What has a poet of Whitman's aims to do with decency or indecency, with
modesty or immodesty? These are social or conventional virtues; he
represents mainly primary qualities and forces. Does life, does death,
does nature, respect our proprieties, our conventional veils and
illusions? Neither will he. He will strip them all away. He will act and
speak as if all things in the universe were equally sacred and divine; as
if all men were really his brothers, all women his sisters; as if all
parts of the human body were equally beautiful and wonderful; as if
fatherhood and motherhood, birth and begetting, were sacred acts. Of
course it is easy to see that this course will speedily bring him in
collision with the guardians of taste and social morality. But what of
that? He professes to take his cue from the elemental laws. "I reckon I
behave no more proudly than the level I plant my house by." The question
is, Is he adequate, is he man enough, to do it? Will he not falter, or
betray self-consciousness? Will he be true to his ideal through thick and
thin? The social gods will all be outraged, but that is less to him than
the candor and directness of nature in whose spirit he assumes to speak.
Nothing is easier than to convict Walt Whitman of what is called
indecency; he laughs indifferent when you have done so. It is not your
gods that he serves. He says he would be as indifferent of observation as
the trees or rocks. And it is here that we must look for his
justification, upon ethical rather than upon the grounds of conventional
art. He has taken our sins upon himself. He has applied to the morbid
sex-consciousness, that has eaten so deeply into our social system, the
heroic treatment; he has fairly turned it naked into the street. He has
not merely in words denied the inherent vileness of sex; he has denied it
in very deed. We should not have taken offense had he confined himself to
words,--had he said sex is pure, the body is as clean about the loins as
about the head; but being an artist, a creator, and not a mere thinker or
preacher, he was compelled to act,--to do the thing instead of saying it.
The same in other matters. Being an artist, he could not merely say all
men were his brothers; he must show them as such. If their weakness and
sins are his also, he must not flinch when it comes to the test; he must
make his words good. We may be shocked at the fullness and minuteness of
the specification, but that is no concern of his; he deals with the
concrete and not with the abstract,--fraternity and equality as a reality,
not as a sentiment.