Complete Prose Works
due time express and supply the teeming region I was in the midst
of, and have briefly touch'd upon. One's mind needs but a moment's
deliberation anywhere in the United States to see clearly enough that
all the prevalent book and library poets, either as imported from
Great Britain, or follow'd and _doppel-gang'd_ here, are foreign to our
States, copiously as they are read by us all. But to fully understand
not only how absolutely in opposition to our times and lands, and how
little and cramp'd, and what anachronisms and absurdities many of their
pages are, for American purposes, one must dwell or travel awhile in
Missouri, Kansas and Colorado, and get rapport with their people and
country.
Will the day ever come--no matter how long deferr'd--when those
models and lay-figures from the British islands--and even the precious
traditions of the classics--will be reminiscences, studies only? The
pure breath, primitiveness, boundless prodigality and amplitude, strange
mixture of delicacy and power, of continence, of real and ideal, and
of all original and first-class elements, of these prairies, the Rocky
mountains, and of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers--will they ever
appear in, and in some sort form a standard for our poetry and art? (I
sometimes think that even the ambition of my friend Joaquin Miller to
put them in, and illustrate them, places him ahead of the whole crowd.)
Not long ago I was down New York bay, on a steamer, watching the sunset
over the dark green heights of Navesink, and viewing all that inimitable
spread of shore, shipping and sea, around Sandy Hook. But an intervening
week or two, and my eyes catch the shadowy outlines of the Spanish
peaks. In the more than two thousand miles between, though of infinite
and paradoxical variety, a curious and absolute fusion is doubtless
steadily annealing, compacting, identifying all. But subtler and wider
and more solid, (to produce such compaction,) than the laws of the
States, or the common ground of Congress, or the Supreme Court, or the
grim welding of our national wars, or the steel ties of railroads,
or all the kneading and fusing processes of our material and business
history, past or present, would in my opinion be a great throbbing,
vital, imaginative work, or series of works, or literature, in
constructing which the Plains, the Prairies, and the Mississippi river,
with the demesnes of its varied and ample valley, should be the concrete
background, and America's humanity, passions, struggles, hopes, there
and now--an _eclaircissement_ as it is and is to be, on the stage of
the New World, of all Time's hitherto drama of war, romance and
evolution--should furnish the lambent fire, the ideal.
AN INTERVIEWER'S ITEM
_Oct. 17, '79_.--To-day one of the newspapers of St. Louis prints the
following informal remarks of mine on American, especially Western
literature: "We called on Mr. Whitman yesterday and after a somewhat
desultory conversation abruptly asked him: 'Do you think we are to have
a distinctively American literature?' 'It seems to me,' said he,'that
our work at present is to lay the foundations of a great nation
in products, in agriculture, in commerce, in networks of
intercommunication, and in all that relates to the comforts of vast
masses of men and families, with freedom of speech, ecclesiasticism, &c.
These we have founded and are carrying out on a grander scale than ever
hitherto, and Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Kansas and Colorado,
seem to me to be the seat and field of these very facts and ideas.
Materialistic prosperity in all its varied forms, with those other
points that I mentioned, intercommunication and freedom, are first to
be attended to. When those have their results and get settled, then
a literature worthy of us will begin to be defined. Our American
superiority and vitality are in the bulk of our people, not in a gentry
like the old world. The greatness of our army during the secession war,
was in the rank and file, and so with the nation. Other lands have their
vitality in a few, a class, but we have it in the bulk of the people.
Our leading men are not of much account and never have been, but the
average of the people is immense, beyond all history. Sometimes I think
in all departments, literature and art included, that will be the way
our superiority will exhibit itself. We will not have great individuals
or great leaders, but a great average bulk, unprecedentedly great.'"
THE WOMEN OF THE WEST
_Kansas City_.--I am not so well satisfied with what I see of the women
of the prairie cities. I am writing this where I sit leisurely in a
store in Main street, Kansas City, a streaming crowd on the sidewalks
flowing by. The ladies (and the same in Denver) are all fashionably
drest, and have the look of "gentility" in face, manner and action, but
they do _not_ have, either in physique or the mentality appropriate
to them, any high native originality of spirit or body, (as the men
certainly have, appropriate to them.) They are "intellectual" and
fashionable, but dyspeptic-looking and generally doll-like; their
ambition evidently is to copy their eastern sisters. Something far
different and in advance must appear, to tally and complete the superb
masculinity of the west, and maintain and continue it.
THE SILENT GENERAL
_Sept. 28, '79_.--So General Grant, after circumambiating the world,
has arrived home again, landed in San Francisco yesterday, from the
ship City of Tokio from Japan. What a man he is! what a history! what an
illustration--his life--of the capacities of that American individuality
common to us all. Cynical critics are wondering "what the people can
see in Grant" to make such a hubbub about. They aver (and it is no
doubt true) that he has hardly the average of our day's literary and
scholastic culture, and absolutely no pronounc'd genius or conventional
eminence of any sort. Correct: but he proves how an average western
farmer, mechanic, boatman, carried by tides of circumstances,
perhaps caprices, into a position of incredible military or civic
responsibilities, (history has presented none more trying, no born
monarch's, no mark more shining for attack or envy,) may steer his way
fitly and steadily through them all, carrying the country and himself
with credit year after year--command over a million armed men--fight
more than fifty pitch'd battles--rule for eight years a land larger than
all the kingdoms of Europe combined--and then, retiring, quietly (with
a cigar in his mouth) make the promenade of the whole world, through its
courts and coteries, and kings and czars and mikados, and splendidest
glitters and etiquettes, as phlegmatically as he ever walk'd the
portico of a Missouri hotel after dinner. I say all this is what people
like--and I am sure I like it. Seems to me it transcends Plutarch. How
those old Greeks, indeed, would have seized on him! A mere plain man--no
art, no poetry--only practical sense, ability to do, or try his best to
do, what devolv'd upon him. A common trader, money-maker, tanner, farmer
of Illinois--general for the republic, in its terrific struggle with
itself, in the war of attempted secession--President following, (a task
of peace, more difficult than the war itself)--nothing heroic, as the
authorities put it--and yet the greatest hero. The gods, the destinies,
seem to have concentrated upon him.
PRESIDENT HAYES'S SPEECHES
_Sept. 30_.--I see President Hayes has come out West, passing quite
informally from point to point, with his wife and a small cortege of
big officers, receiving ovations, and making daily and sometimes
double-daily addresses to the people. To these addresses--all impromptu,
and some would call them ephemeral--I feel to devote a memorandum. They
are shrewd, good-natur'd, face-to-face speeches, on easy topics not
too deep; but they give me some revised ideas of oratory--of a new,
opportune theory and practice of that art, quite changed from the
classic rules, and adapted to our days, our occasions, to American
democracy, and to the swarming populations of the West. I hear them
criticised as wanting in dignity, but to me they are just what they
should be, considering all the circumstances, who they come from, and
who they are address'd to. Underneath, his objects are to compact and
fraternize the States, encourage their materialistic and industrial
development, soothe and expand their self-poise, and tie all and each
with resistless double ties not only of inter-trade barter, but human
comradeship.
From Kansas City I went on to St. Louis, where I remain'd nearly three
months, with my brother T.J.W., and my dear nieces.
ST. LOUIS MEMORANDA
_Oct., Nov., and Dec., '79_.--The points of St. Louis are its position,
its absolute wealth, (the long accumulations of time and trade, solid
riches, probably a higher average thereof than any city,) the unrivall'd
amplitude of its well-laid-out environage of broad plateaus, for
future expansion--and the great State of which it is the head. It fuses
northern and southern qualities, perhaps native and foreign ones, to
perfection, rendezvous the whole stretch of the Mississippi and Missouri
rivers, and its American electricity goes well with its German phlegm.
Fourth, Fifth and Third streets are store-streets, showy, modern,
metropolitan, with hurrying crowds, vehicles, horse-cars, hubbub, plenty
of people, rich goods, plate-glass windows, iron fronts often five or
six stories high. You can purchase anything in St. Louis (in most of the
big western cities for the matter of that) just as readily and cheaply
as in the Atlantic marts. Often in going about the town you see
reminders of old, even decay'd civilization. The water of the west, in
some places, is not good, but they make it up here by plenty of very
fair wine, and inexhaustible quantities of the best beer in the world.
There are immense establishments for slaughtering beef and pork--and I
saw flocks of sheep, 5000 in a flock. (In Kansas City I had visited a
packing establishment that kills and packs an average of 2500 hogs a
day the whole year round, for export. Another in Atchison, Kansas, same
extent; others nearly equal elsewhere. And just as big ones here.)
NIGHTS ON THE MISSISSIPPI
_Oct. 29th, 30th, and 31st_.--Wonderfully fine, with the full harvest
moon, dazzling and silvery. I have haunted the river every night lately,
where I could get a look at the bridge by moonlight. It is indeed a
structure of perfection and beauty unsurpassable, and I never tire of
it. The river at present is very low; I noticed to-day it had much more
of a blue-clear look than usual. I hear the slight ripples, the air
is fresh and cool, and the view, up or down, wonderfully clear, in the
moonlight. I am out pretty late: it is so fascinating, dreamy. The cool
night-air, all the influences, the silence, with those far-off eternal
stars, do me good. I have been quite ill of late. And so, well-near the
centre of our national demesne, these night views of the Mississippi.
UPON OUR OWN LAND
"Always, after supper, take a walk half a mile long," says an old
proverb, dryly adding, "and if convenient let it be upon your own land."
I wonder does any other nation but ours afford opportunity for such a
jaunt as this? Indeed has any previous period afforded it? No one, I
discover, begins to know the real geographic, democratic, indissoluble
American Union in the present, or suspect it in the future, until he
explores these Central States, and dwells awhile observantly on their
prairies, or amid their busy towns, and the mighty father of waters. A
ride of two or three thousand miles, "on one's own land," with hardly a
disconnection, could certainly be had in no other place than the United