Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
the grave. She saw that these great factories, and the strength
of this army of the sons and daughters of toil, made possible the
advance of civilization itself, which cannot go barefoot. She
realized all at once and forever the dignity of labor, this girl of
the people, with a brain which enabled her to overlook the heads
of the rank and file of which she herself formed a part. She never
again, whatever her regret might have been for another life for
which she was better fitted, which her taste preferred, had any
sense of ignominy in this. She never again felt that she was too
good for her labor, for labor had revealed itself to her like a
goddess behind a sordid veil.[544]
Nevertheless she is ready to fight for control of the machine--for a
return to the workers of a larger share of their earnings; but when the
strike fails and she contemplates the misery that it has spread amongst
the workers, she recants:
Her youthful enthusiasm carried her like a leaping-pole to
conclusions beyond her years. “I wonder,” she said to herself,
“if, after all, this inequality of possessions is not a part of
the system of creation, if the righting of them is not beyond the
flaming sword of the Garden of Eden? I wonder if the one who tries
to right them forcibly is not meddling, and usurping the part of
the Creator, and bringing down wrath and confusion not only upon
his own head, but upon the heads of others? I wonder if it is wise,
in order to establish a principle, to make those who have no voice
in the matter suffer for it--the helpless women and children?”...
She reflected, as she had so many times before, that the world was
very old--thousands of years old--and inequality was as old as
the world. Might it not even be a condition of its existence, the
shifting of weights which kept it to its path in the scheme of the
universe?[545]
Mrs. Freeman wisely chose a girl in her teens as the leader in a fierce
labor battle, for Mrs. Freeman’s own thinking on social questions was
still in its teens. She had the warmest sympathy for the exploited
poor; her conscience was as tender as Miss Phelps’s; but her inadequate
knowledge of economics served her ill. If economic inequality is
necessary to keep the world from flying from its orbit, it serves the
purpose likewise of character development. When an old factory-hand
looks back upon a long life of futile labor he thus philosophizes:
Andrew quoted again from the old King of Wisdom--“I withheld not
my heart from any joy, for my heart rejoices in all my labor, and
that was my portion of labor.” Then Andrew thought ... of all the
toilsome lives of those beside him, of all the work which they had
done with their poor, knotted hands, of the tracks which they had
worn on the earth towards their graves, with their weary feet, and
suddenly he seemed to grasp a new and further meaning for that
verse of Ecclesiastes.
He seemed to see that labor is not alone for itself, nor for what
it accomplishes of the tasks of the world, not for its equivalent
in silver and gold, not even for the end of human happiness and
love, but for the growth in character of the laborer.
“That is the portion of labor,” he said.[546]
So the book ends on a Hebraic note. In 1901 when Mrs. Freeman wrote
_The Portion of Labor_ the psychology of work had been pretty well
explored. For years William Morris had been preaching a very different
doctrine, pagan rather than Hebraic, yet Mrs. Freeman seems to have
been acquainted with Morris no more than was Ellen Brewster, her
girlish heroine. Even the starkest New England realism was not very
critical of the industrialism that was destroying the traditional New
England. A cynical reader might perhaps suggest that the explanation
is to be found in the fact that the Yankee was profiting enormously
from this fouling of the Puritan nest.
II • The Afterglow of the Enlightenment--Walt Whitman
If the philosophy of the Enlightenment was fast disintegrating in the
America of 1870, it still numbered its picturesque followers who sought
to leaven the age with the social spirit of an earlier generation. It
was a noble bequest--this gift of the French thinkers--with its passion
for liberty, its faith in man, its democratic program. From that great
reservoir had come pretty much all that was generously idealistic
and humanitarian in the life of the two preceding generations. Its
persuasive idealism had woven itself so closely into the fabric of
national thought that our fathers had come to believe that America
was dedicated in a very special sense to the principles of a free
society. The democratic movement returned to it constantly to refresh
its strength and take new bearings. At every great crisis the familiar
pronouncement of the Declaration of Independence had been confidently
appealed to in furtherance of social justice. And now in the days
of an acquisitive individualism, when idealism was begging alms in
the market-place, it still threw flashes of romantic splendor on
the crude American scene. Old Peter Cooper still dreamed his dreams
of social justice after eighty years had passed over his head; and
Thaddeus Stevens, grown crabbed and surly from bitter struggles, mutely
testified to his passionate equalitarianism on the day of his burial.
But it was Walt Whitman in his den at Camden--culturally and in the
things of the spirit countless leagues removed from Boston--who was the
completest embodiment of the Enlightenment--the poet and prophet of a
democracy that the America of the Gilded Age was daily betraying.
In his somewhat truculent pose of democratic undress Whitman was a
singular figure for a poet, and especially an American poet. The
amplitude and frankness and sincerity of his rich nature were an
affront to every polite convention of the day. Endowed with abundant
sensuousness and catholic sympathies, he took impressions as sharply as
wax from the etcher’s hand; and those impressions he transcribed with
the careful impartiality of the modern expressionist. His sensitive
reactions to experience were emotional rather than intellectual. A
pagan, a romantic, a transcendentalist, a mystic--a child of the
Enlightenment yet heeding the lessons of science and regarding
himself as a realist who honored the physical as the repository of
the spiritual--to an amazing degree he was an unconscious embodiment
of American aspiration in the days when the romantic revolution was
at flood tide. His buoyant nature floated easily on the turbulent
stream of national being, and his songs were defiant chants in praise
of life--strong, abundant, procreative--flowing through the veins of
America.
Oracular and discursive, Whitman lived and moved in a world of sensuous
imagery. His imagination was Gothic in its vast reaches. Thronging
troops of pictures passed before him, vivid, vital, transcripts
of reality, the sharp impress of some experience or fleeting
observation--his own and no one’s else, and therefore authentic.
Delighting in the cosmos he saw reflecting its myriad phases in
the mirror of his own ego, he sank into experience joyously like a
strong swimmer idling in the salt waves. Borne up by the caressing
waters, repressing nothing, rejecting nothing, he found life good in
all its manifestations. As an Emersonian he was content to receive
his sanctions from within, and as he yielded to the stimulus of the
environing present his imagination expanded, his spirits rose to
earth’s jubilee, his speech fell into lyric cadences, and from the
exalted abandon of egoistic experience there issued a strong rich note
of the universal. His like had not before appeared in our literature
for the reason that the childlike pagan had not before appeared.
Emerson with his serene intelligence almost disencumbered of the flesh,
and Hawthorne with his dessicating skepticisms that left him afraid
of sex, were the fruits of a Hebraized culture that Puritan America
understood; but Walt Whitman the caresser of life, the lover who found
no sweeter fat than stuck to his own bones, was incomprehensible, and
not being understood, it was inevitable that he should be inexorably
damned. The most deeply religious soul that American literature knows,
the friend and lover of all the world, the poet of the democratic ideal
to which, presumably, America was dedicated, Whitman was flung into
outer darkness by the moral custodians of an age that knew morality
only from the precepts of the fathers.
The early stages of Whitman’s intellectual development are obscure,
but that in his twenties he caught most of the infections of the
times, literary, political, and social, is clear enough. The young
printer-editor in frock coat and tall hat, with cane and boutonnière,
who often joined the Bohemian society at Pfaff’s restaurant, was a
callow romantic, practicing the conventional literary arts of the time,
writing formal verse, spinning romantic tales,[547] and seeking to
approve himself a reputable littérateur. But the passion of reform was
already stirring within him and a succession of causes--temperance,
anti-capital-punishment, abolitionism--recruited his pen. As a child
of Manhattan and of the Jacksonian revolution it was inevitable that
his first great passion should have been political, and when in the
late forties he found a suitable vehicle of expression in the _Brooklyn
Eagle_, his native Jeffersonianism took stock of current political
programs. His political master was the radical equalitarian William
Leggett--whose praises in after life he never stinted--and from Leggett
and the _Evening Post_, supplemented by Fanny Wright and Tom Paine and
other disreputable influences, he seems to have got the first clear
expression of the sweeping democratic postulates on which later he
was to erect his philosophy. The times were stirring everywhere with
revolution and on Manhattan Island Locofocoism, with the newfangled
matches, ten years before had started its little local bonfire by way
of preparation for a general conflagration that should consume the
accumulated mass of wrong and injustice. The ardent young Whitman was
deeply infected with Locofoco enthusiasm and his editorials for the
_Eagle_ were the pronouncements of an extreme left-wing Democrat, as
became a disciple of Leggett.
In this early phase of his democracy he fixed his hopes on the
great West where, he believed, a freer and more democratic America
was taking shape. He was an expansionist, full of ardent hopes, an
apostle of “manifest destiny.” In such lesser matters as finance and
governmental subsidies he was a good Jacksonian, following Old Bullion
Benton in his preference for hard money and dislike of shin-plasters.
He was opposed to the bankers and monopolists. He called himself a
“free-trader by instinct,” and so late as 1888 he said, “I object to
the tariff primarily because it is not humanitarian--because it is a
damnable imposition upon the masses.”[548] But these lesser things were
inconsequential in comparison with the great objective towards which
America was moving--the ever-widening freedom of men in society. “There
must be,” he wrote in those early years, “continual additions to our
great experiment of how much liberty society will bear.”[549] On that
grand theme he was never tired of speaking. With Tom Paine he believed
that just government was a simple thing, fitted to the capacity of many
heads; it is made complex to hide its dishonesty. After commenting on
the “once derided, but now widely worshipped doctrines which Jefferson
and the glorious Leggett promulgated,” he went on:
... this one single rule, rationally construed and applied, is
enough to form the starting point of all that is necessary in