I think he gives new meaning to democracy and America. In him we see a new
type, rising out of new conditions, and fully able to justify itself and
hold its own. It is the new man in the new world, no longer dependent upon
or facing toward the old. I confess that to me America and the modern
would not mean very much without Whitman. The final proof was wanting
till they gave birth to a personality equal to the old types.
Discussions and speculations about democracy do not carry very far, after
all; to preach equality is not much. But when we see these things made
into a man, and see the world through his eyes, and see new joy and new
meaning in it, our doubts and perplexities are cleared up. Our universal
balloting, and schooling, and material prosperity prove nothing: can your
democracy produce a man who shall carry its spirit into loftiest regions,
and prove as helpful and masterful under the new conditions as the by-gone
types were under the old?
V
I predict a great future for Whitman, because the world is so unmistakably
going his way. The three or four great currents of the century--the
democratic current, the scientific current, the humanitarian current, the
new religious current, and what flows out of them--are underneath all
Whitman has written. They shape all and make all. They do not appear in
him as mere dicta, or intellectual propositions, but as impulses, will,
character, flesh-and-blood reality. We get these things, not as sentiments
or yet theories, but as a man. We see life and the world as they appear to
the inevitable democrat, the inevitable lover, the inevitable believer in
God and immortality, the inevitable acceptor of absolute science.
We are all going his way. We are more and more impatient of formalities,
ceremonies, and make-believe; we more and more crave the essential, the
real. More and more we want to see the thing as in itself it is; more and
more is science opening our eyes to see the divine, the illustrious, the
universal in the common, the near at hand; more and more do we tire of
words and crave things; deeper and deeper sinks the conviction that
personal qualities alone tell,--that the man is all in all, that the
brotherhood of the race is not a dream, that love covers all and atones
for all.
Everything in our modern life and culture that tends to broaden,
liberalize, free; that tends to make hardy, self-reliant, virile; that
tends to widen charity, deepen affection between man and man, to foster
sanity and self-reliance; that tends to kindle our appreciation of the
divinity of all things; that heightens our rational enjoyment of life;
that inspires hope in the future and faith in the unseen,--are on
Whitman's side. All these things prepare the way for him.
On the other hand, the strain and strife and hoggishness of our
civilization, our trading politics, our worship of conventions, our
millionaire ideals, our high-pressure lives, our pruriency, our
sordidness, our perversions of nature, our scoffing caricaturing
tendencies, are against him. He antagonizes all these things.
The more democratic we become, the more we are prepared for Whitman; the
more tolerant, fraternal, sympathetic we become, the more we are ready
for Whitman; the more we inure ourselves to the open air and to real
things, the more we value and understand our own bodies, the more the
woman becomes the mate and equal of the man, the more social equality
prevails,--the sooner will come to Whitman fullness and fruition.