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