AMONG THE PROPHETS With the completion of the main body of his work, and before we pass to the details of his last years in Camden, a brief digression into wider fields may perhaps be permissible. For Whitman’s thought, though it is very consciously his, is interestingly related to that of the preceding century and of his own, and no study of him would be at all complete which left this fact out of consideration. Readers who prefer to follow the path of events will find it again in the next chapter. While it is difficult to imagine a greater contrast than that between the Essayist on Man and the Singer of Myself, they were at least agreed as to the proper subject for human study. Physically they were most dissimilar—Pope, a little, deformed, ivory-faced wit, all nerves and eyes; Whitman, a huge, high-complexioned, phlegmatic peasant-artisan. Between their thought lay the century of Rousseau, Goethe and Hegel, of Washington, Robespierre and Napoleon. And their mental contrast was as marked as their physical. It is clearly indicated in the formal character of their work: Pope’s, a mosaic of brilliant couplets; Whitman’s, a choral or symphonic movement. Wholly lacking in the intellectual dazzle of the Augustan wits, Whitman’s strength lay rather in those naturalistically romantic regions of the imaginative Just as the passion of high conviction returns to English politics with Burke, and to English religion with Wesley, so it finds expression once again in the rhythmical impulse of Lyrical Ballads and the Songs of Innocence. There is here a new feeling for beauty, a new sense of the emotional significance of Nature. With the return of that enthusiasm based upon conviction, which the sceptical Deism of Pope abhorred, there came a more elastic use of metre. For the movement of poetry should vary as the pulse varies under emotion. Passion now took the place of logic in the guidance of the rhythm of thought. And as the spirit of the poet lay open to the stars, his ear caught new and ever subtler rhythms, and became aware that every impelling motive for song has its own perfect and inalienable movement. His attention passed from current standards and patterns to those windy stellar melodies unheard by the town-bred Augustan ear. All this, with much more, is revealed in the work of the new poets, from Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley to Tennyson. When Whitman came, his spirit was aware of this newly apprehended canon of poetic form. At first, he tried the medium of rhymed verses; but his were without inspiration. When self-expression became imperative he abandoned them. For the poet, nothing can be more important than the emotional atmosphere which his verses create, for he It need hardly be said that there are rhythms which suggest and evoke gladness and exaltation; others which call forth melancholy; others which predispose to lascivious passions, and so forth: the thought is older than Plato. Whitman wished to convey to his readers all that I have attempted to describe in the foregoing pages; his own attitude towards life, that of a fearless, proud, abysmal, sympathetic, wholesome man. And he found no medium among those in current use which seemed to him effective for his purpose. He had to go back to the prophets of Israel, and the rhythm into which their message was put anew by the seventeenth century translators, to find a model. It was from them, and from a study of the movements of prose, but especially of speech, that he came to his own singular, and not inappropriate style. At the last definition, the appeal of Leaves of Grass is intended to be that of an intimate kind of speech. It would be interesting, in this connection, to compare Whitman’s manner with that of the other writers of his period who have most distressed the purists—Browning, Carlyle, Emerson and Meredith—but that field is too large for us to enter now. Addington Symonds once said He would—at least in his earlier years—have said with Plato, in his Laws, “The legislator and the poet are rivals, and the latter can only be tolerated if his words are in harmony with the laws of the State”. But over the last phrase he would have laughed, adding, In my Republic the citizens think lightly of the laws! Like Plato, he accused all the poets whom he loved best of an essential hostility to the Republic. Their whole attitude implied an aristocratic spirit, which discovered itself in their rhythms, and struck at the life of America. He would only admit such poets as are in harmony with the spirit of the Republic, and interpret the genius of America. It was for America, then, that he made his chants; chanting them, as he hoped, in such fashion that they might forever nerve new soldiers for the battle which he saw her destined to maintain through all the ages against the ancient tyrannies of the past. If one were to seek among modern writers for those whose genius is related to Whitman’s, one would, I suppose, name first Rousseau, with his moody self-consciousness, his great social enthusiasm, his religious fervour, and his passionate perception of beauty in Nature. But Whitman had almost nothing either of the morbid sentiment or dramatic skill of the French reformer, nor had he Byron’s theatrical and somewhat futile It is rather as a prophet than as a literary figure that we must compare him with his great contemporaries. On this side, he was obviously related to Millet, to Beethoven and to Wagner—but it seems simpler roughly to set him over against several men of his own craft who hold a European reputation—to Carlyle, Mazzini, Emerson, Morris, Browning, Tolstoi and Nietzsche. With Whitman, Carlyle For Mazzini, the word “duty” was not a scourge but a magician’s wand, because he believed. With Emerson, Browning’s belief that the immanent Divinity finds expression through passion, and is lost in all suppression of life; Browning astonished Carlyle by his confident cheerfulness. And his optimism was founded upon knowledge, or at least did not depend upon ignorance. Though he believed in the triumph of the divine But not as a battle between the body and the soul, or between vice and virtue: the conflict, for Browning as for Whitman, is ultimately between love as the inmost spirit of life, and all other virtues and vices whatsoever. Love alone “leaves completion in the soul,” and solves the enigmas of doubt. Browning’s conception of a Democracy, in which all men should “be equal in full-blown powers,” and God should cease to make great men, because the average man would have become great, was set forth in some of the earliest work of a genius as precocious in its development as that of his master Shelley. But it would be easy to exaggerate the relationship which I have indicated. For Browning was a cosmopolitan and delightful gentleman, who in his later years cultivated music and studied yellow parchments and the freaks of human nature, in a Venetian palace; while Whitman was sauntering through old age in the suburb of an American city, appearing by comparison uneducated, uncouth and provincial. Appearance is, however, deceptive, for the earth Walt smacks of is the autochthonous red soil of the creation of all things. Tolstoi, aristocrat as he is by birth and education, is yet a peasant in his physical and spiritual character; a Russian peasant, with the moujik’s almost Oriental stubbornness of resignation and passivity. Like Whitman, he is one of the people, and in some respects he is an incarnation of Russia, as Whitman was of America. But while there are many obvious relations between the two men, their contrast is the more striking. Tolstoi has the Oriental tendency towards pessimism and asceticism. He sees the body and spirit in irreconcilable conflict. And similarly he opposes forever pleasure and duty; so that his is a message of the endless sacrifice of self. An abyss of terror surrounds him, from which he can only escape by a life of resolute and loving self- There is a certain element of pessimism also, in the attitude of William Morris, as of Ruskin his master. But though he flings back the Golden Age into the thirteenth century, his gospel is really one of actual joy. When the citizen finds pleasure in his daily work, the State will prosper; such is his promise for the future, and his condemnation of the present. Carlyle urged men to work, in order to kill doubt, and silence the terrible questions; but Morris finds that the questions are really answered by work, if only it is done in the spirit of the artist, and in fellowship with others. Like Whitman, Morris was one who seemed to his friends almost terribly self-sufficing; he could stand alone, they thought. But strong as he seemed in his solitude, he was the poet of fellowship, of a fellowship which is man’s fulfilment and immortal life. Though Whitman’s view of that life was more philosophical, and his personality had a more mystical depth, the two men had much in common, especially in the aggressive and elemental masculinity of their character, and their superb joy and pride in themselves. It would be interesting to compare Whitman’s general position with that of Nietzsche; that most perplexing figure of young Germany in revolt from Hegel and all the past, from the restraint, system and conventions which threaten the liberty of the individual spirit. But Nietzsche is difficult to summarise; and time has not yet given us the perspective in which alone the general forms of his thought will become evident. It is clear, however, that he expresses that spirit of rebellion which was so marked a feature of the first Between Nietzsche’s “overman,” jealous of every tittle of his identity, and always a law unto himself, refusing to bow his neck to the virtues and vices of the “weaker brother”; and Whitman’s self-asserting Ego, there is the same striking resemblance. One can never omit the dogma of the sacredness of self-assertion, with the criticism of Christianity which it involves, from any statement of Whitman’s position. He evidently detested that plausible levelling argument, so potent for mischief to the race-life which it professes to guard—that one must be always considering the effects of example upon the foolish and perverse, and endeavouring to live down to their folly and perversity, instead of up to the level of true comradeship. Be yourself, say Whitman and Nietzsche, and do not waste your life trying to be what you fancy for the sake of other people you ought to be. Whitman’s doctrine of equality is again really not unlike Nietzsche’s doctrine of inequality; for it only asserts the equality of individuals because of the overman latent in each one; and is different enough from the undistinguishing equalitarianism of popular philosophy. But Whitman had the balancing qualities which Nietzsche lacked. As he said once to Mr. Pearsall Smith: “I am physically ballasted so strong with weightiest animality and appetites, or I should go off in a balloon”. In his case, self-assertion was not associated with mania; for it never snapped those ties of comradeship and love which keep men human, but became instead a bond for fuller and nobler relations with men and women. The comparison with Nietzsche suggests the limits of Whitman’s Hegelianism. For though he once declared that he “rated Hegel as Humanity’s chiefest teacher and the choicest loved physician of my mind and soul”; Perhaps the foregoing very rough and ready comparisons may have thrown some light on the outstanding features of Whitman’s personal message and influence. But there remains another, which I have already suggested, and to which for a moment we must return. Whitman was essentially a prophet-mystic, and while he derived nothing from most of the men with whom his thought is related, the indirect influence upon him of George Fox the Quaker is certain. Fox’s distinguishing quality was his intense personal reality; there are few more vivid figures on any page of history. This seems to be due to the fulness of life which he realised, and could focus in his actual consciousness. From this he did not derive “advanced views” but vital power. And vital power is equally, and perhaps in fuller measure, characteristic of Whitman, manifesting itself by various signs in his daily life, and in the phrases of his book. In Whitman, as in Fox, this was an attractive power of extraordinary force. Around Fox it created a Society of Friends; and one cannot doubt that sooner or later a world-wide Fellowship of Comrades will result from the life-work of Whitman. Fox’s “Friends”—though the meaning of the title may originally have been “Friends of the Truth”—were real friends; united in a new ideal of communion. They shared the highest experience in common; meeting for the purpose of entering together into “the power of the life”. And Whitman also realised that life at its highest is only revealed to comrades. His view of religion was even less formal than that of the early Quakers; but he, too, preferred to sit in silence with those he loved, realising that Divine power and purpose which was one in them. Quakerism has not unfairly been spoken of as a spiritual aristocracy; there seems to be something essentially exclusive about it. On the other hand, it is essentially democratic and would exclude none; but the methods necessary to its conception of truth do not appeal to the many. Similarly, the Fellowship of Whitman’s Comrades must be an aristocracy of overmen—if the words can be divested of all sinister association and read in their most literal sense. Whitman recognised that his inner teachings could only be accepted by the few, and for them he set them forth. But for the many also, he had a message. And though the actual comrades of Whitman must be able to rise to his breadth of view and depth of purpose, that purpose embraces the whole world. For the possibility of Comradeship is implicit in every soul; and there is none—no, not the most foolish or perverted or conventionally good—who is ultimately incapable of entering into it. The fellowship must be as essentially attractive as was the personality of Whitman himself; and if few should be chosen to be its members, yet all would be called. Once realised as the one end of all individual and social life, such a Comradeship would transform our institutions and theories whether of ethics, politics, education or religion. In a word, it would change life into a fine art. For it could be no Utopian theory, but the FOOTNOTES: |