The gospel of the average man, Matthew Arnold thought, was inimical to the
ideal of a rare and high excellence. But, in holding up the average man,
Whitman was only holding up the broad, universal human qualities, and
showing that excellence may go with them also. As a matter of fact, are we
not astonished almost daily by the superb qualities shown by the average
man, the heroism shown by firemen, engineers, workingmen, soldiers,
sailors? Do we not know that true greatness, true nobility and strength of
soul, may go and do go with commonplace, every-day humanity? Whitman would
lift the average man to a higher average, and still to a higher, without
at all weakening the qualities which he shares with universal humanity as
it exists over and under all special advantages and social refinements.
He says that one of the convictions that underlie his "Leaves" is the
conviction that the "crowning growth of the United States is to be
spiritual and heroic,"--a prophecy which in our times, I confess, does not
seem very near fulfillment.
He does not look longingly and anxiously toward the genteel social gods,
but quite the contrary. In the library and parlor, he confesses he is as a
gawk or one dumb. The great middle-class ideal, which is mainly the ideal
of our own people, Whitman flouts and affronts. There are things to him of
higher import than to have wealth and be respectable and in the mode.
We might charge him with narrowness and partiality and with seeing only
half truths, as Mr. Stedman has done, did he simply rest with the native
as opposed to the cultivated, with brawn as opposed to brains. What he
does do, what the upshot of his teaching shows, is that he identifies
himself with the masses, with those universal human currents out of which
alone a national spirit arises, as opposed to isolated schools and
coteries and a privileged few. Whitman decries culture only so far as it
cuts a man off from his fellows, clips away or effaces the sweet, native,
healthy parts of him, and begets a bloodless, superstitious, infidelistic
class. "The best culture," he says, "will always be that of the manly and
courageous instincts and loving perceptions, and of self-respect." For
the most part, our schooling is like our milling, which takes the bone
and nerve building elements out of our bread. The bread of life demands
the coarse as well as the fine, and this is what Whitman stands for.
In his spirit and affiliation with the great mass of the people, with the
commoner, sturdier, human traits, Whitman is more of the type of Angelo,
or Rembrandt, or the antique bards, than he is like modern singers. He was
not a product of the schools, but of the race.