We have too long overlooked in this country the great poet who has recently arisen in America, of whom some of his countrymen speak in connection with Bacon and Shakespeare, whom others compare with Tennyson, - much to the disadvantage of our excellent laureate, - and to whom Mr Emerson writes that he finds in his book "incomparable things, said incomparably well." The book he pronounces "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed;" at which, indeed, says Mr Emerson in the printed letter sent to us, - "I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion."
No illusion truly is Walt Whitman, the new American prodigy, who, as he is himself candid enough to intimate, sounds his barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. He is described by one of his own local papers as "a tenderly affectionate, rowdyish, contemplative, sensual, moral, susceptible, and imperious person," who aspires to cast some of his own grit, whatever that may be, into literature. We have ourselves been disposed to think there is in literature grit enough, according to the ordinary sense, but decidedly Walt Whitman tosses in some more. The author describes himself as "one of the roughs, a kosmos;" indeed, he seems to be very much impressed with the fact that he is a kosmos, and repeats it frequently. A kosmos we may define, from the portrait of it on the front of the book, as a gentleman in his shirt-sleeves, with one hand in a pocket of his pantaloons, and his wide-awake cocked with a dammee-sir air over his forehead.
On the other hand, according to an American review that flatters Mr Whitman, this kosmos is "a compound of the New England transcendentalist and New York rowdy."
But as such terms of compliment may not be quite clear to English readers, we must be content, in simpler fashion, to describe to them this Brooklyn boy as a wild Tupper of the West. We can describe him perfectly by a few suppositions. Suppose that Mr Tupper had been brought up to the business of an auctioneer, then banished to the backwoods, compelled to live for a long time as a backwoodsman, and thus contracting a passion for the reading of Emerson and Carlyle? Suppose him maddened by this course of reading, and fancying himself not only an Emerson but a Carlyle and an American Shakespeare to boot when the fits come on, and putting forth his notion of that combination in his own self-satisfied way, and in his own wonderful cadences? In that state he would write a book exactly like Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.
[four extracts from "Song of Myself" totaling sixty-seven
lines]
We must be just to Mr Whitman in allowing that he has one
positive merit. His verse has a purpose. He desires to assert the
pleasure that a man has in himself, his body and its sympathies,
his mind (in a lesser degree, however) and its sympathies. He
asserts man's right to express his delight in animal enjoyment,
and the harmony in which he should stand, body and soul, with
fellow men and the whole universe. To express this, and to
declare that the poet is the highest manifestation of this,
generally also to suppress shams, is the purport of these Leaves
of Grass. Perhaps it might have been done as well, however,
without being always so purposely obscene, and intentionally
foul-mouthed, as Mr Whitman is.
[ten-line extract from "Song of Myself"]
The fit being very strong indeed upon him, our Wild Tupper of
the West thus puts into words his pleasure at the hearing of an
overture:
[fifteen-line extract from "Song of Myself"]
In the construction of our artificial Whitman, we began with
the requirement that a certain philosopher should have been bred
to the business of an auctioneer. We must add now, to complete
the imitation of Walt Whitman, that the wild philosopher and
poet, as conceived by us, should be perpetually haunted by the
delusion that he has a catalogue to make. Three-fourths of Walt
Whitman's book is poetry as catalogues of auctioneers are poems.
Whenever any general term is used, off the mind wanders on this
fatal track, and an attempt is made to specify all lots included
under it. Does Mr Whitman speak of a town, he is at once ready
with pages of town lots. Does he mention the American country, he
feels bound thereupon to draw up a list of barns, waggons, wilds,
mountains, animals, trees, people, "a Hoosier, a Badger, a
Backeye, a Lousianian, or Georgian, a poke-easy from sandhills
and pines," &c. &c. We will give an illustration of this form of
lunacy. The subject from which the patient starts off is
equivalent to things in general, and we can spare room only for
half the catalogue. It will be enough, however, to show how there
arises catalogue within catalogue, and how sorely the paroxysm is
aggravated by the incidental mention of any one particular that
is itself again capable of subdivision into lots.
[thirty-one-line extract from "A Song for Occupations"]
Now let us compare with this a real auctioneer's catalogue. We
will take that of Goldsmith's chambers, by way of departing as
little as we can from the poetical. For, as Mr Whitman would say
(and here we quote quite literally, prefixing only a verse of our
own, from "A Catalogue of the Household Furniture with the select
collection of scarce, curious, and valuable books of Dr
Goldsmith, deceased, which, by order of the admr, will be sold by
auction, &c., &c.)" - [...]After all, we are not sure whether the poetry of that excellent Mr Good, the auctioneer who, at his Great Room, No. 121 Fleet street, sold the household furniture of Oliver Goldsmith in the summer of 1774, does not transcend in wisdom and in wit "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that" (according to Mr Emerson) "America has yet contributed."