Part 14 (1/2)
”All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream.”
Strangely--in forlorn silence--pa.s.ses before us, as we close his pages, that procession of ”dead, cold Maids.” Ligeia follows Ulalume; and Lenore follows Ligeia; and after them Eulalie and Annabel; and the moaning of the sea-tides that wash their feet is the moaning of eternity. I suppose it needs a certain kindred perversion, in the reader, to know the shudder of the loss, more dear than life, of such as these! The more normal memory of man will still continue repeating the liturgical syllables of a very different requiem:
”O daughters of dreams and of stories, That Life is not wearied of yet-- Faustine, Fragoletta, Dolores, Felise, and Yolande and Julette!”
Yes, Life and the Life-Lovers are enamoured still of these exquisite witches, these philtre-bearers, these Sirens, these children of Circe.
But a few among us--those who understand the poetry of Edgar Allen--turn away from them, to that rarer, colder, more virginal Figure; to Her who has been born and has died, so many times; to Her who was Ligeia and Ulalume and Helen and Lenore--for are not all these One?--to Her we have loved in vain and shall love in vain until the end--to Her who wears, even in the triumph of her Immortality, the close-clinging, heavily-scented cerements of the Dead!
”The old bards shall cease and their memory that lingers Of frail brides and faithless shall be shrivelled as with fire, For they loved us not nor knew us and our lips were dumb, our fingers Could wake not the secret of the lyre.
Else, else, O G.o.d, the Singer, I had sung, amid their rages, The long tale of Man, And his deeds for good and ill.
But the Old World knoweth--'tis the speech of all his ages-- Man's wrong and ours; he knoweth and is still.”
WALT WHITMAN
I want to approach this great Soothsayer from the angle least of all profaned by popular verdicts. I mean from the angle of his poetry.
We all know what a splendid heroic Anarchist he was. We all know with what rude zest he gave himself up to that ”Cosmic Emotion,” to which in these days the world does respectful, if distant, reverence.
We know his mania for the word ”en ma.s.se,” for the words ”ensemble,” ”democracy” and ”libertad.” We know his defiant celebrations of s.e.x, of amorousness, of maternity; of that Love of Comrades which ”pa.s.seth the love of women.” We know the world-shaking effort he made--and to have made it at all, quite apart from its success, marks him a unique genius!--to write poetry about every mortal thing that exists, and to bring the whole breathing palpable world into his Gargantuan Catalogues. It is absurd to grumble at these Inventories of the Round Earth. They may not all move to Dorian flutes, but they form a background--like the lists of the Kings in the Bible and the lists of the s.h.i.+ps in Homer--against which, as against the great blank s.p.a.ces of Life itself, ”the writing upon the wall” may make itself visible.
What seems much less universally realized is the extraordinary genius for sheer ”poetry” which this Prophet of Optimism possessed.
I agree that Walt Whitman's Optimism is the only kind, of that sort of thing, that one can submit to without a blush. At least it is not indecent, bourgeois, and ill-bred, like the fourth-hand Protestantism that Browning dishes up, for the delectation of Ethical Societies. It is the optimism of a person who has seen the American Civil War. It is the optimism of a man who knows ”the Bowery” and ”the road,” and has had queer friends in his mortal pilgrimage.
It is an interesting psychological point, this difference between the ”marching breast-forward” of Mrs. Browning's energetic husband, and the ”taking to the open road” of Whitman. In some curious way the former gets upon one's nerves where the latter does not. Perhaps it is that the boisterous animal-spirits which one appreciates in the open air become vulgar and irritating when they are practised within the walls of a house. A Satyr who stretches his hairy shanks in the open forest is a pleasant thing to see; but a gentleman, with lavender-colored gloves, putting his feet on the chimney-piece is not so appealing. No doubt it is precisely for these Domestic Exercises that Mr. Chesterton, let us say, would have us love Browning. Well!
It is a matter of taste.
But it is not of Walt Whitman's Optimism that I want to speak; it is of his poetry.
To grasp the full importance of what this great man did in this sphere one has only to read modern ”libre vers.” After Walt Whitman, Paul Fort, for instance, seems simply an eloquent prose writer. And none of them can get the trick of it. None of them!
Somewhere, once, I heard a voice that approached it; a voice murmuring of
”Those that sleep upon the wind, And those that lie along in the rain, Cursing Egypt--”
But that voice went its way; and for the rest--what ba.n.a.lities! What inept.i.tudes! They make the mistake, our modern free-versifiers, of thinking that Art can be founded on the Negation of Form. Art can be founded on every other Negation. But not on that one--never on that one! Certainly they have a right to experiment; to invent--if they can--new forms. But they must invent them. They must not just arrange their lines _to look like poetry,_ and leave it at that.
Walt Whitman's New Form of Verse was, as all such things must be, as Mr. Hardy's strange poetry, for instance, is, a deliberate and laborious struggle--ending in what is a struggle no more--to express his own personality in a unique and recognisable manner. This is the secret of all ”style” in poetry. And it is the absence of this labour, of this premeditated concentration, which leads to the curious result we see on all sides of us, the fact, namely, that all young modern poets _write alike._ They write alike, and they _are_ alike--just as all men are like all other men, and all women like all other women, when, without the ”art” of clothing, or the ”art” of flesh and blood, they lie down side by side in the free cemetery. The old poetic forms will always have their place. They can never grow old-fas.h.i.+oned; any more than Pisanello, or El Greco, or Botticelli, or Scopas, or any ancient Chinese Painter, can grow old-fas.h.i.+oned. But when a modern artist or poet sets to work to create a new form, let him remember what he is doing! It is not the pastime of an hour, this. It is not the casual gesture of a mad iconoclast breaking Cla.s.sic Statues into mud, out of which to make goblins. It is the fierce, tenacious, patient, constructive work of a lifetime, based upon a tremendous and overpowering Vision! Such a vision Walt Whitman had, and to such constant inspired labour he gave his life--notwithstanding his talk about ”loafing and inviting his soul”!
The ”free” poetry of Walt Whitman obeys inflexible, occult laws, the laws commanded unto it by his own creative instinct. We need, as Nietzsche says, to learn the art of ”commands” of this kind!
Transvaluers of old values do not spend all their time sipping absinthe. Is it a secret still, then, the magical unity of rhythm, which Walt Whitman has conveyed to the words he uses? Those long, plangent, wailing lines, broken by little gurgling gasps and sobs; those sudden thrilling apostrophes and recognitions; those far-drawn flute-notes; those resounding sea-trumpets; all such effects have their place in the great orchestral symphony he conducts!
Take that little poem--quite spoiled before the end by a horrible bit of democratic vulgarity--which begins:
”Come, I will build a Continent indissoluble; I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon--”
Is it possible to miss the hidden spheric law which governs such a challenge? Take the poem which begins: