THE MYSTIC
In September, 1855, Mr. Moncure Conway, having heard of Whitman during
a visit to Concord, called upon him in Brooklyn, with an introduction
from Emerson. Walt was then living with his family in one of a row of
small artisans' houses, in Ryerton Street,[202] out of Myrtle Avenue.
At the moment, however, he was correcting proofs in the little office
where his book had been printed, and wore a workman's striped blue
shirt, open at the throat. A few days later, he called upon Mr. Conway,
his sister and another lady, at the Metropolitan Hotel, where his
manners and conversation were enjoyed and approved. He was then garbed
in "the baize coat and chequered shirt" in which he appears in the
_Leaves of Grass_ portrait.
Mr. Conway in his story has somewhat confused the details of these
visits with those of another paid by him upon a Sunday morning some two
years later, when the Whitmans seem to have moved to a more commodious
house on North Portland Avenue. The matter is not important, and we may
follow the main lines of the picturesque account which he contributed
in October, 1866, to the _Fortnightly Review_.[203]
According to this narrative, Whitman was discovered basking in the
hot sunshine on some waste land outside Brooklyn. He was wearing the
rough workman's clothes of his choice, was as brown as the soil and
as grey as the grass bents. His visitor was at once impressed by the
exceptional largeness and reality of the man, and by a subtle delicacy
of feeling for which _Leaves of Grass_ does not appear to have prepared
him. Whitman was slow, serene, gracious; in spite of the grey in his
hair and beard, and the deep furrows across his brow, his full red face
and quiet blue-grey eyes were almost those of a child.
Returning to the house, the visitor noticed a quality about him which
belonged by rights to the line-engraving of Bacchus which hung in the
bare room he occupied. Like a Greek hero-god, he made one ask oneself
whether he was merely human. And after crossing the bay with him, and
bathing and sauntering along the beach of Staten Island, the visitor
seems to have left in a condition of almost painful excitement, unable
to give his thought to anything but Whitman.
A few days later, according to this account, Conway found him setting
type for the next edition of his book. Although he was still writing
occasionally for the press, _Leaves of Grass_ continued to provide his
principal occupation. They crossed the ferry together and rambled about
New York. Nearly every artisan they met greeted Walt affectionately as
an old friend, and not one of them knew him as a poet.
Together they went to the Tombs prison, Whitman always having
acquaintances among the outcasts of society, and often visiting
them in detention, both here and at Sing-Sing. Here, Conway had an
opportunity of estimating the power over others which was wielded by
this personality, whose latent force had so much moved himself. The
prisoners confided in him, and on behalf of one he interviewed the
governor of the prison. The victim had been detained for trial on
some petty charge in an unhealthy cell. Whitman repeated the man's
story, and characterised it, with a sort of religious emphasis and
deliberation, as a "damned shame". It was manifestly upon the tip of
the official tongue to rebuke Walt for impertinence; but though he was
dressed as an artisan, his quiet determined gaze was too much for
the autocrat, who gave way before it and ordered the prisoner to be
transferred to better quarters.
* * * * *
Other distinguished visitors called on him from time to time. Of
Emerson's own visits we know next to nothing, but they were frequent
and very welcome, sometimes ending with a dinner at Astor House. We
have a glimpse of Lord Houghton, sharing a dish of roast apples with
his friendly host.[204] Ward Beecher, the famous Brooklyn preacher,
was among the callers; and it was on their way from his church that,
on Sunday, 9th November, 1856, Mrs. Whitman, in her son's absence,
received Bronson Alcott and Thoreau.
Both men belonged to the circle of Emerson's Concord intimates, and
both have left a record of the successful renewal of their visit
upon the following day.[205] The lovable, mystical, oracular Alcott,
the delight of his friends, seems to have been greatly attracted by
Whitman, whom he knew already, and of whom he has spoken in terms of
the highest praise. The mother, he found on that first visit, stately
and sensible, full of faith in her son "Walter"; full, too, in his
absence, of his praises, as being from his childhood up both good and
wise, the faithful and beloved counsellor of brothers and sisters.
They spent two delightful hours with Walt next day, a Philadelphia lady
accompanying them and sharing their intercourse with "the very god
Pan," as Alcott styles him. The conversation was to have been renewed
on the morrow, but Walt failed to put in an appearance. He was apt to
be vague about such appointments, and one could never be sure that
he felt himself bound by them. Like a Quaker of the old school, he
followed the direction of the hour, and his promises were tentative and
well guarded.
Thoreau, too, the naturalist philosopher of Walden, wrote down his
impressions of the interview. He was puzzled by Whitman, finding him
in many ways a strange and surprising being, outside the range of
his experience. Rough, large and masculine but sweet--essentially a
gentleman, he says; but the title is paradoxical and inappropriate, and
he qualifies it immediately by adding that he was coarse not fine. As
to the last point, after vigorously debating it, Whitman and he appear
to have retained contrary convictions. But Whitman himself would have
been the first to disclaim refinement, a quality which he associated
with sterility. If Thoreau had said he was elemental, we would not now
dissent.
They were not likely to understand one another. The two men present a
remarkable contrast, though on certain sides they have much in common.
Thoreau was about two years the older; his principal book of essays,
called _Walden_ after the site of his hermitage, had been published
when he was about Whitman's age. Physically he was most unlike the
genial red-faced giant opposite to him. Slight and rather short, with
long arms and sloping shoulders; mouth, eyes and nose seemed to tell of
solitary concentrated thought. There was something in his face of the
frontiersman, that woodland look one sees also in Lincoln's portraits;
something, too, of the shyness wood creatures have.
He disliked and avoided the generality of men. In this he would compare
himself with Emerson, who found society a refuge from the shabbiness of
life's commonplace, while Thoreau's own resource was always solitude.
He was continually being surprised by the vulgarity of himself and of
his fellows, continually flushing with shame, personal or vicarious;
and he sought and found a refuge in the pure and lonely spirit that
haunted Walden Pool.[206]
Whitman, on the other hand, though he loved solitude, seems, even in
solitude, to have craved for movement. In this he was very far from
the orientalism of Thoreau and its strenuous seeking after peace. He
loved progress. His genius belonged not to the forest pool, whose
reflections were unrippled by a breeze--the mirror of the abstract
mind--but to the surging passion of the ocean beach.
Similarly, in his attitude towards men, he was far removed from both
Thoreau and Emerson. Emerson confessed he could not quite understand
what Whitman so enjoyed in the society of the common people; and many
a Democrat, if he were only as honest, would make the same confession.
It was not that Emerson was in any sense of the word a snob; but the
emotional side of his nature responded but feebly to certain of the
elemental notes whose vibration is felt perhaps more frequently among
the common people than elsewhere. Emerson's fellowship was largely upon
intellectual fields: Whitman's almost wholly upon the more emotional.
Thoreau found society in disembodied thought, and emotional fellowship
in the woods. But to Whitman the sheer contact with people, and
especially the unsophisticated natural folk of the class into which
he was born and among whom he was bred, was not only a pleasure but a
tonic which he could barely exist without. In solitude, he became after
a time, heavy, inert, lethargic. His mind itself seemed to grow stale.
He was a mere pool of water left upon the beach, which loses virtue in
its stagnant isolation.
Whitman seems to have been exceptionally conscious of the stream of
electric life which is the great attractive power of a city, and which
in itself tends to draw all young men and women into its current.
It buoyed him up and carried him, giving him a sense of exaltation
only to be compared with that which other poets have derived from the
mountains, or the wind out of the West. His large body and intuitive
mind craved for the magnetic stimulus and suggestion of people moving
about him; he did not look to them to save him from the commonplace,
nor did he shrink from them as bringing him new burdens of a common
shame.
Coarse, actual, living humanity was his supreme interest and passion.
And the delicacy and refinement of the scholar was dreadful to him,
because it separated him instantly from the vulgar and common folk.
He was one of the roughs, he used to say; and so he was, but with a
difference. It was this that puzzled his Concord friends who were quick
to feel but slow to understand it. Their perplexity did not, however,
turn into mistrust; for their appreciation of all that they understood
was full and generous.
Thoreau hardly knew whether he was more repelled or attracted by this
"great fellow" who seemed to be the personification of Democracy.[207]
Like Tennyson at a later date, he was unable to define him, but stood
convinced that he was "a great big something".[208] A little more
than human, Thoreau added; meaning a little larger than normal human
development.
In any case, the man was an enigma. He wrote of those relations between
men and women for which the poets choose the subtlest and most delicate
words in their treasury, in syllables which seemed to Thoreau like
those of animals which had not attained to speech. Yet even so, he
spoke more truth, beast-like as his voice sounded, than the others. And
Thoreau frankly reminded himself, if Whitman made him blush the fault
might not be Whitman's after all.
They did not talk very much or very deeply, as there were four to share
the conversation. Thoreau, too, was in a rather cynical mood, and spoke
slightingly of Brooklyn and America and her politics, which in itself
was enough to chill the stream of intercourse. But they found a common
interest in the Oriental writers with whom Whitman was but vaguely
acquainted, the scholar advising upon translations. Thoreau and Emerson
had both noted the resemblance between _Leaves of Grass_ and some of
the sacred writings of India; and the latter once humorously described
the _Leaves_ as a mixture of the _Bhagavad-Gitá_[209] and the _New York
Herald_.[210] Thoreau died in 1862, and this was probably their only
meeting.
* * * * *
Thoreau carried off with him a copy of the new edition of Whitman's
poems, fresh from the press, and some of the remarks I have alluded to
refer especially to its contents, and to several of the new poems which
we must now briefly consider, for it is obviously impossible to give
any worthy account of Whitman without attempting at least to outline
the successive expressions of his own views about himself, as they are
set forth in his book.
None of the twenty new _Leaves_ appears so important as the "Song of
Myself," but among them are some of the finest and most suggestive
pages he ever wrote, notably the "Poem of Salutation," and the "Poem of
the Road".[211] The book is now shorn of its prose preface, which would
be a serious loss if large portions of it were not to be found broken
into lines, and otherwise slightly altered, upon the later pages. It
had been used as a quarry for poems, and some of the blocks underwent
but little trimming.
In the "Salutation," he identifies himself elaborately and in much
detail, with all peoples of the globe, finding equals and lovers in
every land. The universal survey is faithfully made; the poem is like
a rapid passage through a gallery of pictures, and regarded as a
whole, suggests the outlines of the world-wide field which its author
desires the reader to view. Whitman asserts his comprehensive sympathy;
like America he includes all men. He is one with them in their common
humanity, and sympathises with them individually in the main purposes
and desires of their lives.
The poem opens in the form of question and answer. Looking into
Whitman's face, the questioner sees as it were a whole world lying
latent within his gaze and becoming actual as he looks. Taking the
poet's hand, he begs him to explain: Walt accedes with readiness, and
immediately forgets the questioner.
The subject of the poem--man as the microcosm not only of the universe
but of the Race--is not perhaps novel; but its meaning is none the
less difficult to expound. For it bears directly upon the cosmic
consciousness, in which, as I have said, many of us are wanting. There
are some, however, who are at times aware of moods in which they
realise the symbolic character of all objects; they see them, that is
to say, as forms through which vivid emotions are conveyed to the soul.
At such moments, the whole world becomes for them a complex of these
symbols, whose authenticity they can no more doubt than the meaning
of daily speech, and whose ultimate significance is of an infinite
content, which forever unfolds before them.
Such moods were evidently frequent with Whitman, and perhaps became
the norm of his consciousness. In them his eyes read the world, as
though it were the writing of that infinite and supreme Soul which
was himself, and yet not himself; that Soul of All, with which his
consciousness was become mystically one. He felt the actual thrill and
meaning of the World's Words; words which he more fully describes or
rather tries to suggest, in another poem, afterwards known as the "Song
of the Rolling Earth".[212] In order to explain Whitman's meaning one
would need to make a study of the roots of this kind of symbolism, a
task which is here impracticable. We must be content instead with a
glance at the poem itself.
"Earth, round, rolling, compact--suns, moons, animals--all these
are words to be said,"[213]
he asserts; vast words, not indeed of dots and strokes, nor of
sounds, but of real things which exist and are uttered. I myself, and
not my name, he says suggestively, is the real word which the Soul
understands. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear, not my words
but Me, The Word. The words of great poets are different from those
of mere singers and minor poets, because they suggest these ultimate
words, these presences and symbols. A symbol, be it remembered, always
using the word in the sense indicated, is no arbitrary sign, it is
a form or appearance, which seen _through_ the eye--to use Blake's
happy formula--presents to the imagination an unimpeachable, distinct
emotional concept.
To Whitman, everything became thus symbolic. He saw the Earth
itself--the whole world about him--as a symbol, infallibly presenting
to him a distinguishable idea or meaning; not indeed a thought,
for the word fails to express something which must clearly be
supra-intellectual--the perception of a conscious state of emotion.
Of what then was the Earth a symbol to Whitman's sight? He says,
frankly enough,[214] that he cannot convey the idea in print; but that
as far as he can suggest it, it is one of progress, or amelioration;
it is generous, calm, subtle; it includes the idea of expression, or
the bearing of fruit; it is the acceptance of all things, and it is the
general purpose which underlies them all.
I fear that those who seek for simple explanations in plain words will
scarcely be satisfied with this. Perhaps Whitman is only reasserting
in his own manner the familiar adage that God is the prince of poets,
and that the universe is His Chapbook which He offers to all. If so, he
either gives a new meaning to the words, or he has rediscovered their
old vital sense and redeemed them from the stigma of rhetoric. I do
not know whether after all the simple-sounding words are not the more
elusive.
The Words of the Earth-Mother spoken to her children are, he would have
us believe, ultimate and infallible; all things may be tried by them.
That is what he means when he says he has read his poems over in the
open air. He has proved them thus to see if their suggestion is that
of the Earth. She sits, as it were, with her back turned toward her
children,[215] but in her hand she holds a mirror, the clear mirror of
appearances which are true, and in that mirror we may see ourselves and
her.
With her ample back toward every beholder,
With the fascinations of youth, and equal fascinations of age,
Sits she whom I too love like the rest--sits undisturb'd,
Holding up in her hand what has the character of a mirror, while
her eyes glance back from it,
Glance as she sits, inviting none, denying none,
Holding a mirror day and night tirelessly before her own face.
How much we can see, depends upon our own character. To the perfect
man, the Face of the Mother is perfect: to the man ashamed, disfigured,
broken, it appears to be such as he. Only the pure behold the Truth.
There is no merely intellectual test of truth, for truth is known only
by the Soul. As one looks into the mirror, and reads the thought behind
appearances, not with the intellect but with the sight of the awakened
soul, one grows to understand what Progress means, one sees a little
further into the secrets of Love; one learns that the divine Love
neither invites nor refuses.
The Sayers of Words are those who with pure insight--or as Coleridge
would say, Imagination--behold things as they are apprehended by the
cosmic consciousness; and thus beholding them as they truly are, find
words which hint to the soul of that Reality which speaks through all
appearance. After the sayers come the singers, the Poets who, building
words together, create new worlds.
In another poem, the Open Road[216] becomes the symbol of Freedom,
Acceptance, Sanity, Comradeship, Immortality and Eternal Battles.
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune--I am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Strong and content, I travel the open road.
(1860.)
Among the best known and most popular of the _Leaves of Grass_, it
is also among those which are most filled with recondite and mystic
meanings. Over these we must not linger, save to note the indication
of the mystic sense by phrases like "the float of the sight of things"
and "the efflux of the Soul". The poem as a whole is marked by musical
cadences, and is vivid from end to end with courage and the open air.
After the "Song of Myself," Thoreau preferred the "Sun-down Poem,"
which describes the crossing of Brooklyn Ferry.[217] It is filled with
the thought that, even after half a century and in our own day, when
others than he will be crossing, still he will be with them there
unseen. The thoughts that come to him show him the Soul wrapt around
in unconsciousness, and the things which, by contact with the clean
senses, are presently realised as meanings by the Soul. The poem is a
fine example of Whitman's delight in movement, in masses of people, and
in the surroundings of his city.
In the "Clef-poem,"[218] intended to strike the key-note, not only for
his poems, but as it were for the universe itself with its innumerable
meanings, he tells how, standing on the beach at night alone, he
realised that all things--soul and body, past and future, here and
there--are interlocked and spanned by a vast homogeneity of essence.
The knowledge sweeps away all possibilities of anxiety about the future
after death; experience can never fail to feed the soul. It contents
him also with the present: no experience can ever be more wonderful to
him than this of to-night, when he lies upon the breast of the Mother
of his being. The future can be nothing but an eternal unfolding of
this that he beholds already present in his body and Soul.
* * * * *
While dwelling upon the symbolical mysticism which cannot be ignored
in Whitman's whole habit of thought, I may add a further word upon
its character.[219] Mysticism appears under several forms. The Indian
guru, winning the eternal consciousness by long practices in the
gymnasium of the mind; the lover discovering it through the fiery
gateways, and tear-washed windows of passion; the poet seeking it in
the eyes of the Beauty that was before the beginning of the world; the
Quaker awaiting its coming in silence and simplicity; the Catholic
preparing for it by prayer and fasting, by ritual and ceremony; the
lover of nature discovering it among her solitudes; the lover of man
entering into it only by faith, in the strenuous service of his kind:
all these bear witness to the many ways of experience along which the
deep waters flow.
Belonging to no school, Whitman had relations with several of the
mystical groups; he had least, I suppose, with that which seeks the
occult by traditional crystal-gazing and the media of hypnotic trances
or the dreams produced by anæsthetic drugs. He was a mystic because
wonders beset him all about on the open road of his soul. In him
mysticism was never associated with pathological symptoms; it was, as
he himself suggests, the flower and proof of his sanity, soundness and
health.
He had not learnt his lore from books. Plato and Plotinus, Buddha and
Boehme, were alike but half-familiar to him; he never studied them
closely as a disciple should. His thought may have been quickened
by old Elias Hicks, and strengthened occasionally by contact with
the Friends. It often recalls the more leonine, less catholic spirit
of George Fox; and the vision of the Soul, standing like an unseen
companion by the side of every man, woman, and child, ready to appear
at the first clear call of deep to human deep, was ever present to
them both, and in itself explains much that must otherwise remain
incomprehensible in their attitude. But the world of Whitman was that
of the nineteenth century, not of the seventeenth: Carlyle, Goethe
and Lincoln, had taken the places of Calvin, Milton and Cromwell. In
many aspects the mysticism of _Leaves of Grass_ is nearer to that of
_The Republic_ and _The Symposium_, than to that of Fox's _Epistles_
and _Journal_; nearer, that is, to the Greek synthesis, than to the
evangelical ardour of the Puritan. Temperance he loved, but he hated
the narrowness of negations.
* * * * *
To return to the book: the thought of the sanity of the Earth is
brought to bear upon the problem of evil in a poem[220] which describes
how, in spite of the mass of corruption returned to it by disease and
death, the earth neutralises all by the chemistry of its laws and life.
With calm and patient acceptance of evil, nature refuses nothing, but
ever provides man anew with innocent and divine materials. And such, it
would seem, is the inherent character of the Universe, and therefore of
the Soul.
A poem,[221] whose opening cadences were suggested by the drip, drip,
drip, of the rain from the eaves, presents the Broad-axe as the true
emblem of America, Whitman's substitute for the Eagle whose wings are
always spread.
Broad-axe, shapely, naked, wan!
Head from the mother's bowels drawn!
Wooded flesh and metal bone! limb only one and lip only one!
Gray-blue leaf by red-heat grown! helve produced from a little seed
sown!
Resting the grass amid and upon,
To be leaned, and to lean on.
Here we enter the picturesque, muscular world of wood-cutters and
carpenters so familiar to the author, and we are reminded of the older
and more sinister uses and products of the axe. Seen by Whitman, the
Broad-axe itself is a poem that tells of strenuous America, with her
free heroic life and the comradeship of her Western cities, great
with the greatness of their common folk. It tells him of the woman of
America, self-possessed and strong; and of large, natural, naïve types
of manhood. It even prophecies to him of Walt Whitman, and sings the
"Song of Myself," the message of the noble fierce undying Self. As a
Cuvier can reconstruct an undiscovered creature from a single fossil
bone, so might the poet seer have foretold America by this symbol of an
axe.
The idea of America is further expounded in several other poems,
especially in the longest of the additions, which was afterwards
expanded into "By Blue Ontario's Shore".[222] Much of its essential
thought, however, and some of its actual phrasing belongs to the
old Preface, and has therefore been already noted. It dwells on the
potential equality of every citizen in the sight of America herself, an
equality based upon the divine Soul which is in each; and also, upon
Liberty, which is the ultimate and essential element of all individual
life.
The thought of America calls up in Whitman's mind the picture of that
poet, that "Soul of Love and tongue of fire," who will utter the idea
which is America, and which alone can integrate her diverse peoples
into one. And here Whitman flings off his cloak which concealed him in
the Preface, and openly announces that it is he himself who incarnates
the spirit of the land.
Fall behind me, States!
A man, before all--myself, typical, before all.
Give me the pay I have served for!
Give me to speak beautiful words! take all the rest;
I have loved the earth, sun, animals--I have despised riches,
I have given alms to every one that asked, stood up for the stupid
and crazy, devoted my income and labour to others,
I have hated tyrants, argued not concerning God, had patience and
indulgence toward the people, taken off my hat to nothing known
or unknown,
I have gone freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with the
young, and with the mothers of families,
I have read these leaves to myself in the open air--I have tried
them by trees, stars, rivers,
I have dismissed whatever insulted my own Soul or defiled my body,
I have claimed nothing to myself which I have not carefully claimed
for others on the same terms,
I have studied my land, its idioms and men,
I am willing to wait to be understood by the growth of the taste of
myself,
I reject none, I permit all,
Whom I have staid with once I have found longing for me ever
afterward.[223]
The poet is that equable sane man, in whose vision alone all things
find and are seen in their proper place, for he sees each _sub specie
æternitatis_--in its eternal aspect.
But while thus boldly declaring himself as the man that should come,
he has of course no desire to stand alone, and attempts to outline
the equipment necessary for future American poets. They must not only
identify themselves in every possible way with America, they must
be themselves creative and virile. Those who criticise, explain and
adjudge, can only create a literary soil; they cannot produce the
flower and fruit of poetry.
Returning to his favourite adage that a man is as great as a nation,
he asserts that the true poet is America; frankly reading himself as
a whole, he will see the meanings of America. Is then America also a
symbol? Assuredly. She is the Republic; she is the Kingdom of God;
she is Blake's Jerusalem; but behold, she is already founded and
four-square upon the solid earth.
That he was open-eyed to the materialistic spirit rampant throughout
the continent while he was writing, is clearly shown in the bitter
mockery of "Respondez,"[224] a poem afterwards suppressed. It is a
challenge to thought; an ironic assertion of things that are false and
futile, and which yet parade as realities. Though suggestive it is
obscure, and its subsequent omission was wise.
Thoughts of the destiny of America,[225] and of the evil and
imperfection which he saw about him, hindering, as it seemed, the
realisation of that destiny, and of the destiny of individual souls,
must often have moved him to passionate longing. He was not one of
those who confuse good with evil; he always recognised the difference
between right and wrong as among the eternal distinctions which could
never cease to hold true. He hated sin as he hated disease, and
recognised both as threatening and actual.
If he rarely denounces, it is because he has seen that the way of the
soul is along the path of love and not of fear or of hate; and because
he recognises the office of sin in the story of the soul. He is not
anxious about vice or virtue, but only about life and love. Love, at
its fullest, is something different from virtue; it contains elements
which virtue can never possess, and which most ethical codes consign to
the category of vice. Such love alone is the expression of the soul;
and every student of love discovers sooner or later that the soul has
its own intimate standard for judging what is wrong and what is right,
and when that which was wrong has now become right for it to do.
Love, then, is Whitman's code. And when he seeks to call the youth
of America away from selfishness and sin, he issues no new table of
Thou-Shalt-Nots, but fills their ears with the words of their destiny,
and of the meaning of America. For he knows that to sin is to choose
a narrow and despicable delight, and that one must needs choose the
nobler, larger joy when it becomes present and real. Hence he recalls
all the aspirations that went to the birth of America, and describes
the parts that women and men must fill if they are to be realised. He
reminds his young readers of all the divine possibilities of manhood
and of womanhood, and of how those possibilities are for them; and
warns them that the body must necessarily affect the soul, for it is
the medium through which the soul comes into consciousness.
Anticipate your own life--retract with merciless power,
Shirk nothing--retract in time--Do you see those errors, diseases,
weaknesses, lies, thefts?
Do you see that lost character?--Do you see decay, consumption,
rum-drinking, dropsy, fever, mortal cancer or inflammation?
Do you see death, and the approach of death?
Think of the Soul;
I swear to you that body of yours gives proportions to your Soul
somehow to live in other spheres,
I do not know how, but I know it is so.[226]
Finally, in the new poems, Whitman makes more plain his attitude
toward the woman question, as it is called. An American National
Women's Rights Association had been founded in 1850, and although
its agitation for the suffrage proved unsuccessful, the more general
movement which it represented, especially the higher education of
women, was gaining ground throughout America. The movement may be said
to have been born in New York State, where Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton
and Miss Susan B. Anthony were its most active leaders; but it owed
much to Boston also, and notably to Margaret Fuller (Ossoli), whose
tragic death had been an irreparable loss to the cause.[227]
Whitman was in cordial sympathy with everything that could forward the
independence of women. But he disliked some outstanding characteristics
of the movement. It was in part a violent reaction against the
unwholesome sentimentalism of the past; a reaction which took the form
of sexless intellectualism with a strong bent towards argumentation,
perhaps the most abhorrent of all qualities to Whitman.
This movement for women's rights seemed to him too academic and too
superficial; college education and the suffrage did not appeal to
him. But he was not the less an enthusiast for the cause itself, as
he understood it. His views are simple and clear. A soul is a soul,
whether it be man's or woman's; and as such, it is of necessity free,
and the equal of others. A woman is every way as good as a man. This
truth must be made effective in all departments of life.
Then, taking up the thought which underlies the teaching of Plato, a
woman is a citizen; and an American woman must be as independent, as
dauntless, as greatly daring as a man. Such as the woman essentially
is, such will be the man, her son, and her mate. But--and it is here
he differs from the leaders of the movement--sex is basic not only in
society but in personal life; and the woman unsexed is but half a woman.
Two poems in the new edition, the nucleus of the subsequent _Children
of Adam_, are devoted to these ideas. In the first,[228] he describes
the women of his ideal:--
They are not one jot less than I am,
They are tanned in the face by shining suns and blowing winds,
Their flesh has the old divine suppleness and strength,
They know how to swim, row, ride, wrestle, shoot, run, strike,
retreat, advance, resist, defend themselves,
They are ultimate in their own right--they are calm, clear,
well-possessed of themselves.
In the second,[229] he declares that life is only life after love--he
means the passionate fulness of love--and indicates that womanhood
is to be glorified not through a sexless revolt, but through the
redemption of paternity. When the begetting of children is recognised
to be as holy and as noble as the bearing of them, then the rights of
women will be on the way to recognition.
If motherhood is the glory of the race, then a movement towards
perpetual virginity brings no solution of our problem. The only
solution lies in the independence of women, and in the evolution of a
higher masculine ideal of the sex relation. The whole thing must be
naturally and honestly faced. Until we so face it, we cannot understand
a world in which it is so implicated, that sex is, as it were, a
summing up of all things.
This last thought grew upon him, becoming more prominent in the next
edition. In the present one it recurs in the open letter to Emerson
printed in its appendix,[230] and gave a peculiar colour to the volume
in the public eye. So much was this the case, that a prosecution seemed
at one time imminent, many persons regarding the book as obscene. Among
timid and conventional people, it seems to be established as a canon of
criticism that it is always immoral to discuss immorality. They go but
little farther who denounce the purity which is not defiled by pitch;
or tear out by the roots all flowers that grow upon dung-heaps.
* * * * *
Such then, added to the old, formed the contents of the new edition of
1856. The appendix included Emerson's letter, which Whitman had been
urged to publish, by Mr. C. A. Dana, editor of the _New York Sun_, and
a personal friend of Emerson.[231] He succeeded in convincing Whitman,
who appears at first to have doubted the propriety of such an action.
There is no evidence that Emerson resented the use thus made of his
glowing testimony, although he would probably have modified his words
had he written in acknowledgment of the enlarged volume. A sentence
from the letter appeared also upon the back of the book: "I greet you
at the commencement of a great career.--R. W. Emerson." This, together
with the storm of indignation aroused by the absolutely frank language
of the poems dealing with sex, gave the book notoriety and a rapid sale.
It is the least pleasing of the editions of _Leaves of Grass_,
insignificant in appearance, and yet aggressive, by reason of that
Emersonian testimonial. The open letter at the end, of which I have
already spoken, is far from agreeable to read. It is careless,
egotistical, naïve to a degree, and crowded with exaggerations.
Addressing Emerson as master, it proceeds to denounce the churches as
one vast lie, and the actual president as a rascal and a thief. It is
so egregiously self-conscious that it makes the reader question for a
moment whether all the egoism and naïveté of the preceding pages may
not have been worn as a pose; but a moment's further consideration
gives the question a final negative. Few men are without their hours of
weakness; and that Whitman was not among those few, the letter is proof
if such were needed.
The letter is not void of interest, since it records the rapid sale
of the previous edition of a thousand copies, and anticipates that in
a few more years the annual issue will be counted by thousands. This
sanguine forecast explains the permanent and otherwise unreasonable
disappointment of Whitman at the reception of his book.
It still made its appearance devoid of the usual adornment of a
publisher's name upon the title-page. Messrs. Fowler & Wells were
again the principal agents, others being arranged with in the chief
American cities, in London also, and Paris and Brussels. Plates were
cast from the type, and a large sale was prepared for. But the New
York agents soon withdrew, unwilling to face the storm of public
opinion,[232] and perhaps the dangers of prosecution, and the book fell
out of print when only a thousand copies had been issued.
* * * * *
The two ventures of 1855 and 1856 had brought Whitman little money,
a mere handful of serious readers, and some notoriety. Though he did
not give in, he began to look about him for some supplementary means
of delivering his soul of its burden. His youthful success on the
political platform, his love of crowds and of personal contact, his
extraordinary popularity among the younger people, and his own keen
sense of the power of oratory, turned his thoughts to lecturing.[233]
He would follow the road which Emerson and Thoreau had taken. He would
evangelise America with his gospel. Henceforward, as his mother said,
he wrote barrels of lectures,[234] and at the same time he studied his
new art more or less systematically. After his death a package of notes
on Oratory, and the rough draft of a prospectus were found among his
papers; the latter was headed, "15 cents. Walt Whitman's Lectures." It
belongs to the year 1858.
By this time he had planned to write, print, distribute and recite
throughout the United States and Canada a number of lectures--partly
philosophical, partly socio-political, partly religious--with the
object of creating what he conceived to be a new, and for the first
time truly American attitude of mind. The lectures were ultimately to
form a second volume of explanation and argument which would sustain
the _Leaves_. He had now omitted any preface to the poems, the creative
work standing alone. But having printed the second edition and thus
relieved his mind of its most pressing burden, he recognised that the
work of explanation and of criticism remained.
Moreover, he conceived that his lectures would quicken public interest
in his book; while, by showing himself, he hoped to dispel some of the
misapprehensions which concealed his real meaning from the popular
mind. He alludes whimsically in this memorandum to the offensive
practice of self-advertisement, of which he was not unconscious,
remarking that "it cannot be helped," for it is the only way by which
he can gain the ear of America, and bid her "Know thyself".
Finally, he proposed to earn his living in this manner. He would have
preferred to give his services without fee, in the Quaker fashion;
but for the time being at least, he must make a charge of ten dollars
(two guineas) a lecture, and expenses, or an admission fee of one dime
(about sixpence) a head.
The idea of lecturing was probably as old as the idea of the _Leaves
of Grass_; he seems to have been considering it ever since he returned
from the South. But now he formulated his ideas, which were of course
those underlying the _Leaves_, and thought much and cogently on the
style and manner of public speaking. His conclusions betray an ideal
for oratory as individual and as mystical as that for the poet's art.
Whitman, the lecturer, is conceived as a prophet possessed by the
tempestuous passion of inspiration. The orator is to combine the
gifts of the great actor with the inspiration of the Pythoness and
the spontaneity of the Quaker prophet. His gestures should be large,
but reserved; the delivery deliberate, thought-awakening, elliptical,
prophetic, wholly unlike that of the glib platform speakers of his day
and our own. At first, erect and motionless, the speaker would impress
his mere personality upon the assembly; then his eyes would kindle,
like the eyes in that strange marble Balzac of Rodin's, and from the
eyes outward the whole body would take fire and speak.
He conceived of oratory not as the delivery of some well-prepared
address, but as the focussing of all the powers of thought and
experience in an hour of inspiration and supreme mastery. He saw how
much it entailed--what breadth of knowledge, what depth of thought,
what perfect flexibility of voice and gesture trained to clear
suggestion, what absolute purity of body, what perfect self-control.
For, he would say to himself, the great orator is an artist as supreme
as Alboni herself; his voice is to be as potent as hers, and his life
must show an equal devotion to its purpose.
In this conception of the orator we have then a most interesting
parallel with that of the poet. And just as Whitman the poet stands
part way between the writer of prose and the singer in verse, including
in himself some of the qualities of each, and adding an inspiration
wholly his own, so Whitman the orator appears in this vision standing
between the actor-singer and the lecturer or preacher, improvising
great words.
The political aspect of his enterprise is suggested by a brief
memorandum, dated in April, 1857,[235] wherein he notes that the
"Champion of America" must keep himself clear of all official
entanglements, devoting himself solely to the maintenance of a living
interest in public questions throughout the length and breadth of the
land. Standing aside from the parties with their clamorous cries, he
must hold the public ear by nobler tones.
In another place[236] he writes that as Washington had freed the
body politic of America from its dependence upon the English crown,
so Whitman will free the American people from their dependence upon
European ideals. The mere publication of such frank, but private
assertions of Whitman's own faith in himself, will doubtless arouse a
ready incredulity in the reader's mind. It might, perhaps, seem kinder
to his memory to suppress them altogether; but upon second thought it
will, I think, appear possible that he was a better judge than others
of his own ability. His personality was one of extraordinary power,
and his outlook of a breadth which was almost unique. And, as I have
said, he felt himself to be an incarnation of the American spirit.
At the time, America was without leadership. Lincoln was still unseen;
and Whitman was fully as capable of filling the highest office in
the United States as several who have held it; while nothing in the
circumstances or traditions of the White House made it absurd for
any able citizen, of whatever rank, to entertain the thought of its
tenancy. This would be especially true of a popular New Yorker, who
made perhaps the best of all candidates for a Presidential campaign.
The Republican party had but just been formed, and for the first time
had fought an election. Thunderclouds of war were in the air, urged on
by the ominous forces of slavery, and America was without a champion.
I think the idea of political leadership crossed Whitman's mind at
this time, and that he put it definitely aside. The hour cried out for
the man, and the cry was not to go unanswered; but with all his power
and all his goodwill and fervour, Whitman became slowly convinced that
it was not to be he. He had seen too much of party manoeuvres, and
had too vigorous a love of personal liberty, to contend for office.
But he did covet the power of a prophet to stir the heart of America,
and appeal to her people everywhere in her name. He never gave up the
idea of lecturing or lost his interest in oratory; but the lectures he
planned, the course on Democracy and the rest, remained undelivered.
It is as though he had prepared himself and stood awaiting a call
which never came.
Instead, he turned once more to add new poems to his collection.
A hint in explanation is to be found in a poem written about this
time,[237] in which he tells how, having first sought knowledge, he
then determined to live for America and become her orator; he was
afterwards possessed by the desire for a heroic life of action, but was
given the commission of song. Finally, another change came over his
spirit; the claims of his own life seized him; he could not escape from
the passion of comradeship which overwhelmed him and wholly absorbed
his thought.[238] We shall consider this phase in the next chapter, but
before doing so, it will be well to recall the political events of the
hour and the circumstances surrounding the advent of a new power and
personality into American life.
FOOTNOTES:
[202] M. D. Conway, _Autobiography_.
[203] _Fort. Rev._, vi., 538; Kennedy, 51.
[204] _In re_, 36.
[205] See _Familiar Letters of H. D. Thoreau_, 339-349.
[206] F. B. Sanborn's _Thoreau_, 307; _cf._ H. S. Salt's _Thoreau_, 293.
[207] _Fam. Letters_, 347.
[208] Camden, lxxii.; _cf._ _Life of A. Tennyson_, ii., 424.
[209] A new translation of the great Indian classic had just appeared.
[210] Kennedy, 78.
[211] _L. of G._, 112, 120.
[212] _L. of G._, 176.
[213] _L. of G._ (1860), 329; _cf._ _An American Primer_, by W. W.
(1904).
[214] _L. of G._, 179.
[215] _L. of G._, 177.
[216] _Ib._, 120.
[217] _L. of G._, 129.
[218] _Ib._, 207; ('60), 229-31.
[219] See also p. 166.
[220] _L. of G._, 285.
[221] _Ib._, 148.
[222] _L. of G._, 264.
[223] _Ib._ (1860), 121.
[224] _L. of G._ (1860), 166.
[225] _Ib._, 171-74; _cf._ _L. of G._, 213.
[226] _L. of G._ (1860), 172.
[227] See esp. the _Life of Susan B. Anthony_.
[228] _L. of G._, 88.
[229] _L. of G._, 90.
[230] _Ib._ (1856).
[231] Bucke, 139.
[232] Burroughs, 19.
[233] Camden, vii.; viii., 244-260; ix., 200; x., 32.
[234] _In re_, 35.
[235] Camden, ix., 7, 8.
[236] _Ib._, viii., 245.
[237] _L. of G._ (1860), 354.
[238] As the poem is not given in the complete _L. of G._ I reprint it
here:--
Long I thought that knowledge alone would suffice me--O if I could
but obtain knowledge!
Then my lands engrossed me--Lands of the prairies, Ohio's land, the
southern savannas, engrossed me--For them I would live--I would
be their orator;
Then I met the examples of old and new heroes--I heard of warriors,
sailors, and all dauntless persons--And it seemed to me that I
too had it in me to be as dauntless as any--and would be so;
And then, to enclose all, it came to me to strike up the songs
of the New World--And then I believed my life must be spent in
singing;
But now take notice, land of the prairies, land of the south
savannas, Ohio's land,
Take notice, you Kanuck woods--and you Lake Huron--and all that
with you roll toward Niagara--and you Niagara also,
And you, Californian mountains--That you each and all find somebody
else to be your singer of songs,
For I can be your singer of songs no longer--One who loves me is
jealous of me, and withdraws me from all but love,
With the rest I dispense--I sever from what I thought would suffice
me, for it does not--it is now empty and tasteless to me,
I heed knowledge, and the grandeur of The States, and the example
of heroes, no more,
I am indifferent to my own songs--I will go with him I love,
It is to be enough for us that we are together--We never separate
again.