BOOKS OF THE DAY
Poet of Democracy
Walt Whitman. By Hugh I'Anson Fausset. (Cape. 125. 6d.) Tins useful biographical and critical study does not add a great deal to our knowledge of the familiar landmarks of Whitman's .career—his early work as a journalist (and reviewer of his own books), his recognition by Emerson (and the use he made of it), his long illness (and the devotion of Anne Gilchrist). Mr. Fausset tells us all we need to know of the poet's life, and of his social and political background (" Society in these States" said Whitman, "is cankeed, crude, superstitious and rotten "), but he is mainly interested in Whitman as the embodiment of problems of our own time.
In calling his poems Leaves of Grass, Whitman showed at once his poetic insight and its limitations. Grass is stubborn, simple, ubiquitous, and necessary to the higher forms of life, but it is not itself one of the highest forms ; and .Whitman's poems bear a similar relation to the higher forms of imaginative poetry. What is impressive in Whitman—apart from brilliant flashes of descriptive poetry—is the overflow of animal vitality, the careless energy, the warm appreciation of the common man, the unbounded confidence in the future. What is alarming and depressing is a failure to appreciate the highest achievements of mind and spirit. And in this Whitman is important in the sense in which Rousseau and Shelley are important. Turn to the popular journals of our time or talk to the popular journalists : they are Whitman without ,the poetry. They have the same intense democratic faith—what the common man enjoys and is willing to pay for, must be right. They have the same unwillingness to believe that the familiar virtues of the common man are the product of generations of prophetic and uncommon teachers, the same conviction that the future of the world depends not on the solution of intricate and stubborn problems, not on sacrifice and vigorous self-discipline, but on a general spirit of get-togetherness in which the whole world will turn into one glorious Fleet Street bar, and the Japanese and Bulgarians will cease to breed three times as fast as the Australians and Swedes, or if not, what the hell anyway.
Whitman's doctrine, expressed over and over again in his poems, was that what is natural is good, and that the indulgence of natural impulses will lead to happiness, and that, too, is good. (In this view, a taste for the higher branches of mathematics, for Tinto-- retto's painting or for tropical medicine is not considered natural.) Happiness, to Whitman, is all of one quality : he does not pause to consider the awkward problems which arise from the fact that the painful sacrifices made by the lover, the hero, the scholar, or the saint, are themselves "pleasure." In praising the physical element in the love of men and women, he was reacting—and
healthily reacting—against the view that what is physical is al evil. But when he went further, and maintained not merely physical love could sometimes be good, but that it was the only of love, he set his face against the whole course of human evolu which has persistently turned the lower and more "animal" ener to " higher " intellectual, moral and imaginative ends. As . Fausset puts it: "The lust of the animal is sub-human and therefore pure. But in man, unless transformed by love, is corrupt, being at once h in so far as it is directed by a conscious will, and inhuman in denial of imaginative values.'
Mr. Fausset can always be relied upon to produce a car balanced and informed -study. Whitman is not one of those gr poets who simply need to be read, marked, and learned until insight and perception mould our minds and sharpen our s bilities : to accept him in toto is not merely to land oneself bog of incoherencies and contradictions, but also to lose somai of the fine-grain sensibility that is delighted and developed The Tempest, by a Leonardo drawing or a Beethoven qua And yet there is much that is eloquent in Whitman's poetry, much in his outlook that appeals to all who believe in a order that will get the best out of every individual citizen, not merely provide a workable system of government. Mr. Fau is at his happiest in this work of disentangling the threads setting an author in perspective: "Psychologically, the umbilical cord which attached him to mother had never been cut. And in some sense she was for him embodiment of . . . maternal Nature, from whose breast he the nourishment of life. . . . To achieve maturity man needs outgrow his infantile dependence upon Nature. . .
It is possible to carp at some of Mr. Fausset's psycho] terminology, one might wish that he had made more of the c parison of Whitman and Blake, and one might jib at his trick beginning paragraphs with conjunctions' but his Whitman net theless is one of the best of his books, and one that was
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