Part 6 (1/2)

”Whitman is confessedly the poet of the body. His book is not upward. He grovels in the earthly and disgusting parts of human life and experience. His egotism is remarkable.

”All the great poets have looked away from their disgusting surroundings and fleshly fetters, into a world of their creation that was bright and ethereal, but Whitman cries: 'I am satisfied with the perishable and the casual.' This alone would debar him from the company of the great masters of song.”

Professor Newcomer of Stanford University, divides honors by offending and defending:

First: ”It deliberately violates the rules of art, and unless we admit that our rules are idle, we must admit Whitman's defects.”

Second: ”It is diffuse, prolix.”

Third: ”This is perhaps the most that can be charged--he was needlessly gross.”

Fourth: ”The innovations in his vocabulary are inexcusable.”

In the following, he as faithfully defends the poet.

First: Of the charged egotism: ”It was not to parade himself as an exceptional being, but rather as an average man to hold the mirror up to other men and declare his kins.h.i.+p with them.”

Second: ”Taking Whitman simply at his own valuation we get much. The joys of free fellows.h.i.+p, the love of comrades, none has sung more heartily or worthily. And his courage and optimism are as deep as Emerson's.”

Third: ”He became the truest laureate of the war, and of Lincoln the idol of the people.”

Fourth: ”Comerado this is no book. Who touches this touches a man! As such, therefore, the book must go down to posterity, not a perfect song, but a cry vibrant still with the feeling of the man who uttered it.”

Professor Newcomer closes his estimate by the declaration that Whitman stands for the American people, but not in the sense that Was.h.i.+ngton or Lincoln or Lowell does, and that his office was somewhat like one who stands by and cheers while the procession goes by. He thinks that Whitman did not sit in the seats of the mighty.

Charles W. Hubner is much more charitable and in fact just, with our poet of the body. He says: ”Proclaiming the sanct.i.ty of manhood and womanhood, the power and eminence of G.o.d within us and without us; the divine relations.h.i.+p of body and soul; the eternalness of spirit and matter, he aims to teach us that all of these are manifestations of the Almighty spirit, present within and without all things, and out of whom all created things have come.” How far this critic removes Whitman from the cla.s.s of those who stood by and cheered while the procession moved on! Hubner makes him a _real teacher_ and revealer of divine laws and eternal truth.

Joel Chandler Harris has also given a vivid picture and a most wholesome interpretation of Whitman: ”In order to appreciate Whitman's poetry and his purpose, it is necessary to possess the intuition that enables the mind to grasp in instant and express admiration, the vast group of facts that make man--that make liberty--that make America. There is no poetry in the details; it is all in the broad, sweeping, comprehensive a.s.similation of the mighty forces behind them--the inevitable, unaccountable, irresistible forward movement of man in the making of the republic.” These estimates pro and con could be multiplied indefinitely.

How much more beautiful it is to face this new force in American poetry and deal with it justly, than to stand off and bark like some of our lesser critics have done and are doing! A recent comment upon Whitman says he has come to stay, and we must make up our minds to study him and to dispose of him by getting in sympathy with him, rather than by decrying him. This seems the just way, and the only safe way to deal with any great original force in literature.

John Burroughs has undoubtedly interpreted Whitman better than any other critic, and unquestionably owes Whitman more than any one else. He has found in the poet what so many others have found in Burroughs. ”Whitman does not to me suggest the wild and unkempt, as he seems to do to many; he suggests the cosmic and the elemental.... He cherished the hope that he had put into his 'Leaves', some of the tonic and fortifying quality of Nature in her more grand and primitive aspects.” From Whitman, I am constrained to believe, Burroughs has drawn much of his primitive strength as a writer. Whitman opened the book of Nature to him, and led him into a certain wilderness of beauty. At twenty, Burroughs began to read Whitman's poems, and says of them: ”I was attracted by the new poet's work from the first. It seemed to let me into a larger, freer air than I found in the current poetry.... Not a poet of dells and fells, but of the earth and the orbs.” He knew that he had found in Whitman a very strong and imposing figure, but he was doubly rea.s.sured when he came upon the statement from the English critic, John Addington Symonds, that Whitman had influenced him more than any other book except the Bible,--more than Plato, more than Goethe.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE PILE OF STONES MARKING THE SITE OF Th.o.r.eAU'S CABIN, BY WALDEN POND]

It was about the year 1858, when Burroughs first began reading Whitman and five years after that, in 1863, when Burroughs moved to Was.h.i.+ngton, the two men began to cultivate each other and were frequent companions till Whitman moved to Camden in 1873.

The friends.h.i.+p of the two men became so beautiful and grew so sacred, till Mr. Burroughs visited him every year in Camden, from 1873 till 1891, when he saw the poet for the last time. Whitman also visited Mr.

Burroughs, who had gone back up the Hudson in 1873, and built his home at West Park, New York.

The peculiar mountain wilderness around Slabsides induced the Naturalist to name the woods about his home, Whitman Land, and now you will hear him speak of the border of ”Whitman Land,” when he approaches Slabsides.

I have sometimes thought that Whitman's influence on him, more than Th.o.r.eau's, induced him to retreat to the woods and build Slabsides, where he could ”follow out these lessons of the earth and air.” So much of this elemental power or force has he seen in Whitman, that he honestly, and probably justly, thinks him ”the strongest poetic pulse that has yet beat in America, or perhaps in Modern times.” A study of the poet is to him an application of the laws of Nature to higher matters, and he pleads guilty to a ”loving interest in Whitman and his work, which may indeed amount to one-sided enthusiasm.” But this is honest, real, and not affected.

After a long study of the art of poetry and the artists, together with a thorough appreciation of form and beauty in all art, Burroughs declares there is once in a great while ”born to a race or people, men who are like an eruption of life from another world, who belong to another order, who bring other standards, and sow the seeds of new and larger types; who are not the organs of the culture or modes of their time and whom their times for the most part decry and disown--the primal, original, elemental men. It is here in my opinion that we must place Whitman; not among the minstrels and edifiers of his age, but among its prophets and saviors. He is nearer the sources of things than the popular poets--nearer the founder and discoverer, closer akin to the large, fervent, prophetic, patriarchal men, who figure in the early heroic ages. His work ranks with the great primitive books. He is of the type of the skald, the bard, the seer, the prophet.” In another place, Burroughs thinks that one can better read Whitman after reading the Greeks, than after reading our finer artists, and I have found this true.

We cannot wonder that he finds Whitman ”the one mountain in our literary landscape,” though, as he appropriately says there are many beautiful hills. Tall and large, he grew more beautiful in his declining years, and ”the full beauty of his face and head did not appear till he was past sixty.” However he was dressed, and wherever he was, one could not fail to be impressed ”with the clean, fresh quality of the man.” To me, his poems have this same clean, fresh quality, and I never read one of them that I don't feel far more satisfied with my lot.

Whitman says: ”I do not call one greater and one smaller. That which fills its place is equal to any.” To him, as to any prophet of the soul, greatness is filling one's place, and the poor get as much consolation out of this almost, as they do from Christ's beat.i.tude: ”Blessed are the poor for they shall inherit the earth.” To make a world, it takes many kinds of individuals, and Whitman did not rank them severally according to money, culture and social position. If a man filled his place, he was equal to any one else, for that is the whole duty of man.

He did not grovel in the earthly and disgusting, as one of our ”artistic” critics has said above. He alluded to many things that the over-nice could call disgusting, but he saw and painted only the beautiful in it all. For an instance that happens to come to my mind, he alludes to the battle of Alamo, but overlooks the military display, the common part of the slaughter. This may be found in any battle, and why Alamo and Goliad, if only to picture an army! Certainly there were more imposing dress parades than that. But after Fannin had surrendered and had accepted honorable terms that were offered by the Mexican General Urrea, Santa Anna orders the entire body of United States Soldiers executed, and on that bright and beautiful suns.h.i.+ny Palm Sunday, they were marched out upon the neighboring prairie and shot down in cold blood, and their bodies committed to the flames! Such a horrible picture has not been recorded elsewhere in the history of this republic. What then does Whitman say?