Leaves of Grass. The Poems of Walt Whitman [Selected]

Walt Whitman.

"Have the elder races halted? Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas? We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson, Pioneers! O Pioneers!"

LONG ago were tenderly bequeathed by the greatest spirit who ever moved on earth—and, may we not say, the greatest poet?—an obscure young man of divine presence, whose soul was as a clear flame of truth in a dark and haunted night, two precepts to his disciples. The first of the two, understood amiss, travestied by men to inglorious ends of caste and worldly advancement, was fatally separated from its fellow more and more in the after theories of religion. The second, which, in use, has been so grandly named the Golden Rule, though always potent for love and human fellowship, has in the perfect meaning the  ppp.00751.017.jpg Christ gave to it been often sorrowfully lost to us. All along it has, like its fellow, been in its full purity more of the sacred instinct of the few pure hearts than of the many. But now, more than ever, in the surge and fret of later time, when its need is inestimably greater, its spirit seems often lost and perverted, while the letter of its tradition is being told and retold with unlimited unction. To restore this spirit to heroic and active influence among men were a poet's work worthy of the highest, and it is this which is the most immediate significance of the "task eternal, and the burden and the lesson," which Walt Whitman has taken up, —this, perhaps, the most dominant aspect for us in England to-day of Walt Whitman's work as a poet.

In point of pure humanity, then, this new song of America is most significant for us. But if stress is laid on Leaves of Grass as a new poetry of love and comradeship at this time of social misgiving, when rich and poor alike make us keenly feel the need of the spirit of human love, the poetic force and quality Walt Whitman brings to aid him in his task must not be overlooked. It is not sentimental valley of the rose and nightingale,—no moonlit dreamland of romance,—whence he draws his inspiration. His poems, whatever critics may say of their art-form and harmonies, are touched with a wider spirit, and in their sweeping music take in the whole scope of Time and Space open to the modern mind. So, if the command was laid upon Walt Whitman to sing "the life-long love of comrades," which is the song of the new Democracy, it was his, too, to first essay the vaster  ppp.00751.018.jpg harmony still of the far-stretched universe as modernly known. The conjunction of this greatness of poetic vision, fearlessly equal to the far range of later science, with the most intimate sympathy with the individual human heart, is what makes Whitman so powerfully suggestive to the younger minds of to-day. In his hopeful gaze into the future, the doubts and misgivings of the time are laid at rest; as he sings of the new, purer Democracy, the social distempers and miseries of this particular hour lose their finality of woe, and are seen to be but a passing stride in the eternal human march.

"One's-self I sing, a simple separate person, Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.         .    .    .    .    .     .     .     .     .    .    . Of life immense in passion, pulse and power, Cheerful, for freest action, form'd under the laws divine, The Modern Man I sing."

The Modern Man! whom most of us are afraid to approach in poetry, or from any high standpoint at all,—Walt Whitman has resolutely faced him, and sounded the hopes and fears of his potential being. The foregoing passage from "Inscriptions," poems introductory to the main body of the Leaves of Grass, may be called indeed the key-note of Walt Whitman's unusual music. Struck thus at the outset, it will be found dominant throughout the book; with it sounding insistently in our ears we shall not be likely to mistake the great intention of this new poetry.

The best way to approach a poet is through his personality; it is only true poets who can bear to be so approached. In attempting to get at the  ppp.00751.019.jpg bearing upon our day and generation of Walt Whitman as a poet, we must first of all make friends with him as a man, for soon it is found that his life and personality are absolutely one with his poetry. It is impossible, indeed, to thoroughly apprehend the Leaves of Grass without knowing and being thrilled by the magnetic individuality that informs them throughout. And Walt Whitman has not stinted the American people of opportunity to see and know him familiarly; his life has been a remarkably open and undisguised one from the first. Visiting him now in his quiet home in Camden, New Jersey, one would find a white-haired venerable man of sixty-six, but it is the Walt Whitman of thirty years back whom one must realise, as he was when, in his prime of manhood and poetic power, he began to write the Leaves of Grass:—

"I now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin, Hoping to cease no till death."

Judged by the conventional good-society standard of appearances, it is to be feared that Walt Whitman would have then seemed an alarmingly natural sort of being, just as his poetry judged by approved rhymester's rules seems particularly audacious. There is a description by W. D. O'Connor, written ten years later it is true, but which will help us to realise his presence better perhaps than anything else. It is to be found in O'Connor's well-known essay, "The Good Grey Poet":—

"For years past thousands of people in New York, in Brooklyn, in Boston, in New Orleans, and latterly in Wash- ington, have seen, even as I saw two hours ago, tallying,

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one might say, the streets of our American cities, and fit to have for his background and accessories their streaming populations and ample and rich façades, a man of striking masculine beauty—a poet—powerful and venerable in appearance; large, calm, superbly formed; oftenest clad in the careless, rough, and always picturesque costume of the common people; resembling and generally taken by strangers for some great mechanic or stevedore, or seaman, or grand labourer of one kind or another; and passing slowly in this guise, with nonchalant and haughty step along the pavement, with the sunlight and shadows falling around him. The dark sombrero he usually wears was, when I saw him just now, the day being warm, held for the moment in his hand; rich light an artist would have chosen lay upon his uncovered head, majestic, large, Homeric, and set upon his strong shoulders with the grandeur of ancient sculpture. I marked the countenence, serene, proud, cheerful, florid, grave; the brow seamed with noble wrinkles; the features, massive and handsome, with firm blue eyes; the eyebrows and eyelids especially showing that fulness of arch seldom seen save in the antique busts; the flowing hair and fleecy beard, both very grey, and tempering with a look of age the youthful aspect of one who is but forty-five; the simplicity and purity of his dress, cheap and plain, but spotless, from snowy falling collar to burnished boot, and exhaling faint fragrance; the whole form surrounded with manliness as with a nimbus, and breathing in its perfect health and vigour, the august charm of the strong."

This depicture of Walt Whitman is valuable as being a direct portrayal, taken on the spot as it were, and showing the magnetic effect of his personal presence, affecting those who came in contact with him to an extraordinary degree, so that indeed it may be that they became poets in their turn, and somewhat idealistic in their accounts. Dr. Maurice Bucke in his vivid book upon Whitman tells  ppp.00751.021.jpg of a certain young man who went to see the poet—being already familiar with Leaves of Grass—and who by means of only a casual and ordinary talk was filled with a strange physical and spiritual exaltation, which lasted for some weeks; what is still more impressive, however, it is added that the young fellow's whole tenour of life was altered by this slight contact,—and that his character, outer life, and entire spiritual being were elevated and purified in a very remarkable way. This might seem exaggerated, but this special account is attested beyond the suspicion even of exaggeration, and it is typical, it will be found, of Walt Whitman's native influence and stimulus throughout. We have the direct testimony of many men of genius to prove this. From the involuntary tribute of Abraham Lincoln,—"Well, he looks like a Man!"—to the more conscious homage of John Burroughs, the poet-naturalist, whose little books of nature we have most of us been reading lately in their charming Edinburgh reprint, all sorts and conditions of men indeed have given their word for him.

To get at the full bearing of his life upon his poems, however, let us return to the very beginning, and trace, briefly at least, his boyhood and youth. In his Specimen Days and Collect, an autobiographical volume of incomparable prose- notes, as well as in many of the poems, Walt Whitman refers constantly to the great influence of his early childish days in their free open-air environment upon his mental and spiritual growth. He was, indeed, wonderfully happy in his early surroundings,—in his vigorous healthy parentage  ppp.00751.022.jpg and home influences. Born on Long Island, or Paumanok, its Indian name, by which he always calls it, in the State of New York, of a stalwart race of farmers, in 1819, the freedom of sun and wind was his, in a wide country-side, with rising hills around, and the sea that he has sung so affectionately, with such deep sympathy, so that its harmonies seem to have subtly informed his poetry, close by. Some of the early pages in Specimen Days give a delightful and vivid description of these boyish haunts, and the old homesteads of the Whitmans and the Van Velsors —his mother's family—as visited after more than forty years' absence. A note by John Burroughs, describing briefly the house where Walt Whitman was born and bred, says:—"The Whitmans lived in a long storey-and-a-half farm-house, hugely timbered, which is still standing. A great smoke-canopied kitchen, with vast hearth and chimney, formed one end of the house, where rousing wood fires gave both warmth and light on winter nights. . . . I must not forget to mention that both the families were near enough to the sea to behold it from the high places, and to hear in still hours the roar of the surf; the latter, after a storm, giving a peculiar sound at night." There is a temptation to quote a great many of Whitman's own notes about the neighbourhood, but only a brief excerpt or two can be given. "The spreading Hempstead plains in the middle of the island," give us one such note full of pastoral feeling. "I have often been out on the edges of these plains toward sundown, and can yet recall in fancy the intermin-  ppp.00751.023.jpg able cow-processions, and hear the music of the tin or copper bells clanking far or near, and breathe the cool of the sweet and slightly aromatic evening air, and note the sunset." Again and again he touches on the sea with an affection and a truth of description which make these careless jottings unspeakably suggestive. "As I write," he says in one place, "the whole experience comes back to me after the lapse of forty and more years—the soothing rustle of the waves, and the saline smell—boyhood's times, the clam-digging, barefoot and with trousers rolled up—hauling down the creek—the perfume of the sedge-meadows— the hay-boat, and the fishing excursions;—or, of later years, little voyages down and out New York bay, in the pilot boats." While still a child his father moved to Brooklyn—then a country-town, thoroughly rural in character—"at that time broad fields and country roads everywhere around," and still within easy reach of the sea. Here his school-days, and his general apprenticeship to life as printer, journalist, magazine-writer, and so on were mainly passed, up to his twentieth year, when he went to New York. A strong, healthy boyhood and youth his seems to have been throughout, out of which the poetic and literary faculty natively grew in a way as unlike the routine academic tradition as well could be. Give a healthy boy books like the Waverley Novels, and the Arabian Nights, in such a life as this, with a suggestive sufficiency of mental and physical work, and you have given him what mere formal scholasticism will never accomplish for him, in true poetic insight.

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The next twelve years, spent variously in street and field, in New York, Brooklyn, New Orleans, and other cities, with long intervals always of country life in the wide sweep of valley and plain and seashore, during which he sounded the teeming life of the fast-growing United States, may be deemed, says Dr. Bucke, the special preparation-time for the writing of the Leaves of Grass. Although, accordingly, one would like to comment at length upon these years of young manhood, it is unnecessary. The reader will find its true history and illustrations in the poems themselves. In some respects, however, the more detailed accounts possible in prose, given in Specimen Days, cast valuable added light upon this probation-time, and his great zest for certain sides of life. His "passion for ferries," for instance, that finds final outcome in the well-known poem, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," has a character- istic note. Referring to the Fulton Ferry, curiously identified with his life in Brooklyn and New York, he writes:—"Almost daily I crossed in the boats, often up in the pilot-houses, where I could get a full sweep, absorbing shows, accompaniments, surroundings. What oceanic currents, eddies, underneath; the great tides of humanity also, with ever shifting movements. Indeed, I have always had a passion for ferries; to me they afford inimitable, streaming, never-failing, living poems. The river and bay scenery, all about New York island, any time of a fine day—the hurrying, splashing sea-tides—the changing panorama of steamers . . . the myriads of white-sail'd schooners, sloops, skiffs, and the  ppp.00751.025.jpg marvellously beautiful yachts . . . what refreshment of spirit such sights and experiences gave me years ago, and many a time since." In the same way are described experiences of the teeming streets; the omnibuses, and the always typical race, since old English coaches first ran, of drivers; the theatres and their plays and players, and, with special stress, the operas and famous singers, for Whitman was always enthusiastically susceptible to music of all kinds.

To this tumultuous wealth of experience succeeds naturally the preparation, and then at last the publication, of the Leaves of Grass volume, which marks memorably the year 1855. A great deal of the matter found in the present volume has been added since the issue of this first edition—a thin royal octavo, generally described as a quarto, of ninety-four pages; but the significance of Whitman's departure from the old routine of poetry was marked in it in a way that no further addition could make more striking. It is not strange, therefore, that the book gained scant recognition. It was not until Emerson sent to Walt Whitman what was really his first recognition from the literary world, the now famous letter of greeting, that the book became at all known. A characteristic passage or two from this letter may be given:—"I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of Leaves of Grass. I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. . . . I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things,  ppp.00751.026.jpg said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire. . . . I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start. . . . " Of this letter, which was published eventually in the New York Tribune, Dr. Bucke says:—"Though it could not arrest, it did service in partially offsetting the tide of adverse feeling and opinion which overwhelmingly set in against the poet and his book." And in the same chapter he notes:—"The first reception of Leaves of Grass by the world was in fact about as disheartening as it could be. Of the thousand copies of this 1855 edition, some were given away, most of them were lost, abandoned, or destroyed." Of this thousand, however, certain of the copies had a history not noted in this instance, but told to the present writer by William Bell Scott, the well-known painter and poet, who thus became the means of introducing Walt Whitman to the English republic of letters. The summer following the publication of the book, that is in 1856, a man, James Grindrod by name, arrived in Sunderland from the United States, with a stock of American books—surplus copies, remainders, and so on—among which were the copies of Leaves of Grass mentioned. These books he disposed of by a curious system of dealing, called hand-selling, a rough and ready sort of auction, by which an article is first put up at a certain price and then gradually brought down until it finds a purchaser. This unlicensed street auctioneering most of those who are familiar  ppp.00751.027.jpg with north-country towns and their market days must have often witnessed, and in this way certain copies of Leaves of Grass fell into the hands of Thomas Dixon—a well-known native of Sunderland, to whom Ruskin wrote the famous letters ultimately published as "Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne." Thomas Dixon in his turn sent three of the copies thus acquired to William Bell Scott, who at once perceiving the unique quality of the book, sent forthwith one copy, which has become in its way historical, to William Michael Rossetti. For this copy gave the germinal suggestion of W. M. Rossetti's volume of ten years later— "Selected Poems by Walt Whitman," which for long well served as the only representative of the poet in England. It is noteworthy in relation to this episode that Mr. William Bell Scott, who first gave greeting and encourage- ment to another poet, of quite opposite order—a poet of romanticism like Dante Gabriel Rossetti— should act also as the herald of Walt Whitman— poet above everything of the actual, and the higher realism.

Further leaves were added to Leaves of Grass out of the abounding experiences of the years between 1855 and 1862, over which we must leap hastily to the outbreak of the Civil War,—an event of heroic importance in Whitman's life. It was a heroic opportunity indeed, and he used it like a hero, serving with passionate devotedness as a nurse to the wounded. The news of his brother's wound first called him hurriedly to the seat of war, and thus beginning his ministry, he tended  ppp.00751.028.jpg the wounded soldiers with a love and tenderness which with his peculiar invigorative influence had effects sometimes almost miraculous. And as he bore himself in this ordeal of death and horror of blood, so he afterwards sang. No war since rumours of war first began ever had such a record as is to be found in his war-poems, from the stirring "First O Songs for a Prelude," to the final strains,—"Spirit whose work is done," "Adieu O Soldiers," and the beautiful last of the series, "To the leaven'd soil they trod," wherein he tells with such exquisite imaginative suggestion of untying the tent ropes for the last time and letting the freshness of the morning wind, sunned and scented with the restoring scent of grass and all growing things, go blowing through, sweeping away for ever the clinging odours of war and death which had made the air sickly and terrible for so long, while the eye sent its glance with a thrill of escape to the wide, calm sweep of hills and plains in the distant sunlight, instinct with the sentiment of restored peace and beauty.

But at the war's end it was not the same robust, virile man who came out of that hospital tent. "Three unflinching years of work in that terrible suspense and excitement changed him," says Dr. Bucke, "from a young to an old man. Under the constant and intense moral strain to which he was subjected . . . he eventually broke down. The doctors called his complaint 'hospital malaria,' and perhaps it was; but that splendid physique was sapped by labour, watching, and still more by the emotions, dreads, deaths, uncertainties of three  ppp.00751.029.jpg years, before it was possible for hospital malaria or any similar cause to overcome it. This illness (the first he ever had in his life), in the hot summer of 1864, he never entirely recovered from —and never will." He hardly gave himself even time for a temporary recovery before returning to his hospital work, between which and his occupation as a clerk in the Government offices he divided his time up to the war's end.

There is no need perhaps to dwell here upon the story of his stupid dismissal from one office by a certain benighted official because of the alleged immorality of Leaves of Grass, though it was this that provoked W. D. O'Connor to his remarkable, if rather combative, manifesto on the poet's behalf, entitled "The Good Grey Poet." This was in 1868. It must be kept in mind, however, that this was only an extreme instance of the social and literary persecution which was levelled at him from the first. "To the pure all things are pure";—it was from this standpoint that Walt Whitman wrote. But there were critics who, instead of meeting with courtesy this poetic attempt to raise noble functions, long ignobly tainted with obscenity, to their true dignity and natural relation in the great scheme of earth and heaven, attacked him with incredible viciousness and rancour. As, however, considerations of Mrs. Grundy have caused the omission of the poems objected to in the present volume, there is no need to dwell further upon the matter here.

There are many delightful glimpses to be got in John Burroughs's Notes, and in his capital little  ppp.00751.030.jpg book, Birds and Poets, as well as from other sources quoted in the Life, of Walt Whitman's way of life in Washington during the following years; until 1873, in fact. In these various notes he is seen facing life with almost the same exuberant vigour as in the first heat of youth, only tempered a little by the inroads of time and the ill-health incurred in the war. One account speaks of his being seen daily "moving around in the open air, especially fine mornings and evenings, observing, listening to, or socially talking with all sorts of people, policemen, drivers, market men, old women, the blacks, or dignitaries." It continues:—"Altogether, perhaps, the good, grey poet is rightly located here. Our wide spaces, great edifices, the breadth of our landscape, the ample vistas, the splendour of our skies, night and day, with the national character, the memoirs of Washington and Lincoln, and others that might be named, make our city, above all others, the one where he fitly belongs. Walt Whitman is now in his fifty-second year, hearty and blooming, tall, with white beard and long hair. The older he gets the more cheerful and gay hearted he grows."

In spite of light heart and cheery temper his ill-health increased upon him, and culminated at last in a paralytic seizure, in February 1873, from which he had almost recovered when in May the same year his mother died somewhat suddenly in Camden, New Jersey, in his presence. "That event," says his chronicler, "was a terrible blow to him, and after the occurrence he became much worse. He left Washington for good, and took up  ppp.00751.031.jpg his residence in Camden. . . . And now for several years," it continues, "his life hung upon a thread. Though he suffered at times severely, he never became dejected or impatient. It was said by one of his friends that in that combination of illness, poverty, and old age, Walt Whitman has been more grand than in the full vigour of his manhood. For along with illness, pain, and the burden of age, he soon had to bear poverty also." Of his poverty there is no need to say more than that it resulted from traits of generosity and kindliness that a money-making world might call imprudence, but that the poets have conspired in their one-sided way to call human nature. Recovering somewhat as time went by, so he has lived on, up to the present day, taking still the same delight in nature and in men, exploring the old country-sides and visiting new ones, publishing new editions of Leaves of Grass, and issuing, too, the special outcome of these later years, the unique book of prose autobiographical jottings already alluded to, Specimen Days and Collect, "the brightest and halest Diary of an Invalid," says Dr. Bucke, "ever written—a book unique in being the expression of strength in infirmity—the wisdom of weakness—so bright and translucent, at once of the earth, earthy, and spiritual as of the sky and stars. Other books of the invalid's room require to be read with the blinds drawn down and the priest on the threshold; but this sick man's chamber is the lane, and by the creek or sea-shore—always with the fresh air and the open sky overhead."

Along with Specimen Days were written from  ppp.00751.032.jpg time to time further poems, and added to the previous collections of Leaves of Grass. The latter volume was also revised, and its arrangement unified, certain of the poems which repeated what was also given in others being left out, and the whole re-touched and altered so as to give a certain epic unity that was rather lacking before. This brings us to consider the poems in themselves, and their full bearing in life and in letters. At once, from the first glance at Whitman's poetry, the reader will see that it is utterly, incomparably unlike anything our ordinary rhymesters have accustomed us to. So apparently abrupt a departure in poetic form and diction may at first cause a certain feeling of distrust. But looking closer, it is soon discovered that here is not, as has been alleged with much asseveration, the freak of a writer trying to be eccentric at all hazards, but the genuine outcome of a quite new and vastly extended apprehension of life and letters. If Walt Whitman had merely come forward with a re-presentment of the ordinary poetaster's topics,—rose-water agonies, drawing-room romances, and so on, such a departure might well be cavilled at. But here comes a poet who has set himself resolutely to deal with the vast developments of the Nineteenth Century, all the teeming life and work of the Americas and of the wider world still, under aspects startlingly different in their scope and tremendous significance to anything the world has known before, and we quarrel with him, forsooth, because he has not expressed himself in elegiacs, or the measures of the time of Queen Elizabeth. In life, in  ppp.00751.033.jpg science, in philosophy, even in religion, let us be liberal. But in poetry:—No! there is safety in conservatism. This is really what it amounts to.

A briefest backward glance through the history of letters teaches another conclusion; constantly, it will be found, the order of poetic expression is changing and developing. But we do not need to make any far historical excursion for light on the subject: the experience of almost every poet will show us the simple rationale of the matter. The first literary instinct of the young writer is always to transcend the traditional means of utterance; the conventional forms have lost their vital response to the subject, he feels; they want re-adjusting, renewing. As he goes on he reconciles in time the new need with the old equipment, bringing in as much fresh force and quality as his genius and energy can satisfactorily compass. This achievement of renovated modes of utterance is of course largely dependent upon the new conditions of life, and therefore of literary subject-matter, amid which he is placed. But what must be specially remarked, it is not usually from too ardent a renascence of words and their art forms that a writer fails in the translation of life, but usually from his being overawed by tradition. Convention is the curse of poetry, as it is the curse of everything else, in which at a second remove the outward show can be made to pass muster for the inward reality. Now, the hastiest glimpse at the conditions under which a poet who has attempted to deal with the whole scope of the new civilisation, and with all that it implies of new science, new philosophy,  ppp.00751.034.jpg and so on, is placed, will show at once that an order of things so vastly different from any order of the past must require a new poetic approach. This new approach Walt Whitman has set himself courageously to accomplish, and whatever exception is taken to the details of his method, there is no young writer, with an eye to the vast human needs of the time, and not hopelessly encumbered with tradition, but will feel, I am sure, that here is at last an initiative, most powerful and intense, which he must after this bear constantly in mind.

Poetry of the last few decades in England has occupied itself mainly with archaic or purely ideal subjects, with specialist experiments in psychology and morbid anatomy, or the familiar stock material of fantasy and sentiment. For these a certain art- glamour, so to speak,—a certain metrical remove,—is required as a rule, which can be best attained, perhaps, by the fine form and dainty colour of rhyming verse. And there will always, let us hope, be those who will continue to supply this artistic poetry, bringing as it does so much inestimable enhancement to the everyday life. Up to the present it may be that this poetry has fairly satisfied the need of the time,—a time occupied too much with its processes of material civilisation and wealth-acquirement to attend very truly to the ideal. But standing now on the verge of a new era—an era of democratic ascendancy—it may be well to ask ourselves, even in conservative England, whether, seeing the immense poetic need of a time dangerously possessed of new and tremendous forces, this poetry of archaic form and  ppp.00751.035.jpg sentiment is likely to be equal to the hour. We want now a poetry that shall be masterfully contemporary, of irresistible appeal to the hearts of the people; and this we certainly have not in England to-day. The critic will say in reply at once, But look at Tennyson, look at Browning! And he is right in insisting upon their great claim. But if we ask ourselves, What then is Tennyson's distinctive achievement in poetry? we have to answer, The Idylls of the King: and Browning's? The Ring and the Book. It does not need a prophet to see at once that there is no hope of poems like these,— masterpieces as both of them are in quite different ways—ever really reaching the people at all. So with their poetry throughout; with all its human feeling and imagination, one feels that it is of ease and refinement. While the wider audience of the people has been vastly increasing, it seems as if the poets had been turning away from it more and more since the time of Burns. It is a far cry from Burns,—even from Wordsworth,—to Tennyson and Browning.

It may seem that a dangerous comparison has been invited in these instances, but it is one that must be faced straightforwardly. The name of Burns suggests a solution of the whole matter. He at any rate sang out of an abounding sympathy with, and knowledge of, the popular needs of his day,—

"Deep in the general heart of men His power survives."

In his songs he relied not only upon the great  ppp.00751.036.jpg elementary passions and sentiments of men for his inspiration, but also upon the natural idiom of speech and the music in vogue at his time. Of course we do not say, copy the method of Burns; but we do say, copy his literary response to life, and his reliance upon contemporary idiom and tune. If it be asked now, as naturally it will, if in Walt Whitman we have a poet who has tried to do this, the answer is unmistakable. His poetry may not be powerful in "the general heart of men" yet, as were the songs of Burns in his time; but we have to remember the incalculable enlargement of life since then, and the enormously increased difficulties of the task, especially, as before remarked, in the case of one who, like Walt Whitman, sets himself to cope with the whole universal, cosmic sweep of space and time. His is, therefore, as he has constantly affirmed, an initiative, rather than a consummation in poetry. "Poets to come!" he cries:—

"Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come! Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for, But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than before known Arouse! for you must justify me. I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future, I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back in the darkness."

Of the virtue of his work as a final accomplishment in poetry, there would probably be no two English readers able to agree. What it is wished to lay  ppp.00751.037.jpg stress on here, is that, as he has been the first to attempt this great work, so his significance as a pioneer, as an initiator, is beyond all dispute. He is suggestive rather than completive; but his suggestion is to the younger minds of to-day by far the greatest thing that is to be found in contemporary poetic movement.

Thinking on this suggestion, first of all from its purely literary side, we are brought face to face at once with problems of extreme difficulty, which have been suggestively treated by William Sloane Kennedy and other American writers recently, but which it will be rather attempted to roughly state than to solve here. The whole of Whitman's departure in poetry is concerned with the vexed question of prose and verse, and the proper functions of the two modes of expression. Absolutely stated, prose is the equivalent of speech in all its range; verse, of song. But it is evident at once that the matter does not rest here. In a hundred ways needs arise which cannot be met by a strict adherence to this line of demarcation, as when, for instance, an elevation of utterance is required that yet does not, properly speaking, arise into pure song. In the right adjustment then of the relations betwixt prose and verse lies the difficult secret of the art of words. Whitman noting in his literary work the restricting effect of exact rhyme measures, sought to attain a new poetic mode by a return to the rhythmic movement of prose, with what signal result may be seen by a sympathetic dive almost anywhere into Leaves of Grass. It is a substitution, it is found at once, of harmony for melody; of a larger, more  ppp.00751.038.jpg epic music for the old lyric movements of poetry. This tendency is indeed one of the time; we find the same in music, as in Wagner, and his disciple Dvorák,—a tendency to advance further and further from tune towards complicate harmonic orchestral effects. And the advance is a great one beyond a doubt. The only danger is that in accepting this new tendency, we may neglect the great virtues of past modes. Always the salvation of all art-expression lies in the perfect adjustment of the new with the old. It is earnestly to be desired, therefore, that the "poets to come," especially those of the immediate future, will be wise enough to see this, and, taking the initiative of Walt Whitman greatly to heart, yet have the high artistic sanity to eschew his mannerisms and incidental weaknesses, and follow only what is essential and supreme in his method, reconciling it intelligently with his noble teaching of the old masters of song. A newer, grander harmony it has been his to herald; but we who come of Celtic stock feel that the older music, the old tunes of the heart, have still a great future, and that it is in the right adjustment of their simple music with the new that the success of poetry as a minister of life in the future will lie.

Thinking on Walt Whitman's initiative in the larger sense, and turning over the Leaves of Grass in a spirit of sympathetic response,—of response as if to a work of nature, rather than of art,—the consciousness of an intimate new seeing of things there thrills one through and through. It is not now the testament of the universal love for men  ppp.00751.039.jpg alone, which we laid stress upon earlier in these pages, but the utterly new poetic insight into the conditioning of human life and action. For though Walt Whitman's deliverance has been prepared for and precedented in philosophy, as in Hegel, for instance, to whom he unhesitatingly states his indebtedness, in poetry it is quite new. Ideas for long the sole property of the philosophical coteries, and moving within the close range of academic influence, are here set humanly free in song, emotionally related to the common life of men. With Whitman the emotional is all in all, and includes the intellectual, as it were; and the reader who would understand his full significance must bring natural and noble feeling to the task. Given this, and his apparent confusions and violent paradoxes assume poetic order and stimulus. With Hegel, he is a mystic, in the profoundest sense; but his mysticism is one that it does not require academic equipment to master,—it is the mysticism whose germs are to be found in the most ignorant being who, awaking at morning, sees that the sun is shining, and is unconsciously glad.

"I am the poet of the Body, and I am the poet of the Soul, The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me, The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into a new tongue."

It is this new translation of the old sorrows and shames and degradations, and their redemption as parts of the divine order of human life, that many  ppp.00751.040.jpg critics have found so intolerable in Leaves of Grass; but let us rather be glad for so timely a deliverance from an old bondage. It is only a highest imagination that can so relate and ennoble things. The poets and so-called idealists in art have of recent times trusted to incidental and adventitious aids,—the aids of picturesque association, romance-interest, and so on, to give their subjects poetic relation; but Walt Whitman has essayed to rely upon the essential primary conditions of being and thought. From this resolute reliance upon the unalterable basis of the divine order he is able to face hopefully problems of this often seemingly so hopeless age, finding under all the tumult of misery and evil the celestial promise:

"In this broad earth of ours, Amid the measureless grossness and the slag, Enclosed and safe within its central heart, Nestles the seed perfection."

This reliance enables him to speak with superb faith in its future of the Democracy that is so unsettling the old feudal relations, in art as well as in political and social life. And the poet whose apprehension has at once so wide a scientific extension, and such an emotional impulse, may well find his heart large enough to embrace life's illimitable multitudes. The idea of a great loving confederacy of men and women, united in the undying cause of Truth and Beauty, gives a most noble human appeal to many of his poems. "Come," he cries,—

 ppp.00751.041.jpg "Come, I will make the continent indissoluble, I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon, I will make divine magnetic lands, With the love of comrades, With the life-long love of comrades. I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies, I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other's necks, By the love of comrades, By the manly love of comrades."

Again:—

"I dream'd in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole rest of the earth, I dream'd that was the new city of Friends, Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love, it led the rest, It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city, And in all their looks and words."

It is not possible here to go much into detail in speaking of the great wealth of poetry to be found in Leaves of Grass. Perhaps it is best for the uninitiated reader to begin with the "Inscriptions," then turn to the section called "Calamus," (Calamus being a sort of American grass which is used here to typify comradeship and love!) reading two or three poems there. Proceeding then, turn to the more simply tuneful summons of "Pioneers! O Pioneers!" in the "Birds of Passage" series, after which it would be an impertinence to direct further,  ppp.00751.042.jpg except perhaps to suggest a return to the beginning of the book to read "Starting from Paumanok," which is a sort of overture to Whitman's after music. By this time the reader's fate as far as Walt Whitman's influence is concerned will be decided. Either will have come the supreme joy of the approach to a new poet, or the tedium of an unappreciated book.

Many of Whitman's most characteristic poems have necessarily been omitted from a volume like the present, intended for an average popular English audience—an audience which, be it confessed, from the actual experiment of the present editor, is apt to find much of Leaves of Grass as unintelligible as Sordello, not without a certain excuse haply in some instances. The method of selection adopted in preparing the volume has certainly not been scientific or very profoundly critical. The limitations of the average run of readers have been, as far as they could be surmised, the limitations of the book, and upon the head of that unaccountable class, who have in the past been guilty of not a few poets' and prophets' maltreatment, rest any odium the thorough-paced disciple of Walt Whitman may attach to the present venture. For those who wish to thoroughly apprehend the Leaves of Grass it will be necessary, let it be said at once, to study them in their complete form, which is to be obtained in the edition of Messrs. Wilson & McCormick, of Glasgow; as also the indispensable Specimen Days and Collect, and the Life by Dr. Maurice Bucke, mentioned in these pages. The Specimen Days volume also contains the famous preface to the  ppp.00751.043.jpg first edition of Leaves of Grass; a very important commentary on the tendencies of the time, entitled Democratic Vistas; a suggestive essay, Poetry To-Day in America; and a lecture on Abraham Lincoln, delivered several times in the last few years in the United States. Dr. Bucke's Life, which is simply invaluable as a straightforwardly enthusiastic presentment of a great and heroic nature, contains, too, W. D. O'Connor's Good Grey Poet, and a valuable appendix of contemporary American notices; the Glasgow edition having a similar list of English ones compiled by Professor Dowden. In this English list the names of Ruskin, Tennyson, Swinburne, Buchanan, Symonds, and other leading poets and writers, bear unique testimony to Whitman's influence.

At last, in thinking on all that might have been said to aid the true apprehension of one of the few true books that have appeared in the present generation, these jottings of comment and suggestion seem, on looking over them, more or less futile and beside the mark. But it would be impossible for any writer, and especially for a young writer, to speak at all finally and absolutely in dealing with a nature so unprecedented and so powerful. All that he can hope to do is to suggest and facilitate the means of approach. Else there is a great temptation to dwell upon many matters left untouched, and specially to enlarge with enthusiasm on certain of the poetic qualities of the book. Of Whitman's felicitous power of words at his best; of his noble symphonic movement in such poems as the heroic funeral-song on President Lincoln,—  ppp.00751.044.jpg "When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd"—(part of which, be it remembered, has been set to music by one of our leading younger composers, C. Villiers Stanford); of his subtle translation of those glimpses of the hidden subtle essences of Nature that the artist finds so elusive and yet so insistent; of his original sense, too, of the inner and outer human aspects: it were a long, startlingly unconventional commentary that satisfactorily expressed these and a hundred things besides.

Apart from any mere literary qualities or excellences, what needs lastly to have all stress laid upon it, is the urgent, intimate, personal influence that Walt Whitman exerts upon those who approach him with sympathy and healthy feeling. There are very few books that have this fine appeal and stimulus; but once the personal magnetism of Walt Whitman has reached the heart, it will be found that his is a stimulus unlike any other in its natural power. His influence is peculiarly individual, and therefore, from his unique way of relating the individual to the universal, peculiarly organic and potent for moral elevation. Add to this, that he is passionately contemporary, dealing always with the ordinary surroundings, facing directly the apparently unbeautiful and unheroic phenomena of the everyday life, and not asking his readers away into some airy other-where of painful return, and it will be found that the new seeing he gives is of immediate and constant effect, making perpetually for love and manliness and natural life. With this seeing, indeed, the commonest things, the most trifling actions, become  ppp.00751.045.jpg transformed and idealised, so that a new dignity enters unawares by the very doorway of the commonplace, ennobling the faces and voices of those around with a divine promise, and making dishonour and unchivalry impossible.

It is the younger hearts who will thrill to this new incitement,—the younger natures, who are putting forth strenuously into the war of human liberation. Older men and women have established their mental and spiritual environment; they work according to their wont. They, many of them, look with something of derision at this san- guine devotion to new ideals, and haply utter smiling protests against the deceptive charms of all things novel. But if the ideals informing Leaves of Grass are in one sense very new, they are also very old,— as old as the world itself. And in the same way, although Walt Whitman is an innovator, he follows as naturally in the literary order as did Marlowe for instance, and after him, Shakespeare, in their day; and is as natively related to this time. The poet who derives in the Nineteenth Century from the Bible, and from Homer,—appreciating such later influences as Carlyle's in letters, Hegel's in philosophy, J. F. Millet's in art, and Wagner's in music, is not blind to the great teaching of the past; and if to this he brings a later seeing all his own, we who are young may well respond to him, too, in turn, and advance fearlessly in the lines of his unique initiative. To the younger hearts and minds, then, be these Leaves of Grass, gathered and interwoven as the emblem of a corresponding fellowship of men and women, dedicate!

 ppp.00751.046.jpg "The prairie-grass dividing, its special odour breathing, I demand of it the spiritual corresponding. Demand the copious and close companionship of men."

The natural life, informed with virile religious love,—the spirit of comradeship, as opposed to the antagonism of class with class, and nation with nation, which has stirred men selfishly and cruelly so long: this were the salvation, cries Walt Whitman, of the new Democracy, inevitably now at hand. And with his tones of heroic incitement and earnest remonstrance ringing in our midst, we who are young may do much in the stress and tumult of the advance to a new and endangered era for the high order of love and truth and liberty, for the divine cause of all heroes and poets.

"Years of the modern! years of the unperform'd! Your horizon rises, I see it parting away for more august dramas, I see not America only, not only, Liberty's nation but other nations preparing, I see tremendous entrances and exits, new combinations, the solidarity of races, I see that force advancing with irresistible power on the world's stage.         .    .    .    .    .     .     .     .     .    .    . Your dreams, O years, how they penetrate through me! (I know not whether I sleep or wake;) The perform'd America and Europe grow dim, retiring in shadow behind me, The unperform'd, more gigantic that ever, advance, advance upon me." ERNEST RHYS. 
  CHELSEA, 1886.