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Democratic Art
Selection copyright © 1997 by Rictor Norton. All
rights reserved. This edition may not be reproduced or
redistributed to third parties without permission of the
editor.
[From Walt Whitman: A Study, 1893,
which appeared one year after Whitman's death, and on the very
day of Symonds' own death. Much of Symonds' study is a reprint
of the section on Whitman in Modern
Ethics, 1891, and a re-working, in December 1892,
of an essay on Whitman which first appeared in Essays
Speculative and Suggestive (1890). The following
excerpts represent a summing up of his view of the liberating
effects of democratic art.]
There are two aspects under which the problem of democratic art
must be regarded. In the first place, we have to ask what sort
of art, including literature under this title, democracy
requires. To this question Whitman, in his Democratic
Vistas, gives an answer: turbid in expression, far
from lucid, but pregnant with sympathetic intelligence of the
main issues. In the second place, we have to ask what elements
are furnished to the artist by the people, which have not already
been worked out in the classical and feudal forms and their
derivatives. Whitman attempts to supply us with an answer to this
second question also, not in his speculative essays, but in the
mass of imaginative compositions which he designates by the name
of poems or notes for poems. His report upon both topics may be
postponed for the moment, while we revert to the revolution
effected by the romantic movement of a hundred years ago. It
behooves us to review the clearance of obsolete obstructions, and
to survey the new ground gained, whereon our hopes are founded
of a future reconstruction.
Delivered from scholastic traditions regarding style and the
right subjects to be handled — delivered form pedantry and
blind reactionary fervour — delivered from dependence upon
aristocratic and ecclesiastical authority — sharing the
emancipation of the intellect by modern science and the
enfranchisement of the individual by new political conceptions
— the poet or the artist is brought immediately face to face
with the wonderful fresh world of men and things he has to
interpret and to recreate. The whole of nature, seen for the
first time with sane eyes, the whole of humanity, liberated for
the first time from caste and class distinctions, invite his
sympathy. Now dawns upon his mind the beauty, the divinity, which
lies enfolded in the simplest folk, the commonest objects
presented to his senses. He perceives the dignity of human
occupations, the grace inherent in each kind of labour well
performed. He discovered that love is a deity in the cottage no
less than in king's chambers; not with the supercilious
condescension of Tasso's Aminta or
Guarini's Pastor Fido, but with a
reverent recognition of the praesens
deus in the heart of every man and woman. In order
to make Florizel and Perdita charming, it is no longer necessary
that they should be prince and princess in disguise; nor need the
tale of Daphnis and Chloe now be
written with that lame conclusion of lost children restored to
wealthy high-born parents. Heroism steps forth from the tent of
Achilles; chivalry descends from the arm-gaunt charger of the
knight; loyalty is seen to be no mere devotion to a dynasty;
passionate friendship quits the brotherhood of Pylades and the
dear embraces of Peirithous. None of these high virtues belonging
to heroic and chivalrous society are lost to us. They are brought
within reach, instead of being relegated to some remote region
in the past, or deemed the special property of privileged
classes. The engine-driver steering his train at night over
perilous viaducts, the life-boat man, the member of a fire-
brigade assailing houses toppling to their ruin among flames;
these are found to be no less heroic than Theseus grappling the
Minotaur in Cretan labyrinths. And so it is with the chivalrous
respect for womanhood and weakness, with loyal self-dedication
to the principle or cause, with comradeship uniting men in
brotherhood, with passion fit for tragedy, with beauty shedding
light from heaven on human habitations. They were though to dwell
far off in antique fable or dim mediaeval legend. They appeared
to our fancy clad in glittering armour, plumed and spurred,
surrounded with the aureole of noble birth. We now behold them
at our house-doors, in the streets and fields around us.
Conversely, our eyes are no longer shut to the sordidness and
baseness which royal palaces and princely hearts may harbour
— to the meanness of the Court of the Valois, to the
vulgarity of the Court of Charles II, to the vile tone of a
Prince Regent, to the dishonour, dishonesty, and disloyalty
toward women which have always, more or less, prevailed in so-
called good society.
This extended recognition of the noble and the lovely
qualities in human life, the qualities upon which pure poetry and
art must seize, is due partially to what we call democracy. But
it implies something more than that word is commonly supposed to
denote — a new and more deeply religious way of looking at
mankind, a gradual triumph after so many centuries of the spirit
which is Christ's, an enlarged faculty for piercing below
externals and appearances to the truth and essence of things.
God,the divine, is recognised as immanent in nature, and in the
soul and body of humanity; not external to these things, not
conceived of as creative from outside, or as incarnated in any
single personage, but as all-pervasive, all-constitutive,
everywhere, and inspiring all. That is the democratic philosophy;
and science has contributed in no small measure to produce it.
Meanwhile, we need not breach the abandonment of high time-
honoured themes. Why should we seek to break the links which bind
us to the best of that far past from which we came? Achilles has
not ceased to be a fit subject for poem or statue, because we
discern heroism in an engine-driver. Lovely knights and Flora
Macdonald, Peirithous and Pylades, King Cophetua and Burd Helen,
abide with all the lustre of their strength and grace and charm.
They have lost nothing because others have gained — because
we now acknowledge that the chivalry, the loyalty, the
comradeship, the love, the pathos, which made their store is
admirable, are shared by living men and women, whose names have
not been sounded through fame's silver trumpet.
I have hitherto touched but lightly upon the extension of
the sphere of beauty which may be expected from democratic art.
Through it we shall be led to discover the infinite varieties of
lovely form which belong peculiarly to the people. Caste and high
birth have no monopoly of physical comeliness. It may even be
maintained that social conditions render it impossible for them
to display more than a somewhat limited range of beauty. Goethe,
I think, defined good society as that which furnished no material
for poetry. We might apply this paradox to plastic art, and say
that polished gentlemen and ladies do not furnish the best
materials for sculpture and painting. How hardly shall they who
wear evening clothes and ball-dresses enter into the kingdom of
the grandest plastic art! The sculpture of Pheidias, the fresco
of Buonarroti, demand suggestions from the body, indications of
the nude. The sublimest attitudes of repose imply movements
determined by specific energy. There is a characteristic beauty
in each several kind of diurnal service, which waits to be
elucidated. The superb poise of the mower, as he swings his
scythe; the muscles of the blacksmith, bent for an unerring
stroke upon the anvil; the bowed form of the reaper, with belt
tightened round his loins; the thresher's arm uplifted, while he
swings the flail; the elasticity of oarsmen rising from their
strain against the waive; the jockey's grip across his saddle;
the mountaineer's slow, swinging stride; the girl at the
spinning-wheel, or carrying the water-bucket on her head, or
hanging linen on the line, or busied with her china-closet: in
each and ever motive of this kind — and the list might be
indefinitely prolonged, for all trades and occupations have some
distinguishing peculiarity — there appears a specific note
of grace inalienable from the work performed. The artists of
previous ages did not wholly neglect this truth. Indeed, they
were eager to avail themselves of picturesque suggestions on the
lines here indicated. Yet they used these motives mainly as
adjuncts to themes of more attractive import, and subordinated
them to what was deemed some loftier subject. Consequently, these
aspects of life did not receive the attention they deserve; and
the stores of beauty inherent in human industries have been only
partially developed. It is the business of democratic art to
unfold them fully. The time has come when the noble and beautiful
qualities of the people demand a prominent place among worthy
artistic motives.
An arduous task lies before poetry and the arts, if they are
to bring themselves into proper relation with the people; not,
as is vulgarly supposed, because the people will debase their
standard, but because it will be hard for them to express the
real dignity, and to satisfy the keen perceptions and the pure
taste of the people.
There is a danger lest the solution of this problem should
suffer from being approached too consciously. What we want is
simplicity, emotional directness, open-mindedness, intelligent
sympathy, keen and yet reverent curiosity, the scientific
combined with the religious attitude toward fact. It will not do
to be doctrinaire or didactic. Patronage and condescension are
the worst of evils here. The spirit of Count Tolstoi, it that
could descend in some new Pentecost, would prepare the world for
democratic art.
Above all things, the middle-class conception of life must
be transcended. Decency, comfort, sobriety, maintenance of
appearances, gradual progression up a social ladder which is
scaled by tenths of inches, the chapel or the church, the gig or
the barouche, the growing balance at one's bankers, the addition
of esquire to our name or of a red rosette to our button-hole,
the firm resolve to keep well abreast with next-door neighbours,
if not ahead of them, in business and respectability — all
these things, which characterise the middle-class man wherever
he appears, are good in their way. It were well that the people
should incorporate these virtues. But there are corresponding
defects in the bourgeoisie which have
to be steadily rejected — an unwillingness to fraternise,
an incapacity for comradeship, a habit of looking down on so-
called inferiors, a contempt for hand-labour, a confusion of
morality with prejudice and formula, a tendency to stifle
religion in the gas of dogmas and dissenting shibboleths, an
obstinate insensibility to ideas. Snobbery and Pharisaism, in one
form or another, taint the middle-class to its core. Self-
righteousness and personal egotism and ostrich-fear corrode it.
We need to deliver our souls from these besetting sins, and to
rise above them into more ethereal atmosphere. The man of
letters, the artist, who would fain prove himself adequate to
democracy in its noblest sense, must emerge from earthy vapours
of complacent self and artificial circumstance and decaying
feudalism. It is his privilege to be free, and to represent
freedom. It is his function to find a voice or mode of utterance,
an ideal of form, which shall be on a par with nature delivered
from unscientific canons of interpretation, and with mankind
delivered from obsolescent class-distinctions.
* * *
After all, the great thing is, if possible, to induce people to
study Whitman for themselves. I am convinced that, especially for
young men, his spirit, if intelligent understood and sympathised
with, must be productive of incalculable good. This, I venture
to emphasise by relating what he did for me. I had received the
ordinary English gentleman's education at Harrow and Oxford.
Being physically below the average in health and strength, my
development proceeded more upon the intellectual than the
athletic side. In a word, I was decidedly academical, and in
danger of becoming a prig. What was more, my constitution in the
year 1865 seemed to have broken down, and no career in life lay
open to me. In the autumn of that year, my friend Frederic Myers
read me aloud a poem from Leaves of
Grass. We were together in his rooms at Trinity
College, Cambridge, and I can well remember the effect of his
sonorous voice rolling out sentence after sentence, sending
electric thrills through the very marrow of my mind. (It was a
piece from "Calamus," beginning "Long I thought
that that knowledge alone would suffice me." Curiously
enough, this has been omitted from subsequent editions, for what
reasons I know not.) I immediately procured the Boston edition
of 1860-61, and began to study it attentively. It cannot be
denied that much in Whitman puzzled and repelled me. But it was
the aesthetic, not the moral, sensibility that suffered; for I
felt at once that his method of treating sexual things (the
common stumbling-block to beginners) was the right one, and
wished that I had come across "Children of Adam"
several years earlier. My academical prejudices, the literary
instincts trained by two decades of Greek and Latin studies, the
refinements of culture, and the exclusiveness of aristocratic
breeding, revolted against the uncouthness, roughness,
irregularity, coarseness, of the poet and his style. But, in
course of a short time, Whitman delivered my soul of these
debilities. As I have elsewhere said in print, he taught me to
comprehend the harmony between the democratic spirit, science,
and that larger religion to which the modern world is being led
by the conception of human brotherhood, and by the spirituality
inherent in any really scientific view of the universe. He gave
body, concrete vitality, to the religious creed which I had been
already forming for myself upon the study of Goethe, Greek and
Roman Stoics, Giordano Bruno, and the founders of the
evolutionary doctrine. He inspired me with faith, and made me
feel that optimism was not unreasonable. This gave me great cheer
in those evil years of enforced idleness and intellectual torpor
which my health imposed upon me. Moreover, he helped to free me
from many conceits and pettinesses to which academical culture
is liable. He opened my eyes to the beauty, goodness and
greatness which may be found in all worthy human beings, the
humblest and the highest. He made me respect personality more
than attainments or position in the world. Through him, I
stripped my soul of social prejudices. Through him, I have been
able to fraternise in comradeship with men of all classes and
several races, irrespective of their caste, creed, occupation,
and special training. To him I owe some of the best friends I now
can claim — sons of the soil, hard workers, "natural
and nonchalant," "powerful uneducated" persons.
Only those who have been condemned by imperfect health to
take a back-seat in life sofar as physical enjoyments are
concerned, and who have also chosen the career of literary study,
can understand what is meant by the deliverance from foibles
besetting invalids and pedants for which I have to thank Walt
Whitman.
What he has done for me, I feel he will do for others —
for each and all of those who take counsel with him, and seek
from him a solution of difficulties differing in kind according
to the temper of the individual — if only they approach him
in the right spirit of confidence and open-mindedness.
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