At first sight Whitman does not seem vitally related to his own country
and people; he seems an anomaly, an exception, or like one of those
mammoth sports that sometimes appear in the vegetable world. The Whitman
ideal is not, and has never been, the conscious ideal of the mass of our
people. We have aspired more to the ideal of the traditional fine
gentleman as he has figured in British letters. There seems to have been
no hint or prophecy of such a man as Whitman in our New England
literature, unless it be in Emerson, and here it is in the region of the
abstract and not of the concrete. Emerson's prayer was for the absolutely
self-reliant man, but when Whitman refused to follow his advice with
regard to certain passages in the "Leaves," the sage withheld further
approval of the work.
We must look for the origins of Whitman, I think, in the deep
world-currents that have been shaping the destinies of the race for the
past hundred years or more; in the universal loosening, freeing, and
removing obstructions; in the emancipation of the people, and their coming
forward and taking possession of the world in their own right; in the
triumph of democracy and of science; the downfall of kingcraft and
priestcraft; the growth of individualism and non-conformity; the
increasing disgust of the soul of man with forms and ceremonies; the
sentiment of realism and positivism, the religious hunger that flees the
churches; the growing conviction that life, that nature, are not failures,
that the universe is good, that man is clean and divine inside and out,
that God is immanent in nature,--all these things and more lie back of
Whitman, and hold a causal relation to him.