With the completion of the main body of his work, and before we pass to the details of his last years in Camden, a brief digression into wider fields may perhaps be permissible. For Whitman’s thought, though it is very consciously his, is interestingly related to that of the preceding century and of his own, and no study of him would be at all complete which left this fact out of consideration. Readers who prefer to follow the path of events will find it again in the next chapter.
While it is difficult to imagine a greater contrast than that between the Essayist on Man and the Singer of Myself, they were at least agreed as to the proper subject for human study.
Physically they were most dissimilar—Pope, a little, deformed, ivory-faced wit, all nerves and eyes; Whitman, a huge, high-complexioned, phlegmatic peasant-artisan. Between their thought lay the century of Rousseau, Goethe and Hegel, of Washington, Robespierre and Napoleon. And their mental contrast was as marked as their physical. It is clearly indicated in the formal character of their work: Pope’s, a mosaic of brilliant couplets; Whitman’s, a choral or symphonic movement.[636]
Wholly lacking in the intellectual dazzle of the Augustan wits, Whitman’s strength lay rather in those naturalistically romantic regions of the imaginative[Pg 290] world which in the eighteenth century were being rediscovered by certain provincial singers, the forerunners of the Lake-poets. In the verses of Scottish poets from Ramsay to Burns; in Macpherson’s “Ossian,” and, finally, in the work of two men who were Londoners but “with a difference”—the soul-revealing cries of Cowper and the lyric abandonment of Blake—there was restored to English poetry that emotional quality which had been banned and ousted by the self-conscious club-men of the eighteenth century.[637]
Just as the passion of high conviction returns to English politics with Burke, and to English religion with Wesley, so it finds expression once again in the rhythmical impulse of Lyrical Ballads and the Songs of Innocence. There is here a new feeling for beauty, a new sense of the emotional significance of Nature.
With the return of that enthusiasm based upon conviction, which the sceptical Deism of Pope abhorred, there came a more elastic use of metre. For the movement of poetry should vary as the pulse varies under emotion. Passion now took the place of logic in the guidance of the rhythm of thought. And as the spirit of the poet lay open to the stars, his ear caught new and ever subtler rhythms, and became aware that every impelling motive for song has its own perfect and inalienable movement. His attention passed from current standards and patterns to those windy stellar melodies unheard by the town-bred Augustan ear. All this, with much more, is revealed in the work of the new poets, from Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley to Tennyson.
When Whitman came, his spirit was aware of this newly apprehended canon of poetic form. At first, he tried the medium of rhymed verses; but his were without inspiration. When self-expression became imperative he abandoned them.
For the poet, nothing can be more important than the emotional atmosphere which his verses create, for he[Pg 291] is conveying rather moods than fancies, inspirations of the soul rather than thoughts of the intelligence. Eventually, it is the poet’s own personality or attitude of mind that most affects the world; and it seemed to Whitman that this must communicate itself through the medium of his thoughts by their rhythm or pulse of speech and phrasing. The manner of speaking means more almost than the matter spoken, because it is by the manner, and not by the thought, that the speaker’s attitude toward life is most intimately conveyed.
It need hardly be said that there are rhythms which suggest and evoke gladness and exaltation; others which call forth melancholy; others which predispose to lascivious passions, and so forth: the thought is older than Plato. Whitman wished to convey to his readers all that I have attempted to describe in the foregoing pages; his own attitude towards life, that of a fearless, proud, abysmal, sympathetic, wholesome man. And he found no medium among those in current use which seemed to him effective for his purpose.
He had to go back to the prophets of Israel, and the rhythm into which their message was put anew by the seventeenth century translators, to find a model. It was from them, and from a study of the movements of prose, but especially of speech, that he came to his own singular, and not inappropriate style. At the last definition, the appeal of Leaves of Grass is intended to be that of an intimate kind of speech. It would be interesting, in this connection, to compare Whitman’s manner with that of the other writers of his period who have most distressed the purists—Browning, Carlyle, Emerson and Meredith—but that field is too large for us to enter now.
Addington Symonds once said[638] that Whitman had influenced him even more deeply than Plato; and the juxtaposition of the two names is as singular as it is suggestive. For while the “arrogant Mannhattanese”[Pg 292] is far indeed from the founder of the Academy, there is something essentially Platonic in Whitman’s attitude toward poetry. For Whitman was a moralist in the highest sense. With Plato, he dreamed always of the Republic, and that dream was the moving passion of his life.
He would—at least in his earlier years—have said with Plato, in his Laws, “The legislator and the poet are rivals, and the latter can only be tolerated if his words are in harmony with the laws of the State”. But over the last phrase he would have laughed, adding, In my Republic the citizens think lightly of the laws!
Like Plato, he accused all the poets whom he loved best of an essential hostility to the Republic. Their whole attitude implied an aristocratic spirit, which discovered itself in their rhythms, and struck at the life of America. He would only admit such poets as are in harmony with the spirit of the Republic, and interpret the genius of America.
It was for America, then, that he made his chants; chanting them, as he hoped, in such fashion that they might forever nerve new soldiers for the battle which he saw her destined to maintain through all the ages against the ancient tyrannies of the past.
If one were to seek among modern writers for those whose genius is related to Whitman’s, one would, I suppose, name first Rousseau, with his moody self-consciousness, his great social enthusiasm, his religious fervour, and his passionate perception of beauty in Nature.[639] And then, after Goethe, to whom I have several times referred in passing, one would add Byron, that audacious egoist, who, threatening the Almighty like some Miltonic Lucifer, fascinated the gaze of Europe.[640]
But Whitman had almost nothing either of the morbid sentiment or dramatic skill of the French reformer, nor had he Byron’s theatrical and somewhat futile[Pg 293] rhetoric of rebellion. He was indeed very much at peace with the cosmos; his confessions are frank, but impersonal; his egoism may be Satanic in its pride, but then for him, Satan, though he remains in opposition, is really an essential factor in the government of the worlds. Temperamentally he was nearer to George Sand;[641] and, on at least one side of his nature, to Victor Hugo.[642]
It is rather as a prophet than as a literary figure that we must compare him with his great contemporaries. On this side, he was obviously related to Millet, to Beethoven and to Wagner—but it seems simpler roughly to set him over against several men of his own craft who hold a European reputation—to Carlyle, Mazzini, Emerson, Morris, Browning, Tolstoi and Nietzsche.
With Whitman, Carlyle[643] recognised the underlying moral purpose of the universe, and the organic unity or solidarity of mankind; but being himself a Calvinistic Jacobin of irritable nerves, these convictions filled him, not with a joyful wonder and faith, but with contempt and despair. He never saw humanity as the body of a Divine and Godlike soul; and though he was continually calling men to duty and repentance, he did so from inward necessity rather than with any anticipation of success. For he felt himself to be a Voice crying in the wilderness. Whitman worshipped the hero as truly as did Carlyle; but then he saw the heroic in the heart of our common humanity, where Carlyle missed it; hence his appeal was one of confidence, not despair.
For Mazzini, the word “duty” was not a scourge but a magician’s wand, because he believed.[644] The Italian was not, like Carlyle, an iconoclast, but a messenger of good tidings; and if he carried a sword, it was in the name of the Prince of Peace. Like Whit[Pg 294]man, he was conscious of the world-life pulsing through him; in himself he found the peremptory spirit of the Republic demanding from him both blood and brain. Like Whitman also, he looked to a comradeship of young men for the regeneration of his nation; and to a poet to come for the great words which alone can unite men and nations, creating the world anew in the image of Humanity. For them both, religion was the ultimate word—a religion free from the shackles of dogma, free in the spirit of the Whole—and it was a word which the world could only receive from the poets that are to be. But while thus similar in their aspirations, they were very different in temper and circumstances. For Mazzini was a fiery, nervous martyr to his cause, a Dantesque exile from the land of his love. And yet his appeal, at least in his writings, is not so intimate as is that of the less vehement apostle of liberty.
With Emerson,[645] whose relationship to Whitman I have already discussed, there is the great contrast of temperament. For in him, passion seems to have played but little part. He is one of the noblest of those constitutional Protestants and individualists who are incapable of feeling the fuller tides of the catholic passion of social sympathy. His earnest and profound spirit seems to dwell forever in the sunny cloisters of a thoughtful solitude, far distant from life’s rough and tumble.
Browning’s belief that the immanent Divinity finds expression through passion, and is lost in all suppression of life;[646] and his faith in the universal plan, which includes the worst with the best, relate his thought to Whitman’s. For them both, each individual life contains a part of............