If we put aside imaginative writers—Hawthorne, Poe, Bret Harte, and Mark Twain—America has produced three men of world-wide significance.[5] These three belong to the same corner of the continent; they form a culminating series, and at the same time they complement1 each other. It is difficult to consider one of them without throwing a glance at the others.
Emerson comes first. In Emerson, after two hundred years, Puritanism seems, for the first time, to have found voice. The men of Banbury and Amsterdam were too much distracted by the outer world to succeed in finding adequate artistic3 expression for the joys that satisfied them and the spirit that so powerfully moved them. They have been the sport of their enemies, and have come down to us in literature as a set of sour fanatics5. It was not until the seed was carried over sea, to germinate6 slowly and peace[90]fully4 in New England, that at length it broke into flower, and that we know clearly that union of robust7 freedom and mystic exaltation which lies at the heart of Puritanism. In his calm and austere8 manner—born of the blood that had passed through the veins9 of six generations of Puritan ministers—Emerson overturned the whole of tradition. “A world in the hand,” he said, with cheery, genial10 scepticism, “is worth two in the bush.” With gentle composure, with serene11 hilarity12, perhaps with an allusion13 to the roses that “make no mention of former roses,” he posited14 the absolute right of the individual to adjudicate in religion, in marriage, in the State. Even he himself, while able, like Spinoza and Goethe, to live by self-regulating laws that are death to men of less sanity15, could not always in his peaceful haunts at Concord16 recognize or allow the fruits of his doctrines17.
Emerson was a man of the study; he seems to have known the world as in a camera obscura spread out before him on a table. He never seems to come, or to be capable of coming, into direct relations with other men or with Nature. Thoreau, an original and solitary18 spirit, born amid the same influences as Emerson, but of different temperament19, resolved to go out into the world, to absorb Nature and the health of Nature: “I wished to live deliberately20, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could[91] not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow21 of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout22 all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner and reduce it to its lowest terms.” So he went into Walden Woods and built himself a hut, and sowed beans, and grew strangely familiar with the lives of plants and trees, of birds and beasts and fishes, and with much else besides. This period of self-dependent residence by Walden Pond has usually been regarded as the chief episode in Thoreau’s life. Doubtless it was, in the case of a man who spent his whole life in a small New England town, and made the very moderate living that he needed by intermittent23 work at pencil-making, teaching, land-surveying, magazine-writing, fence-building, or whitewashing24. Certainly it was this experience which gave form and character to the activities of his life, and the book in which he recorded his experiences created his fame. But in the experience itself there was nothing of heroic achievement. One would rather say that in the Walden episode Thoreau has vindicated25 the place of such an experience in all education. Every one, for some brief period in early[92] life, should be thrown on his own resources in the solitudes26 of Nature, to enter into harmonious27 relations with himself, and to realize the full scope of self-reliance. For the man or woman to whom this experience has never been given, the world must hold many needless mysteries and not a few needless miseries28.
There was in this man a curious mingling29 of wildness and austerity, which Mr. Burroughs, in the most discriminating30 estimate of him yet made, traces to his ancestry31. On the paternal32 side he was French; his privateering grandfather came from Jersey33: “that wild revolutionary cry of his, and that sort of restrained ferocity and hirsuteness34 are French.” But on the mother’s side he was of Scotch35 and New English Puritan stock. In person he was rather undersized, with “huge Emersonian nose,” and deep-set bluish-grey eyes beneath large overhanging brows; prominent pursed-up lips, a weak receding36 chin, “a ruddy weather-beaten face, which reminds one of some shrewd and honest animal’s.” He was a vigorous pedestrian; he had sloping shoulders, long arms, short legs, large hands and feet—the characteristics, for the most part, of an anthropoid37 ape. His hands were frequently clenched38, and there was an air of concentrated energy about him; otherwise nothing specially39 notable, and he was frequently supposed “a pedlar of small wares40.” He possessed41,[93] as his friend Emerson remarked, powers of observation which seemed to indicate additional senses: “he saw as with microscope, heard as with ear-trumpet42, and his memory was a photographic register of all he saw and heard.”
It has been claimed for Thoreau by some of his admirers, never by himself, that he was a man of science, a naturalist43. Certainly, in some respects, he had in him the material for an almost ideal naturalist. His peculiar44 powers of observation, and habits of noting and recording45 natural facts, his patience, his taste for spending his days and nights in the open air, seem to furnish everything that is required. Nor would his morbid46 dislike of dissection47 have been any serious bar, for the least worked but by no means the least important portion of natural history is the study of living forms, and for this Thoreau seems to have been peculiarly adapted; he had acquired one of the rarest of arts, that of approaching birds, beasts and fishes, and exciting no fear. There are all sorts of profoundly interesting investigations48 which only such a man can profitably undertake. But that right question which is at least the half of knowledge was hidden from Thoreau; he seems to have been absolutely deficient49 in scientific sense. His bare, impersonal50 records of observations are always dull and unprofitable reading; occasionally he stumbles on a good observation, but, not realizing its sig[94]nificance, he never verifies it or follows it up. His science is that of a fairly intelligent schoolboy—a counting of birds’ eggs and a running after squirrels. Of the vital and organic relationships of facts, or even of the existence of such relationships, he seems to have no perception. Compare any of his books with, for instance, Belt’s “Naturalist in Nicaragua,” or any of Wallace’s books: for the men of science, in their spirit of illuminating52 inquisitiveness53, all facts are instructive; in Thoreau’s hands they are all dead. He was not a naturalist: he was an artist and a moralist.
He was born into an atmosphere of literary culture, and the great art he cultivated was that of framing sentences. He desired to make sentences which would “suggest far more than they say,” which would “lie like boulders54 on the page, up and down or across, not mere55 repetition, but creation, and which a man might sell his ground or cattle to build,” sentences “as durable56 as a Roman aqueduct.” Undoubtedly57 he succeeded; his sentences frequently have all the massive and elemental qualities that he desired. They have more; if he knew little of the architectonic qualities of style, there is a keen exhilarating breeze blowing about these boulders, and when we look at them they have the grace and audacity59, the happy, natural extravagance of fragments of the finest Decorated Gothic on the site of a[95] fourteenth century abbey. He was in love with the things that are wildest and most untamable in Nature, and of these his sentences often seem to be a solid artistic embodiment, the mountain side, “its sublime60 gray mass, that antique, brownish-gray, Ararat colour,” or the “ancient, familiar, immortal61 cricket sound,” the thrush’s song, his ranz des vaches, or the song that of all seemed to rejoice him most, the clear, exhilarating, braggart62, clarion-crow of the cock. Thoreau’s favourite reading was among the Greeks, Pindar, Simonides, the Greek Anthology, especially ?schylus, and a later ancient, Milton. There is something of his paganism in all this, his cult2 of the aboriginal63 health-bearing forces of Nature. His paganism, however unobtrusive, was radical64 and genuine. It was a paganism much earlier than Plato, and which had never heard of Christ.
Thoreau was of a piece; he was at harmony with himself, though it may be that the elements that went to make up the harmony were few. The austerity and exhilaration and simple paganism of his art were at one with his morality. He was, at the very core, a preacher; the morality that he preached, interesting in itself, is, for us, the most significant thing about him. Thoreau was, in the noblest sense of the word, a Cynic. The school of Antisthenes is not the least interesting of the Socratic[96] schools, and Thoreau is perhaps the finest flower that that school has ever yielded. He may not have been aware of his affinities65, but it will help us if we bear them in mind. The charm that Diogenes exercised over men seems to have consisted in his peculiarly fresh and original intellect, his extravagant66 independence and self-control, his coarse and effective wit. Thoreau sat in his jar at Walden with the same originality67, independence, and sublime contentment; but his wisdom was suave68 and his wit was never coarse—exalted, rather, into a perennial69 humour, flashing now and then into divine epigram. A life in harmony with Nature, the culture of joyous70 simplicity71, the subordination of science to ethics—these were the principles of Cynicism, and to these Thoreau was always true. “Every day is a festival,” said Diogenes, and Metrocles rejoiced that he was happier than the Persian king. “I would rather sit on a pumpkin72 and have it all to myself,” said Thoreau, “than be crowded on a velvet73 cushion.” “Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage74.... It is life near the bone, where it is sweetest.... Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.” He had “travelled much in Concord.” “Methinks I should be content to sit at the back-door in Concord under the poplar tree for ever.” Such utterances76 as these strewn throughout Thoreau’s pages—and the saying in the last days of the[97] dying man to the youth who would talk to him about a future world, “One world at a time”—are full, in the uncorrupted sense, of the finest cynicism. Diogenes, seeing a boy drink out of his hand, threw away his cup; Thoreau had an interesting mineral specimen77 as a parlour ornament78, but it needed dusting every day, and he threw it away: it was not worth its keep. The Cynics seem to have been the first among the Greeks to declare that slavery is opposed to nature. Thoreau not only carried his independence so far as to go to prison rather than pay taxes to Church or State—“the only government that I recognize is the power that establishes justice in the land”—but in 1859, when John Brown lay in prison in Virginia, Thoreau was the one man in America to recognize the greatness of the occasion and to stand up publicly on his side: “Think of him!—of his rare qualities!—such a man as it takes ages to make, and ages to understand; no mock hero, nor the representative of any party. A man such as the sun may not rise upon again in this benighted79 land. To whose making went the costliest80 material, the finest adamant81; sent to be the redeemer of those in captivity82; and the only use to which you can put him is to hang him at the end of a rope!”
Every true Cynic is, above all, a moralist and a preacher. Thoreau could never be anything[98] else; that was, in the end, his greatest weakness. This unfailing ethereality, this perpetual challenge of the acridity83 and simplicity of Nature, becomes at last hypernatural. Thoreau breakfasts on the dawn: it is well; but he dines on the rainbow and sups on the Aurora84 borealis. Of Nature’s treasure more than half is man. Thoreau, with his noble Cynicism, had, as he thought, driven life into a corner, but he had to confess that of all phenomena85 his own race was to him the most mysterious and undiscoverable. He writes finely: “The whole duty of man may be expressed in one line: Make to yourself a perfect body;” but this appears to be a purely86 intellectual intuition. He had a fine insight into the purity of sex and of all natural animal functions, from which we excuse ourselves of speaking by falsely saying they are trifles. “We are so degraded that we cannot speak simply of the necessary functions of human nature;” but he is not bold to justify87 his insight. He welcomed Walt Whitman, at the very first, as the greatest democrat88 the world had seen, but he himself remained a natural aristocrat89. “He was a man devoid90 of compassion91,” remarks Mr. Burroughs, “devoid of sympathy, devoid of generosity92, devoid of patriotism93, as those words are generally understood.” He had learnt something of the mystery of Nature, but the price of his know[99]ledge was ignorance of his fellows. The chief part of life he left untouched.
Yet all that he had to give he gave fully and ungrudgingly; and it was of the best and rarest. We shall not easily exhaust the exhilaration of it. “We need the tonic58 of wildness.” Thoreau has heightened for us the wildness of Nature, and his work—all written, as we need not be told, in the open air—is full of this tonicity; it is a sort of moral quinine, and, like quinine under certain circumstances, it leaves a sweet taste behind.
II.
Whitman has achieved the rarest of all distinctions: he has been placed while yet alive by the side of the world’s greatest moral teachers, beside Jesus and Socrates—
“the latter Socrates,
Greek to the core, yet Yankee too.”
And his biographer records briefly94 his conviction that this man was “perhaps the most advanced nature the world has yet produced.” Yet the facts of his life are few and simple. He was born in May, 1819, on the shores of the great south bay of Long Island. Like Bret Harte, who has given classic expression to the young life of Western America, Whitman is half Dutch, and this ancestral fact is significant. The well-known[100] portrait prefixed to “Leaves of Grass” shows him with an expression like his father’s; in later life he bears a singular resemblance to his mother as she is represented in Bucke’s book. He himself, we are told, makes much of the women of his ancestry. “I estimate three leading sources and formative stamps of my own character,”—in his own words—“the maternal95 nativity-stock brought hither from far-away Netherlands, for one (doubtless the best); the subterranean96 tenacity97 and central bony structure (obstinacy, wilfulness) which I get from my paternal English elements, for another; and the Long Island birth-spot, sea-shores, childhood’s scenes, absorptions, with teeming98 Brooklyn and New York—with, I suppose, my experiences afterwards in the Secession outbreak—for third.” His mother, he wrote, was to him “the ideal woman, practical, spiritual, of all of earth, life, love, to me the best.”
For thirty years the youth set himself to learn the nature of the world. There could be no better education; he has described its elementary stages, by barnyard and roadside, in “There was a child went forth99.” The same large receptiveness still went with him, as he was by turn teacher, printer, journalist, government clerk, and always, and above all, loafer. He loafed year after year in Broadway, on Fulton Ferry, on the omnibuses talking to the drivers, in the workshops[101] talking to the artisans. His physical health was perfect; he earned enough to live on; he felt himself the equal of highest or lowest; he drank of the great variegated100 stream of life before him from every cup. His culture was, in its own way, as large and as sincere as Goethe’s. Of books, indeed, he knew little; he was equally ignorant of science, of philosophy, of the fine arts; he appears to have been content—for his own ends wisely content—with elemental and mostly ancient utterances of the race, as the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare, the Nibelungenlied. And by-and-by, in 1855, when this new personality, with its wide and deep roots, had become organized, Walt Whitman, at the age of thirty-six, himself printed and published a little book called “Leaves of Grass.”
After this there was but one fresh formative influence in Whitman’s life, but without it his life and his work would both have suffered an immense lack. What had chiefly characterized him so far had been his audacious nonchalance101, the frank and absolute egotism of a healthy Olympian schoolboy. In 1860 the Civil War began; from 1862 to 1865 Whitman nursed the sick and wounded at Washington. During that period of three years (broken by an attack of hospital malaria102, the first illness of his life, contracted in the discharge of these self-imposed duties) he visited and tended nearly 100,000 men,[102] and the personal presence of the man, his inexhaustible love and sympathy, were of even more worth than the manifold small but precious services that he was enabled to render. He has himself given a simple and noble record of his work in the “Memoranda” included in “Specimen Days and Collect,” and in “Drum Taps,” a still more precious and intimate record of his experiences. From this period a deep tenderness, a divine compassion for all things human, is never absent from Whitman’s work; it becomes more predominant than even his superb egotism. It is this element in his large emotional nature, brought to full maturity105 by these war experiences, which so many persons have felt thrilling through the man’s whole personality, and which probably explains in some measure the devotion he has inspired. Whitman went to Washington young, in the perfection of virile106 physical energy (“He is a Man,” said the shrewd Lincoln, to whom Whitman was unknown, as he chanced to see him through a window once); he came away old and enfeebled, having touched the height of life, to walk henceforth a downward path. Physically107 impressive, however, at that time and always, he remained. He is described, after this time (chiefly by Dr. Bucke), as six feet in height, weighing nearly two hundred pounds; with eyebrows108 highly arched; eyes light blue, rather small, dull and heavy (this point is of some[103] interest, bearing in mind that with exceptional creative imagination large bright eyes are associated); full-sized mouth, with full lips; large handsome ears, and senses exceptionally acute. The peculiar complexion109 of his face, Bucke described as a bright maroon110 tint111; that of his body “a delicate but well-marked rose colour,” unlike the English or Teutonic stock; his gait an elephantine roll. “No description,” his Boswellian biographer, Dr. Bucke, again speaks (and Mr. Kennedy, a later and equally Boswellian biographer, supplies confirmatory details), “can give any idea of the extraordinary physical attractiveness of the man,” even upon those who came in contact with him for a moment. In 1873 he had a stroke of paralysis112 (left hemiplegia), and for three years there seemed little promise of recovery. The return to health was slow and incomplete. In those years he spent much time bathing, or naked in the open air—“hanging clothes on a rail near by, keeping old broad-brim straw on head and easy shoes on feet”—and considered that that counted for much in his restoration to health. “Perhaps,” he adds, “he or she to whom the free exhilarating ecstasy113 of nakedness in nature has never been eligible114, has not really known what purity is—nor what faith or art or health really is.”
It is not possible to apprehend115 this man’s work unless the man’s personality is appre[104]hended. Every great book contains the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, and no book throbs116 with a more vivid personal life than “Leaves of Grass.” It is the whole outcome of a whole man, audacious and unrepentant, who has here set down the emotional reverberations of a manifold life. “For only,” according to his own large saying,
“For only at last, after many years, after chastity, friendship, procreation, prudence118 and nakedness,
After treading ground and breasting river and lake,
After a loosened throat, after absorbing eras, temperaments119, races, after knowledge, freedom, crimes,
After complete faith, after clarifyings, elevations120, and removing obstructions122,
After these and more, it is just possible there comes to a man, a woman, the divine power to speak words.”
III.
Of art, in the conventional sense of the word, there is not much in Whitman. If we wish to approach him as an artist, J. F. Millet123 probably helps us to understand him, more than any other artist in foreign fields and lands. Millet has a deep and close relationship to Whitman. At first sight, their work is curiously124 unlike: Whitman, in a great new country, delighting in every manifestation125 of joy and youth and hope; Millet, the child of an older and colder country,[105] in love with age and suffering and toil126. Yet in essentials it is identical. Even personally, it is said, Millet recalled Whitman.[6] Judging from the representations of him, Millet, in his prime, was a colossal128 image of manly129 beauty—deep-chested, muscular, erect130, the quiet, penetrating131 blue eyes, the delicately expressive132 eyelids133, the large nose and dilating134 sensitive nostrils135, the firm mouth and jaw136, the thick and dark brown beard. The consumptive artist—a Keats or a Thoreau—craves for health and loveliness; he turns shuddering139 from all that is not pleasant. It is only these men, heroic incarnations of health, who are strong enough to look sanely141 upon age and toil and suffering, and equal to the prodigious142 expense of spirit of writing “Leaves of Grass” with a heart laden143 with memories of Washington hospitals.
Millet and Whitman have, each in his own domain144, made the most earnest, thorough, and successful attempts of modern times to bring the Greek spirit into art, the same attempt which Jan Steen, a great artist whom we scarcely yet rate at his proper value, made in seventeenth century Holland. It is not by the smooth nudities of a Bouguereau or a Leighton that we reach Hellenism. The Greek spirit is the simple,[106] natural, beautiful interpretation145 of the life of the artist’s own age and people under his own sky, as shown especially in the human body. It cannot be the same in two ages or in two lands. One little incident mentioned by Madame Millet to a friend is suggestive, “of Millet compelling her to wear the same shirt for an uncomfortably long time; not to paint the dirt, as his early critics would have us believe, but that the rough linen146 should simplify its folds and take the form of the body, that he might give a fresher and stronger accent to those qualities he so loved, the garment becoming, as it were, a part of the body, and expressing, as he has said, even more than the nude147, the larger and simpler forms of Nature.” There is the genuine Hellenic spirit, working in a different age and under a different sky. Millet felt that for him it was not true to paint the naked body, and at the same time that the body alone was the supremely148 interesting thing to paint. In the “Sower” we see this spirit expressed in the highest form which Millet ever reached—the grace of natural beauty and strength, in no remote discobolus or gladiator, but in the man of his own country and clime, a peasant like himself, whose form he had studied from his own in the mirror in his own studio. The coarse clothes and rough sabots play the same part in Millet’s work as the bizarre, uncouth150 words and varied151 technical phraseology in[107] Whitman’s; one may call them accidental, but they are inevitable152 and necessary accidents. “One must be able,” Millet said, “to make use of the trivial for the expression of the sublime.” They both insisted that the artist must deal with the average and typical, not with the exceptional. They both tried to bring the largeness and simplicity of Nature into their work, and to suggest more than they expressed. They both refused to believe any part of Nature could be other than lovely. “The man who finds any phase or effect in Nature not beautiful,” said Millet sternly, “the lack is in his own heart.”
It is not as an artist that Whitman is chiefly interesting to us. It is true that he has written “Out of the Cradle endlessly rocking,” “When Lilacs last in the Dooryard bloomed,” “This Compost,” and other fragments from which may be gained a simple and pure ?sthetic joy. Frequently, also, we come across phrases which reveal a keen perception of the strangeness and beauty of things, lines that possess a simplicity and grandeur153 scarcely less than Homeric; thus, “the noiseless splash of sunrise;” or of the young men bathing, who “float on their backs, their white bellies154 bulge155 to the sun.” But such results are accidental, and outside the main purpose. For that very reason they have at times something of the divine felicity, unforeseen and[108] incalculable, of Nature; yet always, according to a rough but convenient distinction, it is the poetry of energy rather than the poetry of art. When Whitman speaks prose, the language of science, he is frequently incoherent, emotional, unbalanced, with no very just and precise sense of the meaning or words or the structure of reasoned language.[7] It is clear that in this man the moral in its largest sense—that is to say, the personality and its personal relations—is more developed than the scientific; and that on the ?sthetic side the artist is merged156 in the mystic, wrapt in emotional contemplation of a cosmic whole. What we see, therefore, is a manifold personality seeking expression for itself in a peculiarly flexible and responsive medium. It is a deep as well as a superficial resemblance that these chants bear to the Scriptures157 of the old Hebrews—as Isaiah or the Book of Job—wherein also the writer becomes an artist, and also absorbs all available science, but where his purpose is the[109] personal expression of a moral and religious conception of life and the world. Whitman has invented a name for the person who occupies this rare and, in the highest degree, significant position; he calls him the “Answerer.” It is not the function of answerers, like that of philosophers, to arrange the order and limits of ideas, for they have to settle what ideas are or are not to exist; nor is it theirs, like the singers, to celebrate the ostensible159 things of the world, or to seek out imaginative forms, for they are “not followers160 of beauty, but the august masters of beauty.” The answerer is, in short, the maker161 of ideals.
Whitman will not minimize the importance of the answerer’s mission. “I, too,” he exclaims, “following many and followed by many, inaugurate a religion.” If we wish to understand Walt Whitman, we must have some conception of this religion. We shall find that two great and contradictory162 conceptions dominate his work; although in his thoughts, as in his modes of expression, it is not possible to find any strongly marked progression.
The “Song of Myself” is the most complete utterance75 of Whitman’s first great conception of life.
“I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul;
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is.”
[110]
The absolute unity163 of matter and spirit, and all which that unity involves, is the dominant104 conception of this first and most characteristic period. “If the body were not the soul,” he asks, “what is the soul?” This is Whitman’s naturalism; it is the re-assertion of the Greek attitude on a new and larger foundation. “Let it stand as an indubitable truth, which no inquiries164 can shake, that the mind of man is so entirely165 alienated166 from the righteousness of God, that he cannot conceive, desire, or design anything but what is wicked, distorted, foul167, impure168 and iniquitous169; that his heart is so thoroughly170 environed by sin that it can breathe out nothing but corruption171 and rottenness.” That is the fundamental thought of Christian172 tradition set down in the “Institutes,” clearly and logically, by the genius of Calvin. It is the polar opposite of Whitman’s thought, and therefore for Whitman the moral conception of duty has ceased to exist.
“I give nothing as duties,
What others give as duties I give as living impulses.
(Shall I give the heart’s action as a duty?)”
Morality is thus the normal activity of a healthy nature, not the product either of tradition or of rationalism.
“Whatever tastes sweet to the most perfect person, that is finally right”—this, it has been said, is the maxim173 on which Whitman’s morality[111] is founded, and it is the morality of Aristotle. But no Greek ever asserted and illustrated174 it with such emphatic175 iteration.
From the days when the Greek spirit found its last embodiment in the brief songs, keen or sweet, of the “Anthology,” the attitude which Whitman represents in the “Song of Myself” has never lacked representatives. Throughout the Middle Ages those strange haunting echoes to the perpetual chant of litany and psalm176, the Latin student-songs, float across all Europe with their profane177 and gay paganism, their fresh erotic grace, their “In taberna quando sumus,” their “Ludo cum C?cilia,” their “Gaudeamus igitur.” In the sane140 and lofty sensuality of Boccaccio, as it found expression in the history of Alaciel and many another wonderful story, and in Gottfried of Strasburg’s assertion of human pride and passion in “Tristan and Isolde,” the same strain changed to a stronger and nobler key. Then came the great wave of the Renaissance178 through Italy and France and England, filling art and philosophy with an exaltation of physical life, and again later, in the movements that centre around the French Revolution, an exaltation of arrogant179 and independent intellectual life. But all these manifestations180 were sometimes partial, sometimes extravagant; they were impulses of the natural man surging up in rebellion against the dominant Christian temper; they were, for[112] the most part consciously, of the nature of reactions. We feel that there is a fatal lack about them which Christianity would have filled; only in Goethe is the antagonism181 to some extent reconciled. Beneath the vast growth of Christianity, for ever exalting182 the unseen by the easy method of pouring contempt on the seen, and still ever producing some strange and exquisite183 flower of ascêsis—some Francis or Theresa or Fénelon—a slow force was working underground. A tendency was making itself felt to find in the theoretically despised physical—in those everyday stones which the builders of the Church had rejected—the very foundation of the mysteries of life; if not the basis for a new vision of the unseen, yet for a more assured vision of the seen.
No one in the last century expressed this tendency more impressively and thoroughly, with a certain insane energy, than William Blake—the great chained spirit whom we see looking out between the bars of his prison-house with those wonderful eyes. Especially in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” in which he seems to gaze most clearly “through narrow chinks of his cavern,” he has set forth his conviction that “first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged,” and that “if the doors of perception were cleansed184, everything would appear to man, as it is, in[113]finite.” This most extraordinary book is, in his own phraseology, the Bible of Hell.
Whitman appeared at a time when this stream of influence, grown mighty185, had boldly emerged. At the time that “Leaves of Grass” sought the light Tourgueneff was embodying186 in the typical figure of Bassaroff the modern militant187 spirit of science, positive and audacious—a spirit marked also, as Hinton pointed188 out, by a new form of asceticism189, which lay in the denial of emotion. Whitman, one of the very greatest emotional forces of modern times, who had grown up apart from the rigid190 and technical methods of science, face to face with a new world and a new civilization, which he had eagerly absorbed so far as it lay open to him, had the good inspiration to fling himself into the scientific current, and so to justify the demands of his emotional nature; to represent himself as the inhabitant of a vast and co-ordinated cosmos191, tenoned and mortised in granite192:
“All forces have been steadily193 employed to complete and delight me,
Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul.”
That Whitman possessed no trained scientific instinct is unquestionably true, but it is impossible to estimate his significance without understanding what he owes to science. Something, indeed, he had gained from the philosophy of[114] Hegel—with its conception of the universe as a single process of evolution, in which vice103 and disease are but transient perturbations—with which he had a second-hand194 acquaintance, that has left distinct, but not always well assimilated marks on his work; but, above all, he was indebted to those scientific conceptions which, like Emerson, he had absorbed or divined. It is these that lie behind “Children of Adam.”
This mood of sane and cheerful sensuality, rejoicing with a joy as massive and calm-eyed as Boccaccio’s, a moral-fibred joy that Boccaccio never knew, in all the manifestations of the flesh and blood of the world—saying, not: “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” but, with Clifford: “Let us take hands and help, for this day we are alive together”—is certainly Whitman’s most significant and impressive mood. Nothing so much reveals its depth and sincerity195 as his never-changing attitude towards death. We know the “fearful thing” that Claudio, in Shakespeare’s play, knew as death:
“to die and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction121 and to rot;
... to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and uncertain thoughts
Imagine howling!”
And all the Elizabethans in that age of splendid[115] and daring life—even Raleigh and Bacon—felt that same shudder138 at the horror and mystery of death. Always they felt behind them some vast medi?val charnel-house, gloomy and awful, and the sunniest spirits of the English Renaissance quail196 when they think of it. There was in this horror something of the child’s vast and unreasoned dread197 of darkness and mystery, and it scarcely survived the scientific and philosophic198 developments of the seventeenth century. Whitman’s attitude is not the less deep-rooted and original. For he is not content to argue, haughtily199 indifferent, with Epicurus and Epictetus, that death can be nothing to us, because it is no evil to lose what we shall never miss. Whitman will reveal the loveliness of death. We feel constantly in “Leaves of Grass” as to some extent we feel before the “Love and Death” and some other pictures of one of the greatest of English artists. “I will show,” he announces, “that nothing can happen more beautiful than death.” It must not be forgotten that Whitman speaks not merely from the standpoint of the most intense and vivid delight in the actual world, but that he possessed a practical familiarity with disease and death which has perhaps never before fallen to the lot of a great writer. At the end of the “Song of Myself” he bequeaths himself to the dust, to grow from the grass he loves:
[116]
“If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles,
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.”
And to any who find that dust but a poor immortality200, he would say with Schopenhauer, “Oho! do you know, then, what dust is?” The vast chemistry of the earth, the sweetness that is rooted in what we call corruption, the life that is but the leavings of many deaths, is nobly uttered in “This Compost,” in which he reaches beyond the corpse201 that is good manure202 to sweet-scented roses, to the polished breasts of melons; or again, in the noble elegy203, “Pensive on her dead gazing,” on those who died during the war. In his most perfectly204 lyrical poem, “Out of the Cradle endlessly rocking,” Whitman has celebrated205 death—“that strong and delicious word”—with strange tenderness; and never has the loveliness of death been sung in a more sane and virile song than the solemn death-carol in “When Lilacs last in the Dooryard bloomed”:
“Dark mother, always gliding206 near with soft feet,
Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?
Then I chant it for thee, I glorify207 thee above all,
I bring thee a song, that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly.
[117]
“Over the tree-tops I float thee a song,
Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad208 fields and the prairies wide,
Over the dense-packed cities all and the teeming wharves209 and ways,
I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee, O Death.”
Whitman’s second great thought on life lies in his egoism. His intense sense of individuality was marked from the first; it is emphatically asserted in the “Song of Myself”—
“And nothing, not God, is Greater to one than one’s self is”—
where it lies side by side with his first great thought. But even in the “Song of Myself” it asserts a separate existence:
“This day before dawn I ascended210 a hill and looked at the crowded heaven,
And I said to my spirit, When we become the enfolders of those orbs158, and the pleasure and knowledge of everything in them, shall we be filled and satisfied then?
And my spirit said, No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond.”
In the end he once, at least, altogether denies his first thought; he alludes211 to that body which he had called the equal of the soul, or even the soul itself, as excrement212:
“Myself discharging my excrementitious body to be burned, or reduced to powder, or buried,
My real body doubtless left to me for other spheres.”
[118]
The first great utterance was naturalistic; this egoism is spiritualistic. It is the sublime apotheosis213 of Yankee self-reliance. “I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself.” This became the dominant conception in Whitman’s later work, and fills his universe at length. Of a God, although he sometimes uses the word to obtain emphasis, he at no time had any definite idea. Nature, also, was never a living vascular214 personality for him; when it is not a mere aggregate215 of things, it is an order, sometimes a moral order. Also he wisely refuses with unswerving consistency216 to admit an abstract Humanity; of “man” he has nothing to say; there is nothing anywhere in the universe for him but individuals, undying, everlastingly217 aggrandizing218 individuals. This egoism is practical, strenuous219, moral; it cannot be described as religious. Whitman is lacking—and in this respect he comes nearer to Goethe than to any other great modern man—in what may be possibly the disease of “soul,” the disease that was so bitterly bewailed by Heine. Whitman was congenitally deficient in “soul;” he is a kind of Titanic220 Undine. “I never had any particular religious experiences,” he told Bucke, “never felt the need of spiritual regeneration;” and although he describes himself as “pleased with the earnest words of the sweating Methodist[119] preacher, impressed seriously at the camp-meeting,” we know what weight to give to this utterance when we read elsewhere, of animals:
“They do not sweat and whine221 about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania222 of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.”
We may detect this lack of “soul” in his attitude towards music; for, in its highest development, music is the special exponent223 of the modern soul in its complexity224, its passive resignation, its restless mystical ardours. That Whitman delighted in music is clear; it is equally clear, from the testimony225 of his writings and of witnesses, that the music he delighted in was simple and joyous melody as in Rossini’s operas; he alludes vaguely226 to symphonies, but
“when it is a grand opera,
Ah! this indeed is music—this suits me.”
That Whitman could have truly appreciated Beethoven, or understood Wagner’s “Tannh?user,” is not conceivable.
With Whitman’s egoism is connected his strenuousness227. There is a stirring sound of trumpets228 always among these “Leaves of Grass.”[120] This man may have come, as he tells us, to inaugurate a new religion, but he has few or no marks upon him of that mysticism—that Eastern spirit of glad renunciation of the self in a larger self—which is of the essence of religion. He is at the head of a band of sinewy229 and tan-faced pioneers, with pistols in their belts and sharp-edged axes in their hands:
“And he going with me leaves peace and routine behind him,
And stakes his life to be lost at any moment.”
This strenuousness finds expression in the hurried jolt230 and bustle231 of the lines, always alert, unresting, ever starting afresh. Passages of sweet and peaceful flow are hard to find in “Leaves of Grass,” and the more precious when found. Whitman hardly succeeds in the expression of joy; to feel exquisitely232 the pulse of gladness a more passive and feminine sensibility is needed, like that we meet with in “Towards Democracy;” we must not come to this focus of radiant energy for repose233 or consolation234.
This egoism, this strenuousness, reaches at the end to heights of sublime audacity. When we read certain portions of “Leaves of Grass” we seem to see a vast phalanx of Great Companions passing for ever along the cosmic roads, stalwart Pioneers of the Universe. There are superb[121] young men, athletic235 girls, splendid and savage236 old men—for the weak seem to have perished by the roadside—and they radiate an infinite energy, an infinite joy. It is truly a tremendous diastole of life to which the crude and colossal extravagance of this vision bears witness; we weary soon of its strenuous vitality237, and crave137 for the systole of life, for peace and repose. It is not strange that the immense faith of the prophet himself grows hesitant and silent at times before “all the meanness and agony without end,” and doubts that it is an illusion and “that may-be identity beyond the grave a beautiful fable238 only.” Here and again we meet this access of doubt, and even amid the faith of the “Prayer of Columbus” there is a tremulous, pathetic note of sadness.
Yet there is one keen sword with which Whitman is always able to cut the knot of this doubt—the sword of love. He has but to grasp love and comradeship, and he grows indifferent to the problem of identity beyond the grave. “He a-hold of my hand has completely satisfied me.” He discovers at last that love and comradeship—adhesiveness—is, after all, the main thing, “base and finale, too, for all metaphysics;” deeper than religion, underneath239 Socrates and underneath Christ. With a sound insight he finds the roots of the most universal love in the intimate and physical love of comrades and lovers.
[122]
“I mind how once we lay, such a transparent240 summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips51 and gently turned over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged241 your tongue to my bare-stript heart,
And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet.
“Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love.”
IV.
This “love” of Whitman’s is a very personal matter; of an abstract Man, a solidaire Humanity, he never speaks; it does not appear ever to have occurred to him that so extraordinary a conception can be formulated242; his relations to men generally spring out of his relations to particular men. He has touched and embraced his fellows’ flesh; he has felt throughout his being the mysterious reverberations of the contact:
“There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact and odour of them, that pleases the soul well,
[123]
All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.”
This personal and intimate fact is the centre from which the whole of Whitman’s morality radiates. Of an abstract Humanity, it is true, he has never thought; he has no vision of Nature as a spiritual Presence; God is to him a word only, without vitality; to Art he is mostly indifferent; yet there remains243 this great moral kernel244, springing from the sexual impulse, taking practical root in a singularly rich and vivid emotional nature, and bearing within it the promise of a city of lovers and friends.
This moral element is one of the central features in Whitman’s attitude towards sex and the body generally. For the lover there is nothing in the loved one’s body impure or unclean; a breath of passion has passed over it, and all things are sweet. For most of us this influence spreads no farther; for the man of strong moral instinct it covers all human things in infinitely245 widening circles; his heart goes out to every creature that shares the loved one’s delicious humanity; henceforth there is nothing human that he cannot touch with reverence246 and love. “Leaves of Grass” is penetrated247 by this moral element. How curiously far this attitude is from the old Christian way we realize when we turn to those days in which Christianity was at its height, and see how Saint Bernard with his mild and[124] ardent248 gaze looked out into the world of Nature and saw men as “stinking spawn249, sacks of dung, the food of worms.”
But there is another element in Whitman’s attitude—the artistic. It shows itself in a twofold manner. Whitman came of a vigorous Dutch stock; these Van Velsors from Holland have fully as large a part in him as anything his English ancestry gave him, and his Dutch race shows itself chiefly in his artistic manner. The supreme149 achievement in art of the Dutch is their seventeenth century painting. What marked those Dutch artists was the ineradicable conviction that every action, social or physiological250, of the average man, woman, child, around them might be, with love and absolute faithfulness, phlegmatically251 set forth. In their heroic earthliness they could at no point be repulsed252; colour and light may aureole their work, but the most commonplace things of Nature shall have the largest nimbus. That is the temper of Dutch art throughout; no other art in the world has the same characteristics. In the art of Whitman alone do we meet with it again, impatient indeed and broken up into fragments, pierced through with shafts253 of light from other sources, but still constant and unmistakable. The other artistic element in Whitman’s attitude is modern; it is almost the only artistic element by which, unconsciously perhaps, he allies himself to modern[125] traditions in art instead of breaking through them by his own volcanic254 energy—a curious research for sexual imagery in Nature, imagery often tinged255 by bizarre and mystical colour. Rossetti occasionally uses sexual imagery with rare felicity, as in “Nuptial Sleep”:
“And as the last slow sudden drops are shed
From sparkling eaves when all the storm has fled,
So singly flagged the pulses of each heart.”
With still greater beauty and audacity Whitman, in “I sing the body electric,” celebrates the last abandonment of love:
“Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate256 dawn,
Undulating into the willing and yielding day,
Lost in the cleave257 of the clasping and sweet-fleshed day.”
Or, again, in the marvellously keen “Faces”—so realistic and so imaginative—when the “lily’s face” speaks out her longing258 to be filled with albescent honey. This man has certainly felt the truth of that deep saying of Thoreau’s, that for him to whom sex is impure there are no flowers in Nature. He cannot help speaking of man’s or woman’s life in terms of Nature’s life, of Nature’s life in terms of man’s; he mingles259 them together with an admirably balanced rhythm, as in “Spontaneous Me.” All the functions of man’s or woman’s life are sweet to him because[126] they bear about them a savour of the things that are sweet to him anywhere in the world,
“Of the smell of apples and lemons, of the pairing of birds,
Of the wet of woods, of the lapping of waves.”
Sometimes when he is on this track he seems to lose himself in mystic obscurity; and the words in which he records his impressions are mere patches of morbid colour.
There is a third element in Whitman’s attitude. It is clear that he had from the outset what may be vaguely called a scientific purpose in that frank grasp of the body, which has a significance to be measured by the fierce opposition260 it aroused, and by the tenacity with which, in the latest volume of his old age, “November Boughs,” he still insists that the principle of those lines so gives breath to the whole scheme that the bulk of the pieces might as well have been left unwritten were those lines omitted. He has himself admirably set this forth in “A Memorandum261 at a Venture” in “Specimen Days and Collect.” In religion and politics we have, after a great struggle, gained the priceless possibility of liberty and sincerity. But the region of sex is still, like our moral and social life generally, to a large extent unreclaimed; there still exist barbarous traditions which medi?val Christianity has helped to perpetuate262, so that the words of Pliny[127] regarding the contaminating touch of a woman, who has always been regarded as in a peculiar manner the symbol of sex—“Nihil facile reperiabatur mulierum profluvio magis monstrificum”—are not even yet meaningless. Why should the sweetening breath of science be guarded from this spot? Why should not “freedom and faith and earnestness” be introduced here? Our attitude towards this part of life affects profoundly our attitude towards life altogether. To realize this, read Swift’s “Strephon and Chloe,” which enshrines, vividly263 and unshrinkingly, in a classic form, a certain emotional way of approaching the body. It narrates264 the very trivial experiences of a man and woman on their bridal night. The incidents are nothing; they are perfectly innocent; the interesting fact about them is the general attitude which they enfold. The unquestioning faith of the man is that in setting down the simple daily facts of human life he has drowned the possibilities of love in filth265. And Swift here represents, in an unflinchingly logical fashion, the opinions, more or less realized, more or less disguised, of most people even to-day. Cannot these facts of our physical nature be otherwise set down? Why may we not “keep as delicate around the bowels266 as around the head and heart?” That is, in effect, the question which, in “A Memorandum at a Venture,” Whitman tells us that he under[128]took to answer. This statement of it was probably an afterthought; else he would have carried out his attempt more thoroughly and more uncompromisingly.
For I doubt if even Whitman has fully realized the beauty and purity of organic life; the scientific element in him was less strong than the moral, or even the artistic. While his genial poetic267 manner of grasping things is of prime importance, the new conceptions of purity are founded on a scientific basis which must be deeply understood. Swift’s morbid and exaggerated spiritualism, a legacy268 of medi?valism—and the ordinary “common-sense” view is but the unconscious shadow of medi?val spiritualism—is really founded on ignorance, in other words, on the traditional religious conceptions of an antique but still surviving barbarism.
From our modern standpoint of science, opening its eyes anew, the wonderful cycles of normal life are for ever clean and pure, the loathsomeness269, if indeed anywhere, lies in the conceptions of hypertrophied and hyper?sthetic brains. Some who have striven to find a vital natural meaning in the central sacrament of Christianity have thought that the Last Supper was an attempt to reveal the divine mystery of food, to consecrate270 the loveliness of the mere daily bread and wine which becomes the life of man. Such sacraments of Nature are everywhere subtly woven into the[129] texture271 of men’s bodies. All loveliness of the body is the outward sign of some vital use.
Doubtless these relationships have been sometimes perceived and their meaning realized by a sort of mystical intuition, but it is only of recent years that science has furnished them with a rational basis. The chief and central function of life—the omnipresent process of sex, ever wonderful, ever lovely, as it is woven into the whole texture of our man’s or woman’s body—is the pattern of all the process of our life. At whatever point touched, the reverberation117, multiplexly charged with uses, meanings, and emotional associations of infinite charm, to the sensitive individual more or less conscious, spreads throughout the entire organism. We can no longer intrude272 our crude distinctions of high and low. We cannot now step in and say that this link in the chain is eternally ugly and that is eternally beautiful. For irrational273 disgust, the varying outcome of individual idiosyncrasy, there is doubtless still room; it is incalculable, and cannot be reached. But that rational disgust which was once held to be common property has received from science its death-blow. In the growth of the sense of purity, which Whitman, not alone, has annunciated, lies one of our chief hopes for morals, as well as for art.
[130]
V.
Behind “Leaves of Grass” stands the personality of the man Walt Whitman; that is the charm of the book and its power. It is, in his own words, the record of a Person. A man has here sought to give a fresh and frank representation of his nature—physical, intellectual, moral, ?sthetic—as he received it, and as it grew in the great field of the world. Sometimes there is an element in this record which, while perhaps very American, reminds one of the great Frenchman who shouted so lustily through his huge brass274 trumpet, seated on the apex275 of the universe in the Avenue d’Eylau. The noble lines to “You felons276 on trial in Courts” accompany “To him that was crucified.” Such rhetorical flourishes do not impair277 the value of this revelation. The self-revelation of a human personality is the one supremely precious and enduring thing. All art is the search for it. The strongest and most successful of religions were avowedly278 founded on personalities279, more or less dimly seen. The intimate and candid280 record of personality alone gives quickening energy to books. Herein is the might of “Leaves of Grass.”
In our overstrained civilization the tendency in literature—and in life as it acts on literature[131] and is again reacted on by it—is, on the one hand, towards an artificial mode of presentment, that is, a divorce between the actual and the alleged281, a divorce which, in the language of satire282, is often called hypocrisy283. On the other hand, the tendency is towards a singleness of aim and ideal indeed, but a thin, narrow, super-refined ideal, at the same time rather hysterical284 and rather prim127. In youth we cannot see through these Tartuffes and Précieuses; when we become grown men and women we feel a great thirst for Nature, for reality in literature, and we slake285 it at such fountains as this of “Leaves of Grass.” Like Ant?us of old we bow down to touch the earth, to come in contact with the great primal286 energies of Nature, and to grow strong. We realize that the structure of the world is indeed built most gloriously on the immense pillars of Hunger and Love, and we will not seek to deny or to attenuate287 its foundations. Presenting a truth so abstract in fresh and living concrete language, this man, as an Adam in a new Paradise, which is the very world itself, walks again upon the earth, sometimes with calm complaisance288, sometimes “deliriating” wildly:
“Behold me where I pass, hear my voice, approach,
Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass,
Be not afraid of my body.”
[132]
He has tossed “a new gladness and roughness” among men and women. He has opened a fresh channel of Nature’s force into human life—the largest since Wordsworth, and more fit for human use—“the amplitude289 of the earth, and the coarseness and sexuality of the earth, and the great charity of the earth, and the equilibrium290 also.” And in his vigorous masculine love, asserting his own personality he has asserted that of all—“By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.” Charging himself in every place with contentment and triumph, he embraces all men, as St. Francis in his sweet, humble291, Christian way also embraced them, in the spirit of audacity, and rankness, and pride. So that all he has written is summed up in one ejaculation: “How vast, how eligible, how joyful292, how real is a human being, himself or herself!”
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complement
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cult
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| n.异教，邪教；时尚，狂热的崇拜 | |
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artistic
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| adj.艺术(家)的，美术(家)的；善于艺术创作的 | |
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fully
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fanatics
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| 狂热者，入迷者( fanatic的名词复数 ) | |
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germinate
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robust
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austere
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veins
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genial
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| adj.亲切的，和蔼的，愉快的，脾气好的 | |
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serene
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hilarity
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allusion
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| n.暗示，间接提示 | |
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posited
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sanity
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concord
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doctrines
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| n.教条( doctrine的名词复数 )；教义；学说；（政府政策的）正式声明 | |
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solitary
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temperament
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deliberately
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marrow
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intermittent
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vindicated
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solitudes
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harmonious
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miseries
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mingling
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discriminating
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ancestry
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jersey
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hirsuteness
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scotch
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receding
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anthropoid
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clenched
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specially
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wares
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possessed
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| adj.疯狂的；拥有的，占有的 | |
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42
trumpet
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| n.喇叭，喇叭声；v.吹喇叭，吹嘘 | |
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43
naturalist
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| n.博物学家(尤指直接观察动植物者) | |
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44
peculiar
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| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
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45
recording
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| n.录音，记录 | |
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46
morbid
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| adj.病的；致病的；病态的；可怕的 | |
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47
dissection
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| n.分析；解剖 | |
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48
investigations
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| （正式的）调查( investigation的名词复数 )； 侦查； 科学研究； 学术研究 | |
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49
deficient
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| adj.不足的，不充份的，有缺陷的 | |
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50
impersonal
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| adj.无个人感情的，与个人无关的，非人称的 | |
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51
hips
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| abbr.high impact polystyrene 高冲击强度聚苯乙烯，耐冲性聚苯乙烯n.臀部( hip的名词复数 )；[建筑学]屋脊；臀围（尺寸）；臀部…的 | |
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52
illuminating
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| a.富于启发性的，有助阐明的 | |
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53
inquisitiveness
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| 好奇，求知欲 | |
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54
boulders
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| n.卵石( boulder的名词复数 )；巨砾；（受水或天气侵蚀而成的）巨石；漂砾 | |
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55
mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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56
durable
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| adj.持久的，耐久的 | |
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57
undoubtedly
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| adv.确实地，无疑地 | |
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58
tonic
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| n./adj.滋补品，补药，强身的，健体的 | |
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59
audacity
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| n.大胆，卤莽，无礼 | |
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60
sublime
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| adj.崇高的，伟大的；极度的，不顾后果的 | |
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61
immortal
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| adj.不朽的；永生的，不死的；神的 | |
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62
braggart
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| n.吹牛者；adj.吹牛的，自夸的 | |
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63
aboriginal
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| adj.（指动植物）土生的，原产地的，土著的 | |
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64
radical
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| n.激进份子，原子团，根号；adj.根本的，激进的，彻底的 | |
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65
affinities
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| n.密切关系( affinity的名词复数 )；亲近；（生性）喜爱；类同 | |
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66
extravagant
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| adj.奢侈的；过分的；(言行等)放肆的 | |
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67
originality
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| n.创造力，独创性；新颖 | |
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68
suave
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| adj.温和的；柔和的；文雅的 | |
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69
perennial
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| adj.终年的；长久的 | |
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70
joyous
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| adj.充满快乐的；令人高兴的 | |
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71
simplicity
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| n.简单，简易；朴素；直率，单纯 | |
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72
pumpkin
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| n.南瓜 | |
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73
velvet
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| n.丝绒，天鹅绒；adj.丝绒制的，柔软的 | |
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74
sage
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| n.圣人，哲人；adj.贤明的，明智的 | |
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75
utterance
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| n.用言语表达，话语，言语 | |
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76
utterances
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| n.发声( utterance的名词复数 )；说话方式；语调；言论 | |
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77
specimen
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| n.样本，标本 | |
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78
ornament
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| v.装饰，美化；n.装饰，装饰物 | |
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79
benighted
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| adj.蒙昧的 | |
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80
costliest
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|
| adj.昂贵的( costly的最高级 )；代价高的；引起困难的；造成损失的 | |
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81
adamant
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| adj.坚硬的，固执的 | |
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82
captivity
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| n.囚禁；被俘；束缚 | |
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83
acridity
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| n.辛辣，狠毒；苛性；极苦 | |
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84
aurora
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| n.极光 | |
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85
phenomena
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| n.现象 | |
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86
purely
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| adv.纯粹地，完全地 | |
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87
justify
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| vt.证明…正当(或有理)，为…辩护 | |
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88
democrat
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| n.民主主义者，民主人士；民主党党员 | |
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89
aristocrat
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| n.贵族，有贵族气派的人，上层人物 | |
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90
devoid
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| adj.全无的，缺乏的 | |
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91
compassion
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| n.同情，怜悯 | |
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92
generosity
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| n.大度，慷慨，慷慨的行为 | |
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93
patriotism
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| n.爱国精神，爱国心，爱国主义 | |
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94
briefly
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| adv.简单地，简短地 | |
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95
maternal
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|
| adj.母亲的，母亲般的，母系的，母方的 | |
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96
subterranean
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|
| adj.地下的，地表下的 | |
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97
tenacity
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| n.坚韧 | |
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98
teeming
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|
| adj.丰富的v.充满( teem的现在分词 )；到处都是；（指水、雨等）暴降；倾注 | |
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99
forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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100
variegated
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| adj.斑驳的，杂色的 | |
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101
nonchalance
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| n.冷淡，漠不关心 | |
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102
malaria
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| n.疟疾 | |
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103
vice
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| n.坏事；恶习；[pl.]台钳，老虎钳；adj.副的 | |
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104
dominant
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|
| adj.支配的，统治的；占优势的；显性的；n.主因，要素，主要的人(或物)；显性基因 | |
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105
maturity
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| n.成熟；完成；(支票、债券等)到期 | |
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106
virile
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| adj.男性的；有男性生殖力的；有男子气概的；强有力的 | |
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107
physically
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|
| adj.物质上，体格上，身体上，按自然规律 | |
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108
eyebrows
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| 眉毛( eyebrow的名词复数 ) | |
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109
complexion
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| n.肤色；情况，局面；气质，性格 | |
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110
maroon
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|
| v.困住，使（人）处于孤独无助之境；n.逃亡黑奴；孤立的人；酱紫色，褐红色；adj.酱紫色的，褐红色的 | |
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111
tint
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| n.淡色，浅色；染发剂；vt.着以淡淡的颜色 | |
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112
paralysis
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| n.麻痹(症)；瘫痪(症) | |
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113
ecstasy
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| n.狂喜，心醉神怡，入迷 | |
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114
eligible
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| adj.有条件被选中的；(尤指婚姻等)合适(意)的 | |
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115
apprehend
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| vt.理解，领悟，逮捕，拘捕，忧虑 | |
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116
throbs
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| 体内的跳动( throb的名词复数 ) | |
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117
reverberation
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| 反响； 回响； 反射； 反射物 | |
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118
prudence
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| n.谨慎，精明，节俭 | |
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119
temperaments
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| 性格( temperament的名词复数 )； （人或动物的）气质； 易冲动； （性情）暴躁 | |
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120
elevations
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| （水平或数量）提高( elevation的名词复数 )； 高地； 海拔； 提升 | |
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121
obstruction
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| n.阻塞，堵塞；障碍物 | |
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122
obstructions
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| n.障碍物( obstruction的名词复数 )；阻碍物；阻碍；阻挠 | |
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123
millet
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| n.小米，谷子 | |
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124
curiously
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| adv.有求知欲地；好问地；奇特地 | |
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125
manifestation
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| n.表现形式；表明；现象 | |
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126
toil
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| vi.辛劳工作，艰难地行动；n.苦工，难事 | |
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127
prim
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| adj.拘泥形式的，一本正经的；n.循规蹈矩，整洁；adv.循规蹈矩地，整洁地 | |
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128
colossal
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| adj.异常的，庞大的 | |
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129
manly
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| adj.有男子气概的；adv.男子般地，果断地 | |
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130
erect
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| n./v.树立，建立，使竖立；adj.直立的，垂直的 | |
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131
penetrating
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|
| adj.（声音）响亮的，尖锐的adj.（气味）刺激的adj.（思想）敏锐的，有洞察力的 | |
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132
expressive
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| adj.表现的，表达…的，富于表情的 | |
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133
eyelids
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| n.眼睑( eyelid的名词复数 )；眼睛也不眨一下；不露声色；面不改色 | |
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134
dilating
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| v.（使某物）扩大，膨胀，张大( dilate的现在分词 ) | |
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135
nostrils
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| 鼻孔( nostril的名词复数 ) | |
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136
jaw
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| n.颚，颌，说教，流言蜚语；v.喋喋不休，教训 | |
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137
crave
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| vt.渴望得到，迫切需要，恳求，请求 | |
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138
shudder
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| v.战粟，震动，剧烈地摇晃；n.战粟，抖动 | |
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139
shuddering
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| v.战栗( shudder的现在分词 )；发抖；（机器、车辆等）突然震动；颤动 | |
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140
sane
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| adj.心智健全的，神志清醒的，明智的，稳健的 | |
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141
sanely
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| ad.神志清楚地 | |
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142
prodigious
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| adj.惊人的，奇妙的；异常的；巨大的；庞大的 | |
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143
laden
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| adj.装满了的；充满了的；负了重担的；苦恼的 | |
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144
domain
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| n.(活动等)领域，范围；领地，势力范围 | |
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145
interpretation
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| n.解释，说明，描述；艺术处理 | |
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146
linen
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| n.亚麻布，亚麻线，亚麻制品；adj.亚麻布制的，亚麻的 | |
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147
nude
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| adj.裸体的；n.裸体者，裸体艺术品 | |
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148
supremely
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| adv.无上地，崇高地 | |
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149
supreme
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| adj.极度的，最重要的；至高的，最高的 | |
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150
uncouth
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| adj.无教养的，粗鲁的 | |
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151
varied
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| adj.多样的，多变化的 | |
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152
inevitable
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| adj.不可避免的，必然发生的 | |
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153
grandeur
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| n.伟大，崇高，宏伟，庄严，豪华 | |
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154
bellies
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| n.肚子( belly的名词复数 )；腹部；（物体的）圆形或凸起部份；腹部…形的 | |
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155
bulge
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| n.突出，膨胀，激增；vt.突出，膨胀 | |
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156
merged
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| （使）混合( merge的过去式和过去分词 )； 相融； 融入； 渐渐消失在某物中 | |
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157
scriptures
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| 经文，圣典( scripture的名词复数 )； 经典 | |
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158
orbs
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| abbr.off-reservation boarding school 在校寄宿学校n.球，天体，圆形物( orb的名词复数 ) | |
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159
ostensible
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| adj.(指理由)表面的，假装的 | |
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160
followers
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| 追随者( follower的名词复数 )； 用户； 契据的附面； 从动件 | |
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161
maker
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| n.制造者，制造商 | |
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162
contradictory
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| adj.反驳的，反对的，抗辩的；n.正反对，矛盾对立 | |
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163
unity
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| n.团结，联合，统一；和睦，协调 | |
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164
inquiries
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| n.调查( inquiry的名词复数 )；疑问；探究；打听 | |
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165
entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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166
alienated
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| adj.感到孤独的，不合群的v.使疏远( alienate的过去式和过去分词 )；使不友好；转让；让渡（财产等） | |
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167
foul
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| adj.污秽的；邪恶的；v.弄脏；妨害；犯规；n.犯规 | |
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168
impure
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| adj.不纯净的，不洁的；不道德的，下流的 | |
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169
iniquitous
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| adj.不公正的；邪恶的；高得出奇的 | |
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170
thoroughly
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| adv.完全地，彻底地，十足地 | |
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171
corruption
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| n.腐败，堕落，贪污 | |
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172
Christian
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| adj.基督教徒的；n.基督教徒 | |
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173
maxim
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| n.格言，箴言 | |
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174
illustrated
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| adj. 有插图的，列举的 动词illustrate的过去式和过去分词 | |
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175
emphatic
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| adj.强调的，着重的；无可置疑的，明显的 | |
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176
psalm
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| n.赞美诗，圣诗 | |
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177
profane
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| adj.亵神的，亵渎的；vt.亵渎，玷污 | |
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178
renaissance
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| n.复活，复兴，文艺复兴 | |
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179
arrogant
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| adj.傲慢的，自大的 | |
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180
manifestations
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| n.表示，显示（manifestation的复数形式） | |
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181
antagonism
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| n.对抗，敌对，对立 | |
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182
exalting
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| a.令人激动的，令人喜悦的 | |
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183
exquisite
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| adj.精美的；敏锐的；剧烈的，感觉强烈的 | |
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184
cleansed
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| 弄干净，清洗( cleanse的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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185
mighty
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| adj.强有力的；巨大的 | |
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186
embodying
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| v.表现( embody的现在分词 )；象征；包括；包含 | |
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187
militant
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| adj.激进的，好斗的；n.激进分子，斗士 | |
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188
pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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189
asceticism
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| n.禁欲主义 | |
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190
rigid
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| adj.严格的，死板的；刚硬的，僵硬的 | |
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191
cosmos
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| n.宇宙；秩序，和谐 | |
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192
granite
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| adj.花岗岩，花岗石 | |
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193
steadily
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| adv.稳定地；不变地；持续地 | |
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194
second-hand
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| adj.用过的，旧的，二手的 | |
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195
sincerity
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| n.真诚，诚意；真实 | |
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196
quail
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| n.鹌鹑；vi.畏惧，颤抖 | |
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197
dread
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| vt.担忧，忧虑；惧怕，不敢；n.担忧，畏惧 | |
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198
philosophic
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| adj.哲学的，贤明的 | |
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199
haughtily
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| adv. 傲慢地, 高傲地 | |
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200
immortality
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| n.不死，不朽 | |
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201
corpse
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| n.尸体，死尸 | |
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202
manure
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| n.粪，肥，肥粒；vt.施肥 | |
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203
elegy
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| n.哀歌，挽歌 | |
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204
perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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205
celebrated
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| adj.有名的，声誉卓著的 | |
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206
gliding
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| v. 滑翔 adj. 滑动的 | |
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207
glorify
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| vt.颂扬，赞美，使增光，美化 | |
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208
myriad
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| adj.无数的；n.无数，极大数量 | |
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209
wharves
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| n.码头，停泊处( wharf的名词复数 ) | |
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210
ascended
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| v.上升，攀登( ascend的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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211
alludes
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| 提及，暗指( allude的第三人称单数 ) | |
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212
excrement
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| n.排泄物，粪便 | |
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213
apotheosis
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| n.神圣之理想；美化；颂扬 | |
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214
vascular
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| adj.血管的，脉管的 | |
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215
aggregate
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| adj.总计的，集合的；n.总数；v.合计；集合 | |
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216
consistency
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| n.一贯性，前后一致，稳定性；(液体的)浓度 | |
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217
everlastingly
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| 永久地，持久地 | |
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218
aggrandizing
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| v.扩大某人的权力( aggrandize的现在分词 )；提高某人的地位；夸大；吹捧 | |
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219
strenuous
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| adj.奋发的，使劲的；紧张的；热烈的，狂热的 | |
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220
titanic
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| adj.巨人的，庞大的，强大的 | |
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221
whine
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| v.哀号，号哭；n.哀鸣 | |
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222
mania
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| n.疯狂；躁狂症，狂热，癖好 | |
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223
exponent
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| n.倡导者，拥护者；代表人物；指数，幂 | |
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224
complexity
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| n.复杂(性)，复杂的事物 | |
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225
testimony
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| n.证词；见证，证明 | |
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226
vaguely
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| adv.含糊地，暖昧地 | |
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227
strenuousness
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228
trumpets
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| 喇叭( trumpet的名词复数 )； 小号； 喇叭形物； （尤指）绽开的水仙花 | |
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229
sinewy
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| adj.多腱的，强壮有力的 | |
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230
jolt
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| v.（使）摇动，（使）震动，（使）颠簸 | |
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231
bustle
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| v.喧扰地忙乱，匆忙，奔忙；n.忙碌；喧闹 | |
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232
exquisitely
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| adv.精致地；强烈地；剧烈地；异常地 | |
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233
repose
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| v.(使)休息；n.安息 | |
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234
consolation
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| n.安慰，慰问 | |
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235
athletic
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| adj.擅长运动的，强健的；活跃的，体格健壮的 | |
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236
savage
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| adj.野蛮的；凶恶的，残暴的；n.未开化的人 | |
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237
vitality
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| n.活力，生命力，效力 | |
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238
fable
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| n.寓言；童话；神话 | |
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239
underneath
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|
| adj.在...下面，在...底下；adv.在下面 | |
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240
transparent
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| adj.明显的，无疑的；透明的 | |
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241
plunged
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| v.颠簸( plunge的过去式和过去分词 )；暴跌；骤降；突降 | |
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242
formulated
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| v.构想出( formulate的过去式和过去分词 )；规划；确切地阐述；用公式表示 | |
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243
remains
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|
| n.剩余物，残留物；遗体，遗迹 | |
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244
kernel
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| n.(果实的)核，仁；(问题)的中心，核心 | |
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245
infinitely
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| adv.无限地，无穷地 | |
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246
reverence
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| n.敬畏，尊敬，尊严；Reverence:对某些基督教神职人员的尊称；v.尊敬，敬畏，崇敬 | |
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247
penetrated
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| adj. 击穿的，鞭辟入里的 动词penetrate的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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248
ardent
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| adj.热情的，热烈的，强烈的，烈性的 | |
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249
spawn
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| n.卵，产物，后代，结果；vt.产卵，种菌丝于，产生，造成；vi.产卵，大量生产 | |
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250
physiological
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| adj.生理学的，生理学上的 | |
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251
phlegmatically
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252
repulsed
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| v.击退( repulse的过去式和过去分词 )；驳斥；拒绝 | |
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253
shafts
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| n.轴( shaft的名词复数 )；（箭、高尔夫球棒等的）杆；通风井；一阵（疼痛、害怕等） | |
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254
volcanic
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|
| adj.火山的；象火山的；由火山引起的 | |
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255
tinged
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| v.（使）发丁丁声( ting的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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256
prostrate
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| v.拜倒，平卧，衰竭；adj.拜倒的，平卧的，衰竭的 | |
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257
cleave
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| v．(clave；cleaved)粘着，粘住；坚持；依恋 | |
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258
longing
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| n.（for）渴望 | |
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259
mingles
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| 混合，混入( mingle的第三人称单数 )； 混进，与…交往[联系] | |
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260
opposition
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| n.反对，敌对 | |
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261
memorandum
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| n.备忘录，便笺 | |
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262
perpetuate
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| v.使永存，使永记不忘 | |
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263
vividly
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| adv.清楚地，鲜明地，生动地 | |
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264
narrates
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| v.故事( narrate的第三人称单数 ) | |
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265
filth
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| n.肮脏，污物，污秽；淫猥 | |
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266
bowels
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| n.肠，内脏，内部；肠( bowel的名词复数 )；内部，最深处 | |
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267
poetic
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| adj.富有诗意的，有诗人气质的，善于抒情的 | |
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268
legacy
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| n.遗产，遗赠；先人(或过去)留下的东西 | |
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269
loathsomeness
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270
consecrate
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| v.使圣化，奉…为神圣；尊崇；奉献 | |
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271
texture
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| n.(织物)质地；(材料)构造；结构；肌理 | |
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272
intrude
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| vi.闯入；侵入；打扰，侵扰 | |
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273
irrational
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| adj.无理性的，失去理性的 | |
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274
brass
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| n.黄铜；黄铜器，铜管乐器 | |
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275
apex
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| n.顶点，最高点 | |
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276
felons
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| n.重罪犯( felon的名词复数 )；瘭疽；甲沟炎；指头脓炎 | |
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277
impair
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| v.损害，损伤；削弱，减少 | |
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278
avowedly
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| adv.公然地 | |
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279
personalities
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| n. 诽谤，（对某人容貌、性格等所进行的）人身攻击； 人身攻击；人格, 个性, 名人( personality的名词复数 ) | |
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280
candid
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| adj.公正的，正直的；坦率的 | |
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281
alleged
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| a.被指控的，嫌疑的 | |
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282
satire
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| n.讽刺，讽刺文学，讽刺作品 | |
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283
hypocrisy
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| n.伪善，虚伪 | |
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284
hysterical
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| adj.情绪异常激动的，歇斯底里般的 | |
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285
slake
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| v.解渴，使平息 | |
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286
primal
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| adj.原始的；最重要的 | |
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287
attenuate
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| v.使变小，使减弱 | |
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288
complaisance
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| n.彬彬有礼，殷勤，柔顺 | |
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289
amplitude
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| n.广大；充足；振幅 | |
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290
equilibrium
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| n.平衡，均衡，相称，均势，平静 | |
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291
humble
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| adj.谦卑的，恭顺的；地位低下的；v.降低，贬低 | |
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292
joyful
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| adj.欢乐的，令人欢欣的 | |
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