Chapter IV

It would be wearisome to refer in detail to the numerous estimates of Leaves of Grass which have found print since 1870. The increasing literature about Whitman bespeaks interest, and the kindly tenor of most commentators testifies to the enlarging appreciation of the Good Gray Poet. Within the past decade there have appeared seven biographies of him, all but one of them wholly and frankly lavish in his praise, and that one not unfriendly in criticism. Numerous book chapters have dealt with him in recognition of his genius, and only here and there have there been suggestions of earlier absolute condemnation. Among the biographers have been, in chronological sequence, Richard Maurice Bucke, John Burroughs, John Addington Symonds, Isaac Hull Platt, Geo. R. Carpenter, Bliss Perry, Henry Bryan Binns. Among the notable contributors of book chapters on Whitman may be mentioned from a list of two score or more, Robert Louis Stevenson, in his Studies of Men and Books; A. T. Quiller-Couch, in his Adventures in Criticism; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in his Contemporaries; Havelock Ellis, in The New Spirit; Edward Dowden, in his Studies in Literature; Edmund Gosse, in his Critical Kit-Kats; Hamilton Mabie, in his Backgrounds of Literature; Brander Matthews, in his Aspects of Fiction; Edmund Clarence Stedman, in his Poets of America; George Santayana, in The Poetry of Barbarism; and Algernon Charles Swinburne, in his Studies in Prose and Poetry. These have been mentioned specifically because they average the good and the bad rather than join in a chorus of indiscriminate praise. Indeed, the two last mentioned are distinctly hostile in tone. Swinburne, who in his earlier volume Songs before Sunrise, addressed a long poem, To Walt Whitman in America, fervent in praise,

"Send but a song oversea for us,
Heart of their hearts who are free,
Heart of their singer to be for us
More than our singing can be,"

revoked all his former words of sympathetic admiration and in his later volume, printed in 1894, vehemently fell upon Whitman in this strain:

"There is no subject which may not be treated with success (I
do not say there are no subjects which on other than artistic
grounds it may not be as well to avoid, it may not be better
to pass by) if the poet, by instinct or by training, knows
exactly how to handle it aright, to present it without danger
of just or rational offense. For evidence of this truth we
need look no further than the pastorals of Virgil and
Theocritus. But under the dirty clumsy paws of a harper whose
plectrum is a muck-rake any tune will become a chaos of
discords, though the motive of the tune should be the first
principle of nature--the passion of man for woman or the
passion of woman for man. And the unhealthily demonstrative
and obtrusive animalism of the Whitmaniad is as unnatural, as
incompatible with the wholesome instincts of human passion, as
even the filthy and inhuman asceticism of SS. Macarius and
Simeon Stylites. If anything can justify the serious and
deliberate display of merely physical emotion in literature or
in art, it must be one of two things; intense depth of feeling
expressed with inspired perfection of simplicity, with divine
sublimity of fascination, as by Sappho; or transcendent
supremacy of actual and irresistible beauty in such revelation
of naked nature as was possible to Titian. But Mr. Whitman's
Eve is a drunken apple-woman, indecently sprawling in the
slush and garbage of the gutter amid the rotten refuse of her
overturned fruit-stall: but Mr. Whitman's Venus is a Hottentot
wench under the influence of cantharides and adulterated rum."

Weighing the good and the bad, Robert Louis Stevenson in his essay does not stint admiration nor withhold blame:

"He has chosen a rough, unrhymed, lyrical verse; sometimes
instinct with a fine processional movement; often so rugged
and careless that it can only be described by saying that he
has not taken the trouble to write prose * * * and one thing
is certain, that no one can appreciate Whitman's excellences
until he has grown accustomed to his faults."

Indicating the attitude of his partisans, John Burroughs' summing up is fairly representative:

"Just as ripe, mellowed, storied, ivy-towered, velvet-turfed
England lies back of Tennyson, and is vocal through him; just
as canny, covenanting, conscience-burdened, craggy,
sharp-tongued Scotland lies back of Carlyle; just as thrifty,
well-schooled, well-housed, prudent and moral New England lies
back of her group of poets, and is voiced by them--so America
as a whole, our turbulent democracy, our self-glorification,
our faith in the future, our huge mass-movements, our
continental spirit, our sprawling, sublime and unkempt nature
lie back of Whitman, and are implied by his work."

It is not the purpose of this book to interpret Whitman either as a prophet or a poet, except inferentially as the words of his critics may carry distinct impressions. After all, the justest estimate of Whitman and his book is his own. Whitman's puzzling characteristics are best understood if we realize that Leaves of Grass is an autobiography--and an extraordinarily candid one--of a man whose peculiar temperament found expression in prose-verse. His gentleness, his brusqueness, his egotism, his humility, his grossness, his finer nature, his crudeness, his eloquence, are all here. To him they were the attributes of all mankind.

"I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise;
Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,
Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,
Stuff'd with the stuff that is coarse, and stuff'd with the
stuff that is fine."

In his virile young manhood he announced with gusto: "I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world."

In his serene old age he said: "Over the tree-tops I float thee a song."

And this was his conclusion: "I call to the world to distrust the accounts of my friends, but listen to my enemies as I myself do. I charge you forever reject those who would expound me, for I cannot expound myself."

Whoso challenges Whitman's gift of song may not at any rate deny to him the note of melody. This quality is strong in his titles particularly:

Rise O days from your fathomless deeps.
In cabin'd ships at sea.
Out of the cradle endlessly rocking.
Sands at seventy.
The sobbing of the bells.
Soon shall the winter's foil be here.
Thou mother with thy equal brood.
To the leaven'd soil they trod.
Yon tides with ceaseless swell.
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed.
Sparkles from the wheel.
Brother of all with generous hand.
As a strong bird on pinions free.

For a just estimate of Whitman, as for a clear comprehension of the symbolism contained in Leaves of Grass, a few blades of the latter will not suffice. It must be all, or none. The two poems here given should be taken, therefore, not as representative of the whole, but as types of two widely variant moods:

Of olden time, when it came to pass
That the beautiful god, Jesus, should finish his work on earth,
Then went Judas, and sold the divine youth,
And took pay for his body.

Curst was the deed, even before the sweat of the clutching
hand grew dry;
And darkness frown'd upon the seller of the like of God,
Where, as though earth lifted her breast to throw him from her,
and heaven refus'd him,
He hung in the air, self-slaughter'd.

The cycles, with their long shadows, have stalked silently forward
Since those days--many a pouch enwrapping meanwhile
Its fee, like that paid for the son of Mary.

And still goes one, saying,
"What will ye give me, and I will deliver this man unto you?"
And they make the covenant, and pay the pieces of silver.

Look forth, deliverer,
Look forth, first-born of the dead,
Over the tree-tops of Paradise;
See thyself in yet-continued bonds,
Toilsome and poor, thou bear'st man's form again,
Thou art reviled, scourged, put into prison,
Hunted from the arrogant equality of the rest;
With staves and swords throng the willing servants of authority,
Again they surround thee, mad with devilish spite;
Toward thee stretch the hands of a multitude, like vultures' talons,
The nearest spit in thy face, they smite thee with their palms;
Bruised, bloody, and pinion'd is thy body,
More sorrowful than death is thy soul.

Witness of anguish, brother of slaves,
Not with thy price closed the price of thine image:
And still Iscariot plies his trade.