Of course the essential elements of all first-class artistic and literary
productions are always the same, just as nature, just as man, are
essentially the same everywhere. Yet the literature of every people has a
stamp of its own, starts from and implies antecedents and environments
peculiar to itself.
Just as ripe, mellow, storied, ivy-towered, velvet-turfed England lies
back of Tennyson, and is vocal through him; just as canny, covenanting,
conscience-burdened, craggy, sharp-tongued Scotland lies back of Carlyle;
just as thrifty, well-schooled, well-housed, prudent, and moral New
England lies back of her group of poets, and is voiced by them,--so
America as a whole, our turbulent democracy, our self-glorification, our
faith in the future, our huge mass movements, our continental spirit, our
sprawling, sublime, and unkempt nature, lie back of Whitman and are
implied by his work.
He had not the shaping, manipulating gift to carve his American material
into forms of ideal beauty, and did not claim to have. He did not value
beauty as an abstraction.
What Whitman did that is unprecedented was, to take up the whole country
into himself, fuse it, imbue it with soul and poetic emotion, and recast
it as a sort of colossal Walt Whitman. He has not so much treated American
themes as he has identified himself with everything American, and made the
whole land redolent of his own quality. He has descended upon the gross
materialism of our day and land and upon the turbulent democratic masses
with such loving impact, such fervid enthusiasm, as to lift and fill them
with something like the breath of universal nature. His special gift is
his magnetic and unconquerable personality, his towering egoism united
with such a fund of human sympathy. His power is centripetal, so to
speak,--he draws everything into himself like a maelstrom; the centrifugal
power of the great dramatic artists, the power to get out of and away from
himself, he has not. It was not for Whitman to write the dramas and
tragedies of democracy, as Shakespeare wrote those of feudalism, or as
Tennyson sang in delectable verse the swan-song of an overripe
civilization. It was for him to voice the democratic spirit, to show it
full-grown, athletic, haughtily taking possession of the world and
redistributing the prizes according to its own standards. It was for him
to sow broadcast over the land the germs of larger, more sane, more robust
types of men and women, indicating them in himself.
In him the new spirit of democracy first completely knows itself, is proud
of itself, has faith and joy in itself, is fearless, tolerant, religious,
aggressive, triumphant, and bestows itself lavishly upon all sides. It is
tentative, doubtful, hesitating no longer. It is at ease in the world, it
takes possession, it fears no rival, it advances with confident step.
No man was ever more truly fathered by what is formative and expansive in
his country and times than was Whitman. Not by the literature of his
country was he begotten, but by the spirit that lies back of all, and
that begat America itself,--the America that Europe loves and fears, that
she comes to this country to see, and looks expectantly, but for the most
part vainly, in our books to find.
It seems to me he is distinctly a continental type. His sense of space, of
magnitude, his processional pages, his unloosedness, his wide horizons,
his vanishing boundaries,--always something unconfined and unconfinable,
always the deferring and undemonstrable. The bad as well as the good
traits of his country and his people are doubtless implied by his work.
If he does not finally escape from our unripe Americanism, if he does not
rise through it all and clarify it and turn it to ideal uses, draw out the
spiritual meanings, then avaunt! we want nothing of him.
"The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell.
The former I graft and increase upon myself,
The latter I translate into a new tongue."
The vital and the formative the true poet always engrafts and increases
upon himself, and thence upon his reader; the crude, the local, the
accidental, he translates into a new tongue. It has been urged against
Whitman that he expresses our unripe Americanism only, but serious readers
of him know better than that. He is easy master of it all, and knows when
his foot is upon solid ground. It seems to me that in him we see for the
first time spiritual and ideal meanings and values in democracy and the
modern; we see them translated into character; we see them tried by
universal standards; we see them vivified by a powerful imagination. We
see America as an idea, and see its relation to other ideas. We get a new
conception of the value of the near, the common, the familiar. New light
is thrown upon the worth and significance of the common people, and it is
not the light of an abstract idea, but the light of a concrete example. We
see the democratic type on a scale it has never before assumed; it is on a
par with any of the types that have ruled the world in the past, the
military, the aristocratic, the regal. It is at home, it has taken
possession, it can hold its own. Henceforth the world is going its way. If
it is over-confident, over-self-assertive, too American, that is the
surplusage of the poet, of whom we do not want a penny prudence and
caution; make your prophecy bold enough and it fulfills itself. Whitman
has betrayed no doubt or hesitation in his poetry. His assumptions and
vaticinations are tremendous, but they are uttered with an authority and
an assurance that convince like natural law.