Americans (Sherman)/Walt Whitman
Whitman interests and disquiets us beyond all other American poets by that personality of his, so original, so indolent yet intense, so fearlessly flaunted yet so enigmatically reserved, so palpably carnal yet so illuminated with mystical ardor that at the first bewildering contact one questions whether his urgent touch is of lewdness or divinity. There is something daimonic in the effluence of the man, which visitors remark and remember months and years afterwards as an impulse unaccountably affecting the temper of their lives. It is a sign by which one recognizes native power of one sort or another quite above talent. Hawthorne and other observers were conscious of such an effluence from Whitman's master, Emerson—"a pure, intellectual gleam diffused about his presence like the garment of a shining one." But the aura of the disciple, who roved so far from the decorous circle of the Concord Platonist, was, I fancy, spiked with yellow flame, like the gold-colored nimbus that he sought to paint above the heads of his fellow countrymen—"I paint many heads: but I paint no head without its nimbus of gold-colored light. "Something a little more than human," commented Thoreau, that cool-blooded New Englander, after an hour's conversation with the bard. Edward Carpenter, an English pilgrim who visited him in 1877, says that in the first ten minutes he became conscious "of an impression which subsequently grew even more marked—the impression, namely, of immense vista or background in his personality." As to the final quality of Whitman's personal effluence the testimony of John Burroughs, recorded in 1878, should be decisive: "After the test of time nothing goes home like the test of actual intimacy, and to tell me that Whitman is not a large, fine, fresh magnetic personality, making you love him, and want always to be with him, were to tell me that my whole past life is a deception, and all the perception of my impressions a fraud." His appeal to the imagination was not diminished by his offering to the eye. The mere physical image of him standing against the sky, so nonchalant and imperturbable in his workman's shirt and trousers, as in his first edition of 1855, is, or was, of a novel and compelling effrontery in the smooth gallery of our national statuary. Like the image of Franklin at Paris in his coonskin cap, the image of Lincoln as the railsplitter, or of Mark Twain as the Mississippi pilot, or of Roosevelt as Rough Rider, so the image of Walt Whitman as the carpenter or printer turned bard in Manhattan pleases one's taste for the autocthonous, the home-grown. More than that, it touches the heart by symbolizing the national sense that, after all our civilizing efforts, we live still in an unfinished world. He acquired blandness with the years; yet even in his mild old age he looked out from under his wide-brimmed hat and from the cloudy covert of beard and hair with no academic mien—rather with the untamed and heroic aspect of
The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck, the murderous buckshot and the bullets—
All these I feel or am.
I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs;
Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksman;
I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinn'd with the ooze of my skin;
I fall on the weeds and stones.
The riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close.
Taunt my dizzy ears and beat me violently over the head with whip stocks.
Agonies are one of my changes of garments.
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels; I myself become the wounded person;
My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.
This is the method of Whitman: imaginative contemplation of the object, which identifies him with the object. It does not suggest comparison with the method of Longfellow or of Tennyson. It reminds one rather of the imaginative contemplation practised by mediæval saints, which brought out in hands and brow the marks of the Crucifixion. The vitality and validity of Whitman's report is not that of an experience observed but rather that of an experience repeated.
But Whitman lives for another reason which is worth dwelling upon for the sake of young poets eager for immortality. He lives because of the richness of his vital reference, the fulness of the relations which he established between his book and the living world. There is a sect of poets to-day, with attendant critics, who expect to outlast their age by shunning contact with its hopes and fears, by avoiding commitments and allegiances, and by confining themselves to decorating the interior of an ivory tower in the style of Kubla Khan. Whitman made his bid for perpetuity on another basis. He identified himself and his chants with innumerable things that are precious and deathless—with his wide-extended land and the unending miracles of the seasons, with the independence and union and destiny of "These States," with common people and heroes, their proud memories, their limitless aspiration, and with the sunlight and starlight of the over-arching heaven. Committing himself to democratic America, he surrendered with "immitigable adoration" to a spirit that preserved and magnified him with its own unfolding greatness. And so as the seasons return, he returns with the spring and the musical winds and tides that play about his beloved Mannahatta, with the subtle odor of lilacs in the dooryard, with valor and suffering and victory, with the thoughts and words that perennially consecrate the old battlefield at Gettysburg, with the young men returning from the latest "great war," with civil labor resumed and civil comradeship, with furled flags and May-time and hopes recurrent. He returns; and if we wish to salute him, he will give us the tune:
Again the freshness and the odors, again Virginia's summer sky, pellucid blue and silver;
Again the forenoon purple of the hills;
Again the deathless grass, so noiseless, soft and green,
Again the blood-red roses blooming.
But why is this interesting and vital personality important to us? Open the Leaves of Grass, and you will find this piquantly intimate answer: "I considered long and seriously of you before you were born." Other poets have given little thought to us, and we, in compensation, give little thought to them; for we modern men and women of realistic temper go not to literature to escape from life, but to intensify our sense of it and to find a spirit that will animate us in the thick of it. Whitman, proclaimer of egotism, foresaw our intentness upon our own enterprises, and prepared for the day when we should demand of him: "What have you said, Poet, that concerns us?" Though he is saturated with historical and contemporary references, nothing in him is merely contemporary, merely historical. He gathers up ages, literatures, philosophies, and consumes them as the food of passion and prophecy. He strides with the energy and momentum of the national past into the national future, towering above a poetical movement which he has fathered, scattering social and political and religious gospels, with troops of disciples and unbelievers in this and other lands, crying still proudly as of old: "All that I have said concerns you." He is important, because he recognized that, though there are many ways by which a man can attract attention and get a temporary hearing, there is only one way by which he can permanently interest and attach the affections of the American people and so hold a place among the great Americans: that is by helping them unfold the meanings, fulfil the promises, and justify the faith of democratic society.
By making himself important to the American people as the poetic interpreter of their political and social ideals, Whitman, as things are turning out, finds himself now mid-stream in the democratic movement which encompasses the earth. At the present time it is manifest that, in spite of obstacles and cross-currents, the central current of the world is making towards democracy. Whatever else it involves, democracy involves at least one grand salutary elementary admission, namely, that the world exists for the benefit and for the improvement of all the decent individuals in it. Till recently this admission in many quarters had never been made, had been savagely opposed. It is covertly, secretly, indirectly opposed in many quarters of our own country even to-day. Now the indications are that those who opposite it are going to be outnumbered and overwhelmed. The movement is on, and it will not be stopped. Wise men, ambitious men, far-sighted men will not attempt to block it. They will adapt themselves to it, they will co-operate with it, they will direct and further it as the only way in which they may hope to be of any cheerful significance in the era opening before them. The "ruling class," the statesmen, in all nations will find their mission and their honor progressively dependent upon their capacity for bringing the entire body of humanity into one harmonious and satisfactory life.
Now the supreme power of Whitman consists in this: that his spirit works inwardly, like religion, upon other spirits, quickening and preparing them for this general human fellowship, this world society, which to him, as to many of his great predecessors, appeared to be the legitimate far-off consequence of the principles declared by the American fathers. "Cosmopolitanism" has of late suffered many indignities as a word and as a conception; and those who speak of an international society are readily charged with treasonable and anarchical innovation. In the spiritual sense of the word no aspiration is, as a matter of fact, more thoroughly American and traditional than cosmopolitanism. "God grant!" exclaimed Franklin, "that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say, 'This is my country.'" By statesmen like Washington, Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, or Lincoln this utterance would have been accepted as suggesting the ultimate fruition of the highest statecraft. The diffusion of a spirit among men which will support and make possible such statecraft appeared to writers like Emerson and Whitman as perhaps the central function of the serious man of letters.
"I hate literature," said Whitman, conversing in Camden with colloquial over-emphasis. What he meant was that he rejected the famous "play-theory" of art and looked with disdain upon belles-lettres in their merely recreative and decorative aspects. "Literature is big," he explained on another occasion, "only in one way—when used as an aid in the growth of the humanities—a furthering of the cause of the masses—a means whereby men may be revealed to each other as brothers." Recognizing that "the real work of democracy is done underneath its politics," Whitman conceived of his mission from first to last as moral and spiritual; and nothing could be sillier than the current criticism which derides a sense of mission in the poet and at the same time proudly salutes Whitman as the chief American poet. It is as if one should say, "I am very fond of walnuts, but I don't like the meats." Not a part but the whole of his lifework is permeated with religious and moral intention. What gives to the Leaves of Grass its cumulative effect is its many-sided development of a single theme, of which I shall give one more of his conversational descriptions: "I am for getting all the walls down—all of them. . . . While I seem to love America, and wish to see America prosperous, I do not seem able to bring myself to love America, to desire American prosperity, at the expense of some other nation." "But must we not take care of home first of all?" asked Dudley. "Perhaps," replied Whitman, "but what is home—to the humanitarian what is home?"
It is easy and natural to disparage this diffusive humanitarian sentiment as it is to ignore that diffcult central precept of Christianity which prescribes one's feeling towards one's neighbor. Every one knows, for example, Roosevelt's scornful comparison of the man who loves his own country no better than another to the man who loves his own wife no better than another. Roosevelt, who had a great talent for bringing forward and glorifying the simple elementary passions, has had his share of applause. When the applause dies away and reflection begins, it occurs to some of us that the simple elementary passions pretty well look after themselves. No very rare talent is required to commend to the average man the simple elementary passions. He takes to them by a primitive urge of his being as the bull moose takes to fighting and mating. Nature has given them a vigor and hardiness which provides against their extinction. Meanwhile our societies, national and international, do not run as smoothly and efficiently as men who hate waste and confusion desire. They seem to clamor from their discordant and jarring gear for some motive and regulative power other than the simple elementary passions. What nature has overlooked and neglected or inadequately attended to is the development of those feelings which fit men to live harmoniously in complex civil societies. So that the special task for those who would ameliorate our modern world is to bring forward and glorify an order of emotions quite unknown to the Cave Man—a mutual understanding and imaginative sympathy which begin to develop and operate only when the elementary urges of our nature have been checked and subdued by a reflective culture. Over most of the once-called great statesmen of Whitman's period and of our own generation—the Bismarcks, the Disraelis, the Roosevelts—there falls the shadow of great tasks from which they shrank and the darker and still present shadow of a great calamity which their fostering of the elementary passions helped to bring upon us. In the present posture of the world I think we should not scorn so resolute a patriot as Whitman, who had lived through two or three wars, for confessing the growth in himself and for promoting the growth in others of a sense like this: It seems to me there are other men in other lands yearning and thoughtful;
It seems to me I can look over and behold them in Germany, Italy, France, Spain,
Or far, far away in China, or in Russia or Japan, talking other dialects.
And it seems to me if I could know these men I should become attached to them as I do to men in my own lands.
O I know we should be brethren and lovers;
I know I should be happy with them.
There is at least an appearance of inconsistency between this limitless humanitarian sympathy of Whitman's and his enthusiastic nationalism. There is at least an appearance of inconsistency between his enthusiastic nationalism and his resolute individualism. But let us not forget the appearance of fundamental conflict between the multitude of the heavenly host crying peace on earth and the words of him they heralded saying, "I came not to bring peace but a sword." The exploration of the ground between these opposites, the reconciliation of jarring antinomies, is a task from which statesmen shrink. It is precisely the master task of the poetic and religious imagination. Whitman, as the opening lines of his book declare, recognized it as the very heart of his theme:
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-masse.
There is the mystery which enchanted him and which perplexes us still—the mystery of the coexistence of personal freedom with social authority. He believed in both, just as for centuries men have believed in the coexistence of free-will with foreknowledge absolute. No one has a right to call his reconciliation of the individual with society inadequate who has not taken the trouble to hear the whole of his song and its commentaries in "Democratic Vistas" and "Specimen Days"; for part supports part, and the whole is greater than the sum of them. No other poet exhibits himself so inadequately in extracts. One gets nearly all of Gray in the "Elegy"; but one can no more get all of Whitman in "O Captain! My Captain" than one can get all of a modern symphony in the sound of the flutes or oboes. Whitman is not primarily a melodist. His strength is in the rich interweaving of intricate and difficult harmonies.
In the life-long evolution of his work, he was seeking a concord of soul and body, individual and society, state and nation, nation and the family of nations, some grand chord to unite the dominant notes of all. In his quest for this harmony he clothes himself in his country as in a garment; he becomes America feeling out her relations with the world. I seem to distinguish in his poems three great successive movements or impulses corresponding roughly to the three periods of the national life in which he had his being. The first is a movement of individualistic expansion corresponding to the period before the Civil War. The second is a movement of concentration corresponding to the period of the war. The third is a resumed movement of "individualistic" expansion following the war, and spiritualized by it."
It can hardly be too much emphasized that Whitman and America went through their adolescence together and that the arrogance of his advent in poetry matches the defiant attitude of the young republic. Born at West Hills, Long Island, May 31, 1819, Walt Whitman had a lively consciousness of his inheritance from the French and American revolutions. In his boyhood he had actually been touched by Lafayette. He knew an old friend of Tom Paine's. His own father, though an uneducated man, had caught the free-thinking habit of the eighteenth century. As he grew towards manhood, he felt stirring around him that intoxicating welter of radical enthusiasms and rosy idealisms which in the forties and fifties was loosely described as Transcendentalism, and which remains to this day the most variously fascinating and fragrant blossoming of mind that America has exhibited. It was a delighted movement of emancipation from the old world and her unholy alliances. It was still more a resolute affirmation of faith in the new world and her unexplored possibilities—faith in the resources of nature and the capacity of man to appropriate them. Inspiriting voices were in the air, and every voice cried in one fashion or another: "Trust thyself; every heart vibrates to that iron string. Acccept the place the divine Providence has found for you; the society of your contemporaries, the connexion of events. Great men have always done so and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the Eternal was stirring at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being."
In his roving early days as teacher, printer, editor; reading his Dante and Shakespeare in a wood by the sea; visiting New Orleans and wandering home again by the Mississippi and the Great Lakes, Whitman heard these voices of his age pealing in his ear with an ever more imperative summons, "Trust thyself." And Whitman resolved to trust himself, soul and body, and to trust his time and place, and to commit himself for better or for worse to the society of his contemporaries and the spiritual current flowing beneath American events. There has been much discussion of Whitman's indebtedness at this point to the inspiration of Emerson. It seems clear on the one hand that Whitman sent a copy of his edition of 1855 to Emerson; that in his edition of 1856 he printed Emerson's letter of acknowledgment and spoke of him as "friend and master"; and that in the conversations of his later years with Traubel he repeatedly talked of Emerson with admiration and reverence. It is clear, on the other hand, that Emerson looked upon Whitman as a representative of the new America, for whom he had in some sense prepared the way, and that on July 21, 1855, he wrote to the then almost unknown poet the following memorable letter:
Dear Sir: I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of Leaves of Grass. I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seems the sterile and stingy Nature, as if too much handiwork or too much lymph in the temperament were making our Western wits fat and mean. I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things, said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire.
I, greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging.
I did not know, until I last night saw the book advertised in a newspaper, that I could trust the name as real and available for a post-office.
I wish to see my benefactor, and have felt much like striking my tasks, and visiting New York to pay you my respects.
Now Whitman's "free and brave thought," his determination to trust himself, body and soul, impelled him in the first gush of his self-expression to glorify his earthy and instinctive impulses with a flamboyance which Emerson and many other critics were to condemn as distasteful, shocking, or even dangerous. The powerful virtue in the chants before the war, the virtue for the sake of which Emerson overlooked whatever in them he distasted, was their "fortifying and encouraging" individualism. It is an individualism of adolescent America, unchecked by political experience, modified and colored by emotional attachments to the American scene and the American actors. It is such a passion as made such an indigenous individual as Thoreau love Walden Pond and refuse to pay his taxes. It is an individualism further tempered, however, from the first by a profound sense of the general human brotherhood and a hatred of unearned special privilege. Heir of the Revolutionary Era, Whitman is an equalitarian of a sort. "By God," he exclaims, "I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms." But for bringing in the reign of Equality he confides in men rather than in political mechanisms. "Produce," he asserts, "Produce great persons, the rest follows." He is the Declaration of Independence incarnate. He desires followers but only such as are moved by inner impulse; he will not have clubs studying him nor "schools" trooping after him. Markedly like Emerson and Thoreau in this respect, he is wary of organizations which prescribe the conduct of the individual and relieve him of his personal danger and responsibility. He will stand or fall in his own strength. He is wary of organized majorities. Almost in the spirit of Washington he warns against the savageness and wolfishness of parties, so combative, so intolerant of the idea of equal brotherhood and the interests of all. "It behooves you," he declared, "to convey yourself implicitly to no party, nor submit blindly to their dictators, but steadily hold yourself judge and master over all of them." "I am a radical of radicals," he repeats from youth to grey old age. Beside this utterance one should place his golden words to his biographer Traubel: "Be radical; be radical; be not too damned radical." Despite such cautionary modifications, however, one may say that Whitman's primary impulse is one of revolt against whatever deprives the simple separate person of his right to freedom and the pursuit of happiness.
But the second movement of Whitman's mind proves him a far more complex phenomenon than most of the critics have acknowledged. Mr. George Santayana represents him as a kind of placid animal wallowing unreflectively in the stream of his own sensations. This view of him may indeed be supported by reference to certain of his passages which express with unwise exuberance his delight in the reports of his senses. The unwisdom of his exuberance with reference to the sexual life, for example, is pretty nearly demonstrated by the number of critics whose critical faculty has been quite upset by it; so that they can find nothing significant in this prophet of the new world but his shamelessness. "Hold off from sensuality," enjoined Cicero (who, by the way, was not a Victorian) "for, if you have given yourself up to it, you will find yourself unable to think of anything else." This precept rests upon physiological and psychological facts which Whitman's experiments in heliotherapy have not altered. To put a serpent in a show-window does not blunt its fangs. But to represent Whitman as exclusively or finally preoccupied with the life of the senses is not to represent him whole. It is to ignore a fact which flames from the completed Leaves of Grass, namely, that he is one of the "twice-born"—that he had a new birth in the spirit of the Civil War and a rebaptism in its blood. His book as it now stands is built around that event, and the martyred President is the palpitating heart of it. That Whitman emerged from the warm shallows of his individual sensibility, that he immersed himself in the spiritual undercurrents of the national life,—this significant alteration of his position is established by his conduct and temper in the war.
Through the long agony of the struggle, Whitman went about the military hospitals, nursing the sick and wounded from every state without exception; with malice toward none, with charity for all, tenderly compassionate toward Northerner and Southerner alike. In his "Notes of a Hospital Nurse" he records his affectionate ministrations to two brothers mortally wounded in the same battle but on opposite sides; and he remarks almost as if he himself were a neutral above the conflict. "Each died for his cause." The accent of his compassion recalls the perplexed sadness of that touching passage in the Second Inaugural where Lincoln reflects that "Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other." Almost in the manner of an outraged pacifist, Whitman, after describing an attack on a hospital train, comments as follows: "Multiply the above by scores, aye hundreds—light it with every lurid passion, the wolf's, the lion's lapping thirst for blood—the passionate boiling volcanoes of human revenge for comrades, brothers slain—with the light of burning farms, and heaps of smutting, smouldering black embers—and in the human heart everywhere black, worse embers—and you have an inkling of this war." Yet despite his abhorrence of cruelty and despite his compassion for suffering, Whitman's sympathy does not blunt the edge of his judgment. He is no more a pacifist or a neutral than Lincoln himself. Though his eyes are fixed daily on the dreadful cost of his moral and political faith, he remains a passionate and unrelenting Unionist. Like the great captain whom he was to salute as "the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands," he has sunk his personal sensibilities in the larger and more precious life of the nation. Till the war is over he cries with full heart: "Thunder on! stride on, Democracy! Strike with vengeful stroke." In his vision of the indispensable One encompassing the Many he salutes the sacrificial flag with an out-flaming national loyalty incomprehensible to the conscientious objector:
I stand again in leaden rain your flapping folds saluting,
I sing you over all, flying beckoning through the fight—O the hard-contested fight!
The cannons ope their rosy-flashing muzzles—the hurtled balls scream,
The battle-front forms amid the smoke—the volleys pour incessant from the line,
Hark, the ringing word Charge! now the tussle and the furious maddening yells,
Now the corpses tumble curl'd upon the ground.
Cold, cold in death, for precious life of you,
Angry cloth I saw their leaping.
In the era of reconstruction after the war Whitman reconstructs his individualism in the light of his allegiance to the Union. Musing deeply of "these warlike days and of peace return'd, and the dead that return no more," he hears a phantom with stern visage bidding him chant the poem "that comes from the soul of America, chant me the carol of victory." Brooding once again upon the old mystery, why Lincoln wished to preserve the Union, what justified those rivers of fraternal blood, he bursts into this explanation of the ultimate purpose of a modern democratic state, and offers it, as will be noted at the end, to America militant:
It is not the earth, it is not America who is great,
It is I who am great or to be great, it is You up there, or any one,
It is to walk rapidly through civilizations, governments, theories,
Through poems, pageants, shows, to form individuals,
Underneath all, individuals,
I swear nothing is good to me now that ignores individuals,
The American compact is altogether with individuals,
The only government is that which makes minute of individuals,
The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual—namely, to You
(Mother! with subtle sense severe, with the naked sword in your hand,
I saw you at last refuse to treat but directly with individuals.)
There is a definition of purpose which cuts into Treitschke's cold-blooded assertion that "the individual has no right to regard the State as a means for attaining his own ambitions in life." And it cuts with equal keenness into the conception of those younger international, revolutionary statesmen who, ignoring individuals, propose to deal with classes, legislate for one class, and institute world-wide class-war. But let us admit, also, that it strikes quite as deeply into the pretensions of any class whatsoever, which governing in its own interest, becomes the oppressor and parasite of the body politic. These stalwart American individuals whom Whitman demands in immense numbers as the counterpoise to the levelling State cut all classes to pieces. "The pride and centripetal isolation of a human being in himself," he says in one of his timely pregnant passages, is the check, "whereby Nature restrains the deadly original relentlessness of all her first-class laws."
There is no reconciliation of this haughty individualism with his haughty nationalism possible except through faith—faith to believe that the American type of democratic government is the form best adapted to the production of the largest possible number of great and happy individuals. Rise to that faith, and you find within reach a principle of reconciliation between your proud nationalism, and that profound and sacred instinct in you which impels you to join hands with men and women who live under other flags yet belong to the same great civil society. Keep your eyes fixed on the true goal of national life and you may keep your national loyalty even in a league of nations. You may say in all honesty and with the full ardor of patriotic exaltation: "O America, because you build for mankind, I build for you."
Whitman is not the altogether intoxicated believer in democracy that he is usually made out to be. We may as well embrace this faith, such is the entirely sober argument of "Democratic Vistas," because the experiment is going to be tried, whether we like it or not. The deep currents of the times set that way: "Whatever may be said in the way of abstract argument, for or against the theory of a wider democratizing of institutions in any civilized country, much trouble might well be saved to all European lands by recognizing this palpable fact (for a palpable fact it is), that some form of such democratizing is about the only resource now left. That, or chronic dissatisfaction continued, mutterings which grow annually louder and louder, till, in due course, and pretty swiftly in most cases, the inevitable crisis, crash, dynastic ruin. Anything worthy to be called statesmanship in the Old World, I should say, among the advanced students, adepts, or men of any brains, does not debate today whether to hold on, attempting to lean back and monarchize, or to look forward and democratize—but how, and in what degree and part, most prudently to democratize."
On the occasion of his centenary celebration there was much inconclusive discussion as to whether, had he lived in these days, he would have been a "Bolshevist."
If Whitman had lived at the right place in these years of the Proletarian Millennium, he would have been hanged as a reactionary member of the bour- geoise: First, he distrusts schemes of doctrinaires instituting a new order in sudden and violent contravention of nature, as these lines witness:
Or argument on paper? or by arms?
Nay, nor the world, nor any living thing, will so cohere.
Secondly, he had a realistic scheme of his own for stabilizing democratic society by absorbing the upper and lower economic strata into a renovated and homogeneous middle: "The true gravitation hold of liberalism in the United States will be a more universal ownership of property, general homesteads, general comfort—a vast, intertwining reticulation of wealth. As the human frame, or indeed, any object in this manifold universe, is best kept together by the simple miracle of its own cohesion, and the necessity, exercise and profit thereof, so a great and varied nationality, occupying millions of square miles, were firmest held and knit by the principle of the safety and endurance of the aggregate of its middling property holders. So that, from another point of view, ungracious as it may sound, and a paradox after what we have been saying, democracy looks with suspicious, ill-satisfied eye upon the very poor, the ignorant, and on those out of business. She asks for men and women with occupations, well-off, owners of houses and acres, and with cash in the bank and with some cravings for literature, too; and must have them." A passage by no means devoid of political sagacity.
Thirdly, Whitman is not in the least content as a final term of progress with the material civilization which he expects and demands as the stage following the founding of fundamental institutions and laws. "The fruition of democracy, on aught like a grand scale," he declares with emphasis, "resides altogether in the future." Like most imaginative writers who have striven to present a vast and complex vision, he has been grievously misunderstood. His great songs are songs of faith, winged with anticipative ecstasy, outflying the literal and the humdrum, soaring down that far vista at the end of which a "sublime and serious Religious Democracy" will sternly take command. He has been described as a noisy braggart about himself and his country; but he is complacent with hope, not fulfillment. What he is bragging about is God, that power not ourselves working through man and nature and mysteriously bringing vast designs to pass in spite of all that the almost infinite wickedness and ignorance of man can do to thwart him.
Finally, Whitman would have been hanged by a canny council of workmen because of the germs of a new aristocracy lurking in his "great persons," his powerful free individuals, and pervading, indeed, all that he says or sings. He is a reader of newspapers and passes for a shallow fellow with those who do not also observe that he is a devourer of bibles and epics. He is called a blind and silly optimist by those who overlook the fact that he has made a clean breast of more evil in himself and his countrymen than any other writer had admitted as existing; and his optimism is said to depend upon his championship of vulgarity and mediocrity. It is true that he seems to rely a great deal upon the "divine average." But, then, his standards are not so low. He is not such a facile leveler. His specimen of the average man, what he means by the average man, is Ulysses Grant, is Abraham Lincoln. Whitman adores America because she produces such men, and he clamors for shoals of them—poets, orators, scholars—of the same bulk and build and aplomb. He will not be satisfied till he sees a hundred million of such superb persons, such aristocrats, walking these States. He is a democrat with an exorbitant thirst for distinction, of heroic mold, elate with a vision of grandeurs and glories, of majesties and splendors—like every good democrat with a spark of imagination.
I have set forth some of the main points in Whitman's system of ideas, but I recall his warning: "Do not attempt to explain me; I cannot explain myself." And certainly his service to us is neither contained nor containable in an argument. He gives us the sustaining emotion which prevents argument from falling to pieces of its own dryness. He fulfills the promises and justifies the faith of democratic society in his own characteristic fashion, by being a great individual, by being a great poet. He chiefly serves our society as poets do: "We do not fathom you—we love you." He is a lover himself and the cause of love in others.
How do I know that he is a great poet? Not merely because such judges as Emerson, Tennyson and Swinburne have acknowledged his power. Not because he has achieved a wide international reputation and translations into French, Dutch, Danish, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish. The great court of glory has pronounced unmistakeably in his favor; and this award fortifies, to be sure, the individual judgment. But there is another very simple test, which for some reason or other, is seldom applied to our contemporary verse. What is the purpose and the effect of great poetry—of Homer, The Psalms, Beowulf, the Song of Roland, the Divine Comedy, Richard III, Paradise Lost? It is to raise man in the midst of his common life above the level of his ordinary emotion by filling him with a sentiment of his importance as a moral being and of the greatness of his destiny. Does Whitman's poetry accomplish that end? It does, and it will continue to do so with increases of power as the depth and sweep of his book, its responses to a wide range of need, become familiar in the sort of daily exploration through a number of years, in dull times and crucial, which such a book can repay.
It is ungracious to say that one can measure the magnitude of Whitman by comparing him with his successors in the free verse movement; yet a word of comparison is almost unavoidable. The way to get at the matter is to ask, for example, whether the Spoon River Anthology of Mr. Masters fills one with a sentiment of one's importance as a moral being and of the greatness of one's destiny. Does there not fall over most of the figures in our late poetic renaissance "the shadow of great events from which they have shrunk?" Whitman still towers above his American successors as Pike's Peak towers above its foothills; and not merely by the height of his great argument and the lift of his passion but also—though they surpass him in small subtleties and superficial finish—by the main mastery of his instrument, the marshalling of his phrases, the production of the poetic hypnosis, and the accent and winning freshness of his voice. I have spoken of his theme and the larger aspects of his emotion, and have not space to exhibit his surging cumulative effects:
Here is what moves in magnificent masses careless of particulars.
But I should like to leave in a few lines a taste of the quality of his voice, responding first to simple rapture in the common loveliness of the natural world. Most of us ordinary people feel it when we are young and happy, but in Whitman it is a perennial incitement to benediction. No other American poet communicates so abundantly the sheer joy of living:
The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of motion,
The least insect or animal, the senses, eyesight, love,
The first step I say awed me and pleas'd me so much,
I have hardly gone and hardly wish'd to go any farther,
But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.
Add this impression of a prairie sunset:
And that exquisite line:
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again and ever again, this soil'd world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the cofin—I draw near,
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.
Or read "A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim," another picture of the dead soldier, ending with a swift mystical vision of his transfiguration by the love which passes understanding:
Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.
There is more of the high pity and terror of war, more of the valor and tenderness that come straight from the magnanimous heart, in Whitman's battle chants and dirges than in all our other war poetry put together.
"In Homer and Shakespere," says Whitman truly, one will find a "certain heroic ecstasy, which, or the suggestion of which, is never absent in the works of the masters." That heroic ecstacy is present in Whitman himself. There is not a page of him in which he does not impart it. The continuous miracle is that he manages to impart it with only a line here and there in the familiar grand style of the masters, and these remain, one suspects, by his inadvertence as in his salutation to a tawny headed warrior:
········
Leaving behind thee a memory sweet to soldiers,
Thou yieldest up thyself.
These are lines that the old masters would recognize as in their style; but the heroic ecstasy lives too in the new style of his own:
A man before all—myself, typical, before all,
Give me the pay I have served for,
Give me to sing of the great Idea, take all the rest.
Or consider his salute: "To Him That Was Crucified":
Do not mind because many sounding your name do not understand you,
I do not sound your name, but I understand you.
In nothing does a man measure himself more decisively than in his judgment of other men. Whitman has an instinct and talent for recognizing the heroic in literature, in history, among his own contemporaries. He recognizes it in Christ, in Lincoln, in the nameless crumpled corpse amid the débris of battle; and he responds to it with the adoration of a kindred spirit. This is a decisive test of his quality. This instinct keeps him near the central stream of our national life, an unperturbed and reassuring pilot in misty weather. In recognition of this virtue in him I choose for my last word this line of his: