We had ceased, we imagined, to be surprised at anything that America could produce. We had become stoically indifferent to her Woolly Horses, her Mermaids, her Sea Serpents, her Barnums, and her Fanny Ferns; but the last monstrous importation from Brooklyn, New York, has scattered our indifference to the winds. Here is a thin quarto volume without an author's name on the title-page; but to atone for which we have a portrait engraved on steel of the notorious individual who is the poet presumptive. This portrait expresses all the features of the hard democrat, and none of the flexile delicacy of the civilised poet. The damaged hat, the rough beard, the naked throat, the shirt exposed to the waist, are each and all presented to show that the man to whom those articles belong scorns the delicate arts of civilisation. The man is the true impersonation of his book - rough, uncouth, vulgar. It was by the merest accident that we discovered the name of this erratic and newest wonder; but at page 29 we find that he is -
Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a
Kosmos,
Disorderly, fleshly, and sensual.
The words 'an American' are a surplusage, 'one of the roughs'
too painfully apparent; but what is intended to be conveyed by a
Kosmos' we cannot tell, unless it means a man who thinks that the
fine essence of poetry consists in writing a book which an
American reviewer is compelled to declare is 'not to be read
aloud to a mixed audience.' We should have passed over this book,
Leaves of Grass, with indignant contempt, had not some few
Transatlantic critics attempted to 'fix' this Walt Whitman as the
poet who shall give a new and independent literature to America -
who shall form a race of poets as Banquo's issue formed a line of
kings. Is it possible that the most prudish nation in the world
will adopt a poet whose indecencies stink in the nostrils? We
hope not; and yet there is a probability, and we will show why,
that this Walt Whitman will not meet with the stern rebuke which
he so richly deserves. America has felt, oftener perhaps than we
have declared, that she has no national poet - that each one of
her children of song has relied too much on European inspiration,
and clung too fervently to the old conventionalities. It is
therefore not unlikely that she may believe in the dawn of a
thoroughly original literature, now there has arisen a man who
scorns the Hellenic deities, who has no belief in, perhaps
because he has no knowledge of, Homer and Shakspere; who relies
on his own rugged nature, and trusts to his own rugged language,
being himself what he shows in his poems. Once transfix him as
the genesis of a new era, and the manner of the man may be
forgiven or forgotten. But what claim has this Walt Whitman to be
thus considered, or to be considered a poet at all? We grant
freely enough that he has a strong relish for nature and freedom,
just as an animal has; nay, further, that his crude mind is
capable of appreciating some of nature's beauties; but it by no
means follows that, because nature is excellent, therefore art is
contemptible. Walt Whitman is, as unacquainted with art, as a hog
is with mathematics. His poems - we must call them so for
convenience - twelve in number, are innocent of rhythm, and
resemble nothing so much as the war-cry of the Red Indians.
Indeed, Walt Whitman has had near and ample opportunities of
studying the vociferations of a few amiable savages. Or rather
perhaps, this Walt Whitman reminds us of Caliban flinging down
his logs, and setting himself to write a poem. In fact Caliban,
and not Walt Whitman, might have written this:
I too am not a bit tamed - I too am untranslatable.
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the
world.
Is this man with the 'barbaric yawp' to push Longfellow into
the shade, and he meanwhile to stand and 'make mouths' at the
sun? The chance of this might be formidable were it not
ridiculous. That object or that act which most develops the
ridiculous element carries in its bosom the seeds of decay, and
is wholly powerless to trample out of God's universe one spark of
the beautiful. We do not, then, fear this Walt Whitman, who
gives us slang in the place of melody, and rowdyism in the place
of regularity. The depth of his indecencies will be the grave of
his fame, or ought to be if all proper feeling is not extinct.
The very nature of this man's compositions excludes us from
proving by extracts the truth of our remarks; but we, who are not
prudish, emphatically declare that the man who wrote page 79 of
the Leaves of Grass deserves nothing so richly as the public
executioner's whip. Walt Whitman libels the highest type of
humanity, and calls his free speech the true utterance of a man:
we, who may have been misdirected by civilisation, call it the
expression of a beast.
The leading idea of Walt Whitman's poems is as old as the hills. It is the doctrine of universal sympathy which the first poet maintained, and which the last on earth will maintain also. He says:
Not a mutineer walks handcuffed to the jail but I am
handcuffed to him and walk by his side,
Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp but I also
lie at the last gasp.
To show this sympathy he instances a thousand paltry,
frivolous, and obscene circumstances. Herein we may behold the
difference between a great and a contemptible poet. What
Shakspere - mighty shade of the mightiest bard, forgive us the
comparison! - expressed in a single line,
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,
this Walt Whitman has tortured into scores of pages. A single
extract will show what we mean. This miserable spinner of words
declares that the earth has 'no themes, or hints, or provokers,'
and never had, if you cannot find such themes, or hints, or
provokers in
[eighteen-line extract from "A Song for Occupations"]
Can it be possible that its author intended this as a portion
of a poem? Is it not more reasonable to suppose that Walt Whitman
has been learning to write, and that the compositor has got hold
of his copy-book? The American critics are, in the main, pleased
with this man because he is self-reliant, and because he assumes
all the attributes of his country. If Walt Whitman has really
assumed those attributes, America should hasten to repudiate
them, be they what they may. The critics are pleased also because
he talks like a man unaware that there was ever such a production
as a book, or ever such a being as a writer. This in the present
day is a qualification exceedingly rare, and may be valuable, so
we wish those gentlemen joy of their GREAT UNTAMED.
We must not neglect to quote an unusual passage, which may be suggestive to writers of the Old World. To silence our incredulous readers, we assure them that the passage may be found at page 92: -
Is it wonderful that I should be immortal?
As every one is immortal, I know it is wonderful; but my
eyesight is equally wonderful, and how I was conceived in
my mother's womb is equally wonderful.
And how I was not palpable once but am now, and was born
on the last day of May 1819, and passed from a babe in
the creeping trance of three summers and three winters to
articulate and walk, are all equally wonderful.
And that I grew six feet high, and that I have become a
man thirty-six years old in 1855, and that I am here
anyhow,are all equally wonderful.
The transformation and the ethereal nature of Walt Whitman is
marvellous to us, but perhaps not so to a nation from which the
spirit-rappers sprung.
I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun;
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags;
I bequeath myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I
love.
If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.
Here is also a sample of the man's slang and vulgarity:
[ten-line extract from "Song of Myself"]
And here a spice of his republican insolence, his rank
Yankeedom, and his audacious trifling with death:
[eleven-line extract from "A Boston Ballad"]
We will neither weary nor insult our readers with more extracts
from this notable book. Emerson has praised it, and called it the
'most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet
contributed.' Because Emerson has grasped substantial fame, he
can afford to be generous; but Emerson's generosity must not be
mistaken for justice. If this work is really a work of genius -
if the principles of those poems, their free language, their
amazing and audacious egotism, their animal vigour, be real
poetry and the divinest evidence of the true poet - then our
studies have been in vain, and vainer still the homage which we
have paid the monarchs of Saxon intellect, Shakspere, and Milton,
and Byron. This Walt Whitman holds that his claim to be a poet
lies in his robust and rude health. He is, in fact, as he
declares, 'the poet of the body.' Adopt this theory, and Walt
Whitman is a Titan; Shelley and Keats the merest pigmies. If we
had commenced a notice of Leaves of Grass in anger, we could not
but dismiss it in grief, for its author, we have just discovered,
is conscious of his affliction. He says, at page 33,
I am given up by traitors;
I talk wildly, I am mad.