"The proof of the poet shall be sternly deferr'd till his country has
absorbed him as affectionately as he has absorbed it."
The proof of Whitman shall be deferred till he has borne fruit in actual,
concrete life.
He knew that merely intellectual and artistic tests did not settle matters
in his case, or that we would not reach his final value by making a
dead-set at him through the purely æsthetic faculties. Is he animating to
life itself? Can we absorb and assimilate him? Does he nourish the manly
and heroic virtues? Does he make us more religious, more tolerant, more
charitable, more candid, more self-reliant? If not, he fails of his chief
end. It is doubtful if the purely scholarly and literary poets, like
Milton, say, or like our own Poe, are ever absorbed in the sense above
implied; while there is little doubt that poets like Homer, like
Shakespeare, are absorbed and modify a people's manners and ideals. Only
that which we love affects our lives. Our admiration for art and
literature as such is something entirely outside the sources of character
and power of action.
Whitman identifies himself with our lives. We associate him with reality,
with days, scenes, persons, events. The youth who reads Poe or Lowell
wants to be a scholar, a wit, a poet, a writer; the youth who reads
Whitman wants to be a man, and to get at the meaning and value of life.
Our author's bent towards real things, real men and women, and his power
to feed and foster personality, are unmistakable.
Life, reality, alone proves him; a saner and more robust fatherhood and
motherhood, more practical democracy, more charity, more love, more
comradeship, more social equality, more robust ideals of womanly and manly
character, prove him. When we are more tolerant and patient and
long-suffering, when the strain of our worldly, commercial spirit relaxes,
then is he justified. Whitman means a letting-up of the strain all along
the line,--less hurry, less greed, less rivalry, more leisure, more
charity, more fraternalism and altruism, more religion, less formality and
convention.
"When America does what was promised,
When each part is peopled with free people,
When there is no city on earth to lead my city, the city of young men,
the Mannahatta city--but when the Mannahatta leads all the cities
of the earth,
When there are plentiful athletic bards, inland and seaboard,
When through these States walk a hundred millions of superb persons,
When the rest part away for superb persons, and contribute to them,
When fathers, firm, unconstrained, open-eyed--when breeds of the most
perfect mothers denote America,
Then to me ripeness and conclusion."