Whitman--perhaps the most vital of all, but impossible to be adequately
seized or expressed--is what may be called his ‘illumination.’ “Leaves
of Grass,” of course, would not have been written without it; it runs
behind every page--“the vision and the faculty divine.” This perception
in the universal, this power of seeing things apart from the mundane
self, and independent of their relation to that self, appears to be a
kind of transcendent faculty in man; which occasionally manifests
itself, and which brings him--it may perhaps be said--into relation with
another order of existence. Indeed the strangeness of the sensation, and
the intoxication of this vision, appears sometimes to be so great
that--as in the case of the blinding glare at the mouth of Plato’s
cavern (“Republic,” bk. vii.)--the beholder after witnessing it is
unhinged for ordinary life, and can neither see the things of the world
in their accustomed light, nor describe clearly what else it is that he
has seen. This it is, no doubt, that constitutes the partial ‘mania’ of
the poet (Plato’s “Phædrus”), and which accounts also for the fact that
many people of mystical tendency, after a momentary illumination of the
kind, relapse into a sort of drivel for the rest of their natural
lives--circling always round something which they have neither clearly
apprehended nor can conclusively forget--but out of the memory of which
they hatch systems and ‘revelations’ and dogmas without end. And indeed,
if we suppose, with Dr. Bucke, that the faculty is one that is gradually
evolving in human nature, there can be nothing more likely than that
its first exercise should be accompanied by much doubt and illusion and
disturbance of the intelligence generally, and even of the moral nature.
In the case of Whitman, however, the immense sanity of his intelligence
and his immense grasp of the actual world prevented any serious
dislocation of the kind; and, though the mania and intoxication are at
times almost terrific (as in the ‘Song of Myself’), he never loses his
hold on actual facts, but manages at last to draw them in a great web
over himself, and to show the whole world transparent with the
illumination within.
This faculty of perception in the universal must not be looked upon as a
mere intellectual discrimination of certain facts or objects; it is
rather, I take it, a conscious _identity_ with the object (“I _am_ the
mash’d fireman with breastbone broken”); in which consciousness the
emotional and sensational elements are fused with the intellectual, just
as they are in the consciousness of one’s own existence and actions. It
is a universal light which falls as it were on the interior side of all
objects, enabling the person that moves along it to penetrate to their
very essence and to perceive their abiding relation to each other. And
the faculty begins to develop itself normally in those (as one would
expect) whose emotional and intellectual nature is becoming universal.
When sympathy and intelligence on the ordinary plane have grown so far
as to bring the man into free and unprejudiced relation with almost
every phase of existence, then this new perception dawns upon him; the
scales fall from the eyes which have always before seen by the light of
self, and he sees by the light “which never was on sea or land.”
“Willst du ins Unendliche schreiten, geh’ nur im Endlichen nach allen
Seiten,” says Goethe; not that the mere travelling through the finite of
itself brings one to the ‘infinite,’ but that it prepares the human
being as it were for his translation into it, when the time comes.
With Whitman it would seem that he had travelled along the finite in
pretty well every direction, when, about the age of thirty-five or
thirty-six, or near that time, this new order of consciousness, and of
being, opened out upon him. Instead of upsetting his broadly-based
voluminous nature, it immediately established that nature, forming the
nucleus to its endless ramifications, and the key and reconcilement of
its contrary moods. His luxuriant turbulent emotional passional self
acknowledged instantly its Lord in the universal (“swiftly arose and
spread around me the peace and the knowledge that pass all the argument
of the earth”); and became dedicated to that service thenceforward; and
all the conflicting elements of his own nature and of general nature
were seen--as they must be in such a case--to have their justification
and their use. “The moth and the fish-eggs are in place.”
With Whitman the new perception was eminently sane and undistorted. It
is probable indeed that never in historical times has the cosmic
intuition found a fuller and more complete utterance; for it was not
dwindled away into any mere thin and other-worldly ecstasy, denying in a
kind of spiritual excess the claims of the body and the intellect, but
was blent and harmonised, in fiery union, with the very widest practical
experiences and the inferences of a singularly rich nature. For the
first time in history do we hear the voice of a prophet who really
_knows_ and really _accepts_ the whole range of human life.
The last twenty-five of Whitman’s years were overshadowed by the clouds
of partial and intermittent paralysis. From the miracle of health and
strength which he had been before the war, it was his destiny to come
near to being a chronic invalid. Unfitted for active life, unfitted even
for much literary work, he quietly accepted his lot; and being unable to
express his message in any more resounding way, was content to fashion
the commonplaces of his daily life to its utterance; and no one, I
think, could witness the dignity and simple beauty of this later life
without feeling that here, in its way, was a poem as pregnant as “Leaves
of Grass.” Gentle and humane in manners, the rocky bases of his
nature--if such had been conspicuous before--now covered with tender
herbage and flowers, making the most of small details, fond of children,
and with a pleasant cheery word for all, letting life come and go with
large equanimity, he was a man whom the simplest could approach without
effort, and who was loved by hundreds who never read a word of his
writing. If he had a preference, it was for the “common people.” The
unconscious, uncultured, natural types pleased him best, and he would
make an effort to approach them. The others he allowed to approach
him.
NOTES AND APPRECIATIONS
[Illustration:
Walt
Whitman
1872
]
WHITMAN AS PROPHET
Dr. R. Maurice Bucke, in his “Memories of Walt Whitman,”[5] speaking of
the years 1853-55, and of the inception of “Leaves of Grass,” says, “A
very few years before these dates we find Walt Whitman writing tales,
essays, sketches, and even poems, which are in no way distinguishable
from that ‘mighty tide of ditch water’ which Carlyle tells us flows day
by day from the power-presses of civilisation. All at once he writes the
greatest book of a great century. Where did he get the stuff to put in
it? How did he get it all in a minute, as it were? Or, if it was in him
before, why did it not show itself? My memories of Walt Whitman include
many talks, in which I did my best to obtain light upon these and
related problems. Generally, he would pass over the subject with a
half-answer or a return question; at other times he would be more
explicit, as he was one day in the summer of 1886, when he
said--‘_Leaves of Grass_ was there, though unformed, all the time, in
whatever answers as the laboratory of the mind. I was more or less
conscious of it, and thought often of taking action in that direction.
But, you can understand, there was much to deter--that until the impulse
to move had become very strong, nothing would be done. I could clearly
see that such an enterprise would meet with little favor--at all events
at first--that it would be hooted at (as it was) and perhaps hooted
down. The _Democratic Review_ essays and tales came from the surface of
the mind, and had no connection with what lay below--a great deal of
which indeed was below consciousness. At last came the time when the
concealed growth had to come to light, and the first edition of _Leaves
of Grass_ was written and published.’”
This phrase, “the concealed growth had to come to light,” thus preserved
for us by Dr. Bucke, helps much towards the appreciation of the
prophetic and unexpected character of “Leaves of Grass.” We do not of
course understand why out of green foliage and branches a sudden and
unexpected blossom--yet evidently long prepared in the heart of the
plant--should appear; nor do we understand why, often amid quite
unpromising foliage of the human mind, a great work of art or prophecy
arises; yet we seem to see that the processes are very similar. A centre
of growth, hitherto unnoticed, long hidden, has come to light.
Prophecy at all times has this inevitable spontaneous character, as of
something arising from below the ordinary consciousness, which just for
the very reason that it so arises cannot be deliberately quenched or
stopped--something almost inarticulate, hardly gaining the sphere of
definition; irrational, and out of joint with accepted things;
subversive, inconvenient, contrary; annunciative of a new order. The
prophets are stoned; for they are obviously liars and iconoclasts. They
are charged with inconsistency, and, poor things! they cannot deny the
charge. They cannot help themselves. The flower unfolding out of its own
roots cannot unfold other than it does.
By many such marks Whitman’s work shows a prophetic character. And
while he does not claim to deliver a new Gospel, he seems to claim to
take his place in the line of those who have handed down a world-old
treasure of redemption for mankind. In his poem, “To Him that was
Crucified,”[6] he says:--
“My spirit to yours, dear brother,
Do not mind because many sounding your name do not understand you,
I do not sound your name, but I understand you,
I specify you with joy, O my comrade, to salute you, and
to salute those that are with you, before and since,
and those to come also,
That we all labor together transmitting _the same charge
and succession_,
We few equals, indifferent of lands, indifferent of times,
We, enclosers of all continents, all castes, allowers
of all theologies,
Compassionaters, perceivers, rapport of men,
We walk silent among disputes and assertions, but
reject not the disputers nor anything that is asserted,
We hear the bawling and the din, we are reach’d at by
divisions, jealousies, recriminations on every side,
They close peremptorily on us to surround us, my comrade,
Yet we walk unheld, free, the whole earth over, journeying
up and down till we make our ineffaceable mark upon
time and the diverse eras,
Till we saturate time and eras, that the men and women
of races, ages to come, may prove brethren and
lovers as we are.”
It will be noticed that in this great poem he speaks not merely as a
successor of him that was crucified, but as a continuer of some
world-wide and agelong tradition. And in truth we cannot doubt that the
root of it all _has_ been known and realised since the farthest history;
the charge and succession have certainly descended out of dim obscurity
from the earliest times. How much exactly Walt Whitman may have known of
the Vedic and other early writings is doubtful; but that he had read
here and there among them, quite enough to gain an insight into the
heart of them, and to know that his message was continuous with theirs,
is quite certain. “These are really the thoughts of men in all ages and
lands, they are not original with me.” In the Vedic scriptures, and, in
lineal succession from these, in the Buddhist and Platonist and
Christian writings, in the Taoists of China, the Mystics of Egypt, the
Sufis of Persia, the root is to be found--and is clearly
distinguishable--the very same from which “Leaves of Grass” has sprung.
[It would be too long at present, by quotations from all these writings,
to attempt to prove this; but in an Appendix to this paper I have, in
very imperfect fashion, dotted in a number of parallel passages from
them and from “Leaves of Grass,” and these may serve to illustrate what
I mean.] A glance at these ancient and modern utterances assures us
that all down history the same loving universal spirit has looked out,
making its voice heard from time to time, harmonising the diverse eras,
enclosing continents, castes, and theologies. The same charge and
succession has passed on, and Whitman voices and transmits it in his
turn.
Yet of course there are differences. We cannot say that Whitman is more
subtle, more penetrating, more profound than many of those who have gone
before. It would be hard to imagine anything more subtle and profound
than passages in the Upanishads. But in one respect he is certainly
unique among the prophets, and that is in the universality and breadth
of his appeal. He seems to _liberate_ the good tidings and give it a
democratic scope and world-wide application unknown in the elder
prophets, even in the sayings of Buddha.
The difficulty with the earlier prophets no doubt was that around them
limitations existed on every hand. Races, peoples, religions, were
sharply divided from each other. In the early world exclusiveness was
indispensable. The peoples and nations could not have grown up if each
had not believed that its own customs, morals, religion, race, &c., were
infinitely superior to those of the others. Exclusiveness and war were
the nurses of growing humanity’s powers--of comradeship, organised life,
community of sentiment, courage, self-sacrifice, and all the early
virtues. Problems of social life and character, which could never have
been solved in a general ocean of mankind, were easy to define and
determine in small communities. Ignorance and prejudice were necessary
fences between one state or system of society and another. And however
great certain individual teachers may have been in the past--however
generous and wide their real outlook on life, they still could only act
and speak subject to the very definite limitations prevailing around
them.[7] The Joels, Jeremiahs, Mohammeds, Carlyles,--stung no doubt by
incontrollable impulse to blaze forth that which was in them--have
delivered their special messages: have called the people of their time
to gather themselves round some new centre of life and inspiration,
moral or religious or racial; and in doing so have anathematised every
other code of morals or form of religion, called all outside people
Gentiles or Barbarians, and put them to the sword. They have done work
priceless in their time and locality, insisting on and compelling each
some certain and necessary step in human progress; and having done so,
they have gone their way and been superseded, because their message was
only a part-message. Only a few have not been superseded. Teachers like
the Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth, St. Francis, and the Syrian Bâb,[8]
belong to no race or nationality; if they press the claims of religion
or morality, it is with so little insistence on any particular scheme or
code, that their net may be said to be spread to catch all humanity.
They are accepters rather than deniers; they represent the prophetic
gift in its deepest and most inclusive utterance; and it is difficult to
think of them as becoming antiquated or out of date.
Yet--though it would not be acceptable or desirable to make comparisons
of greatness--we may say that even among these Whitman was (with the
exception perhaps of the Bâb) unique in the realisation of the
world-wide and universal character of his message. The others had
messages of world-wide import to deliver, though perhaps they hardly
knew this at the time; but Whitman realised from the first that this
universality was the very key and centre of his utterance, and set
himself deliberately to emphasise it. Many things conspired, with him,
to this result--the girdling of the earth in his time, and the
extraordinary developments of locomotion and intercommunication which
were bringing together East and West, and all races and classes, creeds
and customs, into close touch and acknowledgment of each other. The
peoples were being compelled to see that none of them has a monopoly of
excellence or defect, but that all illustrate, in their various ways,
forms of necessary life. The Press, the Locomotive, the Wire, were
pushing more and more insistently to this conclusion. The fences were
breaking down; a new Era was shaping; and Whitman himself, by a nature
and temperament of extraordinary balance and fulness, physical, mental,
and moral (“I can resist anything better than my own diversity”), was
fitted to respond to it all--to swim in this ocean of humanity as in a
sea.
[Yet even so, and allowing for the occasioning causes, it must be said
that his utterance, in its dæmonic reach and sweep, is somewhat
staggering! Through “Leaves of Grass” pours a torrent of trades,
classes, characters, occupations, races, nations, morals, manners,
incidents, opinions--things generally accounted beautiful, and things
unbeautiful, things good or evil, proper or improper--in huge
indifference, all apparently accepted on an equality, dismissed on an
equality. It is, to certain folk, most confusing, and at times even
revolting and terrifying.]
Of this new Era, with all its splendours and terrors, Walt Whitman may
be said to be the prophet. Through the “barbaric yawp” and
seeming-random medley of his verse--inarticulate enough at times in its
very endeavour to include and accept every phase and feature of human
life--break out the deep-rolling organ-tones of Creation’s primal music.
We hear the same agelong theme and symphony of all historic time,
gaining, through whatever imperfections, a larger freer expression by
virtue of its so much more extended key-board and orchestra, by virtue
of its discords and sequences more daring than ever used in literature
before.
And the Theme? Whitman has defined it very directly at the first outset
of his poems:--
“One’s Self I sing, a simple separate person,
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.”
The Self, individual and separate, yet conjoined and continuous
throughout Creation’s mass--that is the theme which undoubtedly runs
through the whole of his poems and prophetic utterances. And it is the
theme of the eldest Upanishads of the Vedic sages. It is the theme which
has come down through the ages--variously balanced, with now somewhat
more insistence on one aspect, now somewhat more on another; variously
expressed and illustrated, in poetical, religious, or philosophical
form; variously coloured, confined, or conventionalised by race
and tradition; but inevitably gaining in the long-run in
freedom and fulness of utterance. In Whitman it breaks out almost
unconsciously--certainly less as the result of any intellectual process
or argument than by force of an irresistible impulse--into a strange
torrential pæan of identity. Everything, the whole earth, all its shows,
men and women, sinners and saints, the stars, insects, solar
systems--all beings are envisaged in order to be identified with the
One; they are accorded each their unique unapproachable character and
perfection, only to be embraced:--
“We make our ineffaceable mark upon time and the diverse eras,
Till we saturate time and eras, that the men and women of
races, ages to come, may prove brethren and lovers as we are.”
So in Whitman all the purblind morals and moonlight ideals of the past
are, whether directly or by implication, broken up (hence storm and
terror to many) and led back to their most central motive, the world-old
revelation of the Self, eternal and inseparate.
“I ascend from the moon, I ascend from the night,
I perceive that the ghastly glimmer is noonday sunbeams reflected,
And debouch to the steady and central from the
offspring great or small.”
Always the inward, the enduring, the central, the vital, is acknowledged
and honoured; the external, the temporary, the unessential thrown off.
Underneath all morals, manners, races, titles, classes, the original
human soul and its affections, greater than all. Underneath clothing,
costume, ranks, trades, and occupations, the bodily form, its needs and
physiology. Underneath all art and social life, sex and fraternity.
Greater than all houses, temples, galleries, and museums, the life of
the open air and its lessons. In such simple elementary things as
these--in the universal human soul, rediscovering itself in all forms,
in the healthy and beautiful human body, in sex and fraternity, in the
life with the earth and the open air, Whitman sees the root out of which
future humanity will spring (as it has sprung in the past): out of which
a society of proud, strong, free individuals, who shall also be brethren
and lovers, may easily and naturally arise:--
“Now if a thousand perfect men were to appear it would not amaze me,
Now if a thousand beautiful forms of women appear’d
it would not astonish me.”
We may indeed say that, with the signal appearance of “Leaves of Grass,”
the hour has struck for mankind of liberation, of emancipation, from
mere outer rules and limitations; the hour for the reference of all
life, irrespective of colour, creeds, and principles, to its central
essence. It may be, for reasons already hinted, an hour of danger. Not
a few, accustomed only to walk by well-worn paths and formulæ, will lose
their way. “Take warning! He traveling with me needs the best blood,
thews, endurance.” But it is an hour which must needs come; and it opens
for humanity on an era of unexampled glory.
And here a word about Individuals. It will be recognised by all readers
of Whitman that his insistence on the permanence, the immortality, the
supreme life of the Individual, is a most marked feature of his
teaching. “The sum of all known reverence I add up in you whoever you
are.” “Yourself! yourself! yourself for ever and ever!” “I sing the
songs of the glory of none, not God, sooner than I sing the songs of the
glory of you.” For Whitman every Self in its essence is individual,
eternal, perfect, accruing to itself alone: “I swear I think now that
everything without exception has an eternal soul!”
“Each man to himself and each woman to herself is the word of the
past and present, and the true word of immortality;
No one can acquire for another--not one;
No one can grow for another--not one.”
And yet (strange paradox!) all are One.
“Have you thought there could be but a single Supreme?
There can be any number of Supremes--one does not countervail
another any more than one eyesight countervails another, or one
life countervails another.”
Each is a simple separate person, and yet _en-masse_ with the rest. I
think we may say that no former teacher has quite dared to give this
side of the truth as Whitman has done, nor given it with so free and so
splendid an expression.
Thus it may seem that if in the matter of pure philosophical statement
Whitman does not stand out in the great charge and succession so
strongly as some of his predecessors, yet in two respects at least his
work is unique: namely, in the universality and determination of his
appeal to, and brotherhood with, all creation, and in his insistence on
the root-existence of every Individual from everlasting to
everlasting--his protest, in fact (though quite indirect), against a
mere doctrine of absorption in the Universal.