 
The “good gray poet” is the supreme example of the Vagabond in literature. It is quite possible for one not drawn towards the Vagabond temperament to admire Stevenson, for Stevenson was a fine artist; to take delight in the vigorous “John Bullism” of Lavengro; to sympathize with the natural mysticism of Jefferies; the Puritan austerity of Thoreau. In short, there are aspects in the writings of the other “Vagabonds” in this volume which command attention quite apart from the characteristics specifically belonging to the literary Vagabond. But it is not possible to view Whitman apart from his Vagabondage. He is proud of it, glories in it, and flings it in your face. Others, whatever strain of wildness they may have had, whatever sympathies they may have felt for the rough sweetness of the earth, however unconventional their habits, accepted at any rate the recognized conventions of literature. As men, as thinkers, they were unconventional; as artists conventional. They retained at any rate the literary garments of civilized society. Not so Whitman. He is the Orson of literature. Many years ago Mr. Swinburne greeted him as “a strong-winged soul with prophetic wings”; subsequently he referred to him as a “drunken apple-woman reeling in a gutter.” For this right-about-face he has been upbraided by Whitman’s admirers. Certainly it is unusual to find any reader starting out to bless and ending with a curse. Usually it is the precedent of Balaam that is followed. But Mr. Swinburne’s mingled feelings typify the attitude of every one who approaches the poet, though few of us can express ourselves so resourcefully as the author of Poems and Ballads. There may be some students who accept Whitman without demur at the outset on his own terms. All I can say is that I never heard of one. However broad-minded you may consider yourself, however catholic in your sympathies, Whitman is bound to get athwart some pet prejudice, to discover some shred of conventionality. Gaily, heedlessly, you start out to explore his writings, just as you might start on a walking tour. He is in touch with the primal forces of Nature, you hear. “So much the better,” say you; “civilization has ceased to charm.” “You are enamoured of wildness.” Thus men talk before camping out, captivated by the picturesque and healthy possibilities, and oblivious to the inconveniences of roughing it. There is no question about a “Return to Nature” with Whitman. He never left it. Thoreau quitted the Emersonian study to get fresh inspiration from the woods. Even Jefferies, bred up in the country, carried about with him the delicate susceptibilities of the neurotic modern. Borrow retained a firm grip-hold of many conventions of the city. But Whitman? It was no case with him of a sojourn in the woods, or a ramble on the heath. He was a spiritual native of the woods and heath; not, as some seem to think, because he was a kind of wild barbarian who loved the rough and uncouth, and could be found only in unfrequented parts, but because he was in touch with the elemental everywhere. The wildness of Whitman, the barbarian aspects of the man, have been overrated. He is wild only in so far as he is cosmic, and the greater contains the less. He loves the rough and the smooth, not merely the rough. His songs are no mere pÆans of rustic solitudes; they are songs of the crowded streets, as well of the country roads; of men and women—of every type—no less than of the fields and the streams. In fact, he seeks the elemental everywhere.
He has no quarrel with civilization as such. The teeming life of the town is as wonderful to him as the big solitude of the Earth. Carlyle’s pleasantry about the communistic experiments of the American Transcendentalists would have no application for him. “A return to Acorns and expecting the Golden Age to arrive.” Here is no exclusive child of Nature:—
People talk of Whitman as if he relied entirely on the “staff cut from the woods”; they forget his rainproof coat and good shoes. Assuredly he has no mind to cut himself adrift from the advantages of civilization. The rainproof coat, indeed, reminds one of Borrow’s green gamp, which caused such distress to his friends and raised doubts in the minds of Mr. Watts-Dunton and Dr. Hake as to whether he was a genuine child of Walt Whitman In regarding the work of Whitman there are three aspects which strike one especially. His attitude towards Art, towards Humanity, towards Life. First of all, Whitman’s attitude towards Art. For the highest art two essentials are required—Sincerity and Beauty. The tendency of modern literature has been to ignore the first and to make the second all-sufficient. The efforts of the artist have been concentrated upon the workmanship, and too often he has been satisfied with a merely technical excellence. It is a pleasant and attractive pastime, this playing with words. Grace, charm, and brilliance are within the reach of the artificer’s endeavour. But a literature which is the outcome of the striving after beauty of form, without reference to the sincerity of substance, is like a posy of flowers torn away from their roots. Lacking vitality, it will speedily perish. No writer has seen this more clearly than Whitman, and if in his vigorous allegiance to Sincerity he has seemed oblivious at times to the existence of Beauty, yet he has chosen the better part. And for this reason. Beauty will follow in the wake of Sincerity, whether sought for or no, and the writer whose one passion it is The great utterances of the world are beautiful, because they are true. Whereas the artist who is determined to attain beauty at all costs will obtain beauty of a kind—“silver-grey, placid and perfect,” as Andrea del Sarto said, but the highest beauty it will not be, for that is no mere question of manner, but a perfect blend of manner and matter. It will no doubt be urged that, despite his sincerity, there is a good deal in Whitman that is not beautiful. And this must be frankly conceded. But this will be found only when he has failed to separate the husk from the kernel. Whitman’s sincerity is never in question, but he does not always appreciate the difference between accuracy and truth, between the accidental and the essential. For instance, lines like these—
or physiological detail after this fashion:—
It is well, I think, to seize upon the weakness of Whitman’s literary style at the outset, for it explains so much that is irritating and disconcerting. Leaves of Grass he called his book, and the name is more significant than one at first realizes. For there is about it not only the sweetness, the freshness, the luxuriance of the grass; but its prolific rankness—the wheat and the tares grow together. It has, I know, been urged by some of Whitman’s admirers that his power as a writer does not depend upon his artistic methods or non-artistic methods, and he himself protested against his Leaves being judged merely as literature. And so there has been a tendency to glorify his very inadequacies, to hold him up as a poet who has defied successfully the unwritten laws of Art. This is to do him an ill service. If Whitman’s work be devoid of Art, then it possesses no durability. Literature is an art just as much as music, painting, or sculpture. And if a man, however fine, however inspiring his ideas may be, has no power to shape them—to express them in colour, in sound, in form, in words—to seize upon the essentials and use no details save as suffice to illustrate these essentials, then his work will not last. For it has no vitality. In other words, Whitman must be judged ultimately as an artist, for Art alone endures. And on the whole he can certainly bear the test. His art was not the conventional art of his day, but art it assuredly was. Who could deny the title of artist to the man who wrote those noble verses, “On the Beach at Night”?—
or those touching lines, “Reconciliation”?—
Again, take that splendid dirge in memory of President Lincoln, majestic in its music, spacious and grand in its treatment. It is too long for quotation, but the opening lines, with their suggestive beauty, and the Song to Death, may be instanced.
It is a mistake to think that where Whitman fails in expression it is through carelessness; that he was a great poet by flashes, and that had he taken more pains he would have been greater still. We have been assured by those who knew him intimately that he took the greatest care over his work, and would wait for days until he could get what he felt to be the right word. To the student who comes fresh to a study of Whitman it is conceivable that the rude, strong, nonchalant utterances may seem like the work of an inspired but careless and impatient artist. It is not so. It is done deliberately. “I furnish no specimens,” he says; “I shower them by exhaustless laws, fresh and modern continually, as Nature does.” He is content to be suggestive, to stir your imagination, to awaken your sympathies. And when he fails, he fails as Wordsworth did, because he lacked the power of self-criticism, lacked the faculty of humour—that saving faculty which gives discrimination, and intuitively protects the artist from confusing pathos with bathos, the grand and the grandiose. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his treatment of Sex. Frankness, outspokenness on the primal facts of life are to be welcomed in literature. All the great masters— But at the same time I cannot help feeling that Stevenson was right when he said that Whitman “loses our sympathy in the character of a poet by attracting too much of our attention—that of a Bull in a China Shop.” His aim is right enough; it is to his method one may take objection. Not on the score of morality. Whitman’s The inherent beauty and sanctity of Sex lies surely in its superb unconsciousness; it is a matter for two human beings drawn towards one another by an indefinable, world-old attraction; scream about it, caper over it, and you begin to make it ridiculous, for you make it self-conscious. Animalism merely as a scientific fact serves naught to the poet, unless he can show also what is as undeniable
It is the “rapture” and the mystery which Whitman misses in many of his songs of Sex. There is no need to give here any theological significance to the word “God.” Let the phrase stand for the mystic poetry of animalism. Whitman has no sense of mystery. I have another objection against “The Children of Adam.” The loud, self-assertive, genial, boastful style of Whitman suits very well many of his democratic utterances, his sweeping cosmic emotions. But here it gives one the impression of a kind of showman, who with a flourishing stick is shouting out to a gaping crowd the excellences of manhood and womanhood. Deliberately he has refrained from the mood of imaginative fervour which alone could give a high seriousness to his treatment—a high seriousness which is really indispensable. And his rough, slangy, matter-of-fact comments give an atmosphere of unworthy vulgarity to his subject. Occasionally he is carried away by the sheer imaginative beauty of the subject, then note how different the effect:—
If only all had been of this quality. But interspersed with lines of great force and beauty are cumbrous irrelevancies, wholly superfluous details. William Morris has also treated the subject of Sex in a frank, open fashion. And there is in his work something of the easy, deliberate spaciousness that we find in Whitman. But Morris was an artist first and foremost, and he never misses the poetry of animalism; as readers of the “Earthly Paradise” and the prose romances especially know full well. It is not then because Whitman treats love as an animal passion that I take objection to much in his “Children of Adam.” There are poets enough and to spare who sing of the sentimental aspects of love. We need have no quarrel with Whitman’s aim as expressed by Mr. John Burroughs: “To put in his sex poems a rank and healthy animality, and to make them as frank as the shedding of pollen by the trees, strong even to the point of offence.” All we ask is for him to do so as a poet, not as a mere physiologist. And when he speaks one moment as a physiologist, next as a poet; at one time as a lover, at another as a showman, the result is not inspiring. “He could not make it pleasing,” remarks Mr. Burroughs, “a sweet morsel to be rolled under the tongue; that would have been levity and sin, as in Byron and the other poets . . . He would sooner be It may be objected, of course, that Whitman does not aim in his sex poems at imaginative beauty, that he aims at sanity and wholesomeness; that what he speaks—however rank—makes for healthy living. May be; I am not concerned to deny it. What I do deny is the implication that the wholesomeness of a fact is sufficient justification for its treatment in literature. There are a good many disagreeable things that are wholesome enough, there are many functions of the body that are entirely healthy. But one does not want them enshrined in Art. To attack Whitman on the score of morality is unjustifiable; his sex poems are simply unmoral. But had he flouted his art less flagrantly in them they would have been infinitely more powerful and convincing, and given the Philistines less opportunity for blaspheming. I have dwelt at this length upon Whitman’s treatment of Sex largely because it illustrates his strength and weakness as a literary artist. In some of his poems—those dealing with Democracy, for instance—we have Whitman at his best. In others, certainly a small proportion, we get sheer, unillumined doggerel. In his sex poems there are great and fine ideas, moments of inspiration, But this I think is the inevitable outcome of his style. The style, like the man, is large, broad, sweeping, tolerant; the sense of “mass and multitude” is remarkable; he aims at big effects, and the quality of vastness in his writings struck John Addington Symonds as his most remarkable characteristic. 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. IIIIndeed, it is when we examine Whitman’s attitude 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 coarse, not idealizing their weaknesses, but imbuing them with his own strength and vigour.
But he was no sentimentalist. More tolerant and passive 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 Grass and Les Miserables than in all the volumes of the Synthetic Philosophy. Thus Whitman announces his theme:—
“Whitman,” wrote the late Mr. William Clarke, in his stimulating study of the Poet, 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 noble 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 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, passive 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 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 coarse-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 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 attitude 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 attitude then is of special interest.
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 assuredly, 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 masses, 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. 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 associations are to be countenanced. Thus Classicism in Art constantly needs the freshening, broadening influence of Romanticism. 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 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.
A fitting attitude 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, The way in which his Art and democratic spirit correspond suggests another, though less unconventional poet of the Democracy—William Morris. The spaciousness 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 grass delighted him as fully as a sunset. So with men. He loved many, but no one especially. Catholicity rather than intensity characterised his friendships. 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. 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 classes in either country. In this respect Whitman and Tolstoy, differing in so many ways, join hands. In the “powerful uneducated person” they see the salvation of society, the renovation of its anÆmic life. IVWhitman is no moralist, and has no formal philosophy to offer. But the modern spirit which always seeks after some “criticism of life” does not forsake even the Vagabond. He is certainly the only Vagabond, with the exception of Thoreau, who has felt himself charged with a message for his fellows. The popular tendency is to look for a “message” in all literary artists, and the result is that the art in question is But in Whitman’s case the task of the message hunter is quite simple. Whitman never leaves us in doubt what he believes in, and what ideas he wishes to propagate. It is of course easy—perhaps inevitable—that with a writer whose method it is to hint, suggest, indicate, rather than formulate, elaborate, codify, the student should read in more than was intended. And, after all, as George Eliot said, “The words of Genius bear a wider meaning than the thought which prompted them.” But at any rate there is no mistaking the general outline of his thought, for his outlook upon life is as distinctive as Browning’s, and indeed possesses many points of similarity. But in speaking of Whitman’s message one thing must be borne in mind. Whitman’s work must not be adjudged merely as a special blend of Altruism and Individualism. No man ever works, it has been well said As a panacea for social evils Whitman believes in the remedial power of comradeship in a large-hearted charity.
Mark the watchful impassiveness with which he gazes at the ugly side of life.
Like Browning, also, Whitman fears lassitude and indifference more than the turmoil of passion. He glories in the elemental. At present he thinks we are too fearful of coarseness and rankness, lay too much stress on refinement. And so he delights in “unrefinement,” glories in the woods, air-sweetness, sun-tan, brawn.
Cultured conventions, of which we make so much, distress him. They tend, he argues, to enervation, to a poor imitative, self-conscious art, to an artificial, morbid life. His curative methods were heroic; but who can say that they were not needed, or that they were mischievous? Certainly in aiming first of all at sincerity he has attained that noble beauty which is born of strength. Whitman does not decry culture. But he places first the educative influence of Nature. “The best Culture,” he says, “will always be that of the manly and courageous instincts and loving perception, and of self-respect.” No advocate of lawlessness he; the influence of modern sciences informs every line that he has written. As Mr. Burroughs very justly says: “Whitman’s relation to science is fundamental and vital. It is the soil under his feet. He comes into a world from which all childish fear and illusion has been expelled. He exhibits the religious and poetic faculties perfectly adjusted to a scientific, industrial, democratic age, and exhibits them more fervent and buoyant than ever before. We have gained more than we have lost. The world is anew created by science and democracy, and he pronounces it good with the joy and fervour of the old faith.” In this respect Mr. Burroughs thinks that Whitman shared with Tennyson the glory of being one of the two poets in our time who have drawn inspiration from this source. Certainly no poet of our time has made finer use as an artist of scientific facts than the late Laureate. But Tennyson seems scarcely to have drawn inspiration But he was not a philosopher as Browning was; indeed, there is less of the philosopher about Whitman than about any poet of our age. His method is quite opposed to the philosophic. It is instinctive, suggestive, and as full of contradictions as Nature herself. You can no more extract a philosophy from his sweeping utterances than you can from a tramp over the hills. But, like a tramp over the hills, Whitman fits every reader who accompanies him for a stronger and more courageous outlook. It is not easy to say with Whitman as in the case of many writers: “This line quickened my imagination, that passage unravelled my perplexities.” It is the general effect of his writings that exercises such a remarkable tonic influence. Perhaps he has never indicated this cumulative power more happily than in the lines that conclude his “Song of Myself.”
Yes; that is Whitman’s secret—“Good health.” To speak of him as did his biographer, Dr. Bucke, as “perhaps the most advanced nature the world has yet In his religious thought, his artistic feelings, his affections, there is breadth of sympathy, sanity of outlook, but an entire absence of intensity, of depth. We shall scan his pages vainly for the profound aspiration, the subtle spiritual insight of our greatest religious teachers. In his indifference to form, his insensibility to the noblest music, we shall realize his artistic limitations. Despite his genial comradeship, the more intimate, the more delicate experiences of friendship are not to be found in his company. Delicacy, light and shade, subtlety, intensity, for these qualities you must not seek Whitman. But that is no reason for neglecting him. The Modern and Ancient world are rich in these other qualities, and the special need of the present day is not intensity so much as sanity, not subtlety so much as breadth. In one of his clever phrases Mr. Havelock Ellis has described Whitman “as a kind of Titanic Undine.”
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