Part 15 (2/2)
Wordsworth's ”Daffodils,” ”Three Years She Grew,” ”The Solitary Reaper,” ”The Rainbow,” ”The b.u.t.terfly,” and many others are merely beautiful. These lines from Whitman give one the emotion of the sublime:
”I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems, And all I see multiplied as high as I can cipher edge but the rim of the farther systems.
”Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding, Outward and outward and forever outward.
”My sun has his sun and round him obediently wheels, He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit, And greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside them.”
All men may slake their thirst at the same spring of water, but all men cannot be thrilled or soothed by beholding the same objects of nature. A beautiful child captivates every one, a beautiful woman ravishes all eyes. On my way to the Imperial Valley, I recently drove across a range of California mountains that had many striking features. A lady asked me if I did not think them beautiful. I said, ”No, they are hideous, but the hideous may be interesting.”
The snow is beautiful to many persons, but it is not so to me. It is the color of death. I could stand our northern winters very well if I could always see the face of the brown or ruddy earth. The snow, I know, blankets the fields; and Emerson's poem on the snowstorm is fine; at the same time, I would rather not be obliged to look at the white fields.
We are the first great people without a past in the European sense. We are of yesterday. We do not strike our roots down deep into the geology of long-gone ages. We are easily transplanted. We are a mixture of all peoples as the other nations of the world are not. Only yesterday we were foreigners ourselves. Then we made the first experiment on a large scale of a democratic or self-governing people.
The ma.s.ses, and not a privileged few, give the tone and complexion to things in this country. We have not yet had time to develop a truly national literature or art. We have produced but one poet of the highest order. Whitman is autochthonous. He had no precursor. He is a new type of man appearing in this field.
”What think ye of Whitman?” This is the question I feel like putting, and sometimes do put, to each young poet I meet. If he thinks poorly of Whitman, I think poorly of him. I do not expect great things of him, and so far my test holds good. William Winter thought poorly of Whitman, Aldrich thought poorly of him, and what lasting thing has either of them done in poetry? The memorable things of Aldrich are in prose. Stedman showed more appreciation of him, and Stedman wrote two or three things that will keep. His ”Osawatomie Brown ... he shoved his ramrod down” is sure of immortality. Higginson could not stand Whitman, and had his little fling at him whenever he got the chance.
Who reads Higginson now? Emerson, who far outranks any other New England poet, was fairly swept off his feet by the first appearance of ”Leaves of Gra.s.s.” Whittier, I am told, threw the book in the fire.
Whittier's fame has not gone far beyond New England. The scholarly and academic Lowell could not tolerate Whitman, and if Lowell has ever written any true poetry, I have not seen it. What Longfellow thought of him, I do not know. Th.o.r.eau saw his greatness at a glance and went to see him. In England, I am told, Tennyson used to read him aloud in select company. I know that the two poets corresponded. We catch a glimpse of Swinburne's spasmodic insight in his first burst of enthusiasm over him, and then of his weakness in recanting.
Swinburne's friend and house-mate, Watts Dunton, never could endure him, but what has he done? So it has gone and still is going, though now the acceptance of Whitman has become the fas.h.i.+on.
I have always patted myself on the back for seeing the greatness of Whitman from the first day that I read a line of his. I was bewildered and disturbed by some things, but I saw enough to satisfy me of his greatness.
Whitman had the same faith in himself that Kepler had in his work.
Whitman said:
”Whether I come to my own to-day, or in ten thousand, or ten million years, I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.”
Kepler said: ”The die is cast; the book is written, to be read either now or by posterity. I care not which. It may well wait a century for a reader, since G.o.d has waited six thousand years for an observer like myself.”
Judging from fragments of his letters that I have seen, Henry James was unquestionably hypersensitive. In his dislike of publicity he was extreme to the point of abnormality; it made him ill to see his name in print, except under just the right conditions. He wanted all things veiled and softened. He fled his country, abjured it completely. The publicity of it, of everything in America--its climate, its day, its night, the garish sun, its fierce, blazing light, the manner of its people, its politics, its customs--fairly made him cringe. During his last visit here he tried lecturing, but soon gave it up. He fled to veiled and ripened and cus.h.i.+oned England--not to the country, but to smoky London; and there his hypersensitive soul found peace and ease.
He became a British subject, washed himself completely of every vestige of Americanism. This predilection of his probably accounts for the obscurity or tantalizing indirectness of his writings. The last story I read of his was called ”One More Turn of the Screw,” but what the screw was, or what the turn was, or whether anybody got pinched or squeezed, or what it was all about, I have not the slightest idea. He wrote about his visit here, his trip to Boston, to Albany, to New York, but which town he was writing about you could not infer from the context. He had the gift of a rich, choice vocabulary, but he wove it into impenetrable, though silken, veils that concealed more than they revealed. When replying to his correspondents on the typewriter, he would even apologize for ”the fierce legibility of the type.”
The contrast between the ”singing-robes and the overalls of Journalism” is true and striking. Good and true writing no magazine or newspaper editor will blue-pencil. But ”fine” writing is a different thing--a style that is conscious of itself, a style in which the thought is commonplace and the language studied and ornate, every judicious editor will blue-pencil. Downrightness and sententiousness are prime qualities; brevity, concreteness, spontaneity--in fact, all forms of genuine expression--help make literature. You know the genuine from the spurious, gold from pinchbeck, that's the rub. The secret of sound writing is not in the language, but in the mind or personality behind the language. The dull writer and the inspired writer use, or may use, the same words, and the product will be gold in the one and lead in the other.
<script>