The work of Whitman stands alone in the literature of the world. Both in substance and construction he ignored all precedents and dared to be himself. All the rules of form and taste must be unlearned before the world can accept his style as true literary art. Still it may be that Walt Whitman was a poet, and that sometime the world will look back and marvel at the mechanical precision and glittering polish that confines and emasculates for the sake of a purely artificial form.

Measured by the common rules, Whitman’s work is neither poetry nor prose; it is remotely allied to the wild chanting of the primitive bards, who looked about at the fresh new marvels of earth and sky and sea, and unhampered by forms and rules and customs, sang of the miracles of the universe and the mysteries of life. Whitman seems one of those old bards, fresh from the hand of nature, young with the first creation, the newest handwork of the great Master, untaught in any schools, unfettered by any of the myriad chords, which time is ever weaving about the brains and hearts and consciences of men as the world grows gray; a primitive bard of nature, born by some chance or accident in this old, tired, worn-out world, dropped into this Nineteenth century with its machines and conventions, its artificial life, its unnatural morals and its fettered limbs. He alone in all the ages seems to have been specially given to the world, still fresh with the imprint of the Creator’s hand, and standing amid all our false conventions, natural, simple, true, “naked and not ashamed.” To the world with its crowded cities, its diseased bodies, its unnatural desires, its narrow religion, and its false morals, he comes like a breeze of the morning, from the mountains or the sea. Aye, like a breath of that great, creative life, which touched the fresh world and brought forth the green grass, the sparkling waters and the growing, beauteous, natural earth.

No one ever fell in love with Whitman’s work for its literary art, but his work must live or die because of his philosophy of life and the material he chose from which to weave his songs. It is in his whole point of view that Walt Whitman stands so much alone. No one else has ever looked on the universe and life as this man did. If religion means devotion to that great unseen power that is ever manifest in all of nature’s works, then Walt Whitman was the most reverent soul that ever lived. This man alone of all the world dared defend the Creator in every part and parcel of his work. The high mountains, the deep valleys, the broad plains and the wide seas; the feelings, the desires, and the passions of man; all forms of life and being that exist upon the earth, were to him but several manifestations of a great creative power that formed them all alike, made each one needful to the whole, and every portion sacred through its Master’s stamp.

Whitman’s philosophy knew no evil and no wrong. The fact of existence proved the right of existence; in the great workshop of nature every tool had its special use and its rightful place.

The imperfections of the world come from the narrow visions of men. If the perspective is right, the universe is right. From the narrow valley the house may look old and worn, the fences decayed, the fields barren, the woods scraggy and the cliff ragged and bare; but climb to the only place where either life or landscape can be rightly seen, the mountain top, and look once more. The hills, the valley, the stream, the woods, and the farms have melted and blended into one harmonious whole, and every imperfection has been swept away. The universe is filled with myriad worlds as important as our own, each one a tiny floating speck in an endless sea of space—each whirling, turning, moving on and on and on, through the countless ages, past and yet to come. No one can tell the purpose of their tireless, endless flight through space; but still we know that each has an orbit of its own, and every world is related to the rest, and every grain of sand and the weakest, feeblest spark of power has its needful place in the balance of the whole. So all of good, and all of bad, and all of life, and all of death, and all of all, has the right to be and must needs be. Walt Whitman did not even know how to divide the evil from the good, but he sang them both alike.

The universe can make no mistakes, every particle of energy that has permeated the world since time began, has been working toward a completer system and a more harmonious whole. There is a soul of truth in error; there is a soul of good in evil. From the trials and sorrows and disappointments of life, even from its bitterness and doubt and sin, are often born the holiest desires, the sincerest endeavors and the most righteous deeds.

This is the old, old philosophy, ever forgotten, yet ever present. It is sure in the world of mechanics, it is equally true in the world of morals and of life. Nothing is lost; the force that once was heat is transformed to light; the flood that destroyed the grain, comes at last to turn the miller’s wheel. What we call sin and evil make the experiences of life and go to the upbuilding of character and the development of man. We can know only what we have felt, and however much we try to deceive others, we can tell only of the experiences we ourselves have had. The poorest life is the one that has no tale to tell. In the doubts and darkness of life, in the turbulence of mind and the anguish of the soul, it is most consoling to feel that resignation and confidence which comes from a realization that all is right and that you are master of yourself and at peace with God and man. This calm, optimistic, self-reliant philosophy is ever present with its consoling power in all Walt Whitman’s work.

This is not the boasting of the ignorant egotist who vaunts himself above his fellow man, but the calm, conscious serenity of a great soul, who has learned the patient philosophy of life.

There is an egotism that is cheap and vulgar and born of ignorance alone. There is an egotism that comes from the knowledge that after all what we are depends not upon the estimate of the world, but upon the integrity and character of ourselves. This consciousness of individual worth brings that peace of soul, “which the world can neither give nor take away.”

Happy is the man that has climbed to the height on which Walt Whitman stood. Happy is he that has mastered the haste and impatience of youth, and is content to bide his time. Happy is he that has so far solved the problem of life as to know that reward is not received from others and cannot be withheld by others, but can be given only by ourselves. Such a man has struck the subtle harmony which unites his soul with the universal life and he knows that no one but himself can cut the cord.

To a great mass of men and women, Walt Whitman is known almost alone by that portion of his work called “Children of Adam.” These poems have called forth the fiercest opposition and the bitterest denunciation, and if the common judgment is correct, they are obscene and vile. While this portion of his book is by far the smallest part, still, before the court of public opinion, he must stand or fall upon these lines. In one sense public opinion is right, for unless these stanzas can be defended, his point of view is wrong, and Walt Whitman’s work will die. We need not accept all he did, or give unstinted praise to all his work, but his scheme is consistent in every portion of his thought, and his point of view will determine the place he shall fill in art and life.

It is in this work that the courage and personality of Whitman towers so high above every other man that ever wrote. It is easy for the essayist to speak in general terms and glittering phrases in defense of Whitman’s work. His defenders have been many, but he alone has had the courage to speak.

It is not difficult to insist that his “A Woman Waits for Me” is a tremendous work, and as pure as nature’s generating power. Still perhaps few would dare to read it aloud in an assembly of men and women. If Whitman is right, the world is wrong. This poem, and others of its like, in plain words deals of the deepest, strongest, most persistent feelings that move the sentient world. In proportion as they are deeper and stronger than any other, they should the more be the subject of thought and art. And still ages of established convention have made the world pretend ignorance until no one dares defend his right to life but this brave and simple man.

In both England and America, narrow interpretations of morality have almost stifled art. As remarked by a leading novelist—“All our literature is addressed to the young school girl.” If it will not pass muster before her eyes, it has no right to live, and almost no English or American author has been great enough to rise above these narrow conventions and write the natural and true. The artists of continental Europe have been less fettered and have taken us over a broader range and a wider field. Still while these authors have told more of life, they have treated these tremendous subjects by drawing the curtain only a little way aside, and giving us a curious, perverted, half stolen look, as if they knew that the picture was unholy and therefore tempting to the gaze. But Walt Whitman approached the human body and the mysteries of life from an entirely different view.

If Walt Whitman could have drawn the veil from the universe and shown us the living God in all his majesty and power, he would have approached his throne with no greater reverence than when he stripped the human body and pointed to its every part fresh and sacred from its Maker’s hand.

No true system of life and morals will exist until the holiest feelings and most potent and eternal power is openly recognized and discussed with neither jest nor shame.

Walt Whitman was the great bard of democracy and equality; not simply the vulgar democracy of political rights and promiscuous familiarity, but the deep, broad, fundamental democracy that looks at all of nature and feels the unity and kinship that makes the universe a whole.

To Walt Whitman there could be no thought of class or caste. Each one held his certificate of birth from the same infinite power that, through all the ages and all the false and criminal distinctions of man, has yet decreed that all shall enter helpless and naked through the same gateway of birth, and each alike must go back to the fundamental mother, shorn of every distinction that man in his vain-glorious pride has sought to make. Whitman placed the works of nature above the works of man. He had no faith in those laws and institutions which the world has ever made to defraud, and enslave, and deny the common brotherhood of all. He believed that every child that came upon the earth was legitimate, and had an equal right to land, and sea, and air, and all that nature made, and all that nature gave.

Let this stanza speak to our conscience face to face—is it true or false? Can any but a blasphemer deny the divine right of every man upon the earth? And yet if this simple stanza is true, every law book should be burned and every court abolished and natural justice, unfettered and undenied, should be enthroned above the forms and conventions and laws, which, each and all, deny the integrity of the soul and the equal rights of man.

Through all the injustice and inequality of the world, the vision of democracy has still prevailed and ever must prevail as long as nature brings forth and takes back the master and the slave alike. But the aspiration for democracy is not always high and noble. It is easy to demand for ourselves the same rights enjoyed by our fellow men, but Whitman’s democracy was on a higher plane.

These lines breathe the spirit of true humanity, the spirit that will one day remove all barriers and restrictions, and liberate the high and low alike. For nothing is truer in life or more inevitable in the economy of nature than this sage thought:

It is a sad mistake to believe that injustice and wrong can injure only the poor and the weak. Every mean word and narrow thought and selfish act degrades the aggressor, leaves its mark upon his soul and its penalty in his life. So, too, no good effort is really lost, however it may seem to be. The kind word may be spoken to the deaf, the righteous effort be wrongly directed, the alms unworthily bestowed, but the heart that feels and the soul that tries has grown greater by the act.

Not alone in his theory of personal equality was Walt Whitman a democrat in the highest meaning of the term, but he distrusted the ease and effeminacy of modern life; he doubted and feared the polish and super-sensitiveness that precedes decay; he had no faith in hot-house plants, in pampered life, in luxury and repose. He believed in rugged, primeval nature, in the rocks and hills, the rivers and the pines; he loved the dumb and patient brute, and believed in stalwart men and strong women; in sunlight, rain and air.

Walt Whitman’s work is not of the old, time-worn sort. When he speaks of love it is the love of life, the love of reality, the strong love of men, the intense love of women, the honest love that nature made, the love that is; not the unhealthy, immoral, false, impossible love told in erotic prose and more erotic verse, and given to young girls and boys as the truth, to poison and corrupt with its false and vicious views of life.

But he sings of the common things, the democracy of every day; for it is the small affairs that make up life, and its true philosophy is to see the beauty and greatness and relation of these little things and not to pine for the seemingly momentous events, which can rarely come. The Alexanders, the CÆsars and the Napoleons are scattered only here and there in the great sea of human existence, and yet every life measured by just standards may be as great as these; and the soul that is conscious of its own integrity knows its own worth regardless of the world.

Walt Whitman felt the music of the hammer and the axe as he felt the harmony of the symphonies of Beethoven, and he understood the art of the plough-boy in the field as well as the glorious creations of Millet.

Walt Whitman’s democracy did not end with sex. Man is not always a logical animal. Most of the practical democracy of the world has stopped with men, and generally with white men at that. The political equality of woman has only barely been considered; the still more important question, her economic independence, is yet a far-off dream. But Walt Whitman knew no limit to equality. With him equality meant equality. It could mean nothing else.

Probably Walt Whitman would not have raised his hat to a woman on the street, nor given her his seat in the car, simply because she was a woman. Both these may be well enough, but they grow from false ideas of women and of course through these false ideas women lose the most. Injustice and oppression can never be made up by chivalry and pretended courtesy. And the evil always is and must be the false relation which these create. Men expect to pay women for their political and economic freedom in theater tickets and by taking off their hats in public, and in the end women become willing to receive this paltry and debasing bribe.

“The Open Road,” one of Whitman’s masterpieces, is full of wholesome inclusive democracy.

But Walt Whitman’s democracy was more inclusive still. It is almost becoming the fad to forgive the evil in others and to insist that, after all, their good qualities give them the right to kinship with ourselves, but this is only one side of true democracy. The felon is my brother, not alone because he has every element of good that I so well recognize in myself, but because I have every element of evil that I see in him. Walt Whitman was wise enough to see the feelings and passions that make others sin, and he was just enough and great enough to recognize all these feelings in himself.

These lines are not a burst of poetic feeling, they are the sincere utterances of a brave philosopher and poet, who tells the truth about himself and about you and me. Let us be honest about sin. How do you and I differ from the murderer on the gallows, the prostitute in the street or the burglar in the jail? How wide a breach is there between coveting the house or home or seal skin coat of your neighbor and taking it if you can? How great a difference between making a sharp trade with your neighbor, getting more from him than you give to him, and taking outright what he has? Yet one is business, the other larceny. What is the distance between hating your neighbor, and wishing him dead: how great a chasm between feeling relief at his death, and killing him yourself? So far as the man is concerned, it is not the act that is evil, but the heart that is evil. There is no difference between the committed and the uncommitted crime. Every feeling that makes every sort of crime is in the heart of each and every one. Nature has made the blood of some of us a little cooler, and has developed caution a little more, or fate has made the temptation a trifle less, and thus we have escaped,—that is, managed to conceal the real passion that boils and surges in our hearts. Until this is dead, evil is in our souls. Away with all this talk of superiority and differences. It is cant—pure, simple cant.

Has man the right to be less kind than nature is? Have we the right by word or deed to pass judgment on our fellow man? Can we not learn of love and charity and hope from the sun, the rain, the generous earth, and the pulsing, growing spring? Hear Walt Whitman’s word to a common prostitute:

Neither was it the magnanimous soul of Whitman that was charitable and kind, but it was the truthful, honest man who saw his own goodness in the woman; and her sin, which after all was only an excess of kindness, in himself.

The regenerated world will be built upon the democracy Walt Whitman taught. It will know neither rich nor poor; neither high nor low; neither good nor bad; neither right nor wrong; but

Walt Whitman was always and at all times an optimist. He never struck a despairing note or voiced a doubting strain. His hope was not anchored in blind faith or narrow creed. His optimism was not that of the cowardly fanatic who stubbornly shuts his eyes to avoid an unpleasant view. He looked abroad at all the world and called it good.

Optimism and pessimism in their last analysis are questions of temperament. They depend upon the eye that looks out, not upon the object that it sees. The pessimist points to the sunset, casting its lengthening shadows on the earth, and tells of the night that is coming on; the optimist shows us the rosy dawn, the golden promise of a glorious day. The pessimist tells of winter, whose icy breath chills and deadens all the world; the optimist points to springtime with its ever recurring miracle of light and life. Is the pessimist right or is the optimist right—does the night precede the day, or the day precede the night? After all, are our calendars wrong—does the winter with its white shroud and cold face mark the ending of the year, or does the springtime with its budding life and its resurrecting power awaken the dead earth to joyous, pulsing life again?

Above the view of the optimist, who sees the morning and the spring, and the pessimist, who sees the evening and the closing year, stand a few serene souls, who look on both with clear eye and tranquil mind, and declare that all is good. The morning is right and the evening is right. It is beautiful to pass through the joyous gates of birth; it is good to be clasped in the peaceful arms of death. Rare Walt Whitman at thirty-seven, full of health and vigor and strength, with the world before him, and conscious of his genius and his power, sings in a burst of optimism:

Again at seventy, looking back on a life well spent, conscious that the last few sands are running out, a confirmed invalid with palsied limbs and failing strength, looking death squarely in the face and just before him; with the same sweet smile, the same lovely nature, the same all-embracing philosophy, sings once again his optimistic song:

It must be that somewhere is a serene height where life triumphs over death. It must be that nature does not jar, and that the close of a lovely life is really as peaceful and as beautiful as the decline of a perfect day; that each day rightly lived and every year well spent, must bring the pilgrim more in harmony with his journey drawing to a close.

The world has ever shuddered at death—has stubbornly closed its eyes and refused to look at the great fact that nature places all about our path; has never tried to look in its face, to take its hand, to think of its peaceful, forgiving, soothing touch; has ever called it enemy and never thought to caress it as a friend. Walt Whitman was wiser than the rest. His philosophy made him know that death was equally good, whether the opening gateway to a freer, fuller life, or a restful couch for a weary soul.

Whitman had solved the eternal riddle; he had conquered death; he looked at her pale form and saluted her as he would welcome a new birth. No bard ever sang a more glorious hymn than Walt Whitman sang to death.

Whitman in his wheel chair, physically shattered and broken, but with a mind strong and serene, and at peace with all the world, waiting for the sun to set, is a lesson in optimism better than all the sermons ever preached. Without faith in any form of religion that the world has ever known, he had brought his life so in harmony with nature that he felt every beat of the great, universal heart, and with the confidence of certain knowledge he looked upon the fading earth and caroled a song as he sailed forth on that great unknown sea, which is hidden in perpetual night, from all but the few great souls, whose wisdom and insight have given them the confidence and trust of a little child.

Conscious of the integrity of his purpose, and the inherent righteousness of his life, moved and upheld by his broad philosophy and his patient, trustful soul, with no false modesty and with the same manly egoism that made him what he was—the kindest, gentlest, justest, broadest, manliest man—Walt Whitman asked the reward his life had earned.

When man has grown simpler and saner and truer—when the fever of civilization has been subdued and the pestilence been cured; when man shall no longer deny and revile the universal mother who gave him birth, then Walt Whitman’s day will come. In the clear light of that regenerated time, when the world looks back to the doubt and mist and confusion of to-day, Walt Whitman will stand alone, the greatest, truest, noblest prophet of the age, a man untainted by artificial life and unmoved by the false standards of his time. In a sodden, commercial, money-getting age, he enjoyed all the beauty of the earth without the vulgar lust to own. In a world of privilege and caste, he felt and taught the brotherhood of man and the kinship of all living things. In an age of false modesty and perverted thought, he sang the sanctity of the body with the divinity of the soul. Against the agnostic and the Christian too, he defended every part and portion of the faultless work of the creative power. Above the doleful, doubting voice of men, through the dreariest day and darkest night, in the raging of the storm and the madness of the waves, his strong, optimistic, reassuring note was ever heard above the rest, proclaiming to the universe that all is well. He saw that in a wise economy and a great broad way, that the false was true, the evil good, the wrong was right, and that over all the universe, pervading all its teeming life, a power omnipotent, beneficent and wise, was working to uplift, conserve and purify the whole. The poor, the weak, the suffering, the outcast, the felon, all knew him for their comrade and their friend. His great, inclusive, universal heart left no soul outside, but all alike he knew, the life of all he felt, and one and all he loved. In his vocabulary were no words of bitterness and hate, and in his philosophy no right to censure or to blame. In his every deed and thought he seemed to say:

As the shadows lengthen and the daylight wanes—as the hair whitens and the passions cool, more and more do we learn that love is the true philosophy of life; more and more do we revise the sterner judgments of our earlier years; more and more do we see that pity should take the place of blame, forgiveness of punishment, charity of justice, and hatred be replaced by love. When old familiar faces awake the memories of bygone days, often and often again do we fear that our judgments were cruel and unjust, but every deed of mercy and every act of charity and every thought of pity is like the balm of Gilead to our souls. We may none of us be wise or great, fortune may elude us and fame may never come; but however poor or weak or humble, we yet may inscribe our names in the fairest, brightest book,—the book of love, and on its sacred pages, earned by the glorious truths he taught, by his infinite, ever present love of all, upon the foremost line will be inscribed Walt Whitman’s name.