WALT WHITMAN
Dilettante 1.
DANTE AND HIS IDEAL. With a
M.R.A.S. 2.
By HERBERT BAYNES,
Portrait.
BROWNING S MESSAGE TO HIS Dr.
EDWARD BERDOE.
With a
TIMES.
By
Portrait and Facsimile
Letters. 3. 4.
THE DOCTOR, AND OTHER POEMS.
By
T.
BROWNE, M.A., of Clifton College, Author Fo c s le Yarns." 2 vols.
E. "
5.
GOETHE. King
6.
s
By OSCAR BROWNING, M.A., Tutor With a
College, Cambridge.
DANTE.
of
of
Portrait.
By OSCAR BROWNING, M.A.
With a Front
ispiece. iVos. 5
and
6 are enlarged ft
oi
the Articles in
t/ie
7.
Encyclopedia Britannica." BROWNING S CRITICISM OF LIFE. By W. F. Member of the London Browning Society. RKVELL, With a Portrait.
8.
HENRIK IBSEN. STEED, M.A.
9.
the Rev. PHILII-
H. WICK-
Portrait.
THE ART OF ACTING. With a
10.
By
With a
By PERCY FITZGERALD.
Portrait.
WALT WHITMAN. Cambridge.
With a
By A^ILLIAM CLARKE, M.A., Portrait.
-\
WALT WHITMAN BY
WILLIAM CLARKE,
M.A,
WITH A PORTRAIT
SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO. NEW YORK: MACMILLAN & CO. 1892
Ur
****
r*
*..
PREFACE. THIS
little
book
written
is
an exposition rather
as
than as a criticism of the works of Walt Whitman. Nevertheless,
some
introduced.
The
in
considerations have been
critical
section
first
must not be taken
as
any sense a biography of Whitman, but merely as
an attempt to pourtray
varied influences which
forth the
For biography, the reader Dr. Bucke, and
is
either as published in 1883
moulded
work of Collects,
M
Cormick
&
The
series.
edition
of Leaves of Grass, quoted from in the text, "Author s
poem at Whitman
Copyright
the end, to
Edition"
"Death s
of 1881.
Valley,"
The
five
"
The
little
was written by
Valley of the
Shadow
sections into which this
divided have reference respectively to sonality, his relations to art, his
the
is
The
accompany a reproduction of the painting
by Mr. George Inness. Death."
life.
Days and
by Wilson
Camelot
to set
his
referred to the
to the Specimen
of Glasgow, or in the
and
his personality,
and message
for
s
is
per
America, his
belief about the nature of democracy,
ultimate spiritual creed,
work
Whitman
of
and
his
:
I
am
The The
the poet of the body and I am the poet of the soul, pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of lu-ll are with me, first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into a new tongue." "
"
Song
of
Myself,"
;? Well, he looks like a MAX ment on seeing Whitman. !
from Leaves of Grass.
President Lincoln
s
com
CONTENTS Chap. I.
II.
I
.....
HIS MESSAGE TO
III.
HIS
ART
IV.
HIS
DEMOCRACY
V.
.....21
Page
HIS PERSONALITY
HIS SPIRITUAL
AMERICA
.
CREED
.
.
50
79 IOI
WALT WHITMAN. I.-HIS PERSONALITY. THOSE who
regard
Whitman
as being the
most repre
Bard of Democracy, of its innermost ideas, of its moving forces, of its hopes and destiny, must find an interest in tracing the early influences which sentative
s body and character. The modern scientific doctrine of the effect of environ ment is enforced and enlarged by Whitman himself;
helped to mould the poet
for
he sees not only in social circumstances, in political and in daily human contact, but in the
constitutions,
earth and sky, the rivers and trees, silent influences pass into man s being and affect his whole
which
future.
As Wordsworth found
muring
sound"
Whitman
mur
"
the rocks
contributing their elements to
of man.
beauty born of
passing Lucy s face, so does discover persons, substances, beasts, the
trees, the running rivers,
to
"
into
How
Whitman
s
form the
natural, therefore, that
early
life
and sands
to discover
"
all
spiritual life
we should turn
what were those
agencies which stamped his nature with their seal.
A
\VALT WHITMAN.
On
Whitman was
his father s side
stock, possessed of
what he terms
"
of good English the surly English
and there is no tougher or truer, and never 1 Dr. Bucke tells us that the was, and never will of Whitman ancestor he is able to trace earliest lineal pluck,
be."
2 This person s son in England about i56o. in and lived at Milford, from sailed 1635, England
was born
some time before 1660, At West Hills, in Long Long s the Island, poet great-grandfather, grandfather, and and he himself was born there on the father lived Dr. Bucke describes the Whitmans 3ist May, 1819.
Connecticut, whence his son, Island.
passed over to
;
a solid, tall, strong-framed, long-lived race of men, moderate of speech, friendly, fond of their land and of horses and cattle, sluggish in their passions, but 3 Several of them were fearful when once started." as
"
soldiers
The
under Washington
poet
trade,
s
father
was a
animals, a
had
quiet, serious
good
in the Revolutionary
War.
learnt, as a youth, the carpenter s
man, fond of children and and neighbour. He
citizen, parent,
did his work so well that some of his frames are said
The large, quiet to be still standing as good as ever. personality of his father is traceable throughout Whit man s work ; and the hereditary interest in the car Song of the Broad Axe." mother was Louisa Van Velsor, of Dutch descent, a woman healthy in body and mind, of cheer-
pentry
is
found
Whitman
1 2
in the
"
s
u
Song of Myself." Walt Whitman, by R. M.
Philadelphia), p. 13. 3 Ibid.
Bucke, M.D.
(M Kay,
HIS PERSONALITY. temper, marked spiritual nature, and generous heart. She had been a handsome girl, fond of life in the open
ful
a daring and spirited rider boast of himself that he was
air,
"
so
;
Whitman could
Well-begotten, and raised by a perfect
mother."
His great-grandmother, on the paternal side, lived to a and when left a widow, managed her own
great age,
farm lands, and herself directed the labour of her Of were slaves in the colony then.
slaves, for there
his
two grandmothers, one was a Quakeress of beautiful
character,
who probably
furnished the poet with that aged woman in Leaves of
fine picture of a beautiful,
Grass
:
Behold a woman She looks out from her Quaker cap her face is Clearer and more beautiful than the sky. She sits in an arm-chair under the shaded porch of the "
!
;
farmhouse
;
The sun just shines on her old white head. Her ample gown is of cream-hued linen Her grandsons raised the flax, and her grand-daughters ;
spun
it
with the distaff and the wheel.
The melodious character of the earth, The finish beyond which philosophy cannot
go,
and does
not wish to go,
The
justified
The 1
"
mother of men."
1
old homestead in which
From Noon
P- 355-
to Starry
Whitman was born
Night."
Leaves
is
of Grass,
WALT WHITMAN. thus described by Mr. John Burroughs The Whit the of the at mans, present century, lived beginning in a long storey-and-a-half farmhouse, hugely timbered, "
:
which
is
still
standing.
kitchen, with vast hearth
A
great
smoke-canopied
and chimney, formed one
end of the house. The existence of slavery in New York at that time, and the possession by the family of some twelve or fifteen slaves, house and field servants,
The very young gave things quite a patriarchal look. darkies could be seen, a swarm of them, toward sun down,
in this kitchen, squatted in a circle
on the
floor,
and milk. In the house, and in food and furniture, all was rude but No carpets or stoves were known, and substantial. no coffee and tea, and sugar only for the women. Rousing wood fires gave both warmth and light on winter nights. Pork, poultry,, beef, and all the ordin Cider was ary vegetables and grains were plentiful. the men s common drink, and used at meals. The eating their supper of Indian pudding
homespun. Journeys were made by both men and women on horseback. Both sexes laboured with their own hands the men on the farm, clothes were mainly
the
women
in the
house and around
it.
Books were
The annual copy
of the almanac was a treat, scarce. and was pored over through the long winter evenings. I must not forget to mention that both these families
were near enough to the sea to behold it from the high places, and to hear in still hours the roar of the surf; the latter, after a storm, giving a peculiar at
night.
down
Then
all
sound
hands, male and female, went
frequently on beach
and bathing
parties,
and
HIS PERSONALITY. the
men on
and
for
5
practical expeditions for cutting salt hay,
clamming and
1 fishing."
along the island and
Whitman
tells
us
he spent intervals, many years, all seasons, sometimes riding, sometimes boating, but generally afoot (I was always
that
"
all
its
shores
"
"
then a good walker), absorbing fields, shores, marine incidents, characters, the bay-men, farmers, pilots, always had a plentiful acquaintance with the and with fishermen went every summer on
latter,
sailing
always liked the bare sea-beach, south side, my happiest hours on it to this day."
trips,
and have some of
(Written in 1882.)
1836
to 1850,
he
While
tells us,
living in Brooklyn from he loved to go to a bare, un
frequented shore, bathe and race up and down the hard sand, declaiming Shakspere and Homer to the 2 surf and sea-gulls by the hour.
The elements which entered into Whitman s and built up his manhood are now revealed to and we see why he exclaims, Muscle and pluck "
ever!"
Country
life,
life
us, for
honest labour, simple tastes and
out-of-door living, the sea with its infinite suggestiveness and perpetual grandeur, the tramp by
rural joys,
the shore or through the woods, life in the saddle and on the water, perfect health, the steeping of every sense in the voluptuous beauty of earth all these things
enabled Whitman to be the poet of the body. the strong ties of
1
Quoted
in
Whitman s Specimen Days and
p. ii (Glasgoiv, 1883). 2
Jbid, p. 14.
And
home, the deep human sympathies,
Collects,
WALT WHITMAN. the manly
republican
character
of his
father,
the
mother, the spirit of peace which brooded like a dove over the simple Quaker spiritual intuition of his
homestead these made him also the friend of man and the poet of the soul. But Whitman was to go through wider and more complicated experiences than these, or he could not have become Democracy s chosen bard. He was to become printer and journalist, to go freely, as he expresses it, with powerful, uneducated persons," to sound all the depths of life, good and bad, in a great in vast city, to live day by day with dead and dying an official, army hospitals, to serve the Government as to wander over vast regions of his own vast continent, (l He made him to discover what the great world is. "
with all kinds of writes Dr. Bucke, trade not reports and statistics, employments, by reading with the work hours but by watching and stopping self
men
"
familiar,"
(often his intimate friends) at their work.
He
visited the foundries,
shops, rolling mills, slaughter cotton factories, shipyards, the big carriage and cabinet shops
and
woollen
houses,
wharves, and
went to clam-bakes, races, auctions, weddings, sail ing and bathing parties, christenings, and all kinds of 1
-
merry-makings."
He knew
every
New York omni
bus-driver, and found them both good comrades and capital materials for study.
the
influence
(like the 1
Indeed, he
of these rough,
Broadway
tells
us that
good-hearted fellows
stage-driver in
To Think of Time)
Walt Whitman, by R. M. Bucke, M.D.
HIS PERSONALITY. "
undoubtedly entered into the gestation of Leaves of * No scene of natural beauty, no "apple-
Grass."
tree blows
ous,
and pink with every leaf a
of white "
lilac-bush
indolent, sinking sun,
no
air,"
uplands
in
the
orchard,"
no
miracle,"
burning,
no
"
gorge
expanding the no healthy "
"
hurry ing-tumbling waves," with herby-perfumed breezes
him
"
give
greater inspiration than the thronged streets of New interminable eyes," with the life of York, with the "
the theatre, bar-room, huge hotel, the saloon of the Manhattan crowds, steamer, the crowded excursion, "
with
their
turbulent musical chorus/
torrent, the never-ceasing roar of
the
rushing
modern human
life.
He
absorbs the influences coming from a gang of stevedores or a crowd of young men from a printingoffice as
he does these of
"
the splendid silent
sun,"
so that he can say with truth "
I
have loved the earth, sun, animals,
I
have despis d
riches; I
have given alms to every one that ask d, stood up for the stupid and crazy, devoted my income and labour to others,
Hated tyrants, argued not concerning God, had patience and indulgence toward the people, taken off my hat to nothing known or unknown, Gone freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young, and with the mothers of families, Read these leaves to myself in the open air, tried them by 1
-
trees, stars,
rivers,"
etc.
2
Specimen Days and Collects, p. 19. By Blue Ontario s Shore." Leaves of Grass, "
p. 273.
WALT WHITMAN.
8
A hopeless men,
"
"
subject this for
city
British matrons, organisers of
men, most clergy and all charity,"
"
who live by routine, and convention, and who survey life from the inside of a counting-house or a A great contrast, too, to our literary stuccoed villa.
persons
men, or ture, in
at least to the majority of
Whitman
ated with
life,
as
s it
eyes,
was
is
them.
once more
For
litera
vitally associ
in the days of the Elizabethan
dramatists, of the buoyant Cervantes, of the majestic Dante. It is not a profession, a separate calling, an affair
of libraries and literary coteries, but a transcript life. It has been supposed
from actual contemporary that
Whitman
coarseness, and
carried this to the
extreme limit of
he has been purposely, and (as it almost artificially rude in his contempt of con were) This is not, however, the case. ventions. His that
manners and breeding have been admitted by all who were privileged to know him, to be simple, unaffected, His bearing as man and as natural, and gentle. author
is
frankly democratic.
He
any hatred or contempt of those
does not breathe
who live in greater own simple way.
luxury ; he simply prefers his Scarce a single English contemporary
man
of letters
have thoroughly assimilated this demo cratic spirit, unless we except our noble artist-poet, William Morris, printing, designing, testing colours appears to
and patterns with masses
at
his
own hands, and speaking
out-of-door gatherings
;
in a
Robert Louis Stevenson, in his sylvan Samoa. In other countries Tolstoi s life is
lesser degree,
retreat in
to the
and perhaps
most closely analogous
to that of
Whitman.
HIS PERSONALITY.
The
result of this isolation of
our chief writers from
unquestionably loss of influence. be may reasonably suspected whether the popularity of Tennyson s exquisite poetry is much more than actual popular
life is
It
The average trade unionist probably would somewhat resent Tennyson s attitude to his class were he acquainted with the Laureate s middle-class popularity.
Browning has vigorous popular sympathies, poems, his subtle thought
verse.
but, with a few exceptional
beyond the slow mind of the British attracts only the s pensive muse s cultured few. Swinburne democratic instincts are indeed his is the not much more than skin-deep
carries
him
far
Arnold
artisan.
;
republicanism of his powerful master and inspirer, Landor. Spite of the super
aristocratic
ficially
worth
s
Pagan
reactionary character of a portion of Words poetry, his human instincts are so true, so
deep, that we may accept, as Mr. Arnold does, s o\vn verdict concerning his poems:
worth
will co-operate
nature and
with the benign tendencies in
society,
efficacious in
and
making men
And Wordsworth had
their
wiser, better,
not only
spirit of Nature, but had
poor men
will,
in
known
"
"They
human
degree,
be
and happier.
communed love
Words
with the
in huts
where
But on the whole the peasant-poet, Burns, born of the people and living among them all
his
lie."
life, is still
"
the British democratic bard.
Deep
in the general heart of
His power
And
men
survives."
that mighty influence of the
Ayrshire
plough-
WALT WHITMAN. man
is
surely
Whitman,
due
to the fact that with him, as with
literature
not a thing apart, but a tran like the Bible, the Pilgrim s ;
is
script of actual daily
life
Homer, Don Quixote, and those verses of Tasso which the Venetian gondoliers used to sing.
Progress,
"Out
from the heart of Nature rolled
The burdens
of the Bible
old."
Whitman s personal appearance is thus described by Thomas A. Gere, an employe of an East River steam boat, who was one of the poet s friends, and who, writing in 1882, paints his hero as he appeared in the
years from
185410 1860:
"Walt s
appearance used when he
to attract great attention from the passengers
He was quite six feet in boat. with a the frame of height, gladiator, a flowing gray beard mingled with the hairs on his broad, slightly came on board the
In his well-laundried checked
bared chest.
legs, his fine
shirt
into his boot
sleeves, with trousers frequently
pushed head covered with an immense slouched
black or light
felt
hat,
naturally majestic stride, I
he would walk about with a a massive model of ease and
hardly think his style of dress in
independence. those days was meant to be eccentric
;
he was very
show or sham, and I fancy he antagonistic in what was handy, clean, attired himself merely 1 In Mr. W. D. economical, and comfortable." O Connor s powerful, albeit too florid Vindication of The Good Gray Poet," dated Washington, 2nd to
all
"
"
"
September, 1865, when Whitman was 1
forty-six years
Walt Whitman, by R. M. Bucke, M.D.,
p. 33.
HIS PERSONALITY. old,
we have a
fine portrait of the poet as
A man
"
in his
prime
tt
:
he appeared
of striking masculine beauty
powerful and venerable in appearance large, oftenest clad in the careless, calm, superbly formed rough, and always picturesque costume of the com a poet
;
;
mon
people
resembling,
;
and
generally
taken
by
strangers for some great mechanic, or stevedore, or seaman, or grand labourer of one kind or another ;
and passing slowly
in this guise, with
nonchalant and
haughty step along the pavement, with the sunlight The dark sombrero falling around him.
and shadows
I
saw him
just
day being warm, held for the
moment
in his
he usually wears was, when rich light an
artist
would have chosen
uncovered head, majestic,
upon
now, the
hand
upon Homeric, and
large,
his strong shoulders with the
lay
;
his sat
grandeur of ancient
marked the countenance, serene, proud, cheerful, florid, grave; the brow seamed with noble wrinkles; the features massive and handsome, with firm blue eyes the eyebrows and eyelids especially I
sculpture.
;
showing
that fulness of arch
seldom seen save
in the
the flowing hair and fleecy beard, both with a look of age the youth and tempering very gray, ful aspect of one who is but forty-five (46 ?) ; the sim
antique busts
plicity
;
and purity of from snowy
spotless,
his dress,
cheap and plain, but burnished boot,
falling collar to
and exhaling faint fragrance the whole form sur rounded with manliness as with a nimbus, and breath ing, in its perfect health and vigour, the august charm ;
of the
1 strong." 1
"
The Good Gray
Poet,"
Bucke,
p. 99.
WALT WHITMAN.
12
1880 Dr. Bucke describes the poet, who paid
In
him a
visit
in
Canada during
that year,, as looking so
much
older than he was that persons took him to be seventy or even eighty. Yet, even then, the cheeks
were round and smooth, the body, a delicate but well-marked rose colour ; and it was the white hair "
"
and feebleness
He
perfectly healthy finest
due to paralysis, which alone had the keen bodily senses of a
in walking,
suggested age.
man, almost akin
barbarous races.
"
I
believe
of the
to those
all
the poet
s
senses
are exceptionally acute, his hearing especially so no sound or modulation of sound perceptible to others ;
escapes him, and he seems to hear
many
things that
I have heard him ordinary folk are inaudible. of the speak hearing grass grow and the trees coming
to
out in
1 leaf."
His favourite occupations when in his prime of health and vigour were sauntering about either in the streets or
among
the wild places where nature grew in
her strength and beauty.
"
I loaf
and
invite
my
soul/
he says, meaning that he absorbs every influence around him and passes on these experiences into his inner being and the spiritual world he has created for himself. He loved the splendid silent sun," and "
Mr. Conway relates how he found the bard in the primitive garb of Eden, before even the fig-leaf came into fashion as an article of costume, lying in the sand
by the sun.
sea-shore, revelling in the light
He
and heat of the
also loved to sing to himself in
an under
tone (an invariable sign of a happy nature), and to 1
Bucke,
p. 49.
HIS PERSONALITY.
He
recite poetry.
did not talk much.
He was
never
married, for the reason he gave to Dr. Bucke while the two were enjoying the scenery of the Thousand I suppose the chief Lawrence must married have been an over never
Islands of the
reason
why
I
"
St.
:
mastering passion for entire freedom, unconstraint
had an
instinct against forming ties that
;
I
would bind
* me."
It is generally
known
that
Whitman had
a paralytic
He
was attacked by it in had but he been February, 1873, frequently ill since was with he taken malarial when 1864, fever, induced
seizure several years ago.
by years of labour and watching amid the horrible tragedies of the military hospitals at Washington dur
He has been blamed because, ing the Civil War. with his splendid physique and professed patriotic The charge devotion, he did not serve in the army. breaks down when it is said that Whitman, brought up in
Quaker
traditions, held the creed of
Garrison, and of Tolstoi.
men s
George Fox, of not to destroy fighting was not his
He came
but to save them So far as physical courage is concerned, it probably needed less of that commodity to face the Southern bullets and cavalry charges than to serve in lives
:
metier.
a military hospital with all its terrible sights and sounds. There is here no martial music, no esprit de
no rushing headlong torrent of almost divine madness, no thought of glory to be won, no sudden heroic death nor chance of splendid victory. In place co?*ps,
of these elements of 1
the battlefield, there are
Bucke,
p. 60.
the
WALT WHITMAN.
14 stern,
round
whitewashed walls of the vast ward rising up all like the array of the sheeted dead there are ;
the mangled human forms, the broken limbs, the great red gashes, the pools of blood, the cries of agony, the grim instruments of the surgeon s art, and ever and
anon the ghastly spectre of Death victims on every side. Romance, though
it
battlefield
amid the
may ;
be, has
but
an inspiration
how many can
Argonne, sounding
humming
for
possess
down
his
and bloody men on the their
souls
stern realities of the hospital without
adventitious help or charm kind of delight in riding
whistle of
striking fierce
of tops, birds."
as
?
any Goethe found a positive amid the cannon-balls at "of
the
of water, and
the
though composed
the gurgling
But he could not look upon a
wounded
Men
object or a dead body without mortal terror. are so differently constituted that there is nothing
so difficult to affirm or deny as the presence of courage
any given person. If any censure is to be passed on Whitman for not actually taking up arms for the Republic in her hour of trial, let the blame be laid to the charge of a creed which has been held by some of in
the purest and bravest of men, and not to that of the poet s lack of courage.
Whatever the effect of these years of terrible ex perience on the poet s body, it cannot be doubted For here in these that they gave new life to his soul.
Washington hospitals he must have gazed deep into the very heart s core of supreme pity and human sym He sounded the divine depths of sorrow as pathy. earlier sounded those of joy in nature and of he had
HIS PERSONALITY. flushing virile
How
life.
15
wounded must have
the
loved the noble heroic figure who came stealing gently to the bed of pain, laying his cool palm softly as a
He lived in the utmost mother on the burning brow that in order he might have money for the simplicity !
purchase of
comfort or
articles to give
little
relief.
1
He is able in after years to recall simply but with conscious joy this time of help given to the sufferer :
u
breathe his
This arm,
this
many a dying
has
this breast
Upon
soldier lean
d
to
last,
hand, this voice, have nourish
d, raised,
restored,
To As
life
recalling
to
Whitman
many s
a -prostrate
form."
deep human love
for
2
man
as
man,
the following story told by Mr. W. D. O Connor I remember suffice to reveal this great quality here the anecdote told me by a witness, of his meet let
"
:
ing in a by-street in Boston a poor ruffian, one
he had known well as an innocent
child,
now
whom a
full-
his years,
youth, vicious far
grown flying to beyond Canada from the pursuit of the police, his sin-trampled features bearing marks of the recent bloody brawl in New York, in which, as he supposed, he had killed someone ; and having heard his hurried story, freely confided to him, Walt Whitman, separated not from the bad even by his own goodness, with well I know what tender and tranquil feeling 1 2
Bucke, pp. 36, 37. By Blue Ontario "
s
Shore."
for the ruined being,
Leaven of Grass, p. 273.
1
WALT WHITMAN.
6
and with a love which makes
God which
me
think of that love 01
deserts not any creature, quietly at part
him from his means, held him for a with his arm around his neck, and, bending moment, to the face, horrible and battered and prematurely ing, after assisting
old, kissed
him on the cheek, and
the poor hunted
for the first time in his
low life re wretch, perhaps a token of love and like a touch ceiving compassion from beyond the sun, hastened away in deep dejec tion,
A
* sobbing and in tears." finishing touch may be imparted to
pourtrayal of
Whitman s
this
attempted
account of personality by his appearance so late as the summer of 1890 by an The first thing that struck me was English visitor this
"
:
the physical immensity and magnificent proportions of the man, and, next, the picturesque majesty of his
He
presence as a whole.
sat quite erect in a great
cane-runged chair, cross-legged, and clad in rough gray clothes, with slippers on his feet, and a shirt of pure white linen with a great wide collar, edged with white lace, the shirt buttoned about midway down his breast, the big lapels of the collar
thrown open, the
and exposing the upper He his hirsute chest. wore a vest of gray of portion it was unbuttoned but almost to the homespun, points touching his shoulders,
He
bottom.
had no coat on, and
his shirt-sleeves
were turned up above the elbows, exposing most beautifully shaped arms, and flesh of the most delicate whiteness.
Although
spire visibly, while I 1
it
had
was so to
hot,
he did not per
keep mopping
The Good Gray Poet, by
W.
D.
O
my
Connor.
face.
HIS PERSONALITY.
17
hands are large and massive, but in perfect pro portion to the arms ; the fingers long, strong, white, But his majesty is and tapering to a blunt end. j.is
.
.
concentrated in his head, which
.
is
set with leonine
grace and dignity upon his broad, square shoulders ; and it is almost entirely covered with long, fine, straggling hair, silvery
and
glistening, pure
and white
on the top of his high, rounded crown, streaming over and around his large but delicately shaped ears, down the back of his as sunlit snow, rather thin
his pinky-white cheeks and top ; and, from over the lower part of his face, right down to the middle of his chest, like a cataract of materialised,
big neck
lip,
white, glistening vapour, giving
him a most venerable
and patriarchal appearance. His high, massive fore His nose is large, head is seamed with wrinkles. strong, broad, and prominent, but beautifully chiselled and proportioned, almost straight, very slightly de pressed at the tip, and with deep furrows on each
The
running down to the angles of the mouth. eyebrows are thick and shaggy with strong white side,
hair,
very highly arched, and standing a long way above the eyes, which are of a light blue with a tinge of gray, small, rather deeply set, calm; clear, penetrating,
and
revealing unfathomable depths of tenderness, kind The whole face impresses ness, and sympathy. .
.
.
one with a sense of resoluteness, strength, and lectual power,
and
yet withal, a
conquerable radiance, and hopeful 1
Notes of Visit
to
intel
winning sweetness, un x
joyousness."
Walt Whitman, by
J.
Johnston, M.D.
(Bolton, 1890).
B
WALT WHITMAN.
18
It may be asked whether we are to conceive of Whitman as a cultivated man, On the whole, prob
conventional sense
the
in
ably not,
of the
word.
early education was that of the American common school, he never went to college, he has himself told
His
as one dumb, a gawk, or and his dead," early work in the printingoffice prevented him from acquiring what is called culture." But when we recall the fact that England s
us that in libraries he
lies
"
3
unborn, or "
little Latin and less Greek/ supreme poet knew that Keats was innocent of classical learning, and that Burns derived his inspiration from beggars and "
mountain
daisies rather than "
Or
we
shall not
culture
from
Thebes or Pelop s line, Troy divine,"
the tale of
count the absence of a vast array of In stores of learning as a loss.
and immense
deed we may be reasonably sure that the presence of these would probably have fettered Whitman s peculiar genius. what to
Learning
do with
on the whole have in
lost in
is
good
for the
poet when he knows
as in the case of Browning. But the cultivated New England writers it,
power and
insight
what they ha ye gained
knowledge.
But we must not suppose that Whitman had not In Matthew Arnold s sense of the read a good deal. word culture a knowledge of the best that has been said
and thought
in the
world
1U Calamus."
we may
fairly class
HIS PERSONALITY.
Whitman among
19
We
cultured men.
hear
much
of
hundred best books/ and of speculations as to what one would like to have in the shape of literature were one cast on a desert island.
attempts to collect the
"
This talk shows a growing sense that the best the world can give us is contained in a few books, and a kind of bewilderment over the immense multitudes of
books a cultivated person
man
did
world
s
is
supposed
to read.
Whit
confining himself largely to the greatest spiritual products ; to the Bible, well
in
Shakspere,
Homer
Epictetus.
We
translation),
(in
see, too,
Don
Quixote,
from frequent references, that
he had made himself familiar with the philosophic ideas
and with the writings of Carlyle, Emerson, Tennyson, Arnold, and others of the more significant modern authors. He had read not a little of history and science, and may therefore be called a well-read of Hegel,
The
man.
with a red
fancy portrait of an ignorant barbarian and his boots on the table, must fade
shirt,
away before the
vision of the real
man, as he has been
partly depicted in these pages and in the writings of his friends. have now a very fair idea of him and
We
of the formative influences which
We
see in
moulded his life. him the genuine democrat of the very
highest type, sharing
man, and
all
the feelings of the average
yet adding something unique
something
that
we
call
and
precious,
Unconventional, powerful, with a healthy rudeness, combined with a delicate refinement, born out of deep human sym pathy,
and therefore
society.
His
genius.
mere politeness of somewhat oi the antique
outlasting the
figure has in
it
WALT WHITMAN.
2O heroic
type,
and yet withal a sweet benignity, so
blending the Pagan and the Christian elements with a thoroughly new tone the tone of the New World democrat, who is the peer of anyone, and whose vision sweeps the vast horizon of a mighty continent. We see in him one who has never sold character and in the market, and who has declined and despised the tempting bids which the men of enter In a land where prise make to the men of genius.
intellect
is a powerful factor, where friv olous Anglomaniacs outvie the elder world in pro fuse luxury and vulgar ostentation, a land much of
the
"
"
almighty dollar
whose
has
literature
Whitman has stood figure
been
mere puny
out a colossal and
original, courageous, solitary,
imitation,
commanding
and poor.
His
even greater than anything he has own manhood all that he has produced has flowed produced ; and is
forth
naturally
humanity.
from the fountain-head of
his
own
II.
-HIS MESSAGE TO AMERICA.
PROFESSOR LOMBROSO,
in his
suggestive,
recently translated
sided work,
but one
English, while bears the imprint
into
admitting that Whitman s poetry of strange and wild originality," classes the poet among And the not altogether sane egotists of genius. 1 "
when the poet frankly avows, I know perfectly well my own egotism," the superficial reader at once ac But Whitman is all the cepts Lombroso s estimate. time thinking not of his own individuality, but of modern humanity in its actual types, especially as "
found
"The America, whose representative he is. I sing," exclaims the poet, just as Dante
in
modern man sings
the mediaeval man.
But,
whereas
in
Dante
s
marked the mystic, unfathomable song culmination of a great world-era, Whitman, on the case,
the
"
"
other hand, stands
at
the birth of a vast
world, whose future growth he seeks
He
peers
down
the
"
democratic vistas
modern
to "
penetrate. of the open
new shapes loom not of his own it is of rush new virile life the tidal of personal ego, on the American continent, that he writes. The I
and discerns afar the dim distance. ing up ing age,
in the
great It
is
"
constantly sprinkling the pages of Leaves of Grass 1
The
Man
of Genius, p. 318 (London, 1891). 2J
"
is
WALT WHITMAN. not the individual but the collective American Ego, whose voice he believes himself to be. When he I salute all the inhabitants of the earth," exclaims, or I did not know I held so much goodness," he "
"
man
speaks for the modern
of his
own country
;
for
he reminds one perpetually that he claims nothing for himself which he does not concede to all. No, it is not egotism, it is the identification of a great indivi dual nature with the spirit and life of modern human
He
ity.
is
America
s
voice
not the voice of trans
;
cendental liberalism like Lowell, nor of a softened and humanised Puritanism like Whittier, nor an echo of England and Spain like Irving and Longfellow, but the voice of the average American spread over a vast
and
ragged continent, flush with life, energy, and His task is to foreshadow the future of the
still
hope. democratic "
life
there, to
announce things
to
come.
Fresh come, to a new world indeed, yet long prepared, I see the genius of the modern, child of the real and ideal,
ground for broad humanity, the America, heir of the past so grand,
Clearing the
To
build a grander
future."
true
1
Let us see what Whitman thinks of his own vast held up country with its new problems so suddenly before its people for solution by the sphinx of destiny. Whitman very clearly perceives both sides of the of the shield, and is as severe in his denunciation radical "
American
Song of the
vices,
as
he
Redwood-Tree."
is
confident in
Leaves of Grass,
the
p. 169.
HIS MESSAGE TO AMERICA. grand future of
"
these
States."
We
23
must note
alike
the warning voice of condemnation, and the resonant utterance of clear-sighted and sympathetic hope and faith in the people both of which discover themselves ;
in the essay
To
termed Democratic Vistas written
Whitman
take
first
in 1868.
in his Cassandra-like
char
powerful and searching diagnosis I of America, conceived in the vein of Carlyle say we had best look our times and lands searchingly
acter,
we have
this
"
:
in the face,
diagnosing some deep there, perhaps, more hollowness at present, and here in the United
like a physician
Never was
disease. at heart
than
Genuine
States.
belief
seems
to
have
left us.
The
underlying principles of the States are not honestly believed in (for all this hectic glow, and these melo
dramatic screamings), nor
What
in.
humanity itself believed does not everywhere see penetrating eye
through the mask
?
The
is
spectacle
is
appalling.
an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout. believe not in the women, nor the women
live in
men men.
We The in the
A
scornful superciliousness rules in literature. The aim of all the litterateurs is to find something to make fun of. lot of churches, sects, etc., the most
A
dismal phantasms I know, usurp the name of religion. From deceit in Conversation is a mass of badinage. the spirit, the mother of all false deeds, the offspring
An acute and candid person revenue department in Washington, who is led by the course of his employment to regularly visit the cities, north, south, and west, to investigate frauds, has
is
already incalculable.
in the
talk
d much with me about
his
discoveries.
The
WALT WHITMAN.
24
depravity of the business classes of our country is not than has been supposed, but infinitely greater.
less
The
official services
of America, national,
state,
and
municipal, are saturated in corruption, bribery, false hood, mal-administration ; and the judiciary is tainted.
reek with respectable as much as In fashion non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism. able life, flippancy, tepid amours, weak infidelism, 1
The
great
cities
In small aims, or no aims at all, only to kill time. business (this all-devouring modern word, business), the one sole object
The magician s
is, by any means, pecuniary gain. serpent in the fable ate up all the
and money-making is our magician s ; remaining to-day sole master of the field. best class we show is but a mob of fashionably-
other serpents serpent,
The
dressed speculators and vulgarians. behind this fantastic farce, enacted
Sure,
indeed,
on the
visible
stage of society, solid things and stupendous labours are to be discovered, existing crudely and going on in
the background, to advance and tell themselves in Yet the truths are none the less terrible. I time. say that our New World democracy, however great a success in uplifting the masses out of their sloughs in materialistic development, products,
and
in a certain
highly-deceptive superficial popular intellectuality, is, so far, an almost complete failure in its social aspects,
and
in
really
grand religious, moral, literary, and In vain do we march with unpre
aesthetic results.
cedented strides to empire so colossal, outvying the 1
Whitman
frequently uses this
word
disbelief in the higher purposes of his
to denote a
own
life.
man s
HIS MESSAGE TO AMERICA.
25
beyond Alexander
antique, sway of
s, beyond the proudest In vain have we annex d Texas,
Rome.
California, Alaska, and reach north for Canada and south for Cuba. It is as if we were somehow being
endow d with a
and more and more thoroughlyx left with little or no soul." The prose work of Whitman s from which this vast
appointed body, and then
quotation is taken is intended to be critical ; but in Leaves of Grass the same note is struck in the lines, To the States "
"
:
"
Who
and night-dogs askant
are they as bats
What
a
in the
?
capitol
Presidentiad (O South, your torrid North, your arctic freezings !) Are those really Congressmen ? are those the great
suns
filthy
Judges
Then
I
?
is
that the President
will sleep
sleep, for
This stern those
!
O
!
awhile yet, for
reasons."
denunciation
"
2
see that these States
3
who imagine Whitman
of what he calls a
I
?
barbaric
may be commended to
to
be the mere sounder
yawp,"
the mere glorifier
of crude democracy, the loud-mouthed showman in viting the European peoples generally to step up and see the unrivalled
within
"
these
Columbian There
States."
commonplace optimism 1
p.
in the
collection is,
contained
indeed, far
American
Democratic Vistas," from Specimen Days and 210 (Glasgow, 1883).
2
3
more
versifiers so
"
The
Presidencies of Fillmore, Pierce, Leaves of Grass, p. 219.
Collects,
and Buchanan.
WALT WHITMAN.
26
widely read in England than in either the prose or poetry of Whitman. Indeed, in the older American writers, before the
simple agricultural democracy had
become a highly complex almost hear
Ha, ha
"
!
industrial republic,
we can
"
the eagles of the Great Republic laugh. Whitman, on the contrary, seems, at least
in his later writing, to perceive with great clearness the
shortcomings of the United States
the superficiality,
the ostentation, the vague moral platitudes covering ugly social facts, the imposture connected with the "
game reduced the mock piety of "
political
to
its
baldest and ugliest
the millionaire, the blarney feature, of the politician, the materialism of the business-man, the sensationalism, vulgarity, and all the other surface
manifestations of democracy which led
M. Re nan
to
declare that, from the spiritual point of view, a single Italian city, with its art, its history, its background of
stormy, intense, individual life outweighed in impor tance the whole of America.
Mr. Matthew Arnold observed of America that it had solved the political problem, it had solved the social problem, but it had not solved the human pro blem. By the human problem Mr. Arnold meant a high standard of national
life,
works of creative genius, a
superb and beautiful ideal of manners, of conduct, of faith and aspiration, an ease and grace of living these things, according to Mr. Arnold, America has For a not, and few will be found to gainsay him. brief period, the nation rose to a height of moral
grandeur, when the fabric of her political union was threatened by an immoral and audacious rebellion.
HIS MESSAGE TO AMERICA. But even during that
must record
that
27
terrible crisis, impartial history
members
of Congress did not hesitate
Union
to receive bribes for concessions granted to the
But as soon as the
Civil
War was
Pacific Railway. over came the rush of immigrants, the opening up of the West, and the submergence of the country in a
The
wave of materialism.
tidal
quarter of a
last
century may be said to have been the era of railroad kings, grain-speculators, imported cheap labour, de
bank
faulting
America has thread
officials,
and
machine
"
of organic
politicians.
but dropped the the prey of has become union,
dignity, has
lost
"
all
and "trusts," dominated by unscrupulous anti-social instincts and aims. The with persons has of course shared of the civilised world greater part "rings"
in
this
diseased condition
but America has fared
;
and it is only her any enormous resources which have prevented the strain worse
than
other
from being too acutely
much work cies, that
is
felt.
And
while, doubtless,
being done to correct these
evil
tenden
work lacks concentration, and perhaps
telligent direction.
to
nation,
The
view the political
cultured classes,
and
social
who
are
in. apt.
condition of their
country with some degree of disgust, are much farther masses than are the cultivated people apart from the in England ; and, as a rule, they have no solution to "
offer.
They
"
are too cold, critical, conventional
represent the moral
fervid religious faith all dead. larger,
the
more
English
:
they
decorum of Puritanism, with
intelligent,
The
its
great middle-class,
and with a wider sweep than
middle-class,
is
yet
sunk
in
business
WALT WHITMAN.
28 materialism.
And
the vigorous, alert, clean American the swarms of
workman has been out-numbered by poorly-paid labourers
from
These varied
Europe.
classes, with the six millions of
nominally enfranchised
negroes, without sufficient common faith, ideas, pur do not furnish the requisite conditions
pose, culture, for the
Arnold
solution of the is right.
human problem.
So
far
Mr.
But when he contends that America
has solved the political and social problems, we must for she has not done even that at present. ;
demur
Consider the
political
problem.
The United
States
are Constitution, a work of great ingenuity, constructed by one of the most remarkable group of statesmen the modern world has
bound together by a Federal
seen, but bearing all the marks of the political ideas It is beginning to be sus of the eighteenth century. is a very good vessel in that that Constitution pected fair
weather; but that in a serious storm she may The people of the water-logged.
become hopelessly
United States have had, on the whole, an easy time But it, as compared with the nations of Europe.
of
worth noting that, in the case of the one serious problem which has confronted the American people, it is
their Constitution has
broken down.
The American
Constitution could not solve the problem of American to the arbitrament slavery, which had to be submitted
of the sword.
Inter
arma
silent leges;
and
for four
years the American Constitution was practically sus pended and slavery was first done away with as an act of
Further, the Constitution provided no means for the settlement of the disputed Presidential election in war.
HIS MESSAGE TO AMERICA.
29
1876; and an extra-constitutional tribunal had to be set up, whose decision even now is challenged by half the
American people.
We
perceive too, that, under this Constitution, the Federal power is constantly encroaching on the sup posed political sphere of the various States. Ballotstations, professedly
under State regulations, have been
surrounded by Federal troops, and may be so again.
The powers and mode of
election of the President,
and functions of the Senate, the powers accorded to the Speaker of the House, are all strongly criticised, to some extent disapproved, by an earnest the position
and able minority.
Supposing the directly elected
representatives of the people came into rude collision on some vital question of labour, or of organic reform
with that
"
millionaire
s
club
"
(as
it
has been called),
the Senate, what a dislocation of the entire political
system might not ensue
!
It
must
assumed
also be
problem includes what is the most difficult question of our time, the administration of How utterly the American system has large cities. that the political
broken down in
this respect, let the constant
and
dis
graceful scandals and incompetence of the city govern ments of New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Chicago,
and other places declare. Perhaps the political pro blem never will be solved; possibly the solution may be in a perpetual process of to the Hegelian conception.
have chopped another
is
ever this
off
be,
it
its
according
Perhaps as soon as we
one head of the
destined to rear
may
"becoming"
political
horrid crest.
hydra,
But how
cannot be averred that America
WALT WHITMAN.
30
has more decisively solved the political problem than most of the Western European nations have. Indeed, if there is one country above all others that would appear to have accomplished this feat it is Switzerland.
Turn from the America tained
when
structure
political to the social
How
really solved this?
is
it
is
can
understood that the American
substantially similar to
Europe. There land system of
problem. Has this be main
is
that of
social
Western
no inherent difference between the
England and that of the United States; and upon this economic basis the social edi fice is reared. The only difference lies in the extent of territory which the United States possess as com pared with the British Islands ; and that great patri
has been so rapidly absorbed or wasted that it calculated by an eminent statistician x that, within a quarter of a century there will be no more available
mony
is
Even
land for settlement.
as
lations respecting immigrants
it
of Mr. Lowell that his country "
no longer
the stringent regu
s
Free latch-string never was drawed
Against the poorest child of
is
is,
remind us that the boast
applies.
The
that of England,
Adam s
capitalist
only more
in
kin
system of America
despotic,
ambitious,
and less scrupulous. The contests between capitalist and workmen there are more severe and dangerous than those in England. rich
The
and poor are even more
social contrasts
between
startling than those in
Mr. Giffen.
HIS MESSAGE TO AMERICA. Europe
for
;
wealth there
the
more
far
is
rapidly
The average acquired and less readily assimilated. and the rate of wages is not high, average individual income
is
1 lower than in Great Britain.
Many American
millionaires,
it
is
worthy public causes with lavish hand
more money
true that
rich people than
is
is
true, ;
but
give to also
it is
extravagantly squandered by
In the Old the case in Europe. rich are probably still of
World the majority of the
families sufficiently old to be accustomed to the easy But the and natural use of immense possessions. American millionaire, who is not to the manner born, turns to some bizarre, strained, ostentatious display of
luxury in the shape of big, luxurious yachts, acres of foreign paintings, diamonds, fast horses, and other
which he
vanities,
rarely cares for,
and which he has
rarely time to enjoy, for he is not a man of leisure, but a wealthy drudge of the office, bank, or Stock It is impossible to separate social Exchange. from economic conditions, for the latter all but
life
in
variably constitute the formative mould of the former. The characteristic of social classes is inevitably de termined by the constant habit and action of the
Thus the poor are competing against one another
greater part of the -waking day.
mainly employed for a livelihood,
in
while the rich are engaged in com This fortune does not arise
peting for a fortune.
from genuine payment for social services, but from manipulation of unearned wealth. This, of course, is 1
U.
S.
Census Returns for 1880, and Mulhall
of Statistics, p. 245 (1886).
s
Dictionary
WALT WHITMAN,
32
more It
is
or less the character of our present civilisation. not claimed that America is peculiar in this
respect,
but that she shares the worm-eaten
social
order of Europe, and that she reveals it in a more naked form, unrelieved by the picturesque relics of an earlier form of civilisation. America has,, therefore, no more solved the social problem than has Europe ; and thus the whole of Mr. Arnold s criticism turns
out erroneous.
The
America are no more
and
political
really solved
social
than
is
problems of the human.
The
ease with which the American people have ad vanced is due rather to immense stores of material
wealth than to anything in the structure of Govern ment or society. The three leading democratic nations of the world, France, Great Britain, and the
United so)
States, enjoy (or suffer, if
much
the
same kind of
one
likes to
put
it
political organisation at
bottom. The popular vote is recognised as the source of political power but it is curious that in Great Britain, whose patch-work, time-honoured insti ;
tutions are the least acceptable to democratic theorists, the people have the closest, most immediate control The outward forms differ, of the domestic policy. *
the essence
is
The mass awakened
practically the same.
of the American
people have not yet is sub
to the fact that their social structure
stantially identical with that of
Western Europe.
was said of a distinguished parliamentary
It
orator, that
1 I say domestic purposely, because in foreign matters the English people are much more at the mercy of their Government than are the French or American.
HIS MESSAGE TO AMERICA.
33
him began with the repeal of the corn For the average American, history is very apt and he is apt to begin with the 4th July, 1776
history for laws.
to
;
think of his country as having started de novo an illusion sustained by the comparatively easy course of
American
history.
accident
but
;
abolished,
all
country was is not free.
"
Slavery of course was a serious
was supposed that when that was would be smooth sailing, because the it
"
in
free
some sense
The exaggerated
of such a patriot as Mr.
in
which England "
"
spread-eagleism Hannibal Chollop, or the
Hon. Elijah Pogram is, it is true, rare now for there no sane mind that is not impressed by actual, But the notion is still prevalent palpable facts. that America s troubles are superficial and passing, Europe s deep and abiding. It is this notion which ;
is
produces that easy-going superficial optimism, that resignation to public ineptitude
and
private tyranny,
which can scarcely fail to strike intelligent European visitors to the United States. The coal barons form unscrupulous combinations to advance prices and swell dividends but no one proposes to do any "
"
;
thing except a few persons who have just caught the ground-swell of European socialism, and who are
regarded as
"cranks."
Pinkerton detectives shoot
down unarmed men and women, and even
children
an incident which could not be imagined in England and it seems to cause but a ripple of mild protest even from excellent and kind-hearted people. What is the
;
immortal explanation of it all ? Probably that the principles" of 76 are as much a fetish in America as "
C
WALT WHITMAN.
34
those of 89 are in France.
The French
party.
"
The
conviction, crushes us.
It
to our
is fatal
past
Revolution, I say
with deep
it
weighs like an incubus
upon our hearts, and forbids them to beat. Dazzled by the grandeur of that Titanic struggle, we prostrate So wrote Mazzini * more than half a century ago. His words would not be so true to-day but they have not wholly lost their ourselves before
it
even
yet,"
;
And
while fourth of July orations no longer gather huge audiences as in the days of Webster and Clay, yet the underlying individualism of the American
meaning.
movement of
the last century is still deep-rooted in Individual liberty," and the "
the national character.
accompanying notion
that
every
without external social aid,
So
Europe. spirit
the United
in
stronger
far as
of self-reliance,
own
if
man
can
he wants
to,
States than in
get on are to-day
"
"
any part of
proceeds from a genuine and a determination to stand up this
and not lean on a superior power, and is quite compatible with a very much more collectivist state than any But in so far as it is a shirking of existing to-day. on one
s
this is
worthy of
feet,
social obligation,
antagonism not only an
all praise,
a denial of
human
claims,
or
to the organic conception of society, evil, it is the evil of the nineteenth
whose reAos has been
truly described as
it
an is
century, or "
being
2
ganic
justice."
The
actual condition of
America
is
thus seen to be,
from one point of view, not only imperfect, but more 1 2
Faith and the Future. Leslie Stephen in his Science of Ethics.
HIS MESSAGE TO AMERICA. an
than even
so
able
Mr. Arnold
like
critic
35 will
admit, more so than Whitman is perhaps aware of. For he, as we have seen, accepts American conditions as
"
uplifting the
masses out of their
New
in
as the social facts
sloughs,"
where
York,, Chicago, perhaps
even Boston, 1 throw some doubt upon average income is less than that of Great
this,
and the
He
Britain.
due measure of wealth as
sees the vital necessity of a
vast inter a requisite of general national virtue of wealth Whitman reticulation happily calls twining vast products with that it, thus combining the idea of "a
"
of interdependence, so that the wealth of one shall
not be an isolated phenomenon, but shall necessitate
How
America is from this She may perhaps be nearer to it than the leading European countries, but she is farther from it relatively to her greater advan
the wealth of others. ideal
is
to-day
well
Whitman
tages.
is
about the spiritual
far
known.
not deceived by the vapid talk being absolutely unaffected by
life
external physical conditions. truly heroic
English
who
visitor.
ignorantly
is
2
really
"Blessed
are ye poor/ you,"
for leaving things as
against
point
to Jesus
can become
he declared to an
passages
unintelligently
poor ye have always with
ment
No man
poor,"
There are many persons who quote
and
Gospels, such as
apology
"
proposed himself
or,
the
"The
as a kind of semi-
they are, or as an argu
social
and
from
changes. his
And
they Apostles as being
1 Cf. the recent Memorial against tenement house clothing presented to the U. S. Senate by Senator Hoar. 2
Notes of Visit to Walt Whitman, by
J.
Johnston,
M.D.
WALT WHITMAN.
36
poor in worldly possessions and yet rich in spiritual Such apologists for poverty may be unaware that
life.
Nazareth, in the days of Jesus, there were no absolutely poor people in our sense of the term ; i.e., no people so poverty-stricken as to be compelled to in
beg or there
steal.
any
rich
And
neither
people.
All
significant fact
could
manage
were
!
to
live
Jesus knew nothing of the complex problems of our modern civilisation and neither his ideas nor those of any other great religious teacher lives.
healthy
;
be appreciated by those
can
brutalised
by
daily
What is scrambling for the bare necessaries of life. The very poor, it to be spiritual but to be heroic ? years of hopeless effort, are so pinched and cramped that their spiritual growth is stunted, and the after
heroism are choked in the mephitic air Will you demand great virtues of squalid penury. from such miserable victims of distress ? As well possibilities of
What you will usually grapes from thorns. a of low order, lying, shiftless idleness, cunning get Not until the avenue of a better stolid despair.
demand is
physical life is opened will the benumbed nature glow with human warmth and the shrivelled heart
expand with human feeling. But whether Whitman perceives with equal clear For though he calls ness the way out is doubtful. for a
"
vast,
intertwining reticulation of
wealth,"
he
does not seem to anticipate any considerable organic
change
in
the economic structure of society.
the vast mass of off,
men can become
How
appreciably better
while a few are permitted to appropriate such a
HIS MESSAGE TO AMERICA.
37
large share of the total income, does not appear.
how
Nor
of things which has developed with such startling rapidity in America can be altered without considerable economic changes, to obvious
is it
this condition
be partly affected by
political
Whitman
means.
is
not a political economist, and does not profess to be one, and we have, therefore, no right to demand from him any definite suggestions as to the methods for in creasing the total production, and decreasing the
waste and effecting the better distribution of wealth.
These are questions for the statesman, the publicist, the practical reformer, not for the poet or the seer. But we do expect from the latter a kind of hint as to his social proclivities, a presentiment as to the general
And
direction of the curve of social progress.
Whitman somewhat
He
us.
disappoints
here
declares
middling pro merely for freedom of trade and for for men and women with occupa perty owners ; "
"
owners of houses and
tions, well-off,
cash in the that
"
1 bank."
America
s
And
he "
great
hope
tells
lies
acres,
his
and with
English visitor
in the fact that fully
of her territory is agricultural, and must be and while in the towns and cities there is a great
four-fifths so,
and scum, the whole that therein average," and 2 lie his hopes for the future. From which one infers that the poet looks forward to agricultural life, and in deal of pretentious show, sham,
country shows a splendid
dividual, as contrasted with corporate ownership, as the
1
2
"
Democratic
Vistas,"
Notes of Visit, by
J.
from Specimen Days,
Johnston, M.D.,
p.
12.
p. 221.
WALT WHITMAN.
38
economic
the American Republic. it is not so now, and he but foundation, would be a very bold and even rash person who would predict that this will be the material basis of
foundation
Such was
of
its
the future American nation. culture
is
The
truth
is
that agri
at all, that the
tendency even stronger than in England, and that corporate ownership has extended itself more rapidly than in any other country. According to the leading to
town
scarcely advancing
life is
English authority on the United States, the wealth of joint-stock corporations is estimated at one-fourth the
farming,
1
The growth of tenantunder absentee landlordism and of heavy
total value of all
property.
mortgage indebtedness,
in
the great
States
of the 2
Mississippi valley is assuming dangerous proportions. The actual evolution is not at all in the direction de
as indeed is sired by Whitman, but in quite another the case in Europe, and perhaps most of all in Aus tralia, where, in the colony of Victoria, nearly one :
ha]f of the entire population live in single city of Melbourne.
One Mr.
F.
and about the
has to echo in some degree the charge which W. H. Myers brings against the glowing
prophecies of Victor Hugo respecting "the Republic." \Ve instantly ask, what republic ? Is it the republic of a peasant democracy like that of Switzerland or Norway; or is it a complex republic, both agricul-
1
Bryce
:
The American Commonwealth,
note. ~
See
articles in
The Forum for 1891.
III., p.
4 2I
>
HIS MESSAGE TO AMERICA. and commercial, like that of New Venice was a republic, and the Canton of Unterwalden is one; but they are no more alike than tural, industrial,,
York?
Macedon and Monmouth.
the republic of the
Is
on agriculture and on individual of life, or on a complex of the means ownership on or and public corporate ownership, or on industry future to be based
absolute, complete
collectivism
?
This
is
no mere
of machinery ; it is a question of vital tendencies, of social feeling, a question reaching up into the domain of art, religion, and domestic life.
question
And
to this question
Whitman
gives
no
satisfactory
other than the rather vague reflection about As if it harm d me, giving others the Equality
reply,
"
:
same chances and
rights as myself
my own
indispensable to
as
if it
were not
rights that others possess the
But Equality is conceivable alike in a simple community and in a complex highly social one the question is, which is the American Republic to be ? In reply it may be at once said that
same."
individualist :
all
the actual tendencies are in the latter direction.
Whitman would of his country
That
is
his
in the
remedy.
material resources
and
direction there
for
disease
is
is spiritual,
be
spiritual also.
ful
democratic
spacious,
main minister to the disease and appropriate literature.
by a great
He
is
optimistic as to both
their just distribution
;
in that
him no serious problem. The and consequently the remedy must
That remedy
lies in
a great, power
profoundly religious, modern, no more Pagan than Christian,
literature,
healthy,
treating frankly of
man
as
body
as well as soul.
The
WALT WHITMAN.
38
germinal seed of such literature Whitman conceives himself to have given his country and the world in Leaves of Grass; but this is the mere beginning, the
rough draft of a
first
be to
literature that shall
modern democratic society at the same time its pourtrayal and natural expression and yet also its nutriment, its
He
spiritual food.
looks forward to
only possess d of the religious
fire
poets not
and abandon of
Isaiah, luxuriant in the epic talent of
proud characters as
"
Homer,
or for
in Shakspere, but consistent with
the Hegelian formulas, and consistent with
modern
now
scared away by science, must be restored, brought back by the same power that caused her departure restored with new science.
.
.
.
Faith,
very old,
1 For the sway, deeper, wider, higher than ever." present he is inclined to admit that his countrymen continue to give can do nothing better than to -
"
imitations, yet awhile, of the aesthetic models, supplies,
and of those lands we spring from. These wondrous shores, reminiscences, floods, currents Let them flow on, flow hither freely. And let the sources be enlarged, to include not only the works of British origin, as now, but stately and devout Spain, of that past
!
courteous
France,
Scandinavian lands,
profound Italy s
art
Germany, the manly race, and always the
2 But this steeping of the mind in mystic Orient." of lands and races is to form various literatures the
the mind, to expand our conceptions of the world, to
1 "Democratic 2
"
Vistas,"
Poetry to-day in
Specimen Days,
America,"
p. 253.
Ibid., p. 301.
HIS MESSAGE TO AMERICA.
41
lead to a greater tolerance, a wider outlook, a deeper conception of the almost illimitable forces enfolded in
man, and of the magnificent and varied past manifesta tion of the shall
human
be prepared
In such a spiritual state we democratic literature of
spirit.
for the great
the future.
In the preface to the rhapsody,
"
written in 1872,
Thou Mother, with Whitman expresses
thy Equal Brood," his intention in writing, seventeen years before, his Leaves of Grass. This book, he says, is, in its in "
the song of a great composite democratic And following on, and individual, male or female.
tentions,
amplifying the same purpose, I suppose I have in my to run through the chants of this volume (if ever
mind
completed), the thread-voice, more or less audible, of
an aggregated, inseparable, unprecedented, democratic
electric,
posite,
T nationality"
vast,
We
com shall
Whitman
holds up to the actual, crude, very imperfect, straggling but energetic, vigorous, highly intelligent democracy of America a kind of ideal see that
vision of the true America, in all her varied ampli
tude, her boundless wealth, her resistless power, her
grand
possibilities.
indissoluble."
He
will
"
make
the
continent
language of Words the vacant and the vain to noble rap
worth,
"win
tures"
by poems
what we
He will,
"which
in
the
speak of nothing more than
To do
are."
this
he
first
concentrates attention on the
actual land in which his people live. 1
Specimen Days,
p. 279.
His poetry
is
WALT WHITMAN.
42
Her immense
redolent of America.
outlines, her vast
prairies, her noble
rivers, the scent of her herbage, her clear sky and brilliant sun, her flowing tide of popula tion, her varied types of human character, all live in
these pages as in no other book.
If
America were
wiped out, she could be more easily recalled from Leaves of Grass than from any other collection of books.
He
paints freely on a vast canvas, as in these lines
from the great threnody on President Lincoln "
Lo, body and soul
:
this land,
My own
Manhattan with spires, and the sparkling and hurrying tides, and the ships, The varied and ample land, the South and the North in the light, Ohio s shores and flashing Missouri, And ever the far-spreading prairies cover d with grass and corn." 1 Or, as in these from "
"
There was a child went
"
forth
:
Shadows, aureola and mist, the light falling on roofs and gables of white or brown two miles off, The schooner near by sleepily dropping down the tide, the little boat slack-tow d astern,
The hurrying tumbling waves, quick-broken The
it
The
crests,
slapping, strata of coloured clouds, the long bar of maroon tint away solitary by itself, the spread of purity lies
motionless
in,
edge, the flying sea-crow, the fragrance of salt marsh and shore mud."
horizon
s
"
1
Leaves of Grass,
p. 258.
2
Ibid., p. 284.
HIS MESSAGE TO AMERICA. Or, as in the "
"
Warble
for
Lilac-Time
43
"
:
The hylas croaking in the ponds, the elastic air, Bees, butterflies, the sparrow with its simple notes, Blue-bird and darting swallow, nor forget the high-hole flashing his golden wings,
The tranquil sunny haze, the clinging smoke, the vapour, Shimmer of waters with fish in them, the cerulean above, All that
is
jocund and sparkling, the brooks running,
The maple woods,
the crisp February days and the
sugar-making, The robin where he hops, bright-eyed, brown-breasted, With musical clear call at sunrise, and again at sunset,
Or
among the trees of the apple-orchard building the nest of his mate, melted snow of March, the willow sending forth
flitting
The
its
yellow-green sprouts, is here the
For spring-time
!
summer
is
here
"
!
Or, as in the large, ample suggestiveness of the great Pacific coast of America :
"
Lands bathed in sweeter, and mountain
rarer, healthier air, valleys
cliffs."
O Pio Pioneers Or, as in that buoyant, swinging, tanneers the onward marching music of the "
!
"
"
!
faced children
and
"
pushing on through
"
mystic
nights,"
over
prairie
"
"
dazzling days
and
mountain,
taking possession of the vast continent and its bound less wealth. No less powerful and vivid are the scenes in the cities, as in the quick patriotic rising in to
us in
"
York, suggested Drum-Taps," smooth-faced, snub-nosed rogue (or his "
"
when
New the
New York
WALT WHITMAN.
44 counterpart)
business "
for the first time, a wider
felt,
which he was a
world of
part, than the narrow round of daily
:
The blood
of the
city
arm d
up
!
arm d
The
!
cry
everywhere,
The
from the steeples of churches, and the public buildings and stores, tearful parting, the mother kisses her son, the son
flags flung out
from
The
all
kisses his mother,
(Loth
is
the mother to part, yet not a word does she
speak to detain him.) The tumultuous escort, the ranks of policemen preced ing, clearing the way, The unpent enthusiasm, the wild cheers of the crowd for their favourites,
The
artillery, the silent cannons, bright as gold, * along, rumble lightly over the stones."
Or, again, as in the
"
City of
Ships,"
drawn
addressed to
New
York, under whose showy materialism Whitman appears to discern an ideal beauty and a superb force, as Victor "
Hugo
felt
in Paris
:
City of the sea city of hurried and glittering tides City whose gleeful tides continually rush or recede, whirling in and out with eddies and foam !
!
!
City of wharves and iron
and
stores
city of tall facades of marble
!
Proud and passionate "
gant city
city
mettlesome, mad, extrava
2
!
u Crossing Brooklyn Or, as in 1
Ferry,"
the sights of
"
Leaves of Grass,
p. 220.
Ibid., p. 231.
HIS MESSAGE TO AMERICA. "mast-hemmed Manhattan," of the
gorgeous clouds
"
drenching with their splendour the and women, the voices of young men," who call
of the sunset
men
Ci
45
"
the poet by his name, the flags lowered at sunset, the foundry chimneys casting red and yellow light over Or the vision of the Japanese the tops of the houses. "
swart-cheeked,
envoys,
two-sworded,"
and
"
bare
New York s
headed,
great impassive," driving through thoroughfare in a "Broadway Pageant." Spite of the crime and corruption, the empty religious forms, and the omnipresent demon of greed and of low,
sharp bargaining, the poet will celebrate the colossal force of city life, as well as the teeming prairies and
mighty to
him
All are part of a vast whole which is Whitman,, in short, while resolutely
rivers.
divine.
dealing with
the
He
America.
world what she
Whitman real poetry
real,
writes
may
at
to
really
the same time idealises show her people and the mean.
a very just conception of the the poetry which underlying America has,
too,
;
money-making and
politics
but cannot wholly destroy. is
of
"
seriously injured,
Our Old
"
Feuillage
an impressionist picture arrayed in all their ample variety, inevitably united and made One Identity."
designed "
have
to
These States
present
"
and yet There is a wonderful fascination in the varied elements, the adventures, the heroism which have gone to make "
up America s life. The story of the stout-hearted Cap tain John Smith; of the Indian maiden, Pocahontas; of the simple, stern Puritan settlements of New Eng of Peter Stuyvesant and the Dutch life of Ne\v ;
land
WALT WHITMAN.
46 Amsterdam
;
of Oglethorpe
s
Georgia colony
French explorations about the great lakes Spanish missions in
early
French Creole
California
New
in
life
Orleans
;
of
of the
;
of the
;
the
old
what rich and
ample materials are here, suggesting vast ethnic pre parations and blendings of European peoples to form
We talk
new combinations. lack
But
more
of lack of poetry, but the
not in the subject-matter. idealism in this brief past, how
in ourselves,
is
if
there
is
interest
himself in America
castles there.
But
future of the
human
Whether we and industry
like
it
much
Mr. Ruskin has declined
in the vast future.
were
castles
to
because there are no built
be
by men, and the there,
not here.
or not, the sceptre of
commerce
race will
will as surely
pass to America within a
very measurable distance of time as another day will dawn. Russia and America diverse enough in many ways, but alike in their vast territorial expansion and seem destined to be the great
assimilative capacity political
This
is
organisms, the world-powers of the future. s decree, which cannot be set aside by
Nature
any judgment from another court. A century hence most of the countries of Western Europe will be com pared, not with America as a whole, but with separate States of the Union merely. Spiritually and artistically
supreme, Europe will politically and commercially re cede before the resounding tread of the Western and Eastern giants.
But
informed with no soul
is
?
this Titanic
That
organism to be
the American pro has set himself to solve ; he is
blem, which Whitman wants to help America to find her soul.
A
future
HIS MESSAGE TO AMERICA.
47
given up to the despotism of business, to the sway of the smart, vulgar, money-making animal, to dyspeptic middle-class religionism, to the election of lying rogues to office, to the universal reign of the mediocre and
the
commonplace
the
human
race
Redemption
this is
indeed a future from which
may
well shrink.
will
come, thinks Whitman, through
the spiritual influences of the great poet, bard, seer what you will. He will speak to the people on equal terms, will be
hungry
"
and
"
He
day."
faith of the flush of
understand that
"
glad to pass anything to anyone
for equals night
with the
"the
:
be
is
;
all."
filled
he
"
the vital laws inclose
idea of political liberty
will
knowledge
indispensable;"
sees health for himself in being
will
To him
one of the
he
mass."
There must be in him no tricks, but perfect personal all that a candour, and he must understand that "
person does or thinks is of consequence." He is to lead the people, not as a master from above, but as a
and comrade in their own them the bloom and odour of the
friend
ranks, passing on to earth, of the flowers,
of the atmosphere, of the sea, radiant in strength,
with a healthy dash of barbarism, yet recognising fully the value of the long result of time." We sum Whitman s idea of the modern in brief, up may, "
redeemer, the light-bringer, the friend of man, in his The direct trial of him who would be own words "
:
the greatest poet is to-day. If he does not flood him self with the immediate age as with vast oceanic tides, if
s
he be not himself the age transngur d, and if to him not open d the eternity which gives similitude to all
WALT WHITMAN.
48
periods and locations and processes, and animate and
inanimate forms, and which is the bond of time, and rises up from its inconceivable vagueness and infiniteness in the swimming shapes of to-day, and is held by life, makes the present spot the passage from what was to what shall be, and commits itself to the representation of this wave of an hour, and this one of the sixty beautiful children of the
the ductile anchors of
wave
him merge
let
and wait
in the general run,
his
1
development."
Whitman
s
America was revived by the
in
faith
heroism displayed by the average War ; the heroism and the idealism
man
in the "
also.
We
Civil
have
seen the alacrity with which the American-born popu lace, the peaceablest and most good-natured race in
and the most personally independent and and the least fitted to submit to the irksomeness and exasperation of regimental discipline, not for sprang, at the first tap of the drum, to arms the world,
intelligent,
gain, nor
the
but for an
even glory, nor to repel invasion
emblem, a mere abstraction flag""
And
for the
life,
he exultingly exclaims
the safety of in
"Drum-
"
Taps "
I
:
have witness d the true lightning
my I
1
have lived America
3
to
behold
rise."
;
I
have witness d
;
man
burst forth and warlike
3
Preface to First Issue of Leaves of Grass.
Days and 2
cities electric
"
Specimen
Collects, p. 273.
Democratic
Vistas."
Leaves of Grass,
p, 230.
Specimen Days,
p. 216.
HIS MESSAGE TO AMERICA.
49
Spite of its materialism and hypocrisy, he has faith in the land, faith in the average man s firm resolution,
courage, audacity, friendliness, fluid power. thinks, latent in him,
deep down beneath
It is all,
and turbulence, the great, real, permanent fact. mirror that calm, healthy, broad inner life, alike in froth
essential qualities
Whitman
s
and
in
own mission
the true aim of
;
American
its
he
the outward
To its
varied manifestations, was
and
it
must
literature.
be, in his view,
III.-HIS ART.
WHEN
beginning his self-imposed task, Whitman ap
have been staggered by the vastness of his The view was so extensive, the conceptions.
pears to
own
distance was so great, the sights that could be seen, that were unseen, so overwhelm
and the tendencies ing, that the
poet was intoxicated by the vision.
lacked, too, discrimination
and
art.
He
He
had absorbed but he had no
divine influences from past thinkers, sense of the laws of style, or, indeed, the sense that
were any laws. Hence, the sometimes one might be induced to say, the frequent formless lines, and the attempts to produce effects which no great artist would have employed. The poet was unable, there
through lack of
literary culture, to clothe his
novel
and often glowing conceptions in any ideal poetic form. Rather he flings his ideas at us in a heap, leaving it to us to arrange them in order in our own His results, therefore, fail to satisfy many not minds.
And yet of these results Mr. unsympathetic readers. Havelock Ellis has truly said that they have at "
times something of the divine felicity, unforeseen and incalculable, of Nature ; yet always, according to a rough but convenient distinction, it is the poetry of When Whitman energy rather than the poetry of art.
HIS ART.
51
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
But
it
gan to this
T language."
may be fairly argued whether, when he be Whitman did not gain immensely from
write,
He
imperfect artistic form.
some sense carried
in
on the tradition of English literature in some of its most virile representatives which, as has been well said by one of our greatest critics, is a literature of power, as contrasted with the French literature of ;
intelligence.
And,
further,
Whitman the more faith own nation, the very
fully expressed the life of his character of his own continent.
America had scarcely any consciousness the land of beginnings and
arrived, has hardly arrived yet, at
of her true
life.
She
is
tendencies, her very physical aspect is shaggy and unshorn. She is like a vast edifice, only half finished,
with the scaffolding up, and the
An American
round.
lady
is
litter
said
to
of masonry
all
have asked a
gardener in one of the beautiful Oxford quadrangles, how a lawn could be brought to such a condition of perfection as the emerald
The
"
reply was,
If
you
roll
about three centuries you
turf she
saw before
and water
will get
it
her.
regularly for
such results as you
America, with her brief history, rush of and immigrants, dominating materialism, has not been able to reach the artistic repose, the placid beauty to see
here."
which we are accustomed in Western Europe. 1
The
New Spirit,
by Havelock
Ellis, p. 108.
Had
WALT WHITMAN.
52
Whitman lived in an atmosphere of such repose had he been brought up on European culture, he could only at best have added to the kind of work which ;
Longfellow and Irving did so well. could not have been the voice of virile
America, with
its "powerful
In that case he this great,
uneducated
rough
,
persons,"
of whom the cultivated Bostonian authors knew no more than they did of the working-classes of Europe. The very value of Whitman, then, is that he is a genuine American bard.J In the conditions of his life and work must be found the justification of his His writings contain the promise and method. potency of future greatness and he makes no claim for them beyond that they are the first rough draft of As the births of living a great American literature. ;
"
"
creatures,"
all
says Bacon,
at first are ill-shapen
innovations which are the births of
time."
;
so are
Demo
cracy itself has come in ugly shapes, often revolting to "The Republic has no need of the cultivated mind.
was the exclamation when Lavoisier went
chemists,"
to the guillotine.
"
The
divine
infant,"
as
Whitman
himself puts it, "woke mournfully wailing, amid the roar of cannon, curses, shouts, crash of falling build x And we may tolerate much from the un ings." cultured bard of the
"
divine
infant,"
which we could
not put up with from the poet of a rich, full-orbed We the idle singer of an empty day." era or from for lack of find to must endeavour compensation "
harmony and discernment, 1
"France."
for
much
that
is
Leaves of Grass, p. 188.
wooden,
HIS flat,
prolix, in
Whitman s
ART
S3
writings, in that great quality
which Mr. Arnold, echoing Mr. Swinburne, finds in "
Byron, Still
it
the excellence of sincerity and strength." that when we turn from
must be confessed
the solemn
organ music of Milton, the rhythmical
perfection of Coleridge, the lyric beauty of Shelley, or the sweet cadence of Tennyson, to Whitman s "bar
yawp/ we seem
baric
at
first
to
have quitted the
haunts of the muses for a modern street where we are jostled by a rough
with
mud from
and are splashed and drays. Those accustomed to the choicest
crowd of busy
who have long been peaches and hot-house grapes for
making wry
folk,
the passing waggons
may be excused
faces at the wild berry of the
at first
woods
;
although, after a time they will discover its barbaric It is, however, not merely his Titanic fascination. wildness, but his lack of
plained
of.
Whitman
s
harmony, which must be com
And
those are very doubtful guardians of reputation who do not admit his serious
mingled as these are with passages of surpris and even sublime beauty. ing We open Leaves of Grass at the Song of the Broad a most suggestive piece of work, but containing Axe," some shocking lines, such as these defects,
"
:
"
The
six framing-men, two in the middle and two at each end, carefully bearing on their shoulders a
heavy stick "
The
for a cross-beam."
constructor of wharves, bridges, piers, bulk-heads, floats, slays against the sea."
WALT WHITMAN.
54
Goods of
Take For
"
from houses and temples, screams
freely rifled
women
in the gripe of
this line
u
from
brigands."
Calamus
"
:
any roofed room of a house company, and in libraries I gawk, or unborn or dead/
in
emerge
I
lie
not,
as one
nor
in
dumb, a
5
Or
from
"
A
Song
for
"
Occupations
:
Were
all educations practical and ornamental, well dis played out of one, what would it amount to?"
"
Or "
this line
this line in the
What was
"
Song of
Myself"
:
strewn in the amplest strewing the square rod filling the square rod then."
about me, and not
Enough
Every rational person who knows and who is willing to concede the
of these.
what poetry
is,
widest limits to poetic form, will rightly declare that not poetry. Nor can those long categories of objects and places which Dr. Peter Bayne made so this is
merry over rightly
to
tell
1
be defended, except
charged with us that the
the general idea. But the in
at the risk of
"Whitmania."
being
Whitman wants
modern man, as a democrat, shares a true and fruitful of mankind
life
way
;
in
which
this
idea
is
set
it
imitation of a cheap shopkeeper
advertisement
s
forth,
amuses us by
shocks our sense of form, while
I am of Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne, I am of don, Manchester, Bristol, Edinburgh, Limerick. "
Contemporary Review, Dec. 1875,
its
:
Lon I
be-.
HIS ART. long in Moscow,
Warsaw,
Cracow,
55 or northward in
Chrisuania, or Stockholm, or in Siberian Irkutsk, or in
some
street in
Iceland." *
What
a curious medley, what a tedious catalogue these And Why particular places and not others ? note, too, the American vulgarism, "belong !
in."
Whitman
by no means destitute of a sense of humour; but he must surely have jotted down these and many other lines in a museum, whose catalogue this categorical form would fit were it complete. But, however suggestive the long roll of far-off cities and is
may have been to the poet s own mind, they have no place in anything that can lay claim to an
lands
ideal treatment of
man and
his world.
They
give the
and they furnish the young gentlemen of the Oxford Magazine with good The writer in subject-matter for amusing parody. tends to be impressive, but he is actually tiresome.
enemy occasion
Whitman
to blaspheme,
also guilty of that strained affectation
is
coining new and ugly words, and of that conceit which reveals itself in unusual and
which shows
itself in
grandiose phraseology while he sometimes spoils the effect of a line or passage by verbal redundancy. :
These are perhaps peculiarly American
vices, or at
spread eagle period of any rate were so in the Dickens when American history, produced Martin "
"
"
Chuzzlewit."
Whitman "
philosophers, "
Libertad"
1
"
writes
Americanos
"
"philosophs"
instead
instead of
of Americans,
in place of Liberty, while the Presidency
Salut au
Monde."
Leaves of Grass, p. 117.
WALT WHITMAN.
56
converted into the
"
Presidential" as though Spanish was the language of the American people. Avatar is turned into delicaavataras," delicacy becomes is
"
"
esse/ reminding you of a "
waaren."
Ye
German
untold latencies
ferring to the forces
still
"
store for "
!
colonial-
he exclaims,
folded in
in
re
mankind
germ America he expresses thus Still the future of the States I harUnge glad and sublime." We are reconciled to Manhattan as another name for His confidence
"
in
:
New York;
but who can put up with Mannahatta"? The use of French words here and there, such as allons, mafemme, seems a kind of stage trick, as does "
When he speaks of an affetuoso. inhabitant of Japan as a Japanee, we think at once But the latter of Bret Harte s "Heathen Chinee."
such a word as
is
admittedly Californian slang, while the former
is
used in a serious poem, the Broadway Pageant." In u Democratic referred to some Vistas," Shakspere is "
in the language of an advertising mustard or In the soap maker, as "astral genius, first-class."
what
same work a
liberal thinker
is
called a
"
Liberalist."
Every one of these instances (and many more might be adduced) is inflated, clumsy, in the worst taste. Why, too, in the mystic and deeply suggestive Chant "
ing the Square
nine?
The
Deific,"
is
the
Holy
Spirit
made
English might have been used, or
femi if
not
The repetition that, then the Latin Spiritus Sanctus. of the word "arriving" in the second line of the wondrously beautiful death-chant from last in It is
"
When
lilacs
the door-yard bloomed is a case of redundancy. not easy either to perceive any meaning at all in "
HIS ART.
57
some of Whitman s passages; as, e.g., and death lead the rest
distrust birth
"Let "
them "
;
or,
that
Let the
old propositions be postponed." He reminds one of the old-fashioned unintelligent study of the Bible, when every part was thought by the devout to be
So Whitman cannot perceive when equally inspired. is writing a mass of verbiage or a patch-work of
he
and phrases and when he is moved by All is for him equally good. spirit. This is partly due to the fact that he never met with intelligent and sympathetic criticism in his own coun uncouth
lines
the breath of the
try for
many
years.
The dapper
gentleman of
little
Boston, and even so:ne of the greater
writers of that
Modern Athens," were only scandalised by this un wonted product of a democracy in which so many of them only thought that they believed, and in which "
some among them
frankly believed not at
all.
Em
erson and Thoreau alone greeted with a hearty wel come this new bard who had conferred on the world
what the former declared ordinary piece of wit and yet
contributed."
to
be
wisdom
"
the most extra
that
America has
x
But having noted some of the faults and deficiencies we must, on the other hand, say, as Mr.
of Whitman,
Lowell says of Wordsworth, that "he prising in passages and ejaculations."
is
great and sur After plodding
wearily through broken ground, strewn with rough boul ders and sharp flints, we emerge on Elysian meadows of
peace, or stand
Emerson
amazed
to
at a majestic torrent, or
Whitman, quoted
in
Bucke,
p. 83.
view
WALT WHITMAN.
58
with awe the terrible beauty of a great white peak How thrusting its stern purity far into the blue.
steeped in the spirit of loveliness are these lines from the "Song of Myself": "
Smile, O voluptuous cool-breath d earth Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees Earth of departed sunset earth of the mountains !
!
misty-topt
!
Earth of the vitreous pour of the with blue
moon
full
just tinged
!
Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake Far-swooping elbow d earth rich apple-blossom d !
!
earth
!
Smile, for your lover
No
reader
who has broken
rugged passage, clumsy
Yon
lofty
his
teeth
fail
some crowded
over
in construction, or
with uninteresting detail, will to such lines as the following "
1
comes."
to render his tribute
:
and dazzling towers, pinnacled, red as
burnish d with
From "
Practical, peaceful
roses,
gold."
life,
the
"
Passage to
the people
s
life,
India."
the
People
themselves Lifted, illumin
From
the
crescendo
"
d,bathedin peace
Song of the
movement
yields
elate,
Exposition,"
to
a
sweet
gradually dying away in perfect calm. 1
secure in
Leaves of Grass,
p. 46.
peace."
where
the
cadence,
Above
all,
in
HIS ART. numberless passages from that Hymn of President Lincoln
59 magnificent
Burial
:
"
When And I
lilacs last in
the door-yard
bloom d,
the great star early droop d in the western sky in the night,
mourn
d,
and
yet shall
mourn with ever-returning
spring. "
With
floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent,
sinking sun, burning, expanding the "
Dances for thee, and feastings
And
I
air,
propose saluting thee, adornments
for thee,
the sights of the open landscape and the high-
spread sky are
And
life
and the
fitting,
fields,
and the huge and thoughtful
night. "
Lilac
and
star
and bird twined with the chant of
my
soul,
There
in the fragrant
and
pines and the cedars dusk
dim."
In each of these instances one finds, with Mr.
W. M.
deep and majestical rhythmical sense." Whitman has caught too, and expressed, in a most
Rossetti,
striking
"a
poem, the power and majesty, the wonderful common an object as a locomotive
mystery of so "
:
Fierce-throated beauty Roll through my chant with !
all thy lawless Music, thy swinging lamps at night,
"
Thy
trills
of shrieks
Launch d o
To
by rocks and
hills
return d,
er the prairies wide, across the lakes, the free skies unpent and glad and strong."
WALT WHITMAN.
60
He has expressed here just the feeling which the engineman has for the wonderful object whose move ments he directs he idealises it as a splendid, strong:
limbed, passionate, almost voluptuous beauty, with coarse black hair, and eyes that shoot flames his Noted also is that noble fierce, devoted mistress.
poem addressed hast slept
look
all
"
To
night
on Senegal,
st
amid the
upon
Man-of-War Bird who at dusk that "
the
the storm/
morn America,
at
that sport
and thunder-cloud
lightning-flash
"
"
"
a
st
little
Of very sweeping movement. and infinite suggestiveness too, is that On the Beach at Night," 1 clothed with the poem, silent majesty of the sea and of the night
poem
of vast
full
striking beauty "
:
"
On the beach at night Stands a child with her Watching the
"
Up
east, the
father,
autumn
sky.
through the darkness,
While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading, Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky,
Amid a
transparent clear belt of ether yet
Ascends large and calm the
And nigh Swim the "
From
at
the east,
hand, only a very
little
above,
delicate sisters, the Pleiades.
the beach the child holding the
These burial clouds vour
left in
lord-star Jupiter,
hand
all,
Watching,
silently weeps. 1
of her father,
that lower victorious soon to de
Leaves of Grass,
p. 205.
61
HIS ART. "
Weep Weep
not, child, not,
my
darling,
With these kisses let me remove your tears The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious, ;
shall not long possess the sky, they
They
stars only in apparition
devour the
;
Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the Pleiades shall emerge, "
are immortal, all those stars both silvery and golden shall shine out again, The great stars and the little ones shall shine out again,
They
they endure,
The
vast immortal suns
moons "
"
and the long-enduring pensive
shall again shine.
Then
dearest child, mournest thou only for Jupiter Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars ?
?
Something there is, (With my lips soothing thee, adding I
give thee the
first
I whisper, suggestion, the problem
and
in
direction).
Something there
(Many
is
the burials,
more immortal even than the stars, the days and nights, passing
many
away),
Something that
shall
endure longer even than lustrous
Jupiter,
Longer than sun or any revolving
Or the radiant
sisters, the
satellite,
Pleiades."
is always a dominant note in Whitman s and leads him ever to recur to the great themes which most completely illustrate it, as the great and deep sea stretching into infinitude with its
Vastness
writings,
WALT WHITMAN.
62
never-ceasing murmur and infinite suggestions, type of the sea of life on which sails the immortal ship of the body, ship of the soul, voyaging, voyag "ship ing, voyaging," "
"
huge and thoughtful night/
the night in silence under
globe which "
or the
Over the
floats us
many
a
or this great
star,"
through the celestial spaces
:
and sinking- waves, over the myriad and the prairies wide, Over the dense-packed cities all, and the teeming wharves and ways." rising
fields
But most of all does Whitman peer with longing and audacity into the superb vistas of death." Of "
the dirges in the English language, remembering even Lycidas and Adonais, none leaves so profound an
all
impression of beauty and majesty as the great Burial Hymn of President Lincoln, beginning, When lilacs "
last in
the door-yard bloom
be said of Whitman
s
poetry
Whatever
else
may
must be conceded
that
d."
it
theme of death with a new power and significance. The awful dreams that may come in that sleep of death have no terror for the he has treated
this eternal
democratic poet, nor does he trouble himself much "fond breast" on which "the parting soul
with the
"
relies."
To one
shortly to
him out from
all
die,"
the
he brings rest.
He
his
mes
does not
sage, singling argue, but sits quietly by, assuring the dying man with the peaceful force of a deep faith that he himself will
surely escape, leaving behind nothing that
keeping.
is
worth
HIS ART. The sun
"
bursts through in unlook d-for directions,
Strong thoughts "
63
fill
you and confidence, you smile,
exclude others from you, there
I
I
miserated, do not commiserate,
I
is
nothing to be
com
congratulate you.
Every wonder is possible in those superb vistas, All waits undream d of in that region, that inaccessible
"
land."
He come
to his ear whispers of heavenly death sounds of footsteps gently ascending, mystical
hears
"
"
;
"
breezes wafted soft and soothing," it
with soft
death
we
"
the
is
"
"dark
In the
feet."
Death is lovely and mother always gliding near
low."
ocean of
"
loving,
floating
are laved in a flood of
The
bliss.
soul
T{
turns with joy to vast and well-veiled death," and the body, weary with its pilgrimage, turns, like a tired "
child,
gratefully nestling close
"
in the
bosom
of this
The
death-song, low and wailing in its first bars, grows louder and clearer until it floods the night and pours its serene melody over the world. divine motherhood.
The dead are made the soul "They fit
"
made one
of Keats
with
Nature,"
as Shelley
:
very well in the landscape under the trees and grass, of the sky in the horizon s far margin/
And along the edge
..The ghastly river of Styx has lost itself in
God/ whom each
"
the seas of
soul will front at the goal-of
its
long
voyage, tf
As
filled
with
friendship,
Brother found, The Younger melts
the
love complete,
Elder
.
.,.
in
fondness
in his
arms.
;;
WALT WHITMAN.
64 His
"
Last Invocation
"
"
is
that his real self should
from the fleshy portals of glide noiselessly forth the house of life into the measureless oceans of "
"
space,"
where he believes that
vides for
In
"
Heavenly Death pro
all."
death-poetry of Whitman the "last presented as no enemy at all, but a friend, an object of wonder, beauty, and desire, an essential this
all "
enemy
is
part of
an
infinite world-order, which is viewed, as the philosophers say, sub specie eternitatis, and which is, Shaktherefore, found to be all good and perfect.
spere,
still
leads
us
under the dominion of mediaeval thought, Measure for Measure to the grinning
in
death s-head of the charnel-house, and in Hamlet to the brink of a possible penal abyss. Milton sees in vision his beloved Lycidas joining in the "inexpressive nuptial song in the
love
"
;
but he
is
meek kingdoms
blessed of joy and
alternately filled with Puritan
and
with an unreal classical sense of death.
Shelley in
Adonais comes nearer to a natural view,
for in
mind
the soul of Keats
"
his
has outsoared the shadow of
But Whitman is beyond them all. dim Beyond shadowy forms ferried over the dark river and flitting by in the joyless meadows of asphodel; beyond the chrism and priestly absolution, the hell, be purgatory, and paradise of mediaeval thought Puritan the the and judgment-day triumphant yond Death with him is a perfectly reign of the saints. our night.
:
the
;
natural liberating force, releasing the permanent self into the possibilities of a higher plane of being.
It
puts an end to nothing but a certain physical organ-
HIS ART. ism, which
is
so constructed that
and which
it
cannot
live
except
in the very nature of things
by dying daily, must ultimately decay as a separate thing, and mingle gradually, atom by atom, with the world of material forms out of which it grew. The very wonder of the process fills him with a sense of its strange beauty, and therefore provides us with a new artistic treat ment of death at his hands, a treatment diffused with a beautiful solemnity that partly affects us like some impressive scene in Nature, and partly like the magni ficent
music which
religious
thrills
soul s most
the
secret fibres at the celebration of the mass.
In considering the leading themes poetry and
his
method of
to overlook the series of
Adam/ which
treating them,
poems
Whitman
of
s
it is
called
"
impossible Children of
chiefly led to the
author in the professed
outcry against their of supposed outraged occupy but fifteen pages of
name
These poems decency. Leaves of Grass out of nearly four hundred but the of was censure at directed them. finger instantly ;
These poems celebrate
in very plain language the joy a subject as old as literature itself, and yet ever new and necessarily forming a dominant theme for art in all its varied manifestations. What
of sexual love
are
we
;
to say of this series of
poems ?
impossible to echo the opinion of a friendly American critic, Mr. E. C. Stedman, who, finding It
is
great
power and beauty
ings,
deprecates
"
in
most of Whitman
Children of
Adam."
It
s
writ
appears
that Emerson argued on this point with Whitman when the latter visited Boston in 1860. We are not
E
WALT WHITMAN.
66
Emerson disapproved the sub Whitman s particular way of treating
precisely told whether ject altogether, or it
We
merely.
can scarcely suppose the former, since
Emerson had too much discernment not
to see that
the question of sexual love is an integral part of Whit man s song of the Modern Man." We must assume, "
therefore, that
was Whitman
it
s
literary
method
to
which the Concord sage objected. And here, Emerson, though himself no master of poetic form, was right.
The
true
of the poet s treatment but delicate theme is that it
criticism
passionate, vital,
categorical, physiological.
It is
of
little
tabulated detail, too
flat,
The
suggestion. "
to
make
is
as he says,
if I
a
bare,
method
of fine and beautiful when he determines
poet right a part of the natural order, even, stand sole among men." But he has
illustrious "
much
too
of this is
"
introduced an element of rankness and an elaboration of detail that might have been left out without any This criticism, interference with the essential design.
however, applies to all of Whitman s work ; it reveals the reproach from the artistic point of view, which is not confined to
"
Children of
Adam."
This
is
a legi
timate ground of objection to Whitman as an artist, as But no specific objection has already been indicated.
can rightly be urged against
"
Children of
Adam
"
on
that ground.
We
all
know
literature has "
person
that
most American and much English
been written with the fear of the
before the author
s
eyes.
"young
This interesting
It is of course by no means to be ignored. be should art there of mansions in the that many right
figure
is
HIS ART. innocent with
little
the
67
boudoirs in which she can converse
spirit
of Mrs.
Hemans,
as
her
in
still
younger years she wondered with Dr. Watts at the twinkling star or the busy little bee. Many charming
American books for the young person have been written which even those who are not young persons can read with delight. But two things are certain "
"
:
that the
first,
does not remain such
"
"
young person
for a very great length of time
and second,
;
that litera
ture written from, that point of view can never be
charged with the energy, passion, and grandeur which are born out of the great experiences of life. The
power always has been, always will be, men and women, for those who have tasted of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and
literature of
written for full-grown
who
are yet athirst for the fountain of the water of
If this has
be
in
been true
in the past,
life.
even more true must
it
For the world can no
the era of democracy.
longer be regarded as under a curse, nor can man, or any part of him, be considered as inherently vile.
The modern man must
stand up in his native dignity, and to partake of the
asserting his claim to be here,
great feast of Nature.
The written
particular for
lover,
poems
under consideration were
mistress,
husband,
wife,
for
the
average sane adult, as a statement of the modern view of the sex-relation. A thinking and healthy mind will read them with a full assurance of the high motives by
which their author was animated. true
woman may be
from the tribute of the late
How
a pure and
by them may be seen Ann Gilchrist. Whitman^
affected
WALT WHITMAN.
68 be
it
always understood, covers the whole
field of life,
and he could not therefore have ignored in his scheme one of the most vital and universal of relations a re lation, too, upon which, as he saw it, the ordering of ;
modem
society so largely depends.
rears this great social frame.
love in the heart of a part, as With the
the
dim
Whitman first
man
It is
held, of a wider,
is
science,
and our
heavenly
harmony," this
develop
itself;
religion.
and
And
until flesh
s
in
art,
our law, our
From harmony, from human order does really
great
that
harmony is perpetually ex These offices reach
of love.
from the outer garment of the
man
back
"
pressed in the offices of
far
born the soul that has
raised our eternal institutions, our
shrine
universal love.
rude embrace in some cave
twilight of history
love which
All proceeds from the for a woman, itself but a
spirit.
and blood
inmost
flesh to the
Such
is
Whitman s
reality
is,
to use Coleridge
view. s
defecated to a pure transparency," our poet, phrase, who is at the same time realist and idealist, will be "
justified in treating of the
whole of
man
as
we know
him.
The
fact
Whitman cannot do
that
this
without
rousing against him the abuse of those who often hide pruriency under the cloak of prudery is one of the severest satires
which allows
a morality of our current morality manner of nauseating divorce-
freely all
court details devoid of a single redeeming feature to be read by everyone who can afford a halfpenny, while it confiscates the translations of the novels of Zola.
Whitman
s
treatment,
be
it
remembered,
is
HIS ART. out-spoken,
frank,
and sincere
69 there
;
no veiled
is
doublt-entendre, no parade of innuendoes, no sly giggle over an amorous passage. It is an open, exuberant
man as body as well as spirit would have been out of place in an age either of sincere Monasticism or of sincere Puri of delight over
hymn
and although
tanism, life
essentially in
is
it
of the
;
it
proper treatment of the tions
in
harmony with the
modern world.
its
driven
objection
easily
develop into an
Titian.
And
those
who
find
themselves logically
of the
Boston prude, who
may
to the position
covered up the legs of her dining-table should be seen of men.
The
and
in its ideal rela
treatment in the marble of Phidias or
on the glowing canvas of this
free large
objection to a full
human body
modern poetry can
objection to
adopt
An
lest
they
great fact of sexual love on the physical side is Whitman as subordinated to uni
always regarded by versal ends.
claims "
I
Thus,
in
"Songs
of
Parting,"
he ex
:
announce the great individual,
fluid as
Nature,
Chaste, affectionate, compassionate, fully
armed."
1
The madness
of passion does not overcome ; it is a central purpose, ensphered in a nature dedicated to what the Greeks called "temperance." related
We
to
have had
propagated by monks and hermits and Western religionists, Calvinists, by Syrian as to the virtues of abstinence. This ascetic dogma false notions
Leaves of Grass, p. 381.
WALT WHITMAN.
70
was an obvious reaction against extreme licence ; but is as false as the other. There is no virtue in
the one
abstinence whatever. sand, void of
reasonable
life
dead moon.
that
self-control
virtue
positive, healthy direction of all
good
will
happens Nature."
and a
clear intellect.
Whitman
in
He
is
his actions are
s
"great
thoroughly
at
resides
;
in
s
in
the
actions by a
This
exactly what
is
fluid
individual,
home
full
It is
human
in the world,
beautiful, his relations with
and with women sweet and is
barren as Sahara
It is in itself
as the cold,
as
and
comrades
of charm, because his
the never-erring balance, the perfect poise.
There
no such man absolutely, nor may there ever actually makes for such be such ; but the world-movement is
"
"
a
wholesome embodiment of righteousness.
It may be asked whether Whitman is a poet at all. One need not be specially anxious to show that he is,
but some protest
is needed against any judgment that Addison and Johnson, in the list of poets (not to mention Blackmore and Gibber) and What is a poet ? Is he the left out Whitman.
included,
say,
manufacturer of rhyming stanzas ? If so, we should have to include under the head of poetry that in teresting verse, so full of incident
"
I
put
my
hat upon
my
:
head
And walked into the Strand And there I met another man Whose hat was in his hand."
;
This stanza contains rhyme, grammar, incident, and
HIS ART. suggestion, but
But when we read
not poetry.
is
it
71
such great words as "
Men must
endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither; Ripeness
we
feel at
Let us
"
is all
once that
this is poetry, this is creative art.
noble language of Shelley Poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be sub jected to the accident of surrounding impressions. the
to
listen
:
"
And
whether
withdraws things,
being.
it
It
it
life s
veil
figured curtain, or
from before the scene of
equally creates for us a being within our makes us the inhabitants of a world to
which the familiar world the
own
its
spreads
dark
common
percipients,
is
a chaos.
universe of which
and
it
film of familiarity
we
It
reproduces
are portions
and
purges from our inward sight the which obscures from us the wonder
It compels us to feel that which we and to It perceive, imagine that which we know. creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted It justifies the bold and true words of by reiteration. Tasso Non merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed 1 il Poeta." In the same essay Shelley claims for
of our being.
the authors of language poets that they are not only and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and they are the institutors of statuary, and painting "
;
laws and the founders of 1
A
civil
society,
Defence of Poetry.
and the inven-
WALT WHITMAN.
72
tors of the arts of
and the
life,
teachers,
who draw
into a certain propinquity with the beautiful
and the
apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion." In accord true, that partial
ance with
this
judgment, Shelley claims
sopher, Plato, a place poets,
Shakspere
among
and
for the philo the poets, and for the
Milton,
among
places
the
philosophers.
Now, accepting the
poet
classify
than we
nature
s
Whitman
and far-reaching view of and function, we may certainly
this large
as a poet with greater confidence
and graceful but super ficial moralists like Addison, or makers of ponderous Mr. Arnold s rhyming platitudes like Johnson. criticism of famous phrase, is, perhaps, in adequate as giving no suggestion of glow and rapture,
may
so treat pleasing
"
life,"
which we creation.
rightly
But
it
regard
comes
as
essential
elements
in
as near to a true definition as
if we add to it the idea of a In this sense we and expansive power. heightened see more clearly who and what the true poets of the
any mere phrase can
world have been.
The
early rhapsodists, the Celtic
bards, the makers of sagas
and of the songs charged
human
experiences chanted in rude primal chorus by boatmen rocking on the tide or by peasants
with
joyously treading the vintage these would hardly have satisfied Boileau and the French Academy.
would have pronounced them "intoxicated as he pronounced Shakspere. They knew nothing of formal rules, but they had the power Voltaire
barbarians
"
of divination.
They
treated in an
ideal
spirit
the
HIS ART. of their land and time
civilisation
with holy care
and
faith
ings for
;
;
they preserved they uttered its
aspirations, they expressed the deepest feel social sanctities, for the ideal side of
its
traditions
mystic traditions
its
and
They loved and
laws.
its
interpreted
Nature, they felt in their souls the beauty of her life, they delighted in heroism and comradeship. Surely it is these elements that constitute the very soul of poetry. The creative spirit seizes on the facts of Nature and of
life,
shows them
transforms and glorifies them never was on sea or land."
fluid
with
He who
with this spirit has a far loftier
title
and
"the
related,
light
is
to the
that
possessed
name
of
poet than has the manufacturer of flawless, brilliant, mechanical versicles. To these bardic ranks Whit
man
He
belongs.
is
too primitive and elemental to
be classed even among such
and Shelley, while
literary rebels as
Byron
too vast, his thoughts too deep, to admit of rank with such a poet as Burns.
Whitman in
feels
is,
his
sweep
in truth, of the order sacer vates, for
our modern
life
he
the
moving breath of the applied the words which
To him may be Emerson used of Goethe spirit.
detail
is
"
:
Amid
littleness
and
he detected the genius of
life, the old cunning Proteus, nestling close beside us, and showed that the dulness and prose we ascribe to the age was only
another of his that
masks."
T
It
Whitman has Goethe
culture,
sense of form.
1
not of course implied
is
s
He
vast is
Representative
knowledge,
deep
rather like a strong
Men.
WALT WHITMAN.
74
inspired toiler, possessed of a far greater proportion of genius and insight than of culture, who tells us in a certain crude and partly amorphous way, but with a
and
power
compensating
humanity, and modern in such a manner as to
and
interests,
rally
gift
of
that
this
he endows us with the
Camerado,
no book,
this is
touches
touches a
this,
man."
*
might even be contended that his formlessness new forms that the old rhymes rather be used in the future for mere vers de
holds the germs of will
nature,
does
rather than with literature.
Who It
how
He
our emotions, widen our the forces of our moral nature.
must ever remember
"
him.
stir
We
life
originality,
life affect
societe
;
We know
than for great poetry.
something of
the nineteenth century s experience in reference to music. The innovators had to fight their way against
and genuine
ridicule
dislike
;
until
many
special
movements, and, at least, one entire opera of Wagner, have become almost as hackneyed as any of the Italian
airs,
or,
Wagnerian music.
indeed, It
as
may
anything in the prebe argued that the
also
sweeping conceptions of our age, the suggestions of an infinite surging movement, of an all-pervading
vast,
rhythmic
life,
can never be confined
in the
narrower
and more precise forms of the poetic art, and that Whitman s work affords, in some degree, a hint of The spiritual enlargement and things to come. 1
"
Songs of
Parting,"
from Leaves of Grass,
p. 382.
HIS ART. exaltation brought about by Christianity led to
forms of express
The
art.
new
Christian world could no longer
ideas in
its
Pure form, nakedly displayed,
And Our own time
is
all
things absolutely
manifestly
made."
imbued with the
ideas of
The
marvellous growth of music, change. with its capacity for interpreting subtle emotions and workings of the imagination, is the dominant artistic
artistic
fact of
our
essential
own
fact,,
We
time.
to seize
seem to come nearer to the on the very spirit of life. We
can no longer tolerate the surface ideas expressed in the smooth and easy lines of an earlier age. Like Faust, to see
we yearn to reach the very fountains of being, behind the act the character, beneath the form
the substance. cal,
The
novel becomes more psychologi In such a spiritual.
music more complex and
movement, the genesis of a new epoch in history, there will inevitably be experiments doomed to failure as well as to success. The claim made for Whitman not that he
is,
is a great artist, for he is not, not even a great poet, but that he has apprehended needs of our time, has perceived that some
that he
the
is
restraining shackles must be cast off, and has led the way, as a strong, valiant pioneer, to a new literature
which
shall
chant the deeds and
faith of the
modern
man.
Our acceptance
of Whitman, therefore, mainly de on whether we pends accept the advent, welcome or
WALT WHITMAN.
76
unwelcome, of a new world lieve that the old
we can "
;
him
say with
Away Away Away
on whether we really be on whether
;
forms are exhausted
with old romance
!
with novels, plots, and plays of foreign courts with love-verses sugar d in rhyme, the intrigues, amours of idlers,"
And "
;
can also
Raise a voice for far superber themes, for poets and for art,
To To
exalt the present
and
Here
man s
and the
teach the average
is
trade.
"
man
real,
the glory of his daily walk
x
the ultimate ground of judgment on Whit here is the ultimate test which will
verse
;
decide whether he long for a larger,
is
deeper
no matter how bought
Do we
welcomed or repulsed. ?
life,
for
a richer experience,
Have we courage enough
to
Shall we be quit the shallows for the deep blue ? content to "glance, and nod, and bustle by," pleased with the gay show, cynically amused by the pickle"
herring farce-tragedy," satisfied to be polite and suave, and to skim gracefully the surface of things ? Or must we dive down to the tangled roots beneath the
ocean floor, penetrate beyond the external show, search eagerly for hidden meanings and subtle sugges tions ? Do we care supremely for the soul of man, 1 "Song
of the
Exposition,"
Leaves of Grass, p. 162,
HIS ART. do we
readily
for ourselves,
77
concede to others that which we claim have we
faith in
our fellowmen, and in a part ? Or if not, at
the order of which humanity is least do we desire it, do we reach out with longing for it,
do we
may well be given for this Whitman s writings are, it may
feel that all else
pearl of great price
be said, like
?
an acquired
olives,
taste.
But there are
And the people. will never Philistia well-fed hosts of sleek, respectable,
some
tastes never acquired
by some
"
good, gray poet probably acquire a taste for the not because of his singular versification, nor his alleged "
;
indecencies, nor his absence of the cultivated aca
No ; they will dislike him because he spirit. unconventional, uncomfortable, because he makes
demic is
ill at ease, because, like Madame Pistol (cino need to devant Quickly), they hope there is trouble themselves with any great thoughts while on
them
"
"
an easy path to
Podsnap
is
"
Arthur
as fearful of
The household
s bosom."
Whitman
s
of
glorious audacities
would be of taking a morning on a thoroughbred. And the Podsnap house hold is not a small one it may die out, but it will not be yet. But those whose hearts are stout and daring, whose as a nervous invalid
gallop
;
imagination dilates with wonderment at this great and awful, but splendid mystery in which we are enfolded, whose affections go forth to all the sons and daughters of
men, who with
all
the strength
their nature desire fraternity sire
to
personal good
bow
to
no
and
for themselves,
idols
and
sincerity of
justice, as they
who
de
are determined
however venerable, but to stand
WALT WHITMAN.
78 up on
may
their
bring
own
feet,
and confront whatever destiny Whitman. For they will
these will love
nestle gratefully in these
Leaves of Grass, while the viewless air passes over them, and the golden sun shine bathes them in its life-giving waves. For these elect
"In
certainties
And
now crown themselves
assur d,
peace proclaims olives of endless
age."
But even they are but the forerunners. Whitman has no hortus inclusus, no aristocratic paradise. In the endless cycles all will arrive ; and upon the first-comers merely lies the duty of helping on the rest.
HIS DEMOCRACY.
IV.
WHITMAN bard
:
the voice of
is
Virgil uttered his
Whitman "
more than America s As modern democracy.
aspires to be even
he
tell
Arma
"
us his
virumque
theme
cano"
so
does
:
Of Life immense in passion, pulse and power, Cheerful, for freest action form d under the laws divine,
The Modern Man
When
3
I
x
sing.
phantom of past poetry suggested to him theme of the old poets was war, he replies that he sings also of war, but a larger and greater than any the field the world, for life and death, for the Body and for the Eternal Soul." To foreign lands who ask him athletic her to define America, the
that the
"
;
"
he sends
his poems that they may dis want. This is how the Leaves they Grass to the the purport and beholder of ; open intention of the poet s task is avowed. It is not Democracy,"
cover what
it
is
America only of whom he writes, but of Modern Man, as he is being moulded everywhere by the spirit that fir^t arose and hud the fullest, freest scope on the American continent. Whitman therefore sings of the
Modern Man 1
as
workman,
<l
Inscriptions."
friend, citizen, as
Leaves of Grass, p.
79
husband, 9.
WALT WHITMAN.
So
brother, comrade, as pioneer of a new social order, as both material and spiritual, final and most subtle
compound
of spirit and nature, firmly planted on this and yet moving about in worlds not "
rolling earth, realised."
The message
America.
As
man
is
as truly for
Europe
as for
Whit freedom from conventionality,
representative democratic bard,
exhibits complete
a very deep human love, hope for all, faith in the rationality of the world, courage, energy, and the instinct of solidarity. He may be said to begin with the epic of the
modern world,
in
its
shirt-sleeves,
ploughing and mining, building and weaving, pro pelling its engines over prairies and mountains, across great
and through
rivers
steering
its
vast,
stormy
gigantic steamers over waters
cities,
and
of which
It is the world of "Titanic Ulysses never dreamed. of strenuous, healthy, defiant, birth, democratic masses ; the modern world, in short, as it
forces taking
really
is,
or
is
becoming.
And
from
this great plain
of physical action the poet ascends to mystic, dimlyguessed spiritual spheres, whence he seems to discern
unending progress,
till
the universe itself appears one
vast conscious whole, informed with the spirit of love,
and
its ever-ripening issues all the long man s of past painful path from the lower forms of nature to an expanding being utterly beyond our
justifying in
present imagination to conceive. The general course of things is now tending towards a new type of life and to a new attitude of the indi vidual towards the world.
All lines
seem
to be
con
verging towards a new point in the distant horizon.
HIS DEMOCRACY.
8
1
Old limitations disappear not only in the physical globe through the inventions of science, but in our own thought, through the growth of the general mind. Expansion
is,
dominant idea of our time.
in short, the
Petty states give way to great aggregations tional co-operation
world beyond world reveals
man
of
gaze
;
the
local
conception, Augustinian theology, with ideas derived so largely from yields
itself to
deity
the
to
;
interna
becomes more and more general
its
his
in
"God
is
local
heaven
spirit."
The
and bounded
formal
Roman
;
the wondering
jurisprudence,
is
more fluid Greek idea, unhampered Greek forms. We are probably on the
to the
giving way by the early
eve of scientific conceptions which will render the of the nineteenth century comparatively And in the same way the great industrial jejune. science
forces
which are partly dominated by man and which will, it may be believed, evolve
partly dominate him,
new
sociological ideas that will cast society in another
Of
mould.
good and is
tion
he
is
with
In
the seer.
new
this
evil,
its
world, with
all its
light
revolutionary
he
When
inspired.
all
its
powers
stir,
for
Whitman
writes, by its contempla he began to write he felt
that the literature of his country was, in the main,
devoid of vision and presentiment. tion of the writings of either
With the excep
Emerson, America had produced
mere elegant versifiers, far-off echoes of Eng and Spain, or conventional authors who
land, France,
accepted
without
questioning
in morals, religion,
dogmas Now, how
is it
and
all
the
respectable
society.
possible that any literature can hold F
WALT WHITMAN.
82 the soul of
man by
its
when
divine spell
elements
its
harmony altogether with the spirit of the time and unrelated to its knowledge? Literature must be fast wedded to the real world of thought and life which environs it. And that by no means because we are out of
desire to forget or despise the past
very past
become
will
reflect fully the life of
but because that
;
clearer to us
own
our
if
our natures
The man who
day.
good from the past is the imitating senti mentalist who bows before an outward form from
derives least
We
life has departed. do not to-day believe in any local hell, purgatory, or paradise. Yet our enlarged spiritual powers enable us to appreciate
which the inner
the spiritual genius of Dante more deeply than those Florentines who drove him out of their city. We see the permanent fact detached from its temporary scenic know that the inevitable state of the properties.
We
soul
is
the real substance of Dante
the rest
all
diaeval
is
mere shadow
s
vision
Whitman, who perceives
thought.
;
and
cast by the forms of this,
that
me thus
an even course between stupid bigotry on the one hand and flippant negation on the other, as e.g. in steers
t
the "
"
"
Song
We I
for
Occupations
:
consider bibles and religions divine they are not divine,
I
say they have all grown out of you, and out of you still.
do not say
may grow
It is not they who give the life, it is you who give the life. Leaves are not more shed from the trees, or trees from the earth, than they are shed out of you." 1 1
Leaves of Grass,
p.
172.
HIS DEMOCRACY.
83
This anthropocentric position in literature as in philo sophy will produce as vast results as were brought about by the adoption of the heliocentric theory in our of
conceptions religion,
The State, physical universe. be directed solely towards the
the
industry will
In times past, humanity has been sacri assumed rights of a caste,
good of man.
ficed to regal power, to the
the supposed claims of an external deity on the To-day man is implicit obedience of his creatures.
to
enslaved to money-making, in thrall to machinery, a weary drudge attendant on the incessant demands of the iron monster which he serves.
All these forms of
variance with [democracy, j _e very ^one must be abolished root and branch. The State exists slavery are
for
of
at
no other purpose than its
self
subjects.
and
world at
his fellows, all.
men; man This
If a
is
man he
to realise the collective will
sees nothing divine in
shall find
no
him
divinity in the
Industry shall clothe, feed, and comfort not be the slave of the machine.
shall
the meaning of democracy.
It is
no crude
It does not deny the theory of negation. validity of the great institutions and ideas which have for untold
ages expressed in form or language, in sacrificial rite life of man. But it
and sacred hymn, the spiritual transforms and develops these, terms of thought,
it expresses them in seeks to raise humanity to loftier
it
heights through their agency it strives to make more real and true the inspiring word of the Elohim in the an ;
cient
Hebrew tradition,
after
our likeness
"
:
"Let
us
make man in our image, modern thinker,
a word to the
not descriptive of the past, but prophetic of the future.
WALT WHITMAN.
84
Almost the entire volume of Leaves of Grass is per meated with this idea ; it is, indeed, the central in
Whitman
spiring thought of
s writings. But if any can be it is the specially apt quotation made, following passage addressed "To You," in which the poet speaks from his heart to the average man :
"
I will leave all and come and make the hymns of you. None has understood you, but I understand you None has done justice to you you have not done ;
justice to yourself.
None
but has found you imperfect
;
I
only find no im
perfection in you.
None
but would subordinate you I only never consent to subordinate you. ;
am
he who
will I
only
am
better,
he who places over you no master, owner, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in
yourself.
Painters have painted their swarming groups, and the centre figure of all ;
From
the head of the centre-figure, spreading a nimbus of gold-coloured light.
But
I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head with out its nimbus of gold-coloured light; From my hand, from the brain of every man and woman
streams, effulgently flowing for ever. could sing such grandeurs and glories about you! have not known what you are you have slumber d
it
O
!
You
I
;
upon yourself all your time There is no endowment in man or woman
that
is
not
tallied in you.
There
is
no
good
virtue,
is in
you
no beauty ;
in
man
or
woman, but
as
HIS DEMOCRACY.
No
pluck, no endurance in others, but as
you As for me,
I
give nothing to anyone except
like carefully to I
85
you
I
in
is
good
give the
;
sing the songs of the glory]of none, not God, sooner than I sing the songs of the glory of you." x
Now,
to state
Whitman s fundamental democratic
in as concise a
way
as
is
He
possible.
is,
ideas
at the outset,
The neither absolutely collectivist nor individualist. care and culture of the individual, his spiritual growth, is,
The whole
indeed, the final end.
and
vast array
pomp of nature exists to form spiritual individuals. The individual is no mere function of a social whole, no mere cog or pin in the machinery. This develop ment of the individual is so dominant in Whitman s mind, that, though he writes of the "Modern Man," he is always actually thinking of particular types, dis tinct people. Yet. on the other hand, he sees that the spiritua individual is made a reality by the social whole of which he is a part. Man is not man except 1
as
son,
life
lover,
into a
forms the "
friend,
man, and he gifts
citizen.
The world
in turn renders
pours
back
in
its
new
so bestowed.
One s-self I sing, a simple separate person Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse."
In the next place,
Whitman
s
thoroughly sane genius
perceives the difference between the State and society.
In the
last
rescrt the State
1
must
Leaves of Grass,
p.
rest
186.
on force and
WALT WHITMAN.
86 coercion.
We may
State control, as the
eliminate
But so long as the State force be coterminous with
solute collectivist
many
subjects
from
modern world has exists, its
actually done. so long will coercive
jurisdiction.
would extend that
The ab
jurisdiction
to
every sphere of life, so that no room shall be left for the individual to turn himself about in and do just as he pleases. The absolute anarchist, on the other
hand, would leave people to do what they thought Neither the collective proper in every relation of life. despotism nor the anarchic individualism could, as a matter of fact, last anywhere twenty-four hours; and
Modern Man
the
The
will certainly
not tolerate either.
now is to find out great problem action is where the collective necessary and just is and and where it desirable, impossible dangerous.
On
for reformers
the whole,
modern
society
is
in the sphere of opinion, there
coming to see that, must be no coercion
;
while in that of practical material affairs increasing, collective regulation is essential. People are free now in nearly every civilised
opinions, and form
land to publish
societies
for
their
all
manner
of
propagation,
provided these societies do not use force against the State itself; in which case the State is bound, in order to
On
preserve its existence, to thwart any such aims. the other hand, men cannot be allowed to injure
work them subject them
their neighbours health, to for their
You can
own
profit, to
as they please, to
starvation.
preach a new religion to your fellows, but maintain an open cesspool in your street. cannot you There is really but little of the danger of interference
HIS DEMOCRACY.
87
with genuine liberty that people, calling themselves Individualists (with a very large I), would have us
The modern
believe.
and its
We
powers.
into society, nor
is
beginning, in
be
will
its
national
and extent of
cannot permit the State to be merged
mere society
to take the place of the
needed, and in many ways extended rather than contracted in the
Coercion
State. it
State
local capacity, to realise the nature
is
still
1
future.
Indeed,
it is
through
this very
modern democratic
State, with its fairly just balance, that
shape of society
is
Were
possible.
anything in the
the State abolished,
anarchy would ensue, to be followed inevitably by And such despotism would, for the very despotism. sake of maintaining its existence, curtail the free ac tion of society. The democratic State can allow full
swing to social
activities, to voluntary reforming, reor aesthetic ligious, agencies, working freely among the but the people despotic State cannot, as has been -j
shown ism.
a thousand times over in the history of despot The problem for the modern State is how to
gather in
all
the disinherited,
how
to secure for all
means of life, undue interference
opportunity for work, control over the leisure,
culture,
health,
without
with the freedom of anyone.
This problem suggests that the old notions of free be revised. It is not in the absence of
dom must restriction,
freedom 1
"
but in the presence of opportunity, that
consists.
Force
till
Right
Where is
there
ready,"
as
is
the possibility of
Matthew Arnold
said.
WALT WHITMAN.
88 expansion for
there
all,
that this exists in
freedom.
is
It
cannot be said
Whether the form of
any country.
government be empire, monarchy, or republic, poverty exists everywhere ; and with poverty, as Whitman At this very time we sees, expansion is impossible. read of
bread
and Vienna, caused by lack of
riots in Berlin
of starving millions in Russia ; of public pro vision of food and shelter for unemployed men in the
new
;
cities
of Australia
;
and of deaths from
huge, wealthy London. things are possible, freedom in
starvation
Just in so far as these is
impossible.
Whitman
sees this very clearly.
What perhaps he does not
see quite so clearly
is
organised action can do more for the physical betterment of men than used to be imagined. Certain forms of industry have been so completely that public
developed,
and
necessary for
all,
their
that
products is
it
now
are so absolutely easy and rational to
substitute collective for private ownership in certain It is equally important means of producing wealth. certain that the true freedom of the individual is
actually
increased
rather
collective pressure exerted
provided the pressure
through
the
is
initiative
Whitman does not
than
on
diminished
by the
recalcitrant individuals,
exerted by the authority and of the people themselves.
see this
quite clearly because, while perceiving the distinction between State and society, he, nevertheless, leans on the whole to what
may be
called the anarchist side, as indeed
the
is
He hears a voice general bent of the American mind. of the Civil War rising prophetic over the carnage :
HIS DEMOCRACY. "
The dependence The continuance These
shall tie
89
of Liberty shall be lovers. of Equality shall be comrades.
you and band you stronger than loops
of iron.
O
ecstatic,
I,
partners
!
O
lands
!
with the love of
lovers tie you.
(Were you looking to be held together by lawyers Or by an agreement on a paper ? or by arms ? nor the world, nor any living thing,
Nay,
?
will
so
x cohere.")
On
the whole,
Whitman seems
to look forward to
the continuance of the State as chiefly needful for providing free opportunity for the expansion of society.
The
great State officers are merely seivants of the people, working for the good of individuals, from
whose ranks they are taken, not to be swathed in an majesty like the monarchs of the out-worn
artificial
world, but to reflect the native dignity of the people to return to the ranks when their special task is
and
over.
The
State
itself,
however, by no means sinks its value as the great
into insignificance, but retains
organic bond. "
All thine,
O
sacred Union
!
Ships, farms, shops, barns, factories, mines,
City
We
and State, North, South, item and aggregate, dedicate, dread Mother, all to thee !
Protectress absolute, thou bulwark of all For well we know that while thou givest each !
(generous as God), 1
"
Drum-Taps.
Leaves of Grass, p. 247.
and
al
WALT WHITMAN. Without thee neither
Nor Nor
all
nor each, nor land, home,
nor mine, nor any here this day secure, 1 aught, nor any day secure."
ship,
But while the State forms the organic bond, the great object of desire absence of which
spiritual relationship, in the
is
free
all
chatter about
democracy is empty.
The spirit of the new era is that of comradeship, human affection, association, without which democracy is like Dead Sea apples, gay and lustrous to the sight, but leaving nothing to the taste but rottenness and ashes. The State will provide us with the needful
means
for forming this free spiritual union, but it can never be a substitute for the union itself. The ideal
of
Whitman
is
expressed in those very fine
in their simplicity "
I
I
dreanVd
in
lines,
noble
:
a dream
I
saw a
city invincible
to the
attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth, dream d that was the new city of Friends.
Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love,
it
led the rest.
was seen every hour
It
that city, And in all their looks
in the actions of the
and words.
3
men
of
2
This great ideal of a true home of the soul far trans cends all the mechanical reforms for which so many earnest people are working, and which are in the main For consider needful, but only as means to an end. 1 "Song
2
of the
Exposition."
"
Calamus."
Ibid., p.
109.
Leaves of Grass,
p. 164.
HIS DEMOCRACY.
how few
of the strenuous agitators
and known
How
is it
are fitted to dwell in the
that so
many
sonally so unattractive?
we have "
city of
all
heard
Friends."
people are per cannot accept these thin
"advanced"
We
dogmatists, these quarrelsome disputants, these angry One egotists, as our leaders into the promised land.
long as they remain essentially what they will be little more than surface
feels that so are,
social
changes
changes, with the leaven of the old corruption working underneath.
How
still
many, who presumably have no dying forms, refuse to dance to Because it is urged, of ignor the reformers piping ? ance, of prejudice, of apathy, of fear; no doubt, but is
it
that so
interest in clinging to
partly because of the reformers themselves.
It is
the
work of the reformer to chase away ignorance, preju dice, apathy, and fear; these are the very elements that give him the conditions of his task. Men will not follow him, and they are right in refusing him
he is an egotist, a mere schemer, a a selfish cynic, or a person with low, mean, narrow aims. Such an one cannot long hide from the
their allegiance, if critical prig,
people the narrow brain, the hide-bound
intellect, the
The people s flippant mind, the unlovely disposition. into is Miserable character marvellous. penetration though they may be, they will hug their rags about them and remain inert. The most ignorant superstitious revivalist, if his heart is alive
effect
with the flame of
human
produce more vital and permanent on the poor than will the "emancipated" but
sympathy,
will
cold and calculating egotist.
WALT WHITMAN.
92
And to
not only will the type of reformer here referred to touch the masses
fail
best
men
;
he
will also fail to get the
to co-operate with him.
They
will
not
move
except for wider aims and at a higher bidding. They are of the mind of Fichte The idea alone moves "
:
and where
him,
it
does not move him, there he has
but remains quiescent and inactive. He will never rouse himself to energy and labour, merely that
no
life,
something may come to pass, but that the will of the may be accomplished. Until it speaks, he too is
idea
silent
;
he has no voice but for
it.
respect old things because they are old, does he desire novelty for its own sake.
He
does not
but as
He
little
looks for
and more perfect than the present so before him clearly and distinctly, as not to to would lead difference, long change only improvement, he remains inactive, and concedes to what
better
is
;
until this rises
the old the privilege it derives from ancient posses 1 sion." To the reformer therefore comes Whitman s
solemn message "
Is
reform needed
The greater ality "
:
?
is it
through you
?
the reform needed, the greater the Person
you need
Go, dear friend,
if
mence to-day
to
accomplish
it.
need be give up
all else,
and com
to inure yourself to pluck, reality,
self-esteem, definiteness, elevatedness,
Rest not
till
you
rivet
and publish yourself of your own
3 Personality."
1
-
The Nature of "To
a
Pupil."
the Scholar.
Leaves of Grass,
p. 302.
HIS DEMOCRACY. But shall
what ideal of
to
reform
this
among modern
life,
tend?
to
93
what type of character,
Whitman
conspicuously
writers, anticipates that clean-handed,
open-hearted, free
men and women,
honest workers,
together in friendship, living without conceal ment, living much in the air and sunshine and own ing allegiance to no lord or master, caring but little living
for
many
of the social distinctions that are highly
esteemed now, are the democratic citizens of the future. Like Tolstoi, Whitman has entered into the of the working-people, and has found among them the healthiest elements of our human nature. By the
life
working-classes he does not mean the dirty, sodden, foul-mouthed vagabond who loafs for hours at a pjst on the lookout for drink, nor the riotous street-
whom would be dealt with pretty a sternly by genuine democratic community. Nor of course is he thinking of the servile dependant of the larrikin,
both of
country squire, destitute of some of the essential ele ments of manliness a type practically unknown in America. He has no reference to the unhappy human
wreckage which the sea of poverty and social misery washes on the shores of our great centres of popula tion
though even about these he by no means de
spairs.
healthy,
He
has mainly in
skilled,
well-paid
mind the self-respecting^ and sometimes well-read
mechanic or
artisan ; alert, eager, open-eyed, frank, manly, somewhat too material perhaps, yet with un-
plumbed depths of idealism in him strong alike in body and mind. And he is thinking too of the bright, supple, affectionate, healthy, good-looking woman,
WALT WHITMAN.
94
whether as mother, wife, sister, lover, or friend, too independent to be the slave or toy of man, equal with
him
in every respect, and yet possessing nothing of the sour, atrabiliar anti-masculine sentiment supposed to
be a somewhat characteristic note of the
"advanced"
woman.
Now these desirable, healthy, breezy elements are to-day but imperfectly developed because of the con But they are there in ditions of modern labour. germ, awaiting the sun of a renewed human summer to
ripen into fruition.
society
is
And, unless the growth of by a cataclysm as in
to be again deflected
the case of the irruption of the barbarous hordes into the decaying Roman Empire, we may look for a better
human
type
than that of the modern fine
gentleman who yawns away his time
in a Piccadilly
than that of the
up
to tea-gowns
"
"
society
and
"
"
club, or fritters his energies in so-called
sport
bric-a-brac,
the fashionable slang and scandal of the green-room, and the divorce court. all
In Whitman
democracy work
s
barbaric element.
He
is
or
which
is
turf,
the
mingled with a
rightly distrusts the
lating effect of over-culture
;
mind is given and who is versed in
lady whose
emascu
weakening
men
for
action, loosening moral
fibre, sicklying o er the native hue of resolution with the pale cast of thought. He
would
insist
on a healthy dash of barbarism
weary, anxious, introspective civilisation
;
in our
a matter of
even greater importance in the American than in the He loves the barbarian as Burns did, English cities. as
Wordsworth
in less
measure
did.
He
celebrates
HIS DEMOCRACY.
Q5
the friendly and flowing savage, the Indian trapper he, lounging on a bank, dressed girl
"
and the red mostly
and
He
limbs."
men
that live
woods." "
she, with long eyelashes, bare head,
;
descending on her volup
coarse, straight locks
tuous of
:
in skins
He
"
is
enamour d of growing
among to
calls
out-doors,
cattle or taste of the
mind
matchless with horse,
ocean or
the young Texas rangers,
rifle,
song, supper, courtship,
handsome, proud, and yearns to "race naked along the where shore," and salutes as the ideal city the place fierce men and women pour forth, as the sea to the
large,
turbulent,
generous,
He
affectionate."
"
whistle of death pours its sweeping and unript waves." The modern man is to be no puny, chicken-breasted,
anaemic person, but strong, a audacious, self-poised, vigorous being at home with the winds and waves. Throughout nearly the whole near-sighted
stooping,
Whitman
s writings penetrates the element of odour of the fresh-turned earth, the salt the rankness,
of
sea
an element of
rich, rude, unpruned growth the globe. How this element can be realised in mankind, if the universal tendency to air,
alike in
city
life
man and is
permanent,
easy of solution.
Even
a problem not altogether the keen athletic sports of
is
young men do not, in a crowded country, lead to any deep relations with Nature while many of us are in danger of forgetting that anything more natural exists ;
than the trim parterres of a suburban garden. This love for the elemental forces, perhaps, leads
Whitman ness
of
to dwell with exaggeration
rough,
uncultivated
on the
natures
;
attractive
but
it
also
WALT WHITMAN.
96
enables him to perceive and welcome the new types and to discern their superiority over the
of heroism, military
and
virtues
which arose
aristocratic
in ancient
codes
and mediaeval
of
times.
honour Whit
man
loves the average man as a man, and will not have him lopped and hardened into a machine. The Broadway stage-driver, whom he notes, is not merely a
human piece of mechanism to pilot a vehicle along a good fellow, free-mouth d, quickthe street, but temper d, not bad-looking, ready with life or death for "
and so forth. The engineer not a part of the machinery, but a human being having the same desires as the President or the Secretary of State. How sharply Whitman a friend, fond of
on the
train
women,"
is
comes here into collision with a very respectable body of economic and political doctrine which is now breathing stertorously and will soon be, not a body, For the possessors of but a consuming corpse engines and omnibuses do regard those who labour for them as being primarily embodiments of labour!
force
;
it
relations
expressed in the terms of the economic between them. And these are
is
existing
For there is probably no usually the only relations. railway director in the world who would invite a guard or ticket-collector to his drawing-room and ask
him
to take his decolletee wife or daughter into dinner,
although the
man
in
question
may be
in every
way
superior to the noodle charged with that honour. The cash-nexus is still mainly the bond, the one
bond, which unites the severed
Whitman
sees, too, that
classes.
democracy must have done
HIS DEMOCRACY.
97
once and forever with, not only the forms, but the Great numbers of English people spirit of feudalism. grades have not yet emerged from the feudal feeling. They accept the fact of stratified classes dis of
all
tinct
from each other.
Others take the mechanical,
individualist view of society as
being composed of unrelated units, though this sentiment is declining fast ; faster, perhaps, as a feeling than as a formulated
To Whitman,
creed.
feudalism and mechanism are
both hopeless, false, and dead. must stand clear of the wreck of
alike impossible,
modern man from the
past,
which but impedes
his
The litter
march and
fetters his energies. "
Pass d
!
pass d
!
once so
for us, for ever pass d, that
now void,
inanimate, phantom world, Embroidered, dazzling, foreign world, with all its gorge ous legends, myths,
mighty world,
its priests and warlike lords, and courtly dames, Pass d to its charnel vault, coffin d with crown and armour on, Blazon d with Shakspere s purple page,
Its
kings and castles proud,
And
dirged by Tennyson
But because
s
sweet, sad
that feudal world
is
*
rhyme."
gone
forever,
it
does not follow that society is permanently dissolved into unrelated individuals. Or, if, as Carlyle has it, the Church has fallen speechless from apoplexy and the State shrunken into a police-office, straitened to its pay, we must build up anew and in nobler
get
1
"
Song of the
Exposition."
Leaves of Grass, p. 159.
G
WALT WHITMAN.
98 form
this shattered world.
Not out of the
breast, as the chorus of spirits
but from the collective
life.
individual
proclaimed to Faust,
And
this brings us to
Whitman s
very real and deep historical sense. For, while at times he appears to look with a sort of scorn
on
the fading kingdoms and kings over there," and the fading religions and priests," he sees very clearly that this new collective life, while ridding itself "
on
"
of mere rubbish, must absorb into that has really aided in building
its
own being
up man
s life
on
all
this
Unlike the mere revolutionist, dashing him on the rocks of human institutions, Whitman
planet
self blindly
declares that the
modern man must take up and
corporate into himself
all
of this past
life
that
in
was
good, that he cannot deliberately reject great past periods dedicated to ideas that have sustained and
developed the soul of man. Let the shell of dogma go, but throw not away the Let marriage be as free precious kernel it inclosed. as
you
will,
abolition.
bourgeois
not
but do not imagine that freedom means Indeed, Whitman is at times just a trifle
in
depicting
woman be
living out her
the well-ordered home.
Let
arbitrary restraint
from
prevented by life in her
own
own way
give in to the silly cant that she should
man
does.
but do not do exactly what ;
Let us change our conceptions of what
properly constitutes healthy public order ; but let us understand that there is a public order. Let us not
be deluded into supposing that the great intellects of human race were all in error, that the State is
the
nothing but tyranny, religion but a fraudulent supersti-
HIS DEMOCRACY. tion,
and
that
it
99
has been given to some young, un
kempt, inflated revolutionist to discover that which has been hidden from the wisdom of ages.
There are people with a violent prejudice against who think we must go back to Paganism There are others for our examples and inspiration. Christianity,
prejudiced against Paganism, who insist that we must a matter on which rely solely on the Christian idea the great fathers of the Church were much liberal than many of their spiritual descendants.
there in
is
more
And
a small school which finds the whole secret
Buddhism.
esoteric
Once more be
it
All
All these notions are we cannot u
futile.
go back
said that
"
to
and others
our early anything. the prolonged struggle with the Aryan communism, terrible powers of Nature, the rude vigour of the these
Northern barbarous
forces
tribes
elements of
these are in our
life
of
We
cannot deny any ; to-day, we must incorporate the residual essence of each into the new human synthesis, a process which is vital
it.
aided for us by the wonderful discoveries of science
and the great blending of peoples. This is Whitman s final and ultimate view of the real nature of modern democracy. **
thy best, ship of Democracy, thy freight; tis not the Present only, Past is also stored in thee.
Sail, sail
Of value
The Thou
is
boldest not the venture of thyself alone, not of
the Western Continent alone,
Earth
s
resume entire floats on thy keel,
steadied by thy spars.
O
ship,
is
WALT WHITMAN.
TOO
the antecedent With thee Time voyages in trust nations sink or swim with thee. With all their ancient struggles, martyrs, heroes, epics, ;
wars, thou bear st the other continents. Theirs, theirs as much as thine, the destination
port
triumphant; Steer then with good strong hand and wary eye, helmsman, thou earnest great companions; Venerable, priestly Asia
And 1
"
royal, feudal
Thou Mother with
Grass, p. 348.
sails this
Europe
sails
day with
with
thy Equal
thee."
O
thee,
1
Brood."
Leaves of
V.-HIS SPIRITUAL CREED. THERE
a certain very valid objection to any attempt It metaphysic out of a poet s song.
is
to construct a
moral ; and there looks like reading a story for its more few have been agencies subtly demoralising than "
the moral
tale.
We
"
should read both stories and
beauty and vitality rather than for cheap platitudes as to the virtues of temper ance or the wickedness of seduction. Yet it is for the sake of their
poems
impossible to take leave of
Whitman without con
fundamental philosophy. For what is sidering after all but a love of wisdom, and where philosophy his
we
man
if not in the poet? Apollo s lute," consists in an insight into the essential substance of things, and almost every line of Whitman is informed with this.
shall
the
find
Philosophy,
wise
"musical
as
is
Whitman does not argue. In the debate on God and the soul, he tells us, he is silent. Logic and sermons never convince," the grass, the stars, the mother with her babe at her breast strike their roots "
down deeper
into the
heart of the infinite mystery
than the demonstrations of the schools. "
And For
I
say to mankind, Be not curious about God, curious about each am not curious about
who am God;
I
WAtT V/HITMAN.
>
J
how much I am at peace God and about death). I heai and behold God in every object^ yet understand not God in the least, Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful
(No
array of terms can say
about
than myself.
We
are not
3
1
therefore
to
look
elaboration
for
of
argument, which can be left to the theologians, nor even for that subtle reasoning which pervades so of Browning s poetry. We find calm affirma All the great an attitude of powerful faith. words and ideas of the religious consciousness God,
much tion,
the soul,
the immortal
are here
life
divested of
;
and related to the rushing and myriad forms of the world of Nature. The poet, it is true, never had the introspective sense, nor the kind of religious experiences which we associate with St. Paul, St. Augustine, and the author of the De Imitations. He never felt the need of spiritual Bucke, And he regeneration," he told his friend, Dr. in animals the because they do not make rejoices
their ecclesiastical import,
forces
"
"
me
sick
discussing their duty to
went through any
spiritual crisis
;
God."
He
never
he knows neither
the anguish nor the ecstasy of the apostle or the saint. Are we therefore to say with some critics that he lacks soul? It is rather true that he possessed spiritual
health in as
full
It
is
measure as
his nature
the diseased
who
holding. health as an object of desire and Leaves of Grass,
was capable of
are conscious
who
p. 76.
of
supplicate for
HIS SPIRITUAL CREED.
103
Whitman deliverance from the body of this death. no in the of had, Wordsworth, compunction language him. The tearful page of Augustine s was Confessions just as meaningless to him as a treatise on morbid anatomy would be to a healthy child. Such a condition of the soul unquestionably involves in
wrought
away of
the fading life,
but
life itself
"
certain old types of the religious
does not necessarily mean that the religious Wordsworth saw that. has departed.
it
Dear Child
!
dear Girl
!
that walkest with
me
here,
thou appear st untouched by solemn thought, Thy nature is not therefore less divine If
:
Thou
And God
liest in
Abraham s bosom st at
the
the year s inner shrine, all
;
Temple being with thee when we know worshipp
may be admitted, however, plexity of human nature and of It
it
not."
view of the
in
com
the almost impossible
equal growth of every faculty, that, among Whitman s "splendid and savage old men," athletic women
walking in procession through the breed of orators and bards," and beauty,"
some of the more
"
streets, "
brawniest
august masters of
delicate spiritual growths
of the past can scarcely be looked
for.
Those of us
regard as inexpressibly precious these more ethereal manifestations of the religious genius must console ourselves with the thought that they were
who
purchased
at
a great price
a price which average
humanity under modern conditions cannot afford to But there is certainly a danger that in this pay. glorification of the
body we
shall
tend to produce
WALT WHITMAN. merely a race of splendid animals, well-fed, supple, athletic, powerful, but void of reverence and of the spiritual element.
Whitman s writings by and sensuous beauty may be inclined to regard the poet as Pagan. In truth he is no more Pagan than Christian he is modern and inclusive. Were he Pagan he would be reactionary, and therefore impossible as the democratic poet, for the world will never go back to Paganism as, indeed, Those who
are impressed in
this passion for athleticism
;
;
it
never
will
been
"
go
outlived.
back"
to
any
The same
faith or
form that has
classification
has
been
Such seems, Pagan. ; an impression could only be conveyed to those who look upon one side of Goethe, and upon his earlier applied to
Goethe
he
is
also,
The concluding
career.
it
chapter of Eckermann
s
Conversations, giving us Goethe s final opinions, could The sage him not have been written about a Pagan. self said to Lavater,
"
I
am by no means ^?ti -Christian, I am indeed nickt-Chris-
not even wi-Christian, but x
perhaps, on the whole, Whitman s looks outward, not inward, as But he has the the Christian thinkers and saints do.
And
tian."
this
general attitude.
is,
He
reverence for that which thinkers never had.
is
And,
beneath him, which Pagan as Goethe went through
many phases from his crude Wertherism to his final transcendental optimism, so has Whitman very ob viously modified his early conceptions ; discovering a new meaning 1
in pain
and sorrow, and therefore em-
Henry Crabb Robertson
s
Diary, Vol.
I.
HIS SPIRITUAL CREED.
tO$
bracing in his symphonic scale deeper chords than those he had at first struck with such exuberant
This enlargement (as it may be called, was not change) of his nature probably dates from the tragedies he witnessed in the hospitals, and resonance. for
it
from the personal suffering which paralysed his splendid vitality.
and
in
The
note struck in the
"Whispers
of
variance with that of
"
Passage to
India,"
is
not at
Heavenly Starting from
Death,"
"
Paumanok,"
or
Calamus/ but it is another and deeper. There is no greater delusion, by the way, no more fruitful source of error, than the failure to acknowledge that a powerful mind is always growing, and must not be held closely to its first utterance. When we see what of
"
absurd mischief has arisen from the attempt to com press the Pauline writings, aglow with the fire and energy of a strenuous soul, into
a hard system of
we all do now, went through, in a few brief years, a wonderful development of soul which can be traced logical
when we
dogma
perceive, as
that Shakspere
Love s Labour Lost and Romeo and Juliet" to the The Tempest and the Winter s
from the early conceits of the romantic passion of
calm wisdom of
we may
"
"
"
"
"
wisely conclude that a
"
man
of genius has his phases of inner growth, like the rest of us, and that to look for a narrow, definite, consistent body of Tale,"
doctrine in his writings is to look for something that is not there, that was never intended to be there, and that could not, in the very nature of things,
been
there.
ideas running
But Whitman has all
his abiding,
through his writings,
have
permanent and which may
WALT WHITMAN.
IO6 f
be summed up
we note
as his philosophy.
In the
first
place
his perfect, serene optimism, uttered in the
original Leaves of Grass five years before the philo sopher of modern pessimism was laid in his grave at !
The
Frankfort.
intention of
Whitman
to lead to
is
of will-power and fulness of life ; that of Schopenhauer to extinction of will, to quietism and individualism of the most extreme type and ulti
energy
;
mately to extinction of non-conscious being.
will
and
final
absorption into
No judgment will be pro nounced here between these two antagonistic views, though it is to one or the other that modern society will come. But certain reflections suggest themselves grounds for Whitman s ideas. Rousseau, it has well been said, made the poor very proud, because in the average man he saw the as to the
ideal
tion
man.
Out of the
he saw, as "
rights
emergence of the
glorified
He
therefore spoke to man of his a term false if applied to a past historical
resurrection body. "
charnel-vault of social corrup
in vision, the
if used of man as he might and should In our eagerness to repudiate the crude and unhistorical doctrine of natural rights," we have gone
fact,
but true
be.
"
to another
extreme which has led to a feeling of hope
despair as to society, fortified largely by the In doctrines, or supposed doctrines, of Darwinism. less
other words,
ward
we have gone backward
instead of for
Instead our application of evolution to man. of interpreting man in the terms of that which he is in
becoming, we have tried to interpret him in the terms The natural of that from which he has emerged.
HIS SPIRITUAL CREED. result has
1
been a wide-spread pessimism, as must
07 al
ways be the case when we worship the established fact, forgetting that
a fact
novation
is
pause on the
the
salient
is
fluid, that
it is
As Emerson has
petual state of dissolution.
energy
;
in a per "
it,
In
conservatism the
1
But if it is necessary and economic history of man in understand him, still more necessary is it to last movement."
to trace the natural
order to
envisage his spiritual aspirations, to supplement the historic by the prophetic and reforming element. Now,
whatever else reason
may
or
may
in the world, that
is
not be, it is certain that has a reAos which must
it
partake of its own nature ; else why concern ourselves with rational action at all ? Whitman and the opti mists believe, though they cannot scientifically de monstrate, that this reAos is good, that these issues
towards which democratic society is working are not merely momentous but beneficent. Such an attitude of
mind is not one of blind credulity, but of rational Those who have not this faith are deprived, as
faith.
Dante
says, of "
They but
"intellectual good."
Ch hanno perduto
"
il
ben dello
intdletto."
are excellent, unselfish, learned,
are
like
a watch without
it
may be
;
its
mainspring. Their social effort can only be in the nature of a pisaller. They are labouring on an edifice without a they
foundation, which
the whirlwind
1
u
-
Dell Inferno, Canto III.
The
Conservative,"
Vol.
I.,
p.
will
destroy in
a
281 (Eiverside Edition).
WALT WHITMAN.
IO8
moment
s
Of
furious onset.
if
course,
they have a
good and honest
will, they are really impelled by motives than deeper they are aware of ; but if they
on grounds of mere logic, they would not trouble themselves about bettering the lot of men. They would agree with Schopenhauer that social re acted
form was a
mad
delusion,
quietism as every true
and would
logically take to
pessimist does.
such a
In
case, indeed, "
Were it not better done as others use, To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, Or with
the tangles of Neasra
Or one might respond favourably
s
hair
?"
to the invitation
Will one of the Elizabethan dramas, conveyed ? and let the slide world drink, Certainly he you go "
in
"
who
is
not afflicted with the Welt-schmerz can scarcely
occupy himself more agreeably although one would be inclined to take the flagon of sack and Amaryllis ;
too.
If,
that has
he
however, the subject be of a vehement nature in solitude over the miseries of man,
brooded
become aflame with madness and
will
will
be
likely
red ruin and the breaking the world, instead of being the
to plunge into anarchism,
"
up of laws." For if outcome of reason, is a mere handful
fluke,
of crazy revolutionists which the world has evolved ?
why should not a
destroy
Ex
have nothing against them but mere
man
is
bound
Or
society
force,
they
and no
if
the world be the
evil design,
why should not
to respect that.
product of a positively
the
hypothesi,
the purif)ing vengeance of earnest souls devour
it
in
HIS SPIRITUAL CREED. flames
The
?
cally justified
they can only be historically justified
;
in a process, the results of
which
must be inferred from the
hidden, but which nature of man.
are
full
09
actual facts around us cannot be ethi
as necessary stages
The
1
sense of these world-forces working up to
a mighty denouement is as present to the mind of Whit man as was the sense of the contrast between the
woman crowned with the sun and her divine child, and the beast with seven heads to the author of the Apocalypse one of the earliest attempts, by the way, ;
a philosophy of history. The rushing tide will carry the bark of man to the shore of truth, it will at
the journey is not bring him where he desires to be The storms a mere aimless wandering, it has a goal. by the way will fit man to know the real nature of his ;
world. "
Years prophetical
!
the space ahead as I walk, as it, is full of phantoms,
I
vainly try to pierce
Unborn
deeds, things soon to be, project their shapes
around me, This incredible rush and heat,
Your dreams, (I
know
this strange ecstatic fever
O years O years, how they penetrate
of dreams,
!
not whether
I
sleep or
wake
through
The perform d America and Europe grow dim, shadow behind me, The unperform d, more gigantic than
me
!
;)
retiring
in
advance upon
me."
Faith in a rational reAos 1
"
Songs of
ever, advance,
1
Parting."
is
usually
weakened by a
Leaves of G-rass, p. 371.
HO
WALT WHITMAN.
perpetual suggestion of the problem of evil ; not only moral evil, but physical disease and disaster. How
can a world
filled
with crime
and misery be
related to
The question is as old as man, any good purpose ever new. Whitman has no doubt whatsoever on yet ?
this head, no serious qualms of For a misgiving. moment, now and then, he seems to hesitate, but his
scepticism
is
word, we
say that, for
may mode and condition moral
life.
existence
;
summer
evanescent as a
him, disease
cloud.
In a
a necessary sin is of the
is
of the physical, as the price that must be paid for in which case the only question is whether
Either
is
the existence
is worth the price. That, of course, can We put the question only be answered in two ways. by, it is true, trifle with it, ignore it, take to our cakes
and
ale
;
but sooner or
with a force
we cannot
later,
it
resist.
presses
down on
We may
us
either say
boldly that the privilege of viewing the fleeting shows of time is purchased at far too dear a price our
by
ever-recurring bath in the muddy waters of guilt and misery or we may declare that the rational end is so ;
vast
and magnificent
as to completely dwarf the evils to undergo. Many of us are
and hardships we have
so constituted that we can adopt neither of these answers with unhesitating boldness. The personal equation deflects the balance of rational judgment,
and we spend our
man s
reply
is
clear.
lives in
He
paralysing doubt.
feels neither
Whit
remorseful nor
The end in view justifies the self-contemptuous. means. Does a vessel strike on a rock ? All on board are provided
for
by the boundless resources of
HIS SPIRITUAL CREED. the universe, which are directed, in the eternal pro cess and final drift of things, to the preservation of the
Does a man seem
spiritual individual.
to fail
"
under
probably the day true success, or as Browning says, "but a triumph s evidence for the fulness of the days." The discords the heat of this
rush
be
in,
as
"
life s
Failure
?
that
"
Browning continues,
is
harmony should
prized."
This
long
speculates Mr.
drawn-out complex civilisation itself, Edward Carpenter, may be a sort of
prolonged necessary disease, which shall ultimately The lead us to a larger, and fuller, and healthy life. 1 soul
from
plunges
comes conscious
of
mere
and
innocence
purity into the vortex of the world
s strife,
negative
where
nature and personality
its
it :
be
and
then emerges into a positive and rational order, bringing with it the spoils it has won in its combat of life
and death.
Whitman
treats the fact of evil as
and important as any other
being as natural
in the full spirit of
op
timism. "
Roaming that
in is
Thought over the Universe, I saw the little good steadily hastening towards Immorta
lity,
And
the vast All that
merge
There 1
is
itself
is
lost
nothing to be said on
Civilisation
:
Its
Leaves of Grass, p. 216.
I
and
this
Cause and Cure.
schein, 1890.) 3
called Evil
and become
saw hastening dead."
to
2
world-old problem
(London
:
Sonnen-
-
WALT WHITMAN.
12
evil but what has been said many times before. But Whitman s view seems to be identical with that
of
and may thus be
of ethical idealism,
stated
:
Con
ceiving the universe not as a fixed thing but as a fluid
movement, and as affording subject-matter for man work on, we may think of it as being (so to speak) the outset entirely
and
positively good, or entirely
to at
and
positively evil, as a dual realm after the Persian and Manichsean conceptions, or as actually indifferent with
we are to view the world as we must conclude that work absolutely, actually nor shall we easily dis for its redemption is idle folly cover how it is that any one of us ever dreamed at all If
infinite potentialities.
evil,
;
The gradual cessation of willof a good world. can alone release a suffering race who, never
activity
theless, as
part of an
evil
order, have
no ground of
There is, therefore, complaint against that order. Neither is here no sphere for positive moral action. there
on the second hypothesis, when the world
is
conceived as positively and entirely good at the start. That necessarily means absence of action and re
How
action, for effort implies resistance.
perfection at the outset ? fection, to
make
real
Our
action
and manifest
that
This view, therefore, gives us no merely a
"
is
act
if
all is
to create per
which
human
is latent.
world, but
celestial lubber-land."
John Stuart Mill expressed
his
surprise that
the
Manichsean theory had not been revived in our time. But dualism satisfies no mind. It neither gives a clue to any intellectual problem, nor does it afford moral inspiration.
For, on this theory,
who can
tell
that
HIS SPIRITUAL CREED. our moral action
will
113
be other than the merest forlorn
For the forces of the universe cannot be
relied hope on to support the effort of man, nor can man himself be relied on as a moral power. We are discovering too that what we call evil is a perverted good, that the ?
underlying substance is one, and that the supposed Lust is antagonism of a positive force is illusory. destroyed, not by atrophy of a vital power, but by the force of love. And an entire new penology is arising
on the basis of the healing and restorative theory of punishment.
We is
turn, therefore, to the fourth hypothesis,
that of
Whitman
himself.
We
which
see here the function
served by evil, as that which affords the necessary condition of man s spiritual energy. Until reason
passed into manifested action the nature of the world was indifferent, but capable of good potentially. The manifestation of reason in
man
the gulf between our natural between what we are and what
is
thus the opening of
and our spiritual self, we know we ought to
That gulf must be closed by
be.
above
all
by
neither in a that kind of
human
spiritual action,
Our poet therefore believes pessimism which damps all effort, nor in love.
optimism which renders
effort superfluous. not for him a great prison-house for the captives of the devil, nor will it ever be converted into a glorified Fourieresque millennium. It is and must
The world
is
be, so far as
we
human
are concerned, a sphere for
action, the condition of evil being essential to effort, but the eternal sacred influence ultimately all.
The
enfolding notion of the perpetual pull-devil pu l-baker ]
H
WALT WHITMAN.
114
Whitman could never understand.
theory of dualism "
and
Silent
he
amazed,"
tells
us,
he heard even as a
boy the preacher depicting God as contending The divine soul against some being or influence." "
little
includes
all
there
;
no
is
in
evil
the
the old
city, as
This concep Bible says, but the Lord hath done it. a man Faust," where tion, identical with that of "
cannot
strive without erring, is set forth in the mystic
Chanting the Square
"
Deific,"
in
which the
"
spirit
a plotter and wily drudge, to gether with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, are taken as representing the full and completed being of the
that
defiant,
denies,"
world
the divine square. is thus as firm a believer in religion as he a rejector of asceticism, and advocate of the body s
Whitman is
claims.
He
finds
no
conflict
between these hitherto
conflicting ideas, for the world
is
one,
all
forms of
The old energy are combined in one vast synthesis. dualism, which doubtless had its historical justification, sundered the natural world from thought and con ceived of a distinct entity called God waking up (as in the Greek mythology) from a past eternity of idleness,
another entity called matter, and fashioning But for the modern man the con things out of it. Both are flict between spirit and matter has ceased.
facing
of one stupendous whole;" and only through matter can we rise to the consciousness of The divine power ever manifests itself spiritual life.
indeed
"parts
in Nature, finds
its
own being
reflected back in the
world, and mounting through the spires of form in the developed reason of man. emerges "
"
it
HIS SPIRITUAL CREED. "
Was somebody
asking to see the soul
115
?
See your own shape and countenance, persons, sub stances, beasts, the trees, the running rivers, the
rocks and sands. All hold spiritual joys
and afterwards loosen
them."
1
As indicating that Whitman is fully in the current modern thought it is interesting to note Browning s Rabbi Ben Ezra." agreement, as, e.g., in of
"
Creation therefore ever renews
is
perpetual, the world-process
the very earth-stuff itself is informed with universal, i.e., divine energy. There are not itself,
two worlds, one of which we can know, while the other is unknowable; "the whole fact," as Emerson "
is
said,
here."
Heaven and
hell are
not arbitrary
externally reared by despotic power they in here in the mind, are essential, eternal facts of con
states,
:
scious being
suoprofondo vidi die s interna, Legato con amove in un volume,
"Nel
Cio che per Vuniverso
si
squaderna.
2
A striking epigram of Goethe s is quoted in Henry Crabb Robinson s Diary there is not a God now, In the light of modern philo there will be one day." :
"If
sophic ideas the old notion of a great artificer," painfully elaborated in the dreary mechanical school "
of Paley (whose platitudes are 1 -
Starting from Panmanok." Paradiso. Canto XXXIII. "
still
thought by the
Leaves of Grass,
p. 25.
WALT WHITMAN.
Il6
University of Cambridge to be an essential part of the education of a young gentleman), who makes things ns
a
workman makes them,
And any
such notion
equally so
is
is
is no longer tenable. But death to poetry and art.
the old superficial atheism, a mere empty
negation, scorned of the head and heart
alike.
A
greater idea pervades the poetry of both Shelley and Wordsworth, of Tennyson and Browning ; an idea vital,
dynamic,
in the world,
The
infinite.
divine realises
and when the human race
aims
its
collectively
perceive this, a universal human religion will arise, and the prediction of Goethe will be fulfilled. But and this can only come about through human action ;
here
is
where Whitman
religion
gold between view is not merely
rivets a link of
and democracy.
The
Evolution is speculative ; it has its practical side. which works not an external entity independent of our volition.
We are
not only factors in the world-process,
For God recog but the supremely necessary factors. sees a re as the mother in even himself nises man, flection of her being in the child she has just
brought
Thus we cannot look on with pain into the world. in selfish isolation, the penalty attached to which is
Man
the death of intellect and virtue.
works
for the
conversion of the world into a Kosmos, an ordered This is the rationale of progress. This pro whole. as the identification of the gress may be considered individual with the larger self, so that no man shall
desire either to have or to
may
not have or become.
be anything that his fellows This is the principle on
which Whitman bases democracy
:
HIS SPIRITUAL CREED. "
117
speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy, By God I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.
I
!
5
When
permeates the nature it generates a brotherhood very different from that con
this idea
feeling of
descending pity which a benevolent peer might enter for a starving needle-woman. It is democratic
tain
sympathy, born of the conviction of spiritual solidarity, of the belief that no one can develop his spiritual life apart, but
we
that
are
all
necessary to one another.
may be doubted whether a single human being on this planet at this moment feels this truth through and But to Whitman it is fundamental. He through. It
always comes at that individual
by himself
;
the individual, no doubt.
last to
But
a mere undifferentiated potentiality
is
his spiritual life
is
only possible through
his interaction with the social whole.
What power this conviction gives to a man We need not wonder at the stories of Whitman s love for !
even the most degraded, life
for the
wounded
at his
pouring out his very War. I will
walk with delinquents with passionate "
clares.
I feel
not deny them
I
am
for
*
soldiers in the
of them,
how can
he de
love,"
and henceforth
I will
"
I
deny myself? And, Not addressing an outcast woman, he exclaims till the sun excludes you do I exclude you not till "
:
;
the waters refuse to glisten for you rustle
for
rustle for
you, you,"
do
my
and the leaves
to
words refuse to glisten and
WALT WHITMAN.
Il8
In some lines entitled
x
when brooding Whitman hints the
"Thought,"
over the fate of a foundered vessel, sceptical question "
Are Is
souls drown d and destroy d so only matter triumphant ?
?
"
But it is a passing hint merely ; the whole drift of his ideas tending towards the immortal life of every in dividual. This is a necessary part of the rational TeAo5
;
more
and there
clearly
The
thought.
opponent of the idea of arguments break down before For there is in Whitman s mind no
his
s faith.
"
faintest trace of
there
is
a
is
ordinary
immortality finds
Whitman
no point on which Whitman
is
sundered from certain modern schools of
"
belief
other-worldliness
the
in
vulgar,
any more than
theological
com
The im of rewards and punishments. mortality of the individual is to him a part of the and he believes it great order demanded by reason
mercialism
;
because he trusts
in
reason.
gestions of Nature as
truly
It is
as
born of the sug He mind.
of the
this globe enough till at night on the prairies there sprang cut so noiseless around me myriads of labial gossip other globes ; and in like manner the
thought "
"
"
of night, sibilant
chorals,"
whisper delicately of the
individual emerging from the wreck of his fleshly dwelling, eluding the grasp of the destroyer and proceeding through the (C superb vistas of death spiritual
"
to
"
an ampler ether, a diviner i
Leaves of Grass,
air."
p. 345.
HIS SPIRITUAL CREED.
You not
convince,"
for
"
but you shall find suggestions of the
man s
vast scale on which
being
is
laid out, dwarfing
your old conceptions.
all
"
arguments addressed to the logic and sermons do
shall not look for
analytic understanding,
119
And
have dream d that the purpose and essence of
I
the
known
the transient,
life,
form and decide identity for the unknown permanent. If all came but to ashes of dung, If maggots and rats ended us, then Alarum
Is to
life,
the
for
we
!
are betray d,
Then indeed
Do
suspicion of death.
you suspect death? should die
Do *
now
if I
were to suspect death
I
;
you think I could walk pleasantly and well-suited toward annihilation ?
Pleasantly and well-suited I walk, Whither I walk I cannot define, but I know it is good, The whole universe indicates that it is good, The past and the present indicate that it is good.
"
I
swear
I
think there
is
nothing but immortality
!
That the exquisite scheme is for it, and the nebulous float is for it, and the cohering is for it And all preparation is for it and identity is for it and L life and materials are altogether for it !
"
!
Several schools of
modern
thinkers, or, at least, of
who
think they are thinkers, have decided to put immortality on one side, either as a matter of no
those
1
"
To Think
of
Time."
Leaves of Grass, p. 337.
WALT WHITMAN.
120
dogma which they deny. To pretend a matter of no interest to us whether death
interest or as a
that
it is
ends everything for us is a piece of utter cant, the make-believe and sham. It is a matter of
veriest
infinite moment to every human being whether he himself shall escape death or whether it shall destroy him with his present body ; momentous to him now
and
Society has for ages been affected by a true life is not summed up in the
here.
belief that the
material
of the body
forces
;
and
that belief
if
is
finally abandoned, incalculable will be the effect on
men.
For
at present, so
complex and
transitional
is
civilisation, we cannot be said to have either definitely abandoned or definitely adopted one or the other view. That the belief has been held in a solution of miracle and unverifiable legend is not to
our
the point
Some after-life
:
the faith itself remains intact.
writers appear to think that a faith
connotes a lack of interest
Whitman would
in
in
the
this world.
it might as well be con to-morrow will produce lack
reply that
tended that a belief
in
lustre slackness to-day.
Is
it
not rather, on the other
we feel the keenest interest in the life of when we look forward with buoyant confidence to-day, to another morn of radiant sunshine, another day crowded with happy activities? A dull, benumbing hand, that
despair of to-morrow kills our joy in to-day. One world at a time," said Thoreau on his death "
bed.
Certainly
;
in another world, real to those
but the very words involved belief
which would be most
who had
lived
fully alive
most deeply
in this.
and It
HIS SPIRITUAL CREED. is
121
and miserable creed utilitarian in and narrowest sense of saving one s in
the unfortunate
the worst
dividual soul from a hell prepared by an angry judge which has so discredited any faith in a beyond as to
make really
impossible for some persons to disconnect
it
other-worldliness." But there is no connection whatever between the two. In
such a
faith with
"
thought of Whitman the future life grows as And naturally from this as the flower from the seed.
the
must be well-conditioned if the flower is beauty to the air and sun, so must this life be well-ordered if it is to branch out beyond in the wonder and majesty of immortal strength. as the seed
to unfold
Then
its
there are those who, because of the mercantile
theology of a system of rewards for being good and
punishments
for
being bad,
reject
selfish.
Let
immortality as
being a great truth
the it
desire
for
be said that
underlying the doctrine of rewards and punishments. Nobility is made more noble by its own efforts, while the selfish nature there
is
and
loses its perfume. That is a be tested by anyone. And if the law holds good here, it holds good hereafter, for
inevitably contracts
fact of observation, to
Now is it selfish the real spiritual being is identical. to desire expansion of character, to seek for ever wider spheres of spiritual influence ? On the contrary is the reverse of selfishness, it is the sure test of a
this
And if it great nature. it become the reverse
is ?
so now, at what point does At the point of a mere
physical fact such as death ? Why not then at the a of fact like There is no more point physical sleep ?
WALT WHITMAN.
122
selfishness involved in life
more
useful
Give
us, as
s
desire for a fuller, nobler
to-morrow
life
after the sleep of to-night.
Tennyson exclaims,
on and not
We
one
death than in the desire for a better and
after
to
(k
the reward of going
die."
have seen
that,
in
Whitman
s
thought,
the
world must have a rational reAos, in the absence of which he thinks spiritual effort to be futile. This reAos, says a certain school of thought,
with a large
H
;
Humanity
is
not individual spiritual beings, but an
mankind, past, present, and to For that we are to work. Well, to begin we cannot work for past mankind, for it has no
abstract conception
come. with,
We
are to work, objective existence on this theory. for the present and the future of mankind.
then,
Very good
;
everyone agrees
to this,
from the devoted
who
has well-nigh forgotten his very enthusiasm for the cause to the
fanatical Nihilist
personality in
"
"
equally fanatical revivalist who yearns to save his fellow-men from some awful impending doom. But Is it a passing the question arises, what is mankind ? phenomenon destined to perish like the world itself?
On the plane of mere physical science there can be but one reply to this question. "The great globe itself,
yea, all
certain.
which
it
inherit, shall dissolve
The latest scientific The doctrine of "
pressed
:
conclusion the
"
:
is
that
is
thus ex
Dissipation
of
upon us the conclusion that within a finite period of time past the earth must have been, and within a finite period of time to come must again Energy
forces
be, unfit for the habitation of
man
as at present con-
HIS SPIRITUAL CREED.
have been, and are to be, under the laws
stituted, unless operations
which are
performed
known
governing the
the material
in
123
impossible
operations going on at present
world."
We may
1
in
imagination
stretch the future of the planet as far as
but
it
The
planet at
time,
and
we
please,
must come to an end. the utmost exhibits mere duration of
makes no
difference
;
all
that duration will not endure forever.
If,
therefore, the destruction of the planet as a place of
human abode carries with it the destruction of the human race, then all our effort, our tears, our love, our aspiration, our thoughts that wander through our "agony and bloody sweat," our neve:eternity," "
ceasing fight for truth and justice, all go for nothing. The stream of human progress ever widening and
deepening
up
in the procession of the ages, finally dries
in the arid wastes of time,
and
is
as
though
it
had
To work
then for a limited humanity bounded by space and time is to work for a perishing That is the fact which we must face. world.
never been.
Against this the mere sentimentalism which entwines with our past recollections, our hopes and fears, The question our personal affections, is of no avail. itself
for us
is
demands
whether such a decaying world of reason.
approached,
much
The matter less
merely personal ground. enough of the load of 1
Lord Kelvin
(Sir
Review, March, 1892.
seriously
is
argued, on
Many among life
satisfies
the
not to be even
any
us are weary
and would gladly
lay
it
William Thomson) in Fortnightly
WALT WHITMAN.
124
down without delay. We sympathise with the feeling when he saw those epitaphs at Ferrara
of Byron
:
"Martini
Lucrezia Picini
Luiyi implora pace. implora eterna quieta." We may be the victims of some remote melancholy mysteriously entailed on us, or we may have been foiled in the attainment of our desires or
.
wounded
in the
may be the subjects blighted
love or
desire nothing
a
more
of
.
.
house of our friends; we disease
or
shattered mind.
misfortune or
And we may
for ourselves than to creep into
some dark corner out of the sight of the pitiless sun, and there sink into oblivion. But the problem is not to be solved on the lines of personal desire, but of a and can we say that such an end is rational end consistent with the effacement of mankind from the ;
vast field of being is
?
Whitman
at least thinks that
it
not.
Humanity may survive, think some, but individuals must perish. Humanity is an abstraction there is no humanity apart from individuals. People are ;
perpetually thinking of some ultimate residual essence into which all the forces that have streamed from the countless myriads of the world s individuals shall be But there never will be any such gathered up. essence.
Science shows us that mankind cannot
live
permanently on this planet. Not only so, but the dreams of pretty Utopias of perfect individuals will never be realised here, for the simple reason (if there were no other) that, after the culmination of the s physical conditions as a place of human abode has been reached, decline must set in, owing to the
earth
HIS SPIRITUAL CREED.
125
gradual diminution in the stores of solar light and heat, rendering our planet less and less inhabitable, until it is finally encircled by the icy coldness of death. What, too, is reason to say as to the sacrifice of millions of generations to produce this residual
bound to disappear as soon as reached? Reason demands that every conscious being, while
essence, itself
subserving universal ends, shall also be an end in himself, and thus condemns in toto the undiluted altruism of the positivist school. But what if the residual essence
summum
be
the ground of positivism
pantheism.
Are our
God, the
Here we leave
bonum, the perfect being?
and reach
efforts,
that of impersonal our failures, and sorrows,
and
hopes, all our spiritual animation, ultimately destined to build up, not ourselves, but the being of
an impersonal Deity?
We cannot
say,
be
it
observed,
we are part, and ex hypothesi we are excluded. Thus once more we if we reject the doctrine are brought back apparently that we are ends as well as means to ihe old dual of a world-order
;
for of that order
We
ism, to a Deity separated from the world order. have in the last analysis no place in the latter ; we exist merely to subserve the ends of the former, to
enable the Divine Being to realise his own life more From our anguish he (or it?) derives the palpi fully. tating luxury of a fresh experience ; our joys, all unreal to us, the merest gossamer film, work selves as
substantial realities into his nature.
singular indeed to note
how
close
is
this
them It is
impersonal pantheism to the most inhuman Calvinistic specula-
WALT WHITMAN.
126
men to God one to a jealous, who foreordains according to his
Both
tion.
sacrifice
;
revengeful tyrant, own caprice ; the other to a vast, formless being. In either case unhappy man remains the helpless victim of an external power.
Whitman "
s
question
Sharp as a
shot
rifle
we hear
:
What do you suppose Creation is ? What do you suppose will satisfy
the soul, except to
walk free and own no superior ? What do you suppose I would intimate to you in a hundred ways, but that man or woman is as good as
And
God
?
that there self?"
is
no God any more divine than your
1
Some who would assertion that
God
to help
own
we
all
perhaps, from the bare endure, and suffer, in order
shrink, live,
develop his own being or to
to
satisfy his
pleasure, talk vaguely about our living for
"
the
the good triumph we need not trouble about our own individual spirits.
and contend
good,"
Thus
that
if
in a recent very fervid
noble purpose
we read
"
"
and eloquent work of this on
that our efforts here
bank and shoal of time
"
are
"
directed towards the
building up of a world-city in which a world-purpose is to be consummated. And then the writer continues :
Do we
we know in some other state of existence the good we have done in this shall we meet those for whom we have done, and recognise those whom we love ? I know not "
survive with this
good
;
shall
;
;
1
"
Laws
for
Creations."
Leaves of Grass^
p. 299.
HIS SPIRITUAL CREED. and
1
27
hold it to be at the best a curious question, one deeply touching these clinging affections
I
albeit
make up so much of the sweetness of human The ends of moral perfection are not for our life. * personal satisfaction, but we for them." that
Now, what is this whether we do or not
which
"good"
Who
?
is
can, after
survive
to
due
reflec
tion, even remotely apprehend the meaning of such an idea ? It might be supposed from this that the "
"
was a
kind of huge mountain, good which we were all piling up, stone by stone, an arti ficial lake, which we were making with ceaseless sort of entity, a
But there
contributions from individual buckets.
no such about
It is
thing.
"
deeds"
whereas the
as
is
the agnostic delusion of talking
something of a deed
final issue
final is
its
in
themselves,
reaction on the
It is not the deed that is and the individual fixed, transitory; it is the individual who is rooted in the scheme of things, and the deed which is evanescent. There is no pile, or entity, or
character of the individual.
particular substance
the
which
is
"the
good,"
What we know
or
of good and evil If the will does not survive, then
"
evil
either. will.
"the
is "
in
the
"
good does not survive, or it survives as inherent in God, whose nature on that hypothesis we have helped to
form
at the
which aims
expense of our own
selves.
at the extinction of will, is
But
an
Pessimism, intelligible
"
theory of a good surviving, while the will in which alone the good can be realised is creed.
"
this
"
Ethical Religion,
by
W. M.
"
Salter.
(Boston, 1889.)
WALT WHITMAN.
128
destroyed, is absolutely unintelligible, unless it applies to a God who lives through our death in which case it
becomes
grossly immoral.
How
is
it
possible to
base a theory of progress on an illusion or an injustice ? Whitman rejects both for the doctrine of the eternity of the individual soul :
"
You
are not thrown to the winds; you gather certainly
and
There
around yourself; yourself! yourself for ever
safely
Yourself
!
is
no
possibility of coping with
most perhaps do,
the scale on either side. for a time, or
we may
to
"
*
!
Whitman on
We may of course
other than a ground of pessimism. refuse, as
and ever
throw our weight into ignore the matter
We may
to the last maintain
an attitude
of doubt, honestly unable to come to any conclusion on this, the most momentous of issues. But no ag meliorism," no positivist phrase about "subjective immortality," will deceive mongering and determined soul. Some persons angrily any eager
nostic doctrine of
"
exclaim against Dante for consigning Epicurus to hell because he taught that the soul dies with the body.
Such persons do not understand
that
arbitrarily consign anyone to either
Dante does not
hell,
purgatory, or
He
Each is in simply finds them there. one or the other state because he is such or such a paradise.
person.
The man who
denies his
own spiritual
nature,
Dante would say, is in hell, and could not be any where else. The whole question resolves itself into 1
Leaves of Grans, p. 335*
HIS SPIRITUAL CREED.
On
I2Q
our being constructed ? The growing, expanding religious consciousness of the world has found in man an incarnation of the divine, this
:
what scale
and the object of
is
his
partaker of the divine that, if
we
positively
being
it,
"
might be a
we do not believe then we are at issue with
nature."
deny
that he
is
If
the religious consciousness, and must accept the pes
We
simist position. fall
shall not, in that event,
into a vulgar materialism, for
tion to-day
is
tenable for one instant.
means assume "
something
no
We
that death ends all with us
after
death
pessimistic hypothesis,
"
it
is
true,
materialist posi
may become
;
shall
by no
indeed, the
for
us,
on a
a very terrible apprehension.
We can only escape from an inherently evil world by cessation of activity, by all suppression of desire, and it
may
shall
take
many
But we
aeons to reach that goal.
have certainly abandoned the belief in a rational
We shall end, in which, as rational beings, we share. not as pessimists sacrifice ourselves on the altar of a jealous God, or contribute of our substance to build up the nature of a being whose delight involves our We shall pain, whose life necessitates our death.
simply consume to nothingness temple of the Universal Silence.
in
the vast echoless
strife, and phantoms of unknown forms looming up before us and filling our minds with appre hension, while we perceive the outlines of the past being more and more obliterated every day, there will
For many of
with
the
dim,
us.
children of this age of
veiled
be nothing but perpetual scepticism, leading to paraly sis of the will, and to the frittering of our energies on i
WALT WHITMAN.
I3O
the tasks which do not involve for their accomplish
supremely great and undying purpose. The to be feared, lead lives of mechanical
ment
a
many
will, it is
drudgery, toiling hard for the bread that perisheth, for a long while yet to come. But every change for the better
in
the condition of labour, affording greater
and enjoyment, will have an effect the reverse of that which materialistic atheism vainly imagines. As the world becomes more enjoyable, men will be more loath leave the warm precincts of the cheer ful day;" as life becomes sweeter it will be more leisure
"to
And then it will be for the masses a highly valued. For if they question of pessimism or a new religion. are convinced that there
is
no ultimate good
in
which
they share, no rational end in which they are partakers, but that the Kingdom of Heaven is, after all, really
nothing but
"meat
and
drink,
we may be
sure that
not be of the dilettante kind toyed with by some literary persons, but a most serious, practical matter, with tragic consequences more mo
their
pessimism
will
What this world than any yet recorded. be said to these swarming millions of earnest toilers about the themes they will discuss in a new
mentous to is
to
more vital fashion than conventional The question cannot be argued knows? religionism Whitman s final answer, however, can be given; here. it is the swan-song of the good gray poet," and may and
infinitely
"
serve as the requiem music for his departed soul. is
entitled
:
It
HIS SPIRITUAL CREED.
DEATH S VALLEY.
131
1
Nay, do not dream, designer dark, hast pourtrayed or hit thy theme entire I, hoverer of late by this dark valley, by its confines, having glimpses of it,
Thou
:
Here enter
lists
with thee, claiming
my
make
right to
a symbol too.
For
have seen many wounded soldiers die have seen their lives pass
I
After dread suffering with smiles
off
;
And
I
have watched the death-hours of the old
seen the infant die
:
and
;
The
rich, with all his
And And
then the poor, in meagreness and poverty I myself for long, O Death, have breathed
nurses and his doctors
;
;
my
every breath Amid the nearness and the silent thought of thee.
And out of these and thee I make a scene, a song, brief (not Nor gloom Xor
s
fear of thee,
ravines, nor bleak, nor dark
for
I
do not
fear thee, celebrate the struggle, or contortion, or hard-tied
knot),
Of the broad blessed light and perfect air, with meadows, rippling tides, and trees and flowers and grass,
And
hum of living breeze and in the midst beautiful eternal right hand,
the low
God
s
Harper* Monthly Magazine,
April, 1892.
WALT WHITMAN.
132
Thee, holiest minister of Heaven guide at
thee, envoy, usherer,
last of all,
Rich, florid, loosener of the stricture-knot call d
Sweet, peaceful, welcome
Death."
THE END.
Printed by Cowan
<&
Co.,
Limited, Perth.
life,