The Press Saturday, February 12, 1927. Walt Whitman.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 18924, 12 February 1927, Page 14

The Press Saturday, February 12, 1927. Walt Whitman.

The Managing Committee ot tiie new "'English Men of Letters'' series (now under tbe editorship of Mr J. C'. Squire) has shown enterprise and courage in admitting; Walt Whitman to the series; and, when he Mas to bo admitted, it has shown wisdom in entrusting the treatment ot' him to a critic so sound and experienced as Mr John Bailey. Mr Bailey has done his wor!: admirably; and we are inclined to regard hi 3 new book as the sanest snd most discriminating that has yet appeared about Whitman. It will tend to steady opinion on that extraordinary person and his extraordinary productions; and this was badly needed. Whitman has been too long a victim to extremes of opinion and prejudice; rapturous adulation on the one hand, and unreasoning depreciation on the other. Probably this was only to be expected in the case ot so startling an innovator. Time-honoured canons of poetic criticism did not seem to apply to him. And, as a matter, of fact, each extreme of opinion had abundant material on which to rest. For \\ hitman is, perhaps, the most unequal of all poets. His finest is as fine as anything that the nineteenth century has bequeathed to us, and has touched notes never before sounded; while his worst is not poetry at all, but cheap doggerel, verbose rhetoric, and ugly vulgarity. And the significant fact is that he himself never recognised the difference. He had no trained faculty of self-criticism; nor had he any saving grace of humour. Notwithstanding his absorption in a few great books, the Bible, Homer (in a translation), Walter Scott, Shakespeare, Burns, he had never received any systematic literary training. The trail of ignorance is as conspicuous in his work as the fire of inspiration and genius. He had no faculty for self-culture; and the knockabout life which he led would have rendered it impossible in any case. At first he worked on Long Island at his father's trade. Then we find him writing articles for a New York newspaper; then in the editorial chair. But his heart was not in any of these things. When he ought to have been at work, he was gerierally found lying on his back by the sea, or gazing at the crowds in the streets, or on the steam ferries. Yet all the while this incorrigible loafer was nourishing an internal fire, and laying up a store of thoughts and impressions which he was afterwards to pour forth in a deluge on an astonished world. In 1855, his thirty-sixth year, appeared the first edition of " Leaves of Grass."

The noblest period of his life was during the closing years of the Civil War, when he paid his daily visits to the wounded in the Washington hospitals. Here ho first discovered in himself that extraordinary magnetic and exhilarating power of personality, which, even in old age, " and all unconscious!}', 'he exercised on sober, unimaginative visitors. With the wounded soldiers the influence was electric. His coming was like the rising sun bursting out of clouds. With his smile and his talk and his deep, tender sympathy suffering seemed to disappear; and the hospital doctors positively averred that cases which they had given up as hopeless took a new lease of life. As this went on day after day, the drain on his own tense nervous organisation took its toll. He contracted blood-poisoning; was ill for a year or more, and never wholly recovered. In relation to his art the influence of the war on Whitman was profound. It made a man of him. It deepened and broadened his wholo attitude to life. We have but to compare, for example, the Elegy on the Death of Lincoln with some of the feeble'things of the first edition of the " Leaves," to realise the extent of the change. Among other things, the spectacle of a united America created, in its full breadth and grandeur, his conception of the Democratic Ideal; This Ideal was a very different thing from the actual spectacle of American Democracy at work, for which he had nothing but scorn and contempt.

The driving forces of Whitman's nature were mainly four: Love, Joy, Hope, Wonder. With each of these he overflowed. His love was not merely for "humanity" in the abstract, or " Nature" in the abstract, with -which many of us pretentiously content ourselves. It was love for every individual man, woman, or child, however lofty or degraded, with whom he came into contact, or whom he merely saw in the street. Then his joy in life was something superb and colossal. His poems teem with it. Hence so many of his long lines arc ejaculatory, rapturous outbursts of joy in a great series of things—duly and individually catalogued, even to tedium. He rejoiced in every blade of grass, every leaf and flower, the sea-waves lapping on the beach, the myriads of stars. Hope never failed him. His hopes for this life centre chiefly in a new and regenerated America, with himself as its Prophet. As to the Hereafter he has no definite conception. He is fond of the word "death," repeating it caressingly, as a source of consolation; not as an extinction, but as a-portal to something great and grand. Then again, life in its* every aspect was a source of wonderment to him; and the greatest wonder of all was himself. There are two other aspects of Whitman—perhaps the most obvious of all —on which a word must be said. One is his occasional grwsness. In this connexion it must be remembered that to him every force and energy of Nature was as worthy of reverence as every other; and sex was a great energy of Nature. Therefore he claimed the right to speak as plainly of it as of the others. At the roots of his own character there was no trace of the lascivious, the wanton, or the sensual; and there is abundant evidence that bis conversation was absolutely free from these things. There are passages in his poems which wc would wish away; but these, in their stark in leu harmful to

morals than tlie innuendo and suggestivcncss of many a modern drama or novel. Lastly there is his formlessness, his long meandering lines, his disregard o£ rhythm, rhyme, or metre. These latter decorations he considered to be (i feudal " and antiquated shackles on inspiration, not to be imposed on a free-born American. Hi* " Vers Libre " method (now becoming fashionable in France) had its advantages and its disadvantages. It enabled Whitman to say w hal he wanted, and what he could not have said in any other way. But he never realised the loss which his poetry a* art was suffering. He never realised that -nth things as rhythm, rhyme, and fixed measure arc not artificial decorations superimposed iron) without, but are inherent in the poem itself a- a work of art. Uut the greatest damage of al! to Whitman is conspicuous all over his work. Often a line which begins with poetic tire and force, not knowing where to stop, tails o(T into prosaic bntho.-, or a mere uninspired catalogue of things.