Because of Whitman's glorification of pride, egoism, brawn, self-reliance,
it is charged that the noble, the cultured, the self-denying, have no
place in his system. What place have they in the antique bards?--in Homer,
in Job, in Isaiah, in Dante? They have the same place in Whitman, yet it
is to be kept in mind that Whitman does not stand for the specially social
virtues, nor for culture, nor for the refinements which it induces, nor
for art, nor for any conventionality. There are flowers of human life
which we are not to look for in Walt Whitman. The note of fine manners,
chivalrous conduct, which we get in Emerson; the sweetness and light
gospel of Arnold; the gospel of hero-worship of Carlyle; the gracious
scholarship of our New England poets, etc.,--we do not get in Walt
Whitman. There is nothing in him at war with these things, but he is
concerned with more primal and elemental questions. He strikes under and
beyond all these things.
What are the questions or purposes, then, in which his work has root?
Simply put, to lead the way to larger, saner, more normal, more robust
types of men and women on this continent; to prefigure and help develop
the new democratic man,--to project him into literature on a scale and
with a distinctness that cannot be mistaken. To this end he keeps a deep
hold of the savage, the unrefined, and marshals the elements and
influences that make for the virile, the heroic, the sane, the large, and
for the perpetuity of the race. We cannot refine the elements,--the air,
the water, the soil, the sunshine,--and the more we pervert or shut out
these from our lives the worse for us. In the same manner, the more we
pervert or balk the great natural impulses, sexuality, comradeship, the
religious emotion, nativity, or the more we deny and belittle our bodies,
the further we are from the spirit of Walt Whitman, and from the spirit of
the All.
With all Whitman's glorification of pride, self-esteem, self-reliance,
etc., the final lesson of his life and work is service, self-denial,--the
free, lavish giving of yourself to others. Of the innate and essential
nobility that we associate with unworldliness, the sharing of what you
possess with the unfortunate around you, sympathy with all forms of life
and conditions of men, charity as broad as the sunlight, standing up for
those whom others are down upon, claiming nothing for self which others
may not have upon the same terms,--of such nobility and fine manners, I
say, you shall find an abundance in the life and works of Walt Whitman.
The spirit of a man's work is everything; the letter, little or nothing.
Though Whitman boasts of his affiliation with the common and near at hand,
yet he is always saved from the vulgar, the mean, the humdrum, by the
breadth of his charity and sympathy and his tremendous ideality.
Of worldliness, materialism, commercialism, he has not a trace; his only
values are spiritual and ideal; his only standards are the essential and
the enduring. What Matthew Arnold called the Anglo-Saxon contagion, the
bourgeois spirit, the worldly and sordid ideal, is entirely corrected in
Whitman by the ascendant of the ethic and the universal. His democracy
ends in universal brotherhood, his patriotism in the solidarity of
nations, his glorification of the material in the final triumph of the
spiritual, his egoism issues at last in complete otherism.
A race that can produce a man of his fibre, his continental type, is yet
at its best estate. Did one begin to see evil omen in this perpetual
whittling away and sharpening and lightening of the American type,--grace
without power, clearness without mass, intellect without character,--then
take comfort from the volume and the rankness of Walt Whitman. Did one
begin to fear that the decay of maternity and paternity in our older
communities and the falling off in the native population presaged the
drying up of the race in its very sources? Then welcome to the rank
sexuality and to the athletic fatherhood and motherhood celebrated by
Whitman. Did our skepticism, our headiness, our worldliness, threaten to
eat us up like a cancer? did our hardness, our irreligiousness, and our
passion for the genteel point to a fugitive, superficial race? was our
literature threatened with the artistic degeneration,--running all to art
and not at all to power? were our communities invaded by a dry rot of
culture? were we fast becoming a delicate, indoor, genteel race? were our
women sinking deeper and deeper into the "incredible sloughs of fashion
and all kinds of dyspeptic depletion,"--the antidote for all these ills is
in Walt Whitman. In him nature shows great fullness and fertility, and an
immense friendliness. He supplements and corrects most of the special
deficiencies and weaknesses toward which the American type seems to tend.
He brings us back to nature again. The perpetuity of the race is with the
common people. The race is constantly crying out at the top, in our times
at least; culture and refinement beget fewer and fewer and poorer and
poorer children. Where struggle ceases, that family or race is doomed.
"Now understand me well--it is provided in the essence of things that
from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth
something to make a greater struggle necessary."
In more primitive communities, the sap and vitality of the race were kept
in the best men, because upon them the strain and struggle were greatest.
War, adventure, discovery, favor virility. Whitman is always and
everywhere occupied with that which makes for life, power, longevity,
manliness. The scholar poets are occupied with that which makes for
culture, taste, refinement, ease, art.
"Leaves of Grass," taken as a whole, aims to exhibit a modern, democratic,
archetypal man, here in America, confronting and subduing our enormous
materialism to his own purposes, putting it off and on as a garment;
identifying himself with all forms of life and conditions of men; trying
himself by cosmic laws and processes, exulting in the life of his body and
the delights of his senses; and seeking to clinch, to develop, and to
realize himself through the shows and events of the visible world. The
poet seeks to interpret life from the central point of absolute abysmal
man.
The wild and the savage in nature with which Whitman perpetually
identifies himself, and the hirsute, sun-tanned, and aboriginal in
humanity, have misled many readers into looking upon him as expressive of
these things only. Mr. Stedman thinks him guilty of a certain narrowness
in preferring, or seeming to prefer, the laboring man to the gentleman.
But the poet uses these elements only for checks and balances, and to keep
our attention, in the midst of a highly refined and civilized age, fixed
upon the fact that here are the final sources of our health, our power,
our longevity. The need of the pre-scientific age was knowledge and
refinement; the need of our age is health and sanity, cool heads and good
digestion. And to this end the bitter and drastic remedies from the shore
and the mountains are for us.