Part 15 (1/2)
What has a poet of Whitman's aims to do with decency or indecency, with modesty or immodesty? These are social or conventional virtues; he represents mainly primary qualities and forces Does life, does death, does nature, respect our proprieties, our conventional veils and illusions? Neither will he He will strip thes in the universe were equally sacred and divine; as if all men were really his brothers, all women his sisters; as if all parts of the human body were equally beautiful and wonderful; as if fatherhood and , were sacred acts Of course it is easy to see that this course will speedily bring hiuardians of taste and social morality But what of that? He professes to take his cue from the elemental laws ”I reckon I behave no more proudly than the level I plant h, to do it? Will he not falter, or betray self-consciousness? Will he be true to his ideal through thick and thin? The social Gods will all be outraged, but that is less to him than the candor and directness of nature in whose spirit he assu is easier than to convict Walt Whiths indifferent when you have done so It is not your Gods that he serves He says he would be as indifferent of observation as the trees or rocks And it is here that we must look for his justification, upon ethical rather than upon the grounds of conventional art He has taken our sins upon himself He has applied to the morbid sex-consciousness, that has eaten so deeply into our social system, the heroic treatment; he has fairly turned it naked into the street He has not merely in words denied the inherent vileness of sex; he has denied it in very deed We should not have taken offense had he confined himself to words,--had he said sex is pure, the body is as clean about the loins as about the head; but being an artist, a creator, and not a mere thinker or preacher, he was co it
The sa an artist, he could not merely say all men were his brothers; he must show them as such If their weakness and sins are his also, he must not flinch when it coood We may be shocked at the fullness and minuteness of the specification, but that is no concern of his; he deals with the concrete and not with the abstract,--fraternity and equality as a reality, not as a sentiment
XII
In the phase in which we are now considering him, Whitman appears as the Adamic man re-born here in the nineteenth century, or with science and thehiood for us, and one of these days, or one of these centuries, we shall be able to stand it and enjoy it
”To the garden the world anew ascending, Potent , The love, the life of their bodies, , Curious, here beholdcycles, in their wide sweep, having brought ain, Amorous, mature--all beautiful tofire that ever plays through the, I peer and penetrate still, Content with the present--content with the past, By , Or in front, and I following her just the same”
The critics perpetually misread Whitman because they fail to see this essentially composite and dra of Walt Whitman the private individual, but of Walt Whit for, all types and conditions of men; in fact, that it is the drama of a new deer, more copious, erms of this character he would sow broadcast over the land
In this drama of personality the poet always identifies himself with the scene, incident, experience, or person he delineates, or for wholander, or to the man of the South and the West, ”I depict you as hs, criminals, and low and despised persons as himself; he lays claiuilty of, because, he says, ”the germs are in all men” Men dare not tell their faults He will make them all his own, and then tell them; there shall be full confession for once
”If you becoraded, criminal, ill, then I become so for your sake; If you remember your foolish and outlaw'd deeds, do you think I cannot remember my own foolish and outlaw'd deeds?”
It will not do to read this poet, or any great poet, in a narrow and exacting spirit As Whitreat poems to each man and woman are: Come to us on equal terms, only then can you understand us”
In the roup of poeenerative principle, and all the excesses and abuses that grow out of it he unblushi+ngly imputes to himself What men have done and still do, while under the intoxication of the sexual passion, he does, he makes it all his own experience
That we have here a revelation of his own personal taste and experiences ht to assume it than we have to assume that all other poets speak froular When John Brown inia, in 1860, the poet says:--
”I was at hand, silent I stood with teeth shut close, I watch'd, I stood very near you, old e and your unheal'd wounds, you mounted the scaffold,”--
very near him he stood in spirit; very near him he stood in the person of others, but not in his own proper person
If we take this poet literally, we shall believe he has been in California and Oregon; that he has set foot in every city on the continent; that he grew up in Virginia; that every Southern State has been by turns his home; that he has been a soldier, a sailor, a miner; that he has lived in Dakota's woods, his ”diet ;” that he has lived on the plains with hunters and ranchmen, etc He lays claim to all these characters, all these experiences, because what others do, what others assume, or suffer, or enjoy, that he appropriates to himself
”I as, hell and despair are upon ain crack the ore dribs, thinned with the ooze of my skin, I fall on the weeds and stones, The riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close, Taunt my dizzy ears, and beat onies are one of arments, I do not ask the wounded person how he feels--I myself become the wounded person, My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe
”I become any presence or truth of humanity here, See myself in prison shaped like another man, And feel the dull unintermitted pain
”For me the keepers of convicts shoulder their carbines and keep watch, It is I let out in the ht
Not a mutineer walks hand-cuffed to the jail, but I am hand-cuffed to hiainst Whitman that he does not celebrate love at all, and very justly He had no purpose to celebrate the sentiment of love
Literature is vastly overloaded with this element already He celebrates fatherhood and ically well-begotten, offspring Of that veiled prurient suggestion which readers so delight in--of ”boso loops of perfumed hair,” as one of our latest poets puts it--there is no hint in his volurace theor dalliance on his part would have been his ruin Love as a sentiment has fairly run riot in literature From Whitman's point of view, it would have been positively immoral for hi it as the forbidden, or with the senti it as a charm Woman with hi
Whitman is seldom or never the poet of a sentiment, at least of the domestic and social sentiments His is more the voice of the eternal, abysmal man