Whitman's democracy is the breath of his nostrils, the light of his eyes,
the blood in his veins. The reader does not feel that here is some fine
scholar, some fine poet singing the praises of democracy; he feels that
here is a democrat, probably, as Thoreau surmised, the greatest the world
has yet seen, turning the light of a great love, a great intellect, a
great soul, upon America, upon contemporary life and events, and upon the
universe, and reading new lessons, new meanings, therein. He is a great
poet and prophet, speaking through the average man, speaking as one of the
people, and interpreting life from the point of view of absolute
democracy.
True, the people in their average taste and perceptions are crude and
flippant and superficial, and often the victims of mountebanks and fools;
yet, as forming the body of our social and political organism, and the
chief factor in the world-problem of to-day, they are the exponents of
great forces and laws, and often, in emergencies, show the wisdom and
unimpeachableness of Nature herself. Deep-hidden currents and forces in
them are liable to come to the surface, and when the politicians get in
their way, or miscalculate them, as so often happens, they are crushed.
Whitman is a projection into literature of the cosmic sense and conscience
of the people, and their participation in the forces that are shaping the
world in our century. Much comes to a head in him. Much comes to joyous
speech and song, that heretofore had only come to thought and speculation.
A towering, audacious personality has appeared which is strictly the fruit
of the democratic spirit, and which has voiced itself in an impassioned
utterance touching the whole problem of national and individual life.
X
The Whitman literature is democratic, not in the sense that it caters to
the taste of the masses or to the taste of the average man; for, as a
matter of fact, the masses and the average man are likely to be the last
to recognize its value. The common people, the average newspaper-reading
citizens, are much more likely to be drawn by the artificial and the
conventional. But it is democratic because it is filled with the spirit of
absolute human equality and brotherhood, and gives out the atmosphere of
the universal, primary, human traits. The social, artificial, accidental
distinctions of wealth, culture, position, etc., have not influenced the
poet in the slightest degree. Whitman finds his joy and his triumph, not
in being better than other people or above them, but in being one with
them, and sharing their sins as well as their virtues.
"As if it harm'd me, giving others the same chances and rights as
myself--as if it were not indispensable to my own rights that
others possess the same."
This is one step further than others have taken, and makes democracy
complete in itself. Again, his work identifies itself with the democratic
ideal in getting rid of the professional and arbitrary elements of poetry,
and appealing to the reader entirely through its spirit and content. It is
as democratic in this respect as the workman in the field, or the mechanic
at his bench.
The poems are bathed and flooded with the quality of the common people;
with the commonness and nearness which they share with real things and
with all open-air nature,--with hunters, travelers, soldiers, workers in
all fields, and with rocks, trees, and woods. It is only in the spirit of
these things that a man himself can have health, sweetness, and
proportion; and only in their spirit that he can give an essentially sound
judgment of a work of art, no matter what the subject of it may be.
This spirit of the "commonest, cheapest, nearest" is the only spirit in
which man's concrete life can be carried forward. We do not live and
breathe and grow and multiply, we do not have health and sanity and
wholeness and proportion, we do not subdue and improve and possess the
earth, in the spirit of something exclusive, exceptional, faraway,
aristocratic, but in the spirit of the common and universal. The only
demand is that, in a work of art, the common or universal shall be
vitalized with poetic thought and enthusiasm, or imbued with the ideal of
a rare and high excellence.