Some years ago, when a few copies of a volume called Leaves of Grass
found their way into this country from America, the general verdict
of those who had an opportunity of examining the book was that much
of it was indescribably filthy, most of it mere incoherent
rhapsody, none of it what could be termed poetry in any sense of
the word, and that, unless at the hands of some enterprising
Holywell Street publisher, it had no chance of the honour of an
English reprint. In part this opinion is already proved to have
been a mistaken one, for a West-end publisher has taken compassion
on the stranger, and now presents it to the British public in a
comely form. It may be as well to state at the outset, that the
volume published by Mr. Hotten is not precisely a reprint of the
original Leaves of Grass. It contains much new matter written since
the appearance of that work, and does not contain any of the pieces
marked by that peculiar freedom of speech which is generally
associated in men's minds with the name of Walt Whitman. For the
sake of all parties, the prurient as well as the prudish, lest the
one should be unnecessarily alarmed or the other led into an
unremunerative venture, it is only fair to say that there is
nothing in the present edition to disqualify it for decent society,
not to say qualify it for a place in the Bibliothèque bleue. It has
cost Mr. Rossetti severe pangs, so he informs us, to part with so
much as, from considerations of prudence, he has been obliged to
exclude. "This peculiarly nervous age," this "mealy-mouthed British
nineteenth century," with its present absurd notions about decency,
morality, and propriety, could not be expected to receive "the
indecencies scattered through Whitman's writings" in that æsthetic
spirit in which they should be accepted; and, as he was unwilling
to mutilate, "the consequence is that the reader loses in
totoseveral important poems, and some extremely fine ones - notably
one of quite exceptional value and excellence, entitled Walt
Whitman." In one respect we are willing to admit the loss sustained
in this last instance. The "poem" here referred to is the one which
contains the key to Walt Whitman's philosophy and poetic theory. It
is in it that he describes himself and his qualifications for the
office of poet of the future, grounding his claim upon the fact of
his being "hankering, gross, mystical, nude, one of the roughs, a
kosmos, disorderly, fleshy, sensual, no more modest than immodest";
and proposing to produce poetry of corresponding qualities, a
promise which we must say he most conscientiously fulfils. Its
excellence may be open to question, but about its value to the
reader who wishes to understand Walt Whitman there can be no doubt
whatever.
The present edition is to be considered as an experiment. By
excluding everything offensive, the editor hopes to induce people
to reconsider the case of Walt Whitman, and reverse the verdict
which has been already pronounced. This, we need scarcely observe,
is rather more than they can be fairly asked to do, while the
evidence which supports the gravest of the charges brought against
him is suppressed. But this is not all that Mr. Rossetti expects.
The present selection is so to brace and fortify the British mind
that in a short time, he trusts, it will be able to relish what now
in its weakness it rejects. A complete edition of Walt Whitman,
with all the dirt left in, he looks forward to as "the right and
crowning result" of his labours. This is but the schoolboy's
pudding, which, if we only finish it off, is to be succeeded by a
full meal of the uncommonly strong meat he has in reserve for us. A
fellow-countryman of the poet's, who had unsuccessfully besieged
the virtue of a married lady, is said to have consoled himself with
the reflection that, at any rate, he had "lowered her moral tone
some." Though he himself had not gained his point, his labours, he
thought, had diminished the difficulties in the way of the next
comer. Something of this sort appears to be the modest mission of
the present volume. We must confess we should very much prefer to
see Mr. Rossetti employing himself on some task more worthy of his
abilities. He has on many occasions done good service as a critic
to literature and art, but we cannot look upon his present
enterprise as one in any way beneficial to either. He desires to
have Walt Whitman recognised, not merely as a great poet, but as
the founder of a new school of poetic literature which is to be
greater and more powerful than any the world has yet seen. He is
not, it is true, entirely alone in this attempt. There have been
already certain indications of a Walt Whitman movement in one or
two other quarters. More than a year ago there was a paper in the
Fortnightly Review, which, however, was not so much a criticism of
his poetry as of his person, the writer having had, as well as we
recollect, the privilege of reviewing him as he bathed - an
important advantage, certainly, in the case of a poet whose
principal theme is his own body. Then Mr. Robert Buchanan took him
up in the Broadway magazine, and, saying nearly all that has ever
been said against Walt Whitman - that he is no poet and no artist,
that he is gross, monotonous, loud, obscure, prone to coarse
animalism and to talking rank nonsense - nevertheless arrived at
pretty much the same conclusion as Mr. Rossetti, at least as to the
powerful influence he is to exercise over the literature of the
future. Something of this sort we might, indeed, have expected.
There are people whose reading of the Horatian saying about popular
opinion is "nunquam vulgus rectum videt," and who always set
themselves to find virtues in everything that is generally
condemned. Besides, it would be idle to deny that Walt Whitman has
many attractions for minds of a certain class. He is loud,
swaggering, and self-assertive, and so gets credit for strength
with those who worship nothing that is not strong. He is utterly
lawless, and in consequence passes for being a great original
genius. His produce is unlike anything else that has ever appeared
in literature, and that is enough for those who are always on the
look-out for novelty. He is rich in all those qualities of
haziness, incoherence, and obscurity which seem to be the first
that some readers nowadays look for in poetry. But, above all, he
runs amuck with conventionalities and decencies of every sort,
which naturally endears him to those silly people who take a
childish delight in seeing the respectabilities of the world pulled
by the nose, and what they consider its stupid prejudices shocked.
We need scarcely say we do not suspect a man of Mr. Rossetti's
taste and judgment of this kind of enthusiasm. If we were to hazard
a theory, we should be inclined to attribute his advocacy of Walt
Whitman's poetical claims to an impatience of the feebleness,
emptiness, and sentimentality so abundant in modern poetry. The
feeling is one with which we do not quarrel; we only object to the
form in which it finds expression. A plague of tinkling cymbals is
not to be met by a counter treatment of sounding brass.
An admirer of Walt Whitman has one immense advantage. There is no
standard by which his idol can be measured, no known test which can
be applied to prove his quality. There is, therefore, a wide field
for that dogmatic assertion which is the favourite argument of the
transcendental critic. You must not object that his poetry has no
melody, music, or form. It is something above and beyond all
requirements of that kind. You are not to raise the objection that
in a great deal of what he writes there is no meaning at all, and
in a great deal more the meaning, when got at, is utterly
commonplace. Poetry like Walt Whitman's is not to be judged of by
any one who is influenced by narrow considerations of meaning. You
are not to take exception to his language, that it is a vile jargon
of his own coining. A poet of this order naturally rises above the
trammels of precedent in the matter of language. As to the absence
of imagination, invention, fancy, art, and sundry other things more
or less looked for in poetry, to complain of this in the present
instance only shows that you are incapable of understanding the
subject. This sort of argument always tells powerfully with the
timid, with those people who are haunted by a nervous dread of
being set down as dull and commonplace if they allow common sense
to influence their judgment; and besides, it has the merit of being
unanswerable, except by contradiction. When a man shows you
something with all the outward and visible signs of a wheelbarrow,
and tells you it is an Act of Parliament, it is very hard to know
what to say to him; and it is just as hard to know what to say when
you are offered something like the following and told it is
poetry, and poetry of a very high order. As the admirers of Walt
Whitman always protest against his being judged of fragmentarily,
we take the shortest poem we can find, instead of giving the
queerest extract: -
Return to Index.