preoccupation with art and technique and very little interest in ideas and issues. We were living (as in Emerson's prime) in the trough between two great moral issues.1 If we turn from this consideration of Lanier's shortcomings to the noble pleasure of praising, we find that he has given us two forceful ballads, "The Revenge of Hamish" and "The Song of the Chattahoochee," and lyrics like "Life and Song," "The Stirrup Cup," "Evening Song," "Marsh Song," and "The Ballad of Trees and The Master," which, though some of them are obviously bookish, are quaint, direct and melodious. "How Love Looked for Hell" is a piquant poem; it will have the same admiration that Donne has in English literature. Of the longer pieces, "The Symphony" has immortal stuff in it, though some parts of it, notably the "horn solo," are tainted with sentimentality. The "Psalm of the West" fails as a whole, but it contains the sonnets on Columbus which are masculine, like "Hamish" and better art. Marshes" as Lanier's typical work. of parts of them is unparalleled in as the one beginning There remain the "Hymns of the These are masterpieces; the music American song, and such a passage As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod, is better than Whittier; it has the toughness and spiritual resiliency of William Vaughn Moody. In these hymns all is melody, there is little painting or sculpture, and if the sense is often drowned in a flood of vowels, at its best the movement is bold, free and original. If we try to put all this together, we shall find that Lanier is not what has been claimed for him, one of the great American poets, but rather one of the most interesting of our minor writers. His genius, admirable as it was, was somewhat handicapped by his temperament and his time. He was further handicapped by a theory of technique which crippled his spontaneity, and by manners which are idiosyncrasies and not style. Lanier was, in short, rather a lover of things beautiful than a creator; a brave soldier riding on the quests of a spiritual knighthood, but of a knighthood, like its earthly prototype, which left an inextensive structure behind it, quaint and courtly, but not great, and filled with the memory of the world as it never was. J. 1 For studies in this period see Paul L. Haworth, "Reconstruction and the Union," 1912; John W. Burgess, Reconstruction and the Constitution," 1866-76, 1902; W. A. Dunning, "Reconstruction, Political and Economic," in The American Nation Series; Blaine, "Twenty Years in Congress," 1886, vol. ii; and Rhodes, "History of the United States," vols. vi and vii (1906), especially chaps. xxxix to xliii. WALT WHITMAN (1819-1892) Whitman was born in Huntington, Long Island, in 1819, the second of nine children. He went to public school in Brooklyn and received much of his educational discipline in print shops (1833-1837) and in a year or two of school teaching. From 1839, when he started and carried on a weekly paper in Huntington, until 1855, he worked as compositor at times and at times as newspaper writer. This was mainly in and around New York City, though from 1848 to 1850 he took a leisurely trip through the Middle States, down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans, and back by way of the Great Lakes and Canada. In 1855 appeared "Leaves of Grass," issued and in part actually put into type by Whitman. Subsequent editions under the same title, but each time with an added group of poems, appeared during his lifetime in 1856, 1860, 1865, 1867, 1872, 1876, 1881 (Boston), 1881 (Philadelphia), 1888, and 1891. Whitman went to the front in 1862, when his younger brother, George, was wounded, and continued in service as a hospital nurse until the end of the war. The strain of the work and the result of septic poisoning in 1864 permanently depleted his health. His brief time of office as clerk in the Department of the Interior was ended by his discharge on the ground of being "the author of an indecent book." After suffering a paralytic stroke in 1873 he became an invalid for the rest of his life, living almost in poverty in Camden, New Jersey, until 1881, when the income from his writings became a material help. He died in 1892. 1. Texts. The chief accessible editions of Whitman are: Leaves of GrassComplete Poetical Works, I vol., and Complete Prose Works, I vol., Small, Maynard & Co. Selections from the Prose and Poetry of Whitman, edited by O. L. Triggs, 10 vols. Leaves of Grass, David McKay. No other American poet has been the subject of so much spirited biographical and critical discussion. The more important studies include the following: II. Biography. Walt Whitman, R. M. Bucke; In Re Walt Whitman, edited by literary executors; Walt Whitman, G. R. Carpenter (English Men of Letters); Walt Whitman, Bliss Perry (American Men of Letters); Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person, John Burroughs; The Good Gray Poet, a Vindication, W. D. O'Connor; With Walt Whitman in Camden, Horace Traubel. III. Criticism. Whitman, a Study, John Burroughs; the appropriate chapters in Emerson and Other Essays, J. J. Chapman; Studies in Literature, Edward Dowden; prefatory note to Poems of Walt Whitman, edited by W. M. Rossetti; Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, George Santayana; Poets of America, E. C. Stedman; Familiar Studies of Men and Books, R. L. Stevenson; Studies in Prose and Poetry, A. C. Swinburne. A criticism of Walt Whitman's poetry may as well start with consideration of his verse form, largely because the discussion, like woman suffrage, is bound to come, and may better be disposed of soon in order to make way for more important problems. Some people, like Professor Barrett Wendell, with his comment about "hexameters trying to bubble through sewage," have tried unsuccessfully to dispose of his verse methods by the use of crushing epigram; but the verse, not content with surviving, is exerting an immense influence on contemporary writers. Some critics, like Whitman himself, with his "I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world," have tried with equal unsuccess to substitute a word of defiance for an honest discussion, but the discussion will not be waived. In so brief a statement as this, all that can be done is to mention, as easily subject to proof, a few of the leading facts. The first is that Whitman deliberately adopted his own mode of writing after he had experimented successfully with the conventional forms, and that even in turning to his more individual method, he was not without predecessors or sympathetic contemporaries. Moreover, all along through his career he interspersed passages or whole poems which were as decorously symmetrical as any poem of Longfellow's. His intention and his point of view were comparable to those expounded by Wordsworth in his essay on "Poetic Diction" prefaced to the Lyrical Ballads. What Whitman desired was to free his verses from the traditions of verse-making which were likely to stand between him and his readers. He did not want his poetry to take its place in the ranks, as any uniformed private might do. He wanted it to have the admirable qualities of the athlete or the woodman or the primitive Indian. He therefore gave over the fixed rhythms that occur in ordinary stanzaic forms and the poetic locutions that were associated with drawing-room poetry. He aspired in diction to achieve "a perfectly clear, plate-glassy style," and in the flow of his writings to suggest the rhythms of nature-more especially of the wave-beat on the shore. In attempting this, he became, probably without knowing it, an excellent literary example of reversion to type. He wanted, as one of the people, to write as a people's poet; and he actually did compose in the manner of the old folk poetry with its characteristic employment of parallel structure, sometimes in contrast, sometimes in repetition, sometimes in elaboration. This passage in commentary on himself is quite to the point: I call 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. I charge that there be no theory or school founded out of me. I charge you to leave all free, as I have left all free. A similar basic sentence architecture appears throughout the poetry of the Psalms, as, for example, in this passage from the twenty-sixth: 4. I have not sat with vain persons, neither will I go in with dissemblers. 5. I have hated the congregation of evil-doers; and will not sit with the wicked. 6. I will wash mine hands in innocency: so will I compass thine altar, O Lord: 7. That I may publish with the voice of thanksgiving; and tell of all thy wondrous works. 8. Lord, I have loved the habitation of thy house, and the place where thine honor dwelleth. Again, the same stylistic effect is produced in the early English "Seafarer" from the Exeter Book: I may sing of myself now a song that is true, In chill bands, in the breast my in many a sea; the close watch of the night feet bound by the cold At times, of course, Whitman has carried this parallelism to the point of weariness in his relentlessly long inventory passages. Only the ultra-' enthusiast will defend these. There is fluent regularity in the clatter of a small boy's stick as he runs it along a picket fence, but few call it music. This method of composition achieves a sort of automatic rhythm. But Whitman went far beyond this, and composed not infrequently passages which, taken out of their original contexts, would seem at home in any company. Such, for example, is the quatrain in seven-stressed lines from "The Song of Myself": The wild gander leads the flock through the cool night, Ya-honk, he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation, Furthermore, at his best he was finely sensitive to the adjustment of sound and sense, not only in word values, but also in rhythmic variations. This is well illustrated in a passage from "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," which is reproduced exactly here, but for the purpose of the moment varies from the original in its appearance on the page: I too many and many a time crossed the river of old, Watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls, saw them high in the air floating with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies, Saw how the glistening yellow lit up the parts of their bodies and left the rest in strong shadow, Saw the slow-wheeling circles and the gradual edging toward the south, Saw the reflection of the summer sky in the water, of light round the shape of my head in the sunlit water 8 033333333455+ Look'd toward the lower bay to notice the vessels arriving, etc., etc. 6 The reader with an ear for music will perceive throughout Whitman much more than meets the eye, a melodic beauty which appears most richly in the passages of nature description, and rather less so in the passages of abstract content, but which is never absent long. The open-minded reader of taste will also find many poems or passages which are rough or harsh or monotonous. But only obtuseness or blind prejudice will deny the fine art of Whitman's best verse. Whitman wrote as a conscious and representative democrat. In all people he saw himself and in himself he saw all people. Quite consciously, he limited the world in which he felt any vivid interest to the United States and the American nation. The democracy that he extolled was quite incidentally connected with any form of government. Even on public opinion, although his respect was great, he did not set much value as a positive daily agency for political ends. Naturally he felt little. consequent responsibility as a voting citizen. He pinned his faith to the general promise of social evolution, and believed, quite in accord with Emerson, that if every one were good, everyone would be happy. The future of America was assured because the future of the race was safe, and the future of the race was safe because God willed it so. On this theme Whitman sang with epic fervor about the determinant which is at the back of all faith, the unseen Moral Essence of all the vast Materials of America (age upon age, working in Death the same as in Life) [The powers] that, sometimes known, oftener unknown, really shape and mould the New World. There was little of what is usually regarded as national aspiration in Whitman's feeling for race and national evolution. There is as much difference between his belief in the future of America and the imperial dreams of European nations as there was between the complementary ambitions of himself and Jay Gould. Whitman strove for the spiritual development of the community, while Jay Gould built the railroads; but while Gould's vast projects reached only to the Pacific, Whitman's dreams extended to "beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars." Yet these two were really antithetical American types: the complete captain of industry who, in the name of progress, crushes competitors to the glory of God, and the abstract philanthropist who, in the name of brotherhood, condemns competition by the same formula. If Jay Gould was a harbinger of the 20th century multi-millionaires without their expiatory benevolence, Walt Whitman was, in a measure, a forerunner of several million less prosperous Americans who talk about manifest destiny without either his deep faith or Gould's practical sagacity. In his attitude toward the world of men, Whitman was by nature and experience even more devoid of any international sense than the average man of his day. His mind seemed to entertain no concepts between his tangibly concrete surroundings and the most distantly vague abstractions. There was no one in his social vista between Peter Doyle on a street-car and the "presence . . . whose dwelling is the light of setting suns." What he knew of America he knew down to the ground; of other strata he was grossly ignorant, and of Europe he had no clear imagination. It was a philosophical encyclopedia, a thesaurus of abstractions, but not a place where people lived. Much less was it a community of nations which was for human and tangible and credible reasons fighting its way through the 19th century to the grim climax of the 20th. His view of the world was like a landscape without any middle distance. Here was America, in which the problems of the future were to be solved, while Europe stood yonder in admiring expectancy. In the fullness of time all the |