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constantly see, through all their worldly career, however struggling and
blind and lame, attempts, by all ages, all peoples, according to their
development, to reach, to press, to progress on, and ever farther on, to
more and more advanced ideals.
The glory of the republic of the United States, in my opinion, is to be
that, emerging in the light of the modern and the splendor of science,
and solidly based on the past, it is to cheerfully range itself, and its
politics are henceforth to come, under those universal laws, and embody
them, and carry them out, to serve them. And as only that individual
becomes truly great who understands well that, while complete in himself
in a certain sense, he is but a part of the divine, eternal scheme, and
whose special life and laws are adjusted to move in harmonious relations
with the general laws of Nature, and especially with the moral law, the
deepest and highest of all, and the last vitality of man or state--so
the United States may only become the greatest and the most continuous,
by understanding well their harmonious relations with entire humanity
and history, and all their laws and progress, sublimed with the creative
thought of Deity, through all time, past, present, and future. Thus will
they expand to the amplitude of their destiny, and become illustrations
and culminating parts of the kosmos, and of civilization.
No more considering the States as an incident, or series of incidents,
however vast, coming accidentally along the path of time, and shaped
by casual emergencies as they happen to arise, and the mere result of
modern improvements, vulgar and lucky, ahead of other nations and times,
I would finally plant, as seeds, these thoughts or speculations in the
growth of our republic--that it is the deliberate culmination and result
of all the past--that here, too, as in all departments of the universe,
regular laws (slow and sure in planting, slow and sure in ripening) have
controll'd and govern'd, and will yet control and govern; and that those
laws can no more be baffled or steer'd clear of, or vitiated, by chance,
or any fortune or opposition, than the laws of winter and summer, or
darkness and light.
The summing up of the tremendous moral and military perturbations of
1861-'65, and their results--and indeed of the entire hundred years of
the past of our national experiment, from its inchoate movement down
to the present day (1780-1881)--is, that they all now launch the United
States fairly forth, consistently with the entirety of civilization and
humanity, and in main sort the representative of them, leading the van,
leading the fleet of the modern and democratic, on the seas and voyages
of the future.
And the real history of the United States--starting from that great
convulsive struggle for unity, the secession war, triumphantly
concluded, and _the South_ victorious after all--is only to be written
at the remove of hundreds, perhaps a thousand, years hence.
A MEMORANDUM AT A VENTURE
"All is proper to be express'd, provided our aim is only high
enough."--_J. F. Millet._
"The candor of science is the glory of the modern. It does not hide
and repress; it confronts, turns on the light. It alone has perfect
faith--faith not in a part only, but all. Does it not undermine the old
religious standards? Yes, in God's truth, by excluding the devil from
the theory of the universe--by showing that evil is not a law in itself,
but a sickness, a perversion of the good, and the other side of the
good--that in fact all of humanity, and of everything, is divine in its
bases, its eligibilities."
Shall the mention of such topics as I have briefly but plainly and
resolutely broach'd in the "Children of Adam" section of "Leaves of
Grass" be admitted in poetry and literature? Ought not the innovation
to be put down by opinion and criticism? and, if those fail, by the
District Attorney? True, I could not construct a poem which declaredly
took, as never before, the complete human identity, physical, moral,
emotional, and intellectual, (giving precedence and compass in a certain
sense to the first,) nor fulfil that _bona fide_ candor and entirety
of treatment which was a part of my purpose, without comprehending this
section also. But I would entrench myself more deeply and widely than
that. And while I do not ask any man to indorse my theory, I confess
myself anxious that what I sought to write and express, and the ground I
built on, shall be at least partially understood, from its own platform.
The best way seems to me to confront the question with entire frankness.
There are, generally speaking, two points of view, two conditions of the
world's attitude toward these matters; the first, the conventional one
of good folks and good print everywhere, repressing any direct statement
of them, and making allusions only at second or third hand--(as
the Greeks did of death, which, in Hellenic social culture, was not
mention'd point-blank, but by euphemisms.) In the civilization of
to-day, this condition--without stopping to elaborate the arguments and
facts, which are many and varied and perplexing--has led to states of
ignorance, repressal, and cover'd over disease and depletion,
forming certainly a main factor in the world's woe. A nonscientific,
non-esthetic, and eminently non-religious condition, bequeath'd to us
from the past, (its origins diverse, one of them the far-back lessons
of benevolent and wise men to restrain the prevalent coarseness and
animality of the tribal ages--with Puritanism, or perhaps Protestantism
itself for another, and still another specified in the latter part
of this memorandum)--to it is probably due most of the ill births,
inefficient maturity, snickering pruriency, and of that human pathologic
evil and morbidity which is, in my opinion, the keel and reason-why of
every evil and morbidity. Its scent, as of something sneaking,
furtive, mephitic, seems to lingeringly pervade all modern literature,
conversation, and manners.
The second point of view, and by far the largest--as the world in
working-day dress vastly exceeds the world in parlor toilette--is
the one of common life, from the oldest times down, and especially in
England, (see the earlier chapters of "Taine's English Literature," and
see Shakspere almost anywhere,) and which our age to-day inherits from
riant stock, in the wit, or what passes for wit, of masculine circles,
and in erotic stories and talk, to excite, express, and dwell on, that
merely sensual voluptuousness which, according to Victor Hugo, is the
most universal trait of all ages, all lands. This second condition,
however bad, is at any rate like a disease which comes to the surface,
and therefore less dangerous than a conceal'd one.
The time seems to me to have arrived, and America to be the place, for
a new departure--a third point of view. The same freedom and faith and
earnestness which, after centuries of denial, struggle, repression,
and martyrdom, the present day brings to the treatment of politics and
religion, must work out a plan and standard on this subject, not so
much for what is call'd society, as for thoughtfulest men and women, and
thoughtfulest literature. The same spirit that marks the physiological
author and demonstrator on these topics in his important field, I have
thought necessary to be exemplified, for once, in another certainly not
less important field.
In the present memorandum I only venture to indicate that plan and
view--decided upon more than twenty years ago, for my own literary
action, and formulated tangibly in my printed poems--(as Bacon says an
abstract thought or theory is of no moment unless it leads to a deed or
work done, exemplifying it in the concrete)--that the sexual passion
in itself, while normal and unperverted, is inherently legitimate,
creditable, not necessarily an improper theme for poet, as confessedly
not for scientist--that, with reference to the whole construction,
organism, and intentions of "Leaves of Grass," anything short of
confronting that theme, and making myself clear upon it as the enclosing
basis of everything, (as the sanity of everything was to be the
atmosphere of the poems,) I should beg the question in its most
momentous aspect, and the superstructure that follow'd, pretensive as
it might assume to be, would all rest on a poor foundation, or no
foundation at all. In short, as the assumption of the sanity of birth,
Nature and humanity, is the key to any true theory of life and the
universe--at any rate, the only theory out of which I wrote--it is, and
must inevitably be, the only key to "Leaves of Grass," and every part
of it. _That_, (and not a vain consistency or weak pride, as a late
"Springfield Republican" charges,) is the reason that I have stood out
for these particular verses uncompromisingly for over twenty years, and
maintain them to this day. _That_ is what I felt in my inmost brain and
heart, when I only answer'd Emerson's vehement arguments with silence,
under the old elms of Boston Common.
Indeed, might not every physiologist and every good physician pray
for the redeeming of this subject from its hitherto relegation to the
tongues and pens of blackguards, and boldly putting it for once at
least, if no more, in the demesne of poetry and sanity--as something not
in itself gross or impure, but entirely consistent with highest manhood
and womanhood, and indispensable to both? Might not only every wife and
every mother--not only every babe that comes into the world, if that
were possible--not only all marriage, the foundation and _sine qua
non_ of the civilized state--bless and thank the showing, or taking for
granted, that motherhood, fatherhood, sexuality, and all that belongs
to them, can be asserted, where it comes to question, openly, joyously,
proudly, "without shame or the need of shame," from the highest artistic
and human considerations--but, with reverence be it written, on such
attempt to justify the base and start of the whole divine scheme in
humanity, might not the Creative Power itself deign a smile of approval?
To the movement for the eligibility and entrance of women amid new
spheres of business, politics, and the suffrage, the current prurient,
conventional treatment of sex is the main formidable obstacle. The
rising tide of "woman's rights," swelling and every year advancing
farther and farther, recoils from it with dismay. There will in my
opinion be no general progress in such eligibility till a sensible,
philosophic, democratic method is substituted.
The whole question--which strikes far, very far deeper than most people
have supposed, (and doubtless, too, something is to be said on all
sides,) is peculiarly an important one in art--is first an ethic, and
then still more an esthetic one. I condense from a paper read not long
since at Cheltenham, England, before the "Social Science Congress," to
the Art Department, by P. H. Rathbone of Liverpool, on the "Undraped
Figure in Art," and the discussion that follow'd:
"When coward Europe suffer'd the unclean Turk to soil the sacred shores
of Greece by his polluting presence, civilization and morality receiv'd
a blow from which they have never entirely recover'd, and the trail of
the serpent has been over European art and European society ever since.
The Turk regarded and regards women as animals without soul, toys to be
play'd with or broken at pleasure, and to be hidden, partly from shame,
but chiefly for the purpose of stimulating exhausted passion. Such is
the unholy origin of the objection to the nude as a fit subject for art;
it is purely Asiatic, and though not introduced for the first time
in the fifteenth century, is yet to be traced to the source of all
impurity--the East. Although the source of the prejudice is thoroughly