Escape, and Other Essays by Arthur Christopher Benson (ebook reader online TXT) 📕

as if it were sacred, but as if it were unmentionable; so that the very fact of the child's own origin would seem to be an essentially shameful thing.

The Greeks, it is true, had an instinct for the thought of the vital interdependence of body and soul; but they thought too much of the glowing manifestation of the health and beauty of youth, and viewed the decay and deformity of the human frame too much as a disgrace and an abasement. But here again comes in the largeness of Whitman's presentment, that whatever disasters befall the body, whether through drudgery or battle, disease or sin, they are all parts of a rich and large experience, not necessarily interrupting the co-operation of mind and matter. This is the strongest proof of Whitman's faith in the essential brotherhood of man, that such horrors and wretchednesses do not seem to him to interrupt the design, or to destroy the possibility of a human sympathy which is instinctive rather than a matter of devout effort. Whitman is here on the side of the very greatest and finest human spirits, in that he is shocked and appalled by nothing. He does not call it the best of worlds, but it is the only world that he knows; and the glowing interest, the passionate emotion, the vital rush and current of it, prove beyond all doubt that we are in touch with something very splendid and magnificent indeed, and that no misdeed or disaster forfeits our share in the inheritance. He is utterly at variance with the hideous Calvinistic theory, that God sent some of His creatures into the world for their pain and ruin. Whatever happens to your body or your soul, says Whitman, it is worth your while to live and to have lived. He adopts no facile system of compensations and offsets. He rather protests with all his might that, however broken your body or fatuous your mind, it is a good thing for you to have taken a hand in the affair; and that the essence of the whole situation has not been your success, your dignity, your comfortable obliteration of half your faculties, or on the other hand your failure, your vileness, or your despair, but that just at the time and place at which the phenomenon called yourself took place, that intricate creature, with its bodily needs and desires, its joys of the senses, its outlook on the strange world, took shape and made you exactly what you are, and nothing else. As he says in one of his finest apologues:

Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided,
nothing is scanted.

Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui,
what you are picks its way.

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Then too Walt Whitman claims to be the poet, not of the past or even only of the present, but the singer of the future. He says in The Backward Glance, which I have already quoted, and which must be carefully read by anyone who wishes to understand his work--at least in so far as he understood it himself,--"Isolated advantages in any rank or grace or fortune--the direct or indirect threads of all the poetry of the past--are in my opinion distasteful to the republican genius. . . . Established poems, I know, have the very great advantage of chanting the already performed, so full of glories, reminiscences dear to the minds of men." And he says too that, "The educated world seems to have been growing more and more ennuied for ages, leaving to our time the inheritance of it all." And he further says: "The ranges of heroism and loftiness with which Greek and feudal poets endow'd their godlike or lordly born characters, I was to endow the democratic averages of America. I was to show that we, here and to-day, are eligible to the grandest and the best--more eligible now than any times of old were."

This is a lofty claim, boldly advanced and maintained; and here I am on uncertain ground, because I do not suppose that I can realise what the democratic spirit of America really is. Granted, however, that it is a free and a noble spirit, I feel a doubt as to whether it is possible for any nation, at any time in the world's history, really to take a new start. The American nation is not a new nation; it is in a sense a very old' nation. It has had a perfectly new and magnificent field for its energies, and it has made a sweep of the old conventions; but it cannot get rid of its inheritance of temperament; and I think that, so far as I can judge, it is too anxious to emphasize its sense of revolt, its consciousness of newness of life. Whitman himself would not be so anxious to declare the ennui of the old, if he did not feel himself in a way trammelled by it. The moment that a case is stated with any vehemence, that moment it is certain that the speaker has antagonists in his eye. There is a story of Professor Blackie at Edinburgh making a tirade against the stuffiness of the old English universities to Jowett, the incisive Master of Balliol. At the end, he said generously, "I hope you people at Oxford do not think that we are your enemies up here?" "No," said Jowett drily; "to tell the truth, we don't think about you at all!" The man who is really making a new beginning, serenely confident in his strength, does not, as Professor Blackie did, concern himself with his predecessors at all. Perhaps, indeed, the democratic spirit of America may be quietly glorying in its strength, and may be merely waiting till it suits it to speak. But I do not think it can be said to have found full expression. It seems to me--I may well be wrong--that in matters of culture, the American is far more seriously bent on knowing what has been done in the past even than the Englishman. The Englishman takes the past for granted; he is probably more deeply and instinctively penetrated with its traditions than he knows; but ever since the Romantic movement began in England, about a century ago, the general tendency is anarchical and anti-classical. Writers like Wordsworth, Browning, Carlyle, Ruskin, had very little deference about them. They did not even trouble to assert their independence; they said what they thought, and as they thought it. But the spirit of American literature does not on the whole appear to me to be a democratic spirit. It has not, except in the case of Walt Whitman himself, shown any strong tendency to invent new forms or to ventilate new ideas. It has not broken out into crude, fresh, immature experiments. It has rather worked as the Romans did, who anxiously adopted and imitated Greek models, admiring the form but not comprehending the spirit. A revolt in literary art, such as the Romantic movement in England, has no time to concern itself with the old forms and traditions. Writers like Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Walter Scott, had far too much to say for themselves to care how the old classical schools had worked. They used the past as a quarry, not as a model. But the famous American writers have not originated new forms, or invented a different use of language; they have widened and freshened traditions, they have not thrown them overboard. Neither, if I interpret facts rightly, have the Americans developed a new kind of aristocracy. Whitman's talk of democratic averages is beside the point. The process of levelling up and levelling down only produces low standards. What the world needs, whether in England or America, is a new sort of aristocracy--simple, disinterested, bold, sympathetic, enthusiastic men, of clear vision and free thought. And what the democracy needs is not an envious dislike of all prominence and greatness, but an eye for all greatness, and an admiration for all courage and largeness of soul. England suspects, perhaps erroneously, that America has founded an aristocracy of wealth and influence and physical prowess, rather than an aristocracy of simplicity and fearlessness. One believes that the competitive, the prize-winning spirit, is even more dominant in America than in England. No one doubts the fierce energy and the aplomb of America; but can it be said that IDEAS, the existence of which is the ultimate test of national vigour, are really more prevalent in America than in England? It all depends, of course, upon whether one values the Greek or the Roman ideal more highly, the interest, that is, of life, or the desire to rule and prosper. If the aim of civilisation is orderliness, then the Roman aim is the better; but if the aim is spiritual animation, then the Greeks are the winners. Yet in the last century, England has been more fruitful in ideas than America, although America is incomparably more interested in education than England is.

But it is hard to balance these things. What remains is the fact that Walt Whitman has drawn a fine democratic ideal. His democrat is essentially a worker, with every sort of vigorous impulse, living life in an ecstasy of health and comradeship, careless of money and influence and position, content to live a simple life, finding beauty, and hope, and love, and labour, enough, in the spirit of the great dictum of William Morris, that the reward of labour is life--not success or power or wealth, but the sense of living fully and freely.

I do not claim that this spirit exists in England yet; but does it exist in America? What, in fact, constitutes the inspiration of the average American; what does he expect to find in life, and to make of life? Whitman has no doubt at all. But in what other American writer does this ideal find expression?


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It remains to say a few words about the artistic methods of Walt Whitman. He himself claims no artistic standard whatever. He says that he wishes to create an atmosphere; and that his one aim has been suggestiveness. "I round and finish little, if anything; and could not consistently with my scheme. The reader will always have his or her part to do, just as much as I have had mine."

He says that his purpose has been "not to carry out in the approved style some choice plot of fortune or misfortune, or fancy, or fine thoughts, or incidents or courtesies--all of which has been done overwhelmingly and well, probably never to be excelled . . . but to conform with and build on the concrete realities and theories of the universe furnished by science, and henceforth the only irrefragable basis for anything, verse included--to root both influences in the emotional and imaginative action of the modern time, and dominate all that precedes or opposes them." He adds, "No one will get at my verses who insists upon viewing them as a literary performance, or attempt at such performance, or as aiming mainly toward art or aestheticism."

It is, of course, quite true that no writer is bound by traditions of art, and there is no one who need consider how the thing has been done before, or follow a prescribed code. But for all that, art is not a thing of rules made and enforced by critics. All that critics can do is to determine what the laws of art are; because art has laws underlying it which are as certain as the laws of gravity, even if they are not known. The more permanent art is, the more it conforms to these laws; because the fact is that there is a vital impulse in the human mind towards