I
It has been said, and justly I think, that in Whitman we see the first
appearance in literature of the genuinely democratic spirit on anything
like an ample scale. Plenty of men of democratic tendencies and
affiliations have appeared, but none that have carried the temper and
quality of the people, the masses, into the same regions, or blended the
same humanity and commonness with the same commanding personality and
spirituality. In recent English poetry the names of Burns and Wordsworth
occur to mind, but neither of these men had anything like Whitman's
breadth of relation to the mass of mankind, or expressed anything like his
sweeping cosmic emotion. Wordsworth's muse was clad in homespun, but in no
strict sense was his genius democratic--using the word to express, not a
political creed, but the genius of modern civilization. He made much of
the common man, common life, common things, but always does the poet stand
apart, the recluse, the hermit, the philosopher, loving and contemplating
these things for purposes of his art. Only through intellectual sympathy
is he a part of what he surveys. In Whitman the common or average man has
grown haughty, almost aristocratic. He coolly confronts the old types, the
man of caste, culture, privileges, royalties, and relegates him to the
past. He readjusts the standards, and estimates everything from the human
and democratic point of view. In his scheme, the old traditions--the
aristocratic, the scholastic, the ecclesiastical, the military, the social
traditions--play no part. He dared to look at life, past and present, from
the American and scientific standpoint. He turns to the old types a pride
and complacency equal to their own.
Indeed, we see in the character which Whitman has exploited and in the
interest of which his poems are written, the democratic type fully
realized,--pride and self-reliance equal to the greatest, and these
matched with a love, a compassion, a spirit of fraternity and equality,
that are entirely foreign to the old order of things.