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 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY BOSTON AND NEW YORK

[Illustration: WALT WHITMAN]

 WHITMAN _A STUDY_

 BY JOHN BURROUGHS

 BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge

 Copyright, 1896, BY JOHN BURROUGHS. 

 _All rights reserved. _

CONTENTS

 PAGE

 PRELIMINARY 1

 BIOGRAPHICAL AND PERSONAL 23

 HIS RULING IDEAS AND AIMS 73

 HIS SELF-RELIANCE 85

 HIS RELATION TO ART AND LITERATURE 101

 HIS RELATION TO LIFE AND MORALS 169

 HIS RELATION TO CULTURE 205

 HIS RELATION TO HIS COUNTRY AND HIS TIMES 229

 HIS RELATION TO SCIENCE 249

 HIS RELATION TO RELIGION 257

 A FINAL WORD 263

"_All original art is self-regulated, and no original art can be regulatedfrom without; it carries its own counterpoise, and does not receive itfrom elsewhere. _"--TAINE. 

"_If you want to tell good Gothic, see if it has the sort of roughness andlargeness and nonchalance, mixed in places with the exquisite tendernesswhich seems always to be the sign manual of the broad vision and massypower of men who can see_ past _the work they are doing, and betray hereand there something like disdain for it. _"--RUSKIN. 

"_Formerly, during the period termed classic, when literature was governedby recognized rules, he was considered the best poet who had composed themost perfect work, the most beautiful poem, the most intelligible, themost agreeable to read, the most complete in every respect, --the Æneid, the Gerusalemme, a fine tragedy. To-day something else is wanted. For usthe greatest poet is he who in his works most stimulates the reader'simagination and reflection, who excites him the most himself to poetize. The greatest poet is not he who has done the best, it is he who suggeststhe most; he, not all of whose meaning is at first obvious, and who leavesyou much to desire, to explain, to study, much to complete in yourturn. _"--SAINTE-BEUVE. 

WHITMAN

PRELIMINARY

I

The writing of this preliminary chapter, and the final survey and revisionof my Whitman essay, I am making at a rustic house I have built at a wildplace a mile or more from my home upon the river. I call this placeWhitman Land, because in many ways it is typical of my poet, --anamphitheatre of precipitous rock, slightly veiled with a delicate growthof verdure, enclosing a few acres of prairie-like land, once the site ofan ancient lake, now a garden of unknown depth and fertility. Elementalruggedness, savageness, and grandeur, combined with wonderful tenderness, modernness, and geniality. There rise the gray scarred cliffs, crownedhere and there with a dead hemlock or pine, where, morning after morning, I have seen the bald-eagle perch, and here at their feet this level areaof tender humus, with three perennial springs of delicious cold waterflowing in its margin; a huge granite bowl filled with the elements andpotencies of life. The scene has a strange fascination for me, and holdsme here day after day. From the highest point of rocks I can overlook along stretch of the river and of the farming country beyond; I can hearowls hoot, hawks scream, and roosters crow. Birds of the garden andorchard meet birds of the forest upon the shaggy cedar posts that upholdmy porch. At dusk the call of the whippoorwill mingles with the chorus ofthe pickerel frogs, and in the morning I hear through the robins' cheerfulburst the sombre plaint of the mourning-dove. When I tire of mymanuscript, I walk in the woods, or climb the rocks, or help the men clearup the ground, piling and burning the stumps and rubbish. This scene andsituation, so primitive and secluded, yet so touched with and adapted tocivilization, responding to the moods of both sides of the life andimagination of a modern man, seems, I repeat, typical in many ways of mypoet, and is a veritable Whitman land. Whitman does not to me suggest thewild and unkempt as he seems to do to many; he suggests the cosmic and theelemental, and this is one of the dominant thoughts that run through mydissertation. Scenes of power and savagery in nature were more welcome tohim, probably more stimulating to him, than the scenes of the pretty andplacid, and he cherished the hope that he had put into his "Leaves" someof the tonic and fortifying quality of Nature in her more grand andprimitive aspects. 

His wildness is only the wildness of the great primary forces from whichwe draw our health and strength. Underneath all his unloosedness, or freelaunching forth of himself, is the sanity and repose of nature. 

II

I first became acquainted with Whitman's poetry through the columns of theold "Saturday Press" when I was twenty or twenty-one years old (1858 or1859). The first things I remember to have read were "There was a childwent forth, " "This Compost, " "As I ebb'd with the Ocean of Life, " "OldIreland, " and maybe a few others. I was attracted by the new poet's workfrom the first. It seemed to let me into a larger, freer air than I foundin the current poetry. Meeting Bayard Taylor about this time, I spoke tohim about Whitman. "Yes, " he said, "there is something in him, but he is aman of colossal egotism. "

A few years later a friend sent me a copy of the Thayer & Eldridge editionof "Leaves of Grass" of 1860. It proved a fascinating but puzzling book tome. I grazed upon it like a colt upon a mountain, taking what tasted goodto me, and avoiding what displeased me, but having little or no conceptionof the purport of the work as a whole. I found passages and whole poemshere and there that I never tired of reading, and that gave a strangefillip to my moral and intellectual nature, but nearly as many passagesand poems puzzled or repelled me. My absorption of Emerson had prepared mein a measure for Whitman's philosophy of life, but not for the ideals ofcharacter and conduct which he held up to me, nor for the standards in artto which the poet perpetually appealed. Whitman was Emerson translatedfrom the abstract into the concrete. There was no privacy with Whitman; henever sat me down in a corner with a cozy, comfortable shut-in feeling, but he set me upon a hill or started me upon an endless journey. Wordsworth had been my poet of nature, of the sequestered and the idyllic;but I saw that here was a poet of a larger, more fundamental nature, indeed of the Cosmos itself. Not a poet of dells and fells, but of theearth and the orbs. This much soon appeared to me, but I was troubled bythe poet's apparent "colossal egotism, " by his attitude towards evil, declaring himself "to be the poet of wickedness also;" by his seemingattraction toward the turbulent and the disorderly; and, at times, by whatthe critics had called his cataloguing style of treatment. 

When I came to meet the poet himself, which was in the fall of 1863, Ifelt less concern about these features of his work; he was so sound andsweet and gentle and attractive as a man, and withal so wise and tolerant, that I soon came to feel the same confidence in the book that I at onceplaced in its author, even in the parts which I did not understand. I sawthat the work and the man were one, and that the former must be good asthe latter was good. There was something in the manner in which both thebook and its author carried themselves under the sun, and in the way theyconfronted America and the present time, that convinced beyond the powerof logic or criticism. 

The more I saw of Whitman, and the more I studied his "Leaves, " the moresignificance I found in both, and the clearer it became to me that a newtype of a man and a new departure in poetic literature were hereforeshadowed. There was something forbidding, but there was somethingvital and grand back of it. I found to be true what the poet said ofhimself, --

 "Bearded, sunburnt, gray-neck'd, forbidding, I have arrived, To be wrestled with as I pass for the solid prizes of the universe, For such I afford whoever can persevere to win them, "--

I have persevered in my study of the poet, though balked many times, andthe effect upon my own mental and spiritual nature has been great; no such"solid prizes" in the way of a broader outlook upon life and nature, and, I may say, upon art, has any poet of my time afforded me. There arepassages or whole poems in the "Leaves" which I do not yet understand("Sleep-Chasings" is one of them), though the language is as clear asdaylight; they are simply too subtle or elusive for me; but my confidencein the logical soundness of the book is so complete that I do not troublemyself at all about these things. 

III

I would fain make these introductory remarks to my essay a sort of windowthrough which the reader may get a fairly good view of what lies beyond. If he does not here get any glimpse or suggestion of what pleases him, orof what he is looking for, it will hardly be worth while for him totrouble himself further. 

A great many readers, perhaps three fourths of the readers of currentpoetry, and not a few of the writers thereof, cannot stand Whitman at all, or see any reason for his being. To such my essay, if it ever comes totheir notice, will be a curiosity, may be an offense. But I trust it willmeet with a different reception at the hands of the smaller but rapidlygrowing circle of those who are beginning to turn to Whitman as the mostimposing and significant figure in our literary annals. 

The rapidly growing Whitman literature attests the increasing interest towhich I refer. Indeed, it seems likely that by the end of the century theliterature which will have grown up around the name of this man willsurpass in bulk and value that which has grown up around the name of anyother man of letters born within the century. 

When Mr. Stedman wrote his essay upon the poet early in the eighties, hereferred to the mass of this literature. It has probably more than doubledin volume in the intervening years: since Whitman's death in the spring of'92, it has been added to by William Clark's book upon the poet, ProfessorTrigg's study of Browning and Whitman, and the work of that accomplishedcritic and scholar, so lately gone to his rest, John Addington Symonds. This last is undoubtedly the most notable contribution that has yet beenmade, or is likely very soon to be made, to the Whitman literature. Mr. Symonds declares that "Leaves of Grass, " which he first read at the age oftwenty-five, influenced him more than any other book has done, except theBible, --more than Plato, more than Goethe. 

When we remember that the man who made this statement was eminently a manof books, deeply read in all literatures, his testimony may well offsetthat of a score of our home critics who find nothing worthy or helpful inWhitman's work. One positive witness in such a matter outweighs any numberof negative ones. 

IV

For making another addition to the growing Whitman literature, I have noapology to offer. I know well enough that "writing and talk" cannot"prove" a poet; that he must be his own proof or be forgotten; and my mainpurpose in writing about Whitman, as in writing about nature, is to tellreaders what I have found there, with the hope of inducing them to lookfor themselves. At the same time, I may say that I think no modern poet somuch needs to be surrounded by an atmosphere of comment andinterpretation, through which readers may approach him, as does Whitman. His work sprang from a habit or attitude of mind quite foreign to thatwith which current literature makes us familiar, --so germinal is it, andso little is it beholden to the formal art we so assiduously cultivate. The poet says his work "connects lovingly with precedents, " but it doesnot connect lovingly with any body of poetry of this century. "Leaves ofGrass" is bound to be a shock to the timid and pampered taste of themajority of current readers. I would fain lessen this shock by interposingmy own pages of comment between the book and the public. The critic cansay so many things the poet cannot. He can explain and qualify andanalyze, whereas the creative artist can only hint or project. The poetmust hasten on, he must infold and bind together, he must be direct andsynthetic in every act. Reflection and qualification are not for him, butaction, emotion, volition, the procreant blending and surrender. He worksas Nature does, and gives us reality in every line. 

Whitman says:--

 "I charge you forever reject those who would expound me, for I cannot expound myself. "

The type of mind of Whitman's, which seldom or never emerges as a merementality, an independent thinking and knowing faculty, but always as apersonality, always as a complete human entity, never can expound itself, because its operations are synthetic and not analytic, its mainspring islove and not mere knowledge. In his prose essay called "A Backward Glanceo'er Travel'd Roads, " appended to the final edition of his poems, Whitmanhas not so much sought to expound himself as to put his reader inpossession of his point of view, and of the considerations that lie backof his work. This chapter might render much that I have writtensuperfluous, were there not always a distinct gain in seeing an authorthrough another medium, or in getting the equivalents of him in thethoughts and ideals of a kindred and sympathetic mind. But I have notconsciously sought to expound Whitman, any more than in my other books Ihave sought to expound the birds or wild nature. I have written out somethings that he means to me, and the pleasure and profit I have found inhis pages. 

There is no end to what can be drawn out of him. It has been said andrepeated that he was not a thinker, and yet I find more food for thoughtin him than in all other poets. It has been often said and repeated thathe is not a poet, and yet the readers that respond to him the most fullyappear to be those in whom the poetic temperament is paramount. I believehe supplies in fuller measure that pristine element, something akin to theunbreathed air of mountain and shore, which makes the arterial blood ofpoetry and literature, than any other modern writer. 

V

We can make little of Whitman unless we allow him to be a law untohimself, and seek him through the clews which he himself brings. When wetry him by current modes, current taste, and demand of him formal beauty, formal art, we are disappointed. But when we try him by what we may callthe scientific standard, the standard of organic nature, and demand of himthe vital and the characteristic, --demand of him that he have a law of hisown, and fulfill that law in the poetic sphere, --the result is quitedifferent. 

More than any other poet, Whitman is what we make him; more than any otherpoet, his greatest value is in what he suggests and implies, rather thanin what he portrays; and more than any other poet must he wait to beunderstood by the growth of the taste of himself. "I make the only growthby which I can be appreciated, " he truly says. 

His words are like the manna that descended upon the Israelites, "in whichwere all manner of tastes; and every one found in it what his palate waschiefly pleased with. If he desired fat in it, he had it. In it the youngmen tasted bread; the old men honey; and the children oil. " Many youngmen, --poets, artists, teachers, preachers, --have testified that they havefound bread in Whitman, the veritable bread of life; others have foundhoney, sweet poetic morsels; and not a few report having found only gall. 

VI

In considering an original work like "Leaves of Grass, " the search isalways for the grounds upon which it is to be justified and explained. These grounds in this work are not easy to find; they lie deeper than thegrounds upon which the popular poets rest. Because they are not at onceseen, many readers have denied that there are any such grounds. But todeny a basis of reality to a work with the history of "Leaves of Grass, "and a basis well grounded on æsthetic and artistic principles, is not tobe thought of. 

The more the poet eludes us, the more we know he has his hiding-placesomewhere. The more he denies our standards, the more we know he hasstandards of his own which we must discover; the more he flouts at ourliterary conventions, the more we must press him for his own principlesand methods. How does he justify himself to himself? Could any sane manhave written the Children of Adam poems who was not sustained by deepestmoral and æsthetic convictions? It is the business of the critic to searchfor these principles and convictions, and not shirk the task by ridiculeand denial. 

VII

If there was never any change in taste, if it always ran in the samechannels, --indeed, if it did not at times run in precisely oppositechannels, --there would be little hope that Walt Whitman's poetry wouldever find any considerable number of readers. But one of the laws thatdominate the progress of literature, as Edmond Shérer says, is incessantchange, not only in thought and ideas, but in taste and thestarting-points of art. A radical and almost violent change in theserespects is indicated by Whitman, --a change which is in unison with manythings in modern life and morals, but which fairly crosses the prevailingtaste in poetry and in art. No such dose of realism and individualismunder the guise of poetry has been administered to the reading public inthis century. No such break with literary traditions--no such audaciousattempt to tally, in a printed page, the living concrete man, an actualhuman presence, instead of the conscious, made-up poet--is to be found inmodern literary records. 

VIII

The much that I have said in the following pages about Whitman's radicaldifferences from other poets--his changed attitude towards the universe, his unwonted methods and aims, etc. , --might seem to place him upon aground so unique and individual as to contradict my claims for his breadthand universality. The great poets stand upon common ground; they excelalong familiar lines, they touch us, and touch us deeply, at many points. What always saves Whitman is his enormous endowment of what is "commonest, nearest, easiest, "--his atmosphere of the common day, the common life, andhis fund of human sympathy and love. He is strange because he gives us thefamiliar in such a direct, unexpected manner. His "Leaves" are like somenew fruit that we have never before tasted. It is the product of anotherclime, another hemisphere. The same old rains and dews, the same old sunand soil, nursed it, yet in so many ways how novel and strange! Wecertainly have to serve a certain apprenticeship to this poet, familiarizeourselves with his point of view and with his democratic spirit, before wecan make much of him. The spirit in which we come to him from the otherpoets--the poets of art and culture--is for the most part unfriendly tohim. There is something rude, strange, and unpoetic about him at firstsight that is sure to give most readers of poetry a shock. I think onemight come to him from the Greek poets, or the old Hebrew or Orientalbards, with less shock than from our modern delicate and refined singers;because the old poets were more simple and elemental, and aimed less atthe distilled dainties of poetry, than the modern. They were full ofaction, too, and volition, --of that which begets and sustains life. Whitman's poetry is almost entirely the expression of will andpersonality, and runs very little to intellectual subtleties andrefinements. It fulfills itself in our wills and character, rather than inour taste. 

IX

Whitman will always be a strange and unwonted figure among his country'spoets, and among English poets generally, --a cropping out again, after somany centuries, of the old bardic prophetic strain. Had he dropped upon usfrom some other sphere, he could hardly have been a greater surprise andpuzzle to the average reader or critic. Into a literature that was timid, imitative, conventional, he fell like leviathan into a duck-pond, and thecommotion and consternation he created there have not yet subsided. Allthe reigning poets in this country except Emerson denied him, and many ofour minor poets still keep up a hostile sissing and cackling. He willprobably always be more or less a stumbling-block to the minor poet, because of his indifference to the things which to the minor poet are allin all. He was a poet without what is called artistic form, and withouttechnique, as that word is commonly understood. His method was analogousto the dynamic method of organic nature, rather than to the mechanical orconstructive method of the popular poets. 

X

Of course the first thing that strikes the reader in "Leaves of Grass" isits seeming oddity and strangeness. If a man were to come into a dressreception in shirt sleeves and with his hat on, the feature would strikeus at once, and would be magnified in our eyes; we should quite forgetthat he was a man, and in essentials differed but little from the rest ofus, after all. The exterior habiliments on such occasions count for nearlyeverything; and in the popular poetry rhyme, measure, and the language andmanners of the poets are much more than anything else. If Whitman did notdo anything so outré as to come into a dress reception with his coat offand his hat on, he did come into the circle of the poets without the usualpoetic habiliments. He was not dressed up at all, and he was not at allabashed or apologetic. His air was confident and self-satisfied, if it didnot at times suggest the insolent and aggressive. It was the dress circlethat was on trial, and not Walt Whitman. 

We could forgive a man in real life for such an audacious proceeding onlyon the ground of his being something extraordinary as a person, with anextraordinary message to convey; and we can pardon the poet only onprecisely like grounds. He must make us forget his unwonted garb by hisunique and lovable personality, and the power and wisdom of his utterance. If he cannot do this we shall soon tire of him. 

That Whitman was a personality the like of which the world has not oftenseen, and that his message to his country and to his race was of primeimportance, are conclusions at which more and more thinking persons aresurely arriving. 

His want of art, of which we have heard so much, is, it seems to me, justthis want of the usual trappings and dress uniform of the poets. In theessentials of art, the creative imagination, the plastic and quickeningspirit, the power of identification with the thing contemplated, and theabsolute use of words, he has few rivals. 

XI

I make no claim that my essay is a dispassionate, disinterested view ofWhitman. It will doubtless appear to many as a one-sided view, or ascolored by my love for the man himself. And I shall not be disturbed ifsuch turns out to be the case. A dispassionate view of a man like Whitmanis probably out of the question in our time, or in any near time. Hisappeal is so personal and direct that readers are apt to be eitherviolently for him or violently against, and it will require theperspective of more than one generation to bring out his truesignificance. Still, for any partiality for its subject which my book mayshow, let me take shelter behind a dictum of Goethe. 

"I am more and more convinced, " says the great critic, "that whenever onehas to vent an opinion on the actions or on the writings of others, unlessthis be done from a certain one-sided enthusiasm, or from a lovinginterest in the person and the work, the result is hardly worth gatheringup. Sympathy and enjoyment in what we see is in fact the only reality, and, from such reality, reality as a natural product follows. All else isvanity. "

To a loving interest in Whitman and his work, which may indeed amount toone-sided enthusiasm, I plead guilty. This at least is real with me, andnot affected; and, if the reality which Goethe predicts in such cases onlyfollows, I shall be more than content. 

XII

In the world of literature, as in the world of physical forces, thingsadjust themselves after a while, and no impetus can be given to any man'sname or fame that will finally carry it beyond the limit of his realworth. However "one-sided" my enthusiasm for Whitman may be, or that ofany of his friends may be, there is no danger but that in time he willfind exactly his proper place and level. My opinion, or any man's opinion, of the works of another, is like a wind that blows for a moment acrossthe water, heaping it up a little on the shore or else beating it down, but not in any way permanently affecting its proper level. 

The adverse winds that have blown over Whitman's work have been many andpersistent, and yet the tide has surely risen, his fame has slowlyincreased. 

It will soon be forty years since he issued the first thin quarto editionof "Leaves of Grass, " and, though the opposition to him has been the mostfierce and determined ever recorded in our literary history, oftendegenerating into persecution and willful misrepresentation, yet his famehas steadily grown both at home and abroad. The impression he early madeupon such men as Emerson, Thoreau, William O'Connor, Mr. Stedman, ColonelIngersoll, and others in this country, and upon Professors Dowden andClifford, upon Symonds, Ruskin, Tennyson, Rossetti, Lord Lytton, Mrs. Gilchrist, George Eliot, in England, has been followed by an equally deepor deeper impression upon many of the younger and bolder spirits of bothhemispheres. In fact Whitman saw his battle essentially won in his ownlifetime, though his complete triumph is of course a matter of the distantfuture. 

XIII

But let me give without further delay a fuller hint of the attitude thesepages assume and hold towards the subject they discuss. 

There are always, or nearly always, a few men born to each generation whoembody the best thought and culture of that generation, and express it inapproved literary forms. From Petrarch down to Lowell, the lives and worksof these men fill the literary annals; they uphold the literary andscholarly traditions; they are the true men of letters; they are justlyhonored and beloved in their day and land. We in this country haverecently, in the death of Dr. Holmes, mourned the loss of the last of theNew England band of such men. We are all indebted to them for solace, andfor moral and intellectual stimulus. 

Then, much more rarely, there is born to a race or people men who are likean irruption of life from another world, who belong to another order, whobring other standards, and sow the seed of new and larger types; who arenot the organs of the culture or modes of their time, and whom their timesfor the most part decry and disown, --the primal, original, elemental men. It is here, in my opinion, that we must place Whitman; not among theminstrels and edifiers of his age, but among its prophets and saviors. Heis nearer the sources of things than the popular poets, --nearer thefounders and discoverers, closer akin to the large, fervent, prophetic, patriarchal men who figure in the early heroic ages. His work ranks withthe great primitive books. He is of the type of the skald, the bard, theseer, the prophet. The specialization and differentiation of our latterages of science and culture is less marked in him than in other poets. Poetry, philosophy, religion, are all inseparably blended in his pages. Heis in many ways a reversion to an earlier type. Dr. Brinton has remarkedthat his attitude toward the principle of sex and his use of sexualimagery in his poems, are the same as in the more primitive religions. Whitman was not a poet by elaboration, but by suggestion; not an artist byformal presentation, but by spirit and conception; not a philosopher bysystem and afterthought, but by vision and temper. 

In his "Leaves, " we again hear the note of destiny, --again see theuniversal laws and forces exemplified in the human personality, and turnedupon life with love and triumph. 

XIV

The world always has trouble with its primary men, or with the men whohave any primary gifts, like Emerson, Wordsworth, Browning, Tolstoi, Ibsen. The idols of an age are nearly always secondary men: they break nonew ground; they make no extraordinary demands; our tastes and wants arealready adjusted to their type; we understand and approve of them at once. The primary men disturb us; they are a summons and a challenge; they breakup the old order; they open up new territory which we are to subdue andoccupy; the next age and the next make more of them. In my opinion, thenext age and the next will make more of Whitman, and the next still more, because he is in the great world-current, in the line of the evolutionarymovement of our time. Is it at all probable that Tennyson can ever be toany other age what he has been to this? Tennyson marks an expiring age, the sunset of the feudal world. He did not share the spirit to which thefuture belongs. There was not one drop of democratic blood in his veins. To him, the people were an hundred-headed beast. 

XV

If my essay seems like one continual strain to attain the unattainable, tocompass and define Whitman, who will not be compassed and defined, I canonly say that I regret it, but could not well help it. Talking aboutWhitman, Symonds said, was like talking about the universe, and it is so. There is somewhat incommensurable in his works. One may not hope to speakthe final word about him, to sum him up in a sentence. He is so palpable, so real, so near at hand, that the critic or expounder of him promiseshimself an easy victory; but before one can close with him he is gone. Heis, after all, as subtle and baffling as air or light. 

 . . . "I will certainly elude you, Even while you should think you had unquestionably caught me, behold! Already you see I have escaped from you. "

It is probably this characteristic which makes Whitman an irrepressiblefigure in literature; he will not down for friend or foe. He escapes fromall classification, and is larger than any definition of him that has yetbeen given. How many times has he been exploded by British and Americancritics; how many times has he been labeled and put upon the shelf, onlyto reappear again as vigorous and untranslatable as ever!

XVI

So far as Whitman stands merely for the spirit of revolt, or of reactionagainst current modes in life and literature, I have little interest inhim. As the "apostle of the rough, the uncouth, " to use Mr. Howells'swords, the world would long ago have tired of him. The irruption intoletters of the wild and lawless, or of the strained and eccentric, canamuse and interest us only for a moment. It is because these are onlymomentary phases of him, as it were, and because underneath all heembraces the whole of life and ministers to it, that his fame andinfluence are still growing in the world. One hesitates even to callWhitman the poet of "democracy, " or of "personality, " or of "the modern, "because such terms only half define him. He quickly escapes into thatlarge and universal air which all great art breathes. We cannot sum him upin a phrase. He flows out on all sides, and his sympathies embrace alltypes and conditions of men. He is a great democrat, but, first and lastand over all, he is a great man, a great nature, and deep world-currentscourse through him. He is distinctively an American poet, but hisAmericanism is only the door through which he enters upon the universal. 

XVII

Call his work poetry or prose, or what you will: that it is an inspiredutterance of some sort, any competent person ought to be able to see. Andwhat else do we finally demand of any work than that it be inspired? Howall questions of form and art, and all other questions, sink intoinsignificance beside that! The exaltation of mind and spirit shown in themain body of Whitman's work, the genuine, prophetic fervor, theintensification and amplification of the simple ego, and the resultantraising of all human values, seem to me as plain as daylight. 

Whitman is to be classed among the great names by the breadth andall-inclusiveness of his theme and by his irrepressible personality. Ithink it highly probable that future scholars and critics will find hiswork fully as significant and era-marking as that of any of the fewsupreme names of the past. It is the culmination of an age ofindividualism, and, as opposites meet, it is also the best lesson innationalism and universal charity that this century has seen. 

BIOGRAPHICAL AND PERSONAL

I

Walt Whitman was born at West Hills, Long Island, May 30, 1819, and diedat Camden, N. J. , March 26, 1892. Though born in the country, most of hislife was passed in cities; first in Brooklyn and New York, then in NewOrleans, then in Washington, and lastly in Camden, where his body isburied. It was a poet's life from first to last, --free, unhampered, unworldly, unconventional, picturesque, simple, untouched by the craze ofmoney-getting, unselfish, devoted to others, and was, on the whole, joyfully and contentedly lived. It was a pleased and interested saunterthrough the world, --no hurry, no fever, no strife; hence no bitterness, nodepletion, no wasted energies. A farm boy, then a school-teacher, then aprinter, editor, writer, traveler, mechanic, nurse in the army hospitals, and lastly government clerk; large and picturesque of figure, slow ofmovement; tolerant, passive, receptive, and democratic, --of the people; inall his tastes and attractions, always aiming to walk abreast with thegreat laws and forces, and to live thoroughly in the free, nonchalantspirit of his own day and land. His strain was mingled Dutch and English, with a decided Quaker tinge, which came from his mother's side, and whichhad a marked influence upon his work. 

The spirit that led him to devote his time and substance to the sick andwounded soldiers during the war may be seen in that earlier incident inhis life when he drove a Broadway stage all one winter, that a disableddriver might lie by without starving his family. It is from this episodethat the tradition of his having been a New York stage-driver comes. Heseems always to have had a special liking for this class of workmen. Oneof the house surgeons of the old New York Hospital relates that in thelatter part of the fifties Whitman was a frequent visitor to thatinstitution, looking after and ministering to disabled stage-drivers. "These drivers, " says the doctor, "like those of the omnibuses in London, were a set of men by themselves. A good deal of strength, intelligence, and skillful management of horses was required of a Broadway stage-driver. He seems to have been decidedly a higher order of man than the driver ofthe present horse-cars. He usually had his primary education in thecountry, and graduated as a thorough expert in managing a very difficultmachine, in an exceptionally busy thoroughfare. 

"It was this kind of a man that so attracted Walt Whitman that he wasconstantly to be seen perched on the box alongside one of them going upand down Broadway. I often watched the poet and driver, as probably didmany another New Yorker in those days. 

"I do not wonder as much now as I did in 1860 that a man like Walt Whitmanbecame interested in these drivers. He was not interested in the news ofevery-day life--the murders and accidents and political convulsions--buthe was interested in strong types of human character. We young men had nothad experience enough to understand this kind of a man. It seems to me nowthat we looked at Whitman simply as a kind of crank, if the word had thenbeen invented. His talk to us was chiefly of books, and the men who wrotethem: especially of poetry, and what he considered poetry. He never saidmuch of the class whom he visited in our wards, after he had satisfiedhimself of the nature of the injury and of the prospect of recovery. 

"Whitman appeared to be about forty years of age at that time. He wasalways dressed in a blue flannel coat and vest, with gray and baggytrousers. He wore a woolen shirt, with a Byronic collar, low in the neck, without a cravat, as I remember, and a large felt hat. His hair was irongray, and he had a full beard and mustache of the same color. His face andneck were bronzed by exposure to the sun and air. He was large, and gavethe impression of being a vigorous man. He was scrupulously careful of hissimple attire, and his hands were soft and hairy. "

During the early inception of "Leaves of Grass" he was a carpenter inBrooklyn, building and selling small frame-houses to working people. Hefrequently knocked off work to write his poems. In his life Whitman wasnever one of the restless, striving sort. In this respect he was nottypical of his countrymen. All his urgency and strenuousness he reservedfor his book. He seems always to have been a sort of visitor in life, noting, observing, absorbing, keeping aloof from all ties that would holdhim, and making the most of the hour and the place in which he happened tobe. He was in no sense a typical literary man. During his life in New Yorkand Brooklyn, we see him moving entirely outside the fashionable circles, the learned circles, the literary circles, the money-getting circles. Hebelongs to no set or club. He is seen more with the laboringclasses, --drivers, boatmen, mechanics, printers, --and I suspect may oftenbe found with publicans and sinners. He is fond of the ferries and of theomnibuses. He is a frequenter of the theatre and of the Italian opera. Alboni makes a deep and lasting impression upon him. It is probably to herthat he writes these lines:--

 "Here take this gift, I was reserving it for some hero, speaker, general, One who should serve the good old cause, the great idea, the progress and freedom of the race, Some brave confronter of despots, some daring rebel; But I see that what I was reserving belongs to you just as much as to any. "

Elsewhere he refers to Alboni by name and speaks of her as

 "The lustrous orb, Venus contralto, the blooming mother, Sister of loftiest gods. "

Some of his poems were written at the opera. The great singers evidentlygave him clews and suggestions that were applicable to his own art. 

His study was out of doors. He wrote on the street, on the ferry, at theseaside, in the fields, at the opera, --always from living impulses arisingat the moment, and always with his eye upon the fact. He says he has readhis "Leaves" to himself in the open air, and tried them by the realitiesof life and nature about him. Were they as real and alive as they?--thiswas the only question with him. 

At home in his father's family in Brooklyn we see him gentle, patient, conciliatory, much looked up to by all. Neighbors seek his advice. He iscool, deliberate, impartial. A marked trait is his indifference to moneymatters; his people are often troubled because he lets opportunities tomake money pass by. When his "Leaves" appear, his family are puzzled, donot know what to make of it. His mother thinks that, if "Hiawatha" ispoetry, may be Walt's book is, too. He never counsels with any one, and isutterly indifferent as to what people may say or think. He is not astirring and punctual man, is always a little late; not an early riser, not prompt at dinner; always has ample time, and will not be hurried; thebusiness gods do not receive his homage. He is gray at thirty, and is saidto have had a look of age in youth, as he had a look of youth in age. Hehas few books, cares little for sport, never uses a gun; has no badhabits; has no entanglements with women, and apparently never contemplatesmarriage. It is said that during his earliest years of manhood he keptquite aloof from the "girls. "

At the age of nineteen he edited "The Long Islander, " published atHuntington. A recent visitor to these early haunts of Whitman gatheredsome reminiscences of him at this date:--

"Amid the deep revery of nature, on that mild October afternoon, wereturned to the village of Huntington, there to meet the few, the veryfew, survivors who recall Walt's first appearance in the literary world asthe editor of 'The Long Islander, ' nigh sixty years ago (1838). Two ofthese forefathers of the hamlet clearly remembered his powerfulpersonality, brimful of life, reveling in strength, careless of time andthe world, of money and of toil; a lover of books and of jokes; delightingto gather round him the youth of the village in his printing-room ofevenings, and tell them stories and read them poetry, his own and others'. That of his own he called his 'Yawps, ' a word which he afterwards madefamous. Both remembered him as a delightful companion, generous to afault, glorying in youth, negligent of his affairs, issuing 'The LongIslander' at random intervals, --once a week, once in two weeks, once inthree, --until its financial backers lost faith and hope and turned himout, and with him the whole office corps; for Walt himself was editor, publisher, compositor, pressman, and printer's devil, all in one. "

II

Few men were so deeply impressed by our Civil War as was Whitman. Itaroused all his patriotism, all his sympathies, and, as a poet, tested hispower to deal with great contemporary events and scenes. He was firstdrawn to the seat of war on behalf of his brother, Lieutenant-ColonelGeorge W. Whitman, 51st New York Volunteers, who was wounded by thefragment of a shell at Fredericksburg. This was in the fall of 1862. Thisbrought him in contact with the sick and wounded soldiers, and henceforth, as long as the war lasts and longer, he devoted his time and substance toministering to them. The first two or three years of his life inWashington he supported himself by correspondence with Northernnewspapers, mainly with the "New York Times. " These letters, as well asthe weekly letters to his mother during the same period, form an intenselypathetic and interesting record. 

They contain such revelations of himself, and such pictures of the sceneshe moved among, that I shall here quote freely from them. The followingextract is from a letter written from Fredericksburg the third or fourthday after the battle of December, 1862:--

"Spent a good part of the day in a large brick mansion on the banks of theRappahannock, immediately opposite Fredericksburg. It is used as ahospital since the battle, and seems to have received only the worstcases. Out of doors, at the foot of a tree, within ten yards of the frontof the house, I notice a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, etc. , about a load for a one-horse cart. Several dead bodies lie near, eachcovered with its brown woolen blanket. In the door-yard, toward the river, are fresh graves, mostly of officers, their names on pieces ofbarrel-staves, or broken board, stuck in the dirt. (Most of these bodieswere subsequently taken up and transported North to their friends. )

"The house is quite crowded, everything impromptu, no system, all badenough, but I have no doubt the best that can be done; all the woundspretty bad, some frightful, the men in their old clothes, unclean andbloody. Some of the wounded are rebel officers, prisoners. One, aMississippian, --a captain, --hit badly in leg, I talked with some time; heasked me for papers, which I gave him. (I saw him three months afterwardin Washington, with leg amputated, doing well. )

"I went through the rooms, down stairs and up. Some of the men were dying. I had nothing to give at that visit, but wrote a few letters to folkshome, mothers, etc. Also talked to three or four who seemed mostsusceptible to it, and needing it. "

"December 22 to 31. --Am among the regimental, brigade, and divisionhospitals somewhat. Few at home realize that these are merely tents, andsometimes very poor ones, the wounded lying on the ground, lucky if theirblanket is spread on a layer of pine or hemlock twigs, or some leaves. Nocots; seldom even a mattress on the ground. It is pretty cold. I go aroundfrom one case to another. I do not see that I can do any good, but Icannot leave them. Once in a while some youngster holds on to meconvulsively, and I do what I can for him; at any rate, stop with him andsit near him for hours, if he wishes it. 

"Besides the hospitals, I also go occasionally on long tours through thecamps, talking with the men, etc. ; sometimes at night among the groupsaround the fires, in their shebang enclosures of bushes. I soon getacquainted anywhere in camp, with officers or men, and am always wellused. Sometimes I go down on picket with the regiments I know best. "

After continuing in front through the winter, he returns to Washington, where the wounded and sick have mainly been concentrated. The Capitalcity, truly, is now one huge hospital; and there Whitman establisheshimself, and thenceforward, for several years, has but one daily andnightly avocation. 

He alludes to writing letters by the bedside, and says:--

"I do a good deal of this, of course, writing all kinds, includinglove-letters. Many sick and wounded soldiers have not written home toparents, brothers, sisters, and even wives, for one reason or another, fora long, long time. Some are poor writers, some cannot get paper andenvelopes; many have an aversion to writing, because they dread to worrythe folks at home, --the facts about them are so sad to tell. I alwaysencourage the men to write, and promptly write for them. "

A glimpse of the scenes after Chancellorsville:--

"As I write this, in May, 1863, the wounded have begun to arrive fromHooker's command from bloody Chancellorsville. I was down among the firstarrivals. The men in charge of them told me the bad cases were yet tocome. If that is so, I pity them, for these are bad enough. You ought tosee the scene of the wounded arriving at the landing here foot of SixthStreet at night. Two boat-loads came about half past seven last night. Alittle after eight, it rained a long and violent shower. The poor, pale, helpless soldiers had been debarked, and lay around on the wharf andneighborhood anywhere. The rain was, probably, grateful to them; at anyrate they were exposed to it. 

"The few torches light up the spectacle. All around on the wharf, on theground, out on side places, etc. , the men are lying on blankets and oldquilts, with the bloody rags bound round heads, arms, legs, etc. Theattendants are few, and at night few outsiders also, --only a fewhard-worked transportation men and drivers. (The wounded are getting to becommon, and people grow callous. ) The men, whatever their condition, liethere, and patiently wait till their turn comes to be taken up. Near bythe ambulances are now arriving in clusters, and one after another iscalled to back up and take its load. Extreme cases are sent off onstretchers. The men generally make little or no ado, whatever theirsufferings, --a few groans that cannot be repressed, and occasionally ascream of pain, as they lift a man into the ambulance. 

"To-day, as I write, hundreds more are expected, and to-morrow and thenext day more, and so on for many days. 

"The soldiers are nearly all young men, and far more American than isgenerally supposed, --I should say nine tenths are native-born. Among thearrivals from Chancellorsville I find a large proportion of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois men. As usual, there are all sorts of wounds. Some of the menare fearfully burnt from the explosion of artillery caissons. One ward hasa long row of officers, some with ugly hurts. Yesterday was, perhaps, worse than usual. Amputations are going on, --the attendants are dressingwounds. As you pass by, you must be on your guard where you look. I saw, the other day, a gentleman--a visitor, apparently, from curiosity--in oneof the wards stop and turn a moment to look at an awful wound they wereprobing, etc. He turned pale, and in a moment more he had fainted away andfallen on the floor. "

An episode, --the death of a New York soldier:--

"This afternoon, July 22, 1863, I spent a long time with a young man Ihave been with a good deal from time to time, named Oscar F. Wilber, company G, 154th New York, low with chronic diarrhoea, and a bad woundalso. He asked me to read him a chapter in the New Testament. I complied, and asked him what I should read. He said: 'Make your own choice. ' Iopened at the close of one of the first books of the Evangelists, and readthe chapters describing the latter hours of Christ and the scenes at thecrucifixion. The poor, wasted young man asked me to read the followingchapter also, how Christ rose again. I read very slowly, as Oscar wasfeeble. It pleased him very much, yet the tears were in his eyes. He askedme if I enjoyed religion. I said: 'Perhaps not, my dear, in the way youmean, and yet, maybe, it is the same thing. ' He said: 'It is my chiefreliance. ' He talked of death, and said he did not fear it. I said: 'Why, Oscar, don't you think you will get well?' He said: 'I may, but it is notprobable. ' He spoke calmly of his condition. The wound was very bad; itdischarged much. Then the diarrhoea had prostrated him, and I felt thathe was even then the same as dying. He behaved very manly andaffectionate. The kiss I gave him as I was about leaving he returnedfourfold. He gave me his mother's address, Mrs. Sally D. Wilber, Alleghanypost-office, Cattaraugus County, New York. I had several such interviewswith him. He died a few days after the one just described. "

And here, also, a characteristic scene in another of those longbarracks:--

"It is Sunday afternoon (middle of summer, 1864), hot and oppressive, andvery silent through the ward. I am taking care of a critical case, nowlying in a half lethargy. Near where I sit is a suffering rebel, from the8th Louisiana; his name is Irving. He has been here a long time, badlywounded, and has lately had his leg amputated. It is not doing very well. Right opposite me is a sick soldier boy, laid down with his clothes on, sleeping, looking much wasted, his pallid face on his arm. I see by theyellow trimming on his jacket that he is a cavalry boy. He looks sohandsome as he sleeps, one must needs go nearer to him. I step softly overto him, and find by his card that he is named William Cone, of the 1stMaine Cavalry, and his folks live in Skowhegan. "

In a letter to his mother in 1863 he says, in reference to his hospitalservices: "I have got in the way, after going lightly, as it were, allthrough the wards of a hospital, and trying to give a word of cheer, ifnothing else, to every one, then confining my special attention to the fewwhere the investment seems to tell best, and who want it most. . . . Mother, I have real pride in telling you that I have the consciousness of savingquite a number of lives by keeping the men from giving up, and being agood deal with them. The men say it is so, and the doctors say it is so;and I will candidly confess I can see it is true, though I say it myself. I know you will like to hear it, mother, so I tell you. "

Again he says: "I go among the worst fevers and wounds with impunity; I goamong the smallpox, etc. , just the same. I feel to go withoutapprehension, and so I go: nobody else goes; but, as the darkey said thereat Charleston when the boat ran on a flat and the rebel sharpshooters werepeppering them, '_somebody_ must jump in de water and shove de boat off. '"

In another letter to his mother he thus accounts for his effect upon thewounded soldiers: "I fancy the reason I am able to do some good in thehospitals among the poor, languishing, and wounded boys, is that I am solarge and well, --indeed, like a great wild buffalo with much hair. Many ofthe soldiers are from the West and far North, and they like a man that hasnot the bleached, shiny, and shaved cut of the cities and the East. "

As to Whitman's appearance about this time, we get an inkling from anotherletter to his mother, giving an account of an interview he had withSenator Preston King, to whom Whitman applied for assistance in procuringa clerkship in one of the departments. King said to him, "Why, how can Ido this thing, or anything for you? How do I know but you are asecessionist? You look for all the world like an old Southern planter, --aregular Carolina or Virginia planter. "

The great suffering of the soldiers and their heroic fortitude move himdeeply. He says to his mother: "Nothing of ordinary misfortune seems as itused to, and death itself has lost all its terrors; I have seen so manycases in which it was so welcome and such a relief. " Again: "I go to thehospitals every day or night. I believe no men ever loved each other as Iand some of these poor wounded, sick, and dying men love each other. "

Whitman's services in the hospitals began to tell seriously upon hishealth in June, 1864, when he had "spells of deathly faintness, and hadtrouble in the head. " The doctors told him he must keep away for a while, but he could not. Under date of June 7, 1864, he writes to his mother:--

"There is a very horrible collection in Armory Building (in Armory SquareHospital), --about two hundred of the worst cases you ever saw, and I haveprobably been too much with them. It is enough to melt the heart of astone. Over one third of them are amputation cases. Well, mother, poorOscar Cunningham is gone at last: (he is the 82d Ohio boy, wounded May 3, '63). I have written so much of him I suppose you feel as if you almostknew him. I was with him Saturday forenoon, and also evening. He was morecomposed than usual; could not articulate very well. He died about twoo'clock Sunday morning, very easy, they told me. I was not there. It was ablessed relief. His life has been misery for months. I believe I told you, last letter, I was quite blue from the deaths of several of the poor youngmen I knew well, especially two of whom I had strong hopes of theirgetting up. Things are going pretty badly with the wounded. They arecrowded here in Washington in immense numbers, and all those that came upfrom the Wilderness and that region arrived here so neglected and in suchplight it was awful (those that were at Fredericksburg, and also fromBelle Plain). The papers are full of puffs, etc. , but the truth is thelargest proportion of worst cases get little or no attention. 

"We receive them here with their wounds full of worms, --some all swelledand inflamed. Many of the amputations have to be done over again. One newfeature is, that many of the poor, afflicted young men are crazy; everyward has some in it that are wandering. They have suffered too much, andit is perhaps a privilege that they are out of their senses. Mother, it ismost too much for a fellow, and I sometimes wish I was out of it; but Isuppose it is because I have not felt firstrate myself. "

Of the Ohio soldier above referred to, Whitman had written a few daysbefore: "You remember I told you of him a year ago, when he was firstbrought in. I thought him the noblest specimen of a young Western man Ihad seen. A real giant in size, and always with a smile on his face. Oh, what a change! He has long been very irritable to every one but me, andhis frame is all wasted away. "

To his brother Jeff he wrote: "Of the many I have seen die, or known ofthe past year, I have not seen or known of one who met death with anyterror. Yesterday I spent a good part of the afternoon with a young man ofseventeen named Charles Cutter, of Lawrence City, 1st Massachusetts HeavyArtillery, Battery M. He was brought into one of the hospitals mortallywounded in abdomen. Well, I thought to myself as I sat looking at him, itought to be a relief to his folks, after all, if they could see how littlehe suffered. He lay very placid, in a half lethargy, with his eyes closed;it was very warm, and I sat a long while fanning him and wiping the sweat. At length he opened his eyes quite wide and clear, and looked inquiringlyaround. I said, "What is it, my dear? do you want anything?" He saidquietly, with a good-natured smile, "Oh, nothing; I was only lookingaround to see who was with me. " His mind was somewhat wandering, yet helay so peaceful in his dying condition. He seemed to be a real New Englandcountry boy, so good-natured, with a pleasant, homely way, and quitefine-looking. Without any doubt, he died in course of the night. "

Another extract from a letter to his mother in April, 1864:--

"Mother, you don't know what a feeling a man gets after being in theactive sights and influences of the camp, the army, the wounded, etc. Hegets to have a deep feeling he never experienced before, --the flag, thetune of Yankee Doodle, and similar things, produce an effect on a fellownever felt before. I have seen tears on the men's cheeks, and others turnpale under such circumstances. I have a little flag, --it belonged to oneof our cavalry regiments, --presented to me by one of the wounded. It wastaken by the rebs in a cavalry fight, and rescued by our men in a bloodylittle skirmish. It cost three men's lives just to get one little flagfour by three. Our men rescued it, and tore it from the breast of a deadrebel. All that just for the name of getting their little banner backagain. The man that got it was very badly wounded, and they let him keepit. I was with him a good deal. He wanted to give me something, he said;he did not expect to live; so he gave me the little banner as a keepsake. I mention this, mother, to show you a specimen of the feeling. There isn'ta regiment of cavalry or infantry that wouldn't do the same on occasion. "

[An army surgeon, who at the time watched with curiosity Mr. Whitman'smovements among the soldiers in the hospitals, has since told me that hisprinciples of operation, effective as they were, seemed strangely few, simple, and on a low key, --to act upon the appetite, to cheer by a healthyand fitly bracing appearance and demeanor; and to fill and satisfy incertain cases the affectional longings of the patients, was about all. Hecarried among them no sentimentalism nor moralizing; spoke not to any manof his "sins, " but gave something good to eat, a buoying word, or atrifling gift and a look. He appeared with ruddy face, clean dress, with aflower or a green sprig in the lapel of his coat. Crossing the fields insummer, he would gather a great bunch of dandelion blossoms, and red andwhite clover, to bring and scatter on the cots, as reminders of out-doorair and sunshine. 

When practicable, he came to the long and crowded wards of the maimed, thefeeble, and the dying, only after preparations as for afestival, --strengthened by a good meal, rest, the bath, and freshunderclothes. He entered with a huge haversack slung over his shoulder, full of appropriate articles, with parcels under his arms, and protuberantpockets. He would sometimes come in summer with a good-sized basket filledwith oranges, and would go round for hours paring and dividing them amongthe feverish and thirsty. ]

Of his devotion to the wounded soldiers there are many witnesses. Awell-known correspondent of the "New York Herald" writes thus about him inApril, 1876:--

"I first heard of him among the sufferers on the Peninsula after a battlethere. Subsequently I saw him, time and again, in the Washingtonhospitals, or wending his way there, with basket or haversack on his arm, and the strength of beneficence suffusing his face. His devotion surpassedthe devotion of woman. It would take a volume to tell of his kindness, tenderness, and thoughtfulness. 

"Never shall I forget one night when I accompanied him on his roundsthrough a hospital filled with those wounded young Americans whose heroismhe has sung in deathless numbers. There were three rows of cots, and eachcot bore its man. When he appeared, in passing along, there was a smile ofaffection and welcome on every face, however wan, and his presence seemedto light up the place as it might be lighted by the presence of the God ofLove. From cot to cot they called him, often in tremulous tones or inwhispers; they embraced him; they touched his hand; they gazed at him. Toone he gave a few words of cheer; for another he wrote a letter home; toothers he gave an orange, a few comfits, a cigar, a pipe and tobacco, asheet of paper or a postage-stamp, all of which and many other things werein his capacious haversack. From another he would receive a dying messagefor mother, wife, or sweetheart; for another he would promise to go anerrand; to another, some special friend very low, he would give a manlyfarewell kiss. He did the things for them no nurse or doctor could do, andhe seemed to leave a benediction at every cot as he passed along. Thelights had gleamed for hours in the hospital that night before he left it, and, as he took his way towards the door, you could hear the voices ofmany a stricken hero calling, 'Walt, Walt, Walt! come again! come again!'"

III

Out of that experience in camp and hospital the pieces called "Drum-Taps, "first published in 1865, --since merged in his "Leaves, "--were produced. Their descriptions and pictures, therefore, come from life. The vividincidents of "The Dresser" are but daguerreotypes of the poet's own actualmovements among the bad cases of the wounded after a battle. The samepersonal knowledge runs through "A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray andDim, " "Come up from the Fields, Father, " etc. , etc. 

The reader of this section of Whitman's work soon discovers that it is notthe purpose of the poet to portray battles and campaigns, or to celebratespecial leaders or military prowess, but rather to chant the human aspectsof anguish that follow in the train of war. He perhaps feels that thepermanent condition of modern society is that of peace; that war as abusiness, as a means of growth, has served its time; and that, notwithstanding the vast difference between ancient and modern warfare, both in the spirit and in the means, Homer's pictures are essentially trueyet, and no additions to them can be made. War can never be to us what ithas been to the nations of all ages down to the present; never the mainfact, the paramount condition, tyrannizing over all the affairs ofnational and individual life, but only an episode, a passing interruption;and the poet, who in our day would be as true to his nation and times asHomer was to his, must treat of it from the standpoint of peace andprogress, and even benevolence. Vast armies rise up in a night anddisappear in a day; a million of men, inured to battle and to blood, goback to the avocations of peace without a moment's confusion ordelay, --indicating clearly the tendency that prevails. 

Apostrophizing the genius of America in the supreme hour of victory, hesays:--

 "No poem proud, I, chanting, bring to thee--nor mastery's rapturous verse:-- But a little book containing night's darkness and blood-dripping wounds, And psalms of the dead. "

The collection is also remarkable for the absence of all sectional orpartisan feeling. Under the head of "Reconciliation" are these lines:--

 "Word over all, beautiful as the sky! Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost! That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly, softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world; . . . For my enemy is dead--a man divine as myself is dead; I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin--I draw near; I bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin. "

Perhaps the most noteworthy of Whitman's war poems is the one called "WhenLilacs last in the Door-yard bloomed, " written in commemoration ofPresident Lincoln. 

The main effect of this poem is of strong, solemn, and varied music; andit involves in its construction a principle after which perhaps the greatcomposers most work, --namely, spiritual auricular analogy. At first itwould seem to defy analysis, so rapt is it, and so indirect. No referencewhatever is made to the mere fact of Lincoln's death; the poet does noteven dwell upon its unprovoked atrocity, and only occasionally is the tonethat of lamentation; but, with the intuitions of the grand art, which isthe most complex when it seems most simple, he seizes upon three beautifulfacts of nature, which he weaves into a wreath for the dead President'stomb. The central thought is of death, but around this he curiouslytwines, first, the early-blooming lilacs which the poet may have pluckedthe day the dark shadow came; next the song of the hermit thrush, the mostsweet and solemn of all our songsters, heard at twilight in the duskycedars; and with these the evening star, which, as many may remember, night after night in the early part of that eventful spring, hung low inthe west with unusual and tender brightness. These are the premises whencehe starts his solemn chant. 

The attitude, therefore, is not that of being bowed down and weepinghopeless tears, but of singing a commemorative hymn, in which the voicesof nature join, and fits that exalted condition of the soul which seriousevents and the presence of death induce. There are no words of mereeulogy, no statistics, and no story or narrative; but there are pictures, processions, and a strange mingling of darkness and light, of grief andtriumph: now the voice of the bird, or the drooping lustrous star, or thesombre thought of death; then a recurrence to the open scenery of the landas it lay in the April light, "the summer approaching with richness andthe fields all busy with labor, " presently dashed in upon by a spectralvision of armies with torn and bloody battle-flags, and, again, of thewhite skeletons of young men long afterward strewing the ground. Hence thepiece has little or nothing of the character of the usual productions onsuch occasions. It is dramatic; yet there is no development of plot, buta constant interplay, a turning and returning of images and sentiments. 

The poet breaks a sprig of lilac from the bush in the door-yard, --the darkcloud falls on the land, --the long funeral sets out, --and then theapostrophe:--

 "Coffin that passes through lanes and streets, Through day and night, with the great cloud darkening the land, With the pomp of the inloop'd flags, with the cities draped in black, With the show of the States themselves, as of crape-veiled women, standing, With processions long and winding, and the flambeaus of the night, With the countless torches lit--with the silent sea of faces, and the unbared heads, With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces, With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn; With all the mournful voices of the dirges, pour'd around the coffin, To dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs--Where amid these you journey, With the tolling, tolling bells' perpetual clang; Here! coffin that slowly passes, I give you my sprig of lilac. 

 "(Nor for you, for one alone; Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring; For fresh as the morning--thus would I chant a song for you, O sane and sacred death. 

 "All over bouquets of roses, O death! I cover you over with roses and early lilies; But mostly and now the lilac that blooms the first, Copious, I break, I break the sprigs from the bushes; With loaded arms I come, pouring for you, For you and the coffins all of you, O death. )"

Then the strain goes on:--

 "O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved? And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone? And what shall my perfume be, for the grave of him I love?

 "Sea-winds, blown from east and west, Blown from the eastern sea, and blown from the western sea, till there on the prairies meeting: These, and with these, and the breath of my chant, I perfume the grave of him I love. "

The poem reaches, perhaps, its height in the matchless invocation toDeath:--

 "Come, lovely and soothing Death, Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving, In the day, in the night, to all, to each, Sooner or later, delicate Death. 

 "Prais'd be the fathomless universe, For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious; And for love, sweet love--but praise! O praise and praise, For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding Death. 

 "Dark Mother, always gliding near, with soft feet, Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome? Then I chant it for thee--I glorify thee above all; I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly. 

 "Approach, encompassing Death--strong Deliveress! When it is so--when thou hast taken them, I joyously sing the dead, Lost in the loving, floating ocean of thee, Laved in the flood of thy bliss, O Death. 

 "From me to thee glad serenades, 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. The night, in silence, under many a star; The ocean shore, and the husky whispering wave, whose voice I know; And the soul turning to thee, O vast and well-veil'd Death, And the body gratefully nestling close to thee. "

IV

Whitman despised riches, and all mere worldly success, as heartily as everdid any of the old Christians. All outward show and finery were intenselydistasteful to him. He probably would not have accepted the finest housein New York on condition that he live in it. During his hospitalexperiences he cherished the purpose, as soon as the war was over, ofreturning to Brooklyn, buying an acre or two of land in some by-place onLong Island, and building for himself and his family a cheap house. Whenhis brother Jeff contemplated building, he advised him to build merely anIrish shanty. After what he had seen the soldiers put up with, he thoughtanything was good enough for him or his people. In one of his letters tohis mother, he comments upon the un-American and inappropriateornamentation of the rooms in the Capitol building, "without grandeur andwithout simplicity, " he says. In the state the country was in, and withthe hospital scenes before him, the "poppy-show goddesses" and the Italianstyle of decoration, etc. , sickened him, and he got away from it all asquickly as he could. 

V

During the war and after, I used to see a good deal of Whitman inWashington. Summer and winter he was a conspicuous figure on PennsylvaniaAvenue, where he was wont to walk for exercise and to feed his hunger forfaces. One would see him afar off, in the crowd but not of it, --a large, slow-moving figure, clad in gray, with broad-brimmed hat and graybeard, --or, quite as frequently, on the front platform of the streethorse-cars with the driver. My eye used to single him out many blocksaway. 

There were times during this period when his aspect was ratherforbidding, --the physical man was too pronounced on first glance; theother man was hidden beneath the broad-brimmed hat. One needed to see thesuperbly domed head and classic brow crowning the rank physical man. 

In his middle manhood, judging from the photos, he had a hirsute, kindlylook, but very far removed from the finely cut traditional poet's face. 

VI

I have often heard Whitman say that he inherited most excellent blood fromhis mother, --the old Dutch Van Velser strain, --Long Island blood filteredand vitalized through generations by the breath of the sea. He was hismother's child unmistakably. With all his rank masculinity, there was acurious feminine undertone in him which revealed itself in the quality ofhis voice, the delicate texture of his skin, the gentleness of his touchand ways, the attraction he had for children and the common people. A ladyin the West, writing to me about him, spoke of his "great mother-nature. "He was receptive, sympathetic, tender, and met you, not in a positive, aggressive manner, but more or less in a passive or neutral mood. He didnot give his friends merely his mind, he gave them himself. It is notmerely his mind or intellect that he has put into his poems, it ishimself. Indeed, this feminine mood or attitude might be dwelt upon atmuch length in considering his poems, --their solvent, absorbing power, andthe way they yield themselves to diverse interpretations. 

The sea, too, had laid its hand upon him, as I have already suggested. Henever appeared so striking and impressive as when seen upon the beach. Hislarge and tall gray figure looked at home, and was at home, upon theshore. The simple, strong, flowing lines of his face, his always cleanfresh air, his blue absorbing eye, his commanding presence, and somethingpristine and elemental in his whole expression, seemed at once to put him_en rapport_ with the sea. No phase of nature seems to have impressed himso deeply as the sea, or recurs so often in his poems. 

VII

Whitman was preëminently manly, --richly endowed with the universal, healthy human qualities and attributes. Mr. Conway relates that whenEmerson handed him the first thin quarto edition of "Leaves of Grass, "while he was calling at his house in Concord, soon after the bookappeared, he said, "Americans abroad may now come home: unto us a man isborn. "

President Lincoln, standing one day during the war before a window in theWhite House, saw Whitman slowly saunter by. He followed him with hiseyes, and, turning, said to those about him, "Well, _he_ looks like a_man_. "

 "Meeter of savage and gentleman on equal terms. "

During Whitman's Western tour in 1879 or '80, at some point in Kansas, incompany with several well-known politicians and government officials, hevisited a lot of Indians who were being held as prisoners. The sherifftold the Indians who the distinguished men were who were about to seethem, but the Indians paid little attention to them as, one after theother, the officials and editors passed by them. Behind all came Whitman. The old chief looked at him steadily, then extended his hand and said, "How!" All the other Indians followed, surrounding Whitman, shaking hishand and making the air melodious with their "Hows. " The incidentevidently pleased the old poet a good deal. 

VIII

Whitman was of large mould in every way, and of bold, far-reachingschemes, and is very sure to fare better at the hands of large men than ofsmall. The first and last impression which his personal presence alwaysmade upon one was of a nature wonderfully gentle, tender, and benignant. His culture, his intellect, was completely suffused and dominated by hishumanity, so that the impression you got from him was not that of alearned or a literary person, but of fresh, strong, sympathetic humannature, --such an impression, I fancy, only fuller, as one might have gotfrom Walter Scott. This was perhaps the secret of the attraction he had, for the common, unlettered people and for children. I think that even hisliterary friends often sought his presence less for conversation than tobask in his physical or psychical sunshine, and to rest upon his boundlesscharity. The great service he rendered to the wounded and homesicksoldiers in the hospitals during the war came from his copious endowmentof this broad, sweet, tender democratic nature. He brought father andmother to them, and the tonic and cheering atmosphere of simple, affectionate home life. 

In person Whitman was large and tall, above six feet, with a breezy, open-air look. His temperament was sanguine; his voice was a tenderbaritone. The dominant impression he made was that of something fresh andclean. I remember the first time I met him, which was in Washington, inthe fall of 1863. I was impressed by the fine grain and clean, freshquality of the man. Some passages in his poems had led me to expectsomething different. He always had the look of a man who had just taken abath. The skin was light and clear, and the blood well to the surface. Hisbody, as I once noticed when we were bathing in the surf, had a peculiarfresh bloom and fineness and delicacy of texture. His physiology wasundoubtedly remarkable, unique. The full beauty of his face and head didnot appear till he was past sixty. After that, I have little doubt, it wasthe finest head this age or country has seen. Every artist who saw himwas instantly filled with a keen desire to sketch him. The lines were sosimple, so free, and so strong. High, arching brows; straight, clear-cutnose; heavy-lidded blue-gray eyes; forehead not thrust out and emphasized, but a vital part of a symmetrical, dome-shaped head; ear large, and themost delicately carved I have ever seen; the mouth and chin hidden by asoft, long, white beard. It seems to me his face steadily refined andstrengthened with age. Time depleted him in just the right way, --softenedhis beard and took away the too florid look; subdued the carnal man, andbrought out more fully the spiritual man. When I last saw him (December26, 1891), though he had been very near death for many days, I am sure Ihad never seen his face so beautiful. There was no breaking-down of thefeatures, or the least sign of decrepitude, such as we usually note in oldmen. The expression was full of pathos, but it was as grand as that of agod. I could not think of him as near death, he looked so unconquered. 

In Washington I knew Whitman intimately from the fall of 1863 to the timehe left in 1873. In Camden I visited him yearly after that date, usuallyin the late summer or fall. I will give one glimpse of him from my diary, under date of August 18, 1887. I reached his house in the morning, beforehe was up. Presently he came slowly down stairs and greeted me. "Find himpretty well, --looking better than last year. With his light-gray suit, and white hair, and fresh pink face, he made a fine picture. Among otherthings, we talked of the Swinburne attack (then recently published). W. Did not show the least feeling on the subject, and, I clearly saw, wasabsolutely undisturbed by the article. I told him I had always been moredisturbed by S. 's admiration for him than I was now by his condemnation. By and by W. Had his horse hitched up, and we started for Glendale, tenmiles distant, to see young Gilchrist, the artist. A fine drive through alevel farming and truck-gardening country; warm, but breezy. W. Drivesbriskly, and salutes every person we meet, little and big, black andwhite, male and female. Nearly all return his salute cordially. He said heknew but few of those he spoke to, but that, as he grew older, the oldLong Island custom of his people, to speak to every one on the road, wasstrong upon him. One tipsy man in a buggy responded, 'Why, pap, how d' yedo, pap?' etc. We talked of many things. I recall this remark of W. , assomething I had not before thought of, that it was difficult to see whatthe old feudal world would have come to without Christianity: it wouldhave been like a body acted upon by the centrifugal force without thecentripetal. Those haughty lords and chieftains needed the force ofChristianity to check and curb them, etc. W. Knew the history of manyprominent houses on the road: here a crazy man lived, with two colored mento look after him; there, in that fine house among the trees, an oldmaid, who had spent a large fortune on her house and lands, and was nowdestitute, yet she was a woman of remarkable good sense, etc. We returnedto Camden before dark, W. Apparently not fatigued by the drive of twentymiles. "

In death what struck me most about the face was its perfect symmetry. Itwas such a face, said Mr. Conway, as Rembrandt would have selected from amillion. "It is the face of an aged loving child. As I looked, it was withthe reflection that, during an acquaintance of thirty-six years, I neverheard from those lips a word of irritation, or depreciation of any being. I do not believe that Buddha, of whom he appeared an avatar, was moregentle to all men, women, children, and living things. "

IX

For one of the best pen-sketches of Whitman in his old age we are indebtedto Dr. J. Johnston, a young Scotch physician of Bolton, England, whovisited Whitman in the summer of 1890. I quote from a little pamphletwhich the doctor printed on his return home:--

"The first thing about himself that struck me was the physical immensityand magnificent proportions of the man, and, next, the picturesque majestyof his presence as a whole. 

"He sat quite erect in a great cane-runged chair, cross-legged, and cladin rough gray clothes, with slippers on his feet, and a shirt of purewhite linen, with a great wide collar edged with white lace, the shirtbuttoned about midway down his breast, the big lapels of the collar thrownopen, the points touching his shoulders, and exposing the upper portion ofhis hirsute chest. He wore a vest of gray homespun, but it was unbuttonedalmost to the bottom. He had no coat on, and his shirt sleeves were turnedup above the elbows, exposing most beautifully shaped arms, and flesh ofthe most delicate whiteness. Although it was so hot, he did not perspirevisibly, while I had to keep mopping my face. His hands are large andmassive, but in perfect proportion to the arms; the fingers long, strong, white, and tapering to a blunt end. His nails are square, showing about aneighth of an inch separate from the flesh, and I noticed that there wasnot a particle of impurity beneath any of them. But his majesty isconcentrated in his head, which is set with leonine grace and dignity uponhis broad, square shoulders; and it is almost entirely covered with long, fine, straggling hair, silvery and glistening, pure and white as sunlitsnow, rather thin on the top of his high, rounded crown, streaming overand around his large but delicately-shaped ears, down the back of his bigneck; and, from his pinky-white cheeks and top lip, over the lower part ofhis face, right down to the middle of his chest, like a cataract ofmaterialized, white, glistening vapor, giving him a most venerable andpatriarchal appearance. His high, massive forehead is seamed withwrinkles. His nose is large, strong, broad, and prominent, butbeautifully chiseled and proportioned, almost straight, very slightlydepressed at the tip, and with deep furrows on each side, running down tothe 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, kindness, and sympathy. The upper eyelids droop considerably over theeyeballs. The lips, which are partly hidden by the thick, white mustache, are full. The whole face impresses one with a sense of resoluteness, strength, and intellectual power, and yet withal a winning sweetness, unconquerable radiance, and hopeful joyousness. His voice is highlypitched and musical, with a timbre which is astonishing in an old man. There is none of the tremor, quaver, or shrillness usually observed inthem, but his utterance is clear, ringing, and most sweetly musical. Butit was not in any one of these features that his charm lay so much as inhis _tout ensemble_, and the irresistible magnetism of his sweet, aromaticpresence, which seemed to exhale sanity, purity, and naturalness, andexercised over me an attraction which positively astonished me, producingan exaltation of mind and soul which no man's presence ever did before. Ifelt that I was here face to face with the living embodiment of all thatwas good, noble, and lovable in humanity. "

X

British critics have spoken of Whitman's athleticism, his athletictemperament, etc. , but he was in no sense a muscular man, an athlete. Hisbody, though superb, was curiously the body of a child; one saw this inits form, in its pink color, and in the delicate texture of the skin. Hetook little interest in feats of strength, or in athletic sports. Hewalked with a slow, rolling gait, indeed, moved slowly in all ways; healways had an air of infinite leisure. For several years, while a clerk inthe Attorney-General's Office in Washington, his exercise for an hour eachday consisted in tossing a few feet into the air, as he walked, a round, smooth stone, of about one pound weight, and catching it as it fell. Laterin life, and after his first paralytic stroke, when in the woods, he likedto bend down the young saplings, and exercise his arms and chest in thatway. In his poems much emphasis is laid upon health, and upon purity andsweetness of body, but none upon mere brute strength. This is what he says"To a Pupil:"--

 1. Is reform needed? Is it through you? The greater the reform needed, the greater the PERSONALITY you need to accomplish it. 

 2. You! do you not see how it would serve to have eyes, blood, complexion, clean and sweet? Do you not see how it would serve to have such a body and Soul, that when you enter the crowd, an atmosphere of desire and command enters with you, and every one is impressed with your personality?

 3. O the magnet! the flesh over and over! Go, mon cher! if need be, give up all else, and commence to-day to inure yourself to pluck, reality, self-esteem, definiteness, elevatedness, Rest not, till you rivet and publish yourself of your own personality. 

It is worthy of note that Whitman's Washington physician said he had oneof the most thoroughly natural physical systems he had ever known, --thefreest, probably, from extremes or any disproportion; which answers to theperfect sanity which all his friends must have felt with regard to hismind. 

A few years ago a young English artist stopping in this country madeseveral studies of him. In one of them which he showed me, he had left theface blank, but had drawn the figure from the head down with much care. Itwas so expressive, so unmistakably Whitman, conveyed so surely a certainmajesty and impressiveness that pertained to the poet physically, that Ilooked upon it with no ordinary interest. Every wrinkle in the garmentsseemed to proclaim the man. Probably a similar painting of any of one'sfriends would be more or less a recognizable portrait, but I doubt if itwould speak so emphatically as did this incomplete sketch. I thought itall the more significant in this case because Whitman laid such stressupon the human body in his poems, built so extensively upon it, curiouslyidentifying it with the soul, and declaring his belief that if he made thepoems of his body and of mortality he would thus supply himself with thepoems of the soul and of immortality. "Behold, " he says, "the bodyincludes and is the meaning, the main concern, and includes and is thesoul; whoever you are, how superb and how divine is your body, or any partof it!" He runs this physiological thread all through his book, andstrings upon it many valuable lessons and many noble sentiments. Those whoknew him well, I think, will agree with me that his bodily presence wassingularly magnetic, restful, and positive, and that it furnished acurious and suggestive commentary upon much there is in his poetry. 

The Greeks, who made so much more of the human body than we do, seem notto have carried so much meaning, so much history, in their faces as doesthe modern man; the soul was not concentrated here, but was more evenlydistributed over the whole body. Their faces expressed repose, harmony, power of command. I think Whitman was like the Greeks in this respect. Hisface had none of the eagerness, sharpness, nervousness, of the modernface. It had but few lines, and these were Greek. From the mouth up, theface was expressive of Greek purity, simplicity, strength, and repose. Themouth was large and loose, and expressive of another side of his nature. It was a mouth that required the check and curb of that classic brow. 

And the influence of his poems is always on the side of physiologicalcleanliness and strength, and severance from all that corrupts and makesmorbid and mean. He says the "expression of a well-made man appears notonly in his face: it is in his limbs and joints also; it is curiously inthe joints of his hips and wrists; it is in his walk, the carriage of hisneck, the flex of his waist and knees; dress does not hide him; thestrong, sweet, supple quality he has strikes through the cotton andflannel; to see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more. You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side. "He says he has perceived that to be with those he likes is enough: "To besurrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough, --Ido not ask any more delight; I swim in it, as in a sea. There is somethingin staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contactand odor of them, that pleases the soul well. All things please the soul, but these please the soul well. " Emerson once asked Whitman what it was hefound in the society of the common people that satisfied him so; for hispart, he could not find anything. The subordination by Whitman of thepurely intellectual to the human and physical, which runs all through hispoems and is one source of their power, Emerson, who was deficient in thesensuous, probably could not appreciate. 

XI

The atmosphere of Whitman personally was that of a large, tolerant, tender, sympathetic, restful man, easy of approach, indifferent to anyspecial social or other distinctions and accomplishments that might beyours, and regarding you from the start for yourself alone. 

Children were very fond of him; and women, unless they had been prejudicedagainst him, were strongly drawn toward him. His personal magnetism wasvery great, and was warming and cheering. He was rich in temperament, probably beyond any other man of his generation, --rich in all the purelyhuman and emotional endowments and basic qualities. Then there was a lookabout him hard to describe, and which I have seen in no other face, --agray, brooding, elemental look, like the granite rock, something primitiveand Adamic that might have belonged to the first man; or was it asuggestion of the gray, eternal sea that he so loved, near which he wasborn, and that had surely set its seal upon him? I know not, but I feelthe man with that look is not of the day merely, but of the centuries. Hiseye was not piercing, but absorbing, --"draining" is the word happily usedby William O'Connor; the soul back of it drew things to himself, andentered and possessed them through sympathy and personal force andmagnetism, rather than through mere intellectual force. 

XII

Walt Whitman was of the people, the common people, and always gave outtheir quality and atmosphere. His commonness, his nearness, as of thethings you have always known, --the day, the sky, the soil, your ownparents, --were in no way veiled, or kept in abeyance, by his culture orpoetic gifts. He was redolent of the human and the familiar. Thoughcapable, on occasions, of great pride and hauteur, yet his habitual moodand presence was that of simple, average, healthful humanity, --the virtueand flavor of sailors, soldiers, laborers, travelers, or people who livewith real things in the open air. His commonness rose into the uncommon, the extraordinary, but without any hint of the exclusive or speciallyfavored. He was indeed "no sentimentalist, no stander above men and womenor apart from them. "

The spirit that animates every page of his book, and that it alwayseffuses, is the spirit of common, universal humanity, --humanity apart fromcreeds, schools, conventions, from all special privileges and refinements, as it is in and of itself in its relations to the whole system of things, in contradistinction to the literature of culture which effuses the spiritof the select and exclusive. 

His life was the same. Walt Whitman never stood apart from or above anyhuman being. The common people--workingmen, the poor, the illiterate, theoutcast--saw themselves in him, and he saw himself in them: the attractionwas mutual. He was always content with common, unadorned humanity. Specially intellectual people rather repelled him; the wit, the scholar, the poet, must have a rich endowment of the common, universal, humanattributes and qualities to pass current with him. He sought the societyof boatmen, railroad men, farmers, mechanics, printers, teamsters, mothersof families, etc. , rather than the society of professional men orscholars. Men who had the quality of things in the open air--the virtue ofrocks, trees, hills--drew him most; and it is these qualities and virtuesthat he has aimed above all others to put into his poetry, and to put themthere in such a way that he who reads must feel and imbibe them. 

The recognized poets put into their pages the virtue and quality of thefine gentleman, or of the sensitive, artistic nature: this poet ofdemocracy effuses the atmosphere of fresh, strong Adamic man, --man actedupon at first hand by the shows and forces of universal nature. 

If our poet ever sounds the note of the crude, the loud, the exaggerated, he is false to himself and to his high aims. I think he may be chargedwith having done so a few times, in his earlier work, but not in hislater. In the 1860 edition of his poems stands this portraiture, which maystand for himself, with one or two features rather overdrawn:--

 "His shape arises Arrogant, masculine, naïve, rowdyish, Laugher, weeper, worker, idler, citizen, countryman, Saunterer of woods, stander upon hills, summer swimmer in rivers or by the sea, Of pure American breed, of reckless health, his body perfect, free from taint from top to toe, free forever from headache and dyspepsia, clean-breathed, Ample-limbed, a good feeder, weight a hundred and eighty pounds, full-blooded, six feet high, forty inches round the breast and back, Countenance sunburnt, bearded, calm, unrefined, Reminder of animals, meeter of savage and gentleman on equal terms, Attitudes lithe and erect, costume free, neck gray and open, of slow movement on foot, Passer of his right arm round the shoulders of his friends, companion of the street, Persuader always of people to give him their sweetest touches, and never their meanest. A Manhattanese bred, fond of Brooklyn, fond of Broadway, fond of the life of the wharves and the great ferries, Enterer everywhere, welcomed everywhere, easily understood after all, Never offering others, always offering himself, corroborating his phrenology, Voluptuous, inhabitive, combative, conscientious, alimentive, intuitive, of copious friendship, sublimity, firmness, self-esteem, comparison, individuality, form, locality, eventuality, Avowing by life, manners, words to contribute illustrations of results of These States, Teacher of the unquenchable creed namely egotism, Inviter of others continually henceforth to try their strength against his. "

XIII

Whitman was determined, at whatever risk to his own reputation, to makethe character which he has exploited in his poems a faithful compend ofAmerican humanity, and to do this the rowdy element could not be entirelyignored. Hence he unflinchingly imputes it to himself, as, for thatmatter, he has nearly every sin and dereliction mankind are guilty of. 

Whitman developed slowly and late upon the side that related him to socialcustom and usage, --to the many fictions, concealments, make-believes, andsubterfuges of the world of parlors and drawing-rooms. He never was anadept in what is called "good form;" the natural man that he was showscrude in certain relations. His publication of Emerson's letter with itsmagnificent eulogium of "Leaves of Grass" has been much commented upon. There may be two opinions as to the propriety of his course in thisrespect: a letter from a stranger upon a matter of public interest is notusually looked upon as a private letter. Emerson never spoke with morefelicity and penetration than he does in this letter; but it is forWhitman's own sake that we would have had him practice self-denial in thematter; he greatly plumed himself upon Emerson's endorsement, and wasguilty of the very bad taste of printing a sentence from the letter uponthe cover of the next edition of his book. Grant that it showed a certaincrudeness, unripeness, in one side of the man; later in life, he could nothave erred in this way. Ruskin is reported saying that he never in hislife wrote a letter to any human being that he would not be willing shouldbe posted up in the market-place, or cried by the public crier through thetown. But Emerson was a much more timid and conforming man than Ruskin, and was much more likely to be shocked by such a circumstance. 

It has been said that the publication of this letter much annoyed Emerson, and that he never forgave Whitman the offense. That he was disturbed by itand by the storm that arose there can be little doubt; but there is noevidence that he allowed the fact to interfere with his friendship for thepoet. Charles W. Eldridge, who personally knew of the relations of the twomen, says:--

"There was not a year from 1855 (the date of the Emerson letter and itspublication) down to 1860 (the year Walt came to Boston to supervise theissue of the Thayer & Eldridge edition of 'Leaves of Grass'), that Emersondid not personally seek out Walt at his Brooklyn home, usually that theymight have a long symposium together at the Astor House in New York. Besides that, during these years Emerson sent many of his closest friends, including Alcott and Thoreau, to see Walt, giving them letters ofintroduction to him. This is not the treatment usually accorded a man whohas committed an unpardonable offense. 

"I know that afterwards, during Walt's stay in Boston, Emerson frequentlycame down from Concord to see him, and that they had many walks and talkstogether, these conferences usually ending with a dinner at the AmericanHouse, at that time Emerson's favorite Boston hotel. On several occasionsthey met by appointment in our counting-room. Their relations were ascordial and friendly as possible, and it was always Emerson who sought outWalt, and never the other way, although, of course, Walt appreciated andenjoyed Emerson's companionship very much. In truth, Walt never sought thecompany of notables at all, and was always very shy of purely literarysociety. I know that at this time Walt was invited by Emerson to Concord, but declined to go, probably through his fear that he would see too muchof the literary coterie that then clustered there, chiefly aroundEmerson. "

XIV

Whitman gave himself to men as men and not as scholars or poets, and gavehimself purely as a man. While not specially averse to meeting people onliterary or intellectual grounds, yet it was more to his taste to meet onthe broadest, commonest, human grounds. What you had seen or felt orsuffered or done was of much more interest to him than what you had reador thought; your speculation about the soul interested him less than thelast person you had met, or the last chore you had done. 

Any glimpse of the farm, the shop, the household--any bit of real life, anything that carried the flavor and quality of concrete reality--was verywelcome to him; herein, no doubt, showing the healthy, objective, artistmind. He never tired of hearing me talk about the birds or wild animals, or my experiences in camp in the woods, the kind of characters I had metthere, and the flavor of the life of remote settlements in Maine orCanada. His inward, subjective life was ample of itself; he was familiarwith all your thoughts and speculations beforehand: what he craved waswider experience, --to see what you had seen, and feel what you had felt. He was fond of talking with returned travelers and explorers, and withsailors, soldiers, mechanics; much of his vast stores of information uponall manner of subjects was acquired at firsthand, in the old way, from thepersons who had seen or done or been what they described or related. 

He had almost a passion for simple, unlettered humanity, --an attractionwhich specially intellectual persons will hardly understand. Schooling andculture are so often purchased at such an expense to the innate, fundamental human qualities! Ignorance, with sound instincts and thequality which converse with real things imparts to men, was moreacceptable to him than so much of our sophisticated knowledge, or ourstudied wit, or our artificial poetry. 

XV

At the time of Whitman's death, one of our leading literary journalscharged him with having brought on premature decay by leading a riotousand debauched life. I hardly need say that there was no truth in thecharge. The tremendous emotional strain of writing his "Leaves, " followedby his years of service in the army hospitals, where he contractedblood-poison, resulted at the age of fifty-four in the rupture of a smallblood-vessel in the brain, which brought on partial paralysis. A sunstrokeduring his earlier manhood also played its part in the final break-down. 

That, tried by the standard of the lives of our New England poets, Whitman's life was a blameless one, I do not assert; but that it was asane, temperate, manly one, free from excesses, free from the perversionsand morbidities of a mammonish, pampered, over-stimulated age, I dobelieve. Indeed, I may say I know. The one impression he never failed tomake--physically, morally, intellectually--on young and old, women andmen, was that of health, sanity, sweetness. This is the impression heseems to have made upon Mr. Howells, when he met the poet at Pfaff's earlyin the sixties. 

The critic I have alluded to inferred license in the man from liberty inthe poet. He did not have the gumption to see that Whitman made theexperience of all men his own, and that his scheme included the evil aswell as the good; that especially did he exploit the unloosed, all-loving, all-accepting natural man, --the man who is done with conventions, illusions and all morbid pietisms, and who gives himself lavishly to allthat begets and sustains life. Yet not the natural or carnal man for hisown sake, but for the sake of the spiritual meanings and values to whichhe is the key. Indeed, Whitman is about the most uncompromisingspiritualist in literature; with him, all things exist by and for thesoul. He felt the tie of universal brotherhood, also, as few have felt it. It was not a theory with him, but a fact that shaped his life and coloredhis poems. "Whoever degrades another degrades me, " and the thought firedhis imagination. 

XVI

The student of Whitman's life and works will be early struck by threethings, --his sudden burst into song, the maturity of his work from thefirst, and his self-knowledge and self-estimate. The fit of inspirationcame upon him suddenly; it was like the flowering of the orchards inspring; there was little or no hint of it till almost the very hour ofthe event. Up to the time of the appearance of the first edition of"Leaves of Grass, " he had produced nothing above mediocrity. A hack writeron newspapers and magazines, then a carpenter and house-builder in a smallway, then that astounding revelation "Leaves of Grass, " the very audacityof it a gospel in itself. How dare he do it? how could he do it, and notbetray hesitation or self-consciousness? It is one of the exceptionalevents in literary history. The main body of his work was produced in fiveor six years, or between 1854 and 1859. Of course it was a suddenflowering, which, consciously or unconsciously, must have been longpreparing in his mind. His work must have had a long foreground, asEmerson suggested. Dr. Bucke, his biographer, thinks it was a specialinspiration, --something analogous to Paul's conversion, a sudden openingof what the doctor calls "cosmic consciousness. "

Another student and lover of Whitman says: "It is certain that some timeabout his thirty-fifth year [probably a little earlier] there came overhim a decided change: he seemed immensely to broaden and deepen; he becameless interested in what are usually regarded as the more practical affairsof life. He lost what little ambition he ever had for money-making, andpermitted good business opportunities to pass unheeded. He ceased to writethe somewhat interesting but altogether commonplace and respectablestories and verses which he had been in the habit of contributing toperiodicals. He would take long trips into the country, no one knew where, and would spend more time in his favorite haunts about the city, or on theferries, or the tops of omnibuses, at the theatre and opera, in picturegalleries, and wherever he could observe men and women and art andnature. "

Then the maturity of his work from the first line of it! It seems as if hecame into the full possession of himself and of his material at onebound, --never had to grope for his way and experiment, as most men do. What apprenticeship he served, or with whom he served it, we get no hint. He has come to his own, and is in easy, joyful possession of it, when hefirst comes into view. He outlines his scheme in his first poem, "Startingfrom Paumanok, " and he has kept the letter and the spirit of every promisetherein made. We never see him doubtful or hesitating; we never see himbattling for his territory, and uncertain whether or not he is upon hisown ground. He has an air of contentment, of mastery and triumph, from thestart. 

His extraordinary self-estimate and self-awareness are equally noticeable. We should probably have to go back to sacred history to find a parallelcase. The manner of man he was, his composite character, his relation tohis country and times, his unlikeness to other poets, his affinity to thecommon people, how he would puzzle and elude his critics, how his wordswould itch at our ears till we understood them, etc. , --how did he know allthis from the first?

HIS RULING IDEAS AND AIMS

I

Let me here summarize some of the ideas and principles in which "Leaves ofGrass" has its root, and from which it starts. A collection of poems inthe usual sense, a variety of themes artistically treated and appealing toour æsthetic perceptibilities alone, it is not. It has, strictly speaking, but one theme, --personality, the personality of the poet himself. Toexploit this is always the main purpose, and, in doing so, to make thebook both directly and indirectly a large, impassioned utterance upon allthe main problems of life and of nationality. It is primitive, like theearly literature of a race or people, in that its spirit and purpose areessentially religious. It is like the primitive literatures also in itsprophetic cry and in its bardic simplicity and homeliness, and unlike themin its faith and joy and its unconquerable optimism. 

It has been not inaptly called the bible of democracy. Its biblicalfeatures are obvious enough with the darker negative traits left out. Itis Israel with science and the modern added. 

Whitman was swayed by a few great passions, --the passion for country, thepassion for comrades, the cosmic passion, etc. His first concern seemsalways to have been for his country. He has touched no theme, named noman, not related in some way to America. The thought of it possessed himas thoroughly as the thought of Israel possessed the old Hebrew prophets. Indeed, it is the same passion, and flames up with the same vitality andpower, --the same passion for race and nativity enlightened by science andsuffused with the modern humanitarian spirit. Israel was exclusive andcruel. Democracy, as exemplified in Walt Whitman, is compassionate andall-inclusive:--

 "My spirit has passed in compassion and determination around the whole earth, I have looked for equals and lovers, and found them ready for me in all lands; I think some divine rapport has equalized me with them. 

 "O vapors! I think I have risen with you, and moved away to distant continents, and fallen down there, for reasons, I think I have blown with you, O winds, O waters, I have fingered every shore with you. "

II

The work springs from the modern democratic conception of society, --ofabsolute social equality. 

It embodies the modern scientific conception of the universe, asdistinguished from the old theological conception, --namely, that creationis good and sound in all its parts. 

It embodies a conception of evil as a part of the good, of death as thefriend and not the enemy of life. 

It places comradeship, manly attachment, above sex love, and indicates itas the cement of future states and republics. 

It makes the woman the equal of the man, his mate and not his toy. 

It treats sexuality as a matter too vital and important to be ignored ortrifled with, much less perverted or denied. A full and normalsexuality, --upon this the race stands. We pervert, we deny, we corrupt sexat our peril. Its perversions and abnormalities are to be remedied by afrank and fervent recognition of it, almost a new Priapic cult. 

It springs from a conception of poetry quite different from the currentconception. It aims at the poetry of things rather than of words, andworks by suggestion and indirection rather than by elaboration. 

It aims to project into literature a conception of the new democraticman, --a type larger, more copious, more candid, more religious, than wehave been used to. It finds its ideals, not among scholars or in theparlor or counting-houses, but among workers, doers, farmers, mechanics, the heroes of land and sea. 

Hence the atmosphere which it breathes and effuses is that of real things, real men and women. It has not the perfume of the distilled andconcentrated, but the all but impalpable odor of the open air, the shore, the wood, the hilltop. It aims, not to be a book, but to be a man. 

Its purpose is to stimulate and arouse, rather than to soothe and satisfy. It addresses the character, the intuitions, the ego, more than theintellect or the purely æsthetic faculties. Its end is not taste, butgrowth in the manly virtues and powers. 

Its religion shows no trace of theology, or the conventional pietism. 

It aspires to a candor and a directness like that of Nature herself. 

It aims to let Nature speak without check, with original energy. The onlychecks are those which health and wholeness demand. 

Its standards are those of the natural universal. 

Its method is egocentric. The poet never goes out of himself, but drawseverything into himself and makes it all serve to illustrate hispersonality. 

Its form is not what is called artistic. Its suggestion is to be found inorganic nature, in trees, clouds, and in the vital and flowing currents. 

In its composition the author was doubtless greatly influenced by theopera and the great singers, and the music of the great composers. Hewould let himself go in the same manner and seek his effects throughmultitude and the quality of the living voice. 

Finally, "Leaves of Grass" is an utterance out of the depths ofprimordial, aboriginal human nature. It embodies and exploits a characternot rendered anæmic by civilization, but preserving a sweet and sanesavagery, indebted to culture only as a means to escape culture, reachingback always, through books, art, civilization, to fresh, unsophisticatednature, and drawing his strength thence. 

Another of the ideas that master Whitman and rule him is the idea ofidentity, --that you are you and I am I, and that we are henceforth securewhatever comes or goes. He revels in this idea; it is fruitful with him;it begets in him the ego-enthusiasm, and is at the bottom of hisunshakable faith in immortality. It leavens all his work. It cannot be toooften said that the book is not merely a collection of pretty poems, themes elaborated and followed out at long removes from the personality ofthe poet, but a series of _sorties_ into the world of materials, theAmerican world, piercing through the ostensible shows of things to theinterior meanings, and illustrating in a free and large way the genesisand growth of a man, his free use of the world about him, appropriating itto himself, seeking his spiritual identity through its various objects andexperiences, and giving in many direct and indirect ways the meaning andsatisfaction of life. There is much in it that is not poetical in thepopular sense, much that is neutral and negative, and yet is an integralpart of the whole, as is the case in the world we inhabit. If it offends, it is in a wholesome way, like objects in the open air. 

III

Whitman rarely celebrates exceptional characters. He loves the commonhumanity, and finds his ideals among the masses. It is not difficult toreconcile his attraction toward the average man, towards workingmen and"powerful, uneducated persons, " with the ideal of a high excellence, because he finally rests only upon the most elevated and heroic personalqualities, --elevated but well grounded in the common and universal. 

The types upon which he dwells the most fondly are of the common people. 

 "I knew a man, He was a common farmer--he was the father of five sons, And in them were the fathers of sons--and in them were the fathers of sons. 

 "This man was of wonderful vigor, calmness, beauty of person, The shape of his head, the richness and breadth of his manners, the pale yellow and white of his hair and beard, and the immeasurable meaning of his black eyes, These I used to go and visit him to see--he was wise also, He was six feet tall, he was over eighty years old--his sons were massive, clean, bearded, tan-faced, handsome, They and his daughters loved him--all who saw him loved him, They did not love him by allowance--they loved him with personal love; He drank water only--the blood showed like scarlet through the clear-brown skin of his face, He was a frequent gunner and fisher--he sailed his boat himself--he had a fine one presented to him by a ship-joiner--he had fowling-pieces presented to him by men that loved him; When he went with his five sons and many grandsons to hunt or fish, you would pick him out as the most beautiful and vigorous of the gang, You would wish long and long to be with him--you would wish to sit by him in the boat, that you and he might touch each other. "

All the _motifs_ of his work are the near, the vital, the universal;nothing curious, or subtle, or far-fetched. His working ideas aredemocracy, equality, personality, nativity, health, sexuality, comradeship, self-esteem, the purity of the body, the equality of thesexes, etc. Out of them his work radiates. They are the eyes with which itsees, the ears with which it hears, the feet upon which it goes. The poemsare less like a statement, an argument, an elucidation, and more like alook, a gesture, a tone of voice. 

"The word I myself put primarily for the description of them as they standat last, " says the author, "is the word Suggestiveness. "

"Leaves of Grass" requires a large perspective; you must not get your facetoo near the book. You must bring to it a magnanimity of spirit, --acharity and faith equal to its own. Looked at too closely, it often seemsincoherent and meaningless; draw off a little and let the figure come out. The book is from first to last a most determined attempt, on the part of alarge, reflective, loving, magnetic, rather primitive, thoroughlyimaginative personality, to descend upon the materialism of the nineteenthcentury, and especially upon a new democratic nation now in full careerupon this continent, with such poetic fervor and enthusiasm as to lift andfill it with the deepest meanings of the spirit and disclose the order ofuniversal nature. The poet has taken shelter behind no precedent, orcriticism, or partiality whatever, but has squarely and lovingly faced theoceanic amplitude and movement of the life of his times and land, andfused them in his fervid humanity, and imbued them with deepest poeticmeanings. One of the most striking features of the book is the adequacyand composure, even joyousness and elation, of the poet in the presenceof the huge materialism and prosaic conditions of our democratic era. Hespreads himself over it all, he accepts and absorbs it all, he rejects nopart; and his quality, his individuality, shines through it all, as thesun through vapors. The least line, or fragment of a line, is redolent ofWalt Whitman. It is never so much the theme treated as it is the manexploited and illustrated. Walt Whitman does not write poems, strictlyspeaking, --does not take a bit of nature or life or character and chiseland carve it into a beautiful image or object, or polish and elaborate athought, embodying it in pleasing tropes and pictures. His purpose israther to show a towering, loving, composite personality moving amid allsorts of materials, taking them up but for a moment, disclosing newmeanings and suggestions in them, passing on, bestowing himself uponwhoever or whatever will accept him, tossing hints and clues right andleft, provoking and stimulating the thought and imagination of his reader, but finishing nothing for him, leaving much to be desired, much to becompleted by him in his turn. 

IV

The reader who would get at the spirit and meaning of "Leaves of Grass"must remember that its animating principle, from first to last, isDemocracy, --that it is a work conceived and carried forward in the spiritof the genius of humanity that is now in full career in the NewWorld, --and that all things characteristically American (trades, tools, occupations, productions, characters, scenes) therefore have their placesin it. It is intended to be a complete mirror of the times in which thelife of the poet fell, and to show one master personality accepting, absorbing all and rising superior to it, --namely, the poet himself. Yet itis never Whitman that speaks so much as it is Democracy that speaksthrough him. He personifies the spirit of universal brotherhood, and inthis character launches forth his "omnivorous words. " What would seemcolossal egotism, shameless confessions, or unworthy affiliations withlow, rude persons, what would seem confounding good and bad, virtue andvice, etc. , in Whitman the man, the citizen, but serves to illustrate theboundless compassion and saving power of Whitman as the spokesman of idealDemocracy. With this clue in mind, many difficult things are made plainand easy in the works of this much misunderstood poet. 

Perhaps the single poem that throws most light upon his aims and methods, and the demand he makes upon his reader, is in "Calamus, " and is asfollows:--

 "Whoever you are holding me now in hand, Without one thing all will be useless, I give you fair warning before you attempt me further, I am not what you suppos'd, but far different. 

 "Who is he that would become my follower? Who would sign himself a candidate for my affections?

 "The way is suspicious, the result uncertain, perhaps destructive, You would have to give up all else, I alone would expect to be your sole and exclusive standard, Your novitiate would even then be long and exhausting, The whole past theory of your life and all conformity to the lives around you would have to be abandon'd, Therefore release me now before troubling yourself any further, let go your hand from my shoulders, Put me down and depart on your way. 

 "Or else by stealth in some wood for trial, Or back of a rock in the open air, (For in any roof'd room of a house I emerge not, nor in company, And in libraries I lie as one dumb, a gawk, or unborn, or dead, ) But just possibly with you on a high hill, first watching lest any person for miles around approach unawares, Or possibly with you sailing at sea, or on the beach of the sea or some quiet island, Here to put your lips upon mine I permit you, With the comrade's long-dwelling kiss or the new husband's kiss, For I am the new husband and I am the comrade. 

 "Or, if you will, thrusting me beneath your clothing, Where I may feel the throbs of your heart or rest upon your hip, Carry me when you go forth over land or sea; For thus merely touching you is enough, is best, And thus touching you would I silently sleep and be carried eternally. 

 "But these leaves conning you con at peril, For these leaves and me you will not understand, They will elude you at first and still more afterward, I will certainly elude you, Even while you should think you had unquestionably caught me, behold! Already you see I have escaped from you. 

 "For it is not for what I have put into it that I have written this book, Nor is it by reading it you will acquire it, Nor do those know me best who admire me and vauntingly praise me, Nor will the candidates for my love (unless at most a very few) prove victorious, Nor will my poems do good only, they will do just as much evil, perhaps more, For all is useless without that for which you may guess at many times and not hit, that which I hinted at, Therefore release me and depart on your way. "

When one has fully mastered this poem he has got a pretty good hold uponWhitman's spirit and method. His open-air standards, the baffling andelusive character of his work, the extraordinary demand it makes, itsradical and far-reaching effects upon life, its direct cognizance of evilas a necessary part of the good (there was a human need of sin, saidMargaret Fuller) its unbookish spirit and affiliations, its indirect andsuggestive method, that it can be fully read only through our acquaintancewith life and real things at first hand, etc. , --all this and more is inthe poem. 

HIS SELF-RELIANCE

I

It is over sixty years since Goethe said that to be a German author was tobe a German martyr. I presume things have changed in Germany since thosetimes, and that the Goethe of to-day does not encounter the jealousy andhatred the great poet and critic of Weimar seemed to have called forth. InWalt Whitman we in America have known an American author who was anAmerican martyr in a more literal sense than any of the men named by thegreat German. More than Heine, or Rousseau, or Molière, or Byron, wasWhitman a victim of the literary Philistinism of his country and times;but, fortunately for himself, his was a nature so large, tolerant, andself-sufficing that his martyrdom sat very lightly upon him. Hisunpopularity was rather a tonic to him than otherwise. It was of a kindthat tries a man's mettle, and brings out his heroic traits if he has any. One almost envies him his unpopularity. It was of the kind that only thegreatest ones have experienced, and that attests something extraordinaryin the recipient of it. He said he was more resolute because all haddenied him than he ever could have been had all accepted, and he added:--

 "I heed not and have never heeded either cautions, majorities, nor ridicule. "

There are no more precious and tonic pages in history than the records ofmen who have faced unpopularity, odium, hatred, ridicule, detraction, inobedience to an inward voice, and never lost courage or good-nature. Whitman's is the most striking case in our literary annals, --probably themost striking one in our century outside of politics and religion. Theinward voice alone was the oracle he obeyed: "My commission obeying, toquestion it never daring. "

The bitter-sweet cup of unpopularity he drained to its dregs, and drainedit cheerfully, as one knowing beforehand that it is preparing for him andcannot be avoided. 

 "Have you learn'd lessons only of those who admired you and were tender with you? and stood aside for you? Have you not learn'd great lessons from those who reject you, and brace themselves against you? or who treat you with contempt, or dispute the passage with you?"

Every man is a partaker in the triumph of him who is always true tohimself and makes no compromises with customs, schools, or opinions. Whitman's life, underneath its easy tolerance and cheerful good-will, washeroic. He fought his battle against great odds and he conquered; he hadhis own way, he yielded not a hair to the enemy. 

The pressure brought to bear upon him by the press, by many of hisfriends, and by such a man as Emerson, whom he deeply reverenced, tochange or omit certain passages from his poems, seems only to have servedas the opposing hammer that clinched the nail. The louder the outcry themore deeply he felt it his duty to stand by his first convictions. Thefierce and scornful opposition to his sex poems, and to his methods andaims generally, was probably more confirmatory than any approval couldhave been. It went to the quick. During a dark period of his life, when nopublisher would touch his book and when its exclusion from the mails wasthreatened, and poverty and paralysis were upon him, a wealthyPhiladelphian offered to furnish means for its publication if he wouldomit certain poems; but the poet does not seem to have been tempted forone moment by the offer. He cheerfully chose the heroic part, as he alwaysdid. 

Emerson reasoned and remonstrated with him for hours, walking up and downBoston Common, and after he had finished his argument, says Whitman, whichwas unanswerable, "I felt down in my soul the clear and unmistakableconviction to disobey all, and pursue my own way. " He told Emerson so, whereupon they went and dined together. The independence of the poetprobably impressed Emerson more than his yielding would have done, for hadnot he preached the adamantine doctrine of self-trust? "To believe yourown thought, " he says, "to believe that what is true for you in yourprivate heart is true of all men, --that is genius. "

In many ways was Whitman, quite unconsciously to himself, the man Emersoninvoked and prayed for, --the absolutely self-reliant man; the man whoshould find his own day and land sufficient; who had no desire to beGreek, or Italian, or French, or English, but only himself; who shouldnot whine, or apologize, or go abroad; who should not duck, or deprecate, or borrow; and who could see through the many disguises and debasements ofour times the lineaments of the same gods that so ravished the bards ofold. 

The moment a man "acts for himself, " says Emerson, "tossing the laws, thebooks, idolatries, and customs out of the window, we pity him no more, butthank and revere him. "

Whitman took the philosopher at his word. "Greatness once and forever hasdone with opinion, " even the opinion of the good Emerson. "Heroism worksin contradiction to the voice of mankind, and in contradiction, for atime, to the voice of the great and good. " "Every heroic act measuresitself by its contempt of some external good, "--popularity, for instance. "The characteristic of heroism is persistency. " "When you have chosen yourpart abide by it, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with theworld. " "Adhere to your act, and congratulate yourself if you have donesomething strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorousage. " Heroism "is the avowal of the unschooled man that he finds a qualityin him that is negligent of expense, of health, of life, of danger, ofhatred, of reproach, and knows that his will is higher and more excellentthan all actual and all possible antagonists. " "A man is to carry himselfin the presence of all opposition as if everything were titular andephemeral but he. " "Great works of art, " he again says, "teach us toabide by our spontaneous impression with good-natured inflexibility, themore when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. "

These brave sayings of Emerson were all illustrated and confirmed byWhitman's course. The spectacle of this man sitting there by the window ofhis little house in Camden, poor and partially paralyzed, and looking outupon the trite and commonplace scenes and people, or looking athwart theyears and seeing only detraction and denial, yet always serene, cheerful, charitable, his wisdom and tolerance ripening and mellowing with time, issomething to treasure and profit by. He was a man who needed noassurances. He had the patience and the leisure of nature. He welcomedyour friendly and sympathetic word, or with equal composure he did withoutit. 

I remember calling upon him shortly after Swinburne's fierce onslaughtupon him had been published, some time in the latter part of the eighties. I was curious to see how Whitman took it, but I could not discover eitherin word or look that he was disturbed a particle by it. He spoke as kindlyof Swinburne as ever. If he was pained at all, it was on Swinburne'saccount and not on his own. It was a sad spectacle to see a man retreatupon himself as Swinburne had done. In fact I think hostile criticism, fiercely hostile, gave Whitman nearly as much comfort as any other. Did itnot attest reality? Men do not brace themselves against shadows. Swinburne's polysyllabic rage showed the force of the current he wastrying to stem. As for Swinburne's hydrocephalic muse, I do not thinkWhitman took any interest in it from the first. 

Self-reliance, or self-trust, is one of the principles Whitman announcesin his "Laws for Creations. " He saw that no first-class work is possibleexcept it issue from a man's deepest, most radical self. 

 "What do you suppose creation is? What do you suppose will satisfy the soul but 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 yourself? And that that is what the oldest and newest myths finally mean? And that you or any one must approach creations through such laws?"

I think it probable that Whitman anticipated a long period of comparativeoblivion for himself and his works. He knew from the first that the publicwould not be with him; he knew that the censors of taste, the critics andliterary professors, would not be with him; he knew that the vast army ofPhilistia, the respectable, fashionable mammon-worshiping crowd, would notbe with him, --that the timid, the pampered, the prurient, the conforming, the bourgeoisie spirit, the class spirit, the academic spirit, thePharisaic spirit in all its forms, would all work against him; and that, as in the case of nearly all original, first-class men, he would have towait to be understood for the growth of the taste of himself. None knewmore clearly than he did how completely our people were under theillusion of the genteel and the conventional, and that, even among theemancipated few, the possession of anything like robust æstheticperception was rare enough. America, so bold and original and independentin the world of practical politics and material endeavor, is, in spiritualand imaginative regions, timid, conforming, imitative. There is, perhaps, no civilized country in the world wherein the native, original man, thereal critter, as Whitman loved to say, that underlies all our culture andconventions, crops out so little in manners, in literature, and in socialusages. The fear of being unconventional is greater with us than the fearof death. A certain evasiveness, polish, distrust of ourselves, amountingto insipidity and insincerity, is spoken of by observant foreigners. Inother words, we are perhaps the least like children of any people in theworld. All these things were against Whitman, and will continue to beagainst him for a long time. With the first stroke he broke through theconventional and took his stand upon the natural. With rude hands he toreaway the veils and concealments from the body and from the soul. Heignored entirely all social and conventional usages and hypocrisies, notby revolt against them, but by choosing a point of view from which theydisappeared. He embraced the unrefined and the savage as well as thetender and human. The illusions of the past, the models and standards, hefreed himself of at once, and declared for the beauty and the divinity ofthe now and the here. The rude realism of his "Leaves" shocked like aplunge in the surf, but it invigorated also, if we were strong enough tostand it. 

Out of Whitman's absolute self-trust arose his prophetic egotism, --thedivine fervor and audacity of the simple ego. He shared the conviction ofthe old prophets that man is a part of God, and that there is nothing inthe universe any more divine than the individual soul. "I, too, " he says, and this line is the key to much there is in his work--

 "I, too, have felt the resistless call of myself. "

With the old Biblical writers the motions of their own spirits, theirthoughts, their dreams, were the voice of God. There is something of thesame sort in Whitman. The voice of that inner self was final andauthoritative with him. It was the voice of God. He could drive throughand over all the conventions of the world in obedience to that voice. Thiscall to him was as a voice from Sinai. One of his mastering thoughts wasthe thought of identity, --that you are you, and I am I. This was the finalmeaning of things, and the meaning of immortality. "Yourself, _yourself_, YOURSELF, " he says, with swelling vehemence, "forever and ever. " To becompacted and riveted and fortified in yourself, so as to be a law untoyourself, is the final word of the past and of the present. 

II

The shadow of Whitman's self-reliance and heroic self-esteem--the sort ofeddy or back-water--was undoubtedly a childlike fondness for praise andfor seeing his name in print. In his relaxed moments, when the stress ofhis task was not upon him, he was indeed in many respects a child. He hada child's delight in his own picture. He enjoyed hearing himself lauded asColonel Ingersoll lauded him in his lecture in Philadelphia, and as hisfriends lauded him at his birthday dinner parties during the last two orthree years of his life; he loved to see his name in print, and itemsabout himself in the newspapers; he sometimes wrote them himself and gavethem to the reporters. And yet nothing is surer than that he shaped hislife and did his work absolutely indifferent to either praise or blame; infact, that he deliberately did that which he knew would bring himdispraise. The candor and openness of the man's nature would not allow himto conceal or feign anything. If he loved praise, why should he not befrank about it? Did he not lay claim to the vices and vanities of menalso? At its worst, Whitman's vanity was but the foible of a great nature, and should count for but little in the final estimate. The common humannature to which he lay claim will assert itself; it is not always to bekept up to the heroic pitch. 

III

It was difficult to appreciate his liking for the newspaper. But he hadbeen a newspaper man himself; the printer's ink had struck in; he had manyassociations with the press-room and the composing-room; he loved thecommon, democratic character of the newspaper; it was the average man'slibrary. The homely uses to which it was put, and the humble firesides towhich it found its way, endeared it to him, and made him love to see hisname in it. 

Whitman's vanity was of the innocent, good-natured kind. He was astolerant of your criticism as of your praise. Selfishness, in any unworthysense, he had none. Offensive arrogance and self-assertion, in his lifethere was none. 

His egotism is of the large generous species that never irritates orpricks into you like that of the merely conceited man. His love, hiscandor, his sympathy are on an equal scale. 

His egotism comes finally to affect one like the independence andindifference of natural law. It takes little heed of our opinion, whetherit be for or against, and keeps to its own way whatever befall. 

Whitman's absolute faith in himself was a part of his faith in creation. He felt himself so keenly a part of the whole that he shared its soundnessand excellence; he must be good as it is good. 

IV

Whitman showed just enough intention, or premeditation in his life, dress, manners, attitudes in his pictures, self-portrayals in his poems, etc. , togive rise to the charge that he was a _poseur_. He was a _poseur_ in thesense, and to the extent, that any man is a _poseur_ who tries to live upto a certain ideal and to realize it in his outward daily life. It isclear that he early formed the habit of self-contemplation and of standingapart and looking upon himself as another person. Hence his extraordinaryself-knowledge, and, we may also say, his extraordinary self-appreciation, or to use his own words, "the quite changed attitude of the ego, the onechanting or talking, towards himself. " Of course there is danger in thisattitude, but Whitman was large enough and strong enough to escape it. Hesaw himself to be the typical inevitable democrat that others have seenhim to be, and with perfect candor and without ever forcing the note, heportrays himself as such. As his work is confessedly the poem of himself, himself magnified and projected, as it were, upon the canvas of a greatage and country, all his traits and qualities stand out in heroicproportions, his pride and egotism as well as his love and tolerance. 

"How beautiful is candor, " he says. "All faults may be forgiven of him whohas perfect candor. " The last thing that could ever be charged of Whitmanis that he lacked openness, or was guilty of any deceit or concealments inhis life or works. 

From the studies, notes, and scrap-books which Whitman left, it appearsthat he was long preparing and disciplining himself for the work he had inview. "The long foreground, " to which Emerson referred in his letter, wasof course a reality. But this self-consciousness and self-adjustment to agiven end is an element of strength and not of weakness. 

In the famous vestless and coatless portrait of himself prefixed to thefirst "Leaves of Grass" he assumes an attitude and is in a sense a_poseur_; but the reader comes finally to wonder at the marvelousself-knowledge the picture displays, and how strictly typical it is of thepoet's mental and spiritual attitude towards the world, --independent, unconventional, audacious, yet inquiring and sympathetic in a wonderfuldegree. In the same way he posed in other portraits. A favorite with himis the one in which he sits contemplating a butterfly upon hisforefinger--typical of a man "preoccupied of his own soul. " In another hepeers out curiously as from behind a mask. In an earlier one he stands, hat in hand, in marked _negligé_ costume, --a little too intentional, onefeels. The contempt of the polished ones is probably very strong withinhim at this time. I say contempt, though I doubt if Whitman ever feltcontempt for any human being. 

V

Then Whitman had a curious habit of standing apart, as it were, andlooking upon himself and his career as of some other person. He wasinterested in his own cause, and took a hand in the discussion. From firstto last he had the habit of regarding himself objectively. On his deathbedhe seemed to be a spectator of his own last moments, and was seen to feelhis pulse a few minutes before he breathed his last. 

He has recorded this trait in his poems:--

 "Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am, Stands amused, complacent, compassionate, idle, waiting, Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next, Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it. "

As also in this from "Calamus:"--

 "That shadow my likeness that goes to and fro seeking a livelihood, chattering, chaffering, How often I find myself standing and looking at it where it flits, How often I question and doubt whether that is really me; But among my lovers, and caroling these songs, Oh, I never doubt whether that is really me. "

Whitman always speaks as one having authority and not as a scribe, not asa mere man of letters. This is the privilege of the divine egoism of theprophet. 

Like the utterances of the biblical writers, without argument, withoutelaboration, his mere dictum seems the word of fate. It is not the voiceof a man who has made his way through the world by rejecting and denying, but by accepting all and rising superior. What the "push of reading" orthe push of argument could not start is often started and clinched by hismere authoritative "I say. "

 "I say where liberty draws not the blood out of slavery, there slavery draws the blood out of liberty, ". . . "I say the human shape or face is so great it must never be made ridiculous; I say for ornaments nothing outré can be allowed, And that anything is most beautiful without ornament, And that exaggerations will be sternly revenged in your own physiology and in other persons' physiologies also. 

 "Think of the past; I warn you that in a little while others will find their past in you and your times. . . . Think of spiritual results. Sure as the earth swims through the heavens, does every one of its objects pass into spiritual results. Think of manhood, and you to be a man; Do you count manhood, and the sweet of manhood, nothing? Think of womanhood and you to be a woman; The Creation is womanhood; Have I not said that womanhood involves all? Have I not told how the universe has nothing better than the best womanhood?"

Egotism is usually intolerant, but Whitman was one of the most tolerant ofmen. 

A craving for sympathy and personal affection he certainly had; to bevalued as a human being was more to him than to be valued as a poet. Hisstrongest attachments were probably for persons who had no opinion, goodor bad, of his poetry at all. 

VI

Under close scrutiny his egotism turns out to be a kind of altru-egotism, which is vicarious and all-inclusive of his fellows. It is one phase ofhis democracy, and is vital and radical in his pages. It is a high, imperturbable pride in his manhood and in the humanity which he shareswith all. It is the exultant and sometimes almost arrogant expression ofthe feeling which underlies and is shaping the whole modern world--thefeeling and conviction that the individual man is above all forms, laws, institutions, conventions, bibles, religions--that the divinity of kings, and the sacredness of priests of the old order, pertains to the humblestperson. 

It was a passion that united him to his fellows rather than separated himfrom them. His pride was not that of a man who sets himself up aboveothers, or who claims some special advantage or privilege, but thatgodlike quality that would make others share its great good-fortune. Hencewe are not at all shocked when the poet, in the fervor of his love formankind, determinedly imputes to himself all the sins and vices andfollies of his fellow-men. We rather glory in it. This self-abasement isthe seal of the authenticity of his egotism. Without those things theremight be some ground for the complaint of a Boston critic of Whitman thathis work was not noble, because it celebrated pride, and did not inculcatethe virtues of humility and self-denial. The great lesson of the "Leaves, "flowing curiously out of its pride and egotism, is the lesson of charity, of self-surrender, and the free bestowal of yourself upon all hands. 

The law of life of great art is the law of life in ethics, and was longago announced. 

He that would lose his life shall find it; he who gives himself the mostfreely shall the most freely receive. Whitman made himself the brother andequal of all, not in word, but in very deed; he was in himself a compendof the people for which he spoke, and this breadth of sympathy and freegiving of himself has resulted in an unexpected accession of power. 

HIS RELATION TO ART AND LITERATURE

I

Whitman protests against his "Leaves" being judged merely as literature;but at the same time, if they are not good literature, that of course endsthe matter. Still while the questions of art, of form, of taste, areparamount in most other poets, --certainly in all third and fourth ratepoets, in Whitman they are swallowed up in other questions and values. 

In numerous passages, by various figures and allegories, Whitman indicatesthat he would not have his book classed with the order of mere literaryproductions. 

"Shut not your doors to me, proud libraries, " he says in one of the"Inscriptions, "--

 "For that which was lacking in all your well-fill'd shelves, yet needed most, I bring. Forth from the war emerging, a book I have made, The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything, A book separate, not link'd with the rest nor felt by the intellect, But you, ye untold latencies will thrill to every page. "

Not linked with the studied and scholarly productions, not open to themere bookish mind, but more akin to the primitive utterances and oraclesof historic humanity. A literary age like ours lays great stress upon thesavor of books, art, culture, and has little taste for the savor of realthings, the real man, which we get in Whitman. 

"It is the true breath of humanity, " says Renan, "and not literary merit, that constitutes the beautiful. " An Homeric poem written to-day, he goeson to say, would not be beautiful, because it would not be true; it wouldnot contain this breath of a living humanity. "It is not Homer who isbeautiful, it is the Homeric life. " The literary spirit begat Tennyson, begat Browning, begat the New England poets, but it did not in the samesense beget Whitman, any more than it begat Homer or Job or Isaiah. Theartist may delight in him and find his own ideals there; the critic maystudy him and find the poet master of all his weapons; the disciple ofculture will find, as Professor Triggs has well said, that "there is nobody of writings in literature which demands a wider conversancy with thebest that has been thought or said in the world, "--yet the poet escapesfrom all hands that would finally hold him and monopolize him. Whitman isan immense solvent, --forms, theories, rules, criticisms, disappear in hisfluid, teeming pages. Much can be deduced from him, because much went tothe making up of his point of view. He makes no criticism, yet afar-reaching criticism is implied in the very start of his poems. Nomodern poet presupposes so much, or requires so much preliminary study andreflection. He brings a multitude of questions and problems, and, what issingular, he brings them in himself; they are implied in his temper, andin his attitude toward life and reality. 

Whitman says he has read his "Leaves" to himself in the open air, that hehas tried himself by the elemental laws; and tells us in many ways, directand indirect, that the standards he would be tried by are not those of artor books, but of absolute nature. He has been laughed at for callinghimself a "Kosmos, " but evidently he uses the term to indicate thiselemental, dynamic character of his work, --its escape from indoor, artificial standards, its aspiration after the "amplitude of the earth, and the coarseness and sexuality of the earth, and the great charity ofthe earth, and the equilibrium also. "

II

Unless the poetic perception is fundamental in us, and can grasp thepoetry of things, actions, characters, multitudes, heroisms, we shall readWhitman with very poor results. Unless America, the contemporary age, life, nature, are poetical to us, Whitman will not be. He has aimed at thelarger poetry of forces, masses, persons, enthusiasms, rather than at thepoetry of the specially rare and fine. He kindles in me the delight I havein space, freedom, power, the elements, the cosmic, democracy, and thegreat personal qualities of self-reliance, courage, candor, charity. 

Always in the literary poets are we impressed with the art of the poet assomething distinct from the poet himself, and more or less put on. Thepoet gets himself up for the occasion; he assumes the pose and thelanguage of the poet, as the priest assumes the pose and the language ofdevotion. In Whitman the artist and the man are one. He never gets himselfup for the occasion. Our pleasure in him is rarely or never our pleasurein the well-dressed, the well-drilled, the cultivated, the refined, theorderly, but it is more akin to our pleasure in real things, in humanqualities and powers, in freedom, health, development. Yet I never openhis book without being struck afresh with its pictural quality, its graspof the concrete, its vivid realism, its intimate sense of things, persons, truths, qualities, such as only the greatest artists can give us, and suchas we can never get in mere prose. It is as direct as a challenge, aspersonal as a handshake, and yet withal how mystical, how elusive, howincommensurable! To deny that Whitman belongs to the fraternity of greatartists, the shapers and moulders of the ideal, --those who breathe thebreath of life into the clay or stone of common facts and objects, whomake all things plastic and the vehicles of great and human emotions, --isto read him very inadequately, to say the least. To get at Walt Whitmanyou must see through just as much as you do in dealing with nature; youare to bring the same interpretive imagination. You are not to be balkedby what appears to be the coarse and the familiar, or his rankcontemporaneity; after a time you will surely see the lambent spiritualflames that play about it all. 

 "Prophetic spirit of materials shifting and flickering about me, "

and his cosmic splendor, depth, and power. It is not the denial of art, itis a new affirmation of life. It is one phase of his democracy. It is thelogical conclusion of the vestless and coatless portrait of himself thatappeared in the first edition of his poems. He would give us more of theman, a fuller measure of personal, concrete, human qualities, than anypoet before him. He strips away the artificial wrappings and illusionsusual in poetry, and relies entirely upon the native and intrinsic. Hewill have no curtains, he says, --not the finest, --between himself and hisreader. 

 "Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems, You shall possess the good of the earth and sun (there are millions of suns left), You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books, You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself. "

This is a hint of his democracy as applied to literature, --more direct andimmediate contact with the primary and universal, less of the vestmentsand trappings of art and more of the push and power of original characterand of nature. 

III

It seems to me it is always in order to protest against the narrow anddogmatic spirit that so often crops out in current criticism touching thismatter of art. "The boundaries of art are jealously guarded, " says arecent authority, as if art had boundaries like a state or province thathad been accurately surveyed and fixed, --as if art was a fact and not aspirit. 

Now I shall deny at the outset that there are any bounds of art, or thatart is in any sense an "enclosure, "--a province fenced off and set apartfrom the rest, --any more than religion is an enclosure, though so manypeople would like to make it so. Art is commensurate with the humanspirit. I should even deny that there are any principles of art in thesense that there are principles of mechanics or of mathematics. Art hasbut one principle, one aim, --to produce an impression, a powerfulimpression, no matter by what means, or if it be by reversing all thecanons of taste and criticism. Name any principle, so called, and some daya genius shall be born who will produce his effects in defiance of it, orby appearing to reverse it. Such a man as Turner seemed, at first sight, to set at defiance all correct notions of art. The same with Wagner inmusic, the same with Whitman in poetry. The new man is impossible till heappears, and, when he appears, in proportion to his originality and powerdoes it take the world a longer or shorter time to adjust its criticalstandards to him. But it is sure to do so at last. There is nothing finalin art: its principles follow and do not lead the creator; they aredeductions from his work, not its inspiration. We demand of the new man, of the overthrower of our idols, but one thing, --has he authenticinspiration and power? If he has not, his pretensions are soon exploded. If he has, we cannot put him down, any more than we can put down a law ofnature, and we very soon find some principle of art that fits his case. Isthere no room for the new man? But the new man makes room for himself, andif he be of the first order he largely makes the taste by which he isappreciated, and the rules of art by which he is to be judged. 

IV

The trouble with most of us is that we found our taste for poetry uponparticular authors, instead of upon literature as a whole, or, better yet, upon life and reality. Hence we form standards instead of principles. Standards are limited, rigid, uncompromising, while principles areflexible, expansive, creative. If we are wedded to the Miltonic standardof poetry, the classic standards, we shall have great difficulties withWhitman; but if we have founded our taste upon natural principles--if wehave learned to approach literature through reality, instead of realitythrough literature--we shall not be the victims of any one style or model;we shall be made free of all. The real test of art, of any art, as Burkelong ago said, and as quoted by Mr. Howells in his trenchant little volumecalled "Criticism and Fiction, " is to be sought outside of art, namely, innature. "I can judge but poorly of anything while I measure it by no otherstandard than itself. The true standard of the arts is in every man'spower; and an easy observation of the most common, sometimes of themeanest, things in nature will give the truest lights. " It is thought thatthe preëminence of the Greek standards is settled when we say they arenatural. Yes, but Nature is not Greek. She is Asiatic, German, English, aswell. 

V

In poetry, in art, a man must sustain a certain vital relation to hiswork, and that work must sustain a certain vital relation to the laws ofmind and of life. That is all, and that leaves the doors very wide. We arenot to ask, Is it like this or like that? but, Is it vital, is it real, isit a consistent, well-organized whole?

The poet must always interpret himself and nature after his own fashion. Is his fashion adequate? Is the interpretation vivid and real? Do hislines cut to the quick, and beget heat and joy in the soul? If we cannotmake the poet's ideal our own by sharing his enthusiasm for it, thetrouble is as likely to be in ourselves as in him. In any case he must bea law unto himself. 

The creative artist differs from the mere writer or thinker in this: hesustains a direct personal relation to his subject through emotion, intuition, will. The indirect, impersonal relation which works byreflection, comparison, and analysis is that of the critic andphilosopher. The man is an artist when he gives us a concrete andimmediate impression of reality: from his hands we get the thing itself;from the critic and thinker we get ideas _about_ the thing. The poet doesnot merely say the world is beautiful; he shows it as beautiful: he doesnot describe the flower; he places it before us. What are the enemies ofart? Reflection, didacticism, description, the turgid, the obscure. A poetwith a thesis to sustain is more or less barred from the freedom of pureart. It is by direct and unconsidered expression, says Scherer, that artcommunicates with reality. The things that make for art, then, arefeeling, intuition, sentiment, soul, a fresh and vigorous sense of realthings, --in fact, all that makes for life, health, and wholeness. Goetheis more truly an artist in the first part of Faust than in the second;Arnold has a more truly artistic mind than Lowell. 

The principles of art are always the same in the respect I have indicated, just as the principles of life are always the same, or of health andlongevity are always the same. No writer is an artist who is related tohis subject simply by mental or logical grip alone: he must have a certainemotional affiliation and identity with it; he does not so much convey tous ideas and principles as pictures, parables, impressions, --a livelysense of real things. When we put Whitman outside the pale of art, we mustshow his shortcomings here; we must show that he is not fluid andgenerative, --that he paints instead of interprets, that he gives usreasons instead of impulses, a stone when we ask for bread. "I do notgive a little charity, " he says; "when I give, I give myself. " This theartist always does, not his mind merely, but his soul, his personality. "Leaves of Grass" is as direct an emanation from a central personal forceas any book in literature, and always carries its own test and its ownproof. It never hardens into a system, it never ceases to be penetratedwith will and emotion, it never declines from the order of deeds to theorder of mere thoughts. All is movement, progress, evolution, picture, parable, impulse. 

It is on these grounds that Whitman, first of all, is an artist. He hasthe artist temperament. His whole life was that of a man who lives toideal ends, --who lived to bestow himself upon others, to extract from lifeits meaning and its joy. 

VI

Whitman has let himself go, and trusted himself to the informal andspontaneous, to a degree unprecedented. His course required aself-reliance of the highest order; it required an innate cohesion andhomogeneity, a firmness and consistency of individual outline, that fewmen have. It would seem to be much easier to face the poet's problem inthe old, well-worn forms--forms that are so winsome and authoritative inthemselves--than, to stand upon a basis so individual and intrinsic asWhitman chose to stand upon. His course goes to the quick at once. Howmuch of a man are you? How vital and fundamental is your poetic gift? Canit go alone? Can it face us in undress?

Never did the artist more cunningly conceal himself; never did he socompletely lose himself in the man, identifying himself with the naturaland spontaneous; never emerging and challenging attention on his ownaccount, denying us when we too literally seek him, mocking us when wedemand his credentials, and revealing himself only when we have come tohim upon his own terms. 

The form the poet chose favored this self-revelation; there is nothing, nooutside conscious art, to stand between himself and his reader. "This isno book, " he says: "who touches this touches a man. " In one sense Whitmanis without art, --the impression which he always seeks to make is that ofreality itself. He aims to give us reality without the usual literaryveils and illusions, --the least possible amount of the artificial, theextrinsic, the put-on, between himself and his reader. He banishes fromhis work, as far as possible, what others are so intent upon, --allatmosphere of books and culture, all air of literary intention anddecoration, --and puts his spirit frankly and immediately to his readers. The verse does not seem to have been shaped; it might have grown: it takesno apparent heed of externals, but flows on like a brook, irregular, rhythmical, and always fluid and real. A cry will always be raised againstthe producer in any field who discards the authority of the models andfalls back upon simple Nature, or upon himself, as Millet did in painting, and Wagner in music, and Whitman in poetry. 

Whitman's working ideas, the principles that inspired him, are alldirectly related to life and the problems of life; they are democracy, nature, freedom, love, personality, religion: while the ideas from whichour poets in the main draw their inspiration are related to art, --they areliterary ideas, such as lucidity, form, beauty. 

VII

Much light is thrown upon Whitman's literary methods and aims by a remarkwhich he once made in conversation with Dr. Bucke:--

"I have aimed to make the book simple, --tasteless, or with littletaste, --with very little or no perfume. The usual way is for the poet orwriter to put in as much taste, perfume, piquancy, as he can; but this isnot the way of nature, which I take for model. Nature presents us herproductions--her air, earth, waters, even her flowers, grains, meats--withfaint and delicate flavor and fragrance, but these in the long run makethe deepest impression. Man, dealing with natural things, constantly aimsto increase their piquancy. By crossing and selection he deepens andintensifies the scents and hues of flowers, the tastes of fruits, and soon. He pursues the same method in poetry, --that is, strives for stronglight or shade, for high color, perfume, pungency, in all ways for thegreatest immediate effect. In so doing he leaves the true way, the way ofNature, and, in the long run, comes far short of producing her effects. "

More light of the same kind is thrown upon his methods by the followingpassage from the preface to the first edition of his poems in 1855. 

"To speak in literature, " he says, "with the perfect rectitude andinsouciance of the movements of animals, and the unimpeachableness of thesentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside, is the flawlesstriumph of art. " And again: "The great poet has less a marked style, andis more the channel of thoughts and things without increase or diminution, and is the free channel of himself. He swears to his art, I will not bemeddlesome; I will not have in my writing any elegance, or effect, ororiginality, to hang in the way between me and the rest like curtains. Iwill have nothing hang in the way, not the richest curtains. What I tell, I tell for precisely what it is. Let who may exalt or startle or fascinateor soothe, I will have purpose, as health or heat or snow has, and be asregardless of observation. What I experience or portray shall go from mycomposition without a shred of my composition. You shall stand by my sideand look in the mirror with me. "

VIII

But in view of the profound impression Whitman's work has made upon widelydifferent types of mind on both sides of the Atlantic, and in view of thepersistent vitality of his fame, the question whether he is inside oroutside the pale of art amounts to very little. I quite agree with thelate Mrs. Gilchrist, that, when "great meanings and great emotions areexpressed with corresponding power, literature has done its best, call itwhat you please. "

That Whitman has expressed great meanings and great emotions with adequatepower, even his unfriendly critics admit. Thus Professor Wendell, in anadmirable essay on American literature, says that "though Whitman isuncouth, inarticulate, and lacking in a grotesque degree artistic form, yet for all that he can make you feel for the moment how even theferry-boats plying from New York to Brooklyn are fragments of God'seternities. " In the same way Mr. William Clark, his British critic andexpounder, says that he is wanting in discrimination and art, "flings hisideas at us in a heap, " etc. , and yet that the effect of his work is "tostir our emotions, widen our interests, and rally the forces of our moralnature. "

It seems to me that a man who, through the printed page, can do thesethings, must have some kind of art worth considering. If, through hisimpassioned treatment of a prosy, commonplace object like a ferry-boat, hecan so dignify and exalt it, and so fill it with the meanings of thespirit, that it seems like a part of God's eternities, his methods are atleast worth inquiring into. 

The truth is, Whitman's art, in its lack of extrinsic form and finish, isOriental rather than Occidental, and is an offense to a taste founded uponthe precision and finish of a mechanical age. His verse is like theirregular, slightly rude coin of the Greeks compared with the exact, machine-cut dies of our own day, or like the unfinished look of Japanesepottery beside the less beautiful but more perfect specimens of modernceramic art. 

For present purposes, we may say there are two phases of art, --formal artand creative art. By formal art I mean that which makes a direct appeal toour sense of form, --our sense of the finely carved, the highly wrought, the deftly planned; and by creative art I mean that quickening, fructifying power of the masters, that heat and passion that make theworld plastic and submissive to their hands, teeming with new meanings andthrilling with new life. 

Formal art is always in the ascendant. Formal anything--formal dress, formal manners, formal religion, formal this and that--always counts formore than the informal, the spontaneous, the original. It is easier, itcan be put off and on. 

Formal art is nearly always the gift of the minor poet, and often of themajor poet also. In such a poet as Swinburne, formal art leads by a greatway. The content of his verse, --what is it? In Tennyson as well I shouldsay formal art is in the ascendant. Creative art is his also; Tennysonreaches and moves the spirit, yet his skill is more noteworthy than hispower. In Wordsworth, on the other hand, I should say creative art led:the content of his verse is more than its form; his spiritual andreligious values are greater than his literary and artistic. The same istrue of our own Emerson. Poe, again, is much more as an artist than as aman or a personality. 

I hardly need say that in Whitman formal art, the ostensibly artistic, counts for but very little. The intentional artist, the professional poet, is kept entirely in abeyance, or is completely merged and hidden in theman, more so undoubtedly than in any poet this side the old Orientalbards. We call him formless, chaotic, amorphous, etc. , because he makes noappeal to our modern highly stimulated sense of art or artificial form. Wemust discriminate this from our sense of power, our sense of life, oursense of beauty, of the sublime, of the all, which clearly Whitman wouldreach and move. Whitman certainly has a form of his own: what would apoet, or any writer or worker in the ideal, do without some kind of form?some consistent and adequate vehicle of expression? But Whitman's form isnot what is called artistic, because it is not brought within the rules ofthe prosodical system, and does not appeal to our sense of the consciouslyshaped and cultivated. It is essentially the prose form heightened andintensified by a deep, strong, lyric and prophetic note. 

The bonds and shackles of regular verse-form Whitman threw off. Thiscourse seemed to be demanded by the spirit to which he had dedicatedhimself, --the spirit of absolute unconstraint. The restrictions andhamperings of the scholastic forms did not seem to be consistent with thisspirit, which he identified with democracy and the New World. A poet whosets out to let down the bars everywhere, to remove veils andobstructions, to emulate the freedom of the elemental forces, to effusealways the atmosphere of open-air growths and objects, to be as"regardless of observation" as the processes of nature, etc. , will not beapt to take kindly to any arbitrary and artificial form of expression. Theessentially prose form which Whitman chose is far more in keeping with thespirit and aim of his work than any conventional metrical system couldhave been. Had he wrought solely as a conscious artist, aiming at theeffect of finely chiseled forms, he would doubtless have chosen adifferent medium. 

IX

Whitman threw himself with love and enthusiasm upon this great, crude, seething, materialistic American world. The question is, Did he master it?Is he adequate to absorb and digest it? Does he make man-stuff of it? Isit plastic in his hands? Does he stamp it with his own image? I do notask, Does he work it up into what are called artistic forms? Does he makeit the quarry from which he carves statues or builds temples? becauseevidently he does not do this, or assume to do it. He is content if hepresent America and the modern to us as they are inwrought into his ownpersonality, bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, or as character, passion, will, motive, conviction. He would show them subjectively and asliving impulses in himself. Of course a great constructive, dramatic poetlike Shakespeare would have solved his problem in a different manner, orthrough the objective, artistic portrayal of types and characters. But thepoet and prophet of democracy and of egotism shows us all things in andthrough himself. 

His egotism, or egocentric method, is the fundamental fact about his work. It colors all and determines all. The poems are the direct outgrowth ofthe personality of the poet; they are born directly upon the ego, as itwere, like the fruit of that tropical tree which grows immediately uponthe trunk. His work is nearer his radical, primary self than that of mostpoets. He never leads us away from himself into pleasant paths withenticing flowers of fancy or forms of art. He carves or shapes nothing forits own sake; there is little in the work that can stand on independentgrounds as pure art. His work is not material made precious by elaborationand finish, but by its relation to himself and to the sources of life. 

X

Whitman was compelled to this negation of extrinsic art by the problem hehad set before himself, --first, to arouse, to suggest, rather than tofinish or elaborate, less to display any theme or thought than "to bringthe reader into the atmosphere of the theme or thought;" secondly, to makehis own personality the chief factor in the volume, or present it so thatthe dominant impression should always be that of the living, breathingman as we meet him and see him and feel him in life, and never as we seehim and feel him in books or art, --the man in the form and garb of actual, concrete life, not as poet or artist, but simply as man. This is doubtlessthe meaning of the vestless and coatless portrait of himself prefixed tothe first issue of the "Leaves, " to which I have referred. This portraitis symbolical of the whole attitude of the poet toward his task. It was ahint that we must take this poet with very little literary tailoring; itwas a hint that he belonged to the open air, and came of the people andspoke in their spirit. 

It is never the theme treated, but always the character exploited; neverthe structure finished, but always the plan suggested; never the workaccomplished, but always the impulse imparted, --freedom, power, growth. 

 "Allons! we must not stop here. However sweet these laid-up stores, however convenient this dwelling, we cannot remain here, However sheltered this port, or however calm these waters, we must not anchor here, However welcome the hospitality that surrounds us we are permitted to receive it but a little while. 

 "Allons! With power, liberty, the earth, the elements! Health, defiance, gayety, self-esteem, curiosity; Allons! from all formulas! From your formulas, O bat-eyed and materialistic priests!"

This magnificent poem, "The Song of the Open Road, " is one of the mostsignificant in Whitman's work. He takes the open road as his type, --not anend in itself, not a fulfillment, but a start, a journey, a progression. It teaches him the profound lesson of reception, "no preference nordenial, " and the profounder lesson of liberty and truth:--

 "From this hour, freedom! From this hour I ordain myself loosed of limits and imaginary lines, Going where I list--my own master, total and absolute, Listening to others, and considering well what they say, Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating, Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me. 

 "I inhale great draughts of air, The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine. "

He will not rest with art, he will not rest with books, he will press hisway steadily toward the largest freedom. 

 "Only the kernel of every object nourishes. Where is he who tears off the husks for you and me? Where is he who undoes stratagems and envelopes for you and me?"

Whitman was not a builder. If he had the architectural power which thegreat poets have shown, he gave little proof of it. It was not required bythe task he set before himself. His book is not a temple: it is a wood, afield, a highway; vista, vista, everywhere, --vanishing lights and shades, truths half disclosed, successions of objects, hints, suggestions, briefpictures, groups, voices, contrasts, blendings, and, above all, the tonicquality of the open air. The shorter poems are like bunches of herbs orleaves, or a handful of sprays gathered in a walk; never a thoughtcarefully carved, and appealing to our sense of artistic form. 

The main poem of the book, "The Song of Myself, " is a series ofutterances, ejaculations, apostrophes, enumerations, associations, pictures, parables, incidents, suggestions, with little or no structuralor logical connection, but all emanating from a personality whose presencedominates the page, and whose eye is ever upon us. Without this vivid andintimate sense of the man back of all, of a sane and powerful spiritsustaining ours, the piece would be wild and inchoate. 

XI

The reader will be sure to demand of Whitman ample compensation for theabsence from his work of those things which current poets give us in suchfull measure. Whether or not the compensation is ample, whether the musicof his verse as of winds and waves, the long, irregular, dithyrambicmovement, its fluid and tonic character, the vastness of conception, thelarge, biblical speech, the surging cosmic emotion, the vivid personalpresence as of the living man looking into your eye or walking by yourside, --whether all these things, the refreshing quality as of "harsh saltspray" which the poet Lanier found in the "Leaves, " the electric currentswhich Mrs. Gilchrist found there, the "unexcelled imaginative justice oflanguage" which Mr. Stevenson at times found, the religious liberation andfaith which Mr. Symonds found, the "incomparable things incomparably wellsaid" of Emerson, the rifle-bullets of Ruskin, the "supreme words" ofColonel Ingersoll, etc. , --whether qualities and effects like these, I say, make up to us for the absence of the traditional poetic graces andadornments, is a question which will undoubtedly long divide the readingworld. 

In the works upon which our poetic taste is founded, artistic form isparamount; we have never been led to apply to such works open-airstandards, --clouds, trees, rivers, spaces, --but the precision anddefiniteness of the cultured and the artificial. If Whitman had aimed atpure art and had failed, his work would be intolerable. As his Frenchcritic, Gabriel Sarrazin, has well said: "In the large work which Whitmanattempted, there come no rules save those of nobility and strength ofspirit; and these suffice amply to create a most unlooked-for andgrandiose aspect of beauty. " "Overcrowded and disorderly" as it may seem, "if heroic emotion and thought and enthusiasm vitalize it, " the poet hasreached his goal. 

XII

Sometimes I define Whitman to myself as the poet of the open air, --notbecause he sings the praises of these things after the manner of theso-called nature-poets, but because he has the quality of things in theopen air, the quality of the unhoused, the untamed, the elemental andaboriginal. He pleases and he offends, the same way things at large do. Hehas the brawn, the indifference, the rudeness, the virility, thecoarseness, --something gray, unpronounced, elemental, about him, theeffect of mass, size, distance, flowing, vanishing lines, neutralspaces, --something informal, multitudinous, and processional, --somethingregardless of criticism, that makes no bid for our applause, notcalculated instantly to please, unmindful of details, prosaic if we makeit so, common, near at hand, and yet that provokes thought and stirs ouremotions in an unusual degree. The long lists and catalogues of objectsand scenes in Whitman, that have so excited the mirth of the critics, areone phase of his out-of-doors character, --a multitude of concrete objects, a grove, a thicket, a field, a stretch of beach, --every object sharplydefined, but no attempt at logical or artistic sequence, the effect of thewhole informal, multitudinous. It may be objected to these pages that theyconsist of a mass of details that do not make a picture. But every line isa picture of a scene or an object. Whitman always keeps up the movement, he never pauses to describe; it is all action. 

Passing from such a poet as Tennyson to Whitman is like going from a warm, perfumed interior, with rich hangings, pictures, books, statuary, fine menand women, out into the street, or upon the beach, or upon the hill, orunder the midnight stars. We lose something certainly, but do we not gainsomething also? Do we not gain just what Whitman had in view, namely, direct contact with the elements in which are the sources of our life andhealth? Do we not gain in scope and power what we lose in art andrefinement?

The title, "Leaves of Grass, " is full of meaning. What self-knowledge andself-scrutiny it implies! The grass, perennial sprouting, universal, formless, common, the always spread feast of the herds, dotted withflowers, the herbage of the earth, so suggestive of the multitudinous, loosely aggregated, unelaborated character of the book; the linesspringing directly out of the personality of the poet, the soil of hislife. 

 "What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest is me, "

says the poet, and this turns out to be the case. We only look to see ifin the common and the cheap he discloses new values and new meanings, --ifhis leaves of grass have the old freshness and nutriment, and be not amere painted greenness. 

 "The pure contralto sings in the organ loft, The carpenter dresses his plank--the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp, The married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving dinner, The pilot seizes the king-pin--he heaves down with a strong arm, The mate stands braced in the whale-boat--lance and harpoon are ready, The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches, The deacons are ordained with crossed hands at the altar, The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel, The farmer stops by the bars, as he walks on a First Day loafe, and looks at the oats and rye, The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum, a confirmed case, He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother's bedroom; The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case, He turns his quid of tobacco, while his eyes blurr with the manuscript; The malformed limbs are tied to the anatomist's table, What is removed drops horribly in a pail; The quadroon girl is sold at the stand--the drunkard nods by the bar-room stove, The machinist rolls up his sleeves--the policeman travels his beat--the gate-keeper marks who pass, The young fellow drives the express-wagon--I love him, though I do not know him, The half-breed straps on his light boots to compete in the race, The western turkey-shooting draws old and young--some lean on their rifles, some sit on logs, Out from the crowd steps the marksman, takes his position, levels his piece; The groups of newly-come emigrants cover the wharf or levee, As the woolly-pates hoe in the sugar-field, the overseer views them from his saddle, The bugle calls in the ball-room, the gentlemen run for their partners, the dancers bow to each other, The youth lies awake in the cedar-roofed garret, and harks to the musical rain, The Wolverine sets traps on the creek that helps fill the Huron, The reformer ascends the platform, he spouts with his mouth and nose, * * * * *

 Seasons pursuing each other, the plougher ploughs, the mower mows, and the winter-grain falls in the ground, Off on the lakes the pike-fisher watches and waits by the hole in the frozen surface, The stumps stand thick round the clearing, the squatter strikes deep with his axe, Flatboatmen make fast, towards dusk, near the cotton-wood or pekan-trees, Coon-seekers go through the regions of the Red River, or through those drained by the Tennessee, or through those of the Arkansas, Torches shine in the dark that hangs on the Chattahooche or Altamahaw, Patriarchs sit at supper with sons and grandsons and great-grandsons around them, In walls of adobe, in canvas tents, rest hunters and trappers after their day's sport, The city sleeps and the country sleeps, The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time, The old husband sleeps by his wife, and the young husband sleeps by his wife; And these one and all tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them, And such as it is to be of these, more or less, I am. "

What is this but tufts and tussocks of grass; not branching trees, nor yetsomething framed and deftly put together, but a succession of simplethings, objects, actions, persons; handfuls of native growths, a stretchof prairie or savanna; no composition, no artistic wholes, no logicalsequence, yet all vital and real; jets of warm life that shoot and playover the surface of contemporary America, and that the poet uses as thestuff out of which to weave the song of himself. 

This simple aggregating or cataloguing style as it has been called, andwhich often occurs in the "Leaves, " has been much criticised, but it seemsto me in perfect keeping in a work that does not aim at total artisticeffects, at finished structural perfection like architecture, but topicture the elements of a man's life and character in outward scenes andobjects and to show how all nature tends inward to him and he outward toit. Whitman showers the elements of American life upon his reader until, so to speak, his mind is drenched with them, but never groups them intopatterns to tickle his sense of form. It is charged that his method isinartistic, and it is so in a sense, but it is the Whitman art and has itsown value in his work. Only the artist instinct could prompt to thissuccession of one line genre word painting. 

But this is not the way of the great artists. No, but it is Whitman's way, and these things have a certain artistic value in his work, a work thatprofessedly aims to typify his country and times, --the value of multitude, processions, mass-movements, and the gathering together of elements andforces from wide areas. 

XIII

Whitman's relation to art, then, is primary and fundamental, just as hisrelations to religion, to culture, to politics, to democracy, are primaryand fundamental, --through his emotion, his soul, and not merely throughhis tools, his intellect. His artistic conscience is quickly revealed toany searching inquiry. It is seen in his purpose to convey his message bysuggestion and indirection, or as an informing, vitalizing breath andspirit. His thought and meaning are enveloped in his crowded, concrete, and often turbulent pages, as science is enveloped in nature. He has aprofound ethic, a profound metaphysic, but they are not formulated; theyare vital in his pages as hearing or eyesight. 

Whitman studied effects, and shaped his means to his end, weighing valuesand subordinating parts, as only the great artist does. He knew the powerof words as few know them; he knew the value of vista, perspective, vanishing lights and lines. He knew how to make his words itch at yourears till you understood them; how to fold up and put away in hissentences meanings, glimpses, that did not at first reveal themselves. Itis only the work of the great creative artist that is pervaded by will, and that emanates directly and inevitably from the personality of the manhimself. As a man and an American, Whitman is as closely related to hiswork as Æschylus to his, or Dante to his. This is always a supremetest, --the closeness and vitality of the relation of a man to his work. Could any one else have done it? Is it the general intelligence thatspeaks, the culture and refinement of the age? or have we a new revelationof life, a new mind and soul? The lesser poets sustain only a secondaryrelation to their works. It is other poets, other experiences, the past, the schools, the forms, that speak through them. In all Whitman'srecitatives, as he calls them, the free-flowing ends of the sentences, theloose threads of meaning, the unraveled or unknitted threads and fringes, are all well considered, and are one phase of _his_ art. He seeks hiseffects thus. 

His method is indirect, allegorical, and elliptical to an unusual degree;often a curious suspension and withholding in a statement, a suggestiveincompleteness, both ends of his thought, as it were, left in the air;sometimes the substantive, sometimes the nominative, is wanting, and allfor a purpose. The poet somewhere speaks of his utterance as "propheticscreams. " The prophetic element is rarely absent, the voice of one cryingin the wilderness, only it is a more jocund and reassuring cry than we areused to in prophecy. The forthrightness of utterance, the projectileforce of expression, the constant appeal to unseen laws and powers of thegreat prophetic souls, is here. 

Whitman is poetic in the same way in which he is democratic, in the sameway in which he is religious, or American, or modern, --not by word merely, but by deed; not by the extrinsic, but by the intrinsic; not by art, butby life. 

I am never tired of saying that to put great personal qualities in a poem, or other literary work, not formulated or didactically stated, but intone, manner, attitude, breadth of view, love, charity, good fellowship, etc. , is the great triumph for our day. So put, they are a possession tothe race forever; they grow and bear fruit perennially, like the grass andthe trees. And shall it be said that the poet who does this has no worthyart?

XIV

Nearly all modern artificial products, when compared with the ancient, arecharacterized by greater mechanical finish and precision. Can we say, therefore, they are more artistic? Is a gold coin of the time of Pericles, so rude and simple, less artistic than the elaborate coins of our own day?Is Japanese pottery, the glazing often ragged and uneven, less artisticthan the highly finished work of the moderns?

Are we quite sure, after all, that what we call "artistic form" is in anyhigh or fundamental sense artistic? Are the precise, the regular, themeasured, the finished, the symmetrical, indispensable to our conceptionof art? If regular extrinsic form and measure and proportion are necessaryelements of the artistic, then geometrical flower-beds, and trees set inrows or trained to some fancy pattern, ought to please the artist. But dothey? If we look for the artistic in these things, then Addison is agreater artist than Shakespeare. Dr. Johnson says, "Addison speaks thelanguage of poets, and Shakespeare of men. " Which is really the mostartistic? The one is the coin from the die, the other the coin from thehand. 

Tennyson's faultless form and finish are not what stamp him a greatartist. He would no doubt be glad to get rid of them if he could, at leastto keep them in abeyance and make them less obtrusive; he would giveanything for the freedom, raciness, and wildness of Shakespeare. But he isnot equal to these things. The culture, the refinement, the precision of acorrect and mechanical age have sunk too deeply into his soul. He has notthe courage or the spring to let himself go as Shakespeare did. Tennyson, too, speaks the language of poets, and not of men; he savors of theflower-garden, and not of the forest. Tennyson knows that he is an artist. Shakespeare, apparently, never had such a thought; he is intent solelyupon holding the mirror up to nature. The former lived in an age ofcriticism, and when the poets loved poetry more than they did life andthings; the latter, in a more virile time, and in "the full stream of theworld. "

"Leaves of Grass" is not self-advertised as a work of art. The author hadno thought that you should lay down his book and say, "What a greatartist!" "What a master workman!" He would rather you should say, "What agreat man!" "What a loving comrade!" "What a real democrat!" "What ahealing and helpful force!" He would not have you admire his poetry: hewould have you filled with the breath of a new and larger and saner life;he would be a teacher and trainer of men. 

The love of the precise, the exact, the methodical, is characteristic ofan age of machinery, of a commercial and industrial age like ours. Thesethings are indispensable in the mill and counting-house, but why should weinsist upon them in poetry? Why should we cling to an arbitrary form likethe sonnet? Why should we insist upon a perfect rhyme, as if it was a cogin a wheel? Why not allow and even welcome the freedom of half-rhymes, orsuggestive rhymes? Why, anyway, fold back a sentence or idea to get itinto a prescribed arbitrary form? Why should we call this verse-tinkeringand verse-shaping art, when it is only artifice? Why should we call theman who makes one pretty conceit rhyme with another pretty conceit anartist, and deny the term to the man whose sentences pair with great lawsand forces?

Of course it is much easier for a poet to use the regular verse-forms andverse language than it is to dispense with them; that is, a much lesspoetic capital is required in the former case than in the latter. Thestock forms and the stock language count for a good deal. A very smallamount of original talent may cut quite an imposing figure in the robes ofthe great masters. Require the poet to divest himself of them, and tospeak in the language of men and in the spirit of real things, and see howhe fares. 

XV

Whitman was afraid of what he called the beauty disease. He thought a poetof the first order should be sparing of the direct use of the beautiful, as Nature herself is. His aim should be larger, and beauty should followand not lead. The poet should not say to himself, "Come, I will makesomething beautiful, " but rather "I will make something true, andquickening, and powerful. I will not dress my verse up in fine words andpretty fancies, but I will breathe into it the grit and force andadhesiveness of real things. " Beauty is the flowering of life andfecundity, and it must have deep root in the non-beautiful. 

Beauty, as the master knows it, is a spirit and not an adornment. It isnot merely akin to flowers and gems and rainbows: it is akin to the All. Looking through his eyes, you shall see it in the rude and the savagealso, in rocks and deserts and mountains, in the common as well as in therare, in wrinkled age as well as in rosy youth. 

The non-beautiful holds the world together, holds life together andnourishes it, more than the beautiful. Nature is beautiful because she isso much else first, --yes, and last, and all the time. 

 "For the roughness of the earth and of man encloses as much as the delicates of the earth and of man, And nothing endures but personal qualities. "

Is there not in field, wood, or shore something more precious and tonicthan any special beauties we may chance to find there, --flowers, perfumes, sunsets, --something that we cannot do without, though we can do withoutthese? Is it health, life, power, or what is it?

Whatever it is, it is something analogous to this that we get in Whitman. There is little in his "Leaves" that one would care to quote for its merebeauty, though this element is there also. One may pluck a flower here andthere in his rugged landscape, as in any other; but the flowers are alwaysby the way, and never the main matter. We should not miss them if theywere not there. What delights and invigorates us is in the air, and in thelook of things. The flowers are like our wild blossoms growing under greattrees or amid rocks, never the camellia or tuberose of the garden orhot-house, --something rude and bracing is always present, always a breathof the untamed and aboriginal. 

Whitman's work gives results, and never processes. There is no return ofthe mind upon itself; it descends constantly upon things, persons, realities. It is a rushing stream which will not stop to be analyzed. Ithas been urged that Whitman does not give the purely intellectualsatisfaction that would seem to be warranted by his mental grasp andpenetration. No, nor the æsthetic satisfaction warranted by hisessentially artistic habit of mind. Well, he did not promise satisfactionin anything, but only to put us on the road to satisfaction. His book, hesays, is not a "good lesson, " but it lets down the bars to a good lesson, and that to another, and every one to another still. 

Let me repeat that the sharp, distinct intellectual note--the note ofculture, books, clubs, etc. , such as we get from so many modern writers, you will not get from Whitman. In my opinion, the note he sounds is deeperand better than that. It has been charged by an unfriendly critic that hestrikes lower than the intellect. If it is meant by this that he missesthe intellect, it is not true; he stimulates the intellect as few poetsdo. He strikes lower because he strikes farther. He sounds the note ofcharacter, personality, volition, the note of prophecy, of democracy, andof love. He seems unintellectual to an abnormally intellectual age; heseems unpoetic to a taste formed upon poetic tidbits; he seems irreligiousto standards founded upon the old models of devotional piety; he seemsdisorderly, incoherent to all petty thumb and finger measurements. In hisideas and convictions, Whitman was a modern of the moderns; yet in histype, his tastes, his fundamental make-up, he was primitive, of an earlierrace and age, --before, as Emerson suggests, the gods had cut Man up intomen, with special talents of one kind or another. 

XVI

Take any of Whitman's irregular-flowing lines, and clip and trim them, andcompress them into artificial verse-forms, and what have we gained to makeup for what we have lost? Take his lines called "Reconciliation, " forinstance:--

 "Word over all beautiful as the sky, Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost, That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world; For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead, I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin--I draw near, Bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin. "

Or take his poem called "Old Ireland:"--

 "Far hence amid an isle of wondrous beauty, Crouching over a grave an ancient sorrowful mother, Once a queen, now lean and tatter'd, seated on the ground, Her old white hair drooping, dishevel'd, round her shoulders, At her feet fallen an unused royal harp, Long silent, she, too, long silent, mourning her shrouded hope and heir, Of all the earth her heart most full of sorrow because most full of love. 

 "Yet a word, ancient mother, You need crouch there no longer on the cold ground with forehead between your knees, Oh, you need not sit there veil'd in your old white hair so dishevel'd, For know you the one you mourn is not in that grave, It was an illusion; the son you loved was not really dead, The Lord is not dead, he is risen again young and strong in another country. Even while you wept there by your fallen harp by the grave, What you wept for was translated, pass'd from the grave, The winds favor'd and the sea sail'd it, And now with rosy and new blood, Moves to-day in a new country. "

Or take these lines from "Children of Adam:"--

 "I heard you solemn-sweet pipes of the organ as last Sunday morn I pass'd the church, Winds of autumn, as I walk'd the woods at dusk I heard your long-stretch'd sighs up above so mournful, I heard the perfect Italian tenor singing at the opera, I heard the soprano in the midst of the quartet singing; Heart of my love! you, too, I heard murmuring low through one of the wrists around my head, Heard the pulse of you, when all was still, ringing little bells last night under my ear. "

Put such things as these, or in fact any of the poems, in rhymed andmeasured verse, and you heighten a certain effect, the effect of thehighly wrought, the cunningly devised; but we lose just what the poetwanted to preserve at all hazards, --vista, unconstraint, the effect of thefree-careering forces of nature. 

I always think of a regulation verse-form as a kind of corset which doesnot much disguise a good figure, though it certainly hampers it, and whichis a great help to a poor figure. It covers up deficiencies, and itrestrains exuberances. A personality like Whitman can wear it with easeand grace, as may be seen in a few of his minor poems, but for my part Ilike him best without it. 

XVII

How well we know the language of the conventional poetic! In thislanguage, the language of nine tenths of current poetry, the wind comesup out of the south and kisses the rose's crimson mouth, or it comes outof the wood and rumples the poppy's hood. Morning comes in glisteningsandals, and her footsteps are jeweled with flowers. Everything isbedecked and bejeweled. Nothing is truly seen or truly reported. It is anattempt to paint the world beautiful. It is not beautiful as it is, and wemust deck it out in the colors of the fancy. Now, I do not want the worldpainted for me. I want the grass green or brown, as the case may be; thesky blue, the rocks gray, the soil red; and that the sun should rise andset without any poetic claptrap. What I want is to see these things spinaround a thought, or float on the current of an emotion, as they always doin real poetry. 

Beauty always follows, never leads the great poet. It arises out of theinterior substance and structure of his work, like the bloom of health inthe cheeks. The young poet thinks to win Beauty by direct and persistentwooing of her. He has not learned yet that she comes unsought to thetruthful, the brave, the heroic. Let him think some great thought, experience some noble impulse, give himself with love to life and realityabout him, and Beauty is already his. She is the reward of noble deeds. 

XVIII

The modern standard in art is becoming more and more what has been calledthe canon of the characteristic, as distinguished from the Greek orclassic canon of formal beauty. It is this canon, as Professor Triggssuggests, that we are to apply to Whitman. Dr. Johnson had it in mind whenhe wrote thus of Shakespeare:--

"The work of a correct and regular writer is a garden accurately formedand diligently planted, varied with shades and scented with flowers: thecomposition of Shakespeare is a forest in which oaks extend theirbranches, and pines tower in the air, interspersed sometimes with weedsand brambles, and sometimes giving shelter to myrtles and to roses;filling the eye with awful pomp, and gratifying the mind with endlessdiversity. "

Classic art holds to certain fixed standards; it seeks formal beauty; itholds to order and proportion in external parts; its ideal of naturalbeauty is the well-ordered park or grove or flower-garden. It has a horrorof the wild and savage. Mountains and forests, and tempests and seas, filled the classic mind with terror. Not so with the modern romantic mind, which finds its best stimulus and delight in free, unhampered nature. Itloves the element of mystery and the suggestion of uncontrollable power. The modern mind has a sense of the vast, the infinite, that the Greek hadnot, and it is drawn by informal beauty more than by the formal. 

XIX

It is urged against Whitman that he brings us the materials of poetry, butnot poetry: he brings us the marble block, but not the statue; or hebrings us the brick and mortar, but not the house. False or superficialanalogies mislead us. Poetry is not something made; it is something grown, it is a vital union of the fact and the spirit. If the verse awakens in usthe poetic thrill, the material, whatever it be, must have been touchedwith the transforming spirit of poesy. Why does Whitman's material suggestto any reader that it is poetic material? Because it has already beenbreathed upon by the poetic spirit. A poet may bring the raw material ofpoetry in the sense that he may bring the raw material of a gold coin; thestamp and form you give it does not add to its value. It is doubtful ifany of Whitman's utterances could be worked up into what is called poetrywithout a distinct loss of poetic value. What they would gain in finishthey would lose in suggestiveness. This word "suggestiveness" affords oneof the keys to Whitman. The objection to him I have been consideringarises from the failure of the critic to see and appreciate his avowedpurpose to make his page fruitful in poetic suggestion, rather than insamples of poetic elaboration. "I finish no specimens, " he says. "I showerthem by exhaustless laws, fresh and modern continually, as Nature does. "He is quite content if he awaken the poetic emotion without at allsatisfying it. He would have you more eager and hungry for poetry when youhad finished with him than when you began. He brings the poetic stimulus, and brings it in fuller measure than any contemporary poet; and this isenough for him. 

An eminent musician and composer, the late Dr. Ritter, told me thatreading "Leaves of Grass" excited him to composition as no other poetrydid. Tennyson left him passive and cold, but Whitman set his fingers inmotion at once; he was so fruitful in themes, so suggestive of newharmonies and melodies. He gave the hints, and left his reader to followthem up. This is exactly what Whitman wanted to do. It defines hisattitude toward poetry, towards philosophy, towards religion, --to suggestand set going, to arouse unanswerable questions, and to brace you to meetthem; to bring the materials of poetry, if you will have it so, and leaveyou to make the poem; to start trains of thought, and leave you to pursuethe flight alone. Not a thinker, several critics have urged; no, but thecause of thought in others to an unwonted degree. "Whether you agree withhim or not, " says an Australian essayist, "he will sting you into such ananguish of thought as must in the end be beneficial. " It matters little tohim whether or not you agree with him; what is important is, that youshould think the matter out for yourself. He purposely avoids hemming youin by his conclusions; he would lead you in no direction but your own. "Once more I charge you give play to your self. I charge you leave allfree, as I have left all free. "

No thought, no philosophy, no music, no poetry, in his pages; no, it isall character, impulse, emotion, suggestion. But the true reader of himexperiences all these things: he finds in his pages, if he knows how tolook for it, a profound metaphysic, a profound ethic, a profound æsthetic;a theory of art and poetry which is never stated, but only hinted orsuggested, and which is much more robust and vital than what we are usedto; a theory of good and evil; a view of character and conduct; a theoryof the state and of politics, of the relation of the sexes, etc. , to giveample food for thought and speculation. The Hegelian philosophy is in the"Leaves" as vital as the red corpuscles in the blood, so much is impliedthat is not stated, but only suggested, as in Nature herself. The reallyvast erudition of the work is adroitly concealed, hidden like itsphilosophy, as a tree hides its roots. Readers should not need to be toldthat, in the region of art as of religion, mentality is not first, butspirituality, personality, imagination; and that we do not expect a poet'sthoughts to lie upon his pages like boulders in the field, but rather toshow their presence like elements in the soil. 

 "Love-buds, put before you and within you, whoever you are, Buds to be unfolded on the old terms, If you bring the warmth of the sun to them, they will open, and bring form, color, perfume to you, If you become the aliment and the wet, they will become flowers, fruits, tall branches and trees. "

The early records and sacred books of most peoples contain what is calledthe materials of poetry. The Bible is full of such materials. Englishliterature shows many attempts to work this material up into poetry, butalways with a distinct loss of poetic value. The gold is simply beatenout thin and made to cover more surface, or it is mixed with some basemetal. A recent English poet has attempted to work up the New Testamentrecords into poetry, and the result is for the most part a thin, windydilution of the original. If the record or legend is full of poeticsuggestion, that is enough; to elaborate it, and deck it out in poeticfinery without loss of poetic value, is next to impossible. 

To me the Arthurian legends as they are given in the old books, are morepoetic, more stimulating to the imagination, than they are after they havegone through the verbal upholstering and polishing of such a poet asSwinburne or even Tennyson. These poets add little but words and flowersof fancy, and the heroic simplicity of the original is quite destroyed. 

XX

No critic of repute has been more puzzled and misled by this unwroughtcharacter of our poet's verse than Mr. Edmund Gosse, the London poet andessayist. Mr. Gosse finds Whitman only a potential or possible poet; hiswork is literature in the condition of protoplasm. He is a maker of poemsin solution; the structural change which should have crystallized hisfluid and teeming pages into forms of art never came. It does not occur toMr. Gosse to inquire whether or not something like this may not have beenthe poet's intention. Perhaps this is the secret of the vitality of hiswork, which, as Mr. Gosse says, now, after forty years, shows no sign ofdeclining. Perhaps it was a large, fresh supply of poetic yeast that thepoet really sought to bring us. Undoubtedly Whitman aimed to give his workjust this fluid, generative quality, to put into it the very basicelements of life itself. He feared the "structural change" to which Mr. Gosse refers; he knew it was more or less a change from life to death: thecell and not the crystal; the leaf of grass, and not the gem, is the typeof his sentences. He sacrificed fixed form; above all, did he stop shortof that conscious intellectual elaboration so characteristic of laterpoetry, the better to give the impression and the stimulus of creativeelemental power. It is not to the point to urge that this is not themethod or aim of other poets; that others have used the fixed forms, andfound them plastic and vital in their hands. It was Whitman's aim; thesewere the effects he sought. I think beyond doubt that he gives us theimpression of something dynamic, something akin to the vital forces of theorganic world, much more distinctly and fully than any other poet who haslived. 

Whitman always aimed to make his reader an active partner with him in hispoetic enterprise. "I seek less, " he says, "to state or display any themeor thought, and more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere of thetheme or thought, there to pursue your own flight. " This trait is broughtout by Mr. Gosse in a little allegory. "Every reader who comes toWhitman, " he says, "starts upon an expedition to the virgin forest. Hemust take his conveniences with him. He will make of the excursion whathis own spirit dictates. [We generally do, in such cases, Mr. Gosse. ]There are solitudes, fresh air, rough landscape, and a well of water, butif he wishes to enjoy the latter he must bring his own cup with him. " Thisphase of Whitman's work has never been more clearly defined. Mr. Gosseutters it as an adverse criticism. It is true exposition, however we takeit, what we get out of Whitman depends so largely upon what we bring tohim. Readers will not all get the same. We do not all get the same out ofa walk or a mountain climb. We get out of him in proportion to thesympathetic and interpretative power of our own spirits. Have you thebrooding, warming, vivifying mother-mind? That vague, elusive, incommensurable something in the "Leaves" that led Symonds to say thattalking about Whitman was like talking about the universe, --that seems tochallenge our pursuit and definition, that takes on so many differentaspects to so many different minds, --it seems to be this that has led Mr. Gosse to persuade himself that there is no real Walt Whitman, no man whomwe can take, as we take any other figure in literature, as an "entity ofpositive value and definite characteristics, " but a mere mass of literaryprotoplasm that takes the instant impression of whatever mood approachesit. Stevenson finds a Stevenson in it, Mr. Symonds finds a Symonds, Emerson finds an Emerson, etc. Truly may our poet say, "I containmultitudes. " In what other poet do these men, or others like them, findthemselves?

Whitman was a powerful solvent undoubtedly. He never hardens into anythinglike a system, or into mere intellectual propositions. One of his ownphrases, "the fluid and swallowing soul, " is descriptive of this trait ofhim. One source of his charm is, that we each see some phase of ourselvesin him, as Mr. Gosse suggests. Above all things is he potential andindicative, bard of "flowing mouth and indicative hand. " In his"Inscriptions" he says:--

 "I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a casual look upon you and then averts his face, Leaving it to you to prove and define it, Expecting the main things from you. "

This withholding and half-averted glancing, then, on the part of the poet, is deliberate and enters into the scheme of the work. Mr. Gosse would haveshown himself a sounder critic had he penetrated the poet's purpose inthis respect, and shown whether or not he had violated the canons he hadset up for his own guidance. We do not condemn a creative work when itdeparts from some rule or precedent, but when it violates its ownprinciple, when it is not consistent with itself, when it hath not eyes tosee, or ears to hear, or hands to reach what lies within its own sphere. Art, in the plastic realms of written language, may set its mind uponelaboration, upon structural finish and proportion, upon exact forms andcompensations, as in architecture, or it may set its mind uponsuggestion, indirection, and the flowing, changing forms of organicnature. It is as much art in the one case as in the other. To get rid ofall visible artifice is, of course, the great thing in both cases. Thereis so little apparent artifice in Whitman's case that he has been accusedof being entirely without art, and of throwing his matter together in ahaphazard way, --"without thought, without selection, " without"composition, evolution, vertebration of style, " says Mr. Gosse. Yet hiswork more than holds its own in a field where these things alone aresupposed to insure success. Whitman covers up his processes well, andknows how to hit his mark without seeming to take aim. The verdicts uponhim are mainly contradictory, because each critic only takes in a part ofhis scheme. Mr. Stedman finds him a formalist. Mr. Gosse finds in him anegation of all form. The London critic says he is without thought. ABoston critic speaks of what he happily calls the "waves of thought" inhis work, --vast mind-impulses that lift and sway great masses of concretefacts and incidents. Whitman knew from the start that he would puzzle andbaffle his critics, and would escape from them like air when they feltmost sure they had him in their verbal nets. So it has been from thefirst, and so it continues to be. Without one thing, he says, it isuseless to read him; and of what that one thing needful is, he gives onlythe vaguest hint, only a "significant look. "

XXI

I may here notice two objections to Whitman urged by Mr. Stedman, --acritic for whose opinion I have great respect, and a man for whom I have agenuine affection. With all his boasted breadth and tolerance, Whitman, says my friend, is narrow; and, with all his vaunted escape from theshackles of verse-form, he is a formalist: his "irregular, manneristicchant" is as much at the extreme of artificiality as is the sonnet. Thesecertainly are faults that one does not readily associate with the work ofWhitman. But then I remember that the French critic, Scherer, chargesCarlyle, the apostle of the gospel of sincerity, with being insincere andguilty of canting about cant. If Carlyle is insincere, I think it verylikely that Whitman may be narrow and hide-bound. These things are so mucha matter of temperament that one cannot judge for another. Yet one oughtnot to confound narrowness and breadth, or little and big. All earnest, uncompromising men are more or less open to the charge of narrowness. Aman is narrow when he concentrates himself upon a point; even acannon-shot is. Whitman was narrow in the sense that he was at timesmonotonous; that he sought but few effects, that he poured himself outmainly in one channel, that he struck chiefly the major chords of life. His "Leaves" do not show a great range of artistic motifs. A versatile, many-sided nature he certainly was not; a large, broad, tolerant naturehe as certainly was. He does not assume many and diverse forms like apurely artistic talent, sporting with and masquerading in all the elementsof life, like Shakespeare; but in his own proper form, and in his ownproper person, he gives a sense of vastness and power that areunapproached in modern literature. He asserts himself uncompromisingly, but he would have you do the same. "He who spreads a wider breast than myown proves the width of my own. " "He most honors my style who learns underit to destroy the teacher. " His highest hope is to be the soil of superiorpoems. 

Mr. Stedman thinks he detects in the poet a partiality for the coarser, commoner elements of our humanity over the finer and choicer, --for the"rough" over the gentleman. But when all things have been duly considered, it will be found, I think, that he finally rests only with great personalqualities and traits. He is drawn by powerful, natural persons, whereverfound, --men and women self-poised, fully equipped on all sides:--

 "I announce a great individual, fluid as Nature, chaste, affectionate, compassionate, fully arm'd, I announce a life that shall be copious, vehement, spiritual, bold, "--

and much more to the same effect. 

 "I say nourish a great intellect, a great brain: If I have said anything to the contrary, I hereby retract it. "

Whitman is a formalist, just as every man who has a way of his own ofsaying and doing things, no matter how natural, is a formalist; but he isnot a stickler for form of any sort. He has his own proper form, ofcourse, which he rarely departs from. At one extreme of artificiality Mr. Stedman apparently places the sonnet. This is an arbitrary form; its rulesare inflexible; it is something cut and shaped and fitted together after apredetermined pattern, and to this extent is artificial. If Whitman'sirregularity was equally studied; if it gave us the same sense ofsomething cunningly planned and wrought to a particular end, clipped here, curbed there, folded back in this line, drawn out in that, and attainingto a certain mechanical proportion and balance as a whole, --then therewould be good ground for the critic's charge. But such is not the case. Whitman did not have, nor claim to have, the architectonic power of thegreat constructive poets. He did not build the lofty rhyme. He did notbuild anything, strictly speaking. He let himself go. He named his bookafter the grass, which makes a carpet over the earth, and which is a signand a presence rather than a form. 

XXII

Whitman's defects flow out of his great qualities. What we might expectfrom his size, his sense of mass and multitude, would be an occasionalcumbrousness, turgidity, unwieldiness, ineffectualness: what we mightexpect from his vivid realism would be an occasional over-rankness orgrossness; from his bluntness, a rudeness; from his passion for country, alittle spread-eagleism; from his masterly use of indirection, occasionalobscurity; from his mystic identification of himself with what iscommonest, cheapest, nearest, a touch at times of the vulgar and unworthy;from his tremendous practical democracy, a bias at times toward too low anaverage; from his purpose "to effuse egotism and show it underlying all, "may arise a little too much self-assertion, etc. The price paid for hisstrenuousness and earnestness will be a want of humor; his determinationto glorify the human body, as God made it, will bring him in collisionwith our notions of the decent, the proper; the "courageous, clear voice"with which he seeks to prove the sexual organs and acts "illustrious, "will result in his being excluded from good society; his "heroic nudity"will be apt to set the good dame, Belles-lettres, all a-shiver; hishealthful coarseness and godlike candor will put all the respectable folkto flight. 

XXIII

To say that Whitman is a poet in undress is true within certain limits. Ifit conveys the impression that he is careless or inapt in the use oflanguage, or that the word is not always the fit word, the best word, thesaying does him injustice. No man ever searched more diligently for theright word--for just the right word--than did Whitman. He would wait fordays and weeks for the one ultimate epithet. How long he pressed thelanguage for some word or phrase that would express the sense of theevening call of the robin, and died without the sight! But his languagenever obtrudes itself. It has never stood before the mirror, it does notconsciously challenge your admiration, it is not obviously studied, it isnever on dress parade. His matchless phrases seem like chance hits, somuch so that some critics have wondered how he happened to _stumble_ uponthem. His verse is not dressed up, because it has so few of the artificialadjuncts of poetry, --no finery or stuck-on ornament, --nothing obtrusivelybeautiful or poetic; and because it bears itself with the freedom andnonchalance of a man in his every-day attire. 

But it is always in a measure misleading to compare language with dress, to say that a poet clothes his thought, etc. The language is the thought;it is an incarnation, not an outside tailoring. To improve the expressionis to improve the thought. In the most vital writing, the thought is nude;the mind of the reader touches something alive and real. When we begin tohear the rustle of a pompous or highly wrought vocabulary, when the manbegins to dress his commonplace ideas up in fine phrases, we have enoughof him. 

Indeed, it is only the mechanical writer who may be said to "clothe" hisideas with words; the real poet thinks through words. 

XXIV

I see that a plausible criticism might be made against Whitman, perhapshas been made, that in him we find the big merely, --strength withoutpower, size without quality. A hasty reader might carry away thisimpression from his work, because undoubtedly one of the most obviousthings about him is his great size. It is impossible not to feel that hereis a large body of some sort. We have come upon a great river, a greatlake, an immense plain, a rugged mountain. We feel that this mind requiresa large space to turn in. The page nearly always gives a sense of mass andmultitude. All attempts at the playful or humorous seem ungainly. Thestyle is processional and agglomerative. Out of these vast, rolling, cloud-like masses does there leap forth the true lightning? It seems to methere can be no doubt about that. The spirit easily triumphs. There is notonly mass, there is penetration; not only vastness, there is sublimity;not only breadth, there is quality and charm. He is both Dantesque andDarwinian, as has been said. 

Mr. Symonds was impressed with this quality of vastness in Whitman, and, despairing of conveying an adequate notion of him by any process ofliterary analysis, resorts to the use of a succession of metaphors, --thesymbolic use of objects that convey the idea of size and power. Thus, "heis Behemoth, wallowing in primeval jungles;" "he is a gigantic elk orbuffalo, trampling the grass of the wilderness;" "he is an immense tree, akind of Ygdrasil, striking its roots deep down into the bowels of theworld;" "he is the circumambient air in which float shadowy shapes, risemirage-towers and palm-groves;" "he is the globe itself, --all seas, lands, forests, climates, storms, snows, sunshines, rains of universalearth. "

Colonel Ingersoll said there was something in him akin to mountains andplains, and to the globe itself. 

But Whitman is something more than a literary colossus. Pigmies can onlyclaim pigmy honors. Size, after all, rules in this universe, because sizeand power go together. The large bodies rule the small. There is noimpression of greatness in art without something that is analogous tosize, --breadth, depth, height. The sense of vastness is never the gift ofa minor poet. You cannot paint Niagara on the thumb-nail. Great artistsare distinguished from small by the majesty of their conceptions. 

Whitman's air is continental. He implies a big country, vast masses ofhumanity, sweeping and stirring times, the triumphs of science and theindustrial age. He is the poet of mass and multitude. In his pages thingsare grouped and on the run, as it were. Little detail, little or noelaboration, little or no development of a theme, no minute studiedeffects so dear to the poets, but glimpses, suggestions, rapid surveys, sweeping movements, processions of objects, vista, vastness, --everywherethe effect of a man overlooking great spaces and calling off thesignificant and interesting points. He never stops to paint; he iscontented to suggest. His "Leaves" are a rapid, joyous survey of theforces and objects of the universe, first with reference to character andpersonality, and next with reference to America and democracy. His methodof treatment is wholesale and accumulative. It is typified by this passagein his first poem:--

 "Listen! I will be honest with you, I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes. 

 "I tramp a perpetual journey, My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods, No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair, I have no chair, no church, no philosophy, I lead no man to a dinner table, library, or exchange, But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll, My left hand hooking you round the waist, My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and a plain public road. "

He deals with the major elements of life, and always aims at largeeffects. "Lover of populous pavements, " he is occupied with large thoughtsand images, with races, eras, multitudes, processions. His salute is tothe world. He keeps the whole geography of his country and of the globebefore him; his purpose in his poems spans the whole modern world. Heviews life as from some eminence from which many shades and differencesdisappear. He sees things in mass. Many of our cherished conventionsdisappear from his point of view. He sees the fundamental and necessarythings. His vision is sweeping and final. He tries himself by the orbs. His standards of poetry and art are astronomic. He sees his own likenessin the earth. His rapture springs, not so much from the contemplation ofbits and parts as from the contemplation of the whole. There is a breadthof sympathy and of interest that does not mind particulars. He says:--

 "It is no small matter, this round and delicious globe, moving so exactly in its orbit forever and ever, without one jolt, or the untruth of a single second, I do not think it was made in six days, nor in ten thousand years, nor ten billions of years, Nor planned and built one thing after another as an architect plans and builds a house. "

In old age he sees "the estuary that enlarges and spreads itself grandlyas it pours into the sea. " He looks upon all things at a certain remove. These are typical lines:--

 "A thousand perfect men and women appear, Around each gathers a cluster of friends, and gay children and youths, with offerings. "

 "Women sit, or move to and fro, some old, some young, The young are beautiful--but the old are more beautiful than the young. "

"The Runner, " "A Farm Picture, " and scores of others, are to the sameeffect. Always wholes, total impressions, --always a view as of a "strongbird on pinion free. " Few details, but panoramic effects; not the flower, but the landscape; not a tree, but a forest; not a street corner, but acity. The title of one of his poems, "A Song of the Rolling Earth, " mightstand as the title of the book. When he gathers details and specialfeatures he masses them like a bouquet of herbs and flowers. No cameocarving, but large, bold, rough, heroic sculpturing. The poetry is alwaysin the totals, the breadth, the sweep of conception. The part that islocal, specific, genre, near at hand, is Whitman himself; his personalityis the background across which it all flits. 

We make a mistake when we demand of Whitman what the other poets giveus, --studies, embroidery, delicate tracings, pleasing artistic effects, rounded and finished specimens. We shall understand him better if weinquire what his own standards are, what kind of a poet he would be. Hetells us over and over again that he would emulate the great forces andprocesses of Nature. He seeks for hints in the sea, the mountain, in theorbs themselves. In the wild splendor and savageness of a Colorado canyonhe sees a spirit kindred to his own. 

He dwells fondly, significantly, upon the amplitude, the coarseness, andwhat he calls the sexuality, of the earth, and upon its great charity andequilibrium. 

"The earth, " he says, "does not withhold; it is generous enough:--

 "The truths of the earth continually wait, they are not so concealed either, They are calm, subtle, untransmissible by print. They are imbued through all things, conveying themselves willingly, Conveying a sentiment and invitation of the earth--I utter and utter!"

 * * * * *

 "The earth does not argue, Is not pathetic, has no arrangements, Does not scream, haste, persuade, threaten, promise, Makes no discriminations, has no conceivable failures, Closes nothing, refuses nothing, shuts none out. Of all the powers, objects, states, it notifies, shuts none out. "

He says the best of life

 "Is not what you anticipated--it is cheaper, easier, nearer, "

and that the earth affords the final standard of all things:--

 "I swear there can be no theory of any account unless it corroborate the theory of the earth, No politics, art, religion, behavior, or what not, is of account unless it compares with the amplitude of the earth, Unless it face the exactness, vitality, impartiality, rectitude, of the earth. "

No one can make a study of our poet without being deeply impressed withthese and kindred passages:--

 "The maker of poems settles justice, reality, immortality, His insight and power encircle things and the human race. The singers do not beget, only the Poet begets, The singers are welcom'd, understood, appear often enough, but rare has the day been, likewise the spot, of the birth of the maker of poems, the Answerer, (Not every century, nor every five centuries has contain'd such a day, for all its names. )

 * * * * *

 "All this time and at all times wait the words of true poems, The words of true poems do not merely please, The true poets are not followers of beauty, but the august masters of beauty; The greatness of sons is the exuding of the greatness of mothers and fathers, The words of true poems are the tuft and final applause of science. 

 "Divine instinct, breadth of vision, the law of reason, health, rudeness of body, withdrawnness, Gayety, sun-tan, air-sweetness, such are some of the words of poems, The sailor, the traveler, underlie the maker of poems, the Answerer, The builder, geometer, chemist, anatomist, phrenologist, artist, all these underlie the maker of poems, the Answerer. The words of the true poems give you more than poems; They give you to form for yourself poems, religions, politics, war, peace, behavior, histories, essays, daily life, and everything else. They balance ranks, colors, races, creeds, and the sexes; They do not seek beauty, they are sought, Forever touching them or close upon them follows beauty, longing, fain, love-sick. They prepare for death, yet are they not the finish, but rather the outset, They bring none to his or her terminus or to be contented and full, Whom they take they take into space to behold the birth of stars, to learn one of the meanings, To launch off with absolute faith, to sweep through the ceaseless rings and never be quiet again. 

 * * * * *

 "Of these States the poet is the equable man, Not in him but off from him things are grotesque, eccentric, fail of their full returns, Nothing out of its place is good, nothing in its place is bad, He bestows on every object or quality its fit proportion, neither more nor less, He is the arbiter of the diverse, he is the key, He is the equalizer of his age and land, He supplies what wants supplying, he checks what wants checking, In peace out of him speaks the spirit of peace, large, rich, thrifty, building populous towns, encouraging agriculture, arts, commerce, lighting the study of man, the soul, health, immortality, government, In war he is the best backer of the war, he fetches artillery as good as the engineer's, he can make every word he speaks draw blood, The years straying toward infidelity he withholds by his steady faith, He is no arguer, he is judgment (nature accepts him absolutely), He judges not as the judge judges, but as the sun falling round a helpless thing, As he sees the farthest he has the most faith, His thoughts are the hymns of the praise of things, In the dispute on God and eternity he is silent, He sees eternity less like a play with a prologue and denouement, He sees eternity in men and women, he does not see men and omen as dreams or dots. 

 * * * * *

 "Rhymes and rhymers pass away, poems distill'd from other poems pass away, The swarms of reflectors and the polite pass, and leave ashes, Admirers, impostors, obedient persons, make but the soil of literature. "

Folded up in these sentences, often many times folded up, is Whitman'sidea of the poet, the begetter, the reconciler; not the priest of thebeautiful, but the master of the All, who does not appear once incenturies. 

We hear nothing of the popular conception of the poet, well reflected inthese lines of Tennyson:--

 "The poet in a golden clime was born, with golden stars above. "

"Golden stars" and "golden climes" do not figure at all in Whitman'spages; the spirit of romance is sternly excluded. 

Whitman's ideal poet is the most composite man, rich in temperament, rankin the human attributes, embracing races and eras in himself. All men seethemselves in him:--

 "The mechanic takes him for a mechanic, And the soldier supposes him to be a soldier, and the sailor that he has followed the sea, And the authors take him for an author, and the artists for an artist, And the laborers perceive he could labor with them and love them, No matter what the work is, that he is the one to follow it, or has followed it, No matter what the nation, that he might find his brothers and sisters there. 

 * * * * *

 "The gentleman of perfect blood acknowledges his perfect blood, The insulter, the prostitute, the angry person, the beggar, see themselves in the ways of him, he strangely transmutes them, They are not vile any more, they hardly know themselves they are so grown. "

Let us hold the poet to his own ideals, and not condemn him because he hasnot aimed at something foreign to himself. 

The questions which Whitman puts to him who would be an American poet mayfairly be put to himself. 

 "Are you faithful to things? Do you teach what the land and sea, the bodies of men, womanhood, amativeness, heroic angers, teach? Have you sped through fleeting customs, popularities? Can you hold your hand against all seductions, follies, whirls, fierce contentions? are you very strong? are you really of the whole people? Are you not of some coterie? some school, or mere religion? Are you done with reviews and criticisms of life? animating now to life itself? Have you vivified yourself from the maternity of these States? Have you, too, the old, ever-fresh forbearance and impartiality?

 * * * * *

 What is this you bring my America? Is it uniform with my country? Is it not something that has been better done or told before? Have you not imported this or the spirit of it in some ship? Is it not a mere tale? a rhyme? a pettiness?--is the good old cause in it? Has it not dangled long at the heels of the poets, politicians, literats of enemies' lands? Does it not assume that what is notoriously gone is still here? Does it answer universal needs? will it improve manners? Can your performance face the open fields and the seaside? Will it absorb into me as I absorb food, air, to appear again in my strength, gait, face? Have real employments contributed to it? Original makers, not mere amanuenses?

So far as Whitman's poetry falls within any of the old divisions it islyrical, --a personal and individual utterance. Open the book anywhere andyou are face to face with a man. His eye is fixed upon you. It is a man'svoice you hear, and it is directed to _you_. He is not elaborating atheme: he is suggesting a relation or hinting a meaning. He is notchiseling, or carving a work of art: he is roughly outlining a man; he isplanting a seed, or tilling a field. 

XXV

I believe it was the lamented Professor Clifford who first used the term"cosmic emotion" in connection with "Leaves of Grass. " Whitman'satmosphere is so distinctly outside of and above that which ministers toour social and domestic wants, --the confined and perfumed air of an indoorlife; his mood and temper are so habitually begotten by the contemplationof the orbs and the laws and processes of universal nature, that thephrase often comes to mind in considering him. He is not in any sense, except perhaps in a few minor pieces, a domestic and fireside poet, --asolace to our social instincts and cultivated ideals. He is too large, tooaboriginal, too elemental, too strong for that. I seem to understand andappreciate him best when I keep in mind the earth as a whole, and itsrelation to the system. Any large view or thought, or survey of life ormankind, is a preparation for him. He demands the outdoor temper andhabit, he demands a sense of space and power, he demands above all thingsa feeling for reality. "Vastness" is a word that applies to him; abysmalman, cosmic consciousness, the standards of the natural universal, --allhint some phase of his genius. His survey of life and duty is from a pointnot included in any four walls, or in any school or convention. It is asurvey from out the depths of being; the breath of worlds and systems isin these utterances. His treatment of sex, of comradeship, of death, ofdemocracy, of religion, of art, of immortality, is in the spirit of thegreat out-of-doors of the universe; the point of view is cosmic ratherthan personal or philanthropic. What charity is this!--the charity ofsunlight that spares nothing and turns away from nothing. What "heroicnudity"! like the nakedness of rocks and winter trees. What sexuality!like the lust of spring or the push of tides. What welcome to death, asonly the night which proves the day!

XXVI

This orbic nature which so thrills and fills Whitman is not at all akin tothat which we get in the so-called nature-poets of Wordsworth and hisschool, --the charm of privacy, of the sequestered, the cosy, --qualitiesthat belong to the art of a domestic, home-loving race, and to lovers ofsolitude. Tennyson's poetry abounds in these qualities; so doesWordsworth's. There is less of them in Browning, and more of them in theyounger poets. That communing with nature, those dear friendships withbirds and flowers, that gentle wooing of the wild and sylvan, that flavorof the rural, the bucolic, --all these are important features in thecurrent popular poetry, but they are not to any marked extentcharacteristic of Whitman. The sentiment of domesticity, love as asentiment; the attraction of children, home and fireside; the attractionof books, art, travel; our pleasure in the choice, the refined, theartificial, --these are not the things you are to demand of Whitman. You donot demand them of Homer or Dante or the Biblical writers. We are todemand of him the major things, primary things; the lift of greatemotions; the cosmic, the universal; the joy of health, of selfhood; thestimulus of the real, the modern, the American; always the large, thevirile; always perfect acceptance and triumph. 

Whitman's free use of the speech of the common people is doubtlessoffensive to a fastidious literary taste. Such phrases as "I will be evenwith you, " "what would it amount to, " "give in, " "not one jot less;""young fellows, " "old fellows, " "stuck up, " "every bit as much, " "week inand week out, " and a thousand others, would jar on the page of any otherpoet more than on his. 

XXVII

William Rossetti says his language has a certain ultimate quality. Anothercritic speaks of his absolute use of language. Colonel Ingersoll creditshim with more supreme words than have been uttered by any other man of ourtime. 

The power to use words was in Whitman's eyes a divine power, and wasbought with a price:--

 "For only at last after many years, after chastity, friendship, procreation, prudence, and nakedness, After treading ground, and breasting river and lake, After a loosen'd throat, after absorbing eras, temperaments, races, after knowledge, freedom, crimes, After complete faith, after clarifying elevations and removing obstructions, After these and more, it is just possible there comes to a man, a woman, the divine power to speak words. "

Whitman's sense of composition and his rare artistic faculty of usinglanguage are seen, as John Addington Symonds says, in the "countless clearand perfect phrases" "which are hung, like golden medals of consummateworkmanship and incised form, in rich clusters over every poem heproduced. And, what he aimed at above all, these phrases are redolent ofthe very spirit of the emotions they suggest, communicate the breadth andlargeness of the natural things they indicate, embody the essence ofrealities in living words which palpitate and burn forever. "

The great poet is always more or less the original, the abysmal man. He isface to face with universal laws and conditions. He speaks out of agreater exaltation of sentiment than the prose-writer. He takes liberties;he speaks for all men; he is a bird on "pinions free. "

XXVIII

In saying or implying that Whitman's aim was not primarily literary orartistic, I am liable to be misunderstood; and when Whitman himself says, "No one will get at my verses who insists upon viewing them as a literaryperformance, or attempt at such performance, or as aiming mainly towardart or æstheticism, " he exposes himself to the same misconception. It isthe literary and poetic value of his verses alone that can save them. Their philosophy, their democracy, their vehement patriotism, theirreligious ardor, their spirit of comradeship, or what not, will not alonesuffice. All depends upon the manner in which these things are presentedto us. Do we get the reality, or words about the reality? No matter whatthe content of the verse, unless into the whole is breathed the breath ofthe true creative artist they will surely perish. Oblivion awaits everyutterance not touched with the life of the spirit. Whitman was asessentially an artist as was Shakespeare or Dante; his work shows the samefusion of imagination, will, emotion, personality; it carries the samequality of real things, --not the same shaping, constructive power, but thesame quickening, stimulating power, the same magic use of words. Theartist in him is less conscious of itself, is less differentiated from theman, than in the other poets. He objected to having his work estimated forits literary value alone, but in so doing he used the word in a narrowsense. 

After all these ages of the assiduous cultivation of literature, there hasgrown up in men a kind of lust of the mere art of writing, just as, afterso many generations of religious training, there has grown up a passionfor religious forms and observances. "Mere literature" has come to be acurrent phrase in criticism, meaning, I suppose, that the production towhich it is applied is notable only for good craftsmanship. In the samespirit one speaks of mere scholarship, or of a certain type of man as amere gentleman. It was mere literature that Whitman was afraid of, theæsthetic disease, the passion for letters, for poetry, divorced from loveof life and of things. None knew better than he that the ultimate value ofany imaginative and emotional work, even of the Bible, is its literaryvalue. Its spiritual and religious value is inseparably connected with itsliterary value. 

"Leaves of Grass" is not bookish; it is always the voice of a man, and notof a scholar or conventional poet, that addresses us. We all imbue wordsmore or less with meanings of our own; but, from the point of view I amnow essaying, literature is the largest fact, and embraces all inspiredutterances. The hymn-book seeks to embody or awaken religious emotionalone; would its religious value be less if its poetic value were more? Ithink not. The best of the Psalms of David, from the religious point ofview, are the best from the literary point of view. What reaches andthrills the soul, --that is great art. What arouses the passions--mirth, anger, indignation, pity--may or may not be true art. No one, forinstance, can read "Uncle Tom's Cabin" without tears, laughter, anger; butno one, I fancy, could ever get from it that deep, tranquil pleasure andedification that the great imaginative works impart. Keble's poetry ismore obviously religious than Wordsworth's or Arnold's, but howshort-lived, because it is not embalmed in the true artistic spirit! Inall the great poems, there is something as deep and calm as the light andthe sky, and as common and universal. I find this something in Whitman. Insaying, therefore, that his aim was ulterior to that of art, that he wasnot begotten by the literary spirit, I only mean that his aim was that ofthe largest art, and of the most vital and comprehensive literature. Weshould have heard the last of his "Leaves" long ago had they not possessedunmistakably the vitality of true literature, "incomparable things, incomparably well said, " as Emerson remarked. 

A scientific or philosophical work lives independently of its literarymerit, but an emotional and imaginative work lives only by virtue of itsliterary merit. Different meanings may be attached to these words"literary merit" by different persons. I use them as meaning that vitaland imaginative use of language which is the characteristic of all trueliterature. The most effective way of saying a thing in the region of thesentiments and emotions, --that is the true literary way. 

HIS RELATION TO LIFE AND MORALS

I

I have divided my subject into many chapters, and given to each a separateheading, yet I am aware that they are all but slight variations of asingle theme, --viz. , Whitman's reliance upon absolute nature. That theremight be no mistake about it, and that his reader might at once be put inpossession of his point of view, the poet declared at the outset of hiscareer that at every hazard he should let nature speak. 

 "Creeds and schools in abeyance Retiring back awhile, sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten, I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard, Nature without check, with original energy. "

The hazard of letting nature speak will, of course, be great, --the hazardof gross misapprehension on the part of the public, and of hesitancy andinadequacy on the part of the poet. The latter danger, I think, was safelypassed; Whitman never flinched or wavered for a moment, and that hiscriticism is adequate seems to me equally obvious. But the formercontingency--the gross misapprehension of the public, even the wiserpublic--has been astounding. He has been read in a narrow, literal, bourgeois spirit. The personal pronoun, which he uses so freely, has beentaken to stand for the private individual Walt Whitman, so that he hasbeen looked upon as a compound of egotism and licentiousness. Hischaracter has been traduced, and his purpose in the "Leaves" entirelymisunderstood. 

We see at a glance that his attitude towards nature, towards God, towardsthe body and the soul, reverses many of the old ascetic theologicalconceptions. 

All is good, all is as it should be; to abase the body is to abase thesoul. Man is divine inside and out, and is no more divine about the headthan about the loins. It is from this point of view that he has launchedhis work. He believed the time had come for an utterance out of radical, uncompromising human nature; let conventions and refinements stand back, let nature, let the soul, let the elemental forces speak; let the body, the passions, sex, be exalted; the stone rejected by the builders shall bethe chief stone in the corner. Evil shall be shown to be a part of thegood, and death shall be welcomed as joyously as life. 

Whitman says his poems will do just as much evil as good, and perhapsmore. To many readers this confession of itself would be his condemnation. To others it would be an evidence of his candor and breadth of view. Isuppose all great vital forces, whether embodied in a man or in a book, work evil as well as good. If they do not, they only tickle the surfaceof things. Has not the Bible worked evil also? Some think more evil thangood. The dews and the rains and the sunshine work evil. 

From Whitman's point of view, there is no good without evil; evil is anunripe kind of good. There is no light without darkness, no life withoutdeath, no growth without pain and struggle. Beware the emasculated good, the good by exclusion rather than by victory. "Leaves of Grass" will workevil on evil minds, --on narrow, unbalanced minds. It is not a guide, butan inspiration; not a remedy, but health and strength. Art does not preachdirectly, but indirectly; it is moral by its spirit, and the mood andtemper it begets. 

Whitman, in celebrating manly pride, self-reliance, the deliciousness ofsex; in glorifying the body, the natural passions and appetites, nativity;in identifying himself with criminals and low or lewd persons; in franklyimputing to himself all sins men are guilty of, runs the risk, of course, of being read in a spirit less generous and redemptive than his own. 

The charity of the poet may stimulate the license of the libertine; theoptimism of the seer may confirm the evil-doer; the equality of thedemocrat may foster the insolence of the rowdy. This is our lookout andnot the poet's. We take the same chances with him that we do with nature;we are to trim our sails to the breeze he brings; we are to sow wheat andnot tares for his rains to water. 

Whitman's glorification of the body has led some critics to say that he isthe poet of the body only. But it is just as true to say he is the poet ofthe soul only. He always seeks the spiritual through the material. Hetreats the body and the soul as one, and he treats all things as havingreference to the soul. 

 "I will not make a poem, nor the least part, of a poem, but has reference to the soul, Because, having look'd at the objects of the universe, I find there is no one, nor any particle of one, but has reference to the soul. "

The curious physiological strain which runs through the poems is to beconsidered in the light of this idea. He exalts the body because in doingso he exalts the soul. 

 "Sure as the earth swims through the heavens, does every one of its objects pass into spiritual results. "

II

The reader of Whitman must do his or her own moralizing; the poet is herenot to deprecate or criticise, but to love and celebrate; he has nopartialities; our notions of morality do not concern him; he exploits theaverage man just as he finds him; he _is_ the average man for the timebeing and confesses to all his sins and shortcomings, and we will make ofthe result good or evil, according to our mental horizon. That his work isunmixed good is the last thing the poet would claim for it. He has not, after the easy fashion of the moralist, set the good here and the badthere; he has blended them as they are in nature and in life; our profitand discipline begin when we have found out whither he finally tends, orwhen we have mastered him and extracted the good he holds. If we expect heis going to preach an austere system of morality to us, or any system ofmorality, we are doomed to disappointment. Does Nature preach such asystem? does Nature preach at all? neither will he. He presents you theelements of good and evil in himself in vital fusion and play; your partis to see how the totals are at last good. 

It is objected that Whitman is too persistent in declaring himself ananimal, when the thing a man is least likely to forget is that he is ananimal and the thing he is least likely to remember is that he is a spiritand a child of God. But Whitman insists with the same determination thathe is a spirit and an heir of immortality, --not as one who has cheated thedevil of his due, but as one who shares the privileges and felicities ofall, and who finds the divine in the human. Indeed it is here that hesounds his most joyous and triumphant note. No such faith in spiritualresults, no such conviction of the truth of immortality, no suchdetermined recognition of the unseen world as the final reality is to befound in modern poetry. 

As I have said, Whitman aimed to put his whole nature in a poem--thephysical or physiological, the spiritual, the æsthetic andintellectual, --without giving any undue prominence to either. If he hasnot done so, if he has made the animal and sexual too pronounced, more sothan nature will justify in the best proportioned man, then and then onlyis his artistic scheme vitiated and his work truly immoral. 

It may be true that the thing a man is least likely to forget is that heis an animal; what he is most likely to forget, is that the animal is justas sacred and important as any other part; indeed that it is the basis ofall, and that a sane and healthful and powerful spirituality andintellectuality can only flow out of a sane and healthful animality. 

 "I believe in you, my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you, And you must not be abased to the other. "

III

Furthermore, Whitman's main problem is to project into literature the newdemocratic man as he conceives him, --the man of the future, intenselyAmerican, but in the broadest sense human and cosmopolitan; he is toproject him on a scale large enough for all uses and conditions, ignoringthe feudal and aristocratic types which have for the most part dominatedliterature, and matching them with a type more copious in friendship, charity, sympathy, religion, candor, and of equal egoism and power. 

It is to exploit and enforce and illustrate this type or character that"Leaves of Grass" is written. The poems are the drama of this newdemocratic man. This type Whitman finds in himself. He does not have tocreate it as Shakespeare did Hamlet or Lear; he has only to discover itin himself. He is it and he gives it free utterance. His work is, therefore, as he says, the poem of himself, --himself writtenlarge, --written as upon the face of the continent, written in the typesand events he finds on all sides. He sees himself in all men, the bad aswell as the good, and he sees all men in himself. All the stupendousclaims he makes for himself he makes for others. His egotism is vicariousand embraces the world. It is not the private individual Walt Whitman thatmakes these stupendous claims for himself; it is Walt Whitman as thespokesman of the genius of American democracy. He is not to discuss aquestion. He is to outline a character, he is to incarnate a principle. The essayist or philosopher may discuss the value of any given idea, --maytalk about it; the creative artist alone can give us the thing itself, theconcrete flesh-and-blood reality. Whitman is not only to make this survey, to launch this criticism; he is to embody it in a living humanpersonality, and enable us to see the world of man and morals through itseyes. What with the scientist, the philosopher, is thought, must beemotion and passion with him. 

Whitman promises that we shall share with him "two greatnesses, and athird one rising inclusive and more resplendent, "--

 "The greatness of Love and Democracy and the greatness of Religion"--

not merely as ideas, but as living impulses. He is to show the spirit ofabsolute, impartial nature, incarnated in a human being, imbued withlove, democracy, and religion, moving amid the scenes and events of theNew World, sounding all the joys and abandonments of life, and re-readingthe oracles from the American point of view. And the utterance launchedforth is to be imbued with poetic passion. 

Whitman always aims at a complete human synthesis, and leaves his readerto make of it what he can. It is not for the poet to qualify and explain. He seeks to reproduce his whole nature in a book, --reproduce it with allits contradictions and carnalities, the good and the bad, the coarse andthe fine, the body and the soul, --to give free swing to himself, trustingto natural checks and compensations to ensure a good result at last, butnot at all disturbed if you find parts of it bad as in creation itself. 

His method being that of the poet, and not that of the moralist orpreacher, how shall he sort and sift, culling this virtue and that, givingparts and fragments instead of the entire man? He must give all, notabstractly, but concretely, synthetically. 

To a common prostitute Whitman says:--

 "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. "

We are housed in social usages and laws, we are sheltered and warmed andcomforted by conventions and institutions and numberless traditions;their value no one disputes. But for purposes of his own Whitman ignoresthem all; he lets in upon us the free and maybe raw air of the greatout-of-doors of absolute nature; his standards are not found inside of anyfour walls; he contemplates life, and would quicken it in itsfundamentals; his survey is from a plane whence our arts and refinementsand petty distinctions disappear. He sees the evil of the world no lessnecessary than the good; he sees death as a part of life itself; he seesthe body and the soul as one; he sees the spiritual always issuing fromthe material; he sees not one result at last lamentable in the universe. 

IV

Unless, as I have already said, we allow Whitman to be a law unto himself, we can make little of him; unless we place ourselves at his absolute pointof view, his work is an offense and without meaning. The only question is, Has he a law, has he a steady and rational point of view, is his work aconsistent and well-organized whole? Ask yourself, What is the point ofview of absolute, uncompromising science? It is that creation is all goodand sound; things are as they should be or must be; there are noconceivable failures; there is no evil in the final analysis, or, if thereis, it is necessary, and plays its part also; there is no more beginningnor ending than there is now, no more heaven or hell than we find or makehere:--

 "Did you guess the celestial laws are yet to be work'd over and rectified?"

It has been urged that Whitman violates his own canon of the excellence ofnature. But what he violates is more a secondary or acquired nature. Heviolates our social conventions and instincts, he exposes what we coverup; but the spirit of his undertaking demanded this of him. Remember thatat all hazards he is to let nature--absolute nature--speak; that he is tobe the poet of the body as well as of the soul, and that no part of thebody of a man or woman, "hearty and clean, " is vile, and that "none shallbe less familiar than the rest. "

His glory is, that he never flinched or hesitated in following hisprinciple to its logical conclusions, --"my commission obeying, to questionit never daring. "

It was an heroic sacrifice, and atones for the sins of us all, --the sinsof perverting, denying, abusing the most sacred and important organs andfunctions of our bodies. 

V

In Whitman we find the most complete identification of the man with thesubject. He always is, or becomes, the thing he portrays. Not merely doeshe portray America, --he speaks out of the American spirit, the spirit thathas broken irrevocably with the past and turns joyously to the future; hedoes not praise equality, he illustrates it; he puts himself down besidethe lowest and most despised person, and calls him brother. 

 "You felons on trial in courts, You convicts in prison-cells, you sentenced assassins chain'd and handcuff'd with iron, Who am I too that I am not on trial or in prison? Me ruthless and devilish as any, that my wrists are not chain'd with iron, or my ankles with iron?"

He does not give a little charity, he gives himself as freely as theclouds give rain, or the sun gives light; he does not write a treatise ondemocracy, he applies the democratic spirit to everything in heaven and onearth, and redistributes the prizes from its points of view; he does not, except very briefly, sing the praises of science, but he launches hispoems always from the scientific view of the world, in contradistinctionto the old theological and mythical point of view. It is always theexample, it is always the thing itself, he gives us. Few precepts, nosermon, no reproof. Does he praise candor? No, he is candor; he confessesto everything; he shows us the inmost working of his mind. We know himbetter than we know our nearest friends. Does he exalt the pride of man inhimself, or egoism? Again he illustrates it: he is egoism; he makes thewhole universe revolve around himself; he never for a moment goes out ofhimself; he does not seek a theme; he is the theme. His egocentric methodof treatment is what characterizes him as an artist. He elaborates notheme, he builds nothing, he carves nothing, but makes himself a sourceand centre of pulsing, vital energy. Wave after wave radiates from him. What we see and get always is Walt Whitman. Our attention is never fixedupon the writer, but always upon the man. 

Of course this method of Whitman of becoming one with his subject, andspeaking out of it, is always the method of the creative artist. It isthis that distinguishes the artist from the mere thinker or prose-writer. The latter tells us about a thing; the former gives us the thing, or thespirit of the thing itself. 

If Whitman had put his criticism of our time and civilization in anargument or essay, the world would have received it very differently. Asan intellectual statement or proposition, we could have played with it andtossed it about as a ball in a game of shuttlecock, and dropped it when wetired of it, as we do other criticism. But he gave it to us as a man, as apersonality, and we find it too strong for us. It is easier to deal with atheory than with the concrete reality. A man is a summons and a challenge, and will not be easily put aside. 

The great philosophical poets, like Lucretius, try to solve the riddles. Whitman's aim is only to thrust the riddles before you, to give you a newsense of them, and start the game afresh. He knows what a complex, contradictory thing the universe is, and that the most any poet can do isto break the old firmament up into new forms. To put his arms around it?No. Put your arms around your fellow-man, and then you have encompassed itas nearly as mortal can do. 

VI

Whitman's attraction toward the common people was real. There is one thingthat makes every-day humanity, the great, toiling, unlettered masses, forever welcome to men who unite great imagination with broadsympathies, --they give a sense of reality; they refresh, as nature alwaysrefreshes. There is a tang and a sting to the native, the spontaneous, that the cultivated rarely has. The farmer, the mechanic, the sailor, thesoldier, savor of the primal and the hardy. In painting his own portrait, Whitman makes prominent the coarser, unrefined traits, because here thecolors are fast, --here is the basis of all. The careful student of Whitmanwill surely come to see how all the elements of his picture--his pride, his candor, his democracy, his sensuality, his coarseness, --finally fittogether, and correct and offset each other and make a perfect unity. 

No poet is so easily caricatured and turned into ridicule as Whitman. Heis deficient in humor, and hence, like the Biblical writers, is sometimeson the verge of the grotesque without knowing it. The sense of theridiculous has been enormously stimulated and developed in the modernmind, and--what is to be regretted--it has been mostly at the expense ofthe sense of awe and reverence. We "poke fun" at everything in thiscountry; to whatever approaches the verge of the ridiculous we give a pushand topple it over. The fear which all Americans have before their eyes, and which is much stronger than the fear of purgatory, is the fear ofappearing ridiculous. We curb and check any eccentricity or markedindividuality of manners or dress, lest we expose ourselves to the shaftsof ridicule. Emerson said he had heard with admiring submission the remarkof a lady who declared that the sense of being perfectly well dressed gavea feeling of inward tranquillity which religion was powerless to bestow;and what ranks before religion with us as a people is being in the mode, and writing our verse and cutting our coats in the approved style. Prideof the eye, a keen sense of the proprieties and the conventionalities, anda morbid feeling for the ridiculous, would have been death to Whitman'sundertaking. He would have faltered, or betrayed self-consciousness. Hecertainly never could have spoken with that elemental aplomb andindifference which is so marked a feature of his work. Any hesitation, anyknuckling, would have been his ruin. We should have seen he was notentirely serious, and should have laughed at him. We laugh now only for amoment; the spell of his earnestness and power is soon upon us. 

VII

Thoreau considered Whitman's "Leaves" worth all the sermons in the countryfor preaching; and yet few poets have assumed so little the function ofthe preacher. His great cure-all is love; he gives himself instead of asermon. His faith in the remedial power of affection, comradeship, istruly Christ-like. Lover of sinners is also his designation. The reproofis always indirect or implied. He brings to bear character rather thanprecept. He helps you as health, as nature, as fresh air, pure water help. He says to you:--

 "The mockeries are not you; Underneath them, and within them, I see you lurk; I pursue you where none else has pursued you: Silence, the desk, the flippant expression, the night, the accustomed routine, --if these conceal you from others, or from yourself, they do not conceal you from me. The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion, --if these balk others, they do not balk me. The pert apparel, the deformed attitude, drunkenness, greed, premature death, --all these I part aside. I track through your windings and turnings, --I come upon you where you thought eye should never come upon you. "

Whitman said, in the now famous preface of 1855, that "the greatest poetdoes not moralize, or make applications of morals, --he knows the soul. "There is no preaching or reproof in the "Leaves. "

 "I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame; I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done; I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate; I see the wife misused by her husband; I see the treacherous seducer of the young woman; I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be hid, --I see these sights on the earth, I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny; I see martyrs and prisoners, I observe a famine at sea, --I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be killed, to preserve the lives of the rest, I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like; All these--all the meanness and agony without end I sitting look out upon, See, hear, and am silent. "

Only once does he shame and rebuke the offender; then he holds up to him"a hand-mirror. "

 "Hold it up sternly! See this it sends back! (who is it? is it you?) Outside fair costume, --within, ashes and filth. No more a flashing eye, --no more a sonorous voice or springy step, Now some slave's eye, voice, hands, step, A drunkard's breath, unwholesome eater's face, venerealee's flesh, Lungs rotting away piecemeal, stomach sour and cankerous, Joints rheumatic, bowels clogged with abomination, Blood circulating dark and poisonous streams, Words babble, hearing and touch callous, No brain, no heart left, no magnetism of sex; Such, from one look in this looking-glass ere you go hence, Such a result so soon--and from such a beginning!"

The poet's way is so different from the moralist's way! The poet confessesall, loves all, --has no preferences. He is moral only in his results. Weask ourselves, Does he breathe the air of health? Can he stand the test ofnature? Is he tonic and inspiring? That he shocks us is nothing. The firsttouch of the sea is a shock. Does he toughen us, does he help makearterial blood?

All that men do and are guilty of attracts him. Their vices andexcesses, --he would make these his own also. He is jealous lest he bethought better than other men, --lest he seem to stand apart from evencriminals and offenders. When the passion for human brotherhood is uponhim, he is balked by nothing; he goes down into the social mire to findhis lovers and equals. In the pride of our morality and civic well-being, this phase of his work shocks us; but there are moods when the soul saysit is good, and we rejoice in the strong man that can do it. 

The restrictions, denials, and safeguards put upon us by the social order, and the dictates of worldly prudence, fall only before a still more fervidhumanism, or a still more vehement love. 

The vital question is, Where does he leave us? On firmer ground, or in themire? Depleted and enervated, or full and joyous? In the gloom ofpessimism, or in the sunlight of its opposite?---

 "_So long!_ I announce a man or woman coming--perhaps you are the one; I announce a great individual, fluid as Nature, chaste, affectionate, compassionate, fully armed. 

 "_So long!_ I announce a life that shall be copious, vehement, spiritual, bold, And I announce an old age that shall lightly and joyfully meet its translation. 

 "I announce myriads of youths, beautiful, gigantic, sweet-blooded; I announce a race of splendid and savage old men. "

There is no contradiction here. The poet sounds all the experiences oflife, and he gives out the true note at last. 

 "No specification is necessary, --all that a male or female does, that is vigorous, benevolent, clean, is so much profit to him or her, in the unshakable order of the universe, and through the whole scope of it forever. "

VIII

Nothing but the most uncompromising religious purpose can justify certainthings in the "Leaves;" nothing but the most buoyant and pervasivespirituality can justify its overwhelming materiality; nothing but themost creative imagination can offset its tremendous realism; nothing butthe note of universal brotherhood can atone for its vehement Americanism;nothing but the primal spirit of poesy itself can make amends for thisopen flouting of the routine poetic, and this endless procession before usof the common and the familiar. 

IX

Whitman loved the word "unrefined. " It was one of the words he would haveus apply to himself. He was unrefined, as the air, the soil, the water, and all sweet natural things are unrefined (fine but not _re_fined). Heapplies the word to himself two or three times in the course of his poems. He loved the words sun-tan, air-sweetness, brawn, etc. He speaks of his"savage song, " not to call forth the bards of the past, he says, but toinvoke the bards of the future. 

 "Have I sung so capricious and loud my savage songs?"

The thought that his poems might help contribute to the production of a"race of splendid and savage old men" was dear to him. He feared thedepleting and emasculating effects of our culture and conventions. Thedecay of maternity and paternity in this country, the falling off of thenative populations, were facts full of evil omen. His ideal of manly orwomanly character is rich in all the purely human qualities andattributes; rich in sex, in sympathy, in temperament; physiologicallysound and clean, as well as mentally and morally so. 

 "Fear grace, fear delicatesse; Fear the mellow-sweet, the sucking of honey-juice: Beware the advancing mortal ripening of nature! Beware what precedes the decay of the ruggedness of states and men. "

He was himself the savage old man he invoked. It was no part of his planto preach, in refined and euphonious terms, hygiene and the value of thenatural man, but to project into literature the thing itself, to exploit acharacter coarse as well as fine, and to imbue his poems with aphysiological quality as well as a psychological and intellectual. 

 "I will scatter the new roughness and gladness among them. "

He says to the pale, impotent victim of over-refinement, with intentionalrudeness, "Open your scarf'd chops till I blow grit within you. "

X

One of the key-words to Whitman both as a man and a poet is the word"composite. " He was probably the most composite man this century hasproduced, and in this respect at least is representative of the Americanof the future, who must be the result of the blending of more diverseracial elements than any man of history. He seems to have had anintuition of his composite character when he said in his first poem:--

 "I am large, --I contain multitudes. "

The London correspondent of the "New York Tribune, " in reluctantlyconceding at the time of the poet's death something to the Britishadmiration of him, said he was "rich in temperament. " The phrase is wellchosen. An English expert on the subject of temperament, who visitedWhitman some years ago, said he had all four temperaments, the sanguine, the nervous, the melancholic, and the lymphatic, while most persons havebut two temperaments, and rarely three. 

It was probably the composite character of Whitman that caused him toattract such diverse and opposite types of men, --scholars and workingmen, lawyers, doctors, scientists, and men of the world, --and that made himpersonally such a puzzle to most people, --so impossible to classify. Onthe street the promenaders would turn and look after him, and I have oftenheard them ask each other, "What man was that?" He has often been takenfor a doctor, and during his services in the army hospitals various mythswere floating about concerning him. Now he was a benevolent Catholicpriest, --then some unknown army general, or retired sea captain; at onetime he was reputed to be one of the owners of the Cunard line ofsteamers. To be taken for a Californian was common. One recalls thecomposite character of the poet whom he outlines in his poems (seequotation, page 159). 

The book is as composite as the man. It is all things to all men; it lendsitself to a multitude of interpretations. Every earnest reader of it willfind some clew or suggestion by the aid of which he fancies he can unlockthe whole book, but in the end he will be pretty sure to discover that onekey is not enough. To one critic, his book is the "hoarse song of a man, "its manly and masculine element attracts him; to another he is the poet ofjoy, to another the poet of health, to still another he is the bard ofpersonality; others read him as the poet of nature, or the poet ofdemocracy. His French critic, Gabriel Sarrazin, calls him an apostle, --theapostle of the idea that man is an indivisible fragment of the universalDivinity. 

XI

What has a poet of Whitman's aims to do with decency or indecency, withmodesty or immodesty? These are social or conventional virtues; herepresents mainly primary qualities and forces. Does life, does death, does nature, respect our proprieties, our conventional veils andillusions? Neither will he. He will strip them all away. He will act andspeak as if all things in the universe were equally sacred and divine; asif all men were really his brothers, all women his sisters; as if allparts of the human body were equally beautiful and wonderful; as iffatherhood and motherhood, birth and begetting, were sacred acts. Ofcourse it is easy to see that this course will speedily bring him incollision with the guardians of taste and social morality. But what ofthat? He professes to take his cue from the elemental laws. "I reckon Ibehave no more proudly than the level I plant my house by. " The questionis, Is he adequate, is he man enough, to do it? Will he not falter, orbetray self-consciousness? Will he be true to his ideal through thick andthin? The social gods will all be outraged, but that is less to him thanthe candor and directness of nature in whose spirit he assumes to speak. 

Nothing is easier than to convict Walt Whitman of what is calledindecency; he laughs indifferent when you have done so. It is not yourgods that he serves. He says he would be as indifferent of observation asthe trees or rocks. And it is here that we must look for hisjustification, upon ethical rather than upon the grounds of conventionalart. He has taken our sins upon himself. He has applied to the morbidsex-consciousness, that has eaten so deeply into our social system, theheroic treatment; he has fairly turned it naked into the street. He hasnot merely in words denied the inherent vileness of sex; he has denied itin very deed. We should not have taken offense had he confined himself towords, --had he said sex is pure, the body is as clean about the loins asabout the head; but being an artist, a creator, and not a mere thinker orpreacher, he was compelled to act, --to do the thing instead of saying it. 

The same in other matters. Being an artist, he could not merely say allmen were his brothers; he must show them as such. If their weakness andsins are his also, he must not flinch when it comes to the test; he mustmake his words good. We may be shocked at the fullness and minuteness ofthe specification, but that is no concern of his; he deals with theconcrete and not with the abstract, --fraternity and equality as a reality, not as a sentiment. 

XII

In the phase in which we are now considering him, Whitman appears as theAdamic man re-born here in the nineteenth century, or with science and themodern added, and fully and fearlessly embodying himself in a poem. It isstronger than we can stand, but it is good for us, and one of these days, or one of these centuries, we shall be able to stand it and enjoy it. 

 "To the garden the world anew ascending, Potent mates, daughters, sons, preluding, The love, the life of their bodies, meaning and being, Curious, here behold my resurrection, after slumber, The revolving cycles, in their wide sweep, having brought me again, Amorous, mature--all beautiful to me--all wondrous, My limbs, and the quivering fire that ever plays through them, for reasons most wondrous; Existing, I peer and penetrate still, Content with the present--content with the past, By my side, or back of me, Eve following, Or in front, and I following her just the same. "

The critics perpetually misread Whitman because they fail to see thisessentially composite and dramatic character of his work, --that it is notthe song of Walt Whitman the private individual, but of Walt Whitman asrepresentative of, and speaking for, all types and conditions of men; infact, that it is the drama of a new democratic personality, a characteroutlined on a larger, more copious, more vehement scale than has yetappeared in the world. The germs of this character he would sow broadcastover the land. 

In this drama of personality the poet always identifies himself with thescene, incident, experience, or person he delineates, or for whom hespeaks. He says to the New Englander, or to the man of the South and theWest, "I depict you as myself. " In the same way he depicts offenders, roughs, criminals, and low and despised persons as himself; he lays claimto every sin of omission and commission men are guilty of, because, hesays, "the germs are in all men. " Men dare not tell their faults. He willmake them all his own, and then tell them; there shall be full confessionfor once. 

 "If you become degraded, criminal, ill, then I become so for your sake; If you remember your foolish and outlaw'd deeds, do you think I cannot remember my own foolish and outlaw'd deeds?"

It will not do to read this poet, or any great poet, in a narrow andexacting spirit. As Whitman himself says: "The messages of great poems toeach man and woman are: Come to us on equal terms, only then can youunderstand us. "

In the much misunderstood group of poems called "Children of Adam" thepoet speaks for the male generative principle, and all the excesses andabuses that grow out of it he unblushingly imputes to himself. What menhave done and still do, while under the intoxication of the sexualpassion, he does, he makes it all his own experience. 

That we have here a revelation of his own personal taste and experiencesmay or may not be the case, but we have no more right to assume it than wehave to assume that all other poets speak from experience when they usethe first person singular. When John Brown mounted the scaffold inVirginia, in 1860, the poet says:--

 "I was at hand, silent I stood with teeth shut close, I watch'd, I stood very near you, old man, when cool and indifferent, but trembling with age and your unheal'd wounds, you mounted the scaffold, "--

very near him he stood in spirit; very near him he stood in the person ofothers, but not in his own proper person. 

If we take this poet literally, we shall believe he has been in Californiaand Oregon; that he has set foot in every city on the continent; that hegrew up in Virginia; that every Southern State has been by turns his home;that he has been a soldier, a sailor, a miner; that he has lived inDakota's woods, his "diet meat, his drink from the spring;" that he haslived on the plains with hunters and ranchmen, etc. He lays claim to allthese characters, all these experiences, because what others do, whatothers assume, or suffer, or enjoy, that he appropriates to himself. 

 "I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs, Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen, I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinned with the ooze of my skin, I fall on the weeds and stones, The riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close, Taunt my dizzy ears, and beat me violently over the head with whipstocks. 

 "Agonies are one of my changes of garments, I do not ask the wounded person how he feels--I myself become the wounded person, My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe. 

 "I become any presence or truth of humanity here, See myself in prison shaped like another man, And feel the dull unintermitted pain. 

 "For me the keepers of convicts shoulder their carbines and keep watch, It is I let out in the morning and barred at night. Not a mutineer walks hand-cuffed to the jail, but I am hand-cuffed to him and walk by his side. "

XIII

It is charged against Whitman that he does not celebrate love at all, andvery justly. He had no purpose to celebrate the sentiment of love. Literature is vastly overloaded with this element already. He celebratesfatherhood and motherhood, and the need of well-begotten, physiologicallywell-begotten, offspring. Of that veiled prurient suggestion which readersso delight in--of "bosoms mutinously fair, " and "the soul-lingering loopsof perfumed hair, " as one of our latest poets puts it--there is no hintin his volume. He would have fallen from grace the moment he had attemptedsuch a thing. Any trifling or dalliance on his part would have been hisruin. Love as a sentiment has fairly run riot in literature. FromWhitman's point of view, it would have been positively immoral for himeither to have vied with the lascivious poets in painting it as theforbidden, or with the sentimental poets in depicting it as a charm. Womanwith him is always the mate and equal of the man, never his plaything. 

Whitman is seldom or never the poet of a sentiment, at least of thedomestic and social sentiments. His is more the voice of the eternal, abysmal man. 

The home, the fireside, the domestic allurements, are not in him; love, aswe find it in other poets, is not in him; the idyllic, except in toucheshere and there, is not in him; the choice, the finished, the perfumed, theromantic, the charm of art and the delight of form, are not to be lookedfor in his pages. The cosmic takes the place of the idyllic; the begetter, the Adamic man, takes the place of the lover; patriotism takes the placeof family affection; charity takes the place of piety; love of kind ismore than love of neighbor; the poet and the artist are swallowed up inthe seer and the prophet. 

The poet evidently aimed to put in his sex poems a rank and healthfulanimality, and to make them as frank as the shedding of pollen by thetrees, strong even to the point of offense. He could not make it pleasing, a sweet morsel to be rolled under the tongue; that would have been levityand sin, as in Byron and the other poets. It must be direct and rank, healthfully so. The courage that did it, and showed no wavering orself-consciousness, was more than human. Man is a begetter. How shall apoet in our day and land treat this fact? With levity and by throwing overit the lure of the forbidden, the attraction of the erotic? That is oneway, the way of nearly all the poets of the past. But that is notWhitman's way. He would sooner be bestial than Byronic, he would soonershock by his frankness than inflame by his suggestion. And this in theinterest of health and longevity, not in the interest of a prurient andeffeminate "art. " In these poems Whitman for a moment emphasizes sex, theneed of sex, and the power of sex. "All were lacking if sex were lacking. "He says to men and women, Here is where you live after all, here is theseat of empire. You are at the top of your condition when you are fullestand sanest there. Fearful consequences follow any corrupting or abusing orperverting of sex. The poet stands in the garden of the world naked andnot ashamed. It is a great comfort that he could do it in this age ofhectic lust and Swinburnian impotence, --that he could do it and not beridiculous. To have done it without offense would have been proof that hehad failed utterly. Let us be shocked; it is a wholesome shock, like thedouse of the sea, or the buffet of the wind. We shall be all the betterfor it by and by. 

XIV

The lover of Whitman comes inevitably to associate him with character andpersonal qualities. I sometimes meet women whom I say are of the Whitmantype--the kind of woman he invoked and predicted. They bear children, andare not ashamed; motherhood is their pride and their joy: they arecheerful, tolerant, friendly, think no evil, meet high and low on equalterms; they walk, row, climb mountains; they reach forth into the actualworld of questions and events, open-minded, sympathetic, frank, natural, good-natured; the mates and companions of their husbands, keeping pacewith them in all matters; home-makers, but larger than home, considerate, forgiving, unceremonious, --in short, the large, fresh, wholesome open-airnatures whose ideal so completely possessed Walt Whitman. 

A British critic wisely says the gift of Whitman to us is the gift of liferather than of literature, but it is the gift of life through literature. Indeed, Whitman means a life as much as Christianity means a life. Hesays:--

 "Writing and talk do not prove me. "

Nothing but the test of reality finally proves him:--

 "The proof of the poet shall be sternly deferr'd till his country has absorbed him as affectionately as he has absorbed it. "

The proof of Whitman shall be deferred till he has borne fruit in actual, concrete life. 

He knew that merely intellectual and artistic tests did not settle mattersin his case, or that we would not reach his final value by making adead-set at him through the purely æsthetic faculties. Is he animating tolife itself? Can we absorb and assimilate him? Does he nourish the manlyand heroic virtues? Does he make us more religious, more tolerant, morecharitable, more candid, more self-reliant? If not, he fails of his chiefend. It is doubtful if the purely scholarly and literary poets, likeMilton, say, or like our own Poe, are ever absorbed in the sense aboveimplied; while there is little doubt that poets like Homer, likeShakespeare, are absorbed and modify a people's manners and ideals. Onlythat which we love affects our lives. Our admiration for art andliterature as such is something entirely outside the sources of characterand power of action. 

Whitman identifies himself with our lives. We associate him with reality, with days, scenes, persons, events. The youth who reads Poe or Lowellwants to be a scholar, a wit, a poet, a writer; the youth who readsWhitman wants to be a man, and to get at the meaning and value of life. Our author's bent towards real things, real men and women, and his powerto feed and foster personality, are unmistakable. 

Life, reality, alone proves him; a saner and more robust fatherhood andmotherhood, more practical democracy, more charity, more love, morecomradeship, more social equality, more robust ideals of womanly and manlycharacter, prove him. When we are more tolerant and patient andlong-suffering, when the strain of our worldly, commercial spirit relaxes, then is he justified. Whitman means a letting-up of the strain all alongthe line, --less hurry, less greed, less rivalry, more leisure, morecharity, more fraternalism and altruism, more religion, less formality andconvention. 

 "When America does what was promised, When each part is peopled with free people, When there is no city on earth to lead my city, the city of young men, the Mannahatta city--but when the Mannahatta leads all the cities of the earth, When there are plentiful athletic bards, inland and seaboard, When through these States walk a hundred millions of superb persons, When the rest part away for superb persons, and contribute to them, When fathers, firm, unconstrained, open-eyed--when breeds of the most perfect mothers denote America, Then to me ripeness and conclusion. "

XV

After all I think it matters little whether we call him poet or not. Grantthat he is not a poet in the usual or technical sense, but poet-prophet, or poet-seer, or all combined. He is a poet plus something else. It iswhen he is judged less than poet, or no poet at all, that we feelinjustice is done him. Grant that his work is not art, that it does notgive off the perfume, the atmosphere of the highly wrought artistic workslike those of Tennyson, but of something quite different. 

We have all been slow to see that his cherished ends were religious ratherthan literary; that, over and above all else, he was a great religiousteacher and prophet. Had he been strictly a literary poet, like Lowell, orLongfellow, or Tennyson, --that is, a writer working for purely artisticeffects, --we should be compelled to judge him quite differently. 

"Leaves of Grass" is a gospel--glad tidings of great joy to those who areprepared to receive it. Its final value lies in its direct, intense, personal appeal; in what it did for Symonds, who said it made a man ofhim; in what it did for Stevenson, who said it dispelled a thousandillusions; in what it did for Mrs. Gilchrist, who said it enabled her tofind her own soul; in what it does for all earnest readers of it inblending with the inmost current of their lives. Whitman is the life-giverof our time. How shall a poet give us life but by making us share hislarger measure of life, his larger hope, his larger love, his largercharity, his saner and wider outlook? What are the three great life-givingprinciples? Can we name them better than St. Paul named them eighteenhundred years ago, --faith, hope, charity? And these are the cornerstonesof Whitman's work, --a faith so broad and fervent that it accepts death asjoyously as life, and sees all things at last issue in spiritual results;a hope that sees the golden age ahead of us, not behind us; and a charitythat balks at nothing, that makes him identify himself with offenders andoutlaws; a charity as great as his who said to the thief on the cross, "This day thou shalt be with me in paradise. "

To cry up faith, hope, and charity is not to make men partakers of them;but to exemplify them in a survey of the whole problem of life, to makethem vital as hearing, or eyesight in a work of the imagination, to showthem as motives and impulses controlling all the rest, is to beget andfoster them in the mind of the beholder. 

He is more and he is less than the best of the other poets. The popular, the conventional poets are mainly occupied with the artistic side ofthings, --with that which refines, solaces, beautifies. Whitman is mainlyoccupied with the cosmic and universal side of things, and the human andspiritual values that may be extracted from them. His poetry is not theresult of the same kind of selection and partiality as that we are morefamiliar with. 

Hence, while the message of Tennyson and his kind is the message ofbeauty, the message of Whitman is, in a much fuller sense, the message oflife. He speaks the word of faith and power. This is his distinction; heis the life-giver. Such a man comes that we may have life, and have itmore abundantly. 

The message of beauty, --who would undervalue it? The least poet andpoetling lisps some word or syllable of it. The masters build its templesand holy places. All own it, all receive it gladly. But the gospel oflife, there is danger that we shall not know it when we hear it. It is aharsher and more heroic strain than the other. It calls no man to hisease, or to be lulled and soothed. It is a summons and a challenge. Itlays rude, strong hands upon you. It filters and fibres your blood. It ismore of the frost, the rains, the winds, than of cushions or parlors. 

The call of life is a call to battle always. We are stronger by thestrength of every obstacle or enemy overcome. 

 "Listen! I will be honest with you, I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes, These are the days that must happen to you:

 "You shall not heap up what is called riches, You shall scatter with lavish hand all that you earn or achieve; You but arrive at the city to which you were destined--you hardly settle yourself to satisfaction, before you are called by an irresistible call to depart. You shall be treated to the ironical smiles and mockings of those who remain behind you; What beckonings of love you receive, you shall only answer with passionate kisses of parting, You shall not allow the hold of those who spread their reached hands toward you. 

 "Allons! After the GREAT COMPANIONS! and to belong to them!"

XVI

Whitman always avails himself of the poet's privilege and magnifieshimself. He magnifies others in the same ratio, he magnifies all things. "Magnifying and applying come I, " he says, "outbidding at the start theold cautious hucksters. " Indeed, the character which speaks throughout"Leaves of Grass" is raised to the highest degree of personal exaltation. To it nothing is trivial, nothing is mean; all is good, all is divine. Theusual distinctions disappear, burned up, the poet says, for religion'ssake. All the human attributes are heightened and enlarged; sympathy aswide as the world; love that balks at nothing; charity as embracing as thesky; egotism like the force of gravity; religious fervor that consumes thecoarsest facts like stubble; spirituality that finds God everywhere everyhour of the day; faith that welcomes death as cheerfully as life;comradeship that would weld the nation into a family of brothers;sexuality that makes prudes shudder; poetic enthusiasm that scornfullydispenses with all the usual adventitious aids; and in general alargeness, coarseness, and vehemence that are quite appalling to thegeneral reader. Lovers of poetry will of necessity be very slow inadjusting their notions to the standards of "Leaves of Grass. " It is asurvey of life and of the world from the cosmic rather than from theconventional standpoint. It carries the standards of the natural-universalinto all fields. 

Some men have accepted poverty and privation with such contentment andcomposure as to make us almost envious of their lot; and Whitman acceptsthe coarser, commoner human elements which he finds in himself, and whichmost of us try to conceal or belittle, with such frankness and perceptionof their real worth that they acquire new meaning and value in our eyes. If he paraded these things unduly, and showed an overweening preferencefor them, as some of his critics charge, this is of course an element ofweakness. 

His precept and his illustration, carried out in life, would fill the landwith strong, native, original types of men and women animated by the mostvehement comradeship, selfism and otherism going hand in hand. 

HIS RELATION TO CULTURE

I

"Leaves of Grass" is not the poetry of culture, but it is to be said inthe same breath that it is not such a work as an uncultured man produces, or is capable of producing. 

The uncultured man does not think Whitman's thoughts, or propose Whitman'sproblems to himself, or understand or appreciate them at all. The "Leaves"are perhaps of supreme interest only to men of deepest culture, becausethey contain in such ample measure that without which all culture is merevarnish or veneer. They are indirectly a tremendous criticism of Americanlife and civilization, and they imply that breadth of view and thatliberation of spirit--that complete disillusioning--which is the bestresult of culture, and which all great souls have reached, no matter whoor what their schoolmasters may have been. 

Our reading public probably does not and cannot see itself in Whitman atall. He must be a great shock to its sense of the genteel and therespectable. Nor can the working people and the unlettered, though theywere drawn to Whitman the man, be expected to respond to any considerableextent to Whitman the poet. His standpoint can be reached only afterpassing through many things and freeing one's self from many illusions. Heis more representative of the time-spirit out of which America grew, andwhich is now shaping the destiny of the race upon this continent. Hestrikes under and through our whole civilization. 

He despised our social gods, he distrusted our book-culture, he wasalarmed at the tendency to the depletion and attenuation of the nationaltype, and he aimed to sow broadcast the germs of more manly ideals. Hispurpose was to launch his criticism from the basic facts of human life, psychic and physiologic; to inject into the veins of our anæmic literaturethe reddest, healthiest kind of blood; and in doing so he has given freeswing to the primary human traits and affections and to sexuality, and hascharged his pages with the spirit of real things, real life. 

We have been so long used to verse which is the outcome of the literaryimpulse alone, which is written at so many removes from the primary humanqualities, produced from the extreme verge of culture and artificialrefinement, which is so innocent of the raciness and healthful coarsenessof nature, that poetry which has these qualities, which implies the bodyas well as the mind, which is the direct outgrowth of a radical humanpersonality, and which make demands like those made by real things, iseither an offense to us or is misunderstood. 

II

Whitman says his book is not a good lesson, but it takes down the bars toa good lesson, and that to another, and that to another still. To takedown bars rather than to put them up is always Whitman's aim; to make hisreader free of the universe, to turn him forth into the fresh andinexhaustible pastures of time, space, eternity, and with a smart slapupon his back with the halter as a spur and send-off, is about what hewould do. His message, first and last, is "give play to yourself;" "letyourself go;"--happiness is in the quest of happiness; power comes to himwho power uses. 

 "Long enough have you timidly waded, holding a plank by the shore; Now I will you to be a bold swimmer, To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout, and laughingly dash with your hair. "

To hold Whitman up to ridicule, and to convict him of grossness andtediousness, is easy enough; first, because he is so out of relation tothe modes and taste of his times, and, secondly, because he has somewhatof the uncouthness and coarseness of large bodies. Then his seriousnessand simplicity, like that of Biblical and Oriental writers, --a kind ofchildish inaptness and homeliness, --often exposes him to our keen, almostabnormal sense of the ridiculous. He was deficient in humor, and he wrotehis book in entire obliviousness of social usages and conventions, so thatthe perspective of it is not the social or indoor perspective, but thatof life and nature at large, careering and unhampered. It is probably theone modern poem whose standards are not social and what are calledartistic. 

Its atmosphere is always that of the large, free spaces of vast, unhousednature. It has been said that the modern world could be reconstructed from"Leaves of Grass, " so compendious and all-inclusive is it in its details;but of the modern world as a social organization, of man as the creatureof social usages and prohibitions, of fashions, of dress, ofceremony, --the indoor, parlor and drawing-room man, --there is no hint inits pages. In its matter and in its spirit, in its standards and in itsexecution, in its ideals and in its processes, it belongs to andaffiliates with open-air nature, often reaching, I think, the cosmic andunconditioned. In a new sense is Whitman the brother of the orbs andcosmic processes, "conveying a sentiment and invitation of the earth. " Allhis enthusiasms, all his sympathies have to do with the major andfundamental elements of life. He is a world-poet. We do not readily adjustour indoor notions to him. Our culture-standards do not fit him. 

III

The problem of the poet is doubtless more difficult in our day than in anypast day; it is harder for him to touch reality. 

The accumulations of our civilization are enormous: an artificial world ofgreat depth and potency overlies the world of reality; especially does itoverlie the world of man's moral and intellectual nature. Most of us liveand thrive in this artificial world, and never know but it is the world ofGod's own creating. Only now and then a man strikes his roots down throughthis made land into fresh, virgin soil. When the religious genius strikeshis roots through it, and insists upon a present revelation, we are apt tocry "heretic;" when the poet strikes his roots through it, as Whitman did, and insists upon giving us reality, --giving us himself before custom orlaw, --we cry "barbarian, " or "art-heretic, " or "outlaw of art. "

In the countless adjustments and accumulations, and in the oceaniccurrents of our day and land, the individual is more and more lost sightof, --merged, swamped, effaced. See him in Whitman rising above it all. Seeit all shot through and through with his quality and obedient to his will. See the all-leveling tendency of democracy, the effacing and sterilizingpower of a mechanical and industrial age, set at naught or reversed by asingle towering personality. See America, its people, their doings, theirtypes, their good and evil traits, all bodied forth in one compositecharacter, and this character justifying itself and fronting the universewith the old joy and contentment. 

IV

 "The friendly and flowing savage, who is he? Is he waiting for civilization, or is he past it and master of it?"

Do we not, consciously or unconsciously, ask this or a similar question ofevery poet or artist whom we pass in review before us? Is he master of hisculture, or does it master him? Does he strike back through it to simple, original nature, or is he a potted plant? Does he retain the native savagevirtues, or is he entirely built up from the outside? We constantlymistake culture for mere refinement, which it is not: it is a liberatingprocess; it is a clearing away of obstructions, and the giving to inherentvirtues a chance to express themselves. It makes savage nature friendlyand considerate. The aim of culture is not to get rid of nature, but toutilize nature. The great poet is always a "friendly and flowing savage, "the master and never the slave of the complex elements of our artificiallives. 

Though our progress and civilization are a triumph over nature, yet in animportant sense we never get away from nature or improve upon her. Herstandards are still our standards, her sweetness and excellence are stillour aim. Her health, her fertility, her wholeness, her freshness, herinnocence, her evolution, we would fain copy or reproduce. We would, if wecould, keep the pungency and aroma of her wild fruit in our cultivatedspecimens, the virtue and hardiness of the savage in our fine gentlemen, the joy and spontaneity of her bird-songs in our poetry, the grace andbeauty of her forms in our sculpture and carvings. 

A poetic utterance from an original individual standpoint, somethingdefinite and characteristic, --this is always the crying need. What a finetalent has this or that young British or American poet whom we might name!But we see that the singer has not yet made this talent his own; it is akind of borrowed capital; it is the general taste and intelligence thatspeak. When will he redeem all these promises, and become a fixed centreof thought and emotion in himself? To write poems is no distinction; to bea poem, to be a fixed point amid the seething chaos, a rock amid thecurrents, giving your own form and character to them, --that is something. 

It matters little, as Whitman himself says, who contributes the mass ofpoetic verbiage upon which any given age feeds. 

But for a national first-class poem, or a great work of the imagination ofany sort, the man is everything, because such works finally rest uponprimary human qualities and special individual traits. A richly endowedpersonality is always the main dependence in such cases, or, as Goethesays, "in the great work the great person is always present as the greatfactor. "

"Leaves of Grass" is as distinctly an emanation from Walt Whitman, fromhis quality and equipment as a man apart from anything he owed to books orto secondary influences, as a tree is an emanation from the soil. It is, moreover, an emanation from him as an American in the latter half of thenineteenth century, and as a typical democratic composite man, a man ofthe common people, bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh, but withan extraordinary endowment of spiritual and intellectual power, to whichhe has given full swing without abating one jot or tittle the influence ofhis heritage of the common stock. 

V

There is one important quality that enters into all first-class literaryproduction and into all art, which is taken little account of in currentcriticism: I mean the quality of the manly, --the pulse and pressure ofmanly virility and strength. Goethe spoke of it to Eckermann as a certainurgent power in which the art of his time was lacking. The producers hadtaste and skill, but were not masterful as men. Goethe always lookedstraight through the work to the man behind it; in art and poetry thepersonality was everything. The special talent of one kind or another wasquite secondary. The greatest works are the least literary. To speak inliterature as a man, and not merely as a scholar or professionallitterateur, is always the crying need. The new poet has this or thatgift, but what is the human fund back of all? What is his endowment of thecommon universal human traits? How much of a man is he? His measure inthis respect will be the measure of the final value of his contribution. 

The decadence of literature sets in when there is more talent thancharacter in current production; when rare literary and artistic gifts nolonger come wedded to large human and manly gifts; when taste isfastidious rather than robust and hearty. When was there a man born toEnglish or American literature with a large endowment of the universalhuman qualities, or with those elements that give breadth and power, andwhich lead art rather than follow it? We are living in an age of greatpurity and refinement of taste in art and letters, but destitute of power. Goethe spoke of Walter Scott not merely as a great talent, but as a"comprehensive nature. " Without this comprehensive nature as a setting, his great talent would have amounted to but little. This gives the weight, the final authority. How little there was on the surface of Scott of theliterary keenness, subtlety, knowingness of later producers, and yet howfar his contribution surpasses theirs in real human pathos andsuggestiveness!

The same might be said of Count Tolstoï, who is also, back of all, a greatloving nature. 

One has great joy in Whitman because he is beyond and over all a large andloving personality; his work is but a thin veil through which a greatnature clearly shows. The urgent power of which Goethe speaks is almosttoo strong, --too strong for current taste: we want more art and less man, more literature and less life. It is not merely a great mind that we feel, but a great character. It penetrates every line, and indeed makes it trueof the book that whoever "touches this touches a man. "

The lesson of the poet is all in the direction of the practical manly andwomanly qualities and virtues, --health, temperance, sanity, power, endurance, aplomb, --and not at all in the direction of the literary andartistic qualities or culture. 

 "To stand the cold or heat, to take good aim with a gun, to sail a boat, to manage horses, to beget superb children, To speak readily and clearly, to feel at home among common people, To hold our own in terrible positions on land and sea. "

All his aims, ideas, impulses, aspirations, relate to life, topersonality, and to power to deal with real things; and if we expect fromhim only literary ideas--form, beauty, lucidity, proportion--we shall bedisappointed. He seeks to make the impression of concrete forces andobjects, and not of art. 

 "Not for an embroiderer, (There will always be plenty of embroiderers--I welcome them also), But for the fibre of things, and for inherent men and women. 

 "Not to chisel ornaments, But to chisel with free stroke the heads and limbs of plenteous Supreme Gods, that The States may realize them, walking and talking. "

His whole work is a radiation from an exemplification of the idea thatthere is something better than to be an artist or a poet, --namely, to be aman. The poet's rapture springs not merely from the contemplation of thebeautiful and the artistic, but from the contemplation of the whole; fromthe contemplation of democracy, the common people, workingmen, soldiers, sailors, his own body, death, sex, manly love, occupations, and the forceand vitality of things. We are to look for the clews to him in the openair and in natural products, rather than in the traditional art forms andmethods. He declares he will never again mention love or death inside of ahouse, and that he will translate himself only to those who privately staywith him in the open air. 

 "If you would understand me, go to the heights or water-shore; The nearest gnat is an explanation, and a drop or motion of waves a key: The maul, the oar, the handsaw, second my words. 

 "No shuttered room or school can commune with me, But roughs and little children better than they. 

 "The young mechanic is closest to me--he knows me pretty well. The woodman, that takes his axe and jug with him, shall take me with him all day; The farm-boy, ploughing in the field, feels good at the sound of my voice: In vessels that sail, my words sail--I go with fishermen and seamen, and love them. 

 "My face rubs to the hunter's face when he lies down alone in his blanket; The driver, thinking of me, does not mind the jolt of his wagon; The young mother and old mother comprehend me; The girl and the wife rest the needle a moment, and forget where they are: They and all would resume what I have told them. "

VI

So far as literature is a luxury, and for the cultured, privileged few, its interests are not in Whitman; so far as poetry represents the weaknessof man rather than his strength; so far as it expresses a shrinking fromreality and a refuge in sentimentalism; so far as it is aristocratic as inTennyson, or mocking and rebellious as in Byron, or erotic and mephitic asin Swinburne, or regretful and reminiscent as in Arnold, or a melodiousbaying of the moon as in Shelley, or the outcome of mere scholarly andtechnical acquirements as in so many of our younger poets, --so far asliterature or poetry, I say, stand for these things, there is little ofeither in Whitman. Whitman stands for the primary and essential; he standsfor that which makes the body as well as the mind, which makes life saneand joyous and masterful. Everything that tends to depletion, satiety, theabnormal, the erotic and exotic, that induces the stress and fever oflife, is foreign to his spirit. He is less beautiful than the popularpoets, yet more beautiful. He will have to do only with the inevitablebeauty, the beauty that comes unsought, that resides in the interiormeanings and affiliations, --the beauty that dare turn its back upon thebeautiful. 

Whitman has escaped entirely the literary disease, the characteristicsymptoms of which, according to Renan, is that people love less thingsthemselves than the literary effects which they produce. He has escapedthe art disease which makes art all in all; the religious disease, whichruns to maudlin piety and seeks to win heaven by denying earth; the beautydisease, which would make of poesy a conventional flower-garden. He bringsheroic remedies for our morbid sex-consciousness, and for all thepathological conditions brought about by our excess of refinement, and thedyspeptic depletions of our indoor artificial lives. Whitman withstood theæsthetic temptation, as Amiel calls it, to which most of our poets fall avictim, --the lust for the merely beautiful, the epicureanism of theliterary faculties. We can make little of him if we are in quest ofæsthetic pleasures alone. "In order to establish those literaryauthorities which are called classic centuries, " says Renan, "somethinghealthy and solid is necessary. Common household bread is of more valuehere than pastry. " But the vast majority of literary producers aim atpastry, or, worse yet, confectionery, --something especially delightful andtitivating to the taste. No doubt Renan himself was something of aliterary epicure, but then he imposed upon himself large and serioustasks, and his work as a whole is solid and nourishing; his charm of styledoes not blind and seduce us. It makes all the difference in the worldwhether we seek the beautiful through the true, or the true through thebeautiful. Seek ye the kingdom of truth first and all things shall beadded. The novice aims to write beautifully, but the master aims to seetruly and to feel vitally. Beauty follows him, and is never followed byhim. 

Nature is beautiful because she is something else first, yes, and last, too, and all the while. Whitman's work is baptized in the spirit of thewhole, and its health and sweetness in this respect, when compared withthe over-refined artistic works, is like that of a laborer in the fieldscompared with the pale dyspeptic ennuyé. 

VII

Whitman's ideal is undoubtedly much larger, coarser, stronger--much moreracy and democratic--than the ideal we are familiar with in currentliterature, and upon which our culture is largely based. He applies thedemocratic spirit not only to the material of poetry, --excluding all theold stock themes of love and war, lords and ladies, myths and fairies andlegends, etc. , --but he applies it to the form as well, excluding rhyme andmeasure and all the conventional verse architecture. His work stands or itfalls upon its inherent, its intrinsic qualities, the measure of life orpower which it holds. This ideal was neither the scholar nor the priest, nor any type of the genteel or exceptionally favored or cultivated. Hisinfluence does not make for any form of depleted, indoor, over-refined orextra-cultured humanity. The spirit of his work transferred to practicebegets a life full and strong on all sides, affectionate, magnetic, tolerant, spiritual, bold with the flavor and quality of simple, healthful, open-air humanity. He opposes culture and refinement only as heopposes that which weakens, drains, emasculates, and tends to beget ascoffing, carping, hypercritical class. The culture of life, of nature, and that which flows from the exercise of the manly instincts andaffections, is the culture implied by "Leaves of Grass. " The democraticspirit is undoubtedly more or less jealous of the refinements of ourartificial culture and of the daintiness and aloofness of our literature. The people look askance at men who are above them without being of them, who have dropped the traits and attractions which they share withunlettered humanity. Franklin and Lincoln are closer akin to this spirit, and hence more in favor with it, than a Jefferson or a Sumner. 

Whitman might be called the poet of the absolute, the unconditioned. Hiswork is launched at a farther remove from our arts, conventions, usages, civilization, and all the artificial elements that modify and enter intoour lives, than that of any other man. Absolute candor, absolute pride, absolute charity, absolute social and sexual equality, absolute nature. Itis not conditioned by what we deem modest or immodest, high or low, maleor female. It is not conditioned by our notions of good and evil, by ournotions of the refined and the select, by what we call good taste and badtaste. It is the voice of absolute man, sweeping away the artificial, throwing himself boldly, joyously, upon unconditioned nature. We are allengaged in upholding the correct and the conventional, and drawing theline sharply between good and evil, the high and the low, and it is wellthat we should; but here is a man who aims to take absolute ground, and tolook at the world as God himself might look at it, without partiality ordiscriminating, --it is all good, and there is no failure or imperfectionin the universe and can be none:--

 "Open mouth of my Soul uttering gladness, Eyes of my Soul seeing perfection, Natural life of me, faithfully praising things, Corroborating forever the triumph of things. "

He does not take sides against evil, in the usual way, he does not takesides with the good except as nature herself does. He celebrates the All. 

Can we accept the world as science reveals it to us, as all significant, as all in ceaseless transmutation, as every atom aspiring to be man, anendless unfolding of primal germs, without beginning, without end, withoutfailure or imperfection, the golden age ahead of us, not behind us?

VIII

Because of Whitman's glorification of pride, egoism, brawn, self-reliance, it is charged that the noble, the cultured, the self-denying, have noplace in his system. What place have they in the antique bards?--in Homer, in Job, in Isaiah, in Dante? They have the same place in Whitman, yet itis to be kept in mind that Whitman does not stand for the specially socialvirtues, nor for culture, nor for the refinements which it induces, norfor art, nor for any conventionality. There are flowers of human lifewhich we are not to look for in Walt Whitman. The note of fine manners, chivalrous conduct, which we get in Emerson; the sweetness and lightgospel of Arnold; the gospel of hero-worship of Carlyle; the graciousscholarship of our New England poets, etc. , --we do not get in WaltWhitman. There is nothing in him at war with these things, but he isconcerned with more primal and elemental questions. He strikes under andbeyond all these things. 

What are the questions or purposes, then, in which his work has root?Simply put, to lead the way to larger, saner, more normal, more robusttypes of men and women on this continent; to prefigure and help developthe new democratic man, --to project him into literature on a scale andwith a distinctness that cannot be mistaken. To this end he keeps a deephold of the savage, the unrefined, and marshals the elements andinfluences that make for the virile, the heroic, the sane, the large, andfor the perpetuity of the race. We cannot refine the elements, --the air, the water, the soil, the sunshine, --and the more we pervert or shut outthese from our lives the worse for us. In the same manner, the more wepervert or balk the great natural impulses, sexuality, comradeship, thereligious emotion, nativity, or the more we deny and belittle our bodies, the further we are from the spirit of Walt Whitman, and from the spirit ofthe All. 

With all Whitman's glorification of pride, self-esteem, self-reliance, etc. , the final lesson of his life and work is service, self-denial, --thefree, lavish giving of yourself to others. Of the innate and essentialnobility that we associate with unworldliness, the sharing of what youpossess with the unfortunate around you, sympathy with all forms of lifeand conditions of men, charity as broad as the sunlight, standing up forthose whom others are down upon, claiming nothing for self which othersmay not have upon the same terms, --of such nobility and fine manners, Isay, you shall find an abundance in the life and works of Walt Whitman. 

The spirit of a man's work is everything; the letter, little or nothing. Though Whitman boasts of his affiliation with the common and near at hand, yet he is always saved from the vulgar, the mean, the humdrum, by thebreadth of his charity and sympathy and his tremendous ideality. 

Of worldliness, materialism, commercialism, he has not a trace; his onlyvalues are spiritual and ideal; his only standards are the essential andthe enduring. What Matthew Arnold called the Anglo-Saxon contagion, thebourgeois spirit, the worldly and sordid ideal, is entirely corrected inWhitman by the ascendant of the ethic and the universal. His democracyends in universal brotherhood, his patriotism in the solidarity ofnations, his glorification of the material in the final triumph of thespiritual, his egoism issues at last in complete otherism. 

A race that can produce a man of his fibre, his continental type, is yetat its best estate. Did one begin to see evil omen in this perpetualwhittling away and sharpening and lightening of the American type, --gracewithout power, clearness without mass, intellect without character, --thentake comfort from the volume and the rankness of Walt Whitman. Did onebegin to fear that the decay of maternity and paternity in our oldercommunities and the falling off in the native population presaged thedrying up of the race in its very sources? Then welcome to the ranksexuality and to the athletic fatherhood and motherhood celebrated byWhitman. Did our skepticism, our headiness, our worldliness, threaten toeat us up like a cancer? did our hardness, our irreligiousness, and ourpassion for the genteel point to a fugitive, superficial race? was ourliterature threatened with the artistic degeneration, --running all to artand not at all to power? were our communities invaded by a dry rot ofculture? were we fast becoming a delicate, indoor, genteel race? were ourwomen sinking deeper and deeper into the "incredible sloughs of fashionand all kinds of dyspeptic depletion, "--the antidote for all these ills isin Walt Whitman. In him nature shows great fullness and fertility, and animmense friendliness. He supplements and corrects most of the specialdeficiencies and weaknesses toward which the American type seems to tend. He brings us back to nature again. The perpetuity of the race is with thecommon people. The race is constantly crying out at the top, in our timesat least; culture and refinement beget fewer and fewer and poorer andpoorer children. Where struggle ceases, that family or race is doomed. 

 "Now understand me well--it is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary. "

In more primitive communities, the sap and vitality of the race were keptin the best men, because upon them the strain and struggle were greatest. War, adventure, discovery, favor virility. Whitman is always andeverywhere occupied with that which makes for life, power, longevity, manliness. The scholar poets are occupied with that which makes forculture, taste, refinement, ease, art. 

"Leaves of Grass, " taken as a whole, aims to exhibit a modern, democratic, archetypal man, here in America, confronting and subduing our enormousmaterialism to his own purposes, putting it off and on as a garment;identifying himself with all forms of life and conditions of men; tryinghimself by cosmic laws and processes, exulting in the life of his body andthe delights of his senses; and seeking to clinch, to develop, and torealize himself through the shows and events of the visible world. Thepoet seeks to interpret life from the central point of absolute abysmalman. 

The wild and the savage in nature with which Whitman perpetuallyidentifies himself, and the hirsute, sun-tanned, and aboriginal inhumanity, have misled many readers into looking upon him as expressive ofthese things only. Mr. Stedman thinks him guilty of a certain narrownessin preferring, or seeming to prefer, the laboring man to the gentleman. But the poet uses these elements only for checks and balances, and to keepour attention, in the midst of a highly refined and civilized age, fixedupon the fact that here are the final sources of our health, our power, our longevity. The need of the pre-scientific age was knowledge andrefinement; the need of our age is health and sanity, cool heads and gooddigestion. And to this end the bitter and drastic remedies from the shoreand the mountains are for us. 

IX

The gospel of the average man, Matthew Arnold thought, was inimical to theideal of a rare and high excellence. But, in holding up the average man, Whitman was only holding up the broad, universal human qualities, andshowing that excellence may go with them also. As a matter of fact, are wenot astonished almost daily by the superb qualities shown by the averageman, the heroism shown by firemen, engineers, workingmen, soldiers, sailors? Do we not know that true greatness, true nobility and strength ofsoul, may go and do go with commonplace, every-day humanity? Whitman wouldlift the average man to a higher average, and still to a higher, withoutat all weakening the qualities which he shares with universal humanity asit exists over and under all special advantages and social refinements. He says that one of the convictions that underlie his "Leaves" is theconviction that the "crowning growth of the United States is to bespiritual and heroic, "--a prophecy which in our times, I confess, does notseem very near fulfillment. 

He does not look longingly and anxiously toward the genteel social gods, but quite the contrary. In the library and parlor, he confesses he is as agawk or one dumb. The great middle-class ideal, which is mainly the idealof our own people, Whitman flouts and affronts. There are things to him ofhigher import than to have wealth and be respectable and in the mode. 

We might charge him with narrowness and partiality and with seeing onlyhalf truths, as Mr. Stedman has done, did he simply rest with the nativeas opposed to the cultivated, with brawn as opposed to brains. What hedoes do, what the upshot of his teaching shows, is that he identifieshimself with the masses, with those universal human currents out of whichalone a national spirit arises, as opposed to isolated schools andcoteries and a privileged few. Whitman decries culture only so far as itcuts a man off from his fellows, clips away or effaces the sweet, native, healthy parts of him, and begets a bloodless, superstitious, infidelisticclass. "The best culture, " he says, "will always be that of the manly andcourageous instincts and loving perceptions, and of self-respect. " Forthe most part, our schooling is like our milling, which takes the boneand nerve building elements out of our bread. The bread of life demandsthe coarse as well as the fine, and this is what Whitman stands for. 

In his spirit and affiliation with the great mass of the people, with thecommoner, sturdier, human traits, Whitman is more of the type of Angelo, or Rembrandt, or the antique bards, than he is like modern singers. He wasnot a product of the schools, but of the race. 

HIS RELATION TO HIS COUNTRY AND HIS TIMES

I

It has been said, and justly I think, that in Whitman we see the firstappearance in literature of the genuinely democratic spirit on anythinglike an ample scale. Plenty of men of democratic tendencies andaffiliations have appeared, but none that have carried the temper andquality of the people, the masses, into the same regions, or blended thesame humanity and commonness with the same commanding personality andspirituality. In recent English poetry the names of Burns and Wordsworthoccur to mind, but neither of these men had anything like Whitman'sbreadth of relation to the mass of mankind, or expressed anything like hissweeping cosmic emotion. Wordsworth's muse was clad in homespun, but in nostrict sense was his genius democratic--using the word to express, not apolitical creed, but the genius of modern civilization. He made much ofthe common man, common life, common things, but always does the poet standapart, the recluse, the hermit, the philosopher, loving and contemplatingthese things for purposes of his art. Only through intellectual sympathyis he a part of what he surveys. In Whitman the common or average man hasgrown haughty, almost aristocratic. He coolly confronts the old types, theman of caste, culture, privileges, royalties, and relegates him to thepast. He readjusts the standards, and estimates everything from the humanand democratic point of view. In his scheme, the old traditions--thearistocratic, the scholastic, the ecclesiastical, the military, the socialtraditions--play no part. He dared to look at life, past and present, fromthe American and scientific standpoint. He turns to the old types a prideand complacency equal to their own. 

Indeed, we see in the character which Whitman has exploited and in theinterest of which his poems are written, the democratic type fullyrealized, --pride and self-reliance equal to the greatest, and thesematched with a love, a compassion, a spirit of fraternity and equality, that are entirely foreign to the old order of things. 

II

At first sight Whitman does not seem vitally related to his own countryand people; he seems an anomaly, an exception, or like one of thosemammoth sports that sometimes appear in the vegetable world. The Whitmanideal is not, and has never been, the conscious ideal of the mass of ourpeople. We have aspired more to the ideal of the traditional finegentleman as he has figured in British letters. There seems to have beenno hint or prophecy of such a man as Whitman in our New Englandliterature, unless it be in Emerson, and here it is in the region of theabstract and not of the concrete. Emerson's prayer was for the absolutelyself-reliant man, but when Whitman refused to follow his advice withregard to certain passages in the "Leaves, " the sage withheld furtherapproval of the work. 

We must look for the origins of Whitman, I think, in the deepworld-currents that have been shaping the destinies of the race for thepast hundred years or more; in the universal loosening, freeing, andremoving obstructions; in the emancipation of the people, and their comingforward and taking possession of the world in their own right; in thetriumph of democracy and of science; the downfall of kingcraft andpriestcraft; the growth of individualism and non-conformity; theincreasing disgust of the soul of man with forms and ceremonies; thesentiment of realism and positivism, the religious hunger that flees thechurches; the growing conviction that life, that nature, are not failures, that the universe is good, that man is clean and divine inside and out, that God is immanent in nature, --all these things and more lie back ofWhitman, and hold a causal relation to him. 

III

Of course the essential elements of all first-class artistic and literaryproductions are always the same, just as nature, just as man, areessentially the same everywhere. Yet the literature of every people has astamp of its own, starts from and implies antecedents and environmentspeculiar to itself. 

Just as ripe, mellow, storied, ivy-towered, velvet-turfed England liesback of Tennyson, and is vocal through him; just as canny, covenanting, conscience-burdened, craggy, sharp-tongued Scotland lies back of Carlyle;just as thrifty, well-schooled, well-housed, prudent, and moral NewEngland lies back of her group of poets, and is voiced by them, --soAmerica as a whole, our turbulent democracy, our self-glorification, ourfaith in the future, our huge mass movements, our continental spirit, oursprawling, sublime, and unkempt nature, lie back of Whitman and areimplied by his work. 

He had not the shaping, manipulating gift to carve his American materialinto forms of ideal beauty, and did not claim to have. He did not valuebeauty as an abstraction. 

What Whitman did that is unprecedented was, to take up the whole countryinto himself, fuse it, imbue it with soul and poetic emotion, and recastit as a sort of colossal Walt Whitman. He has not so much treated Americanthemes as he has identified himself with everything American, and made thewhole land redolent of his own quality. He has descended upon the grossmaterialism of our day and land and upon the turbulent democratic masseswith such loving impact, such fervid enthusiasm, as to lift and fill themwith something like the breath of universal nature. His special gift ishis magnetic and unconquerable personality, his towering egoism unitedwith such a fund of human sympathy. His power is centripetal, so tospeak, --he draws everything into himself like a maelstrom; the centrifugalpower of the great dramatic artists, the power to get out of and away fromhimself, he has not. It was not for Whitman to write the dramas andtragedies of democracy, as Shakespeare wrote those of feudalism, or asTennyson sang in delectable verse the swan-song of an overripecivilization. It was for him to voice the democratic spirit, to show itfull-grown, athletic, haughtily taking possession of the world andredistributing the prizes according to its own standards. It was for himto sow broadcast over the land the germs of larger, more sane, more robusttypes of men and women, indicating them in himself. 

In him the new spirit of democracy first completely knows itself, is proudof itself, has faith and joy in itself, is fearless, tolerant, religious, aggressive, triumphant, and bestows itself lavishly upon all sides. It istentative, doubtful, hesitating no longer. It is at ease in the world, ittakes possession, it fears no rival, it advances with confident step. 

No man was ever more truly fathered by what is formative and expansive inhis country and times than was Whitman. Not by the literature of hiscountry was he begotten, but by the spirit that lies back of all, andthat begat America itself, --the America that Europe loves and fears, thatshe comes to this country to see, and looks expectantly, but for the mostpart vainly, in our books to find. 

It seems to me he is distinctly a continental type. His sense of space, ofmagnitude, his processional pages, his unloosedness, his wide horizons, his vanishing boundaries, --always something unconfined and unconfinable, always the deferring and undemonstrable. The bad as well as the goodtraits of his country and his people are doubtless implied by his work. 

If he does not finally escape from our unripe Americanism, if he does notrise through it all and clarify it and turn it to ideal uses, draw out thespiritual meanings, then avaunt! we want nothing of him. 

 "The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell. The former I graft and increase upon myself, The latter I translate into a new tongue. "

The vital and the formative the true poet always engrafts and increasesupon himself, and thence upon his reader; the crude, the local, theaccidental, he translates into a new tongue. It has been urged againstWhitman that he expresses our unripe Americanism only, but serious readersof him know better than that. He is easy master of it all, and knows whenhis foot is upon solid ground. It seems to me that in him we see for thefirst time spiritual and ideal meanings and values in democracy and themodern; we see them translated into character; we see them tried byuniversal standards; we see them vivified by a powerful imagination. Wesee America as an idea, and see its relation to other ideas. We get a newconception of the value of the near, the common, the familiar. New lightis thrown upon the worth and significance of the common people, and it isnot the light of an abstract idea, but the light of a concrete example. Wesee the democratic type on a scale it has never before assumed; it is on apar with any of the types that have ruled the world in the past, themilitary, the aristocratic, the regal. It is at home, it has takenpossession, it can hold its own. Henceforth the world is going its way. Ifit is over-confident, over-self-assertive, too American, that is thesurplusage of the poet, of whom we do not want a penny prudence andcaution; make your prophecy bold enough and it fulfills itself. Whitmanhas betrayed no doubt or hesitation in his poetry. His assumptions andvaticinations are tremendous, but they are uttered with an authority andan assurance that convince like natural law. 

IV

I think he gives new meaning to democracy and America. In him we see a newtype, rising out of new conditions, and fully able to justify itself andhold its own. It is the new man in the new world, no longer dependent uponor facing toward the old. I confess that to me America and the modernwould not mean very much without Whitman. The final proof was wantingtill they gave birth to a personality equal to the old types. 

Discussions and speculations about democracy do not carry very far, afterall; to preach equality is not much. But when we see these things madeinto a man, and see the world through his eyes, and see new joy and newmeaning in it, our doubts and perplexities are cleared up. Our universalballoting, and schooling, and material prosperity prove nothing: can yourdemocracy produce a man who shall carry its spirit into loftiest regions, and prove as helpful and masterful under the new conditions as the by-gonetypes were under the old?

V

I predict a great future for Whitman, because the world is so unmistakablygoing his way. The three or four great currents of the century--thedemocratic current, the scientific current, the humanitarian current, thenew religious current, and what flows out of them--are underneath allWhitman has written. They shape all and make all. They do not appear inhim as mere dicta, or intellectual propositions, but as impulses, will, character, flesh-and-blood reality. We get these things, not as sentimentsor yet theories, but as a man. We see life and the world as they appear tothe inevitable democrat, the inevitable lover, the inevitable believer inGod and immortality, the inevitable acceptor of absolute science. 

We are all going his way. We are more and more impatient of formalities, ceremonies, and make-believe; we more and more crave the essential, thereal. More and more we want to see the thing as in itself it is; more andmore is science opening our eyes to see the divine, the illustrious, theuniversal in the common, the near at hand; more and more do we tire ofwords and crave things; deeper and deeper sinks the conviction thatpersonal qualities alone tell, --that the man is all in all, that thebrotherhood of the race is not a dream, that love covers all and atonesfor all. 

Everything in our modern life and culture that tends to broaden, liberalize, free; that tends to make hardy, self-reliant, virile; thattends to widen charity, deepen affection between man and man, to fostersanity and self-reliance; that tends to kindle our appreciation of thedivinity of all things; that heightens our rational enjoyment of life;that inspires hope in the future and faith in the unseen, --are onWhitman's side. All these things prepare the way for him. 

On the other hand, the strain and strife and hoggishness of ourcivilization, our trading politics, our worship of conventions, ourmillionaire ideals, our high-pressure lives, our pruriency, oursordidness, our perversions of nature, our scoffing caricaturingtendencies, are against him. He antagonizes all these things. 

The more democratic we become, the more we are prepared for Whitman; themore tolerant, fraternal, sympathetic we become, the more we are readyfor Whitman; the more we inure ourselves to the open air and to realthings, the more we value and understand our own bodies, the more thewoman becomes the mate and equal of the man, the more social equalityprevails, --the sooner will come to Whitman fullness and fruition. 

VI

Some of our own critics have been a good deal annoyed by the fact thatmany European scholars and experts have recognized Whitman as the onlydistinctive American poet thus far. It would seem as if our reputation forculture and good manners is at stake. We want Europe to see America in ourliterary poets like Lowell, or Longfellow, or Whittier. And Europe maywell see much that is truly representative of America in these and inother New England poets. She may see our aspiration toward her own idealsof culture and refinement; she may see native and patriotic themes firingLowell and Whittier; she may see a certain spirit and temper begotten byour natural environment reflected in Bryant, our delicate and gentlehumanities and scholarly aptitudes shining in Longfellow. But in everycase she sees a type she has long been familiar with. All the poets'thoughts, moods, points of view, effects, aims, methods, are what she haslong known. These are not the poets of a new _world_, but of a new_England_. The new-world book implies more than a new talent, more than afresh pair of eyes, a fresh and original mind like the poets named; suchmen are required to keep up the old line of succession in Englishauthorship. What is implied is a new national and continental spirit, which must arise and voice the old eternal truths through a large, new, democratic personality, --a new man, and, beyond and above him, a newheaven and a new earth. 

Our band of New England poets have carried the New England spirit intopoetry, --its sense of fitness, order, propriety, its shrewdness, inventiveness, aptness, and its aspiration for the pure and noble in life. They have finely exemplified the best Yankee traits; but in no instancewere these traits merged in a personality large enough, bold enough, andcopious and democratic enough to give them national and continentalsignificance. It would be absurd to claim that the pulse-beat of a greatpeople or a great era is to be felt in the work of any of these poets. 

Whitman is responded to in Europe, because he expresses a new type withadequate power, --not, as has been so often urged, simply because he isstrange, and gives the jaded literary palate over there a new fillip. Hemeets the demand for something in American literature that should not facetoward Europe, that should joyfully stand upon its own ground and yetfulfill the conditions of greatness. He fully satisfies the thirst forindividualism amid these awakening peoples, and the thirst for nationalismalso. He realizes the democratic ideal, no longer tentative or apologetic, but taking possession of the world as its own and reappraising the waresit finds there. 

VII

The American spirit is a continental spirit; there is nothing insular ornarrow about it. It is informal, nonchalant, tolerant, sanguine, adaptive, patient, candid, puts up with things, unfastidious, unmindful ofparticulars; disposed to take short cuts, friendly, hospitable, unostentatious, inclined to exaggerate, generous, unrefined, --nevermeddlesome, never hypercritical, never hoggish, never exclusive. Whitmanshared the hopeful optimistic temperament of his countrymen, the faith andconfidence begotten by a great, fertile, sunny land. He expresses theindependence of the people, --their pride, their jealousy of superiors, their contempt of authority (not always beautiful). Our want of reverenceand veneration are supplemented in him with world-wide sympathies andgood-fellowship. 

Emerson is our divine man, the precious quintessence of the New Englandtype, invaluable for his stimulating and ennobling strain; but his geniusis too astral, too select, too remote, to incarnate and give voice to thenational spirit. Clothe him with flesh and blood, make his daringaffirmations real and vital in a human personality and imbued with theAmerican spirit, and we are on the way to Whitman. 

Moreover, the strong, undisguised man-flavor of "Leaves of Grass, " thethrob and pressure in it of those things that make life rank and make itmasterful, and that make for the virility and perpetuity of the race, are, if it must be confessed, more keenly relished abroad than in this country, so thoroughly are we yet under the spell of the merely refined andconventional. We fail to see that in letters, as in life, the great prizesare not to the polished, but to the virile and the strong. 

VIII

Democracy is not so much spoken of in the "Leaves" as it is it thatspeaks. The common, the familiar, are not denied and left behind, they aremade vital and masterful; it is the "divine average" that awakensenthusiasm. Humanity is avenged upon the scholar and the "gentleman" forthe slights they have put upon it; creeds and schools in abeyance;personal qualities, force of character, to the front. Whitman triumphsover the mean, the vulgar, the commonplace, by accepting them and imbuingthem with the spirit of an heroic ideal. Wherever he reveals himself inhis work, it is as one of the common people, never as one of a coterie orof the privileged and cultivated. He is determined there shall be nomistake about it. He glories in the common heritage. He emphasizes inhimself the traits which he shares with workingmen, sailors, soldiers, andthose who live in the open air, even laying claim to the "rowdyish. " He isproud of freckles, sun-tan, brawn, and holds up the powerful andunrefined. 

 "I am enamor'd of growing out-doors, Of men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods, Of the builders and steerers of ships and the wielders of axes and mauls, and the drivers of horses; I can eat and sleep with them week in and week out. "

"Nothing endures, " he says, "but personal qualities. " "Produce greatpersons and the rest follows. " Does he glory in the present? he reverentlybows before the past also. Does he sound the call of battle for the Union?but he nourishes the sick and wounded of the enemy as well. Does he floutat the old religions? but he offers a larger religion in their stead. Heis never merely negative, he is never fanatical, he is never narrow. Hesees all and embraces and encloses all. 

Then we see united and harmonized in Whitman the two great paramounttendencies of our time and of the modern world, --the altruistic orhumanitarian tendency and the individualistic tendency; or, democracy andindividualism, pride and equality, or, rather, pride in equality. Thesetwo forces, as they appear in separate individuals, are oftenantagonistic. In Carlyle, individualism frowned upon democracy. In Whitmanthey are blended and work together. Never was such audacious anduncompromising individualism, and never was such bold and sweepingfraternalism or otherism. The great pride of man in himself, which is onemotif of the poems, flows naturally into the great pride of man in hisfellows; his egoism does not separate him from, but rather unites himwith, all men. What he assumes they shall assume, and what he claims forhimself he demands in the same terms for all. He has set such an exampleof self-trust and self-assertion as has no parallel in our literature, atthe same time that he has set an equal example in practical democracy anduniversal brotherhood. 

IX

Whitman's democracy is the breath of his nostrils, the light of his eyes, the blood in his veins. The reader does not feel that here is some finescholar, some fine poet singing the praises of democracy; he feels thathere is a democrat, probably, as Thoreau surmised, the greatest the worldhas yet seen, turning the light of a great love, a great intellect, agreat soul, upon America, upon contemporary life and events, and upon theuniverse, and reading new lessons, new meanings, therein. He is a greatpoet and prophet, speaking through the average man, speaking as one of thepeople, and interpreting life from the point of view of absolutedemocracy. 

True, the people in their average taste and perceptions are crude andflippant and superficial, and often the victims of mountebanks and fools;yet, as forming the body of our social and political organism, and thechief factor in the world-problem of to-day, they are the exponents ofgreat forces and laws, and often, in emergencies, show the wisdom andunimpeachableness of Nature herself. Deep-hidden currents and forces inthem are liable to come to the surface, and when the politicians get intheir way, or miscalculate them, as so often happens, they are crushed. Whitman is a projection into literature of the cosmic sense and conscienceof the people, and their participation in the forces that are shaping theworld in our century. Much comes to a head in him. Much comes to joyousspeech and song, that heretofore had only come to thought and speculation. A towering, audacious personality has appeared which is strictly the fruitof the democratic spirit, and which has voiced itself in an impassionedutterance touching the whole problem of national and individual life. 

X

The Whitman literature is democratic, not in the sense that it caters tothe taste of the masses or to the taste of the average man; for, as amatter of fact, the masses and the average man are likely to be the lastto recognize its value. The common people, the average newspaper-readingcitizens, are much more likely to be drawn by the artificial and theconventional. But it is democratic because it is filled with the spirit ofabsolute human equality and brotherhood, and gives out the atmosphere ofthe universal, primary, human traits. The social, artificial, accidentaldistinctions of wealth, culture, position, etc. , have not influenced thepoet in the slightest degree. Whitman finds his joy and his triumph, notin being better than other people or above them, but in being one withthem, and sharing their sins as well as their virtues. 

 "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. "

This is one step further than others have taken, and makes democracycomplete in itself. Again, his work identifies itself with the democraticideal in getting rid of the professional and arbitrary elements of poetry, and appealing to the reader entirely through its spirit and content. It isas democratic in this respect as the workman in the field, or the mechanicat his bench. 

The poems are bathed and flooded with the quality of the common people;with the commonness and nearness which they share with real things andwith all open-air nature, --with hunters, travelers, soldiers, workers inall fields, and with rocks, trees, and woods. It is only in the spirit ofthese things that a man himself can have health, sweetness, andproportion; and only in their spirit that he can give an essentially soundjudgment of a work of art, no matter what the subject of it may be. 

This spirit of the "commonest, cheapest, nearest" is the only spirit inwhich man's concrete life can be carried forward. We do not live andbreathe and grow and multiply, we do not have health and sanity andwholeness and proportion, we do not subdue and improve and possess theearth, in the spirit of something exclusive, exceptional, faraway, aristocratic, but in the spirit of the common and universal. The onlydemand is that, in a work of art, the common or universal shall bevitalized with poetic thought and enthusiasm, or imbued with the ideal ofa rare and high excellence. 

XI

Our critics have been fond of taunting Whitman with the fact that thecommon people, the workers, of whom he makes so much, and to whom heperpetually appeals, do not read him, or show any liking for his poems atall. 

Whitman's appeal to the common people, to the democratic masses, is anappeal to the future; it is an appeal to the universal human conscienceand intelligence, as they exist above and beneath all special advantagesof birth and culture and stand related to the total system of things. Italso calls attention to the fact that the spirit in which he writes, andin which he is to be read, is the spirit of open-air life and nature. 

 "No school or shutter'd room commune with me, But roughs and little children, better than they, "

because the simple, unforced, unrefined elements of human nature are thoseout of which the poems sprang and with which they are charged. Theirspirit is closer akin to unlettered humanity than to the over-intellectualand sophisticated products of the schools. 

Of course "roughs and little children" can make nothing of "Leaves ofGrass, " but unless the trained reader has that fund of fresh, simple, wholesome nature, and the love for real things, which unlettered humanitypossesses, he will make nothing of it either. 

XII

It has been truly said that "the noblest seer is ever over-possessed. "This has been the case with nearly all original, first-class men. Carlylefurnished a good illustration of its truth in our own time. He wasover-possessed with his idea of the hero and hero-worship. And it may bethat Whitman was over-possessed with the idea of democracy, America, nationality, and the need of a radically new departure in poeticliterature. Yet none knew better than he that in the long run theconditions of life and of human happiness and progress remain about thesame; that the same price must still be paid for the same things; thatcharacter alone counts; that the same problem "how to live" ever confrontsus; and that democracy, America, nationality, are only way stations, andby no means the end of the route. The all-leveling tendency of democracyis certainly not in the interest of literature. The world is not saved bythe average man, but by the man much above the average, the rare andextraordinary man, --by the "remnant, " as Arnold called them. 

No one knew this better than Whitman, and he said that "one maingenesis-motive" of his "Leaves" was the conviction that the crowninggrowth of the United States was to be spiritual and heroic. Only "superbpersons" can finally justify him. 

HIS RELATION TO SCIENCE

I

The stupendous disclosures of modern science, and what they mean whentranslated into the language of man's ethical and æsthetic nature, havenot yet furnished to any considerable extent the inspiration of poems. That all things are alike divine, that this earth is a star in theheavens, that the celestial laws and processes are here underfoot, thatsize is only relative, that good and bad are only relative, that forcesare convertible and interchangeable, that matter is indestructible, thatdeath is the law of life, that man is of animal origin, that the sum offorces is constant, that the universe is a complexus of powersinconceivably subtle and vital, that motion is the law of all things, --infact, that we have got rid of the notions of the absolute, the fixed, thearbitrary, and the notion of origins and of the dualism of the world, --towhat extent will these and kindred ideas modify art and all æstheticproduction? The idea of the divine right of kings and the divine authorityof priests is gone; that, in some other time or some other place God wasnearer man than now and here, --this idea is gone. Indeed, the whole ofman's spiritual and religious belief which forms the background ofliterature has changed, --a change as great as if the sky were to changefrom blue to red or to orange. The light of day is different. Butliterature deals with life, and the essential conditions of life, you say, always remain the same. Yes, but the expression of their artistic valuesis forever changing. If we ask where is the modern imaginative work thatis based upon these revelations of science, the work in which they are theblood and vital juices, I answer, "Leaves of Grass, " and no other. Thework is the outgrowth of science and modern ideas, just as truly as Danteis the outgrowth of mediæval ideas and superstitions; and the imagination, the creative spirit, is just as unhampered in Whitman as in Dante or inShakespeare. The poet finds the universe just as plastic and ductile, justas obedient to his will, and just as ready to take the impress of hisspirit, as did these supreme artists. Science has not hardened it at all. The poet opposes himself to it, and masters it and rises superior. He isnot balked or oppressed for a moment. He knows from the start what sciencecan bring him, what it can give, and what it can take away; he knows theuniverse is not orphaned; he finds more grounds than ever for a pæan ofthanksgiving and praise. His conviction of the identity of soul and body, matter and spirit, does not shake his faith in immortality in the least. His faith arises, not from half views, but from whole views. In him theidea of the soul, of humanity, of identity, easily balanced the idea ofthe material universe. Man was more than a match for nature. It was allfor him, and not for itself. His enormous egotism, or hold upon thecentral thought or instinct of human worth and import, was an anchor thatnever gave way. Science sees man as the ephemeron of an hour, aniridescent bubble on a seething, whirling torrent, an accident in a worldof incalculable and clashing forces. Whitman sees him as inevitable and asimmortal as God himself. Indeed, he is quite as egotistical andanthropomorphic, though in an entirely different way, as were the oldbards and prophets before the advent of science. The whole import of theuniverse is directed to one man, --to you. His anthropomorphism is not aprojection of himself into nature, but an absorption of nature in himself. The tables are turned. It is not alien or superhuman beings that he seesand hears in nature, but his own that he finds everywhere. All gods aremerged in himself. 

Not the least fear, not the least doubt or dismay, in this book. Not onemoment's hesitation or losing of the way. And it is not merely anintellectual triumph, but the triumph of soul and personality. The ironknots are not untied, they are melted. Indeed, the poet's contentment andtriumph in view of the fullest recognition of all the sin and sorrow ofthe world, and of all that baffles and dwarfs, is not the least of theremarkable features of the book. 

II

Whitman's relation to science is fundamental and vital. It is the soilunder his feet. He comes into a world from which all childish fear andillusion has been expelled. He exhibits the religious and poetic facultiesperfectly adjusted to a scientific, industrial, democratic age, andexhibits them more fervent and buoyant than ever before. We have gainedmore than we have lost. The world is anew created by science anddemocracy, and he pronounces it good with the joy and fervor of the oldfaith. 

He shared with Tennyson the glory of being one of the two poets of note inour time who have drawn inspiration from this source, or viewed theuniverse through the vistas which science opens. Renan thought the modernpoetic or imaginative contemplation of the universe puerile and factitiouscompared with the scientific contemplation of it. The one, he said, wasstupendous; the other childish and empty. But Whitman and Tennyson werefully abreast with science, and often afford one a sweep of vision thatmatches the best science can do. Tennyson drew upon science more for hisimages and illustrations than Whitman did; he did not absorb andappropriate its results in the wholesale way of the latter. Science fedWhitman's imagination and made him bold; its effects were moral andspiritual. On Tennyson its effects were mainly intellectual; it enlargedhis vocabulary without strengthening his faith. Indeed, one would say, from certain passages in "In Memoriam, " that it had distinctly weakenedhis faith. Let us note for a moment the different ways these two poets usescience. In his poem to Fitzgerald, Tennyson draws upon the nebularhypothesis for an image:--

 "A planet equal to the sun Which cast it, that large infidel Your Omar. "

In "Despair" there crops out another bold inference of science, the vision"of an earth that is dead. "

 "The homeless planet at length will be wheel'd thro' the silence of space, Motherless evermore of an ever-vanishing race. "

In the "Epilogue" he glances into the sidereal heavens:--

 "The fires that arch this dusky dot-- Yon myriad-worlded way-- The vast sun-clusters' gather'd blaze, World-isles in lonely skies, Whole heavens within themselves, amaze Our brief humanities. "

As our American poet never elaborates in the Tennysonian fashion, he doesnot use science as material, but as inspiration. His egoism andanthropomorphic tendency are as great as those of the early bards, and hemakes everything tell for the individual. Let me give a page or two fromthe "Song of Myself, " illustrative of his attitude in this respect:--

 "I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits, grains, esculent roots, And am stuccoed with quadrupeds and birds all over, And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons, And call anything close again, when I desire it. 

 "In vain the speeding or shyness, In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against any approach, In vain the mastodon retreats beneath its own powdered bones, In vain objects stand leagues off, and assume manifold shapes, In vain the ocean settling in hollows, and the great monsters lying low, In vain the buzzard houses herself with the sky, In vain the snake slides through the creepers and logs, In vain the elk takes to the inner passes of the woods, In vain the razor-billed auk sails far north to Labrador, I follow quickly, I ascend to the nest in the fissure of the cliff. 

 * * * * *

 "I am an acme of things accomplished, and I an endorser of things to be. My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs, On every step bunches of ages, and large bunches between the steps, All below duly traveled, and still I mount and mount. 

 "Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me, Afar down I see the huge first Nothing--I know I was even there, I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist, And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon. 

 "Long I was hugged close--long and long. Immense have been the preparations for me, Faithful and friendly the arms that have helped me, Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen, For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings, They sent influences to look after what was to hold me. 

 "Before I was born out of my mother, generations guided me, My embryo has never been torpid--nothing could overlay it. For it the nebula cohered to an orb, The long, slow strata piled to rest it in, Vast vegetables gave it sustenance, Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths, and deposited it with care. All forces have been steadily employed to complete and delight me, Now I stand on this spot with my Soul. 

 "I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems, And all I see, multiplied as high as I can cipher, edge but the rim of the farther systems: Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding, Outward, outward, and forever outward: My sun has his sun, and around him obediently wheels; He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit, And greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside them. 

 "There is no stoppage, and never can be stoppage. If I, you, the worlds, all beneath or upon their surfaces, and all the palpable life, were this moment reduced back to a pallid float, it would not avail in the long run. We should surely bring up again where we now stand, And as surely go as much farther--and then farther and farther. A few quadrillions of eras, a few octillions of cubic leagues, do not hazard the span or make it impatient. They are but parts--anything is but a part, See ever so far, there is limitless space outside of that, Count ever so much, there is limitless time around that. "

In all cases, Whitman's vision is as large as that of science, but it isalways the vision of a man and not that of a philosopher. His report ofthe facts has an imaginative lift and a spiritual significance which theman of science cannot give them. In him, for the first time, a personalityhas appeared that cannot be dwarfed and set aside by those things. He doesnot have to stretch himself at all to match in the human and emotionalrealm the stupendous discoveries and deductions of science. In him manrefuses to stand aside and acknowledge himself of no account in thepresence of the cosmic laws and areas. It is all for him, it is alldirected to him; without him the universe is an empty void. This is the"full-spread pride of man, " the pride that refuses to own any masteroutside of itself. 

 "I know my omnivorous words, and cannot say any less, And would fetch you, whoever you are, flush with myself. "

HIS RELATION TO RELIGION

Whitman, as I have elsewhere said, was swayed by two or three greatpassions, and the chief of these was doubtless his religious passion. Hethrilled to the thought of the mystery and destiny of the soul. 

 "The soul, Forever and forever--longer than soil is brown and solid--longer than water ebbs and flows. "

He urged that there could be no permanent national grandeur, and no worthymanly or womanly development, without religion. 

 "I specifically announce that the real and permanent grandeur of these States must be their Religion, Otherwise there is no real and permanent grandeur. "

All materials point to and end at last in spiritual results. 

 "Each is not for its own sake, I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky are for Religion's sake. "

All our ostensible realities, our art, our literature, our businesspursuits, etc. , are but fuel to religion. 

 "For not all matter is fuel to heat, impalpable flame, the essential life of the earth, Any more than such are to Religion. "

Again he says:--

 "My Comrade! For you to share with me two greatnesses--And a third one, rising inclusive and more resplendent, The greatness of Love and Democracy--and the greatness of Religion. "

It is hardly necessary to say that the religion which Whitman celebratesis not any form of ecclesiasticism. It was larger than any creed that hasyet been formulated. It was the conviction of the man of science touchedand vivified by the emotion of the prophet and poet. As exemplified in hislife its chief elements were faith, hope, charity. Its object was toprepare you to live, not to die, and to "earn for the body and the mindwhat adheres and goes forward, and is not dropped by death. "

The old religion, the religion of our fathers, was founded upon a curse. Sin, repentance, fear, Satan, hell, play important parts. Creation hadresulted in a tragedy in which the very elemental forces were implicated. The grand scheme of an infinite Being failed through the machinations ofthe Devil. Salvation was an escape from a wrath to come. The way wasthrough agony and tears. Heaven was only gained by denying earth. Thegreat mass of the human race was doomed to endless perdition. Now there isno trace of this religion in Whitman, and it does not seem to have leftany shadow upon him. Ecclesiasticism is dead; he clears the ground for anew growth. To the priests he says: "Your day is done. "

He sings a new song; he tastes a new joy in life. The earth is as divineas heaven, and there is no god more sacred than yourself. It is as if theworld had been anew created, and Adam had once more been placed in thegarden, --the world, with all consequences of the fall, purged from him. 

Hence we have in Whitman the whole human attitude towards the universe, towards God, towards life and death, towards good and evil, completelychanged. We have absolute faith and acceptance in place of the fear andrepentance of the old creeds; we have death welcomed as joyously as life, we have political and social equality as motifs and impulses, and notmerely as sentiments. He would show us the muse of poetry, as impartial, as sweeping in its vision, as modern, as real, as free from the morbid andmake-believe, as the muse of science. He sees good in all, beauty in all. It is not the old piety, it is the new faith; it is not the old worship, it is the new acceptance; not the old, corroding religious pessimism, butthe new scientific optimism. 

He does not deny, he affirms; he does not criticise, he celebrates; his isnot a call to repentance, it is a call to triumph:--

 "I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough, None has ever yet adored or worship'd half enough, None has begun to think how divine he himself is, or how certain the future is. "

He accepted science absolutely, yet science was not an end in itself: itwas not his dwelling; he but entered by it to an area of his dwelling. 

The flower of science was religion. Without this religion, or somethingakin to it, --without some spiritual, emotional life that centred about anideal, --Whitman urged that there could be no permanent national orindividual development. In the past this ideal was found in thesupernatural; for us and the future democratic ages, it must be found inthe natural, in the now and the here. 

The aristocratic tradition not only largely shaped the literature of thepast, it shaped the religion: man was a culprit, his life a rebellion; hisproper attitude toward the unseen powers was that of a subject to hisoffended sovereign, --one of prostration and supplication. Heaven was aselect circle reserved for the few, --the aristocracy of the pure and just. The religion of a democratic and scientific era, as voiced by Whitman andas exemplified in his life, is of quite another character, --notveneration, but joy and triumph; not fear, but love; not self-abasement, but self-exaltation; not sacrifice, but service: in fact, not religion atall in the old sense of the spiritual at war with the natural, the divinewith the human, this world a vale of tears, and mundane things but filthand ashes, heaven for the good and hell for the bad; but in the new senseof the divinity of all things, of the equality of gods and men, of thebrotherhood of the race, of the identity of the material and thespiritual, of the beneficence of death and the perfection of the universe. The poet turns his face to earth and not to heaven; he finds themiraculous, the spiritual, in the things about him, and gods and goddessesin the men and women he meets. He effaces the old distinctions; heestablishes a sort of universal suffrage in spiritual matters; there areno select circles, no privileged persons. Is this the democracy ofreligion? liberty, fraternity, and equality carried out in the spiritualsphere? Death is the right hand of God, and evil plays a necessary partalso. Nothing is discriminated against; there are no reprisals orpostponements, no dualism or devilism. Everything is in its place; man'slife and all the things of his life are well-considered. 

Carried out in practice, this democratic religion will not beget priests, or churches, or creeds, or rituals, but a life cheerful and full on allsides, helpful, loving, unworldly, tolerant, open-souled, temperate, fearless, free, and contemplating with pleasure, rather than alarm, "theexquisite transition of death. "

A FINAL WORD

After all I have written about Whitman, I feel at times that the mainthing I wanted to say about him I have not said, cannot say; the bestabout him cannot be told anyway. "My final merit I refuse you. " His fullsignificance in connection with the great modern movement; how he embodiesit all and speaks out of it, and yet maintains his hold upon theprimitive, the aboriginal; how he presupposes science and culture, yetdraws his strength from that which antedates these things; how he gloriesin the present, and yet is sustained and justified by the past; how he isthe poet of America and the modern, and yet translates these things intouniversal truths; how he is the poet of wickedness, while yet every fibreof him is sound and good; how his page is burdened with the material, thereal, the contemporary, while yet his hold upon the ideal, the spiritual, never relaxes; how he is the poet of the body, while yet he is in evenfuller measure the poet of the soul; in fact, how all contradictions arefinally reconciled in him, --all these things and more, I say, I feel thatI have not set forth with the clearness and emphasis the subject demanded. Other students of him will approach him on other lines, and will disclosemeanings that I have missed. 

Writing about him, as Symonds said, is enormously difficult. At times Ifeel as if I was almost as much at sea with regard to him as when I firstbegan to study him; not at sea with regard to his commanding genius andpower, but with regard to any adequate statement and summary of him incurrent critical terms. One cannot define and classify him as he can amore highly specialized poetic genius. What is he like? He is likeeverything. He is like the soil which holds the germs of a thousand formsof life; he is like the grass, common, universal, perennial, formless; heis like your own heart, mystical yearning, rebellious, contradictory, butever throbbing with life. He is fluid, generative, electric; he is full ofthe germs, potencies, and latencies of things; he provokes thought withoutsatisfying it; he is formless without being void; he is both Darwinian andDantesque. He is the great reconciler, he united and harmonized so manyopposites in himself. As a man he united the masculine and feminineelements in a remarkable degree; he united the innocent vanity of thechild with the self-reliance of a god. In his moral aspects, he unitedegoism and altruism, pride and charity, individualism and democracy, fierce patriotism and the cosmopolitan spirit; in his literary aspects heunited mysticism and realism, the poet and prophet, the local and theuniversal; in his religious aspects he united faith and agnosticism, theglorification of the body and all objective things, with an unshakabletrust in the reality of the invisible world. 

Rich in the elements of poetry, a London critic says, almost beyond anyother poet of his time, and yet the conscious, elaborate, crystallic, poetic work which the critic demanded of him, carefully stopping short of, quite content to hold it all in solution, and give his reader an impulserather than a specimen. 

I have accepted Whitman entire and without reservation. I could not dootherwise. It was clear enough to me that he was to be taken as a whole ornot at all. We cannot cut and carve a man. The latest poet brings uspoetic wares, curiously and beautifully carved and wrought specimens, someof which we accept and some of which we pass by. Whitman brings us nocunning handicraft of the muses: he brings us a gospel, he brings us aman, he brings us a new revelation of life; and either his work appeals tous as a whole, or it does not so appeal. He will not live in separatepassages, or in a few brief poems, any more than Shakespeare or Homer orDante, or the Bible, so lives. 

The chief thing about the average literary poet is his poetic gift, apartfrom any other consideration; we select from what he brings us as weselect from a basket of fruit. The chief thing about Whitman is thepersonality which the poetic gift is engaged in exploiting; the excitementof our literary or artistic sense is always less than the excitement ofour sense of life and of real things. We get in him a fixed point of view, a new vantage-ground of personality from which to survey life. It is lesswhat he brings, and more what he is, than with other poets. To take him byfragments, picking out poetic tidbits here and there, rejecting all therest, were like valuing a walk through the fields and woods only for theflowers culled here and there, or the bits of color in the grass orfoliage. Is the air, the sunshine, the free spaces, the rocks, the soil, the trees, and the exhilaration of it all, nothing? There are flowers inWhitman, too, but they are amid the rocks or under the trees, and seemquite unpremeditated and by the way, and never the main concern. If ourquest is for these alone, we shall surely be disappointed. "In order toappreciate Whitman's poetry and his purpose, " says Joel Chandler Harris, "it is necessary to possess the intuition that enables the mind to graspin instant and express admiration the vast group of facts that makeman, --that make liberty, --that make America. There is no poetry in thedetails; it is all in the broad, sweeping, comprehensive assimilation ofthe mighty forces behind them, --the inevitable, unaccountable, irresistible forward movement of man in the making of this republic. "

And again: "Those who approach Walt Whitman's poetry from the literaryside are sure to be disappointed. Whatever else it is, it is not literary. Its art is its own, and the melody of it must be sought in othersuggestions than those of metre. . . . Those who are merely literary willfind little substance in the great drama of Democracy which is outlinedby Walt Whitman in his writings, --it is no distinction to call them poems. But those who know nature at first hand--who know man, who see in thisRepublic something more than a political government--will find therein thethrill and glow of poetry and the essence of melody. Not the poetry thatculture stands in expectation of, nor the melody that capers in verse andmetre, but those rarer intimations and suggestions that are born inprimeval solitudes, or come whirling from the vast funnel of the storm. "How admirable! how true! No man has ever spoken more to the point uponWalt Whitman. 

The appearance of such a man as Whitman involves deep world-forces of raceand time. He is rooted in the very basic structure of his age. After whatI have already said, my reader will not be surprised when I tell him thatI look upon Whitman as the one mountain thus far in our literarylandscape. To me he changes the whole aspect, almost the very climate, ofour literature. He adds the much-needed ruggedness, breadth, audacity, independence, and the elements of primal strength and health. We owe muchto Emerson. But Emerson was much more a _made_ man than was Whitman, --muchmore the result of secondary forces, the college, the church, and of NewEngland social and literary culture. With all his fervid humanity anddeeply ingrained modernness, Whitman has the virtues of the primal and thesavage. "Leaves of Grass" has not the charm, or the kind of charm, of themore highly wrought artistic works, but it has the incentive of nature andthe charm of real things. We shall not go to it to be soothed and lulled. It will always remain among the difficult and heroic undertakings, demanding our best moments, our best strength, our morning push and power. Like voyaging or mountain-climbing, or facing any danger or hardship byland or sea, it fosters manly endeavor and the great virtues of sanity andself-reliance. 

Transcriber's Notes:

Passages in italics are indicated by _underscore_. 

Additional spacing after some of the quotes is intentional to indicateboth the end of a quotation and the beginning of a new paragraph aspresented in the original text. 

The following misprint has been corrected: "differentation" corrected to "differentiation" (page 18)

Other than the corrections listed above, printer's inconsistencies inspelling, punctuation, hyphenation, and ligature usage have been retained.