Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
in his prose writings and in casual talk. Amongst scores of such
passages a single one must serve for illustration.
I say that our New World democracy, however great a success in
uplifting the masses out of their sloughs, in materialistic
development, products, and in a certain highly-deceptive
superficial popular intellectuality, is, so far, an almost complete
failure in its social aspects, and in really grand religious,
moral, literary, and esthetic results.... Shift and turn the
combinations of the statement as we may, the problem of the future
of America is in certain respects as dark as it is vast. Pride,
competition, segregation, vicious wilfulness, and license beyond
example, brood already upon us. Unwieldy and immense, who shall
hold in behemoth? who bridle leviathan? Flaunt it as we choose,
athwart and over the roads of our progress loom huge uncertainty,
and dreadful threatening gloom. It is useless to deny it: Democracy
grows rankly up the thickest, noxious, deadliest plants and
fruits of all--brings worse and worse invaders--needs newer,
larger, stronger, keener compensations and compellers. Our lands
embracing so much ... hold in the breast that flame also, capable
of consuming themselves, consuming us all.... Even today, amid
these whirls, incredible flippancy, and blind fury of parties,
infidelity, entire lack of first-rate captains and leaders,
added to the plentiful meanness and vulgarity of the ostensible
masses--that problem, the labor question, beginning to open like
a yawning gulf, rapidly widening every year--what prospect have
we? We sail a dangerous sea of seething currents, cross and
under-currents, vortices,--all so dark and untried.[566]
As a realist Whitman granted the worst charges of the critics of
democracy, but he probed deeper and brought other facts to light
that modified the equation. It was the difficult question the old
Federalists had posed and that Carlyle had lately revived--the
question, is not this meanness inseparable from democracy? is not
your people in fact a great beast, requiring the lash and the curb?
It was the crux of the long debate over democracy and to it Whitman
gave anxious and frequent consideration. In fighting the battle of
1790 over again, like Jefferson he rested his case on the native
integrity and measureless potentiality of the “bulk-people”--they are
the deep soil from which spring the abundant fruits and flowers of
civilization. Gentle-nurtured folk do not understand this--they do
not like the rank qualities of vital being. Matthew Arnold “always
gives you the notion that he hates to touch the dirt--the dirt is so
dirty! But everything comes out of the dirt--everything: everything
comes out of the people ... not university people, not F.F.V. people:
people, people, just people!” In the rude, vital, natural man is the
inexhaustible wellspring of good and evil; “He’s got it all ... not
only the cruel, beastly, hoggish, cheating, bedbug qualities, but
also the spiritual--the noble--the high-born”;[567] in “some ways” he
is a “devil of a fellow,” but he is not “all devil or even chiefly
devil.”[568] And because he is not chiefly devil such love and beauty
and justice and comradeship as there is in the world, such progress
in civilization as has been made hitherto, have been possible--how
otherwise? If he has journeyed thus far out of the primeval slime, what
bounds shall be set to his eventual journeyings? Why put out one’s eyes
with a mere handful of years?
So Whitman projected his democratic commonwealth far into the future;
he would not have us believe that it had been realized here in America.
Political democracy, the struggle for political rights that had engaged
America hitherto, was only negative, a necessary preliminary to the
ultimate reality. “I submit,” he said, “that the fruition of democracy,
on aught like a grand scale, resides altogether in the future,” and its
realization depends upon the use to which the people put their freedom.
If from it emerges a proud and self-conscious individualism--“the
quality of Being, in the object’s self, according to its own central
idea and purpose, and of growing therefrom and thereto--not criticism
by other standards, and adjustments thereto”--then democracy on a grand
scale will be possible and the self-reliant citizen will take his
place in a free creative society. The ideal of the growing man, and
the ideal of the perfect State--broadly social rather than narrowly
political--these were his twin ideals; and the tie that is to bind
men together in spontaneous solidarity is love. How characteristic
is his sketch of the perfect city, and how deeply saturated with the
Enlightenment! There is wanting only a physiocratic economics to make
it perfect.
A great city is that which has the greatest men and women,
* * * * *
Where the city stands with the brawniest breed of orators and bards,
Where the city stands that is belov’d by these, and loves them in
return and understands them.
Where no monuments exist to heroes but in the common words and deeds,
Where thrift is in its place, and prudence is in its place,
Where the men and women think lightly of the laws,
Where the slave ceases and the master of slaves ceases,
Where the populace rise at once against the never-ending audacity of
elected persons,
* * * * *
Where outside authority enters always after the precedence of inside
authority.
Where the citizen is always the head and ideal, and President, Mayor,
Governor and what not, are agents for pay,
Where children are taught to be laws to themselves, and to depend on
themselves.
Where equanimity is illustrated in affairs,
* * * * *
Where the city of faithfulest friends stands,
Where the city of the cleanliness of the sexes stands,
* * * * *
There the great city stands.[569]
Individualism, solidarity--on such strong bases he erected his ideal
democracy, and the heaven-reaching temple will be overlaid with the
rich arts and graces of a civilization worthy at last of the name. Such
was the Enlightenment as it came to flower in the passionate idealism
of Walt Whitman--a dream that was mocked and flouted and nullified
by the Drews and Fisks and Goulds--the “hoggish, cheating, bedbug
qualities” of a generation that scorned him for a beast. Even his stout
faith was shaken at times by the infidelities of the Gilded Age. He
was troubled by the gap that opened between the free individual and
the perfect State. “I seem to be reaching for a new politics--for a
new economy,” he confessed in 1888; “I don’t quite know what, but for
something.”[570] Although he protested, “The older I grow ... the more
I am confirmed in my optimism, my democracy,” he projected his hopes
farther into the future. He sympathized with the socialists but he
was not one of them. His revolutionary ardor abated and he preferred
in later years to call himself an evolutionist.[571] “Be radical--be
radical,” he said to Traubel, “be not too damned radical.”[572] With
his catholic sympathies that refused all bitterness he could not be a
partisan--“after the best the partisan will say something better will
be said by the man.”[573]
So in the twilight of the romantic revolution Whitman quietly
slipped away. The great hopes on which he fed have been belied by
after events--so his critics say;[574] as the great hopes of the
Enlightenment have been belied. Certainly in this welter of today, with
science become the drab and slut of war and industrialism, with sterile
money-slaves instead of men, Whitman’s expansive hopes seem grotesque
enough. Democracy may indeed be only a euphemism for the rulership of
fools. Yet in a time of huge infidelities, in the dun breakdown and
disintegration of all faiths, it is not wholly useless to recall the
large proportions of Walt Whitman, his tenderness, his heartiness, his
faith, his hope. There was in him no weak evasion, no sniveling over
the shards of the goodly vessel broken at the well, but even when “old,
alone, sick, weak-down, melted-worn with sweat,” a free and joyous
acceptance of life.
Thanks in old age--thanks ere I go,
For health, the midday sun, the impalpable air--for life, mere life,
* * * * *
For all my days--not those of peace alone--the days of war the same,
For gentle words, caresses, gifts from foreign lands.
For shelter, wine and meat--for sweet appreciation,
* * * * *
For beings, groups, love, deeds, words, books--for colors, forms,
For all the brave strong men--devoted, hardy, men--who’ve forward
sprung in freedom’s help, all years, all lands,
For braver, stronger, more devoted men--(a special laurel ere I go,
to life’s war’s chosen ones,
The cannoneers of song and thought--the great artillerists--the
foremost leaders, captains of the soul:)
As soldier from an ended war return’d--As traveler out of myriads,
to the long procession retrospective.
Thanks--joyful thanks!--a soldier’s, traveler’s thanks.[575]
A great figure, the greatest assuredly in our literature--yet perhaps
only a great child--summing up and transmitting into poetry all
the passionate aspirations of an America that had passed through
the romantic revolution, the poet of selfhood and the prophet of
brotherhood, the virile man and the catholic lover--how shall Walt
Whitman become dumb or cease to speak to men unless the children of
those who are now half-devil and half-God shall prove to be wholly
devil--or wholly moron?
III • The Backwash of the Frontier--Mark Twain
As Whitman contemplated the feeble literature purveyed by the
worshipers of the genteel he asked with some irritation: “What
is the reason in our time, our lands, that we see no fresh local
courage, sanity, of our own--the Mississippi, stalwart Western men,
real mental and physical facts, Southerners, etc., in the body of
our literature?” That was in 1870 and the answer was at hand in the
person of Mark Twain. Here at last was an authentic American--a native
writer thinking his own thoughts, using his own eyes, speaking his own
dialect--everything European fallen away, the last shred of feudal
culture gone, local and western yet continental. A strange and uncouth
figure in the eyes of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, yet the very embodiment of
the turbulent frontier that had long been shaping a native psychology,
and that now at last was turning eastward to Americanize the Atlantic
seaboard. Yet in spite of a rare vein of humor, the outcropping of
a rich and whimsical imagination, he made his way slowly to polite
recognition. For years he was regarded by authoritative critics as
little more than a buffoon, an extravagant fun-maker with a broad
streak of western coarseness; and it was not till near the end, when
he had long been an international figure, that the culture of the
East accepted him. It was Howells then who pronounced him “the sole,
the incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature ... the very marrow of
Americanism.”
Just as that judgment was at the time, it needs qualification
now. The marrow of Americanism is not the same substance from
generation to generation. The outer environing life of a people
works itself slowly into the bones and brings about subtle changes.
Mark Twain was indubitably an embodiment of three centuries of
American experience--frontier centuries, decentralized, leveling,
individualistic; but the Americanism that issued from them came to