The reader of Whitman must do his or her own moralizing; the poet is here
not to deprecate or criticise, but to love and celebrate; he has no
partialities; our notions of morality do not concern him; he exploits the
average man just as he finds him; he _is_ the average man for the time
being and confesses to all his sins and shortcomings, and we will make of
the result good or evil, according to our mental horizon. That his work is
unmixed good is the last thing the poet would claim for it. He has not,
after the easy fashion of the moralist, set the good here and the bad
there; he has blended them as they are in nature and in life; our profit
and discipline begin when we have found out whither he finally tends, or
when we have mastered him and extracted the good he holds. If we expect he
is going to preach an austere system of morality to us, or any system of
morality, we are doomed to disappointment. Does Nature preach such a
system? does Nature preach at all? neither will he. He presents you the
elements of good and evil in himself in vital fusion and play; your part
is to see how the totals are at last good.
It is objected that Whitman is too persistent in declaring himself an
animal, when the thing a man is least likely to forget is that he is an
animal and the thing he is least likely to remember is that he is a spirit
and a child of God. But Whitman insists with the same determination that
he is a spirit and an heir of immortality,--not as one who has cheated the
devil of his due, but as one who shares the privileges and felicities of
all, and who finds the divine in the human. Indeed it is here that he
sounds his most joyous and triumphant note. No such faith in spiritual
results, no such conviction of the truth of immortality, no such
determined recognition of the unseen world as the final reality is to be
found in modern poetry.
As I have said, Whitman aimed to put his whole nature in a poem--the
physical or physiological, the spiritual, the æsthetic and
intellectual,--without giving any undue prominence to either. If he has
not done so, if he has made the animal and sexual too pronounced, more so
than nature will justify in the best proportioned man, then and then only
is his artistic scheme vitiated and his work truly immoral.
It may be true that the thing a man is least likely to forget is that he
is an animal; what he is most likely to forget, is that the animal is just
as sacred and important as any other part; indeed that it is the basis of
all, and that a sane and healthful and powerful spirituality and
intellectuality can only flow out of a sane and healthful animality.
"I believe in you, my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other."