most characteristic period. “If the body were not the soul,” he asks, “what is the soul?” This is Whitman’s naturalism; it is the re-assertion of the Greek attitude on a new and larger foundation. “Let it stand as an indubitable truth, which no inquiries can shake, that the mind of man is so entirely alienated from the righteousness of God, that he cannot conceive, desire, or design anything but what is wicked, distorted, foul, impure and iniquitous; that his heart is so thoroughly environed by sin that it can breathe out nothing but corruption and rottenness.” That is the fundamental thought of Christian tradition set down in the “Institutes,” clearly and logically, by the genius of Calvin. It is the polar opposite of Whitman’s thought, and therefore for Whitman the moral conception of duty has ceased to exist.

“I give nothing as duties,

What others give as duties I give as living impulses.(Shall I give the heart’s action as a duty?)”

Morality is thus the normal activity of a healthy nature, not the product either of tradition or of rationalism.

“Whatever tastes sweet to the most perfect person, that is finally right”—this, it has been said, is the maxim on which Whitman’s morality[111] is founded, and it is the morality of Aristotle. But no Greek ever asserted and illustrated it with such emphatic iteration.

From the days when the Greek spirit found its last embodiment in the brief songs, keen or sweet, of the “Anthology,” the attitude which Whitman represents in the “Song of Myself” has never lacked representatives. Throughout the Middle Ages those strange haunting echoes to the perpetual chant of litany and psalm, the Latin student-songs, float across all Europe with their profane and gay paganism, their fresh erotic grace, their “In taberna quando sumus,” their “Ludo cum Cæcilia,” their “Gaudeamus igitur.” In the sane and lofty sensuality of Boccaccio, as it found expression in the history of Alaciel and many another wonderful story, and in Gottfried of Strasburg’s assertion of human pride and passion in “Tristan and Isolde,” the same strain changed to a stronger and nobler key. Then came the great wave of the Renaissance through Italy and France and England, filling art and philosophy with an exaltation of physical life, and again later, in the movements that centre around the French Revolution, an exaltation of arrogant and independent intellectual life. But all these manifestations were sometimes partial, sometimes extravagant; they were impulses of the natural man surging up in rebellion against the dominant Christian temper; they were, for[112] the most part consciously, of the nature of reactions. We feel that there is a fatal lack about them which Christianity would have filled; only in Goethe is the antagonism to some extent reconciled. Beneath the vast growth of Christianity, for ever exalting the unseen by the easy method of pouring contempt on the seen, and still ever producing some strange and exquisite flower of ascêsis—some Francis or Theresa or Fénelon—a slow force was working underground. A tendency was making itself felt to find in the theoretically despised physical—in those everyday stones which the builders of the Church had rejected—the very foundation of the mysteries of life; if not the basis for a new vision of the unseen, yet for a more assured vision of the seen.

No one in the last century expressed this tendency more impressively and thoroughly, with a certain insane energy, than William Blake—the great chained spirit whom we see looking out between the bars of his prison-house with those wonderful eyes. Especially in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” in which he seems to gaze most clearly “through narrow chinks of his cavern,” he has set forth his conviction that “first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged,” and that “if the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man, as it is, in[113]finite.” This most extraordinary book is, in his own phraseology, the Bible of Hell.

Whitman appeared at a time when this stream of influence, grown mighty, had boldly emerged. At the time that “Leaves of Grass” sought the light Tourgueneff was embodying in the typical figure of Bassaroff the modern militant spirit of science, positive and audacious—a spirit marked also, as Hinton pointed out, by a new form of asceticism, which lay in the denial of emotion. Whitman, one of the very greatest emotional forces of modern times, who had grown up apart from the rigid and technical methods of science, face to face with a new world and a new civilization, which he had eagerly absorbed so far as it lay open to him, had the good inspiration to fling himself into the scientific current, and so to justify the demands of his emotional nature; to represent himself as the inhabitant of a vast and co-ordinated cosmos, tenoned and mortised in granite:

“All forces have been steadily employed to complete and delight me,

Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul.”

That Whitman possessed no trained scientific instinct is unquestionably true, but it is impossible to estimate his significance without understanding what he owes to science. Something, indeed, he had gained from the philosophy of[114] Hegel—with its conception of the universe as a single process of evolution, in which vice and disease are but transient perturbations—with which he had a second-hand acquaintance, that has left distinct, but not always well assimilated marks on his work; but, above all, he was indebted to those scientific conceptions which, like Emerson, he had absorbed or divined. It is these that lie behind “Children of Adam.”

This mood of sane and cheerful sensuality, rejoicing with a joy as massive and calm-eyed as Boccaccio’s, a moral-fibred joy that Boccaccio never knew, in all the manifestations of the flesh and blood of the world—saying, not: “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” but, with Clifford: “Let us take hands and help, for this day we are alive together”—is certainly Whitman’s most significant and impressive mood. Nothing so much reveals its depth and sincerity as his never-changing attitude towards death. We know the “fearful thing” that Claudio, in Shakespeare’s play, knew as death:

“to die and go we know not where;

To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;... to be worse than worst

Of those that lawless and uncertain thoughts

Imagine howling!”

And all the Elizabethans in that age of splendid[115] and daring life—even Raleigh and Bacon—felt that same shudder at the horror and mystery of death. Always they felt behind them some vast mediæval charnel-house, gloomy and awful, and the sunniest spirits of the English Renaissance quail when they think of it. There was in this horror something of the child’s vast and unreasoned dread of darkness and mystery, and it scarcely survived the scientific and philosophic developments of the seventeenth century. Whitman’s attitude is not the less deep-rooted and original. For he is not content to argue, haughtily indifferent, with Epicurus and Epictetus, that death can be nothing to us, because it is no evil to lose what we shall never miss. Whitman will reveal the loveliness of death. We feel constantly in “Leaves of Grass” as to some extent we feel before the “Love and Death” and some other pictures of one of the greatest of English artists. “I will show,” he announces, “that nothing can happen more beautiful than death.” It must not be forgotten that Whitman speaks not merely from the standpoint of the most intense and vivid delight in the actual world, but that he possessed a practical familiarity with disease and death which has perhaps never before fallen to the lot of a great writer. At the end of the “Song of Myself” he bequeaths himself to the dust, to grow from the grass he loves:

“If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles,

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

And filter and fibre your blood.”

And to any who find that dust but a poor immortality, he would say with Schopenhauer, “Oho! do you know, then, what dust is?” The vast chemistry of the earth, the sweetness that is rooted in what we call corruption, the life that is but the leavings of many deaths, is nobly uttered in “This Compost,” in which he reaches beyond the corpse that is good manure to sweet-scented roses, to the polished breasts of melons; or again, in the noble elegy, “Pensive on her dead gazing,” on those who died during the war. In his most perfectly lyrical poem, “Out of the Cradle endlessly rocking,” Whitman has celebrated death—“that strong and delicious word”—with strange tenderness; and never has the loveliness of death been sung in a more sane and virile song than the solemn death-carol in “When Lilacs last in the Dooryard bloomed”:

“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.

“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-packed cities all and the teeming wharves and ways,

I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee, O Death.”

Whitman’s second great thought on life lies in his egoism. His intense sense of individuality was marked from the first; it is emphatically asserted in the “Song of Myself”—

“And nothing, not God, is Greater to one than one’s self is”—

where it lies side by side with his first great thought. But even in the “Song of Myself” it asserts a separate existence:

“This day before dawn I ascended a hill and looked at the crowded heaven,

And I said to my spirit, When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of everything in them, shall we be filled and satisfied then?

And my spirit said, No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond.”

In the end he once, at least, altogether denies his first thought; he alludes to that body which he had called the equal of the soul, or even the soul itself, as excrement:

“Myself discharging my excrementitious body to be burned, or reduced to powder, or buried,

My real body doubtless left to me for other spheres.”

The first great utterance was naturalistic; this egoism is spiritualistic. It is the sublime apotheosis of Yankee self-reliance. “I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself.” This became the dominant conception in Whitman’s later work, and fills his universe at length. Of a God, although he sometimes uses the word to obtain emphasis, he at no time had any definite idea. Nature, also, was never a living vascular personality for him; when it is not a mere aggregate of things, it is an order, sometimes a moral order. Also he wisely refuses with unswerving consistency to admit an abstract Humanity; of “man” he has nothing to say; there is nothing anywhere in the universe for him but individuals, undying, everlastingly aggrandizing individuals. This egoism is practical, strenuous, moral; it cannot be described as religious. Whitman is lacking—and in this respect he comes nearer to Goethe than to any other great modern man—in what may be possibly the disease of “soul,” the disease that was so bitterly bewailed by Heine. Whitman was congenitally deficient in “soul;” he is a kind of Titanic Undine. “I never had any particular religious experiences,” he told Bucke, “never felt the need of spiritual regeneration;” and although he describes himself as “pleased with the earnest words of the sweating Methodist[119] preacher, impressed seriously at the camp-meeting,” we know what weight to give to this utterance when we read elsewhere, of animals:

“They do not sweat and whine about their condition,

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,

They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,

Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,

Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,

Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.”

We may detect this lack of “soul” in his attitude towards music; for, in its highest development, music is the special exponent of the modern soul in its complexity, its passive resignation, its restless mystical ardours. That Whitman delighted in music is clear; it is equally clear, from the testimony of his writings and of witnesses, that the music he delighted in was simple and joyous melody as in Rossini’s operas; he alludes vaguely to symphonies, but

“when it is a grand opera,

Ah! this indeed is music—this suits me.”

That Whitman could have truly appreciated Beethoven, or understood Wagner’s “Tannhäuser,” is not conceivable.

With Whitman’s egoism is connected his strenuousness. There is a stirring sound of trumpets always among these “Leaves of Grass.”[120] This man may have come, as he tells us, to inaugurate a new religion, but he has few or no marks upon him of that mysticism—that Eastern spirit of glad renunciation of the self in a larger self—which is of the essence of religion. He is at the head of a band of sinewy and tan-faced pioneers, with pistols in their belts and sharp-edged axes in their hands:

“And he going with me leaves peace and routine behind him,

And stakes his life to be lost at any moment.”

This strenuousness finds expression in the hurried jolt and bustle of the lines, always alert, unresting, ever starting afresh. Passages of sweet and peaceful flow are hard to find in “Leaves of Grass,” and the more precious when found. Whitman hardly succeeds in the expression of joy; to feel exquisitely the pulse of gladness a more passive and feminine sensibility is needed, like that we meet with in “Towards Democracy;” we must not come to this focus of radiant energy for repose or consolation.

This egoism, this strenuousness, reaches at the end to heights of sublime audacity. When we read certain portions of “Leaves of Grass” we seem to see a vast phalanx of Great Companions passing for ever along the cosmic roads, stalwart Pioneers of the Universe. There are superb[121] young men, athletic girls, splendid and savage old men—for the weak seem to have perished by the roadside—and they radiate an infinite energy, an infinite joy. It is truly a tremendous diastole of life to which the crude and colossal extravagance of this vision bears witness; we weary soon of its strenuous vitality, and crave for the systole of life, for peace and repose. It is not strange that the immense faith of the prophet himself grows hesitant and silent at times before “all the meanness and agony without end,” and doubts that it is an illusion and “that may-be identity beyond the grave a beautiful fable only.” Here and again we meet this access of doubt, and even amid the faith of the “Prayer of Columbus” there is a tremulous, pathetic note of sadness.

Yet there is one keen sword with which Whitman is always able to cut the knot of this doubt—the sword of love. He has but to grasp love and comradeship, and he grows indifferent to the problem of identity beyond the grave. “He a-hold of my hand has completely satisfied me.” He discovers at last that love and comradeship—adhesiveness—is, after all, the main thing, “base and finale, too, for all metaphysics;” deeper than religion, underneath Socrates and underneath Christ. With a sound insight he finds the roots of the most universal love in the intimate and physical love of comrades and lovers.

“I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning,

How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me,

And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,

And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet.

“Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,

And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,

And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,

And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,

And that a kelson of the creation is love.”

IV.

This “love” of Whitman’s is a very personal matter; of an abstract Man, a solidaire Humanity, he never speaks; it does not appear ever to have occurred to him that so extraordinary a conception can be formulated; his relations to men generally spring out of his relations to particular men. He has touched and embraced his fellows’ flesh; he has felt throughout his being the mysterious reverberations of the contact:

“There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact and odour of them, that pleases the soul well, All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.”

This personal and intimate fact is the centre from which the whole of Whitman’s morality radiates. Of an abstract Humanity, it is true, he has never thought; he has no vision of Nature as a spiritual Presence; God is to him a word only, without vitality; to Art he is mostly indifferent; yet there remains this great moral kernel, springing from the sexual impulse, taking practical root in a singularly rich and vivid emotional nature, and bearing within it the promise of a city of lovers and friends.

This moral element is one of the central features in Whitman’s attitude towards sex and the body generally. For the lover there is nothing in the loved one’s body impure or unclean; a breath of passion has passed over it, and all things are sweet. For most of us this influence spreads no farther; for the man of strong moral instinct it covers all human things in infinitely widening circles; his heart goes out to every creature that shares the loved one’s delicious humanity; henceforth there is nothing human that he cannot touch with reverence and love. “Leaves of Grass” is penetrated by this moral element. How curiously far this attitude is from the old Christian way we realize when we turn to those days in which Christianity was at its height, and see how Saint Bernard with his mild and[124] ardent gaze looked out into the world of Nature and saw men as “stinking spawn, sacks of dung, the food of worms.”

But there is another element in Whitman’s attitude—the artistic. It shows itself in a twofold manner. Whitman came of a vigorous Dutch stock; these Van Velsors from Holland have fully as large a part in him as anything his English ancestry gave him, and his Dutch race shows itself chiefly in his artistic manner. The supreme achievement in art of the Dutch is their seventeenth century painting. What marked those Dutch artists was the ineradicable conviction that every action, social or physiological, of the average man, woman, child, around them might be, with love and absolute faithfulness, phlegmatically set forth. In their heroic earthliness they could at no point be repulsed; colour and light may aureole their work, but the most commonplace things of Nature shall have the largest nimbus. That is the temper of Dutch art throughout; no other art in the world has the same characteristics. In the art of Whitman alone do we meet with it again, impatient indeed and broken up into fragments, pierced through with shafts of light from other sources, but still constant and unmistakable. The other artistic element in Whitman’s attitude is modern; it is almost the only artistic element by which, unconsciously perhaps, he allies himself to modern[125] traditions in art instead of breaking through them by his own volcanic energy—a curious research for sexual imagery in Nature, imagery often tinged by bizarre and mystical colour. Rossetti occasionally uses sexual imagery with rare felicity, as in “Nuptial Sleep”:

“And as the last slow sudden drops are shed

From sparkling eaves when all the storm has fled,

So singly flagged the pulses of each heart.”

With still greater beauty and audacity Whitman, in “I sing the body electric,” celebrates the last abandonment of love:

“Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn,

Undulating into the willing and yielding day,

Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-fleshed day.”

Or, again, in the marvellously keen “Faces”—so realistic and so imaginative—when the “lily’s face” speaks out her longing to be filled with albescent honey. This man has certainly felt the truth of that deep saying of Thoreau’s, that for him to whom sex is impure there are no flowers in Nature. He cannot help speaking of man’s or woman’s life in terms of Nature’s life, of Nature’s life in terms of man’s; he mingles them together with an admirably balanced rhythm, as in “Spontaneous Me.” All the functions of man’s or woman’s life are sweet to him because

“Of the smell of apples and lemons, of the pairing of birds,

Of the wet of woods, of the lapping of waves.”

Sometimes when he is on this track he seems to lose himself in mystic obscurity; and the words in which he records his impressions are mere patches of morbid colour.

There is a third element in Whitman’s attitude. It is clear that he had from the outset what may be vaguely called a scientific purpose in that frank grasp of the body, which has a significance to be measured by the fierce opposition it aroused, and by the tenacity with which, in the latest volume of his old age, “November Boughs,” he still insists that the principle of those lines so gives breath to the whole scheme that the bulk of the pieces might as well have been left unwritten were those lines omitted. He has himself admirably set this forth in “A Memorandum at a Venture” in “Specimen Days and Collect.” In religion and politics we have, after a great struggle, gained the priceless possibility of liberty and sincerity. But the region of sex is still, like our moral and social life generally, to a large extent unreclaimed; there still exist barbarous traditions which mediæval Christianity has helped to perpetuate, so that the words of Pliny[127] regarding the contaminating touch of a woman, who has always been regarded as in a peculiar manner the symbol of sex—“Nihil facile reperiabatur mulierum profluvio magis monstrificum”—are not even yet meaningless. Why should the sweetening breath of science be guarded from this spot? Why should not “freedom and faith and earnestness” be introduced here? Our attitude towards this part of life affects profoundly our attitude towards life altogether. To realize this, read Swift’s “Strephon and Chloe,” which enshrines, vividly and unshrinkingly, in a classic form, a certain emotional way of approaching the body. It narrates the very trivial experiences of a man and woman on their bridal night. The incidents are nothing; they are perfectly innocent; the interesting fact about them is the general attitude which they enfold. The unquestioning faith of the man is that in setting down the simple daily facts of human life he has drowned the possibilities of love in filth. And Swift here represents, in an unflinchingly logical fashion, the opinions, more or less realized, more or less disguised, of most people even to-day. Cannot these facts of our physical nature be otherwise set down? Why may we not “keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart?” That is, in effect, the question which, in “A Memorandum at a Venture,” Whitman tells us that he under[128]took to answer. This statement of it was probably an afterthought; else he would have carried out his attempt more thoroughly and more uncompromisingly.

For I doubt if even Whitman has fully realized the beauty and purity of organic life; the scientific element in him was less strong than the moral, or even the artistic. While his genial poetic manner of grasping things is of prime importance, the new conceptions of purity are founded on a scientific basis which must be deeply understood. Swift’s morbid and exaggerated spiritualism, a legacy of mediævalism—and the ordinary “common-sense” view is but the unconscious shadow of mediæval spiritualism—is really founded on ignorance, in other words, on the traditional religious conceptions of an antique but still surviving barbarism.

From our modern standpoint of science, opening its eyes anew, the wonderful cycles of normal life are for ever clean and pure, the loathsomeness, if indeed anywhere, lies in the conceptions of hypertrophied and hyperæsthetic brains. Some who have striven to find a vital natural meaning in the central sacrament of Christianity have thought that the Last Supper was an attempt to reveal the divine mystery of food, to consecrate the loveliness of the mere daily bread and wine which becomes the life of man. Such sacraments of Nature are everywhere subtly woven into the[129] texture of men’s bodies. All loveliness of the body is the outward sign of some vital use.

Doubtless these relationships have been sometimes perceived and their meaning realized by a sort of mystical intuition, but it is only of recent years that science has furnished them with a rational basis. The chief and central function of life—the omnipresent process of sex, ever wonderful, ever lovely, as it is woven into the whole texture of our man’s or woman’s body—is the pattern of all the process of our life. At whatever point touched, the reverberation, multiplexly charged with uses, meanings, and emotional associations of infinite charm, to the sensitive individual more or less conscious, spreads throughout the entire organism. We can no longer intrude our crude distinctions of high and low. We cannot now step in and say that this link in the chain is eternally ugly and that is eternally beautiful. For irrational disgust, the varying outcome of individual idiosyncrasy, there is doubtless still room; it is incalculable, and cannot be reached. But that rational disgust which was once held to be common property has received from science its death-blow. In the growth of the sense of purity, which Whitman, not alone, has annunciated, lies one of our chief hopes for morals, as well as for art.

V.

Behind “Leaves of Grass” stands the personality of the man Walt Whitman; that is the charm of the book and its power. It is, in his own words, the record of a Person. A man has here sought to give a fresh and frank representation of his nature—physical, intellectual, moral, æsthetic—as he received it, and as it grew in the great field of the world. Sometimes there is an element in this record which, while perhaps very American, reminds one of the great Frenchman who shouted so lustily through his huge brass trumpet, seated on the apex of the universe in the Avenue d’Eylau. The noble lines to “You felons on trial in Courts” accompany “To him that was crucified.” Such rhetorical flourishes do not impair the value of this revelation. The self-revelation of a human personality is the one supremely precious and enduring thing. All art is the search for it. The strongest and most successful of religions were avowedly founded on personalities, more or less dimly seen. The intimate and candid record of personality alone gives quickening energy to books. Herein is the might of “Leaves of Grass.”

In our overstrained civilization the tendency in literature—and in life as it acts on literature[131] and is again reacted on by it—is, on the one hand, towards an artificial mode of presentment, that is, a divorce between the actual and the alleged, a divorce which, in the language of satire, is often called hypocrisy. On the other hand, the tendency is towards a singleness of aim and ideal indeed, but a thin, narrow, super-refined ideal, at the same time rather hysterical and rather prim. In youth we cannot see through these Tartuffes and Précieuses; when we become grown men and women we feel a great thirst for Nature, for reality in literature, and we slake it at such fountains as this of “Leaves of Grass.” Like Antæus of old we bow down to touch the earth, to come in contact with the great primal energies of Nature, and to grow strong. We realize that the structure of the world is indeed built most gloriously on the immense pillars of Hunger and Love, and we will not seek to deny or to attenuate its foundations. Presenting a truth so abstract in fresh and living concrete language, this man, as an Adam in a new Paradise, which is the very world itself, walks again upon the earth, sometimes with calm complaisance, sometimes “deliriating” wildly:

“Behold me where I pass, hear my voice, approach,

Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass,

Be not afraid of my body.”

He has tossed “a new gladness and roughness” among men and women. He has opened a fresh channel of Nature’s force into human life—the largest since Wordsworth, and more fit for human use—“the amplitude of the earth, and the coarseness and sexuality of the earth, and the great charity of the earth, and the equilibrium also.” And in his vigorous masculine love, asserting his own personality he has asserted that of all—“By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.” Charging himself in every place with contentment and triumph, he embraces all men, as St. Francis in his sweet, humble, Christian way also embraced them, in the spirit of audacity, and rankness, and pride. So that all he has written is summed up in one ejaculation: “How vast, how eligible, how joyful, how real is a human being, himself or herself!”

About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books.

This book is part of the public domain. Havelock Ellis (2017). The New Spirit. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022 https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/55878/pg55878-images.html

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org, located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html.