Paestum (verse)
Thayer, Mary Dixon
WHITMAN AND THE WAYSIDE By GEORGE N. SHUSTER AMONG our present fondest hopes is that the public will be spared a round half dozen of the models suggested for a memorial to Walt Whitman. Although...
...We have neither understood nor forgiven because the man was not one of us...
...And if less has been said about the beautiful lyric melodiousness of this southerner than about the rhapsodies of Walt, the reason lies simply in the plain general truth that we always have neglected to develop our own domestic arts...
...For Lincoln was the true American renaissance...
...The total absence of realism from his work is astonishing, especially where civic facts are concerned...
...Whitman was the true revolution against America...
...It would be difficult to find a point of view which might be more unhesitatingly called national...
...The really magnificent thing about him is that same humble wonder with which his century of sophisticates rediscovered their trousers and their geraniums...
...But it is quite true that he was tall enough to reach stars—a circumstance which Americans generally have neither understood nor forgiven...
...The weak thing about him was not a tendency to shock the more settled Bostonians, nor a habitual disregard for the rules of prosody...
...And, although one truly may find it worth while to honor the virtues of Whitman, some mindfulness of his vagaries may not be altogether unwholesome...
...Well, when the tremendous Civil crash came, Whitman groping pathetically over the red battlefields, turned to the great woodsman who had stemmed the tide of war...
...and Lanier, who explored the norms of symphonic melody in reverent quest for the hidden constitution of verse, also was convinced (with the great majority of his brethren) that democracy would sign a new and more spiritual pact for the control of commerce...
...had he been something of a pioneer, he hardly would have applauded himself...
...America has been a giant swarm of immigrants thumbing the vast spaces for a page on which to scrawl—an uprooted swarm hunting multitudinous hives, carrying the hastily sorted baggage of lost cities, and instinct with a simplicity that on the one hand was greed and on the other hand an earnest spiritual fidelity...
...in his heart he was tame, with that mammoth tameness which is sentimental, tearful, and unsteady...
...But imagine the horror of waysides lined with barbarous marbles supposed to symbolize a barbarian...
...It was rather a kind of childish ignorance that goes strangely ill with his beard —ignorance of what the world about him was like, of the fact that it was far less prepared for a dithyramb than for a drubbing...
...The fact that "the good grey poet" buried Lincoln as a woman might bury her lover is his own best and firmest literary portrait...
...The people who build the man his monument should turn it toward the East, for he was an alien...
...We never have been young enough not to care about seeming to be old-fashioned...
...It has been hard enough to put up with ecstatic memoirs and untamed applause...
...More than any other modern citizen, the American has believed in the sanctity of law...
...Thoreau, for all his struggling, was comparatively a man of the world...
...He turned to him confidently, as all men turn sometimes, in their quest for explanations...
...Walt Whitman, both as moralist and poet, was the creature of that ultimate refinement which we call leisure—he was riotous in scattering stars because he had never been obliged to walk with the stars in their orbits...
...at times, it even may have been a little difficult to put up with Walt...
...Culture must be cited into the presence of the Fathers" was Lanier's own resume of his attitude toward art...
...And certainly, it is no wonder that Walt understood them not at all—Walt half asleep by the sea, rifling the cargoes of the great romantics and guzzling the wine of Shelley like a new god Pan...
...Nothing could be so pitiless as sculpture in the attempt to travesty what was great and abiding in Whitman...
...It happened to be, ironically enough, a poetic ceremony which Lincoln himself would not have understood...
...Whitman, therefore, was a bacchanalian threnody...
...It is no wonder that our fathers were stripped clean and looked at the stars timidly as at things not to be clutched, while they stalked the bison as they stalked each other—excepting when they made an inventory of those holiest and most wise of platitudes, which we call traditions...
...Essentially the man was not even tentatively wild...
...and he found him dead...
...It is significant that while this shout stirred, with its triumph and awe, an English Christian mystic like Chesterton, it disgusted an American Christian mystic like Sidney Lanier...
...In this sense he was a shout— a chaotic, half-unconscious shout of tribute to God's world, which, though it be a lost Paradise, is none the less Paradise...
...Although an official sculptor already has been chosen in Jo Davidson, there is some danger lest the enthusiastic in literary villages yearn for the multiplication of monuments...
...He was a stave in the song Europe had been giddy with, from the days of Rousseau and Rene...
...Provincial, indeed...
...and so the revolutionary emancipations of Whitman, who brushed aside traditions as the socially elect sometimes play havoc with manners, startled and angered him into bitter criticism which too often has been termed provincial...
...Had he been a four-square savage, he would have swallowed beauty without intoxication...
...had he been a soldier, he would have saluted Lincoln with a silent quatrain, as Tabb saluted Damien...
...The poetry of this wounded Confederate soldier was a wholly native because a wholly traditional thing...
Vol. 3 • January 1926 • No. 11
