WALT WHITMAN AND OTHERS

Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21732, 14 March 1936, Page 19

WALT WHITMAN AND OTHERS

In the. late seventies and the early eighties, when I was young, the name of Walt Whitman was jrery familiar to all those who read, and thought, and questioned: to those I mean, who are now called by the rather misleading name of the intelligentsia. Not only had one of his early self-revealing poems, banned in America, achieved a succes d'esclandre and his poetry become a bone of contention to the critics of his day, but he was recognised almost from the first as. "an Influence." In Victorian days we were all hero, worshippers, and there were not a few men whom we thought great, and who, in the jargon of the day, were called "Influences." Portraits of three such men have looked down on my writing table for more than 40 years: Emerson with his eagle beak, and long New England face; Darwin, high domed, snubnosed, a modern Socrates; and Whitman, the good grey poet, wrinkled beyond belief tanned by sun and wind, looking out from his frame with frank, calm eyes, to which nothing human is alien—nothing, however terrific, disturbing. I never look at them without affection, nor speak of them without respect. Lost World That you may know something of what these great ones were to men of my generation, let me sketch as well as I am able the world in which we tried the "wings of our adolescence, and in which they appeared to us as giants. We came for the most part from a comfortable privileged class, who enjoyed a world which seemed expressly made for our delight, and in which we saw no shadow of approaching change. Our roots were in the country; but for our- delectation a few weeks of the "Season" opened to us, each year, the wonderful, fascinating world of London. For our childhood this sufficed, and surely no children were ever more richly endowed. But with adolescence came curiosity, and the spirit of adventure. Bit by bit we put off childish things. The University, the lawcourts, the counting house, cast us remorselessly into the stream of life; and the World of London, no longer our playground, became to us a place of almost mad excitement and unrest. It was a fantastic world as one looks back upon it—a rich tapestry of flamboyant design and bright definite colour, picked out with antic figures, quaint, decided, eccentric; and the Victorians took it all so solemnly. Molehills took on the aspect of mountains. Everyone had a view, an ideal, or a cause for which, if need were, he would stake his salvation. And the fantastic figures were so fascinating to youth. Kipling blew his trumpet, waved his flag, and smote his leg with a swagger cane. Poor Henley with his gigantic head and torso wrung from his tortured brain caustic criticism, and, withal, some stanzas of unforgettable verse, meanwhile assuring us that his head though bloody was unbowed. Stevenson, in velvet coat, half-Bohemian, half Sunday school teacher, entranced us with his novels, and soothed us with a vague philosophy of life which meant just nothing at all. Swinburne, the quaintest figure of an antic world, drowned the speck of his genius in a flood of melodious verse, and came meekly to heel when Watts-Dunton caught him, tidied him, dieted him and put him on the top shelf of respectability for the admiration of duly accredited visitors. Phil May climbed nimbly from the gutter to fame, and then so sadly stumbled down the steep slope of Avernus to an early grave. Ballet | girls and curates joined joyous hands under the aegis of Stewart Headlam. who, as far as might be, guaranteed their morals , and the seemly length of their skirt. Serious actors and actresses wrung from the great Queen the admission that the stage is not necessarily the gate of hell and she granted to Irving, the most perfect Mesphistopheles the stage had seen, the honour of knighthood. Fabians brewed their mild bright socialistic ale. Labourites tasted, with many qualms, the ardent drinks of communism; and Scott Holland, with his Christian Socialists, triumphantly produced a beverage guaranteed, like the temperance drink of the time, to supply all the "pep" and none of the dangers of the headier liquors. Decadents, Philistines, and "Influences" "The shapes arise!" as Whitman sings, and already my canvas is overcrowded. For the most part they trod their little measure in the sunlight of Victorian optimism; but there were shadows. What of the decadents? Oscar Wilde elaborated his pose of perversity and held it till remorse caught him by the heel, and brought him at last to a pauper's death, to repentance, and to reconciliation with the Roman Catholic Church. Poor Aubre"y Beardsley, so clever, so attractive, so young, died untimely yet repentant', leaving for his friends the tragic cry, "Burn all copies of my Lysistrata, and all my bawdy drawings." Many another clever youth cut short by hjs own hand the life which had brought him neither fame nor happiness. In the end Francis Thompson, decadent against his will,

Victorian Influences

(BPZCUU.T TOUrntH K>B THS PBKSS.) [By G. M. I». LESTEE.I

summed up the tragedy of these lost lives in that most poignant of sad poems, "The Hound of Heaven." Meanwhile the world went on. The Philistines, whom Matthew Arnold taught us to despise, spent their time in hunting, and shooting, and fishing, and in some other pastimes which were not for publication. Generals in little frontier wars earned their reward of medals and ribbons; and all the countless thousands who make England held their steady way from the cradle to the grave. Above the heads of the crowd tower the "Influences," the Victorian heroes. Carlyle begat a generation of drill sergeants, whose lineal descendants Hitler, Lenin, and Mussolini, now rule nations. Gladstone with his welloiled tongue gave the first impulse to the emotional diplomacy which is yielding its sad harvest in the League of Nations. Huxley's clear bugle still echoes in the ears of those who, in the paths of science, seek after truth. For me and many others Emerson lifted our heads above the clouds that we might not faint by the way; Darwin held the lamp of reason to our feet that we should not stumble; and good Walt Whitman blew the world clean of humbug, privilege, convention, and cant; , The Wind from the West But you may say these two, Emerson and Whitman, were Americans. Why cross the broad Atlantic for Emerson? Why seek Whitman so far afield? Clever, commonplace Herbert Spencer called Emerson a mystagogue, whose words were but as the rumbling of distant thunder. Were there no mystagogues in England? Many of them, certainly; but none of them Emersons. Walt Whitman preached comradeship and democracy. Victorian England was full of good fellowship and the word democracy was on everybody's lips; yet it was to Whitman that we listened, because he was Whitman. It was, I think, the fact that both Emerson and Whitman were Americans that laid the foundation of their influence. They came from the land of far distances and wide horizons, from the quiet glades and sun-spangled meadows of New England; a land, where, or so we thought, the artificialities and conventions of Victorian England were of no more account than the weeds of the field. But that was not all; they had for us a message. I first heard of Emerson in the days of my eager questing youth. I* read his works coiled up in the bows of a coasting steamer, whose captain was my friend, flitting hither and thither as trade dictated, through the long days of a most memorable summer. He opened for me vistas bright and shining, which still lead me onward towards the unknown. With all his aloofness he was so friendly. He had that kindliness, tolerant and detached, which -seems the birthright of those fair souls to whom the outer world is nothing and the Inner Light is all. Not long afterwards, by a happy chance, 'Walt Whitman met me in the way, so warm, so colourful, so humorous, that I deemed him a true brother of all the world. It is difficult to recall his charm and his novelty in an age which claims as of right so much that he stood for. He broke up conventions not # as men do now, in rebellion against them, but put them aside with a tolerant smile. He had no use for them, but still they were to him part of the pattern and colour of life. His comradeship was not the hearty good fellowship of the Victorians, but the unconscious heartbrotherhood of the mining camp, ttie lumber gang, the fishing boat, The whole world animate and inanimate sang to him, and found an echo in his heart. In a word, he was the authentic, archetypal vagabond, shrewd, detached, warmhearted, humorous. And was he a poet? For decades not a few, this question has been debated; its solution is beyond my competence. Whitman was like a certain Oxford youth who, in virtue of some tiny poetic spark within him, threw into a dull pedantic prize poem the priceless couplet which unforgettably tells of "the rose red city half as old as time." You may read page after page of the tortured English which Whitman put forth as verse, and condemn him as a long-winded, prosy egotist, but now and again you will light upon a passage, perfect in rhythm, feeling, and expression, which establishes his rank among the great poets of his time. I must linger no longer over my incomplete but affectionate memory of this kindly man. I will end my tale with his beautiful stately farewell to his mother: As at thy portals also death. Entering thy sovereign,' dim, illimitable grounds, To memories of my mother, to the divine blending, maternity, To her, buried and gone, yet buried not, gone not from me, (I see again the calm benignant face fresh and beautiful still, I sit by the form in the coffin, I kiss and kiss convulsively again the sweet old lips, the cheeks, the closed eyes in the coffin.) To her, the ideal woman, practical, spiritual, of all of earth, life, love, to me the best, I grave a monumental line, before I go, amid these songs, And set a tombstone here.