ILLUMINATION
Whitman returned to Brooklyn about the time that Free-soil Democrats
and Liberty men were uniting at Buffalo on the ticket and platform
which I have already described. He established a small book-store and
printing office on Myrtle Avenue,[116] and commenced the publication of
the _Freeman_, a weekly first, but afterwards a daily paper.
The venture continued for about a year but eventually proved
unsuccessful. Its failure may have been due to the comparatively small
circle of readers which the Free-soil party in Brooklyn could provide,
or it may have resulted from the same lack of regularity which killed
the _Long Islander_. It is not improbable that Whitman wearied of
the continuous mechanical production demanded by the ownership and
management of a daily paper. He was not methodical; and his mind was
struggling with ideas which made him restless in harness, ideas so
large and fundamental that much of the merely ephemeral detail of
journalism must have become irritating and irksome. When the _Freeman_
collapsed it was a bondage broken, and its owner and editor became a
freeman himself.
His father was some sixty years of age and failing in health, and for
lack of anything more suited to his state of mind, Walt joined him,
taking up his business and becoming a master carpenter, building small
frame-houses in Brooklyn and selling them upon completion as his father
had been doing these thirty years.
Brooklyn was growing fast, and the Whitmans prospered. Walt lived at
home and spent little; he was soon on the way to become rich. What was
more important, he was now the master of his own time; and carpentering
left his mind free to work entirely in its own way. He was no longer
being "pushed for copy". When the mood was urgent he could idle; that
is to say, he could give himself up to his thoughts. He could dream,
but the saw in his hand and the crisp timber kept him close to reality.
He was out of doors, too, and among things rather than thoughts, so
that his ideas were but rarely bookish.
* * * * *
Yet though he was the opposite of bookish he was not ill-read. He
always carried a volume or part of a magazine in his knapsack with his
mid-day dinner;[117] and every week for years he had visited Coney
Island beach to bathe there and to read. He watched the English and
American reviews, bought second-hand copies whenever they contained
matter of interest to him, tore out his prize and devoured it with his
sandwich. He loved especially to read a book in its native elements:
the _Inferno_[118] in an ancient wood, Homer in a hollow of the rocks
with the Atlantic surf on either hand, while he saw all the stage-plays
of Shakespeare upon the boards.
He had always remained faithful to Scott, and especially to the
Border ballads of his collection, with their innumerable and repaying
notes. He studied the Bible systematically and deliberately, weighing
it well and measuring it by the standards of outdoor America in the
nineteenth century. In the same way and spirit he had read and re-read
Shakespeare's plays before seeing them, until he could recite extended
passages; and he had come to very definite conclusions about their
feudal and aristocratic atmosphere and influence.
He read Æschylus and Sophocles in translations, and felt himself
nearer to the Greeks than to Shakespeare or the Middle Ages. It is
interesting to note that he barely mentions Euripides, most modern of
the Hellenes, the poet of women, and was evidently little acquainted
with Plato. Surely if he had read _The Republic_ or _The Symposium_
there could be no uncertainty upon the matter.
But about another poet, as opposed to Plato as any in the category,
there is no shade of doubt. Whitman, like Goethe and Napoleon, was
a lover of that shadowy being whom Macpherson exploited with such
success--Ossian the Celt.[119] Ossian is dead, and for good reasons--we
can do much better than read Ossian to-day; but with all his mouthings
and in spite of the pother of his smoke, he is not without a flavour
of those Irish epics which are among the perfect things of pure
imagination. And when one thinks of the eighteenth century with
its town wit, one cannot wonder at the welcome Macpherson's Ossian
won. Great billowy sea-mists engulf its reader; and through them he
perceives phantom-forms, which, though they are but the shadows of men,
are pointed out to him for gods. But at least the sea is there, and the
wind and an outdoor world. Whitman was not blind to the indefinite and
misty in Ossian.[120] He himself clung to the concrete, and though he
could rant he preferred upon the whole to use familiar phrases. But he
loved Ossian for better, for worse. And we may add as a corollary he
disliked Milton.[121]
In the case of the foreign classics I have mentioned, and of others
like Don Quixote, Rousseau, and the stories of the Nibelungen,[122] he
fell back upon translations, and in works of classical verse, often
upon prose. He declaimed the _Iliad_ in Pope's heroics, but he studied
it according to Buckley.[123]
As a journalist and writer for the magazines, he had become more or
less acquainted with contemporary literature, but, with few exceptions
only, it seems to have affected him negatively. He knew something of
Wordsworth, Byron and Keats;[124] the first he said was too much of a
recluse and too little of a lover of his kind; Byron was a pessimist,
and in the last of the three he seemed only to find one of the
over-sensitive products of civilisation and gentility. Tennyson--whose
"Ulysses" (1842) was a special favourite--interested him from the
beginning, though Whitman always resented what he called his "feudal"
atmosphere.[125] It is doubtful whether he had yet read anything of
Carlyle's, though he would be acquainted with the ideas of _Heroes and
Hero-Worship_.
Among Americans, he was apparently most familiar with Bryant and with
Fenimore Cooper. When he first studied Emerson is uncertain; he seems
to have known him as a lecturer, and could not have been ignorant of
the general tendencies of his teaching.[126] Longfellow's "Evangeline,"
Lowell's "Biglow Papers" and Whittier's "Voices of Freedom" were the
talk of the time. He had met Poe; and his tragic death at Baltimore
in 1849 may have set him to re-read the brilliant but disappointing
verses, and profounder criticism, of that ill-starred genius.[127]
But it was from the pages of the Bible, of Homer and of Shakespeare,
of Ossian and of Scott that he derived most. Ballads he loved when
they came from the folk; but Blake and Shelley, the purely lyrical
writers of the new era, do not seem to have touched him; perhaps they
were hardly virile enough, for when he came to know and appreciate
Burns, it was as a lyrist who was at once the poet of the people and
a full-blooded man. From all of which it may be deduced that it was
the elemental and the virile, rather than the subtle qualities of
imagination which appealed to him; he responded to breadth and strength
of movement and of passion, rather than to any kind of formal or
static beauty. For him, poetry was a passionate movement, the rhythm
of progress, the march of humanity, the procession of Freedom. It
was more; it was an abandonment to world-emotions. Where he felt this
abandonment to inspiration, he recognised poetry, and only there. In
American literature he did not feel it at all.
When he read poetry, the sea was his favourite companion. The rhythm
of the waves satisfied the rhythmical needs of his mind. Everything
that belonged to the sea exercised a spell over him. The first vision
that made him desire the gift of words was that of a full-rigged
ship;[128] and the love of ships and shipping remained a passion with
him to the end; so that when he sought to describe his own very soul
it was as a ship he figured it. For the embrace of the sea itself, for
the swimmer's joy,[129] he had the lover's passion of a Swinburne or a
Meredith.
His reading was not, of course, confined to pure literature, but we
have no list of the books which he read in other departments. We know
that he was deeply interested in the problems of philosophy and the
discoveries of science.
Though never what is called a serious student of their works, he had
a good understanding of the attitude both of the metaphysicians and
of the physicists of his time; and he had no quarrel with either. In
his simple and direct way he came indeed very near to them both; for
he loved and reverenced concrete fact as he reverenced the concept
of the cosmos. Individual facts were significant to him because they
were all details of a Whole, but he loved facts too for their own
sake. And to the Whole, the cosmos, his soul responded as ardently as
to the detailed parts. The deeper his knowledge of detail--the closer
his grasp upon facts--the more intense must be his consciousness of
the Whole. This consciousness of the Whole illuminated him more fully
about this date, in a way I will soon recount; it must for some time
previously have been exercising an influence upon his thought.
Regarding poetry as the rhythmical utterance of emotions which are
produced in the soul by its relation to the world, he doubtless
regarded science as the means by which that world becomes concrete,
diverse and real to the soul, as it becomes one and comprehensible to
it through philosophy. Science and philosophy seemed alike essential,
not hostile, to poetry. Poetry is the utterance of an inspired emotion;
but an emotion inspired by what? By the discovery that the Other and
the Self are so akin that joy and passion arise from their contact.
In order to conceive of science or philosophy as hostile to poetry,
we must think of them as building up some barrier between us and the
world. But in this respect modern science does not threaten poetry, for
it recognises the homogeneity of a material self with a material world;
neither does idealism threaten the source of this emotion, regarding
the self and the world as both essentially ideal.
The aim of modern thought has been, not to isolate the soul, but rather
to give it back to the world of relations. It seems to me that, in so
far as Religion has attempted to separate between the Self and things,
between God and Man, between the soul and the flesh, Religion has cut
at the roots of poetry; but the Religion which attempted this is not, I
believe, the religion of the modern world.
Whitman then accepted modern science and philosophy with equanimity,
in so far as he understood them, and in their own spheres. Apparent
antagonisms between them did not trouble him. They were for him
different functions of the one soul. He was too sensible of his own
identity and unity in himself to share in the perplexity of those who
lose this sense through the exclusive exercise of one or other of their
functions. His joint exercise of these proved them to be harmonious. He
was unconscious of any quarrel in himself between the scientific and
the poetic, the religious and the philosophic faculties.
Definitions in such large matters must generally seem absurd and almost
useless, yet here they may be suggestive. If Whitman had formulated
his thought he might, perhaps, have said: "Science is the Self probing
into the details of the Not-self; Philosophy is the Self describing the
Not-self as a Whole; Religion is the attitude of the Self toward the
Not-self; and Poetry springs from the passionate realisation of the
homogeneity of the Self with the Not-self".
In such rough and confessedly crude definitions we may suggest, at any
rate, a theory for his attitude toward the thought of his day. That
thought, it seems unnecessary to add, was impregnated by the positive
spirit of science. Names like those of Leibnitz, Lamarck, Goethe, Hegel
and Comte remind us that the idea of evolution was becoming more and
more suggestive in every field--soon to be enforced anew, and more
definitely, by Darwin, Wallace and Spencer. The idea of an indwelling
and unfolding principle or energy is the special characteristic of
nineteenth century thought; and it has been accompanied by a new
reverence for all that participates in the process of becoming. Every
form of life has its secret, and is worthy of study, for that secret
is a part of the World's Secret, the Eternal Purpose which affects
every soul. We are each a part of that progressive purpose which we
call the universe. But we are each absolutely and utterly distinct and
individual. Every one has his own secret, his own purpose; in the old
phrase, it is to his own master that each one standeth or falleth.
Ideas such as these, the affirmations of a new age, were driving the
remnants of the old faiths and the dogmas of the school of Paley into
the limbo of the incredible; but they were also casting out the futile
atheisms and scepticisms of the dead century. The era of Mazzini,
Browning, Ruskin, Emerson, was an era of affirmations, not an era of
doubt. And Whitman caught the spirit of his age: eagerly he accepted
and assimilated it.
His knowledge of modern thought came to him chiefly through the more
popular channels of periodical literature, and through conversations
with thoughtful men. Probably the largest and most important part
of his reading, then and always, was the daily press. A journalist
himself, he had besides an insatiable craving for living facts, and
especially for American facts. He wanted to know everything about his
country. America was his passion: he understood America. Sometimes he
wondered if he was alone in that.
* * * * *
The papers were, indeed, crowded with news of enterprise and adventure.
In California, the new territory which Frémont and Stockton had taken
from Mexico, gold was discovered in 1848, and in eighteen months a
torrent of 50,000 argonauts had poured across the isthmus and over the
plains, leaving their trail of dead through the awful grey solitude
of the waterless desert. In the summer of '49 there were five hundred
vessels lying in San Francisco harbour,[130] where a few years earlier
a single visitor had been comparatively rare. And at the same hour,
on the eastern coast, every port was a-clamour with men frantically
demanding a passage, and the refrain of the pilgrims' song was
everywhere heard,
Oh, California, that's the land for me.
There is no indication in Whitman's writings that he was ever swept off
his feet by this fierce tide of adventure. Anyone who has felt such
a current setting in among the fluid populations of the West is not
likely to underestimate its power. Even in the more staid and sober
East the excitement must have been intense: and it is, at the first
thought, surprising that Walt, who was still full of youth and strength
and ambition, should have remained at home. On second thought, however,
it is clear that gold-seeking was about the last enterprise to entice
a man who was shortly to relinquish house-building because he was
accumulating money.
The attraction of the new lands may have been strong when the _Freeman_
released him, but he had had wandering enough for the present, and the
attraction of New York itself was at least as strong. Unlike Joaquin
Miller, who was among the first in each of the new mining camps which
sprang up along the Pacific slopes during the next fifty years, Whitman
remained within the circle of New York Bay. He was content to see the
vessels being built for their long and hazardous voyage, strong to take
all the buffeting of two oceans--those beautiful Yankee clipper ships
which have never been rivalled for grace combined with speed. He was
content to see all the possibilities of that bold frontier life in the
friendly faces of young men leaning over the bench or driving their
jolly teams.
He was not one of those who need to go afield in order that their
sluggish blood may be quickened into daring, or their dull mood be
thrilled with admiring wonder. Nothing was commonplace to his eyes,
and he found adventures enough to occupy him in any street. Thus
while others were framing new governments for new communities, he
stayed at home and framed new houses for new families of workmen; and
perhaps after all, in his transcendental fashion, he found his own
work the more romantic. He had a deeply-rooted prejudice against the
exceptional; he planned for himself the life of an average American of
the middle nineteenth century, no longer geographically a frontiersman,
though more than ever a pioneer in other fields. He would have taken
his pan and washed for gold in the Sacramento had he wanted; but the
Brooklyn streets and ferry, Broadway and the faces of New York held
him. He had not exhausted them yet.
He had, moreover, a strongly conservative instinct, an inclination to
"stay put," evident in his story from this time forth. He was not a
nomad, forever striking his tent and moving on; he wanted a settled
home, and attached himself more than most men to the familiar. He took
root, like a tree. The secure immobility of his base allowed him to
stretch his branches far in every direction.
His mind, too, we may be sure, was occupied with its own problems. At
first, perhaps, as an inner struggle with insurgent and rebel thoughts
and desires, but now as an effort of the conscious self to include
and harmonise new elements, and so to lie open to all experience with
equanimity, refusing none. Such a process of integration in a mind like
Whitman's requires years of slow growth and brooding consciousness, if
it is to be fully and finally achieved. And as the integration of his
character became more and more complete, he won another point of view
upon all things, and, as it were, saw all things new. It is little
wonder that we have but scanty record of the years from 1850 to 1855.
In his home-life in Brooklyn he was happy and beloved and able to
follow his own path without being questioned, or, for that matter,
understood. He was probably not quite the easiest of men to live
with.[131] He had his own notions, with which others were not allowed
to interfere; he never took advice, and was not too considerate of
domestic arrangements.
As to money, which was never too plentiful in the household, he
professed and felt a royal indifference, in which, one may suspect, the
others did not share. The father was somewhat penurious on occasion and
capable of sharp practice; he had worked hard and incessantly, and had
known poverty; the youngest son, moreover, would always be dependent
upon others, and Jesse, the oldest, seems to have displayed little
ability. One can understand that the father and his second son--who,
with the largest share of capacity, must have seemed to the old man
the most given over to profitless whims and to idle pleasures--had not
always found it easy to live together, and that in the past the mother,
with her good sense and understanding of them both, had often had to
mediate between them. In the later years, however, Walt understood his
father thoroughly and himself better, so that their relationship became
as happy as it was really affectionate.
His knowledge of the world, his coolness in a crisis, his deliberate
balancing of the facts, and yet more deliberate and confident
pronouncing of judgment, made him an oracle to be consulted by his
family and the neighbours on every occasion of difficulty. The
sisters and younger brothers were all fond of him; he was more than
good-natured and kind, and never presumed upon his older years to limit
their freedom of action or thought.
* * * * *
The man's kindliness and benignity are admirably suggested in the
portraits taken in his thirty-sixth year, the earliest that we have.
One in particular--that chosen for the frontispiece of this book--is
almost articulate with candour and goodwill. In many respects it is the
most interesting of the hundred or more portraits extant. Whitman was
an excellent sitter, especially to the camera. His photographs give
you a glance of recognition, and rarely wear the abstracted look, the
stolidity, which is noticeable in several easel pictures.
The daguerrotype of 1854 is the most speaking of the whole series. It
is an absolutely frank face, by no means the mask which, according to
the sitter himself, one of the later portraits shows. It is frank,
and it is kindly, but how much more! The longer one gazes at it the
more complex its suggestions become. The eyes are not only kind, they
are the eyes of a mystic, a seer; they are a thought wistful, but
they are very clear. Like William Blake's, they are eyes that are
good for the two visions; they see and they are seen through. If, as
I suppose is probable, something of the expression is due to the fact
that the photograph was taken on a brilliant summer's day, we can only
congratulate ourselves that the elements co-operated with the sitter's
soul.
In striking contrast with the eyes is the good-natured but loose mouth,
a faun-like expression upon its thick lips, which dismisses at once
any fancy of the ascetic saint. The nose, too, is thick, strong and
straight, with large nostrils. Even in the photograph you can feel
that rich and open texture of the skin which radiates the joy of
living from every pore.
It is the face, above all, of a man, and the face of a man you would
choose for a comrade; there would be no fear of his failing or
misunderstanding you. But, withal, it is the face of a spirit wholly
untamed, a wood-creature if you will, perhaps the face of Adam himself,
looking out upon Eden with divine eyes of immortality.
Remember, as you meet his gaze, that he knows the life of cities, and
that the Fall lies behind him, not before. Perhaps that is why some who
have looked at it describe it as the "Christ portrait"--for Jesus was
the second Adam--but this is not the ascetic Christ of the Churches,
the smile about the lips is too full for that. No, it is the face of a
man responsive to all the appeals of the senses, a man who drives the
full team of those wild horses of passion which tear in pieces less
harmonious souls.
This is a man who saw life whole, and had joy of it. He knew the life
of the body on every side, save that of sickness, and of the mind
on every side, save that of fear. His large, friendly, attractive
personality was always feeding him with the materials of experience,
and there was nothing in it all which he did not relish. The responses
of his nature to each object and incident were joyous; for the
responses of a harmonious nature are musical, whatever be the touch
that rouses them.
* * * * *
A shrewd estimate of Whitman's character had been made five years
before by a New York phrenologist, and its general accuracy seems
to have vanquished the incredulity of its subject.[132] Mr. Fowler
described him--I will translate the jargon of his pseudo-science
into plain English--as capable of deep friendship and sympathy, with
tendencies to stubbornness and self-esteem, and a strong feeling for
the sublime. He thought that Whitman's danger lay in the direction of
indolence and sensuality, "and a certain reckless swing of animal
will". At the same time he recognised in him the quality of caution
largely developed.
As this estimate was subsequently quoted by Whitman with approval, and
referred to as an authority, it evidently tallied with his reading
of himself, and while it is by no means remarkable or particularly
significant, it bears out other testimony. That "reckless swing of
animal will" always distinguished him from the colourless peripatetic
brains and cold-blooded collectors of copy so numerous in the hosts of
journalism. Walt came of a race of slow but passionate men, and when he
was deeply moved he could be terrible. At such times his wrath blazed
up and overwhelmed him in its sudden access, but it was as short-lived
as it was swift.
It is related[133] that once in a Brooklyn church he failed to remove
his soft broad-brimmed hat, and entered the building with his head
thus covered, looking for all the world like some Quaker of the olden
time. The offending article was roughly knocked off by the verger. Walt
picked it up, twisted it into a sort of scourge, seized the astonished
official by the collar--he always detested officials--trounced him with
it, clapped it on his head again, and so, abruptly and coolly, left
the church. He was a tall, muscular fellow, stood six feet two, and
was broad in proportion, and could deal effectually with an offensive
person when he felt that action was called for. Such actions naturally
added to his popularity among the "boys"--the stage-drivers, firemen
and others--with whom he was always a favourite. But, as a rule, he
had no occasion to use his strength in this manner. He never gave,
and rarely recognised, provocation. There are times, however, when
persuasion has to give place to more summary demonstrations of purpose.
Of his strength, but especially of his health, he was not a little
proud. As a lad, the praise that delighted him most was that of his
well-developed body as he bathed.[134] He did not care to be thought
handsome; he knew that wholesomeness and health were really more
attractive, and he was content with his own perfect soundness. He was
never ailing, even when, in his 'teens, he outgrew for a time his
natural vigour. In middle life it was his boast that he could not
remember what it was to be sick. Vanity is so natural in the young
that when properly based it is probably a virtue, and there can be no
question that Walt's was well-founded.
* * * * *
There is something more, however, in the portrait I have been
describing than the perfection of physical health. It is health raised
to its highest possibility, which radiates outward from the innermost
seat of life, potent with the magnetism of personality, through every
pore and particle of flesh. His health, hitherto unbroken, had been
deepened into that sense of spiritual well-being which, in its fulness,
only accompanies the realisation of harmony or wholeness.[135] He had
undergone some fusing process which ended in unity and illumination.
It is difficult to say anything at all adequate about such an
experience, because it appears to belong to the highest of the stages
of consciousness which the race has yet attained; and because there are
many men and women of the finest intellectual training and the widest
culture to whom it remains foreign.
The petals of consciousness unfold as it were from within, and every
stage of unfolding, being symmetrical, appears to be perfect. A further
evolution is almost inconceivable, but the flower still unfolds. The
healthy and vigorous personality of the man whose story we are trying
to read, continued its development a stage further than the general,
and at an age of from thirty to thirty-five established an exceptional
relation with the universe.
That exceptional relation is best described as mystical, though the
word has unhappy and unwholesome associations, which cannot attach to
the character revealed in the portrait. Whitman was almost aggressively
cheerful and rudely healthy. But he was not the less a mystic. One
of the most essentially religious of men, his religion was based upon
profound personal experience.
The character of mystical experience seems to vary as widely as does
that of individual mystics, but it has certain common features. It is
essentially an irruption of some profounder self into the field of
consciousness; an irruption which is accompanied by a mysterious but
most authoritative sense of the fulness, power and permanence of this
new life. Consequent upon this life-enhancement, come joy and ecstasy.
The whole story of the development of consciousness is, as I have
said, a process of unfoldings; but there is one critical moment of
that process which occurs sometimes after the attainment of maturity,
of such infinite significance to the individual that it seems like a
revolution rather than a mere development in consciousness. It is often
described as conversion. Whitman's experience was fully as significant
and wonder-compelling as any; but momentous as it was, its nature
compelled him to regard it as a further and crowning step in a long
succession of stairs--a culmination, not a change of direction. With it
he came to the top of the slope and looked over, on to the summit, and
beheld the outstretched world. It was no turning round and going the
other way; it was the rewarding achievement of a long and patient climb.
But the simile of the mountain-side hardly suffices, for this was
a bursting of constraint--a breaking, as well as a surmounting of
barriers; as though the accumulating waters in some dark and hidden
reservoir should so increase in volume that they burst at last through
their confining walls of rubble and of rock, forcing their way upwards
in a rush of ecstasy to the universal life and the outer sunshine. This
outlet of the pent-up floods of emotional experience into another and
a vaster sphere of consciousness--this outpouring of the soul from its
confinement in the darkness to the freedom of the light--results from
the slow accumulation of the stores of life, but it has at last its
supreme hour, its divine instant of liberation.
In this it has its parallel with the passion of Love. For the inner
mysteries of religion and of sex are hardly to be separated. They are
different phases of the one supreme passion of immanent, expanding
and uniting life; mysterious breakings of barriers, and burstings
forth; expressions of a power which seems to augment continually with
the store of the soul's experience in this world of sense; experience
received and hidden beneath the ground of our consciousness. To feel
the passion of Love is to discover something of that mystery breaking,
in its orgasm, through the narrow completeness and separate finality
of that complacent commonplace, which in our ignorance we build so
confidently over it, and creating a new life of communion. To feel the
passion of religion is to discover more.
The relation of the two passions was so evident to Whitman that we
may believe it was suggested to his mind by his own experience. In
some lives it would appear that the one passion takes the place of the
other, so that the ascetics imagine them to be mutually exclusive;
but this was certainly not Whitman's case. Whitman's mysticism was
well-rooted in the life of the senses, and hence its indubitable
reality. We have seen that he had had experience of sex-love, and
we have found reasons to aver that it was of a noble and honourable
order; we have seen this experience followed by an acute crisis and its
determination, or at least its suspension, and change of character.
But in the meantime, the sex-experience had revealed to Whitman the
dominance in his nature of those profound emotional depths of which
he had always been dimly conscious since the hours on Long Island
beach. The whole crisis had made him realise more fully than ever the
solemnity and mysterious purpose of life. It had not satisfied him: it
had roused in him many perplexities, and had entailed what was probably
the first great sacrifice of his life. In a word, this obscure and
mysterious page in his story prepared him who read it for a further
emotional revelation, such as I have been describing.
This actually came to him one memorable midsummer morning[136] as he
lay in the fields breathing the lucid air. For suddenly the meaning of
his life and of his world shone clear within him, and arising, spread
an ineffable peace, joy and knowledge all about him. The long process
of integration was at last completed. He was at one with himself, and
at peace. It was the new birth of his soul, and properly speaking, the
commencement of his manhood.
Co-incident with self-realisation came the realisation of the
universe. He saw and felt that it was all of the same divine stuff as
the new-born soul within him; that love ran through it purposefully
from end to end; that thought could not fathom the suggestions which
the least of things was capable of making to its brother the soul;
that the very leaves of the grass were inspired with divine spirit
as truly as the leaves of any Bible. It was as though something far
larger than that which he had hitherto regarded as himself had now
become self-conscious in him. He was an enthusiast in the literal
sense of that mystic word, possessed by a god, filled with the divine
consciousness. The Spirit is One, and he was in the Spirit. It
identified him with the things and objects that hitherto had appeared
external to him, and infinitely increased his sense of their mysterious
beauty. George Fox's description of his own mystical experience is
true, upon the whole, of Whitman's. He writes: "Now was I come up in
spirit through the flaming sword into the Paradise of God. All things
were new, and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before,
beyond what words can utter."[137] When one considers the Quaker
reputation for veracity and caution, one can hardly doubt that these
wonderful words describe a condition of consciousness similar to that
of Whitman on the June morning of which we speak.
Fox continues that the nature of things lay so open to him that he was
at a stand "whether he should practise physic for the good of mankind".
It was by the subtle sympathy of the Spirit that the first Quaker
supposed himself to be familiar with the medicinal virtues of herbs,
and the same sympathy made Whitman feel that he understood the purpose
of their myriad lives. The wonder of the universal life was revealed to
them both. They partook of the consciousness which pervades all matter.
To both men illumination brought a double gift of vision, vision into
the nature of the universal purpose--of the spiritual or deeper side
of life--and insight into the condition and needs of individuals. But
in Fox and Whitman this insight, which seems to predominate rather in
observant than in creative types of genius such as theirs, was less
prominent than the other vision. They were more largely occupied with
the universal than with the individual; and while their words carry
the extraordinarily intimate message of an appeal to the profoundest
element in each soul, their very universality may have rendered
them often indifferent to the secondary consciousness or individual
self of their hearers. And it is observable that neither of them
evinced anything of that dramatic gift which seems to require the
predominance of this insight into the secondary self-consciousness. The
impersonality with which as preacher or poet they made their public
appeal, must have made them at times somewhat inaccessible in their
private lives.
Consciousness, it would seem, is of a double nature, being, as it were,
both personal and impersonal--if we may use these terms of something
that seems after all to be so wholly personal. And hence it appears
contradictory to itself, and we are forever trying to harmonise it
by the sacrifice of one portion to the other. But in reality it is
one consciousness with two functions: the first for fellowship and
communion, the second for definition and for concrete achievement.
Whitman developed these two functions harmoniously; he never sacrificed
his individual self-consciousness to the cosmic. He was just as
positively Walt Whitman the man, as he was Walt Whitman the organ of
inspiration. I think we may say that in the midst of that mysterious
wonder, that extension of himself which took place at the touch of
God, Whitman's own identity, so far from being lost, was deepened and
intensified, so that he knew instinctively and beyond a doubt that it
was in some sense of the word absolute and imperishable.
* * * * *
Earlier in this chapter we viewed philosophy as the attempt of the
Self to apprehend the Not-self as a Whole; Whitman's revelation was,
it seems to me, the discovery in himself of the sense which does
so apprehend the universe; not as a hypothetical Whole, but as an
incarnate purpose, a life with which he was able to hold some kind of
communion. It was a realisation, not a theory. Whatever this communion
may have been, it related him to the universe on its spiritual side by
a bond of actual experience. It related him to the ants and the weeds,
and it related him more closely still to all men and women the world
over. The warmth of family affection was extended to all things, as it
had been in the experience of the Nazarene, and of the little poor man
of Assisi.
But while his sense of relationship to individuals was thus quickened,
the quickening power lay in the realisation of God's life, and of his
own share in it. His realisation of God had come to him through an
ardent love of individual and concrete things; but now it was that
realisation which so wonderfully deepened and impassioned his relation
to individuals. What we mean when we use the word God in public, is
necessarily somewhat ambiguous and obscure; but when Whitman used it,
as he did but rarely and always with deliberation, he seems to have
meant the immanent, conscious Spirit of the Whole.
Theory came second to experience with him, and he was no adept at
definition: the interest he grew to feel in the Hegelian philosophy
and in metaphysics resulted from his longing, not to convince himself,
but to explain himself intelligibly to his fellows, and, in so far as
it was possible, make plainer to them the meaning of the world and of
themselves.
It seems desirable to define his position a little further, though we
find ourselves at once in a dilemma; for at this point it is evident
that he was both--or neither--a Christian nor a Pagan. He is difficult
to place, as indeed we must often feel our own selves to be, for whom
the idea of a suffering God is no more completely satisfying than
that of Unconscious Impersonal Cosmic Force. Again, while worship was
a purely personal matter for him, yet the need of fellowship was so
profound that he strove to create something that may not improperly be
described as a Church, a world-wide fellowship of comrades, through
whose devotion the salvation of the world should be accomplished.
In a profound sense, though emphatically not that of the creeds,
Whitman was Christian, because he believed that the supreme Revelation
of God is to be sought, not in the external world, but in the soul of
man; because he held, though not in the orthodox form, the doctrine
of Incarnation; because he saw in Love, the Divine Law and the Divine
Liberty; and because it was his passionate desire to give his life to
the world. In all these things he was Christian, though we can hardly
call him "a Christian," for in respect of all of these he might also be
claimed by other world-religions.
As to the Churches, he was not only outside them, but he frankly
disliked them all, with the exception of the Society of Friends;
and even this he probably looked upon principally as a memory of
his childhood, a tradition which conventionality and the action of
schismatics had gone far to render inoperative in his Nineteenth
Century America. We may say that he was Unitarian in his view of Jesus;
but we must add that he regarded humanity as being fully as Divine as
the orthodox consider Jesus to be; while his full-blooded religion was
very far from the Unitarianism with which he was acquainted;[138] and
his faith in humanity exalted the passions to a place from which this
least emotional of religious bodies is usually the first to exclude
them. In fact, he took neither an intellectual nor an ascetic view of
religion. He had the supreme sanity of holiness in its best and most
wholesome sense; but whenever it seemed to be applied to him in later
years he properly disclaimed the cognomen of saint, less from humility,
though he also was humble, than because he knew it to be inapplicable.
In conventional humility and the other negative virtues, renunciation,
remorse and self-denial, he saw more evil than good. His message was
one rather of self-assertion, than of self-surrender. One regretfully
recognises that, for many critics, this alone will be sufficient to
place him outside the pale.
Another test would be applied by some, and though it would exclude
many besides Whitman, we may refer to it in passing. He was apparently
without the sense of mystical relationship, save that of sympathy, with
Jesus as a present Saviour-God.[139] But none the less he had communion
with the Deity whose self-revealing nature is not merely Energy but
Purpose. And his God was a God not only of perfect and ineffable
purpose, but of all-permeating Love.[140]
Whether his relation to God can be described as prayer, it is perhaps
unprofitable to ask. It is better worth while to question whether
he was conscious of feeding upon "the bread of life," for this
consciousness is a test of communion. Undoubtedly he was; and the
nourishment which fed his being came to him as it were through all
media. The sacrament of wafer and cup is the symbol of that Immanent
Real Presence which is also recognised in the grace before meat.
Whitman partook of the sacrament continually, converting all sensation
into spiritual substance.
The final test of religions, however, is to be found in their fruits,
and the boast of Christianity is its "passion for souls". Now Whitman
is among the great examples of this passion, and his book is one long
"personal appeal" addressed, sometimes almost painfully, "to You".
But, it may be asked, did he aim at "saving souls for Christ"? If I
understand this very mystical and obscure question, and its ordinary
use, I must answer, No,--but I am not sure of its meaning. Whitman's
own salvation urged him to save men and women by the Love of God for
the glory of manhood and of womanhood and for the service of humanity.
Far as this may be from an affirmative reply to the question, the
seer who has glimpses of ultimate things will yet recognise Whitman
as an evangelical. For he brought good tidings in his very face. He
preached Yourself, as God purposed you, and will help and have you to
be. Whether this is Paganism or Christianity let us leave the others
to decide; sure for ourselves, at least, that it is no cold code of
ethical precepts and impersonal injunctions, but the utterance of a
personality become radiant, impassioned and procreative by the potency
of the divine spirit within.
* * * * *
In stating thus the nature of Whitman's vision, I do not wish to place
it too far out of the field of our common experience. His ordinary
consciousness had been touched by it in earlier hours; and some gleam
or glimmer of it enters every life as an element of romance. But for
most of us, only as a light on the waters that passes and is gone, not
as in Whitman's case, and in the case of many another mystic whether
Pagan or Christian--for mysticism is far older and more original
than the creeds--as the inward shining and immortal light which
henceforward becomes for them synonymous with health and wholeness.
For most men, the fairy light of childhood becomes a half-forgotten,
wholly foolish memory; Romance also we outgrow, or cling only to its
dead corpse as to a pretty sentiment. Thus the wonder of our childhood
and our youth, so essentially real in itself, fades into the light of
common day; it becomes for our unbelief a light that never was on sea
or land.
But in Whitman's story we find it living on, to become transformed in
manhood into the soul of all reality. His wonder at the world grew
more. And this wonder, always bringing with it, to the man as to the
child, a sense of exhilaration and expansion, was at the heart of his
religion, as it is doubtless at the heart of all. No one will ever
understand Whitman or his influence upon those who come in contact
with him, who does not grasp this fact of his unflagging and delighted
wonder at life. It kept him young to the end. The high-arched brows
over his eyes are its witness.
FOOTNOTES:
[116] Bucke, 25.
[117] J. T. Trowbridge, _My Own Story_. _Cf._ list of articles, etc.,
in Camden, vol. x.
[118] Later than this, spring, 1859; _cf._ Camden, ix., 92.
[119] Camden, ix., 188; _Comp. Prose_, 184, 185.
[120] Camden, ix., 95.
[121] _Ib._, 98.
[122] _Ib._, 80, 81.
[123] _L. of G._, 441.
[124] Camden, ix., 98, 120.
[125] _Ib._, 123-128; _Comp. Prose_, 487.
[126] Camden, ix., 160; _cf._ Trowbridge.
[127] _L. of G._, 441.
[128] Kennedy, 43.
[129] _Fortnightly Review_, vi., 538.
[130] _Camb. Mod. Hist._, 400, 401; C. H. Shinn, _Mining Camps_ (1885),
132, 133.
[131] _In re_, 33-40.
[132] _In re_, 25 n.
[133] Johnston, 102.
[134] G. Gilchrist, _op. cit._
[135] _Comp. Prose_, 502.
[136] _In re_, 342; Camden, iii., 276, 277, 287; Bucke's _Cosmic
Consciousness_, 33-35; _L. of G._, 32, 33. _Cf._:--
... "Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge
that pass all the argument of the Earth.
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the Spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women
my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love,
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap'd stones, elder, mullein
and poke weed."--L. of G., ed. '92.
[137] _Fox's Journal_ (ed. 1901), p. 28.
[138] _Comp. Prose_, 322; Camden, v., 280, 281.
[139] _Cf._ however, _infra_, 167.
[140] _Cf. In re_, 368; Camden, ix., 166 (on Hegel).