I
It is over sixty years since Goethe said that to be a German author was to
be a German martyr. I presume things have changed in Germany since those
times, and that the Goethe of to-day does not encounter the jealousy and
hatred the great poet and critic of Weimar seemed to have called forth. In
Walt Whitman we in America have known an American author who was an
American martyr in a more literal sense than any of the men named by the
great German. More than Heine, or Rousseau, or Molière, or Byron, was
Whitman a victim of the literary Philistinism of his country and times;
but, fortunately for himself, his was a nature so large, tolerant, and
self-sufficing that his martyrdom sat very lightly upon him. His
unpopularity was rather a tonic to him than otherwise. It was of a kind
that 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 the
greatest ones have experienced, and that attests something extraordinary
in the recipient of it. He said he was more resolute because all had
denied 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 of
men who have faced unpopularity, odium, hatred, ridicule, detraction, in
obedience to an inward voice, and never lost courage or good-nature.
Whitman's is the most striking case in our literary annals,--probably the
most striking one in our century outside of politics and religion. The
inward voice alone was the oracle he obeyed: "My commission obeying, to
question it never daring."
The bitter-sweet cup of unpopularity he drained to its dregs, and drained
it cheerfully, as one knowing beforehand that it is preparing for him and
cannot 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 to
himself and makes no compromises with customs, schools, or opinions.
Whitman's life, underneath its easy tolerance and cheerful good-will, was
heroic. He fought his battle against great odds and he conquered; he had
his own way, he yielded not a hair to the enemy.
The pressure brought to bear upon him by the press, by many of his
friends, and by such a man as Emerson, whom he deeply reverenced, to
change or omit certain passages from his poems, seems only to have served
as the opposing hammer that clinched the nail. The louder the outcry the
more deeply he felt it his duty to stand by his first convictions. The
fierce and scornful opposition to his sex poems, and to his methods and
aims generally, was probably more confirmatory than any approval could
have been. It went to the quick. During a dark period of his life, when no
publisher would touch his book and when its exclusion from the mails was
threatened, and poverty and paralysis were upon him, a wealthy
Philadelphian offered to furnish means for its publication if he would
omit certain poems; but the poet does not seem to have been tempted for
one moment by the offer. He cheerfully chose the heroic part, as he always
did.
Emerson reasoned and remonstrated with him for hours, walking up and down
Boston Common, and after he had finished his argument, says Whitman, which
was unanswerable, "I felt down in my soul the clear and unmistakable
conviction to disobey all, and pursue my own way." He told Emerson so,
whereupon they went and dined together. The independence of the poet
probably impressed Emerson more than his yielding would have done, for had
not he preached the adamantine doctrine of self-trust? "To believe your
own thought," he says, "to believe that what is true for you in your
private heart is true of all men,--that is genius."
In many ways was Whitman, quite unconsciously to himself, the man Emerson
invoked and prayed for,--the absolutely self-reliant man; the man who
should find his own day and land sufficient; who had no desire to be
Greek, or Italian, or French, or English, but only himself; who should
not whine, or apologize, or go abroad; who should not duck, or deprecate,
or borrow; and who could see through the many disguises and debasements of
our times the lineaments of the same gods that so ravished the bards of
old.
The moment a man "acts for himself," says Emerson, "tossing the laws, the
books, idolatries, and customs out of the window, we pity him no more, but
thank and revere him."
Whitman took the philosopher at his word. "Greatness once and forever has
done with opinion," even the opinion of the good Emerson. "Heroism works
in contradiction to the voice of mankind, and in contradiction, for a
time, to the voice of the great and good." "Every heroic act measures
itself by its contempt of some external good,"--popularity, for instance.
"The characteristic of heroism is persistency." "When you have chosen your
part abide by it, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the
world." "Adhere to your act, and congratulate yourself if you have done
something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous
age." Heroism "is the avowal of the unschooled man that he finds a quality
in him that is negligent of expense, of health, of life, of danger, of
hatred, of reproach, and knows that his will is higher and more excellent
than all actual and all possible antagonists." "A man is to carry himself
in the presence of all opposition as if everything were titular and
ephemeral but he." "Great works of art," he again says, "teach us to
abide by our spontaneous impression with good-natured inflexibility, the
more when the whole cry of voices is on the other side."
These brave sayings of Emerson were all illustrated and confirmed by
Whitman's course. The spectacle of this man sitting there by the window of
his little house in Camden, poor and partially paralyzed, and looking out
upon the trite and commonplace scenes and people, or looking athwart the
years and seeing only detraction and denial, yet always serene, cheerful,
charitable, his wisdom and tolerance ripening and mellowing with time, is
something to treasure and profit by. He was a man who needed no
assurances. He had the patience and the leisure of nature. He welcomed
your friendly and sympathetic word, or with equal composure he did without
it.
I remember calling upon him shortly after Swinburne's fierce onslaught
upon 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 either
in word or look that he was disturbed a particle by it. He spoke as kindly
of Swinburne as ever. If he was pained at all, it was on Swinburne's
account and not on his own. It was a sad spectacle to see a man retreat
upon himself as Swinburne had done. In fact I think hostile criticism,
fiercely hostile, gave Whitman nearly as much comfort as any other. Did it
not attest reality? Men do not brace themselves against shadows.
Swinburne's polysyllabic rage showed the force of the current he was
trying to stem. As for Swinburne's hydrocephalic muse, I do not think
Whitman took any interest in it from the first.
Self-reliance, or self-trust, is one of the principles Whitman announces
in his "Laws for Creations." He saw that no first-class work is possible
except 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 comparative
oblivion for himself and his works. He knew from the first that the public
would not be with him; he knew that the censors of taste, the critics and
literary professors, would not be with him; he knew that the vast army of
Philistia, the respectable, fashionable mammon-worshiping crowd, would not
be with him,--that the timid, the pampered, the prurient, the conforming,
the bourgeoisie spirit, the class spirit, the academic spirit, the
Pharisaic 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 to
wait to be understood for the growth of the taste of himself. None knew
more clearly than he did how completely our people were under the
illusion of the genteel and the conventional, and that, even among the
emancipated few, the possession of anything like robust æsthetic
perception was rare enough. America, so bold and original and independent
in the world of practical politics and material endeavor, is, in spiritual
and imaginative regions, timid, conforming, imitative. There is, perhaps,
no civilized country in the world wherein the native, original man, the
real critter, as Whitman loved to say, that underlies all our culture and
conventions, crops out so little in manners, in literature, and in social
usages. The fear of being unconventional is greater with us than the fear
of death. A certain evasiveness, polish, distrust of ourselves, amounting
to insipidity and insincerity, is spoken of by observant foreigners. In
other words, we are perhaps the least like children of any people in the
world. All these things were against Whitman, and will continue to be
against him for a long time. With the first stroke he broke through the
conventional and took his stand upon the natural. With rude hands he tore
away the veils and concealments from the body and from the soul. He
ignored entirely all social and conventional usages and hypocrisies, not
by revolt against them, but by choosing a point of view from which they
disappeared. He embraced the unrefined and the savage as well as the
tender and human. The illusions of the past, the models and standards, he
freed himself of at once, and declared for the beauty and the divinity of
the now and the here. The rude realism of his "Leaves" shocked like a
plunge in the surf, but it invigorated also, if we were strong enough to
stand it.
Out of Whitman's absolute self-trust arose his prophetic egotism,--the
divine fervor and audacity of the simple ego. He shared the conviction of
the old prophets that man is a part of God, and that there is nothing in
the 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, their
thoughts, their dreams, were the voice of God. There is something of the
same sort in Whitman. The voice of that inner self was final and
authoritative with him. It was the voice of God. He could drive through
and over all the conventions of the world in obedience to that voice. This
call to him was as a voice from Sinai. One of his mastering thoughts was
the thought of identity,--that you are you, and I am I. This was the final
meaning of things, and the meaning of immortality. "Yourself, _yourself_,
YOURSELF," he says, with swelling vehemence, "forever and ever." To be
compacted and riveted and fortified in yourself, so as to be a law unto
yourself, is the final word of the past and of the present.