Whitman's attraction toward the common people was real. There is one thing
that makes every-day humanity, the great, toiling, unlettered masses,
forever welcome to men who unite great imagination with broad
sympathies,--they give a sense of reality; they refresh, as nature always
refreshes. There is a tang and a sting to the native, the spontaneous,
that the cultivated rarely has. The farmer, the mechanic, the sailor, the
soldier, savor of the primal and the hardy. In painting his own portrait,
Whitman makes prominent the coarser, unrefined traits, because here the
colors are fast,--here is the basis of all. The careful student of Whitman
will surely come to see how all the elements of his picture--his pride,
his candor, his democracy, his sensuality, his coarseness,--finally fit
together, and correct and offset each other and make a perfect unity.
No poet is so easily caricatured and turned into ridicule as Whitman. He
is deficient in humor, and hence, like the Biblical writers, is sometimes
on the verge of the grotesque without knowing it. The sense of the
ridiculous has been enormously stimulated and developed in the modern
mind, and--what is to be regretted--it has been mostly at the expense of
the sense of awe and reverence. We "poke fun" at everything in this
country; to whatever approaches the verge of the ridiculous we give a push
and topple it over. The fear which all Americans have before their eyes,
and which is much stronger than the fear of purgatory, is the fear of
appearing ridiculous. We curb and check any eccentricity or marked
individuality of manners or dress, lest we expose ourselves to the shafts
of ridicule. Emerson said he had heard with admiring submission the remark
of a lady who declared that the sense of being perfectly well dressed gave
a feeling of inward tranquillity which religion was powerless to bestow;
and what ranks before religion with us as a people is being in the mode,
and writing our verse and cutting our coats in the approved style. Pride
of the eye, a keen sense of the proprieties and the conventionalities, and
a morbid feeling for the ridiculous, would have been death to Whitman's
undertaking. He would have faltered, or betrayed self-consciousness. He
certainly never could have spoken with that elemental aplomb and
indifference which is so marked a feature of his work. Any hesitation, any
knuckling, would have been his ruin. We should have seen he was not
entirely serious, and should have laughed at him. We laugh now only for a
moment; the spell of his earnestness and power is soon upon us.