Lastly, as most important, after all, to human beings in our disputable
state, what is that higher prudence which was to be the aim and issue of
these deliberate productions?
Whitman is too clever to slip into a succinct formula. If he could have
adequately said his say in a single proverb, it is to be presumed he
would not have put himself to the trouble of writing several volumes. It
was his programme to state as much as he could of the world with all its
contradictions, and leave the upshot with God who planned it. What he
has made of the world and the world’s meanings is to be found at large in
his poems. These altogether give his answers to the problems of belief
and conduct; in many ways righteous and high-spirited, in some ways loose
and contradictory. And yet there are two passages from the preface to
the _Leaves of Grass_ which do pretty well condense his teaching on all
essential points, and yet preserve a measure of his spirit.
“This is what you shall do,” he says in the one, “love the earth, and
sun, and animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks,
stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labour to
others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and
indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or
unknown, or to any man or number of men; go freely with powerful
uneducated persons, and with the young, and mothers of families, read
these leaves (his own works) in the open air every season of every
year of your life; re-examine all you have been told at school or
church, or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul.”
“The prudence of the greatest poet,” he adds in the other—and the
greatest poet is, of course, himself—“knows that the young man who
composedly perilled his life and lost it, has done exceeding well for
himself; while the man who has not perilled his life, and retains it
to old age in riches and ease, has perhaps achieved nothing for
himself worth mentioning; and that only that person has no great
prudence to learn, who has learnt to prefer real long-lived things,
and favours body and soul the same, and perceives the indirect surely
following the direct, and what evil or good he does leaping onward
and waiting to meet him again, and who in his spirit, in any
emergency whatever, neither hurries nor avoids death.”
There is much that is Christian in these extracts, startlingly Christian.
Any reader who bears in mind Whitman’s own advice and “dismisses whatever
insults his own soul” will find plenty that is bracing, brightening, and
chastening to reward him for a little patience at first. It seems hardly
possible that any being should get evil from so healthy a book as the
_Leaves of Grass_, which is simply comical wherever it falls short of
nobility; but if there be any such, who cannot both take and leave, who
cannot let a single opportunity pass by without some unworthy and unmanly
thought, I should have as great difficulty, and neither more nor less, in
recommending the works of Whitman as in lending them Shakespeare, or
letting them go abroad outside of the grounds of a private asylum.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU:
HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS.