Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
merging in the fellowship, sympathetic, responsive, manlike yet divine,
of which the poet should be the prophet and literature provide the
sermons.
It was a noble conception--washing away all the meanness that befouled
Jacksonian individualism--and it somewhat slowly found its way to
parity with his first master conception, the universal ego, and settled
into place in those later opening lines of _Leaves of Grass_:
One’s-self I sing, a simple separate person,
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.[558]
Then came the war to strengthen his faith in the common man. As he
watched the soldiers marching, fighting, suffering, he was deeply
impressed with their courage, patience, kindness, manliness, and came
to reverence the deep wellspring of national being from which issued
such inexhaustible waters. It was not the few but the many that gave
him hope. “I never before so realized the majesty and reality of the
American people _en masse_,” he wrote of some regiments returning
from the front. “It fell upon me like a great awe.”[559] And as he
contemplated this fecund people, with its sons and daughters issuing
strong and wholesome from every part of the land, there came to him
a new conception of unity--the Union that Lincoln loved--the drawing
together into an indissoluble whole of the far-flung commonwealths--a
realization of the perfect State where reign liberty, equality,
fraternity. Solidarity had taken on a political complexion but its
life-blood was in the veins of a free people.
But pagan though he was in his deeper nature, a child of the emotional
fifties, he was a transcendentalist also and his democratic philosophy,
as it took shape, bears unmistakable marks of the New England school,
supplemented perhaps by Quakerism. His well-known comment, “I was
simmering and simmering; it was Emerson brought me to boil,” suggests
much, and in particular that the Enlightenment as it had come to him
through the Jeffersonian heritage was supplemented and spiritualized
by the Enlightenment as it had taken special form in passing through
the transcendental mind. To this latter source must be traced the
philosophic monism that served to draw his speculations together--a
mystic sense of the divine oneness of life that took his major
postulates in golden hands and fused them into a single spiritual
whole. Thus instructed the “great Idea, the idea of perfect and free
individuals,” became curiously Emersonian in all its amplifications.
There is the same glorification of consciousness and will, the same
exaltation of the soul, the same trust in the buried life that men call
instinct, the same imperious call to heed the voice of innate Godhood;
and round and about this “perfect and free individual” is a mystical
egocentric universe wherein the children of men may luxuriate in
their divinity. The body is excellent as the soul is excellent; away,
therefore, with all shamefacedness--the mean secretiveness, the putting
of fingers to the lips in presence of the naked, the lies in presence
of open palpable fact! For if this be indeed God’s universe, and He is
in and through it all, the children of Adam may stand in His presence
unafraid--nay, rather with pride in their own excellence. “I exist as I
am, that is enough,” for “Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy
whatever I touch or am touch’d from.”
Whitman not only accepted Emerson with ungrudging loyalty but he dwelt
much with Hegel and the German idealists, and with their help he
penetrated curiously to the core of things, discovering there an inner
spiritual reality that is the abiding substance behind the external
manifestation. He had come upon food to sustain his faith in presence
of the mean and base that compassed him about, and the puzzling
contradictions of life no longer troubled him. If man be perfectible,
if he be indeed a child of God though still in his infancy, how
glorious must be the future toward which he is pressing! The evil will
pass and the good remain.
Roaming in thought over the Universe, I saw the little that is Good
steadily hastening towards immortality,
And the vast all that is call’d Evil I saw hastening to merge
itself and become lost and dead.[560]
When he turned from the oracular utterance of _Leaves of Grass_ to
sober exposition, he phrased it thus:
There is, apart from mere intellect ... a wondrous something that
realises without argument ... an intuition of the absolute balance,
in time and space, of the whole of this multifarious, mad chaos of
fraud, frivolity, hoggishness--this revel of fools, and incredible
make-believe and general unsettledness, we call the _world_; a
soul-sight of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the
whole congeries of things, all history and time, and all events
however trivial, however momentous, like a leash’d dog in the hands
of the hunter.[561]
To discover this divine clue and be drawn by the unseen thread
into the orbit of things, to suffer the Me--the “human identity of
understanding, emotions, spirit”--to fuse with the Not Me--“the whole
of the material, objective universe and laws, with what is behind them
in time and space”--became therefore for Whitman the grand objective
of man’s life and effort. This for him was the sum and substance of
religion, which was no other than the binding of the individual back
upon the whole. “A vast similitude interlocks all.” And so from his
conception of social solidarity he went forward to the conception of
spiritual solidarity, and discovered religion to be the crown and
glory of the “American Idea.” Walt Whitman and America were to be the
prophets of religion. “Easily at home in a natural world of prodigious
brightness and scale, he ... saw ‘the most splendid race the sun ever
shone upon,’ and was urging the life of instinct and impulse. Love
was the key--taking form and in ‘Starting from Paumanok’ he asserted
his Love, Democracy, Religion--a new religion.”[562] His message was
purpose.
The soul,
Forever and forever--longer than soil is brown and solid--longer than
water ebbs and flows.
I will make the poems of materials, for I think they are to be the
most spiritual poems,
And I will make the poems of my body and of mortality,
For I think I shall then supply myself with the poems of my soul and
of immortality.
I will make a song for these States that no one State may under any
circumstances be subjected to another State,
* * * * *
I will sing the song of companionship,
* * * * *
I will write the evangel-poem of comrades and of love,
* * * * *
I am the credulous man of qualities, ages, races,
I advance from the people in their own spirit,
* * * * *
I, too, following many and follow’d by many, inaugurate a
religion, ...
* * * * *
Each is not for its own sake,
I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky are for religion’s
sake.
I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough,
None has ever yet adored or worship’d half enough,
None has begun to think how divine he himself is, and how certain the
future is.
* * * * *
I say that the real and permanent grandeur of these States must be
their religion,
Otherwise there is no real and permanent grandeur;
* * * * *
My comrade!
For you to share with me two greatnesses, and a third one rising
inclusive and more resplendent,
The greatness of Love and Democracy, and the greatness of
Religion.[563]
But this new religion of the mystical Whitman, in harmony with
post-transcendental thought, was deeply impregnated with the spirit of
science. He was in the very fullness of his powers when the conception
of evolution came to him and he greeted it gladly, weaving it into all
his thinking and discovering in it a confirmation of his idealistic
philosophy. It was the evolution of Herbert Spencer, it must be
remembered, that Whitman accepted--teleological, buoyantly optimistic,
dominated by the conception of progress, shot through with the spirit
of the Enlightenment; and such an evolution was a confirmation and not
a denial of his transcendental premises. It supplemented rather than
contradicted the tenets of his faith. Like Emerson as he saw the bounds
of the material universe slowly pushed back by science he discovered
amidst the constant change the presence of growth, development, the
natural passage from the simple to the complex; and like Theodore
Parker he felt that this slow unfolding was no other than the unfolding
of God, making Himself evident and unmistakable to man. Evolution was
God’s great plan. “The law over all, the law of laws, is the law of
successions,” he was persuaded; “for what is the present after all but
a growth out of the past?” But noble as is the evidence of God’s work
discoverable by science, the soul is not content to rest with such
evidence; it must seek out the reality behind the manifestation; and
for this work the poet alone is fitted. The poet must complete the work
of the scientist. The noble “Passage to India” is a lovely chant of
human progress, the adventurous soul conquering the earth; but it must
not pause there; it must seek God through the universe until it finds
Him, and “Nature and Man shall be disjoin’d and diffused no more,” and
“All these hearts as of fretted children shall be sooth’d.”
Bathe me O God in thee, mounting to thee,
I and my soul to range in range of thee.[564]
It was in this profoundly religious spirit that Whitman accepted
science, built it into his poetry, rested confidently upon it; and
it is this spirit that explains his formal statement in the “Song of
Myself.”
I accept Reality and dare not question it,
Materialism first and last imbuing.
Hurrah for positive science! long live exact demonstration!
Fetch stonecrop mixt with cedar and branches of lilac,
This is the lexicographer, this the chemist, this made a grammar
of the old cartouches,
These mariners put the ship through dangerous unknown seas,
This the geologist, this works with the scalpel, and this is
the mathematician.
Gentlemen, to you the first honors always!
Your facts are useful, and yet they are not my dwelling,
I but enter by them to an area of my dwelling.[565]
Equipped with such a philosophy and supported by such a faith Whitman
accepted the twin duties laid upon him: to make clear to America her
present failure in the great adventure--how far she had fallen short
hitherto of any adequate democratic reality; and to mark out afresh
the path to the Canaan of democratic hopes--reviving the early hopes of
the Enlightenment and drawing in lovelier colors the democratic Utopia
dreamed of for a hundred years. To be both critic and prophet--that
he conceived to be his mission, a mission that he was faithful to for
upwards of forty years. For the first duty he was admirably equipped.
No other knew this America so intimately or so broadly--had penetrated
so lovingly to the common heart and read so clearly its secret
hopes and fears. That America was not yet a democracy--was very far
indeed from a democracy--that it was a somewhat shoddy _bourgeois_
capitalistic society shot through with cant and hypocrisy and every
meanness, he saw with calm, searching eyes. No contemporary critic, not
Godkin, not Emerson, saw more clearly the unlovely reality or dealt
with it more scathingly, not only in _Leaves of Grass_ but especially