Part 10 (1/2)

Looking through his eyes, you shall see it in the rude and the savage also, in rocks and deserts and mountains, in the coe as well as in rosy youth

The non-beautiful holds the world together, holds life together and nourishes it, more than the beautiful Nature is beautiful because she is so much else first,--yes, and last, and all the tihness of the earth and of man encloses asendures but personal qualities”

Is there not in field, wood, or shore so more precious and tonic than any special beauties we may chance to find there,--flowers, perfuh we can do without these? Is it health, life, power, or what is it?

Whatever it is, it is soet in Whitman

There is little in his ”Leaves” that one would care to quote for its h this element is there also One ed landscape, as in any other; but the flowers are always by the way, and never the main matter We should not orates us is in the air, and in the look of things The flowers are like our wild blossoreat trees or aarden or hot-house,--so is always present, always a breath of the untaives results, and never processes There is no return of the s, persons, realities It is a rushi+ng streaed that Whitive the purely intellectual satisfaction that would seerasp and penetration No, nor the aesthetic satisfaction warranted by his essentially artistic habit of , but only to put us on the road to satisfaction His book, he says, is not a ”good lesson,” but it lets down the bars to a good lesson, and that to another, and every one to another still

Let me repeat that the sharp, distinct intellectual note--the note of culture, books, clubs, etc, such as we get froet from Whitman In my opinion, the note he sounds is deeper and better than that It has been charged by an unfriendly critic that he strikes lower than the intellect If it is meant by this that he misses the intellect, it is not true; he stimulates the intellect as few poets do He strikes lower because he strikes farther He sounds the note of character, personality, volition, the note of prophecy, of democracy, and of love He seee; he seems unpoetic to a taste forious to standards founded upon the old models of devotional piety; he seeer measurements In his ideas and convictions, Whitman was a modern of the moderns; yet in his type, his tastes, his fundae,--before, as Eests, the Gods had cut Man up into men, with special talents of one kind or another

XVI

Take any of Whit lines, and clip and trim them, and coained to make up for e have lost? Take his lines called ”Reconciliation,” for instance:--

”Word over all beautiful as the sky, Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost, That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world; For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead, I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin--I draw near, Bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin”

Or take his poem called ”Old Ireland:”--

”Far hence arave an ancient sorrowful round, Her old white hair drooping, dishevel'd, round her shoulders, At her feet fallen an unused royal harp, Long silent, she, too, long silent,her shrouded hope and heir, Of all the earth her heart most full of sorrow because most full of love

”Yet a word, ancient round with forehead between your knees, Oh, you need not sit there veil'd in your old white hair so dishevel'd, For know you the one you rave, It was an illusion; the son you loved was not really dead, The Lord is not dead, he is risen again young and strong in another country

Even while you wept there by your fallen harp by the grave, What you wept for was translated, pass'd frorave, The winds favor'd and the sea sail'd it, And noith rosy and new blood, Moves to-day in a new country”

Or take these lines from ”Children of Adaan as last Sunday morn I pass'd the church, Winds of autu-stretch'd sighs up above soat the opera, I heard the soprano in the ; Heart of h one of the wrists aroundlittle bells last night under s as these, or in fact any of the poehten a certain effect, the effect of the highly wrought, the cunningly devised; but we lose just what the poet wanted to preserve at all hazards,--vista, unconstraint, the effect of the free-careering forces of nature

I always think of a regulation verse-forure, though it certainly haure It covers up deficiencies, and it restrains exuberances A personality like Whitrace, as may be seen in a few of his minor poems, but for my part I like hiuage of the conventional poetic! In this language, the language of nine tenths of current poetry, the wind comes up out of the south and kisses the rose's crimson mouth, or it co co sandals, and her footsteps are jeweled with flowers Everything is bedecked and bejeweled Nothing is truly seen or truly reported It is an attempt to paint the world beautiful It is not beautiful as it is, and we must deck it out in the colors of the fancy Now, I do not want the world painted for reen or brown, as the case ray, the soil red; and that the sun should rise and set without any poetic claptrap What I want is to see these things spin around a thought, or float on the current of an emotion, as they always do in real poetry

Beauty always follows, never leads the great poet It arises out of the interior substance and structure of his work, like the bloo poet thinks to win Beauty by direct and persistent wooing of her He has not learned yet that she coht to the truthful, the brave, the heroic Let hiive himself with love to life and reality about him, and Beauty is already his She is the reward of noble deeds

XVIII

Themore and more what has been called the canon of the characteristic, as distinguished from the Greek or classic canon of forests, that we are to apply to Whitman Dr Johnson had it in mind when he wrote thus of Shakespeare:--

”The work of a correct and regular writer is a garden accurately forently planted, varied with shades and scented with flowers: the composition of Shakespeare is a forest in which oaks extend their branches, and pines tower in the air, interspersed so shelter to ratifying the mind with endless diversity”

Classic art holds to certain fixed standards; it seeks formal beauty; it holds to order and proportion in external parts; its ideal of natural beauty is the well-ordered park or grove or flower-garden It has a horror of the wild and savage Mountains and forests, and tempests and seas, filled the classic mind with terror Not so with the ht in free, unhaestion of uncontrollable power