giving utterance to this profoundly religious faith in man. He is rather
the prophet of what is to be than the celebrator of what is. "Democracy,"
he writes, "is a word the real gist of which still sleeps quite
unawakened, notwithstanding the resonance and the many angry tempests out
of which its syllables have come from pen or tongue. It is a great word,
whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten because that history has yet
to be enacted. It is in some sort younger brother of another great and
often used word, Nature, whose history also waits unwritten." Political
democracy, now taking shape, is the house to live in, and whilst what we
demand of it is room for all, fair chances for all, none disregarded or
left out as of no account, the main question, the kind of life that is to
be led in that house is altogether beyond the ken of the statesmen as
such, and is involved in those deepest facts of the nature and destiny of
man which are the themes of Walt Whitman's writings. The practical outcome
of that exalted and all-accepting faith in the scheme of things, and in
man, toward whom all has led up and in whom all concentrates as the
manifestation, the revelation of Divine Power is a changed estimate of
himself; a higher reverence for, a loftier belief in the heritage of
himself; a perception that pride, not humility, is the true homage to his
Maker; that "noblesse oblige" is for the Race, not for a handful; that it
is mankind and womankind and their high destiny which constrain to
greatness, which can no longer stoop to meanness and lies and base aims,
but must needs clothe themselves in "the majesty of honest dealing"
(majestic because demanding courage as good as the soldier's, self-denial
as good as the saint's for every-day affairs), and walk erect and
fearless, a law to themselves, sternest of all lawgivers. Looking back to
the palmy days of feudalism, especially as immortalized in Shakespeare's
plays, what is it we find most admirable? what is it that fascinates? It
is the noble pride, the lofty self-respect; the dignity, the courage and
audacity of its great personages. But this pride, this dignity rested half
upon a true, half upon a hollow foundation; half upon intrinsic qualities,
half upon the ignorance and brutishness of the great masses of the people,
whose helpless submission and easily dazzled imaginations made
stepping-stones to the elevation of the few, and "hedged round kings,"
with a specious kind of "divinity." But we have our faces turned toward a
new day, and toward heights on which there is room for all.
"By God, I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart
of on the same terms"
is the motto of the great personages, the great souls of to-day. _On the
same terms_, for that is Nature's law and cannot be abrogated, the
reaping as you sow. But all shall have the chance to sow well. This is
pride indeed! Not a pride that isolates, but that can take no rest till
our common humanity is lifted out of the mire everywhere, "a pride that
cannot stretch too far because sympathy stretches with it":
"Whoever you are! claim your own at any hazard!
These shows of the east and west are tame, compared to you;
These immense meadows--these interminable rivers--
You are immense and interminable as they;
These furies, elements, storms, motions of Nature, throes of apparent
dissolution--you are he or she who is master or mistress over them,
Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements, pain,
passion, dissolution.
"The hopples fall from your ankles--you find an unfailing sufficiency;
Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest, whatever
you are promulges itself;
Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided, nothing is
scanted;
Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance and ennui, what you are
picks its way."
This is indeed a pride that is "calming and excellent to the soul"; that
"dissolves poverty from its need and riches from its conceit."
And humility? Is there, then, no place for that virtue so much praised by
the haughty? Humility is the sweet spontaneous grace of an aspiring,
finely developed nature which sees always heights ahead still unclimbed,
which outstrips itself in eager longing for excellence still unattained.
Genuine humility takes good care of itself as men rise in the scale of
being; for every height climbed discloses still new heights beyond. Or it
is a wise caution in fortune's favourites lest they themselves should
mistake, as the unthinking crowd around do, the glitter reflected back
upon them by their surroundings for some superiority inherent in
themselves. It befits them well if there be also due pride, pride of
humanity behind. But to say to a man, 'Be humble' is like saying to one
who has a battle to fight, a race to run, 'You are a poor, feeble
creature; you are not likely to win and you do not deserve to.' Say rather
to him, 'Hold up your head! You were not made for failure, you were made
for victory: go forward with a joyful confidence in that result sooner or
later, and the sooner or the later depends mainly on yourself.'
"What Christ appeared for in the moral-spiritual field for humankind,
namely, that in respect to the absolute soul there is in the possession of
such by each single individual something so transcendent, so incapable of
gradations (like life) that to that extent it places all being on a common
level, utterly regardless of the distinctions of intellect, virtue,
station, or any height or lowliness whatever" is the secret source of that
deathless sentiment of Equality which how many able heads imagine
themselves to have slain with ridicule and contempt as Johnson, kicking a
stone, imagined he had demolished Idealism when he had simply attributed
to the word an impossible meaning. True, _In_equality is one of Nature's
words: she moves forward always by means of the exceptional. But the
moment the move is accomplished, then all her efforts are toward equality,
toward bringing up the rear to that standpoint. But social inequalities,
class distinctions, do not stand for or represent Nature's inequalities.
Precisely the contrary in the long run. They are devices for holding up
many that would else gravitate down and keeping down many who would else
rise up; for providing that some should reap who have not sown, and many
sow without reaping. But literature tallies the ways of Nature; for though
itself the product of the exceptional, its aim is to draw all men up to
its own level. The great writer is "hungry for equals day and night," for
so only can he be fully understood. "The meal is equally set"; all are
invited. Therefore is literature, whether consciously or not, the greatest
of all forces on the side of Democracy.
Carlyle has said there is no grand poem in the world but is at bottom a
biography--the life of a man. Walt Whitman's poems are not the biography
of a man, but they are his actual presence. It is no vain boast when he
exclaims,
"Camerado! this is no book;
Who touches this touches a man."
He has infused himself into words in a way that had not before seemed
possible; and he causes each reader to feel that he himself or herself has
an actual relationship to him, is a reality full of inexhaustible
significance and interest to the poet. The power of his book, beyond even
its great intellectual force, is the power with which he makes this felt;
his words lay more hold than the grasp of a hand, strike deeper than the
gaze or the flash of an eye; to those who comprehend him he stands "nigher
than the nighest."
America has had the shaping of Walt Whitman, and he repays the filial debt
with a love that knows no stint. Her vast lands with their varied,
brilliant climes and rich products, her political scheme, her achievements
and her failures, all have contributed to make these poems what they are
both directly and indirectly. Above all has that great conflict, the
Secession War, found voice in him. And if the reader would understand the
true causes and nature of that war, ostensibly waged between North and
South, but underneath a tussle for supremacy between the good and the evil
genius of America (for there were just as many secret sympathizers with
the secession-slave-power in the North as in the South) he will find the
clue in the pages of Walt Whitman. Rarely has he risen to a loftier height
than in the poem which heralds that volcanic upheaval:--
"Rise, O days, from your fathomless deeps, till you loftier and fiercer
sweep!
Long for my soul, hungering gymnastic, I devour'd what the earth gave
me;
Long I roam'd the woods of the north--long I watch'd Niagara pouring;
I travel'd the prairies over, and slept on their breast--
I cross'd the Nevadas, I cross'd the plateaus;
I ascended the towering rocks along the Pacific, I sail'd out to sea;
I sail'd through the storm, I was refresh'd by the storm;
I watch'd with joy the threatening maws of the waves;
I mark'd the white combs where they career'd so high, curling over;
I heard the wind piping, I saw the black clouds;
Saw from below what arose and mounted (O superb! O wild as my heart,
and powerful!)
Heard the continuous thunder, as it bellow'd after the lightning;
Noted the slender and jagged threads of lightning, as sudden and fast
amid the din they chased each other across the sky;
--These, and such as these, I, elate, saw--saw with wonder, yet pensive
and masterful;
All the menacing might of the globe uprisen around me;
Yet there with my soul I fed--I fed content, supercilious.
"'Twas well, O soul! 'twas a good preparation you gave me!
Now we advance our latent and ampler hunger to fill;
Now we go forth to receive what the earth and the sea never gave us;
Not through the mighty woods we go, but through the mightier cities;
Something for us is pouring now, more than Niagara pouring;
Torrents of men (sources and rills of the Northwest, are you indeed
inexhaustible?)
What, to pavements and homesteads here--what were those storms of the
mountains and sea?
What, to passions I witness around me to-day? Was the sea risen?
Was the wind piping the pipe of death under the black clouds?
Lo! from deeps more unfathomable, something more deadly and savage;
Manhattan, rising, advancing with menacing front--Cincinnati, Chicago,
unchain'd;
--What was that swell I saw on the ocean? behold what comes here!
How it climbs with daring feet and hands! how it dashes!
How the true thunder bellows after the lightning! how bright the flashes
of lightning!
How DEMOCRACY, with desperate, vengeful port strides on, shown through
the dark by those flashes of lightning!
(Yet a mournful wail and low sob I fancied I heard through the dark,
In a lull of the deafening confusion.)
"Thunder on! stride on, Democracy! stride with vengeful stroke!
And do you rise higher than ever yet, O days, O cities!
Crash heavier, heavier yet, O storms! you have done me good;
My soul, prepared in the mountains, absorbs your immortal strong
nutriment,
--Long had I walk'd my cities, my country roads, through farms, only
half satisfied;
One doubt, nauseous, undulating like a snake, crawl'd on the ground
before me,
Continually preceding my steps, turning upon me oft, ironically hissing
low;
--The cities I loved so well, I abandon'd and left--I sped to the
certainties suitable to me;
Hungering, hungering, hungering for primal energies, and nature's
dauntlessness;
I refresh'd myself with it only, I could relish it only;
I waited the bursting forth of the pent fire--on the water and air I
waited long;
--But now I no longer wait--I am fully satisfied--I am glutted;
I have witness'd the true lightning--I have witness'd my cities
electric;
I have lived to behold man burst forth, and warlike America rise;
Hence I will seek no more the food of the northern solitary wilds,
No more on the mountain roam, or sail the stormy sea."
But not for the poet a soldier's career. "To sit by the wounded and soothe
them, or silently watch the dead" was the part he chose. During the whole
war he remained with the army, but only to spend the days and nights,
saddest, happiest of his life, in the hospital tents. It was a beautiful
destiny for this lover of men, and a proud triumph for this believer in
the People; for it was the People that he beheld, tried by severest tests.
He saw them "of their own choice, fighting, dying for their own idea,
insolently attacked by the secession-slave-power." From the workshop, the
farm, the store, the desk, they poured forth, officered by men who had to
blunder into knowledge at the cost of the wholesale slaughter of their
troops. He saw them "tried long and long by hopelessness, mismanagement,
defeat; advancing unhesitatingly through incredible slaughter; sinewy with
unconquerable resolution. He saw them by tens of thousands in the
hospitals tried by yet drearier, more fearful tests--the wound, the
amputation, the shattered face, the slow hot fever, the long impatient
anchorage in bed; he marked their fortitude, decorum, their religious
nature and sweet affection." Finally, newest, most significant sight of
all, victory achieved, the cause, the Union safe, he saw them return back
to the workshop, the farm, the desk, the store, instantly reabsorbed into
the peaceful industries of the land:--
"A pause--the armies wait.
A million flush'd embattled conquerors wait.
The world, too, waits, then soft as breaking night and sure as dawn
They melt, they disappear."
"Plentifully supplied, last-needed proof of Democracy in its
personalities!" ratifying on the broadest scale Wordsworth's haughty claim
for average man--"Such is the inherent dignity of human nature that there
belong to it sublimities of virtue which all men may attain, and which no
man can transcend."
But, aware that peace and prosperity may be even still severer tests of
national as of individual virtue and greatness of mind, Walt Whitman scans
with anxious, questioning eye the America of to-day. He is no
smooth-tongued prophet of easy greatness.
"I am he who walks the States with a barb'd tongue questioning every
one I meet;
Who are you, that wanted only to be told what you knew before?
Who are you, that wanted only a book to join you in your nonsense?"
He sees clearly as any the incredible flippancy, the blind fury of
parties, the lack of great leaders, the plentiful meanness and vulgarity;
the labour question beginning to open like a yawning gulf.... "We sail a
dangerous sea of seething currents, all so dark and untried.... It seems
as if the Almighty had spread before this nation charts of imperial
destinies, dazzling as the sun, yet with many a deep intestine difficulty,
and human aggregate of cankerous imperfection saying lo! the roads! The
only plans of development, long and varied, with all terrible balks and
ebullitions! You said in your soul, I will be empire of empires, putting
the history of old-world dynasties, conquests, behind me as of no
account--making a new history, a history of democracy ... I alone
inaugurating largeness, culminating time. If these, O lands of America,
are indeed the prizes, the determinations of your soul, be it so. But
behold the cost, and already specimens of the cost. Thought you greatness
was to ripen for you like a pear? If you would have greatness, know that
you must conquer it through ages ... must pay for it with proportionate
price. For you, too, as for all lands, the struggle, the traitor, the wily
person in office, scrofulous wealth, the surfeit of prosperity, the
demonism of greed, the hell of passion, the decay of faith, the long
postponement, the fossil-like lethargy, the ceaseless need of revolutions,
prophets, thunderstorms, deaths, new projections and invigorations of
ideas and men."
"Yet I have dreamed, merged in that hidden-tangled problem of our fate,
whose long unravelling stretches mysteriously through time--dreamed,
portrayed, hinted already--a little or a larger band, a band of brave and
true, unprecedented yet, arm'd and equipt at every point, the members
separated, it may be by different dates and states, or south or north, or
east or west, a year, a century here, and other centuries there, but
always one, compact in soul, conscience-conserving, God-inculcating,
inspired achievers not only in literature, the greatest art, but achievers
in all art--a new undying order, dynasty from age to age transmitted, a
band, a class at least as fit to cope with current years, our dangers,
needs, as those who, for their time, so long, so well, in armour or in
cowl, upheld and made illustrious that far-back-feudal, priestly world."
Of that band, is not Walt Whitman the pioneer? Of that New World
literature, say, are not his poems the beginning? A rude beginning if you
will. He claims no more and no less. But whatever else they may lack they
do not lack vitality, initiative, sublimity. They do not lack that which
makes life great and death, with its "transfers and promotions, its superb
vistas," exhilarating--a resplendent faith in God and man which will
kindle anew the faith of the world:--
"Poets to come! Orators, singers, musicians to come!
Not to-day is to justify me, and answer what I am for;
But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than before
known,
"Arouse! Arouse--for you must justify me--you must answer.
"I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future,
I but advance a moment, only to wheel and hurry back in the darkness.
"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."
ANNE GILCHRIST.
[Illustration: ANNE GILCHRIST
Photogravure from a painting by her son, made in 1882]
LETTER I[3]
WALT WHITMAN TO W. M. ROSSETTI AND ANNE GILCHRIST
_Washington,
December 9, 1869._
DEAR MR. ROSSETTI:
Your letter of last summer to William O'Connor with the passages
transcribed from a lady's correspondence, had been shown me by him, and
copy lately furnished me, which I have just been rereading. I am deeply
touched by these sympathies and convictions, coming from a woman and from
England, and am sure that if the lady knew how much comfort it has been to
me to get them, she would not only pardon you for transmitting them to Mr.
O'Connor but approve that action. I realize indeed of this emphatic and
smiling _well done_ from the heart and conscience of a true wife and
mother, and one too whose sense of the poetic, as I glean from your
letter, after flowing through the heart and conscience, must also move
through and satisfy science as much as the esthetic, that I had hitherto
received no eulogium so magnificent.
I send by same mail with this, same address as this letter, two
photographs, taken within a few months. One is intended for the lady (if I
may be permitted to send it her)--and will you please accept the other,
with my respects and love? The picture is by some criticised very severely
indeed, but I hope you will not dislike it, for I confess to myself a
perhaps capricious fondness for it, as my own portrait, over some scores
that have been made or taken at one time or another.
I am still employed in the Attorney General's office. My p. o. address
remains the same. I am quite well and hearty. My new editions,
considerably expanded, with what suggestions &c. I have to offer,
presented I hope in more definite form, will probably get printed the
coming spring. I shall forward you early copies. I send my love to Moncure
Conway, if you see him. I wish he would write to me. If the pictures don't
come, or get injured on the way, I will try again by express. I want you
to loan this letter to the lady, or if she wishes it, give it to her to
keep.
WALT WHITMAN.
LETTER II
ANNE GILCHRIST TO WALT WHITMAN
_September 3, 1871._
DEAR FRIEND:
At last the beloved books have reached my hand--but now I have them, my
heart is so rent with anguish, my eyes so blinded, I cannot read in them.
I try again and again, but too great waves come swaying up & suffocate me.
I will struggle to tell you my story. It seems to me a death struggle.
When I was eighteen I met a lad of nineteen[4] who loved me then, and
always for the remainder of his life. After we had known each other about
a year he asked me to be his wife. But I said that I liked him well as my
friend, but could not love him as a wife should love & felt deeply
convinced I never should. He was not turned aside, but went on just the
same as if that conversation had never passed. After a year he asked me
again, and I, deeply moved by and grateful for his steady love, and so
sorry for him, said yes. But next day, terrified at what I had done and
painfully conscious of the dreary absence from my heart of any faintest
gleam of true, tender, wifely love,[5] said no again. This too he bore
without desisting & at the end of some months once more asked me with
passionate entreaties. Then, dear friend, I prayed very earnestly, and it
seemed to me (that) that I should continue to mar & thwart his life so was
not right, if he was content to accept what I could give. I knew I could
lead a good and wholesome life beside him--his aims were noble--his heart
a deep, beautiful, true Poet's heart; but he had not the Poet's great
brain. His path was a very arduous one, and I knew I could smooth it for
him--cheer him along it. It seemed to me God's will that I should marry
him. So I told him the whole truth, and he said he would rather have me on
those terms than not have me at all. He said to me many times, "Ah, Annie,
it is not you who are so loved that is rich; it is I who so love." And I
knew this was true, felt as if my nature were poor & barren beside his.
But it was not so, it was only slumbering--undeveloped. For, dear Friend,
my soul was so passionately aspiring--it so thirsted & pined for light, it
had not power to reach alone and he could not help me on my way. And a
woman is so made that she cannot give the tender passionate devotion of
her whole nature save to the great conquering soul, stronger in its
powers, though not in its aspirations, than her own, that can lead her
forever & forever up and on. It is for her soul exactly as it is for her
body. The strong divine soul of the man embracing hers with passionate
love--so alone the precious germs within her soul can be quickened into
life. And the time will come when man will understand that a woman's soul
is as dear and needful to his and as different from his as her body to his
body. This was what happened to me when I had read for a few days, nay,
hours, in your books. It was the divine soul embracing mine. I never
before dreamed what love meant: not what life meant. Never was alive
before--no words but those of "new birth" can hint the meaning of what
then happened to me.
The first few months of my marriage were dark and gloomy to me within, and
sometimes I had misgivings whether I had judged aright, but when I knew
there was a dear baby coming my heart grew light, and when it was born,
such a superb child--all gloom & fear forever vanished. I knew it was
God's seal to the marriage, and my heart was full of gratitude and joy. It
was a happy and a good life we led together for ten short years, he ever
tender and affectionate to me--loving his children so, working earnestly
in the wholesome, bracing atmosphere of poverty--for it was but just
possible with the most strenuous frugality and industry to pay our way. I
learned to cook & to turn my hand to all household occupation--found it
bracing, healthful, cheerful. Now I think it more even now that I
understand the divineness & sacredness of the Body. I think there is no
more beautiful task for a woman than ministering all ways to the health &
comfort & enjoyment of the dear bodies of those she loves: no material
that will work sweeter, more beautifully into that making of a perfect
poem of a man's life which is her true vocation.