Whitman says his book is not a good lesson, but it takes down the bars to
a good lesson, and that to another, and that to another still. To take
down bars rather than to put them up is always Whitman's aim; to make his
reader free of the universe, to turn him forth into the fresh and
inexhaustible pastures of time, space, eternity, and with a smart slap
upon his back with the halter as a spur and send-off, is about what he
would do. His message, first and last, is "give play to yourself;" "let
yourself go;"--happiness is in the quest of happiness; power comes to him
who power uses.
"Long enough have you timidly waded, holding a plank by the shore;
Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,
To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout,
and laughingly dash with your hair."
To hold Whitman up to ridicule, and to convict him of grossness and
tediousness, is easy enough; first, because he is so out of relation to
the modes and taste of his times, and, secondly, because he has somewhat
of the uncouthness and coarseness of large bodies. Then his seriousness
and simplicity, like that of Biblical and Oriental writers,--a kind of
childish inaptness and homeliness,--often exposes him to our keen, almost
abnormal sense of the ridiculous. He was deficient in humor, and he wrote
his book in entire obliviousness of social usages and conventions, so that
the perspective of it is not the social or indoor perspective, but that
of life and nature at large, careering and unhampered. It is probably the
one modern poem whose standards are not social and what are called
artistic.
Its atmosphere is always that of the large, free spaces of vast, unhoused
nature. It has been said that the modern world could be reconstructed from
"Leaves of Grass," so compendious and all-inclusive is it in its details;
but of the modern world as a social organization, of man as the creature
of social usages and prohibitions, of fashions, of dress, of
ceremony,--the indoor, parlor and drawing-room man,--there is no hint in
its pages. In its matter and in its spirit, in its standards and in its
execution, in its ideals and in its processes, it belongs to and
affiliates with open-air nature, often reaching, I think, the cosmic and
unconditioned. In a new sense is Whitman the brother of the orbs and
cosmic processes, "conveying a sentiment and invitation of the earth." All
his enthusiasms, all his sympathies have to do with the major and
fundamental elements of life. He is a world-poet. We do not readily adjust
our indoor notions to him. Our culture-standards do not fit him.