Whitman is not one of those who can be deceived by familiarity. He
considers it just as wonderful that there are myriads of stars as that
one man should rise from the dead. He declares "a hair on the back of
his hand just as curious as any special revelation." His whole life is
to him what it was to Sir Thomas Browne,--one perpetual miracle.
Everything is strange, everything unaccountable, everything beautiful;
from a bug to the moon, from the sight of the eyes to the appetite for
food. He makes it his business to see things as if he saw them for the
first time, and professes astonishment on principle. But he has no
leaning towards mythology; avows his contempt for what he calls
"unregenerate poetry"; and does not mean by nature
"the smooth walks, trimmed edges, butterflies, posies, and
nightingales of the English poets, but the whole orb, with its
geologic history, the Kosmos, carrying fire and snow, that rolls
through the illimitable areas, light as a feather though weighing
billions of tons."
Nor is this exhaustive; for in his character of idealist all
impressions, all thoughts, trees and people, love and faith, astronomy,
history, and religion, enter upon equal terms into his notion of the
universe. He is not against religion; not, indeed, against any religion.
He wishes to drag with a larger net, to make a more comprehensive
synthesis, than any or than all of them put together. In feeling after
the central type of man, he must embrace all eccentricities; his
cosmology must subsume all cosmologies, and the feelings that gave birth
to them; his statement of facts must include all religion and all
irreligion, Christ and Boodha, God and the devil. The world as it is,
and the whole world as it is, physical, and spiritual, and historical,
with its good and bad, with its manifold inconsistencies, is what he
wishes to set forth, in strong, picturesque, and popular lineaments, for
the understanding of the average man. One of his favourite endeavours is
to get the whole matter into a nutshell; to knock the four corners of
the universe, one after another, about his readers' ears; to hurry him,
in breathless phrases, hither and thither, back and forward, in time and
space; to focus all this about his own momentary personality; and then,
drawing the ground from under his feet, as if by some cataclysm of
nature, to plunge him into the unfathomable abyss sown with enormous
suns and systems, and among the inconceivable numbers and magnitudes and
velocities of the heavenly bodies. So that he concludes by striking into
us some sense of that disproportion of things which Shelley has
illuminated by the ironical flash of these eight words: The desire of
the moth for the star.
The same truth, but to what a different purpose! Whitman's moth is
mightily at his ease about all the planets in heaven, and cannot think
too highly of our sublunary tapers. The universe is so large that
imagination flags in the effort to conceive it; but here, in the
meantime, is the world under our feet, a very warm and habitable corner.
"The earth, that is sufficient; I do not want the constellations any
nearer," he remarks. And again: "Let your soul stand cool and composed,"
says he, "before a million universes." It is the language of a
transcendental common sense, such as Thoreau held and sometimes uttered.
But Whitman, who has a somewhat vulgar inclination for technical talk
and the jargon of philosophy, is not content with a few pregnant hints;
he must put the dots upon his i's; he must corroborate the songs of
Apollo by some of the darkest talk of human metaphysic. He tells his
disciples that they must be ready "to confront the growing arrogance of
Realism." Each person is, for himself, the keystone and the occasion of
this universal edifice. "Nothing, not God," he says, "is greater to one
than oneself is"; a statement with an irreligious smack at the first
sight; but like most startling sayings, a manifest truism on a second.
He will give effect to his own character without apology; he sees "that
the elementary laws never apologise." "I reckon," he adds, with quaint
colloquial arrogance, "I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I
plant my house by, after all." The level follows the law of its being;
so, unrelentingly, will he; everything, every person, is good in his own
place and way; God is the maker of all, and all are in one design. For
he believes in God, and that with a sort of blasphemous security. "No
array of terms," quoth he, "no array of terms can say how much at peace
I am about God and about death." There certainly never was a prophet who
carried things with a higher hand; he gives us less a body of dogmas
than a series of proclamations by the grace of God; and language, you
will observe, positively fails him to express how far he stands above
the highest human doubts and trepidations.
But next in order of truths to a person's sublime conviction of himself,
comes the attraction of one person for another, and all that we mean by
the word love:--
"The dear love of man for his comrade--the attraction of friend for
friend,
Of the-well-married husband and wife, of children and parents,
Of city for city and land for land."
The solitude of the most sublime idealist is broken in upon by other
people's faces; he sees a look in their eyes that corresponds to
something in his own heart; there comes a tone in their voices which
convicts him of a startling weakness for his fellow-creatures. While he
is hymning the _ego_ and commercing with God and the universe, a woman
goes below his window; and at the turn of her skirt, or the colour of
her eyes, Icarus is recalled from heaven by the run. Love is so
startlingly real that it takes rank upon an equal footing of reality
with the consciousness of personal existence. We are as heartily
persuaded of the identity of those we love as of our own identity. And
so sympathy pairs with self-assertion, the two gerents of human life on
earth; and Whitman's ideal man must not only be strong, free, and
self-reliant in himself, but his freedom must be bounded and his
strength perfected by the most intimate, eager, and long-suffering love
for others. To some extent this is taking away with the left hand what
has been so generously given with the right. Morality has been
ceremoniously extruded from the door only to be brought in again by the
window. We are told, on one page, to do as we please; and on the next we
are sharply upbraided for not having done as the author pleases. We are
first assured that we are the finest fellows in the world in our own
right; and then it appears that we are only fine fellows in so far as we
practise a most quixotic code of morals. The disciple who saw himself in
clear ether a moment before is plunged down again among the fogs and
complications of duty. And this is all the more overwhelming because
Whitman insists not only on love between sex and sex, and between
friends of the same sex, but in the field of the less intense political
sympathies; and his ideal man must not only be a generous friend but a
conscientious voter into the bargain.
His method somewhat lessens the difficulty. He is not, the reader will
remember, to tell us how good we ought to be, but to remind us how good
we are. He is to encourage us to be free and kind by proving that we are
free and kind already. He passes our corporate life under review, to
show that it is upheld by the very virtues of which he makes himself the
advocate. "There is no object so soft," he says somewhere in his big,
plain way, "there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the
wheel'd universe." Rightly understood, it is on the softest of all
objects, the sympathetic heart, that the wheel of society turns easily
and securely as on a perfect axle. There is no room, of course, for
doubt or discussion, about conduct, where every one is to follow the
law of his being with exact compliance. Whitman hates doubt, deprecates
discussion, and discourages to his utmost the craving, carping
sensibilities of the conscience. We are to imitate, to use one of his
absurd and happy phrases, "the satisfaction and aplomb of animals." If
he preaches a sort of ranting Christianity in morals, a fit consequent
to the ranting optimism of his cosmology, it is because he declares it
to be the original deliverance of the human heart; or at least, for he
would be honestly historical in method, of the human heart as at present
Christianised. His is a morality without a prohibition; his policy is
one of encouragement all round. A man must be a born hero to come up to
Whitman's standard in the practice of any of the positive virtues; but
of a negative virtue, such as temperance or chastity, he has so little
to say, that the reader need not be surprised if he drops a word or two
upon the other side. He would lay down nothing that would be a clog; he
would prescribe nothing that cannot be done ruddily, in a heat. The
great point is to get people under way. To the faithful Whitmanite this
would be justified by the belief that God made all, and that all was
good; the prophet, in this doctrine, has only to cry "Tally-ho," and
mankind will break into a gallop on the road to El Dorado. Perhaps, to
another class of minds, it may look like the result of the somewhat
cynical reflection that you will not make a kind man out of one who is
unkind by any precepts under heaven; tempered by the belief that, in
natural circumstances, the large majority is well disposed. Thence it
would follow, that if you can only get every one to feel more warmly and
act more courageously, the balance of results will be for good.
So far, you see, the doctrine is pretty coherent as a doctrine; as a
picture of man's life it is incomplete and misleading, although
eminently cheerful. This he is himself the first to acknowledge; for if
he is prophetic in anything, it is in his noble disregard of
consistency. "Do I contradict myself?" he asks somewhere; and then pat
comes the answer, the best answer ever given in print, worthy of a sage,
or rather of a woman: "Very well, then, I contradict myself!" with this
addition, not so feminine and perhaps not altogether so satisfactory: "I
am large--I contain multitudes." Life, as a matter of fact, partakes
largely of the nature of tragedy. The gospel according to Whitman, even
if it be not so logical, has this advantage over the gospel according to
Pangloss, that it does not utterly disregard the existence of temporal
evil. Whitman accepts the fact of disease and wretchedness like an
honest man; and instead of trying to qualify it in the interest of his
optimism, sets himself to spur people up to be helpful. He expresses a
conviction, indeed, that all will be made up to the victims in the end;
that "what is untried and afterward" will fail no one, not even "the old
man who has lived without purpose and feels it with bitterness worse
than gall." But this is not to palliate our sense of what is hard or
melancholy in the present. Pangloss, smarting under one of the worst
things that ever was supposed to come from America, consoled himself
with the reflection that it was the price we have to pay for cochineal.
And with that murderous parody, logical optimism and the praises of the
best of possible worlds went irrevocably out of season, and have been no
more heard of in the mouths of reasonable men. Whitman spares us all
allusions to the cochineal; he treats evil and sorrow in a spirit almost
as of welcome; as an old sea-dog might have welcomed the sight of the
enemy's topsails off the Spanish Main. There, at least, he seems to say,
is something obvious to be done. I do not know many better things in
literature than the brief pictures--brief and vivid like things seen by
lightning,--with which he tries to stir up the world's heart upon the
side of mercy. He braces us, on the one hand, with examples of heroic
duty and helpfulness; on the other, he touches us with pitiful instances
of people needing help. He knows how to make the heart beat at a brave
story; to inflame us with just resentment over the hunted slave; to stop
our mouths for shame when he tells of the drunken prostitute. For all
the afflicted, all the weak, all the wicked, a good word is said in a
spirit which I can only call one of ultra Christianity; and however
wild, however contradictory, it may be in parts, this at least may be
said for his book, as it may be said of the Christian Gospels, that no
one will read it, however respectable, but he gets a knock upon his
conscience; no one however fallen, but he finds a kindly and supporting
welcome.