Walt Whitman has issued a new and complete edition of his poems, with the same title as that given to his first volume, published in 1855, and reissued at Camden, N. J., some twenty years later. In his volume all the objectionable passages which were the cause of so much complaint at the time of their first appearance are given entire without a word changed or omitted. It was said of Mr. Mallock by an English reviewer, that in his last novel he had introduced "the beastly into literature." Considering some of the unexpurgated lines in this volume, Mr. Whitman is entitled to the honorable position of the apostle of the beastly in poetry. Nothing that Swinburne - a kindred unclean spirit, of greater intellectual power, however - ever wrote compares with the foulness of some of the "good gray poet's" verse. The lines might be appropriate over the portals of a bawdy house, but not in a volume of poetry from a respectable publishing firm, intended for general circulation.
Mr. Whitman has been so long silent that the leading facts in his career are generally forgotten. He is now in his 63d year, having been born in 1819 at West Hills, on Long Island. His father was an Englishman and his mother from Holland. During his life he has worked as printer, carpenter, school- teacher, army-nurse, and clerk in the office of the Attorney-General. He has traveled quite extensively, and has suffered of late years from partial paralysis. For a proper appreciation of his poetry a peculiarly cultured taste is required. Claiming to be a writer for and of the people, those to whom Whitman appeals have shown the least sympathy with him and the greatest ignorance of the inspirations of his muse. Possibly we do not comprehend Whitman. Certainly we fail to enjoy what he is pleased to call his poetry. To any of Carlyle's heavily-capitalized pages the same title might be applied with equal force. The difficulty is to understand why it would not be equally effective and striking if entitled "prose." Take as an instance the poem entitled "Our Old Feuillage":
Always our old feuillage!
Always Florida's green peninsula - always the
priceless delta of Louisiana -always the
cotton-fields of Alabama and Texas,
Always California's golden hills, and hollows, and
the silver mountains of New Mexico - always
soft-breath'd Cuba,
Always the vast slope drain'd by the Southern Sea,
inseparable with the slopes drain'd by the Eastern
and Western Seas,
The eighteen thousand miles of sea-coast and
bay-coast on the main, the thirty thousand miles of
river navigation,
The seven millions of distinct families and the same
number of dwellings -always these, and more,
branching forth into numberless branches,
Always the free range and diversity - always the
continent of Democracy;
Always the prairies, pastures, forests, vast cities,
travelers, Kanada the snows:
Always these compact lands tied at the hips with the
belt stringing the huge oval lakes -Thus, in the same strain, this so-called poetry runs on for four pages without a single period! It is true that Walt Whitman has been praised by such high authorities in literature as Emerson, Tennyson, and Ruskin. Their eulogies, however, were rather on the thoughts and sentiments of the author than praise of his versification. His power is rugged and his controlling impulse, apart from his egotism, is to say whatever occurs to him at the moment, whether relevant or irrelevant. He lacks both rhyme and rhythm. His is imaginative, but not metrical, composition; the fruit of an excited imagination, but without measured form. If we call him a great poet, and judge him by his writings, where shall we assign our Longfellow or Whittier, tried on the same kind of evidence? Macaulay has as broad and liberal a definition of ars poetica as anyone. "By poetry," he says, "we mean the art of employing words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination; the art of doing by means of words what the painter does by means of colors." Now, if we take one or two of Walt Whitman's best efforts, how does he fulfill these requirements? Here is a little bit called "Aboard at a Ship's Helm":
Aboard at a ship's helm,
A young steersman steering with care.
Through fog on a seacoast dolefully ringing,
An ocean-bell - O a warning bell rocked by the
waves.
O you give a good notice indeed, you bell by the
sea-reefs ringing,
Ringing, ringing, to warn the ship from its
wreck-place.
For as on the alert O steersman, you mind the loud
admonition.
The bows turn, the freighted ship tacking speeds
away under her gray sails,
The beautiful and noble ship with all her precious
wealth speeds away gayly and safe.
But O the ship, the immortal ship! O ship aboard the
ship!
Ship of the body, ship of the soul, voyaging,
voyaging, voyaging.Or take a few lines from another poem:
Sauntering the pavement or riding the country by
road, lo, such faces!
Faces of friendship, precision, caution, suavity,
ideality,
The spiritual prescient face, the always welcome
common benevolent face,
The face of the singing of music, the grand faces of
natural lawyers and judges broad at the back-top,
The faces of hunters and fishers, bulged at the
brows, the shaved blanched faces of orthodox
citizens,
The pure, extravagant, yearning, questioning
artist's face,
The ugly face of some beautiful soul, the handsome
detested or despised face.
This now is too lamentable a face for a man.
Some abject louse asking leave to be, cringing for
it,
Some milk-nosed maggot blessing what lets it wrig to
its hole.
The face is a haze more chill than the Arctic
sea,Its sleepy and wabbling icebergs crunch as they
go.Milton defines poetry as "thoughts that voluntary move harmonious numbers"; and Chatfield says, "Poetry is the music of thought, conveyed to us in the music of language." Joubert happily puts it, "Nothing which does not transport is poetry. The lyre is a winged instrument." Let us see, then how a few lines from Whitman's "Song of Myself" come up to the requirements of these authorities:
I celebrate myself, and sing myself, and what I
assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to
you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of
summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this
soil, this air.
Born here of parents born here from parents the
same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health
begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back awhile sufficed at what they are, but
never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every
hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.Take some of the shorter poems. Here is an ode to "Beautiful Women":
Women sit or move to and fro, some old, some young,
The young are beautiful - but the old are more
beautiful than the young.Here is another, entitled "Thought":
Of obedience, faith, adhesiveness;
As I stand aloof and look there is to me something
profoundly affecting in large masses of men
following the lead of those who do not believe in
men.Ruskin considers that "It is a shallow criticism that would define poetry as confined to literary productions in rhyme and metre. The written poem is only poetry talking, and the statue, the picture, and the musical composition are poetry acting. Milton and Goethe, at their desks, were not more truly poets than Phidias with his chisel, Raphael at his easel, or deaf Beethoven bending over his piano, inventing and producing strains which he himself could never hope to hear" - and this great critic, Ruskin, say Whitman's admirers, has praised our hero! So be it! Phidias and Raphael and Beethoven were judged in accordance with the merits of what they produced. Their "acted poetry" stood the test of the most acute analysis and was given prominent rank because it was perfection. In the same manner "talking poetry," by whoever written, must satisfy the eye, the ear, the mind, the heart, all the higher mental faculties in order to be classed as true, genuine inspired poetry. Does this short poem meet these demands:
A GLIMPSE
A Glimpse, through an interstice caught,
Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a barroom
around the stove late of a winter night, and I
unremark'd seated in a corner,
Or a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently
approaching and seating himself near, that he may
hold me by the hand,
A long while amid the noises of coming and going, of
drinking and oath and smutty jest,
There we two, content, happy in being together,
speaking little, perhaps not a word.See how easily Whitman's verse becomes prose, and what would be the spontaneous criticism on any author who should write such prose:
Thou orb aloft full-dazzling, thou hot October noon!
Flooding with sheeny light the gray beach sand, the
sibilant near sea with vistas far, and foam, and
tawny streaks and shades and spreading blue; O sun
of noon refulgent! My special word to thee. Hear me
illustrious! Thy lover me, for always have I loved
thee, even as basking babe, then happy boy alone by
some woodedge, thy touching-distant beams enough, or
man matured, or young or old, as now to thee I
launch my invocation. Thou that with fructifying
beat and light, o'er myriad farms, o'er land and
waters North and South, o'er Mississippi's endless
course, o'er Texas' grassy plains, Kanada's woods,
o'er all the globe that turns its face to thee
shining in space; thou that impartially infoldest
all, not only continents, seas; thou that to grapes
and weeds and little wild flowers givest so
liberally, shed, shed thyself on mine and me, but
with a fleeting ray out of the million millions.
Strike through these chants. Nor only launch thy
subtle dazzle and thy strength for these; prepare
the later afternoon of me myself - prepare my
lengthening shadows, prepare my starry nights.There is no thought of melody, of the mechanical requirements of verse. It is simply a combination of words like unto the bits of glass in the child's kaleidoscope. Is it the language of a real genius or the voice of a ponderous fool? Whitman himself partially answers the question in a song from which we have already quoted. He is:
Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of
Manhattan the son,
Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking, and
breeding.
No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women,
or apart from them.
No more modest than immodest.
I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so
luscious.This is the pen picture of himself by the man claiming to be the apostle of a new art, instead of being really the apostle of a great art in its most degraded form.
There is no necessity for further quotation. We can admire the native, rugged strength of Whitman's unhampered genius. His active, brilliant imagination and his far-reaching enthusiasm seeking expression in language - in words that shall fire the heart and excite the mind - are characteristics of an extraordinary nature. So too his command of language and, apparently inexhaustible vocabulary is remarkable in a man with such antecedents and personal history. But these qualities do not make him a great poet. And to rank him as such is, to our thinking, to establish an entirely new standard from that which we have been wont to apply to the great masters of song. If they are true poets, then is Whitman a false one; if he is a poetic genius, then were the most honored names of literature but poetasters and "pitiful rhymers."