III.

Whitman is not one of those who can be deceived by familiarity. He

considers it just as wonderful that there are myriads of stars, as that

one man should rise from the dead. He declares “a hair on the back of

his hand just as curious as any special revelation.” His whole life is

to him what it was to Sir Thomas Browne, one perpetual miracle.

Everything is strange, everything unaccountable, everything beautiful;

from a bug to the moon, from the sight of the eyes to the appetite for

food. He makes it his business to see things as if he saw them for the

first time, and professes astonishment on principle. But he has no

leaning towards mythology; avows his contempt for what he calls

“unregenerate poetry;” and does not mean by nature

“The smooth walks, trimmed hedges, butterflies, posies, and

nightingales of the English poets, but the whole orb, with its

geologic history, the Kosmos, carrying fire and snow, that rolls

through the illimitable areas, light as a feather though weighing

billions of tons.”

Nor is this exhaustive; for in his character of idealist all impressions,

all thoughts, trees and people, love and faith, astronomy, history, and

religion, enter upon equal terms into his notion of the universe. He is

not against religion; not, indeed, against any religion. He wishes to

drag with a larger net, to make a more comprehensive synthesis, than any

or than all of them put together. In feeling after the central type of

man, he must embrace all eccentricities; his cosmology must subsume all

cosmologies, and the feelings that gave birth to them; his statement of

facts must include all religion and all irreligion, Christ and Boodha,

God and the devil. The world as it is, and the whole world as it is,

physical, and spiritual, and historical, with its good and bad, with its

manifold inconsistencies, is what he wishes to set forth, in strong,

picturesque, and popular lineaments, for the understanding of the average

man. One of his favourite endeavours is to get the whole matter into a

nutshell; to knock the four corners of the universe, one after another,

about his readers’ ears; to hurry him, in breathless phrases, hither and

thither, back and forward, in time and space; to focus all this about his

own momentary personality; and then, drawing the ground from under his

feet, as if by some cataclysm of nature, to plunge him into the

unfathomable abyss sown with enormous suns and systems, and among the

inconceivable numbers and magnitudes and velocities of the heavenly

bodies. So that he concludes by striking into us some sense of that

disproportion of things which Shelley has illuminated by the ironical

flash of these eight words: The desire of the moth for the star.

The same truth, but to what a different purpose! Whitman’s moth is

mightily at his ease about all the planets in heaven, and cannot think

too highly of our sublunary tapers. The universe is so large that

imagination flags in the effort to conceive it; but here, in the

meantime, is the world under our feet, a very warm and habitable corner.

“The earth, that is sufficient; I do not want the constellations any

nearer,” he remarks. And again: “Let your soul stand cool and composed,”

says he, “before a million universes.” It is the language of a

transcendental common sense, such as Thoreau held and sometimes uttered.

But Whitman, who has a somewhat vulgar inclination for technical talk and

the jargon of philosophy, is not content with a few pregnant hints; he

must put the dots upon his i’s; he must corroborate the songs of Apollo

by some of the darkest talk of human metaphysic. He tells his disciples

that they must be ready “to confront the growing arrogance of Realism.”

Each person is, for himself, the keystone and the occasion of this

universal edifice. “Nothing, not God,” he says, “is greater to one than

oneself is;” a statement with an irreligious smack at the first sight;

but like most startling sayings, a manifest truism on a second. He will

give effect to his own character without apology; he sees “that the

elementary laws never apologise.” “I reckon,” he adds, with quaint

colloquial arrogance, “I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I

plant my house by, after all.” The level follows the law of its being;

so, unrelentingly, will he; everything, every person, is good in his own

place and way; God is the maker of all and all are in one design. For he

believes in God, and that with a sort of blasphemous security. “No array

of terms,” quoth he, “no array of terms can say how much at peace I am

about God and about death.” There certainly never was a prophet who

carried things with a higher hand; he gives us less a body of dogmas than

a series of proclamations by the grace of God; and language, you will

observe, positively fails him to express how far he stands above the

highest human doubts and trepidations.

But next in order of truths to a person’s sublime conviction of himself,

comes the attraction of one person for another, and all that we mean by

the word love:—

“The dear love of man for his comrade—the attraction of friend for

friend,

Of the well-married husband and wife, of children and parents,

Of city for city and land for land.”

The solitude of the most sublime idealist is broken in upon by other

people’s faces; he sees a look in their eyes that corresponds to

something in his own heart; there comes a tone in their voices which

convicts him of a startling weakness for his fellow-creatures. While he

is hymning the _ego_ and commercing with God and the universe, a woman

goes below his window; and at the turn of her skirt, or the colour of her

eyes, Icarus is recalled from heaven by the run. Love is so startlingly

real that it takes rank upon an equal footing of reality with the

consciousness of personal existence. We are as heartily persuaded of the

identity of those we love as of our own identity. And so sympathy pairs

with self-assertion, the two gerents of human life on earth; and

Whitman’s ideal man must not only be strong, free, and self-reliant in

himself, but his freedom must be bounded and his strength perfected by

the most intimate, eager, and long-suffering love for others. To some

extent this is taking away with the left hand what has been so generously

given with the right. Morality has been ceremoniously extruded from the

door only to be brought in again by the window. We are told, on one

page, to do as we please; and on the next we are sharply upbraided for

not having done as the author pleases. We are first assured that we are

the finest fellows in the world in our own right; and then it appears

that we are only fine fellows in so far as we practise a most quixotic

code of morals. The disciple who saw himself in clear ether a moment

before is plunged down again among the fogs and complications of duty.

And this is all the more overwhelming because Whitman insists not only on

love between sex and sex, and between friends of the same sex, but in the

field of the less intense political sympathies; and his ideal man must

not only be a generous friend but a conscientious voter into the bargain.

His method somewhat lessens the difficulty. He is not, the reader will

remember, to tell us how good we ought to be, but to remind us how good

we are. He is to encourage us to be free and kind, by proving that we

are free and kind already. He passes our corporate life under review, to

show that it is upheld by the very virtues of which he makes himself the

advocate. “There is no object so soft,” he says somewhere in his big,

plain way, “there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel’d

universe.” Rightly understood, it is on the softest of all objects, the

sympathetic heart, that the wheel of society turns easily and securely as

on a perfect axle. There is no room, of course, for doubt or discussion,

about conduct, where every one is to follow the law of his being with

exact compliance. Whitman hates doubt, deprecates discussion, and

discourages to his utmost the craving, carping sensibilities of the

conscience. We are to imitate, to use one of his absurd and happy

phrases, “the satisfaction and aplomb of animals.” If he preaches a sort

of ranting Christianity in morals, a fit consequent to the ranting

optimism of his cosmology, it is because he declares it to be the

original deliverance of the human heart; or at least, for he would be

honestly historical in method, of the human heart as at present

Christianised. His is a morality without a prohibition; his policy is

one of encouragement all round. A man must be a born hero to come up to

Whitman’s standard in the practice of any of the positive virtues; but of

a negative virtue, such as temperance or chastity, he has so little to

say, that the reader need not be surprised if he drops a word or two upon

the other side. He would lay down nothing that would be a clog; he would

prescribe nothing that cannot be done ruddily, in a heat. The great

point is to get people under way. To the faithful Whitmanite this would

be justified by the belief that God made all, and that all was good; the

prophet, in this doctrine, has only to cry “Tally-ho,” and mankind will

break into a gallop on the road to El Dorado. Perhaps, to another class

of minds, it may look like the result of the somewhat cynical reflection

that you will not make a kind man out of one who is unkind by any

precepts under heaven; tempered by the belief that, in natural

circumstances, the large majority is well disposed. Thence it would

follow, that if you can only get every one to feel more warmly and act

more courageously, the balance of results will be for good.

So far, you see, the doctrine is pretty coherent as a doctrine; as a

picture of man’s life it is incomplete and misleading, although eminently

cheerful. This he is himself the first to acknowledge; for if he is

prophetic in anything, it is in his noble disregard of consistency. “Do

I contradict myself?” he asks somewhere; and then pat comes the answer,

the best answer ever given in print, worthy of a sage, or rather of a

woman: “Very well, then, I contradict myself!” with this addition, not so

feminine and perhaps not altogether so satisfactory: “I am large—I

contain multitudes.” Life, as a matter of fact, partakes largely of the

nature of tragedy. The gospel according to Whitman, even if it be not so

logical, has this advantage over the gospel according to Pangloss, that

it does not utterly disregard the existence of temporal evil. Whitman

accepts the fact of disease and wretchedness like an honest man; and

instead of trying to qualify it in the interest of his optimism, sets

himself to spur people up to be helpful. He expresses a conviction,

indeed, that all will be made up to the victims in the end; that “what is

untried and afterward” will fail no one, not even “the old man who has

lived without purpose and feels it with bitterness worse than gall.” But

this is not to palliate our sense of what is hard or melancholy in the

present. Pangloss, smarting under one of the worst things that ever was

supposed to come from America, consoled himself with the reflection that

it was the price we have to pay for cochineal. And with that murderous

parody, logical optimism and the praises of the best of possible words

went irrevocably out of season, and have been no more heard of in the

mouths of reasonable men. Whitman spares us all allusions to the

cochineal; he treats evil and sorrow in a spirit almost as of welcome; as

an old sea-dog might have welcomed the sight of the enemy’s topsails off

the Spanish Main. There, at least, he seems to say, is something obvious

to be done. I do not know many better things in literature than the

brief pictures,—brief and vivid like things seen by lightning,—with which

he tries to stir up the world’s heart upon the side of mercy. He braces

us, on the one hand, with examples of heroic duty and helpfulness; on the

other, he touches us with pitiful instances of people needing help. He

knows how to make the heart beat at a brave story; to inflame us with

just resentment over the hunted slave; to stop our mouths for shame when

he tells of the drunken prostitute. For all the afflicted, all the weak,

all the wicked, a good word is said in a spirit which I can only call one

of ultra-Christianity; and however wild, however contradictory, it may be

in parts, this at least may be said for his book, as it may be said of

the Christian Gospels, that no one will read it, however respectable, but

he gets a knock upon his conscience; no one however fallen, but he finds

a kindly and supporting welcome.