BOOKS.
ANNE GILCHRIST"
THIS is the story of a very amiable woman's life, but it with hardly convince those who do not already admire Mrs.. Gilchrist's heroes, that her hero-worship was always wise and discriminating. She became, in turn, very deeply devoted to, the genius of Carlyle, of Blake, and of Walt Whitman, and in conjunction with her husband, who died before his Life of Blake was completed, ebe did a good deal to spread abroad the repu- tation of Blake's singularly powerful and mystic conception of Art. The Life of Blake which Mr. Gilchrist wrote, and which Mrs. Gilchrist, with the help of the brothers Rossetti, com- pleted and brought out, will hold its own as a very adequate picture of the genius of a man whose conceptions no one pretends to follow in their eccentric flights of symbolic and tran- scendental intuition, but whom nevertheless the least skilful can discern to have been a man of highly original power, both in the region of art and in that of poetry. Mr. Gilchrist found in his wife a curious fullness of sympathy and of capacity to enter into ideas which in Blake's case were saved from being simply bewildering by the definiteness of form and colour. And this sympathetic insight made her a most fitting literary executrix. Indeed, no one who reads this Life will refuse his cordial respect to the woman who,- after she had gained a certain reputation by so ably carrying out her husband's intention in relation to his unfinished work,. yet proceeded to give herself up simply to the education of her children, and did not turn to literature again till after her dutiful care of them had been fully rewarded. Perhaps it would have been just as well if, towards the latter part of her life, she had not taken up with a new hero, and undertaken to preach to the English world the evangel of Walt Whitman. But in that case it is not likely that this biography would have been written. Its significance appears to be almost entirely bound up with her appreciation of the American rhapsodist,. and with the efforts she made,—with immense applause from the late Mr. D. G. Rossetti and his brother (who, indeed, adds a prefatory notice to this volume),—to convert the English, world to Walt Whitman's transcendent, or perhaps we should say transcendental, merits. Without the essays on Whitman and the pious pilgrimage to the New World which Mrs. Gilchrist seems• to have undertaken principally to become personally acquainted with him, there would have been very little in this volume, except a few letters from Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle, to give to the public. Mrs. Gilchrist's own letters are not remarkable. They are generally simple and unaffected, and in their efforts to fathom the depths of Blake's or Walt Whitman's thoughts are very painstaking, though not especially illuminating. And, there- fore, but for the bold enterprise in which, towards the end of her career, she engaged, of announcing to the world the new Avatar of the democratic era, it is not probable that " Anne Gilchrist," as Mr. Gilchrist uniformly, though somewhat oddly, insists on • Anse Gilchrist her Lift and Writings. Edited by Herbert Harlakenden Gilchrist. With a Prefatory Notice by William Michael Rossetti, London : T. Fisher Haydn.
naming his mother, would have had a literary reputation of her own at all. What she did for Blake's genius was done as her husband's literary representative, and it was only when it was found that Walt Whitman needed the cordial support of some good woman, not herself committed to the proscription of all the moral conventions of feminine delicacy, that Mrs. Gilchrist's devotion to Walt Whitman became a factor of some importance in the estimation of the literary world.
Though no one of fair mind can ascribe to Mrs. Gilchrist any but the purest and most single-minded enthusiasm in her defence of Walt Whitman, we cannot say that this biography impresses us at all deeply with her power of literary or moral insight. She was, so far as we can judge, a thoroughly good woman, with an almost morbid enthusiasm of her own for a system of intellectual and moral pantheism, which, however, she had no particular gift for recommending to the rest of the world. Had not her husband been taken from her so early, it is likely enough that she would never have embarked in any literary effort of her own, and we do not think that the world would have lost anything by her silence. But the loneliness of her position, and the bias towards a semi. sceptical, semi-poetical transcendentalism which the study of Blake had inspired, combined to tempt her to dabble in a literary region for which, as it seems to us at least, she was by no means particularly well fitted. From the moment when Mr. W. M. Rossetti writes to her of Walt Whitman as "one of the greatest sons of earth, a few steps below Shakespeare on the throne of immortality," to the time of her death, this Life becomes little more than a chronicle of her belief in the new evangel which she deliberately compares to the Christian Gospel, and regards as its complement and fulfilment. But then, of course, her view of the Christian Gospel was not ours. It was a great question to Mrs. Gilchrist whether it was most fitting to speak of Christ as a great poet and the predecessor of Whitman, or to speak of Whitman as a great religions teacher, the successor of Christ. We confess that to us all this part of the book is very painful, and rather inflated. None the less it is certain that Mrs. Gilchrist was not consciously in any degree exag- gerating either what she thought or what she felt in using this language. Her judgments seem rather to show how little she felt the depth of the Christian Gospel, than how deeply she understood Walt Whitman's.
It is clear that Mrs. Gilchrist began from the scientific point of view by effacing altogether, as Carlyle had taught her to efface, the distinction between the natural and the supernatural. The natural, she held, is the supernatural. Then she went on to reject the idea of moral evil or sin as a reality. The following passage explains one of the chief grounds of her admiration for Walt Whitman :—
" Above all is every thought and feeling in these poems touched by the light of the great revolutionary truth that man, unfolded through -vast stretches of time out of lowly antecedents, is a rising, not a fallen creature; emerging slowly from purely animal life ; as slowly as the strata are piled and the ocean beds hollowed ; whole races still barely emerged, countless individuals in the foremost races barely emerged : the wolf, the snake, the hog' yet lingering in the best ; but new ideals achieved, and others come in sight, so that what once seemed et is fit no longer, is adhered to uneasily and with shame ; the con- flicts and antagonisms between what we call good and evil, at once the sign and the means of emergence, and needing to account for them no supposed primeval disaster, no outside power thwarting and marring the Divine handiwork, the perfect fitness to its time and place of all that has proceeded from the Great Source. In a word that Evil is relative ; is that which the slowly developing reason and -conscience bid us leave behind. The prowess of the lion, the subtlety of the fox, are cruelty and duplicity in man."
That creed, of course, ignores altogether the sense of guilt -and sin and shame, and knocks the bottom out of the distinc- tion between the moral misfortunes to which men are born, and the moral evil which they commit. Indeed, it transforms the whole moral scenery of the world into a process of evolution, and obliges us to regard the drama of conscience as an illusion got up to betray as into a detestation of our own worst actions which is neither just nor rational. When this belief was well established, it was not much to be wondered at that Mrs. Gilchrist should have pared down Christianity into a preparation for a democratic form of pantheism, instead of measuring the shortcomings of the modern democratic pantheism by its failure to develop the central idea of Christianity. Let us hear what she says of Walt Whitman :— " What I, in my heart, believe of Whitman is, that be takes up the thread where Christ left it ; that he inaugurates, in his own person, anew phase of religion ; a religion which casts out utterly the abject. nese of fear; sees the " nimbus round every head," knowing that evil, like its prototype darkness, is not a thing, an existence at all, but the absence of a thing—of light ; of balanced and proportionate develop- ment—activities not having found their right outlet—or not yet subordinated by the higher ones that will by-and-by unfold—im- pulses that have not yet opened their eyes to the beautiful daylight provided for them, but work in a kind of darkness as before birth, the soul remaining so much longer an embryo than the body—how often even when the hair is grey ! So then is laid to rest that phantom of a Devil—of some "power or being contending against God." For you see what is called Christianity is not of Christ's making at all, but is the idea of Him, of His teaching, life and death, passed to on through the darkening medium of infinitely less developed, lees great and beautiful natures than His own—minds which clung with passionate tenacity to the traditions of their past—to the notions of a vindictive angry God to be propitiated by sacrifices and atone- ments ; which seem to belong as inevitably to the early life of races as the belief in and dread of something cruel and terrible, ghost or demon lurking in the dark, does to childhood. But now I think what the keen, strong, honest intellect of the Vol- taires and Humes could not accomplish : nor the eloquent scorn, the passionate indignation of beautiful divine Shelley—I mean the demolition of the childish and outgrown absurdities, the moral basenesses in the idea of God interwoven (shaped on the pattern of an Eastern despot) with the memories of Christ's beautiful life and teaching and death into a system embodying the intellectual and moral status of that time and nation by Matthew, Luke, and Paul ; and that demolition will happen now gently and quickly—now that there is once more a kindred human soul to Christ's on the earth—one filled with the earns radiant glowing consciousness (it is a consciousness, not a belief) of the divine and immortal nature of the human soul—the same fearless, trusting, loving attitude towards God, as of a son, the same actual close embracing brothers love of every human creature—all taking shape in what new and rich developments through the lips of this Poet The earth has not journeyed eighteen hundred times round the min for nothing, sines then ! Now Christianity will go—and Christ he better understood and loved than He has been since those early times when His great personal influence yet vibrated in the world, and the darkness of his expounders had not begun to work adversely to the growing lights of succeeding times. Thus, whoever takes up Walt Whitman's book as a student of Poetry alone, will not rightly understand it many and many a line and passage which will appear to him common, insignificant as a drop of water—has like that drop of water latent within it, power enough to furnish forth a flash of lightning and a peal of thunder if only it be taken up where the right conditions for liberating that force are present. I think he will one day win as ardent adhesion from men of science and philosophers, as from lovers of art, and they need him most of all: "
In a writer who adopted with all her heart this view of moral evil as the mere immaturity of good, we do not much wonder that Whitman's creed should have taken root. What we do wonder at is the literary enthusiasm with which Walt Whit- man's embodiment of that creed, was received by the Rossetti clique, and by Mrs. Gilchrist as its chief feminine exponent. Walt Whitman appears to the present writer at least, to be always stalking upon stilts, always trying to stretch farther into the universe than finite and mortal man can stretch, and almost always grotesquely reminding us of the transcendental ladies in Martin Chuzzlewit who are introduced "to a Pogram by a Hominy." For example, the second motto of this work, the motto taken from Walt Whitman, is as follows :-
" I was thinking the day most splendid, till I saw what the not-day exhibited ;
I was thinking this globe enough, till there sprang out so twinkle around me myriads of other globes."
There you have, in rude, crude, and pretentiously gasping English, the substance of Blanco White's splendid sonnet:-
" Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed Beneath thy beams, oh son ? Or who could find When fly and leaf and insect lay revealed, That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind ? Why do we then shun death with anxious strife ? If light can thus deceive, wherefore not life f'
For the most part, we can find nothing in Walt Whitman's so- called wisdom that is not an apology for everything that is, whether good or evil, including of course an apology for the open recognition of everything that is, whether good or evil, and at all times whether fit or unfit. And though it is clear enough that it cost Mrs. Gilchrist a pang to rend the veil of her natural feminine modesty and reticence in her apology for Whitman, she managed to persuade herself so effectually of Walt Whitman's wisdom, that she came to admire the very stiltedness and magniloquent roughness of Walt Whitman's versification, on the ground, we suppose, that it represented a sort of noble pride in the blots and abraptnoseee and rudenesses of human nature. For if all is equally good, as Whitman taught, the caterpillar is as deserving of admiration as the butterfly, and the clumsy halting of the boor as the light, elastic step of the athlete. Mrs. Gilchrist was a good woman, and did her duty as a wife, a mother, and a friend. But she was not a woman of genius, and she will not convince those
who are not already disciples of Walt Whitman, of the gigantic spiritual and poetical stature of that democratic but blatant bard.
Previous page
