Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
government: _to make no more laws than those useful for preventing
a man or body of men from infringing on the rights of other men_.
And again:
There is not a greater fallacy on earth than the doctrine of
_force_, as applied in government.... Sensible men have long seen
that the best government is that which governs least.[550]
Such comments, of course, are only familiar echoes of the
Enlightenment--echoes that run through all the thinking of the
naturistic school, from Godwin and Paine to Channing and Emerson and
Thoreau. In the minds of the children of the Enlightenment the creative
ideal of individualism was always pointing toward the ultimate end
of philosophic anarchism, and Whitman with his assured faith in the
average man accepted the Godwinian political theory as naturally as
did Thoreau. What other politics, indeed, was possible for those who
built upon the postulates of the innate excellence of human nature
and the measureless potentialities of men when vicious social codes
have been swept away and the plastic clay is molded by a kindly
environment? The perfectibility of man was no romantic dream to the
disciples of the French school, but a sober statement of sociological
fact, based on a rationalistic psychology; and Whitman was convinced
that he was a competent realist in thus envisaging the social problem.
If man’s instincts are trustworthy, what justification is there for
narrow repressions laid on his freedom? Hitherto those repressions
have only maimed and distorted him, encouraging his baser rather than
his better impulses; and before he can realize his potentialities he
must put away all external compulsions and learn to rely solely upon
himself. Hence the immediate objective of the democratic revolution was
individual freedom, the breaking of all chains, to the end that free
men may create a society worthy of them.
So it was as a revolutionary that Whitman began his work; and a
revolutionary he remained to the end, although in his last years he
chose to call himself an evolutionist. A born rebel, he was always
preaching the gospel of rebellion. “I am a radical of radicals,” he
said late in life, “but I don’t belong to any school.”[551] It was this
revolutionary spirit that made him the friend of all rebellious souls
past and present. “My heart is with all you rebels--all of you, today,
always, wherever: your flag is my flag,”[552] he said to a Russian
anarchist; and it was this sympathy that enabled him to understand
Fanny Wright and Tom Paine and Priestley, who “have never had justice
done them.”[553] “The future belongs to the radical,” and so _Leaves of
Grass_--he says in “Starting from Paumanok”--“beat the gong of revolt.”
Conventional law and order he frankly despised and those individuals
who sought their own law and followed it awoke his admiration.
Thoreau’s “lawlessness” delighted him--“his going his own absolute
road let hell blaze all it chooses.” It is a coward and a poltroon who
accepts his law from others--as true of communities as it is true of
individuals. He was a good Jeffersonian in his fear of Federalistic
consolidation that must put an end to local rights and freedoms.
To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States,
_Resist much, obey little_,
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
... no nation, state, city of this earth, ever afterward resumes
its liberty.[554]
I am for those that have never been master’d,
For men and women whose tempers have never been master’d,
For those whom laws, theories, conventions can never master.[555]
This is the spirit of the radical forties when men were prone to
repudiate their allegiance to the political state; when left-wing
Abolitionists were dissolving the Union by resolutions; and
transcendentalists were proclaiming the doctrine of nullification of
unrighteous law. It had come out of the Jacksonian upheaval, but it
was daily discovering fresh sanctions as the anarchistic premises of
the Enlightenment were more adequately explored and the revolutionary
spirit of Europe broke in upon America. During these turbulent years
Whitman’s great plan was in gestation, but before _Leaves of Grass_
came to print in the first slender edition of 1855 other influences had
been at work, confirming his earlier views, endowing them with lyric
passion and expanding them into a grandiose whole. Those influences
would seem to have been the fervid emotionalism of the fifties, the
monistic idealism of the transcendental school, and the emerging
scientific movement. On the whole perhaps it was the first, with its
vague and expansive Utopianism, that bit most deeply, stimulating his
rich pagan nature to unconventional frankness and encouraging him to
throw off the inhibitions of a Puritan ethicism that held American
thought in narrow bondage. The rude and ample liberalisms that so
shocked his early readers were in no sense peculiar to Whitman, despite
common opinion, but the expression of the surging emotionalism of the
times, and _Leaves of Grass_, can best be understood by setting its
frank paganism against the background of the lush fifties.
* * * * *
With its Calvinistic antecedents--Scotch-Irish and Huguenot as well
as New England Puritan--America had always been unfriendly to a
pagan evaluation of man’s duties and destiny, and the revolutionary
movement of the forties had been kept within sober ethical bounds.
John Humphrey Noyes was probably the most radical American of the
times, yet the Perfectionism of his earlier years, with its ascetic
religiosity, bore little resemblance to the later communism of the
Oneida Community. But the liberalism of the fifties was casting off all
Hebraic restraints and running wild, proclaiming a new heaven about to
appear on the free continent of America, and bidding the youth of the
land live joyously as children of the earth. Paganism for the first
time lifted up its head and surveyed the American scene--a youthful
paganism, lusty and vigorous, that suggested amazing applications of
the respectable doctrines of freedom and individuality, to the scandal
of older-fashioned folk. From the free spaces of the West, carried on
the tide of the Gold Rush, had come a spontaneous reaction from the
earlier repressions. Liberalism was passing from the political to the
social--a free welling-up of repressed desires, a vast expansiveness.
Too long had the natural human emotions been under the ban of
asceticism; too long had a God of wrath dispossessed a God of love.
Life is good in the measure that it is lived fully, and to live fully
is to live in the flesh as well as the spirit. Emerson the prophet of
the earlier decade had suffered from an extreme unfleshliness; Whitman
the prophet of the fifties would recover the balance. As the current of
emotionalism gathered force a frank _joie de vivre_ submerged the old
reticences; candor, frankness, a very lust of self-expression, was the
new law for free men and women--a glorification of the physical that
put to rout the traditional Hebraisms. A riotous sentimentalism ran
about the land until it seemed to timid souls as if liberty were quite
running away with decency. Freedom for black slaves was one thing,
but freedom for women--the loosening of social convention--suggested
terrifying eventualities like free love and the disruption of the
family. They would countenance no such immoral freedom and under the
leadership of young Anthony Comstock the forces of reticence and
respectability made ready to do battle with the new liberalisms.
It was not alone Walt Whitman who threw down the gage to the
Comstockian watchmen in the gates. The apostle of the new freedom,
the high priest of emotional liberalism, was Henry Ward Beecher,
lately come out of the West, who from the pulpit of Plymouth Church
swept his thousands of idolizing followers along the path of Utopian
emotionalism. With a rich amplitude and golden vagueness of metaphor
he preached the new gospel. From his lips flowed a lyric chant, a vast
paean, a very shout in praise of liberty and love, of godlike man and
a manlike God. “Life--affirmative, immediate, in a highly ornamented
Mayday world--he acknowledged and commemorated life!”[556] He bathed
in a “perpetual tropical luxuriance of blessed love.” “I never knew
how to worship until I knew how to love,” he cried; “and to love I
must have something ... that touching my heart, shall not leave the
chill of ice but the warmth of summer.” Like a good Emersonian he
discarded reason--the discipline of the ancestral Calvinism--to follow
the “secret chords of feeling,” the “heart’s instincts, whose channels
you may appoint but whose flowing is beyond control.” A “magnificent
pagan”--so Thoreau called him--he reveled in sensuous beauty. His
emotions mounted as he contemplated this new land, this new people,
the golden future that beckoned--with all shackles broken, dedicated
to freedom, warm and palpitating from abundant life--a radiant world
of lovely women and manly men. He dwelt on Pisgah and from the heights
looked out on a divine democracy. “The life of the common people is the
best part of the world’s life,” he exclaimed; “the life of the common
people is the life of God.” And to his congregation intoxicated with
his rhetoric he shouted, “Ye are gods! You are crystalline, your faces
are radiant!”[557] And the end and outcome envisaged by this prophet of
the American Idea was a vaguely grandiose fellowship, not of the Saints
alone, but of all the thronging children of men, for of such is God’s
kingdom of this world.
As such lyric chants fell on Whitman’s ears, they must have quickened
the ferment of thought that was eventually to clarify for him the
ideal of democracy, exalting it by making it warm and human and
social. The old Jacksonian leveling had been negative; its freedoms
had been individual, its anarchism selfish and unsocial. The great
ideal of the fellowship had been lost in the scramble for rights. Even
transcendental democracy had narrowed its contacts. The hermit Thoreau
in his cabin at Walden Pond was no symbol of a generous democratic
future. In the struggle for liberty and equality the conception of
fraternity had been denied and the golden trinity of the Enlightenment
dismembered. It was this idea of fraternity, made human and hearty by
his warm love of men and women, that Whitman got from the expansive
fifties and built into his thinking. The conception of solidarity,
then entering the realm of proletarian thought through the labors of
Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, was his response to the new times--a
response that infused his democratic faith with a glowing humanism.
Democracy spiritualized by Channing and Emerson and Parker had suffered
limitations from their lingering Hebraisms--the Puritan passion for
righteousness had imposed strict ethical bounds on the democratic
will. In Thoreau it had been subjected to caustic skepticisms--the
transcendental individualist quizzically asked, “What _is_ your
people?” and refused to subject himself to the mass. But in Whitman
all limitations and skepticisms were swept away by the feeling of
comradeship. Flesh is kin to flesh, and out of the great reserves
of life is born the average man “with his excellent good manliness.”
Not in distinction but in oneness with the whole is found the good
life, for in fellowship is love and in the whole is freedom; and love
and freedom are the law and the prophets. The disintegrations of the
earlier individualism must be succeeded by a new integration; fear and
hate and jealousy and pride have held men apart hitherto, but love
will draw them together. After all solidarity--the children of America