from three standpoints: philosophic basis, poetical form and poetical theory. Broadly speaking, Whitman resembles the Symbolists in being an idealist. After the tide of French realism had reached its high-water mark with the novels of the Naturalists, a wave of idealism swept over France and found its literary expression in the poetry of the Symbolists. The Moi was again enthroned as the sole and sovereign theme of poetry. Nor was this the joyous, irrepressible ego of the Romantic poets; but a personality taking account of itself amid the manifestations of a new age, and attuned to the marvels of the infinite and the infinitesimal as revealed by science. In expressing his most intimate self under these conditions, the poet often succeeded in animating the cold lessons of realism with the ardent inspirations of idealism. Whitman has been described as an idealist who bound himself by a solemn vow to be a thorough-going realist. He was an idealist of the older, transcendental type, Kant having studied and stated, Fichte and Schelling and Hegel'. He has all the boisterous buoyancy of the Romanticists, yet, as he came later, he had a scientific outlook which they lacked and which makes him cry 'Hurrah for positive science.' I accept Reality and dare not question it, Yet he recognises the limits of the scientists and passes beyond: Your facts are useful, and yet they are not my dwelling, I but enter by them to an area of my dwelling 3. Like the Symbolists, Whitman was an idealist: he also resembled them in his fondness for mysticism and for oriental literature. 'In the instinctive operations of his mind,' writes Bliss Perry, 'he was a Mystic... In his capacity for brooding imaginative ecstasy he was Oriental rather than Western'. Enamoured of mystery and the infinite, the young poets of the Symbolist school sought the unknown wherever they thought it lay concealed. And if their feverish search for mystery has little in common with Whitman's quiet penetrating glance, a broader conception of the Symbolist movement will be found to reveal a closer parallel. 1 Calamus, Leaves of Grass, i, p. 146. 2 Inscriptions, Leaves of Grass, i, p. 61. 3 Ibid. 4 Walt Whitman, London, Boston and New York, 1906, p. 276. Remembering that Whitman's sovereign theme was life immense in passion, pulse, and power, Cheerful, for freest action form'd under the laws divine1, we are struck by the fact that M. Francis Vielé-Griffin makes the Symbolist programme equally comprehensive: 'Ce qui caractérise le symbolisme, c'est la passion du mouvement au geste infini, de la Vie même, joyeuse ou triste, belle de toute la multiplicité de ses métamorphoses, passion agile et protéenne qui se confond avec les heures du jour et de la nuit, perpétuellement renouvelée, intarissable et diverse comme l'onde et le feu, riche du lyrisme éternel, prodigue comme la terre puissante, profonde et voluptueuse comme le Mystère.' The similarity between these two ideals has also struck a French poet who was one of the first in his country to be influenced by the American poet. In a recent article, M. Philéas Lebesque wrote: 'Si le symbolisme avait compris dès le début sa propre grandeur il y a beau temps que le Barde de Manhattan aurait dû être revendiqué comme précurseur.' It has already been said that Whitman and the verslibristes have so much in common that a few French writers have suggested the indebtedness of the latter to the former for many technical innovations. This question would require special treatment. For the present we shall attempt to note a few principles common to the work of Whitman and of the French Symbolists-principles which occasion the resemblances that have been mistaken for borrowings. Like all modern poets, Whitman and the Symbolists recognise the lyric as the only possible form of poetic expression. One of the greatest of foreign influences exerted on Symbolisme was that of another American poet, Edgar Allan Poe. Both Baudelaire and Mallarmé translated Poe's poetry which they loved for its elusive music and alluring morbidity. His essays provided them with certain principles of poetic taste among which may be mentioned their predilection for the short poem. Whitman also knew Poe. In some of his later poems there is a strain of delicate melancholy, which may be due to this acquaintance. Yet the robust optimism of Leaves of Grass is diametrically opposed to the morbid tendencies of Poe, Baudelaire, Mallarmé and his school. And some of Whitman's remarks concerning the American model of the Symbolists emphasise this difference between the French poets and himself. In his last piece of selfcriticism, A Backward Glance o'er Travel'd Roads, Whitman writes, 1 L. of G., i, p. 1. 2 Mercure de France, Oct. 1895. 3 La Phalange, 15 juin 1908. 'Toward the last I had among much else look'd over Edgar Poe's poems of which I was not an admirer, tho' I always saw that beyond their limited range of melody (like perpetual chimes of music bells, ringing from lower b flat up to g) they were melodious expressions, and perhaps never excelled ones, of certain pronounc'd phases of human morbidity. (The Poetic area is very spacious-has room for all—has so many mansions!) But I was repaid in Poe's prose by the idea that (at any rate for our occasions, our day) there can be no such thing as a long poem. The same thought had been haunting my mind before, but Poe's argument, though short, work'd the sum and proved it to me1.' Without employing a fixed stanza, both Whitman and the verslibristes wrote in paragraphs, grouping together lines of varying lengths irrespective of any prearranged plan and in obedience only to their personal inspiration. Here is a passage from M. Verhaeren: Son or ailé qui s'enivre d'espace, Son or planant, son or rapace, Son or vivant, Son or dont s'éclairent et rayonnent les vents, Son or que boit la terre, Par les pores de sa misère, Son or ardent, son or furtif, son or retors, Morceau d'espoir et de soleil-son or2! And here is one from Whitman : The main shapes arise! Shapes of Democracy total, result of centuries, Shapes ever projecting other shapes, Shapes of turbulent manly cities, Shapes of the friends and home-givers of the whole earth, Underlying this freedom of structure is a common instinct for music in poetry. In emphasising the musical rather than the pictorial effects of verse, Whitman broke with his more formal predecessors just as the young poets of the eighties did in France. For no distinction between Parnassians and Symbolists is more fundamental than this, that while the former conceived of poetry as allied to painting and sculpture, to the Symbolists music was the handmaid of poetry. Their ideal was to wed poetry to music more intimately than had ever been done. before. Verlaine appealed for 'la musique avant toute chose,' and it is music that supplied them with the rhythms and even the diction 1 Leaves of Grass, iii, p. 56. 2 Le Banquier, Les Forces tumultueuses (Paris, 1902), p. 49. of poetry. They tried to effect in the poetry of their day a revolution analogous to that achieved by Wagner whose operas were their most powerful models of the use of Symbolism, and the liberation of form, in music. Through Wagner, as through Poe, the Symbolists are again connected with Whitman who, though he knew little of the later movement that came through Wagner, once told his friends: 'I know from the way you fellows talk of it, that the music of Wagner is the music of the Leaves'.' Whitman frequently admitted his indebtedness to music for suggesting rhythmical variations. During the gestation of his poems, he was saturated for years with the rendering by the best vocalists and performers of operas and oratorios. On one occasion he remarked, 'with as much sincerity as geniality that it would indeed be strange if there were no music at the heart of his poems, for more of these were actually inspired by music than he himself could mention".' The rich rugged rhythm and interior music of the Leaves are evident in such a passage as this: Proud music of the storm, Blast that careers so free, whistling across the prairies, You serenades of phantoms with instruments alert, Blending with Nature's rhythmus all the tongues of nations; You formless, free religious dances-you from the Orient, You undertone of rivers, roar of pouring cataracts, You sounds from distant guns with galloping cavalry, Echoes of camps with all the different bugle-calls, Trooping tumultuous, filling the midnight late, bending me powerless, Another trait common to Whitman and the Symbolists is their confusion of the forms of poetry and prose in the attempt to mould a subtler and more intimate medium of poetic expression. Even in Mallarmé, the father of French Symbolists, this tendency is evident. 'Le vers est partout dans la langue où il y a rhythme,' he writes, 'partout excepté dans les affiches et à la quatrième page des journaux. Dans le genre appelé prose, il y a des vers, quelquefois admirables, de tous rhythmes. Mais en vérité il n'y a pas de prose; il y a l'alphabet, et puis des vers plus ou moins serrés, plus ou moins diffus. Toutes les fois qu'il y a effort ou style, il y a versification.' Whitman has dealt at length with the need which the modern poet must feel for utmost freedom of expression. And though his object, 2 See R. M. Bucke, Walt Whitman, p. 156. 1 L. of G., i, p. xxxiii. 3 L. of G., ii, p. 178. Jules Huret, L'Enquête sur l'évolution littéraire, p. 60. ་ which is to celebrate not only the intricacies of modern thought but all the mechanical manifestations of our age, scarcely resembles that of the Symbolists who too often aimed only at expressing the niceties of their own refined natures, the means Whitman proposes to adopt in effacing the distinction between poetry and prose are identical with those practised by the French poets. In my opinion,' he writes, ‘the time has arrived to essentially break down the barriers of form between prose and poetry. I say the latter is henceforth to win and maintain its character regardless of rhyme, and the measurement-rules of iambic, spondee, dactyl, etc., and that........the truest and greatest Poetry (while subtly and necessarily always rhythmic, and distinguishable easily enough) can never again, in the English language, be express'd in arbitrary and rhyming metre, any more than the greatest eloquence, or the truest power and passion. While admitting that the venerable and heavenly forms of chiming versification have in their time play'd great and fitting parts......it is, notwithstanding, certain to me that the day of such conventional rhyme is ended.' He adds that the poetry of the future 'adapting itself to comprehend the size of the whole people, with the free play, emotions, pride, passions, experiences, that belong to them, body and soul-to the general globe, and all its relations in astronomy as the savans portray them to us to the modern, the busy nineteenth century (as grandly poetic as any, only different) with steamships, railroads, factories, electric telegraphs, cylinder presses -to the thought of the solidarity of nations, the brotherhood and sisterhood of the entire earth-to the dignity and heroism of the practical labor of farms, factories, foundries, workshops, mines, or on shipboard, or on lakes and rivers-resumes that other medium of expression, more flexible, more eligible-soars to the freer, vast, diviner heaven of prose'.' How strikingly this passage compares with the famous preface to Les petits poèmes en prose in which Charles Baudelaire, a forerunner of the Symbolists, voices the desire for a new, more supple poetical form Quel est celui de nous qui n'a pas, dans ses jours d'ambition, rêvé le miracle d'une prose poétique, musicale sans rhythme et sans rime, assez souple et assez heurtée pour s'adapter aux mouvements lyriques de l'âme, aux ondulations de la rêverie, aux soubresauts de la conscience? C'est surtout de la fréquentation des villes énormes, c'est du croisement de leurs innombrables rapports que naît cet idéal obsédant.' 1 New Poetry, Complete Prose Works, Camden Book-lover's edition, ii, pp. 272 f. |