Captain! Who touches this, touches a man. I think I could turn and live with animais. A great city is that which has the greatest men and women. The United States themselves are the greatest poem. The mania of owning things. These United States. To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too. Me imperturbe, standing at ease in nature. Powerful uneducated persons. Leaves of grass.
I have omitted the quotation marks around these lines and phrases because the marks hardly exist in our minds and mem- ories. It is Whitman^ language rather than his message that exerts power. He worked with ali his soul to become a national bard, the voice of "the divine average," the Muse of Democracy. But we have no national bards; the average man or woman does not feel divine, nor wants to; democracy prefers to get along without a muse. Whitman loved his country and often wrote thrillingly about it, but it is probable that he never really understood it. He has penetrated not because he is accepted by the "powerful uneducated persons" he idealizes, but because he is a poet in the original sense, a maker, a coiner of wonderful new language.
His ideas, if you can call them that, he borrowed from many sources, including Emerson [69], who was among the first to hail his genius. His rhythms echo, among other books, the Bible. Nonetheless he is a true revolutionary in poetry. His free-swinging, cadenced, wavelike verse, his fresh (even if often absurd) manipulations of language, his boldness of vocabulary—ali helped to liberate American poetry, and have had a profound effect abroad. There is no doubt also that his erotic candor was useful in the revolt against the genteel tradi- tion.
The first three issues of Leaves of Grass (1855, 1856, 1860) contain ninety percent of his best work. After that he tended to repeat himself or to create poses rather than poetry. Whitman was a bit of a charlatan; if you want to be fancy you can say that he wore masks.
He was homosexual. His verse, and particularly his odd notion of democracy, cannot be understood except in the light of his bias toward males.
He had an original temperament, a certain peasant shrewd- ness, but only a moderate amount of brains. He can excite us with his rhapsodic, prophetic note. He can move us with his musical threnodies. He can cause to pass before our eyes a series of wonderful tiny images of people and things in action. These are not small gifts. They are enough to make him the greatest of American poets.
On the other hand, he tries too hard to make a virtue of his deficiencies. He was poorly educated, his experience of life (despite the legends he busily circulated) seems to have been limited, and he depended too much on the resources of his own rich temperament and too little on the common stock of three thousand years of the Western tradition. This makes him parochial when he thinks he is being daringly American. It lends a certain hollowness to his boast that he is "non-literary and non-decorous."
Ignoring scales of values, he embraces and celebrates ali creation—often with infectious passion, often absurdly. Everything in Whitman seems to be equal to everything else; everything becomes equally divine. Sometimes the reader, fatigued by so many unvarying hosannas, is inclined to agree with the poet Sidney Lanier, who said that Whitman argues that "because the Mississippi is long, therefore every American is God."
Ali these criticisms have been made often, and more severely. Yet he somehow remains. England and the Continent, anxious to believe that his barbaric yawp is the true voice of America (it satisfies their conventional romantic notion of us), appreciate him more widely than we do. But rea- sonably cultivated Americans, if not Whitman's beloved work- ers, also acknowledge his curious and thrilling spell. It is not because his is a truly native voice—Frost [106] is far more authentically American. It is rather because his chant is universal, almost Homeric [2,3], touching in us primitive feelings
about death and nature and the gods who refuse to die in even the most civilized among us. Trail-breaking in form, Whitman seems to be preclassical, pre-Christian in feeling, though he thought of himself as the trumpeter of a new time.
In addition to the three important prose works suggested, the reader might tick off, for minimum reading, the following poems: his masterpiece, "Song of Myself'; "I Sing the Body Electric,,; "Song of the Open Road"; "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"; "Song of the Answerer"; "Song of the Broad-Axe"; "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"; "As I Ebbed with the Ocean of Life"; "When I Heard the Leairfd Astronomer"; "By the Bivouac's Fitful Flame"; "As Toilsome I Wandered Virginias Woods"; "The Wound-Dresser"; "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"; "There Was a Child Went Forth"; "Proud Music of the Storm"; "Passage to нndia"; "Prayer of Columbus"; "A Noiseless Patient Spider"; and "Years of the Modern."
C.F.
86
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
1821-1880 Madame Bovary
Before commenting on this novel, I wish to recommend the one translation that does it justice—that by Francis Steegmuller. It will serve to convince the reader that good rea- sons exist for its authors high reputation.
When Madame Bovary was first published, in serial form, Flaubert had to defend himself before the public prosecutor against charges that it was offensive to morality and religion. He won the case. But the excitement over Madame Bovary, though transferred from the moral to the literary plane, has never since quite died down. The novel has continued to agi- tate many readers, including other novelists and critics. I must at once admit that, while I admire it as an unquestioned mas- terpiece, I nevertheless find it a bit chilly in its superb detach- ment.
Unlike Balzac [68], Flaubert was the classic type of the pure and dedicated artist. The son of a Rouen surgeon, he pur- sued law studies in Paris briefly and unhappily; in 1844 suf- fered a nervous attack; then withdrew to a life of study and writing varied by intervals of travei and erotic experience. He was not by nature a happy man. His native melancholy was fur- ther underlined by the loss of loved ones, by the misunder- standing with which the world greeted much of his work, and by the self-torture that followed from his literary perfection- ism.
"The Idea," he wrote, "exists only by virtue of its form.,> Form to Flaubert meant more than a frame or a pattern. It was a complex affair. A few of its many elements were "the perfect word" (le mot juste), cunningly contrived and varied rhythms, assonance, reverberant or echoing sequences of symbols, and a genuine architectural structure. Over Madame Bovary he spent five laborious years. Before his time, no novйis in French had been so carefully written. Which is why I suggest Steegmullers translation: The emotional tone and weight of Madame Bovary are created by the use of a special language, requiring the most careful carry-over into English.
Flaubert believed that the artist hovered somewhere above the moral universe, that he should not judge, explain, or teach but merely understand and perfectly record. Insofar as this novel is devoid of sentimentality, as it is of pity, Flaubert suc- ceeded in his aim. Yet it conveys a message, if only a negative one; and that message we have already received in the pages of Gullivers Traveis [52]. Like Swift, Flaubert did not love the human race. Madame Bovary, for ali its seeming detachment, seems to me a beautifully organized expression of misanthropy.
Whether or not this is true, no one can deny its influence. Most of the later novйis that turn on the discrepancy between our ideal lives and the actual gray ones that we live owe much
to Flaubert. Madame Bovary is the first Walter Mitty. She has given a name, Bovarysme, to her disease, a morbid passion for believing oneself other and better than one is. It is even possi- ble that thousands of young men and women have rebelled against their environment, in daydream or in reality, not because they were spontaneous rebels, but because Madame Bovary infected them—just as young men committed suicide as a consequence of reading Goethe^ Sorrows of Young Werther [62].