“I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning,How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me,And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet.“Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,And that a kelson of the creation is love.”
“I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning,How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me,And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet.“Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,And that a kelson of the creation is love.”
“I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning,How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me,And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet.
“I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,
And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet.
“Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,And that a kelson of the creation is love.”
“Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love.”
This “love” of Whitman’s is a very personal matter; of an abstract Man, asolidaireHumanity, he never speaks; it does not appear ever to have occurred to him that so extraordinary a conception can be formulated; his relations to men generally spring out of his relations to particular men. He has touched and embraced his fellows’ flesh; he has felt throughout his being the mysterious reverberations of the contact:
“There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact and odour of them, that pleases the soul well,All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.”
“There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact and odour of them, that pleases the soul well,All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.”
“There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact and odour of them, that pleases the soul well,All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.”
“There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact and odour of them, that pleases the soul well,
All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.”
This personal and intimate fact is the centre from which the whole of Whitman’s morality radiates. Of an abstract Humanity, it is true, he has never thought; he has no vision of Nature as a spiritual Presence; God is to him a word only, without vitality; to Art he is mostly indifferent; yet there remains this great moral kernel, springing from the sexual impulse, taking practical root in a singularly rich and vivid emotional nature, and bearing within it the promise of a city of lovers and friends.
This moral element is one of the central features in Whitman’s attitude towards sex and the body generally. For the lover there is nothing in the loved one’s body impure or unclean; a breath of passion has passed over it, and all things are sweet. For most of us this influence spreads no farther; for the man of strong moral instinct it covers all human things in infinitely widening circles; his heart goes out to every creature that shares the loved one’s delicious humanity; henceforth there is nothing human that he cannot touch with reverence and love. “Leaves of Grass” is penetrated by this moral element. How curiously far this attitude is from the old Christian way we realize when we turn to those days in which Christianity was at its height, and see how Saint Bernard with his mild andardent gaze looked out into the world of Nature and saw men as “stinking spawn, sacks of dung, the food of worms.”
But there is another element in Whitman’s attitude—the artistic. It shows itself in a twofold manner. Whitman came of a vigorous Dutch stock; these Van Velsors from Holland have fully as large a part in him as anything his English ancestry gave him, and his Dutch race shows itself chiefly in his artistic manner. The supreme achievement in art of the Dutch is their seventeenth century painting. What marked those Dutch artists was the ineradicable conviction that every action, social or physiological, of the average man, woman, child, around them might be, with love and absolute faithfulness, phlegmatically set forth. In their heroic earthliness they could at no point be repulsed; colour and light may aureole their work, but the most commonplace things of Nature shall have the largest nimbus. That is the temper of Dutch art throughout; no other art in the world has the same characteristics. In the art of Whitman alone do we meet with it again, impatient indeed and broken up into fragments, pierced through with shafts of light from other sources, but still constant and unmistakable. The other artistic element in Whitman’s attitude is modern; it is almost the only artistic element by which, unconsciously perhaps, he allies himself to moderntraditions in art instead of breaking through them by his own volcanic energy—a curious research for sexual imagery in Nature, imagery often tinged by bizarre and mystical colour. Rossetti occasionally uses sexual imagery with rare felicity, as in “Nuptial Sleep”:
“And as the last slow sudden drops are shedFrom sparkling eaves when all the storm has fled,So singly flagged the pulses of each heart.”
“And as the last slow sudden drops are shedFrom sparkling eaves when all the storm has fled,So singly flagged the pulses of each heart.”
“And as the last slow sudden drops are shedFrom sparkling eaves when all the storm has fled,So singly flagged the pulses of each heart.”
“And as the last slow sudden drops are shed
From sparkling eaves when all the storm has fled,
So singly flagged the pulses of each heart.”
With still greater beauty and audacity Whitman, in “I sing the body electric,” celebrates the last abandonment of love:
“Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn,Undulating into the willing and yielding day,Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-fleshed day.”
“Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn,Undulating into the willing and yielding day,Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-fleshed day.”
“Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn,Undulating into the willing and yielding day,Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-fleshed day.”
“Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn,
Undulating into the willing and yielding day,
Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-fleshed day.”
Or, again, in the marvellously keen “Faces”—so realistic and so imaginative—when the “lily’s face” speaks out her longing to be filled with albescent honey. This man has certainly felt the truth of that deep saying of Thoreau’s, that for him to whom sex is impure there are no flowers in Nature. He cannot help speaking of man’s or woman’s life in terms of Nature’s life, of Nature’s life in terms of man’s; he mingles them together with an admirably balanced rhythm, as in “Spontaneous Me.” All the functions of man’s or woman’s life are sweet to him becausethey bear about them a savour of the things that are sweet to him anywhere in the world,
“Of the smell of apples and lemons, of the pairing of birds,Of the wet of woods, of the lapping of waves.”
“Of the smell of apples and lemons, of the pairing of birds,Of the wet of woods, of the lapping of waves.”
“Of the smell of apples and lemons, of the pairing of birds,Of the wet of woods, of the lapping of waves.”
“Of the smell of apples and lemons, of the pairing of birds,
Of the wet of woods, of the lapping of waves.”
Sometimes when he is on this track he seems to lose himself in mystic obscurity; and the words in which he records his impressions are mere patches of morbid colour.
There is a third element in Whitman’s attitude. It is clear that he had from the outset what may be vaguely called a scientific purpose in that frank grasp of the body, which has a significance to be measured by the fierce opposition it aroused, and by the tenacity with which, in the latest volume of his old age, “November Boughs,” he still insists that the principle of those lines so gives breath to the whole scheme that the bulk of the pieces might as well have been left unwritten were those lines omitted. He has himself admirably set this forth in “A Memorandum at a Venture” in “Specimen Days and Collect.” In religion and politics we have, after a great struggle, gained the priceless possibility of liberty and sincerity. But the region of sex is still, like our moral and social life generally, to a large extent unreclaimed; there still exist barbarous traditions which mediæval Christianity has helped to perpetuate, so that the words of Plinyregarding the contaminating touch of a woman, who has always been regarded as in a peculiar manner the symbol of sex—“Nihil facile reperiabatur mulierum profluvio magis monstrificum”—are not even yet meaningless. Why should the sweetening breath of science be guarded from this spot? Why should not “freedom and faith and earnestness” be introduced here? Our attitude towards this part of life affects profoundly our attitude towards life altogether. To realize this, read Swift’s “Strephon and Chloe,” which enshrines, vividly and unshrinkingly, in a classic form, a certain emotional way of approaching the body. It narrates the very trivial experiences of a man and woman on their bridal night. The incidents are nothing; they are perfectly innocent; the interesting fact about them is the general attitude which they enfold. The unquestioning faith of the man is that in setting down the simple daily facts of human life he has drowned the possibilities of love in filth. And Swift here represents, in an unflinchingly logical fashion, the opinions, more or less realized, more or less disguised, of most people even to-day. Cannot these facts of our physical nature be otherwise set down? Why may we not “keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart?” That is, in effect, the question which, in “A Memorandum at a Venture,” Whitman tells us that he undertook to answer. This statement of it was probably an afterthought; else he would have carried out his attempt more thoroughly and more uncompromisingly.
For I doubt if even Whitman has fully realized the beauty and purity of organic life; the scientific element in him was less strong than the moral, or even the artistic. While his genial poetic manner of grasping things is of prime importance, the new conceptions of purity are founded on a scientific basis which must be deeply understood. Swift’s morbid and exaggerated spiritualism, a legacy of mediævalism—and the ordinary “common-sense” view is but the unconscious shadow of mediæval spiritualism—is really founded on ignorance, in other words, on the traditional religious conceptions of an antique but still surviving barbarism.
From our modern standpoint of science, opening its eyes anew, the wonderful cycles of normal life are for ever clean and pure, the loathsomeness, if indeed anywhere, lies in the conceptions of hypertrophied and hyperæsthetic brains. Some who have striven to find a vital natural meaning in the central sacrament of Christianity have thought that the Last Supper was an attempt to reveal the divine mystery of food, to consecrate the loveliness of the mere daily bread and wine which becomes the life of man. Such sacraments of Nature are everywhere subtly woven into thetexture of men’s bodies. All loveliness of the body is the outward sign of some vital use.
Doubtless these relationships have been sometimes perceived and their meaning realized by a sort of mystical intuition, but it is only of recent years that science has furnished them with a rational basis. The chief and central function of life—the omnipresent process of sex, ever wonderful, ever lovely, as it is woven into the whole texture of our man’s or woman’s body—is the pattern of all the process of our life. At whatever point touched, the reverberation, multiplexly charged with uses, meanings, and emotional associations of infinite charm, to the sensitive individual more or less conscious, spreads throughout the entire organism. We can no longer intrude our crude distinctions of high and low. We cannot now step in and say that this link in the chain is eternally ugly and that is eternally beautiful. For irrational disgust, the varying outcome of individual idiosyncrasy, there is doubtless still room; it is incalculable, and cannot be reached. But that rational disgust which was once held to be common property has received from science its death-blow. In the growth of the sense of purity, which Whitman, not alone, has annunciated, lies one of our chief hopes for morals, as well as for art.
Behind “Leaves of Grass” stands the personality of the man Walt Whitman; that is the charm of the book and its power. It is, in his own words, the record of aPerson. A man has here sought to give a fresh and frank representation of his nature—physical, intellectual, moral, æsthetic—as he received it, and as it grew in the great field of the world. Sometimes there is an element in this record which, while perhaps very American, reminds one of the great Frenchman who shouted so lustily through his huge brass trumpet, seated on the apex of the universe in the Avenue d’Eylau. The noble lines to “You felons on trial in Courts” accompany “To him that was crucified.” Such rhetorical flourishes do not impair the value of this revelation. The self-revelation of a human personality is the one supremely precious and enduring thing. All art is the search for it. The strongest and most successful of religions were avowedly founded on personalities, more or less dimly seen. The intimate and candid record of personality alone gives quickening energy to books. Herein is the might of “Leaves of Grass.”
In our overstrained civilization the tendency in literature—and in life as it acts on literatureand is again reacted on by it—is, on the one hand, towards an artificial mode of presentment, that is, a divorce between the actual and the alleged, a divorce which, in the language of satire, is often called hypocrisy. On the other hand, the tendency is towards a singleness of aim and ideal indeed, but a thin, narrow, super-refined ideal, at the same time rather hysterical and rather prim. In youth we cannot see through these Tartuffes andPrécieuses; when we become grown men and women we feel a great thirst for Nature, for reality in literature, and we slake it at such fountains as this of “Leaves of Grass.” Like Antæus of old we bow down to touch the earth, to come in contact with the great primal energies of Nature, and to grow strong. We realize that the structure of the world is indeed built most gloriously on the immense pillars of Hunger and Love, and we will not seek to deny or to attenuate its foundations. Presenting a truth so abstract in fresh and living concrete language, this man, as an Adam in a new Paradise, which is the very world itself, walks again upon the earth, sometimes with calm complaisance, sometimes “deliriating” wildly:
“Behold me where I pass, hear my voice, approach,Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass,Be not afraid of my body.”
“Behold me where I pass, hear my voice, approach,Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass,Be not afraid of my body.”
“Behold me where I pass, hear my voice, approach,Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass,Be not afraid of my body.”
“Behold me where I pass, hear my voice, approach,
Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass,
Be not afraid of my body.”
He has tossed “a new gladness and roughness” among men and women. He has opened a fresh channel of Nature’s force into human life—the largest since Wordsworth, and more fit for human use—“the amplitude of the earth, and the coarseness and sexuality of the earth, and the great charity of the earth, and the equilibrium also.” And in his vigorous masculine love, asserting his own personality he has asserted that of all—“By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.” Charging himself in every place with contentment and triumph, he embraces all men, as St. Francis in his sweet, humble, Christian way also embraced them, in the spirit of audacity, and rankness, and pride. So that all he has written is summed up in one ejaculation: “How vast, how eligible, how joyful, how real is a human being, himself or herself!”