3:13/ 
 
 CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 GIFT OF 
 R. Falkenan 
 
 UNDERGRADUATE LIBRARY 
 
Cornell University Library 
 
 PS3231.S98 
 
 Walt Whitman; a study, by John Addington S 
 
 3 1924 014 247 385 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tiiis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924014247385 
 
Walt Whitman 
 
 A STUDY 
 
 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 
 
 fflTH TORTRAIT MND FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 
 
 LONDON 
 
 
 JOH 
 
 N C. NIMMO 
 
 H 
 
 KING WILLIAM STREET, STRAND 
 
 
 
 MDCCCXCIII 
 
 
 
 Pc 
 
 
 \ 
 
 ';,^'' 
 
 ^v 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 NOTICE OF WALT WHI TMAN'S LIFE 
 
 BOKN in 1819 on Long Island — ^His ancestry — Life in boyhood 
 at Brooklyn — Teaching school and journalism — Learns the 
 printing trade — Youth and early manhood in New York — 
 Descriptions of his personal appearance and qualities — 
 Eoamings through the Southern and Western States — 
 Speculates in building — Forms the first conception of 
 " Leaves of Grass " — Experiments in style — First edition 
 of 1855 — Its reception — Emerson, Thoreau, Lincoln — Walt 
 adheres to his original plan — The Secession War — Hospital 
 work — Severe illness in 1864 — Paralysis in 1873— "Drum 
 Taps " and " Democratic Vistas" — Whitman and Secretary 
 Harlan — Whitman in the Attorney-General's office — His 
 chronic bad health, owing to the stress of hospital-work, 
 lays him up — Poverty — "Specimen Days" — Their value for 
 the understanding of his character — Protracted invalidism 
 at Camden, N.J. — Growth of his fame as writer — Devoted 
 friends — Death in 1892 . , . xi 
 
 STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 I 
 Difficulty of dealing with '.Whitman's work by any purely 
 critical method — Controversies aroused by " Leaves of 
 Grass " — The man and his personality — Leadership of a 
 cause — Originality and largeness of scale— Impossibility 
 of reducing his doctrine to a system — The main points of 
 his creed ..... 
 
vui TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 II 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Religion — God immanent in the universe — All faith and dogmas 
 are provisional, relative in value — Analysis of the poem 
 " Chanting the Square Deific " — Unrestricted faith and 
 imperturbable optimism — In vfhat way was Whitman a 
 Christian? — His religion corresponds to the principles of 
 modern science — The Cosmic Enthusiasm — Its importance 
 for the individual . 13 
 
 III 
 
 Personality or Self — The meaning of egotism for Whitman — 
 Intimate connection between man and nature — Paramount 
 importance of a sound and self-reliant personality — AU 
 things exist for the individual — Body and soul' — The ideal 
 of athletic selfhood . . 36 
 
 IV 
 
 ex-Love — Amativeness and Adhesiveness — Love of women, love 
 of comrades — Whitman's treatment of [fhe normal sexual 
 emotions — His relation to science — The poet's touch on 
 scientific truths — Breadth of view — Primitive conception 
 of sexuality and marriage — Misconceptions to which his 
 doctrines have been exposed 54 
 
 The Love of comrades — " Calamus " — The ideal of a friendship, 
 fervid, passionate, pure — Novelty of this conception — 
 Liability to misconstruction — Question whether a new type 
 of chivalry be not involved in the doctrine of "Calamus " 
 — Political importance of comradeship — Speculations on the 
 ground-stufi of " Calamus " -67 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS xi 
 
 VI 
 
 Democracy — The word Mi-Masse — Equality of human beings- 
 Miracles are all around us in the common world — Where- 
 ever and whoever^Heroism in daily life no less than in 
 ancient fable or religious myth — Democracy under the 
 aspect of a new creed — Questions regarding Democratic 
 Art — Extension of the spheres of poetry and plastic beauty 
 — ^Middle-class prejudices and pettinesses — The advent of 
 the people — Critique of culture — America and Europe — 
 Whitman's firm belief in Democracy— The " Divine Average ' ' 
 — His attitude toward the past . . . 8& 
 
 VII 
 
 Whitman's start in literature — Attempts to create a new style — 
 Analysis of the first preface to " Leaves of Grass " (1855) 
 — Qualities, intellectual and moral, demanded from the 
 democratic bard . .125 
 
 VIII-IX 
 Summary of Whitman's description of the poet — How far did he 
 realise his own ideal ? — Weak points in his method — His 
 permanently substantial qualities — Question whether his 
 writings are to be called poetry — Passages proving his 
 high rank as a creative artist . .... 139. 
 
 Beturn to the diflBculty of criticising Whitman — Allusive and 
 metaphorical ways of presenting him— The main thing is 
 to make people read him — Statement by the author of 
 this study of what Whitman did for himself . . 154 
 
SHORT NOTICE OF THE LIFE OF 
 WALT WHITMAN 
 
 Walt Whitman was born in the year 1819, at 
 West Hills, on Long Island, New York State. 
 He was the second of six sons and two daughters 
 children of Walter Whitman and his wife, Louisa 
 Van Velsor. The 'earliest known ancestor of the 
 Whitman family was Abijah, born in England 
 about 1560. His son, Zechariah, emigrated to 
 Connecticut in the first half of the seventeenth 
 century, and his grandson, Joseph, settled on 
 Long Island. The Whitmans were probably 
 yeomen in the old country, for I find no arms 
 recorded under their name. The poet's mother 
 claimed descent from one of the old Dutch 
 families of New York. 
 
 " The Whitmans," writes Dr. Bucke, " were, 
 and ai'e still, a solid, tall, strong-framed, long- 
 lived race of men, moderate of speech, friendly, 
 fond of their land and of horses and cattle, 
 
xii SHORT NOTICE OF THE 
 
 sluggish in their passions, but fearful when once 
 started." The Van Velsors were also farmers, 
 occupied for the most part with horse-breeding. 
 Walt inherited on both sides a sound constitu- 
 tion, untainted blood, comeliness of person, well- 
 balanced emotions, and excellent moral principles. 
 
 Long Island, or Panmanok, as Walt loved 
 to call it, using its ancient Indian name, is 
 about a hundred miles in length, and has been 
 described in these words : " Shaped like a fish, 
 plenty of sea- shore, the horizon boundless, the air 
 fresh and healthy, the numerous bays and creeks 
 swarming with aquatic birds, the south-side mea- 
 dows covered with salt hay, the soil generally 
 tough, but affording numberless springs of the 
 sweetest water in the world." 
 
 Whitman's " Leaves of Grass " are saturated 
 through and through with the inspirations and 
 associations of his breezy birthplace. Yet the 
 greater portion of his early boyhood was spent at 
 Brooklyn, whither his father, a carpenter by trade, 
 removed. He went to school until the age of 
 thirteen, and was then sent to learn printing. It 
 appears, however, that Walt paid frequent visits 
 to his relatives upon the Island. As early as 
 
LIFE OF WALT WHITMAN xiii 
 
 sixteen, or thereabouts, he tramped the country, 
 " teaching school," and began about this time to 
 write for newspapers and magazines. In 1839-40 
 he edited a weekly journal called the Long 
 Islander, at Huntingdon. Then he settled down 
 in New York to the work of a compositor, com- 
 bining this with journalism and public speaking. 
 
 The next period of fifteen years was decisive 
 for his character as man of genius and citizen. 
 He absorbed the whole life of New York and 
 Brooklyn into his own nature, exploring every 
 quarter of the huge city, becoming acquainted 
 with all trades, consorting familiarly with all 
 classes and sorts of people. The enormous variety 
 of knowledge, the broad sympathies, the just per- 
 ception of relative values in life, and the serene 
 wisdom which distinguish " Leaves of Grass," 
 were gained at this time. It may be well, before 
 continuing this biographic sketch, to introduce 
 here some descriptions of the man and his 
 appearance, the impressions he made on friends 
 and strangers, which have been preserved for us 
 by those who knew him. 
 
 " Walt Whitman had a small printing-office 
 and book-store in Myrtle Avenue, Brooklyn, 
 
xiv SHORT NOTICE OF THE 
 
 where after his return from the South he started 
 the Freeman newspaper, first as weekly, then as 
 daily, and continued it a year or so. The super- 
 ficial opinion about him was that he was some- 
 what of an idler, ' a loafer,' but not in a bad 
 sense. He always earned his own living. I 
 thought him a very natural person. He wore 
 plain, cheap clothes, which were always particu- 
 larly clean. Everybody knew him, every one 
 almost liked him. We all of us (referring to the 
 other members of his family, brothers, sisters, 
 father and mother), long before he published 
 'Leaves of Grass,' looked upon him as a man 
 who was to make a mark in the world. He was 
 always a good listener, the best I ever knew — 
 of late years, I think, he talks somewhat more — 
 in those early years (1849-54) he talked very 
 little indeed. When he did talk his conversation 
 Was remarkably pointed, attractive, and clear. 
 When ' Leaves of Grass ' first appeared I 
 thought it a great work, but that the man was 
 greater than the book. His singular coolness was 
 an especial feature. I have never seen him 
 excited in the least degree : never heard him 
 swear but once. He was quite grey at thirty. 
 
LIFE OF WALT WHITMAN xv 
 
 He had a look of age in his youth, as he has now 
 a look of youth in his age." 
 
 " Walt's appearance used to attract great 
 attention from the passengers when he came on 
 board the boat. He was quite six feet in height 
 with the frame of a gladiator, a flowing grey beard 
 mingled with the hairs on his broad, slightly 
 bared chest. In his well-laundried checked shirt- 
 sleeves, with trousers frequently pushed into his 
 boot-legs, his fine head covered with an immense 
 slouch black or light felt hat, he would walk 
 about with a naturally majestic stride, a massive 
 model of ease and independence. I hardly think 
 his style of dress in those days was meant to be 
 eccentric ; he was very antagonistic to all show or 
 sham, and I fancy he merely attired himself in 
 what was handy, clean, economical, and comfort- 
 able. His marked appearance, however, obtained 
 for him a variety of callings in the minds of 
 passengers who did not know him. ' Is he a 
 retired sea captain ? ' some would ask ; ' an actor ? 
 a military ofiicer ? a clergyman ? Had he been a 
 smuggler, or in the slave trade ? ' To amuse 
 Walt I frequently repeated these odd speculations 
 upon him. He laughed until the tears ran when 
 
xvi SHORT NOTICE OF THE 
 
 I once told him that a very confidential observer 
 had assured me he was crazy ! " 
 
 " On Pennsylvania Avenue or Seventh or Four- 
 teenth Street, or perhaps of a Sunday along the 
 suburban road towards Rock Creek, or across on 
 Arlington Heights, or up the shores of the 
 Potomac, you will meet moving along at a firm 
 but moderate pace, a robust figure, six feet high, 
 costumed in blue or grey, with drab hat, broad 
 shirt collar, grey- white beard, full and curly, with 
 face like a red apple, blue eyes, and a look of 
 animal health more indicative of hunting or boat- 
 ing than the department office or author's desk. 
 Indeed, the subject of our item, in his verse, his 
 manners, and even in his philosophy, evidently 
 draws from, and has reference to, the influences 
 of sea and sky, and woods and prairies, with their 
 laws, and man in his relations to them, while 
 neither the conventional parlour nor library has 
 cast its spells upon him." 
 
 " Walt Whitman's dress was always extremely 
 plain. He usually wore in pleasant weather a 
 light-grey suit of good woollen cloth. The only 
 thing peculiar about his dress was that he had 
 no necktie at any time, and always wore shirts 
 
LIFE OF WALT WHITMAN xvii 
 
 with very large turn-down collars, the button at 
 the neck some five or six inches lower than usual, 
 so that the throat and upper part of the breast 
 were exposed. In all other respects he dressed 
 in a substantial, neat, plain, common way. 
 Everything he wore, and everything about him, 
 was always scrupulously clean. His clothes might 
 (and often did) show signs of wear, or they might 
 be torn or have holes worn in them ; but they 
 never looked soiled. Indeed, an exquisite aroma 
 of cleanliness has always been one of the special 
 features of the man ; it has always belonged to 
 his clothes, his breath, his whole body, his eating 
 and drinking, his conversation, and no one could 
 know him for an hour without seeing that it 
 penetrated his mind and life, and was in fact the 
 expression of a purity which was physical as 
 much as moral, and moral as much as physical." 
 
 " Lethargic during an interview, passive and 
 receptive, an admirable listener, never in a hurry, 
 with the air of one who has plenty of leisure, 
 always in perfect repose, simple and direct in 
 manners, a lover of plain, common people, ' meeter 
 of savage and gentlemen on equal terms,' tem- 
 perate, chaste, sweet-breath'd, tender and affec- 
 
xviii SHORT NOTICE OF THE 
 
 tionate, of copious friendship, with a large, 
 summery, paternal soul that shines in all ways 
 and looks, he is by no means the ' rough ' certain 
 people have been so willing to believe. Fastidious 
 as a high caste Brahmin in his food and personal 
 neatness and cleanliness, well dresaed, with a 
 grey, open throat, a deep sympathetic voice, a 
 kind, genial look, the impression he makes upon 
 you is that of the best blood and breeding. He 
 reminds one of the first men, the beginners ; has 
 a primitive outdoor look — not so much from being 
 in the open air as from the texture and quality of 
 his make — a look as of the earth, the sea, or the 
 mountains, and ' is usually taken,' says a late 
 champion of his cause, ' for some great mechanic, 
 or stevedore, or seaman, or grand labourer of one 
 kind or another.' His physiognomy presents very- 
 marked features — features of the true antique 
 pattern, almost obsolete in modern faces — seen in 
 the strong, square bridge of his nose, his high 
 arching brows, and the absence of all bulging in 
 his forehead — a face approximating in type to 
 the statued Greek. He does not mean intellect 
 merely, but life ; and one feels that he must 
 arrive at his results rather by sympathy and 
 
LIFE OF WALT WHFrMAN xix 
 
 absorption than by hard intellectual processes — 
 by the effluence of power rather than by direct 
 and total application of it." 
 
 " For years past, thousands of people in New- 
 York, in Brooklyn, in Boston, in New Orleans, 
 and latterly in Washington, have seen, even as I 
 saw two hours ago, tallying, one might say, the 
 streets of our American cities, and fit to have for 
 his background and accessories their streaming 
 populations and ample and rich fajades, a man of 
 striking masculine beauty — a poet — powerful and 
 venerable in appearance ; large, calm, superbly 
 formed ; oftenest clad in the careless, rough, and 
 always picturesque costume of the common people ; 
 resembling, and generally taken by strangers for 
 some great mechanic or stevedore, or seaman, or 
 grand labourer of one kind or another ; and 
 passing slowly in this guise, with nonchalant 
 and haughty step along the pavement, with the 
 sunlight and shadows falling around him. The 
 dark sombrero he usually wears was, when I saw 
 him just now, the day being warm, held for the 
 moment in his hand ; rich light an artist would 
 have chosen, lay upon his uncovered head, 
 majestic, large, Homeric, and Bet upon his strong 
 
xviii SHORT NOTICE OF THE 
 
 tionate, of copious friendship, with a large, 
 summery, paternal soul that shines in all ways 
 and looks, he is by no means the ' rough ' certain 
 people have been so willing to believe. Fastidious 
 as a high caste Brahmin in his food and personal 
 neatness and cleanliness, well dresaed, with a 
 grey, open throat, a deep sympathetic voice, a 
 kind, genial look, the impression he makes upon 
 you is that of the best blood and breeding. He 
 reminds one of the first men, the beginners ; has 
 a primitive outdoor look — not so much from being 
 in the open air as from the texture and quality of 
 his make — a look as of the earth, the sea, or the 
 mountains, and ' is usually taken,' says a late 
 champion of his cause, ' for some great mechanic, 
 or stevedore, or seaman, or grand labourer of one 
 kind or another.' His physiognomy presents very 
 marked features — features of the true antique 
 pattern, almost obsolete in modern faces — seen in 
 the strong, square bridge of his nose, his high 
 arching brows, and the absence of all bulging in 
 his forehead — a face approximating in type to 
 the statued Greek. He does not mean intellect 
 merely, but life ; and one feels that he must 
 arrive at his results rather by sympathy and 
 
LIFE OF WALT WHITMAN xix 
 
 absorption than by hard intellectual processes — 
 by the effluence of power rather than by direct 
 and total application of it." 
 
 "For years past, thousands of people in New- 
 York, in Brooklyn, in Boston, in New Orleans, 
 and latterly in Washington, have seen, even as I 
 saw two hours ago, tallying, one might say, the 
 streets of our American cities, and fit to have for 
 his background and accessories their streaming 
 populations and ample and rich fagades, a man of 
 striking masculine beauty — a poet — powerful and 
 venerable in appearance ; large, calm, superbly 
 formed ; oftenest clad in the careless, rough, and 
 always picturesque costume of the common people ; 
 resembling, and generally taken by strangers for 
 some great mechanic or stevedore, or seaman, or 
 grand labourer of one kind or another ; and 
 passing slowly in this guise, with nonchalant 
 and haughty step along the pavement, with the 
 sunlight and shadows falling around him. The 
 dark sombrero he usually wears was, when I saw 
 him just now, the day being warm, held for the 
 moment in his hand ; rich light an artist would 
 have chosen, lay upon his uncovered head, 
 majestic, large, Homeric, and Bet upon his strong 
 
XX SHORT NOTICE OF THE 
 
 shoulders with the grandeur of ancient sculpture. 
 I marked the countenance, serene, proud, cheer- 
 ful, florid, grave ; the brow seamed with noble 
 wrinkles ; the features massive and handsome, 
 with firm blue eyes ; the eyebrows and eyelids 
 especially showing that fulness of arch seldom 
 seen save in the antique busts ; the flowing hair 
 and fleecy beard, both very grey, and tempering 
 with a look of age the youthful aspect of one who 
 is but forty-five ; the simplicity and purity of his 
 dress cheap and plain, but spotless, from snowy 
 falling collar to burnished boot, and exhaling 
 faint fragrance ; the whole form surrounded with 
 manliness as with a nimbus, and breathing, in 
 its perfect health and vigour, the august charm of 
 the strong." 
 
 These notices are culled from various sources.* 
 The repetition of the same points in them is the 
 strongest evidence of Whitman's remarkable 
 personality. His health in early manhood seems 
 to have been absolutely perfect, and mere exist- 
 ence was perpetual joy. 
 
 In 1847-48 he edited the Daily Eagle news- 
 paper at Brooklyn, and in 1849 he set forth on 
 
 * See Dr. Bucke's " Life of Walt Whitman," pp. 25, 33, 43, 50, 57, 99. 
 
LIFE OF WALT WHITMAN xxi 
 
 an excursion through the middle, southern, and 
 western States. " He passed slowly," says Dr. 
 Bucke, " through Pennsylvania and Virginia, 
 crossed the Alleghany Mountains, took a steam- 
 boat at Wheeling, descended by leisurely stages 
 the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans, 
 and lived there some time, employed edi- 
 torially on a newspaper, the Crescent." On his 
 return journey, he took a different route, reach- 
 ing New York by way of St. Louis, Chicago, 
 Milwaukee, Detroit, the great Lakes, and 
 Niagara. Referring to these wanderings in a 
 letter which he empowered me to publish (dated 
 August 19, 1890), Whitman says: "My life, 
 young manhood, mid-age, times south, &c., have 
 been jolly bodily, and doubtless open to criticism." 
 After this sentence there foUow details con- 
 cerning his domestic circumstances, which prove 
 that, although he never married, his youth and 
 manhood were not passed without episodes of 
 passion and permanent attachment. 
 
 It must be remembered that Whitman de- 
 pended on labour for his bread. All through 
 these journeyings, then, he was brought into 
 inamediate contact with the people. The United 
 
xxii SHORT NOTICE OF THE 
 
 States, in their breadth and length and largeness, 
 became known to him, and he laid ample 
 foundations of experience for the work of his 
 prime. 
 
 Settling down again at Brooklyn in 1851 he 
 edited a newspaper called the Freeman, and also 
 began to build and sell houses. That proved, 
 commercially, a paying speculation. But "Walt 
 already felt that he had something different to 
 do in life than to make money. " Leaves of 
 Grass " was taking shape, and of this work he 
 says in the letter to myself already quoted : 
 "The writing and rounding off of 'Leaves of 
 Grass ' has been to me reason-for-being and life's 
 comfort below all." Some years elapsed before 
 he determined upon the form which this book 
 should assume. He made many experiments, 
 wrote and re-wrote, testing his compositions by 
 comparison with open nature, until at last he 
 shaped that peculiar style which has been the 
 subject of so much criticism. 
 
 In 1855 the first edition appeared at Brooklyn, 
 a thin quarto volume, containing twelve poems 
 and the prose-preface, which ranks among his 
 most poetical performances. Whitman assisted 
 
WALT \\liri_MAN ON TIIK AVlIAkK 
 
 AT CAMDEN, MOW JliRSKV, JULY 1 S90. 
 
LIFE OF WALT WHITMAN xxiii 
 
 at the printing of the book. It was greeted 
 with howls of execration and roars of laughter. 
 " When the book aroused such a tempest of 
 anger and condemnation everywhere," he told a 
 friend, " I went off to the east end of Long 
 Island, and spent the late summer and all the 
 fall — the happiest of my life — around Shelter 
 Island and Peconic Bay. Then came back to 
 New York with the confirmed resolution, from 
 which I never afterwards wavered, to go on with 
 my poetic enterprise in my own way, and finish 
 it as well as I could." The rest of his life is 
 inextricably interwoven with the "writing and 
 rounding-off of 'Leaves of Grass.'" Edition fol- 
 lowing edition, at irregular intervals, between 
 1855 and 1892, added form and substance to 
 the nucleus of the first twelve poems. What 
 is inost remarkable in the history of this work 
 is the way in which the original conception 
 admitted of infinite extension and adjustment. 
 You feel, on looking through the slender volume 
 of 1855, that the author already contemplated 
 additions, and that the extremely singular style 
 and form of his poems were adapted to this 
 method of treatment. The growth of " Leaves 
 
xxiv SHORT NOTICE OF THE 
 
 of Grass " might fancifully be compared to that 
 of a stag's antlers, which put forth yearly snags 
 or prongs, until the stag of ten attains the 
 fulness of majestic maturity. 
 
 Among other eminent men to whom Whitman 
 addressed a copy of " Leaves of Grass " was 
 Emerson. He replied in a private letter of great 
 cordiality, which he never afterwards retracted 
 or modified, even though Whitman and his 
 printers adopted the rather questionable measure 
 of publishing it in the enlarged edition of 1856. 
 It must be inserted here, for the part this letter 
 played in the history of Whitman's fame was 
 important. 
 
 "Concord, Mass., Jvly 21, 1885. 
 
 " Dear Sir, — I am not blind to the worth of 
 the wonderful gift of 'Leaves of Grass.' I find 
 it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom 
 that America has yet contributed. I am very 
 happy in reading it, as great power makes us 
 happy. It meets the demand I am always 
 making of what seems the sterile and stingy 
 Nature, as if too much handiwork or too much 
 lymph in the temperament were making our 
 
LIFE OF WALT WHITMAN xxv 
 
 Western wits fat and mean. I give you joy of 
 your free and brave thought. I have great joy 
 in it. I find incomparable things, said incom- 
 parably well, as they must be. I find the courage 
 of treatment which so deliofhts us, and which 
 large perception only can inspire. 
 
 " I greet you at the beginning of a great career, 
 which yet must have had a long foreground some- 
 where, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a 
 little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion ; 
 but the solid sense of the book is a sober cer- 
 tainty. It has the best merits — namely, of forti- 
 fying and encouraging. 
 
 " I did not know, until I last night saw the 
 book advertised in a newspaper, that I could trust 
 the name as real and available for a post-office. 
 
 " I wish to see my benefactor, and have felt 
 much like striking my tasks, and visiting New 
 York to pay you my respects. 
 
 "R. W. Emerson." 
 
 Emerson, I may add, sent a copy of "Leaves 
 of Grass " to Carlyle, and presented one to 
 Arthur Hugh Clough. Thoreau also began to 
 take notice of Whitman. He was puzzled by 
 
xxvi SHORT NOTICE OF THE 
 
 the poet's audacities. " There are two or three 
 pieces in the book which are disagreeable, to say 
 the least ; simply sensual." But he adds : " I do 
 not believe that all the sermons, so-called, that 
 have been preached in this land put together are 
 equal to it for preaching. We ought to rejoice 
 greatly in him." It was Thoreau, too, who said 
 "He is Democracy." And here I may recall 
 President Lincoln's remark on seeing Whitman 
 from the windows of the White House : " Well, 
 he is a man." Napoleon, it may be remembered, 
 said the like to Goethe. 
 
 But the public were not of the same opinion 
 as Emerson, Thoreau, Lincoln. The fury roused 
 by the edition of 1856 frightened Whitman's 
 publishers, who refused to sell the book. He 
 meanwhile continued to compose chants in the 
 same triumphant tone of self-complacent egotism, 
 until he had enough new material to produce 
 the enlarged and beautifully printed edition 
 of i860. 
 
 If Walt had written nothing after this, his 
 immortality as poet would have been secured, 
 and his thoughts in their mass and detail would 
 have been adequately expressed. Among the 
 
LIFE OF WALT WHITMAN xxvii 
 
 most important matter added in the i860 edition 
 was the section entitled " Calamus." 
 
 Copies soon found their way to England, and 
 within the space of a few years, we were all 
 reading and discussing Walt. 
 
 Walt's life as a creative poet was rudely inter- 
 rupted by the national convulsion of the great 
 Secession War. What happened to him at that 
 period, determined his subsequent career ; partly 
 by condemning him to the long and tedious illness, 
 which checked his marvellous vitality at its high- 
 tide ; partly by supplying him with themes for 
 the sweetest and purest, if not the most impres- 
 sive, of his poems ; partly by consecrating and 
 ennobling a personality which the public hitherto 
 misunderstood. This does not mean that Whit- 
 man needed purification or rehabilitation on 
 account of anything that he had previously said, 
 or done, or published. He remained the same 
 man, followed the track traced out at the begin- 
 ning of his poet's life, abated no jot or tittle of 
 the doctrine he felt called on to deliver. But his 
 life during the war, his service in the cause of 
 sufferers, his practical exemplification of principles 
 in circumstances trying to the sturdiest and the 
 
xxviii SHORT NOTICE OF THE 
 
 bravest, the sacrifice of his health, the test of his 
 religion by unwearied acts of love and charity 
 and comradeship, forced society to recognise the 
 essential worth and dignity of the poet, who had 
 been condemned as a New York rowdy, a free 
 lover, a disseminator of lawless and immoral 
 paradoxes. No one, however prejudiced, can 
 study Specimen Days — the unaffected and spon- 
 taneous record of his experience — without feeling 
 that the grounds of common hostility to the 
 author of Children of Adam must be overhauled 
 and reconsidered. Disciples of his doctrine appeal 
 with confidence to those pages, and say : the man 
 who lived and acted thus, was sound to the core 
 and worthy of a patient hearing. 
 
 How this came about, may be briefly related. 
 Walt's brother George volunteered for the army 
 of the north, and was wounded in the first 
 Fredericksburg battle; December 1862. Walt 
 started for the camp upon the Rappahannock, 
 nursed his brother through, and then went down 
 to Washington in charge of wounded Brooklyn 
 soldiers. There he stayed, as an attendant in the 
 military hospitals, bestowing the same care on 
 men of both sides, and visiting the battle-fields. 
 

 l:^^ 
 
 ^^*^ I 
 
 i 
 
 ^ 
 
 <G 
 
 ,llil4ifli 
 
 
 03 
 
 CO 
 
 o X 
 X o 
 E- Pi 
 
 < S 
 M !^ 
 
 ^ Di 
 o w 
 
 z 
 w 
 
 Q 
 % 
 
 o 
 
 S 
 o 
 
 Qi 
 
 N 
 
 < 
 ,-! 
 
 cn en 
 o o 
 
LIFE OF WALT WHITMAN xxix 
 
 A superficial description of his energy would 
 profit little. Those who wish to be informed, 
 must interrogate the original sources, which may 
 be briefly designated the gospel of Walt Whit- 
 man's life.* For the rest, it is enough to say 
 that constant attendance upon soldiers suffer- 
 ing from horrible wounds, gangrene, typhus, 
 in those crowded hospitals, undermined his 
 magnificent constitution. He had a serious 
 illness in 1864, recovered from it, and returned 
 to his work at Washington. But the seeds of 
 permanent disease had been sown. In February 
 1873, he was attacked by paralysis. During 
 the next three years, his life hung on a thread, 
 and the man, who had been so superbly vigorous, 
 was now condemned to invalidism. We who 
 have been privileged to read his private cor- 
 respondence at this period, know with what con- 
 tinued cheerfulness and courage he sustained 
 these trials. The public has access to notes pub- 
 lished in his complete works.t The sweetness of 
 his nature, his sympathy for others, his afiection- 
 ateness, and the sanguine faith which was his 
 
 * See Dr. Bncke's biography pp. 34-40, and " Specimen Days" (col- 
 lected works of Walt Whitman 1888), from p. 21 to p. 80. 
 t " Specimen Days,'' after p. 80. 
 
XXX SHORT NOTICE OF THE 
 
 piety, were never altered. Poverty came to make 
 the situation still more serious. Yet the real 
 beauty and goodness of the man never shone more 
 clearly than in those overclouded days. Whitman 
 did not make a full recovery. His life dragged 
 on a broken wing until its close in 1892. But the 
 last twenty years of his existence on the earth 
 were not wasted. They stamped his work as poet 
 and prophet with the seal of indubitable genuine- 
 ness. Would that aU prophets, of Chelsea or 
 otherwhere, could boast a practical commentary 
 so efficient and illuminative of their teaching. 
 
 The poetical outcome of Walt's experience in 
 the Secession War was a book called " Drum 
 Taps," which appeared in 1865, including the 
 finest of his literary efforts, that " Lament for 
 Lincoln," which opens with the phrase, " When 
 lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed." All these 
 pieces have been incorporated into the later 
 editions of " Leaves of Grass." The patriotic 
 eloquence of Whitman's masterpiece in prose, 
 "Democratic Vistas" (1871), obviously springs 
 from the deepened and heightened emotions 
 stirred in him by the awful struggle he had 
 witnessed. 
 
LIFE OF WALT WHITMAN xxxi 
 
 Before the end of the war Whitman received a 
 clerkship in the Department of the Interior at 
 Washington. Soon after this appointment the 
 Chief Secretary, Mr. James Harlan, discharged 
 him, " because he was the author of an indecent 
 book." Mr. Harlan, it appears, had used his 
 liberty as chief of this State office to inspect his 
 clerk's desk, and found in it an annotated copy 
 of "Leaves of Grass." That happened in the 
 summer of 1865. Nine weeks after the event, 
 Mr. William Douglas O'Connor, of Washington, 
 who had learned to appreciate Walt as a friend, 
 and to admire him as a writer, appeared before 
 the public with a vindication of the " Good Gray 
 Poet." The attack on Secretary Harlan was 
 scathing, the rhetoric tremendous. And in 1883 
 Mr. O'Connor returned to the assault with fiercer 
 animosity, and still more copious eloquence.* 
 Now that Whitman is lying cold and still beneath 
 the huge block of granite at Camden, we need 
 not rake up the embers of that volcanic con- 
 troversy. There are confessedly passages in 
 " Leaves of Grass " which offend the ordinary 
 
 * Both pieces are published in Dr. Bucke's " Life of Walt Whit- 
 man," pp. 71-132. 
 
xxxii SHORT NOTICE OF THE 
 
 sense of propriety, and opinions on such points 
 admit of difference. The fact, however, remains 
 that the book in question was out of print at the 
 time of Harlan's action, and did not reappear 
 until the year 1867. Meanwhile Whitman had 
 obtained another clerkship in the office of the 
 Attorney-General at Washington. This, too, he 
 lost in the summer of 1874, when he was ill and 
 incapacitated from active service by paralysis at 
 Camden. I have before me copies of letters 
 written to a dear friend at the time. They 
 show a serene indifference to the disaster, and 
 a tranquil outlook over the immediate future. 
 And yet no source of income remained to him. 
 " Leaves of Grass " was not what publishers 
 would call a " property." The book brought in 
 next to nothing. How Whitman bore the accu- 
 mulated troubles of that period has been so 
 well set forth by his friend Dr. Bucke, that I 
 cannot omit the passage : 
 
 " As to the profits of ' Leaves of Grass,' they 
 had never been much, and now two men, in suc- 
 cession, in New York (T. O'K. and C. P. S.), in 
 whose hands the sale of the book, on commission, 
 had been placed, took advantage of his helpless- 
 
LIFE OF WALT WHITMAN xxxiii 
 
 ness to embezzle the amounts due (they calcu- 
 lated that death would soon settle the score and 
 rub it out). So that, although I hardly ever 
 heard him speak of them, I know that during 
 those four years Walt Whitman had to bear the 
 imminent prospect of death, great pain and suffer- 
 ing at times, poverty, his poetic enterprise a 
 failure, and the face of the public either clouded 
 in contempt or turned away with indifference. 
 If a man can go through such a trial as this 
 without despair or misanthropy — if he can main- 
 tain a good heart, can preserve absolute self- 
 respect, and as absolutely the respect, love, and 
 admiration of the few who thoroughly know him 
 — then he has given proofs I should say of per- 
 sonal heroism of the first order. It was, perhaps, 
 needed that Walt Whitman should afford such 
 proofs ; at all events he has afforded them. What 
 he was, how he lived, kept himself up during 
 those years, and how at the end partially re- 
 ■cuperated, is so well set forth by himself in 
 ' Specimen Days,' that it would be mere imperti- 
 nence for any one else to attempt to retell the 
 tale. The illness his friends looked upon with so 
 much dread has borne fruit in one of the sanest 
 
xxxiv SHORT NOTICE OF THE 
 
 and sweetest of books, the brightest and halest 
 ' Diary of an Invahd ' ever written — a book 
 unique in being the expression of strength in 
 infirmity- — the wisdom of weakness — so bright 
 and translucent, at once of the earth earthy, and 
 spiritual as of the sky and stars. Other books 
 of the invalid's room require to be read with 
 the blinds drawn down and the priest on the 
 threshold ; but this sick man's chamber is the 
 lane, and by the creek or sea-shore^always 
 with the fresh air and the open sky overhead." 
 Little more is left to be related. Whitman's 
 father died in the year 1855 ; his mother died at 
 Camden (New Jersey) in 1873. To this town 
 Whitman came during the first months of his 
 paralytic seizure. And here he remained till 
 his own death in March 1892. His last years 
 were cheered and comforted by the devoted 
 attention of many friends, among whom Dr. 
 E.. M. Bucke and Mr. Horace Traubel, John 
 Burroughs and Mrs. Gilchrist, F. Warren Frit- 
 zinger and Mrs. Davis ought to be especially 
 commemorated. He had the satisfaction of 
 feeling that " Leaves of Grass " at last was 
 making way. It had been partially re-issued 
 
LIFE OF WALT WHITMAN xxxv 
 
 in England by "W. M. Rossetti, and an English 
 school of hearty admirers grew up in Lancashire. 
 Selections were translated into German by Karl 
 Knortz and T. W. RoUeston. French critics de- 
 voted serious studies to its literary qualities and 
 philosophical teaching.* And what was better 
 than fame, affection of the strongest, tenderest, 
 and purest quality attended him from staunch 
 and noble men whom he could love and honour. 
 His work lives after him. It is of a kind which 
 the world will not willingly let die. 
 
 * While correcting these proofs, I notice that a literary Society 
 at Padua is going at their next meeting to discass " the poem of 
 Walt Whitman" (Venice, March 20, 1893). 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 The world has lost another good and great man. 
 Walt Whitman died in March 1892 at Camden, 
 New Jersey, U.S.A., after a lingering and painful 
 illness, which terminated in distressing debility, 
 borne by him with serenity and fortitude. A 
 spiritual force has been resumed through his 
 death into the occult stock of universal energy ; 
 and it is too early as yet to sum up any final 
 account of his achievement as the teacher of 
 a new way of regarding life, the prophet of a 
 democratic religion, and the poet of a revolu- 
 tionary school. 
 
 Whitman, indeed, is extremely baffling to 
 criticism. I have already said in print that 
 "speaking about him is like speaking about 
 the universe." I meant this to be appreciative. 
 
2 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 in so far as the largeness and comprehensiveness 
 of the man's natm-e are concerned. But the 
 saying has, like the famous Delphian knife, a 
 double handle. Not merely because he is large 
 and comprehensive, but because he is intangible, 
 elusive, at first sight self-contradictory, and in 
 some sense formless, does Whitman resemble the 
 universe and defy critical analysis. 
 
 The peculiar surroundings of the man during 
 his lifetime rendered it difficult to be impartial 
 with regard to him. Assuming from the first 
 an attitude of indifference to public opinion, 
 challenging conventionalities, and quietly igno- 
 ring customary prejudice, he was exposed at 
 the beginning of his career to unmerited insults 
 and a petty persecution. Not only did critics 
 and cultivated persons fling stones at him ; but 
 even a Minister of State thought it his duty to 
 deprive him of a modest office which he held. 
 This opposition was far from abating his courage 
 or altering the calm of his essentially masculine 
 nature. But it excited the pugnacious instincts 
 of those few devoted followers and disciples who 
 had gathered round him. Whitman began to be 
 enveloped in a dust of controversy — indecent 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 3 
 
 abuse upon the one hand, extravagant lauda- 
 tion on the other — outrage and depreciation, 
 retahated by what the French call reclame and 
 claque. Sane criticism found it necessary to 
 stand aloof from the ignoble fray ; feeling con- 
 fident that Whitman's worth would obtain due 
 and ultimate recognition ; knowing, as Sam 
 Johnson used to say, that " no man is written 
 up or down except by himself"; dreading lest 
 the sterling qualities of such magnificent work 
 should be brought into discredit by clamorous 
 and undiscriminating advocacy. 
 
 Whitman's own personality augmented these 
 difficulties. No one was ever more generous 
 and frank of nature, more ready to accept 
 differences of opinion, more tolerant of criticism. 
 At the same time he displayed a desire to diffuse 
 his doctrines, an eagerness to be acknowledged 
 in his lifetime. He craved for responsive affec- 
 tion in the audience to whom he appealed, and 
 regarded his literary teaching in the light of a 
 cause. He acted like one who did not trust 
 to the certainty of the eventual success of genius. 
 He collected and distributed trifling panegyrics 
 of himself, culled from the holes and corners of 
 
4 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 American journalism. He showed small sense 
 of proportion in criticism, and seemed to value 
 people by the amount of personal zeal they dis- 
 played in the propagation of his views. This 
 spirit was somewhat grotesquely exhibited in 
 his table-talk at a banquet held in honour of 
 his seventy-second birthday.* The kindness of 
 his words about his friends and followers must 
 have touched all who were concerned, as much, 
 I hope, as they touched me. When I read what 
 he said of me, I recognised the acumen of his 
 insight into several points of my character. 1 
 felt that probably my name would survive in 
 those unpremeditated remarks long after my own 
 writings shall have been forgotten. Yet I could 
 not help being amused by one sentence, which 
 gave a special flavour to his praise : " The best - 
 thing about Symonds is his splendid aspiration. 
 He was quite willing to leap into the gulf." 
 Whitman, as the context proves, did not mean 
 that Symonds is a Quintus Curtius, open to^ 
 undertake a job of self-devotion at a moment's 
 notice. He was only testing me by the standard 
 
 * See Walt Whitman's Birthday, May 31, 1891, LippmcoWs 
 Magazine. 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 5 
 
 of discipleship, which he applied to each and 
 all of his acquaintances in turn. Early in the 
 history of " Leaves of Grass " I accepted the 
 book, and staked my critical reputation upon an 
 open avowal of its sterling merit — indifferent 
 to what my brother-students thought about it. 
 That is no topic for eulogy : certainly none 
 which need have been dwelt upon by Whitman. 
 It may be false delicacy, it may be the result 
 of effete culture, it may be feudalism in my 
 blood. But I confess that I have always found 
 this note in Whitman and his circle difficult to 
 keep in tune with. 
 
 As Ernest Renan said of Victor Hugo, writing 
 on the day after his death : " Who would now 
 interrogate the general upon the subject of the 
 manoeuvres he employed, the sacrifices which 
 were the conditions of his success ? The general 
 is forced to be egotistic. He is the army ; and a 
 glaring exhibition pf personality, unpardonable 
 in the rest of men, is imposed on him by circum- 
 stances. Hugo (and in like manner JJTiitman) 
 had become a symbol, a principle, an affirmation, 
 the affirmation of idealism and emancipated art. 
 He owed the whole of himself to his own religion. 
 
6 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 He was like a god, who had to be his own high 
 priest. His lofty and vigorous nature lent itself 
 to the playing of this part, which would have 
 been unbearable to one of different calibre. A 
 mighty instinct came to manifestation through 
 him. He was like the main-spring of a spiritual 
 world. He could not find the time to have taste ; 
 good taste, moreover, would have been of little 
 service to him." There is irony- in everything 
 which Renan wrote ; and these sentences (trans- 
 ferred by me from his panegyric of Hugo to 
 Whitman) are steeped in irony. To dispense 
 with taste, or the refinements of gentle feelings, 
 is what no man, not even the greatest, can do 
 with impunity. No general, not even Napoleon, 
 no founder, not even Christ was great enough 
 for that. Whitman then appeared omnivorous of 
 praise, indiscriminative as to its quality, lacking 
 the repose which belongs to the highest type of 
 greatness. Instead of leaving his fame and 
 influence to the operation of natural laws, he 
 encouraged the claque and the reclame which 
 I have pointed out as prejudicial. 
 
 I sincerely regard him, and have long regarded 
 him, as a man born to remind the world of many 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 7 
 
 important and neglected truths, to flash the light 
 of authentic inspiration upon many dark and 
 puzzling questions, and to do so with the force of 
 admirable courage, flawless candour. But the 
 ways he chose for pushing his gospel and adver- 
 tising his philosophy, put a severe strain on 
 patience. Were Buddha, Socrates, Christ, so 
 interested in the dust stirred up around them by 
 second-rate persons, in third-rate cities, and in 
 more than fifth-rate literature ? 
 
 In addition to what I have been advancing upon 
 the difficulty of dealing fairly with Whitman 
 during his lifetime — passing now to higher and 
 more serious planes of reflection — his very origin- 
 ality, his__ individuality, the unique quahties 
 which made him so remarkable"a master^' render 
 
 the task^ seizing~andTormulating the essential 
 truth about him, both as te acher a nd as poet, 
 well-mgh impracticable at the present time. 
 Those of us who leel his influence most deeply, 
 believe that his work has secured attention, and 
 hope ardently that its import will be gradually 
 absorbed and assimilated, so that in course of 
 time a living image of himself shall exist in 
 thousands, and the exposition be rendered easy. 
 
8 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 Like Nature, he seemed, at first sight, to be a 
 mass of contradictions and insoluble problems, of 
 potent stufis irreducible by any known method of 
 analysis. We could feel him, submit to his 
 impact, be enamoured of his charm. But we 
 knew that it was impossible to find a formula for 
 all that is implied in the two letters W. W. 
 Critics, saddened, and made shy by their thank- 
 less task, judged it better to leave him to his 
 predestined working in the sphere of thought, 
 feeling assured that, like Nature, he could. take 
 care of himself 
 
 How ill it fared with even superior intelli- 
 gences in their efforts to evaluate W. W. 
 might be illustrated by two examples. When 
 " Songs before Sunrise " were re-issued in 1883, 
 Mr. Swinburne suffered an eloquent ode " To 
 Walt Whitman in America " to be reprinted. 
 It contains the following impassioned stanza : 
 
 O strong-winged soul with prophetic 
 Lips hot with the bloodbeats of song, 
 
 With tremor of heartstrings magnetic, 
 With thoughts as thunders in throng. 
 
 With consonant ardours of chords 
 
 That piei'ce men's souls as with swords 
 And hale them hearing along. 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 9 
 
 On reading this ode, and especially the lines just 
 quoted, I, for my part, felt that true things had 
 here been said regarding Whitman, but with 
 rather more of the claque and the reclame flavour 
 than I judged desirable. Still, I welcomed and 
 appreciated the poem as a noteworthy contri- 
 bution to the tradition gradually forming in 
 support of Whitman's credit. Sad then was my 
 disappointment to discover, before the eighties 
 were over (that is within seven years of this 
 dithyrambic blessing), that Mr. Swinburne was 
 cursing Whitman by all his gods in prose, and 
 stigmatising the muse of " Leaves of Grass," as 
 a drunken apple-woman reeling in a gutter. I 
 forget the exact verbiage of the scurrility ; and 
 I do not impute the change of attitude implied in 
 it, so much to Mr. Swinburne's levity, as to the 
 bewilderment created in his mind by Whitman's 
 incongruities. 
 
 The next instance is that of a critic not so 
 lavish of the hyperboles of praise and blame as 
 Mr. Swinburne is. My friend Mr. R. L. Steven- 
 son once published a constrained and measured 
 study of Walt Whitman, which struck some of 
 those who read it as frigidly appreciative. He 
 
lo A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 subsequently told me that he had first opened 
 upon the key-note of a glowing panegyric, but 
 felt the pompous absurdity of its exaggeration. ■ 
 He began again, subduing the whole tone of 
 the composition. When the essay was finished 
 in this second style, he became conscious that 
 it misrepresented his own enthusiasm for the 
 teacher who at a critical moment of his youthful 
 life had helped him to discover the right line 
 of conduct. 
 
 I feel that I may not unfairly be accused by 
 the school of Whitman of having been lukewarm 
 toward him in his lifetime, and of having started 
 this memorial notice in a somewhat carping 
 strain. Here, as elsewhere, however, it is my 
 single desire to live in the Whole, and to see 
 things, so far as may be possible, in their 
 relation to the Whole. I am sure, moreover, 
 that Whitman's genial and manly spirit, so 
 lately resumed into the sum of things, approves 
 of any earnest attempt on his disciple's part 
 to show what his relative value is. No one, not 
 Buddha, not Socrates, not Christ, has an absolute 
 value. True criticism dares not forget that 
 " the eternal things," " the abiding relations " 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN ii 
 
 of the universe, extend around, above us all, 
 sustaining and environing individualities how- 
 ever potent. 
 
 In 1889 I allowed the following words of mine 
 to be circulated in a collection of what may 
 be called testimonials to the bard of Camden : 
 " ' Leaves of Grass,' which I first read at the age 
 of twenty-five, influenced me more perhaps than 
 any other book has done, except the Bible ; 
 more than Plato, more than Goethe. It is 
 impossible for me to speak critically of what has 
 so deeply entered into the fibre and marrow of 
 my being." 
 
 The time has now come for attempting 
 some explanation of what I meant. Whitman 
 threw clear light upon truths which I had but 
 dimly perceived, and gave me the courage of 
 opinions previously held with some timidity and 
 shyness. 
 
 I will try to express his influence under 
 several headings. It should, however, be pre- 
 mised that Whitman does not lend himself to 
 systematic exposition. 
 
 He says emphatically : 
 
12 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 I charge you, too, for ever, reject those who would expound 
 
 me — for I cannot expound myself ; 
 I charge you that there be no theory or school founded out 
 
 of me; 
 I charge you to leave all free, as I have left all free. 
 
 It is useless to extract a coherent scheme of 
 thought from his voluminous writings. He tells 
 us himself that he is full of contradictions, that 
 his precepts will do as much harm as good, 
 that he desires to " tally the broadcast doings 
 of the day and the night." But though he 
 may not be , reducible to system, we can trace 
 an order in his ideas. First comes religion or 
 the concept of the universe ; then personality, 
 or the sense of self and sex ; then love, diverging 
 into the amative and comradely emotions ; then 
 democracy, or the theory of human equality and 
 brotherhood. The world, man as an essential 
 part of the world, man as of prime importance 
 to himself alone, love and liberty as necessary 
 to his happiness ; these are the constituents of 
 Whitman's creed, 
 
II 
 
 I WILL take Religion first. Ernest Renan, in 
 the paper from which I have quoted, written 
 immediately after Victor Hugo's death, uttered 
 some remarks about the central thought of that 
 great poet, which may be used as text and in- 
 troduction for what I have to say about Walt 
 Whitman. " Is he spiritualist ? Is he mate- 
 rialist? I remain in ignorance. Upon the one 
 side, he does not know what abstraction is. 
 His principal devotion, I might say the only 
 one, is for two or three eminent realities, such 
 as Paris, Napoleon, the People. Concerning 
 souls, he abides by the same conception as 
 TertuUian's. He believes that he can see them, 
 touch them. Immortality, in his idea, is not 
 the mere immortality of thought. At the same 
 time he is in the highest degree an idealist. 
 The idea, for him, penetrates matter, consti- 
 tutes the essence and the reason of its being. 
 
14 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 His God is not the God concealed of Spinoza, 
 foreign to the evolution of the universe; it is 
 a God to whom it may be useless to address 
 prayer, but whom he worshipped with a kind 
 of trembling. It is the abysm of the Gnostics. 
 His life was passed under the puissant pre- 
 occupation of a living infinite, which embraced 
 him, surged around and from him on all sides 
 and portions of his being, and in the bosom of 
 which it was sweet to him to lose himself and 
 lose his reason." 
 
 Here we have a fine description of a great 
 spirit, which offered analogies to Whitman's, but 
 which differed in some essential particulars. By 
 commenting upon this passage I will try to bring 
 into relief what seems to me to have been Whit- 
 man's fundamental conception of the universe 
 and man's relation to it — of religion in short. 
 Whether he was a spiritualist or a materialist 
 need no' more be discussed in his case than in 
 that of Victor Hugo. Those who conceive of 
 cosmic unity at all, contemplate spirit and matter 
 as the X and y of one inscrutable, yet only real, 
 existence. This was undoubtedly the attitude of 
 Whitman. Every detail of the world endowed 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 15 
 
 with life, with shape, contained for him God,ji/ 
 was a microcosm of the whole, an apparent and 
 ever-recurring miracle. Upon abstractions he 
 refused to dwell, because (without having perhaps 
 appropriated the Hegelian philosophy) he re- 
 garded the concrete as the ultimate reality, the 
 self-effectuation of the Idea, while the abstract 
 remains mere gaping void. For Whitman, as 
 for Hugo, two or three immense facts were the 
 main objects of his enthusiasm. We may de- 
 scribe them as America, Self, Sex, the People. 
 Whether Hugo really held by TertuUian's con- 
 crete notion of the soul, as Renan puts it, I will 
 not pause to debate. Whitman certainly did 
 not. For him Soul was the most etherealised, 
 the least palpable and visible, yet the most for- 
 mative and durable element in everything that 
 is. He clung to the belief in immortality. Yet 
 he never attempted to define what immortality 
 -will be. His strongest faith in the survival of 
 the individual is expressed in phrases like 
 -these : 
 
 My foot is tenoned and mortised in granite, 
 I laugh at what you call dissolution, 
 And I know the amplitude of time. 
 
1 6 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 I know not how I came of you, and I know not where I go 
 with you ; but I know I came well, and shall go well. 
 
 Whitman's God, like the God attributed to 
 Hugo, hke Goethe's God, is immanent in the 
 universe. 
 
 God dwells within and moves the world and moulds, 
 Himself and Nature in one form enfolds ; 
 Thus all that lives in Him, and breathes, and is. 
 Shall ne'er His puissance, ne'er His spirit miss. 
 
 Yet this God was not for him the object of 
 trembhng adoration. Rather he says : 
 
 Me imperturbe, standing at ease in Nature. 
 
 I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God 
 
 not in the least, 
 Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than 
 
 myself. 
 
 Nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's 
 self is. Nor again was the supreme being the 
 abysm of the Gnostics for his soul, but the ever 
 present fact, which ever3rwhere exists around us, 
 in which we exist, which we help to constitute, 
 nearer and more essential to us than aught else. 
 To pray to such a God is of course useless, 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 17 
 
 except in the sense of committing ourselves to 
 him, as the bird gives itself to the air, the wave 
 rocks upon the vast profound it ruffles, the ray 
 of light floats undulating through illimitable 
 ether : bird, wave, and sunbeam, just like the 
 soul of man, being each a distinct and indis- 
 pensable part of that totality in which it lives 
 and moves and has its being. 
 
 In Whitman's thought, as in that of Bruno, 
 Spinoza, Goethe, there is no separation of God 
 from the Universe. Therefore what is said about 
 the latter, holds good of the former. In spite 
 of the reality of both to our soul, both are 
 unknown and unknowable in their essence. The 
 same is true of Life and Death. Therefore all 
 forms of religions, faiths, metaphysics, cosmolo- 
 gies, remain in the region of mere guesses, and 
 possess no more than a relative value for the 
 understanding. 
 
 I heard what was said of the universe ; 
 
 Heard it and heard it of several thousand years ; 
 
 It is middUng well as far as it goes, — but is that all ? 
 
 Magnifying and applying come I, 
 
 Outbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters, 
 
 Taking myself the exact dimensions of Jehovah, 
 
1 8 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 Lithographing Kronos, Zeus his son, and Hercules his 
 grandson ; 
 
 Buying drafts of Osiris, Isis, Belus, Brahma, Buddha, 
 
 In ray portfolio placing Manito loose, Allah on a leaf, the 
 crucifix engraved, 
 
 With Odin, and the hideous-faced Mexitli, and every idol and 
 image ; 
 
 Taking them all for what they are worth, and not a cent 
 more; 
 
 Admitting they were alive and did the work of their days; 
 
 Accepting the rough deific sketches to fill out better in my- 
 self — ^bestowing them freely on each man and woman I see. 
 
 This passage, though it may sound irreverent, is 
 nothing more than an expression of the behef 
 that theology is the subject of comparative study, 
 and has to be considered from the point of view 
 of historical development. There is no finality 
 in any creed, nor can there be, because man's 
 place in the universe is but a speck of cloud in 
 an illimitable sky, a fragment of straw afloat 
 upon a boundless ocean. This does not prevent 
 what Whitman calls religion — that is to say, a 
 sturdy confidence in the security of the whole 
 scheme of things, a sense of universal life and 
 of our indestructible participation in the same — 
 from being for him the most important of all 
 human facts and qualities. 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 19 
 
 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 worshipped half enough, 
 None has begun to think how divine he himself is, or 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 ; 
 (Nor character, nor life worthy the name, without Religion ; 
 Nor land, nor man or woman, without Religion). 
 
 The Religion of which he speaks might be 
 defined as a recognition of divinity in all things. 
 It is a profound belief in the eternity of Spirit 
 underlying all appearances, phenomena, tran- 
 sitions of birth and death, development, and 
 dissolution. Its essence is an imperturbable 
 optimism, or what he elsewhere designates as 
 " unrestricted faith." *No apparent irrationality 
 or contradictions in the world as we perceive it, 
 ought to shake this faith. The origin of evil 
 offers no problem. If God, as you theologians 
 aver, made the world, then God made evil as 
 well as good. There is no way of extricating 
 yourselves from the corollaries of your own 
 theorem. You say, indeed, that God made the 
 
20 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 world out of nothing ; and that, having made it, 
 God remains apart from it and independent. 
 But what do you mean by nothing, when there 
 can be nothing at all but God ? It is impossible 
 to conceive of God in any way, least of all in 
 the way which your metaphysic forces on the 
 human mind, and at the same time to conceive 
 of something which is not a part of God. 
 |Therefbre God made the world out of himself, 
 I or rather he is the world ; and everything in 
 the world, what we call ;bad as well as what we 
 call good, the ugly as well as the beautiful to 
 our eyes, the painful as well as the pleasurable 
 to our senses, is God. There is no possible 
 method of eluding this argument, unless you 
 posit matter as outside God and independent of 
 him, in which case the Universe contains two 
 Gods. But that is what you theologians are 
 anxious to deny. 
 
 It must not be imagined that Whitman uses 
 this language. On the contrary, he says to 
 mankind : 
 
 Be not curious about God, 
 For I, who am curious about each, am not curious about 
 God. 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 21 
 
 He refuses to discuss and formulate what ha 
 feels to be in evei-ything around him. 
 
 Why should I wish to see God better than this day ? 
 
 I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and 
 
 each moment then ; 
 In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own 
 
 face in the glass ; 
 I find letters from God drop't in the street — and every one 
 
 is sign'd by God's name. 
 And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe'er 
 
 I go, 
 Others will punctually come for ever and ever. 
 
 But, though he does not employ irrefutable 
 arguments against orthodox theology, these are 
 implied in the position of unrestricted faith and 
 imperturbable optimism Avhich he assumes. In 
 like manner, though he will not argue with 
 materialism, he says to modern science : All your 
 theories of the universe lead inevitably to the 
 conclusion that one spiritual vitality pervades the 
 whole. The world, as you present it to our reason, 
 must be thought, because we think the world, 
 because the order of the world is uniform, intel- 
 ligible to our understanding, progressing by 
 ascertainable processes of evolution. Everything 
 in the world is the thought of some spirit or 
 
2 2 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 soul, for which the name of God is a convenient 
 symbol. 
 
 Therefore, he is able to proclaim : 
 
 I make the poem of evil also — I commemorate that part 
 
 also. 
 I am myself just as much evil as good, and so my nation is. 
 
 And I say there is in fact no evil 
 (Or if there is, I say it is just as important to you, to the 
 
 land, or to me, as anything else). 
 
 In strict conformity with this view of things, 
 he includes Satan, the genius of revolt, dissatis- 
 faction, discord, in his conception of divinity. 
 One of his most remarkable poems, " Chanting 
 the Square Deific," is, in fact, an analysis of the 
 Divine Ideal ; not that men may presume to 
 describe the world-soul as it ontologically is, 
 but that the intellect of man, anthropomorphic 
 by the law of its own nature, imagines this to 
 be endowed with spiritual qualities analogous to 
 those it recognises in itself The Square Deific 
 is what man thinks and feels, when proceed- 
 ing outward from himself, his personality, 
 the " I " of Whitman's fundamental creed, he 
 formulates his impressions of the universal spirit. 
 The Square is not Deity, because we can predicate 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 23 
 
 nothing about God. It is Deific, or God-making, 
 because we are compelled to make God in our 
 image. 
 
 This poem is so important for the understand- 
 ing of Whitman's thought that we must examine 
 it more closely. What then, are the four main 
 conceptions which he considers necessary to the 
 Divine Idea? The first is that of inexorable 
 destiny, implacable fact. This gives birth to 
 deities like Jehovah, Brahma, Kronos, Earth. 
 
 I am Time, old, modern as any, 
 Unpersuadable, relentless, executing righteous judgments, 
 Aged beyond computation, yet ever new, ever with those 
 
 mighty laws rolling. 
 Relentless, I forgive no man — whoever sins dies — I will have 
 
 that man's life ; 
 Therefore let none expect mercy. Have the seasons gravita- 
 
 tion, the appointed days mercy ? No more have I, 
 
 But as the seasons and gravitation, and as all the appointed 
 
 days that forgive not, 
 I dispense from this side judgments inexorable without the 
 
 least remorse. 
 
 Thus the first and fundamental side of the 
 four-square Idea is Law, that which science demon- 
 strates. The second conception is that of con- 
 solation, healing, affection. It creates deities 
 like the Lord Christ, Hermes, Hercules. 
 
24 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 Many times have I been rejected, taunted, put in prison, and 
 
 crucified, and many times shall be again. 
 All the world have I given up for my dear brothers' and 
 
 sisters' sake, for the soul's sake. 
 Wending my way through the homes of men, rich or poor, 
 
 with the kiss of affection, 
 For I am affection, I am the cheer-bringing God, with hope 
 
 and all-enclosing charity. 
 
 The second side of the square appears to contra- 
 dict and compensate the first, yet it is no less 
 eternal and indispensable to the idea. 
 
 But my charity has no death — my wisdom dies not, neither 
 
 early nor late, 
 And my sweet love bequeathed here and elsewhere never dies. 
 
 The third conception is that of revolt, of Satan. 
 
 Aloof, dissatisfied, plotting revolt. 
 
 Comrade of criminals, brother of slaves, 
 
 Crafty, despised, a drudge, ignorant. 
 
 With Sudra face and worn brow, black, but in the depths of 
 
 my heart, proud as any, 
 Lifted now and always against whoever scorning assumes to 
 
 rule me. 
 
 Satan, no less eternal, no less indispensable 
 to the idea than Law and Charity, but seeming 
 to contradict both, wUl remain " permanent here 
 from my side, equal with any, real as any." 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 25 
 
 In other words, the human mind cannot project 
 a spiritual world where strife shall not reign as 
 well as love, and both be antagonistic to destiny. 
 Charity and Hatred are alike needed for organic 
 life. Law alone would congeal the universe 
 into an inert crystal. But now appears the 
 fourth conception, which, according to Whit- 
 man's feeling of the world, unites and fuses law, 
 love, revolt in a more ethereal essence — what 
 Shelley phrased the " Life of Life " — ^the true 
 spirituality, the essential vitality of the vast 
 complex. By a strange whim of fancy, while 
 he adopts the ,Holy Ghost of Christian theology. 
 Whitman uses the female gender. His phrase 
 is " Santa Spirita," instead of " Sanctus Spiri- 
 tus." In dealing with Whitman's language, the 
 critic has, in such cases, either to credit him 
 with an esoteric meaning or to suppose that 
 he was regardless of grammar and usage. Did 
 he intend to suggest that the Anima Mundi, 
 which forms the fourth and resultant concept 
 of his Square Deific, possesses an essential 
 femininity ? Was he casting a side-glance at 
 Goethe's " Ewig-Weibliches " ? I am inclined 
 to repudiate that explanation of this " Santa 
 
26 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 Spirita." We shall see that when he comes to 
 treat of human loves and passions, the female 
 is regarded as the fundamental element of sex 
 and sexual attraction, the male as the ethereal 
 and all pervasive element of free affection. 
 Therefore, in the present instance, I take the 
 phrase " Santa Spirita " to be a variation on 
 the old theme of the Holy Ghost, introduced 
 with sensitive aesthetic tact, but with more 
 than an Emperor Sigismund's disregard for 
 accidence, in order to shadow forth a frail and 
 fugitive, but eminently vital, conception. Whit- 
 man's actual words must be repeated. Their 
 mysticism is far too subtle for abridgment or 
 description. He is engaged in trying once again 
 to express what Bruno thought, what throbs 
 in the heart of those of us who feel that Science 
 marries with Religion — namely, that there is a 
 point beyond Law, Love and Hatred, where the 
 harmony we dimly guess, on which our faith 
 is founded, merges in eternal, concrete, spiritual 
 energy. His unrestricted faith, his imper- 
 turbable optimism, transcends the sphere of 
 law, charity, revolt. Jehovah, Jesus, Satan, 
 find the resolution of their discord, the atone- 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 27 
 
 ment of their contradiction, in that unity of 
 the universe which can only be dimly appre- 
 hended by our mortal minds, but upon which 
 our confidence as creatures of the total scheme 
 is fixed and grounded. He calls it " Santa 
 Spirita." Shelley, as I noted, called it "Life 
 of Life." Under this or that name, under any 
 name, it connotes the individual's conviction that 
 he is an inviolable factor of the universal 
 order, unable to escape from its decrees, incapable 
 of dispensing with the consolation of the heart, 
 condemned to suffer and rebel, yet conscious 
 that the music of the whole, if heard in its 
 entirety by him, would justify his separate 
 striving. 
 
 Santa Spirita, breather, life, 
 
 Beyond tbe light, lighter than light, 
 
 Beyond the flames of hell, joyous, leaping easily above hell, 
 
 Beyond Paradise, perfumed solely with my own perfume, 
 
 Including all life on earth, touching, including God, including 
 
 Saviour and Satan, 
 Ethereal, pervading all, (for without me what were all 1 what 
 
 were God 'i) 
 Essence of forms, life of the real identities, permanent, 
 
 positive, (namely the unseen), 
 Life of the great round world, the sun and stars, and of man, 
 
 I, the general soul, 
 
28 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 Here the square finishing, the solid, I the most solid. 
 Breathe my breath also through these songs. 
 
 With this blast of mysticism, "Whitman leaves 
 us. But the mysticism is carefully adapted to 
 the conditions under which we have to live ; inex- 
 orable law, tender and recurrent charities, burning 
 black-hearted no less recurrent revolts against 
 law, heart-broken negations of love — these are 
 our permanent visible relations to the scheme of 
 things. But there is a fourth relation, tran- 
 scending and including these, beyond them, and 
 above them, beneath them, and embracing 
 them, which gives the human heart the hope of 
 final reconciliation to its destiny. Whitman, in 
 his imperturbable optimism, his unrestricted faith, 
 declares that this fourth and final relation is the 
 one which souls are bound to stand by. Here we 
 find the truth, " the solid, the most solid." 
 
 What looks ethereal and evanescent, what 
 seems to be a dream of perfection, a vision of 
 unrealised harmony, constitutes the pith and 
 substance, the fibre and the soul, the irrefragable 
 and unremovable ground-work of the whole. 
 The most spiritual, the least tangible, the most 
 irreducible to terms of actual experience, is the 
 
A STUDY OF WxVLT WHITMAN 29 
 
 ultimate reality, unifying all things. That is 
 what he means by soul, when speaking of the 
 cosmos. That is the man's religion ; and as such, 
 he bids us to accept it. "By faith shall ye live." 
 How much or how little of a Christian Whit- 
 man was, can be judged from the foregoing 
 extracts. In the technical sense of that word, as 
 understood by existing Churches, he was clearly 
 not a Christian. But if the Christianity of 
 Christ, as apart from that of Christendom, be 
 intended, then he fully shared its spirit. He 
 retained a tender reverence for Jesus, whom he 
 called "the Lord Christ," and to whom he ac- 
 corded the title of " divine." It is the beauty of 
 Christ's character, his brotherhood, his religion of 
 love, the sacredness of his mission — a mission 
 still capable of being imitated — it is this which 
 enthrals the heart of the man ; not the fable of 
 his miraculous nativity, nor the Miltonic scheme 
 of vicarious redemption. 
 
 Recall Christ, brother of rejected persons — brother of slaves, 
 felons, idiots, and of insane and diseased persons. 
 
 Then again, it is the charm of that nomadic 
 life in Galilee, that " sweet story of old," as the 
 
30 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 children's hymn expressed it, which attracts 
 him. 
 
 Walking the old hills of Judaea with the beautiful gentle God 
 at my side. 
 
 How near to Renan's "doux GaHleen," and 
 yet, in spirit, how far closer to the children's 
 hymn, is that phrase ! In this mood of loving 
 comradeship with Christ, the brother of rejected 
 persons, the sufferer for others, the gentle God, 
 Whitman wrote that address, " To Him that was 
 Crucified," which has been challenged for undue 
 familiarity. In the same mood, he spoke those 
 strong and sustaining words, " To one shortly to 
 die," against which no cavil can be raised. In 
 the same mood, he expressed his brotherhood for 
 persons whom other men misuse and cast aside 
 like pestilent rags, in the lines called '' The City 
 Dead-House." Inspired by the spirit of this 
 Christ, he laid his health and manhood down 
 as a willing sacrifice for the sick and wounded 
 soldiers of the great American War. How much 
 or how little of a real follower after Christ 
 Whitman was, can be judged from these things. 
 
 Still, it was not Whitman's vocation or his 
 deliberate intention to shore up tottering his- 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 31 
 
 torical Christianity in any of its dogmatic forms. 
 " I too," he says, in one of his apparently 
 egotistic proclamations ; "I too, following many, 
 and foUow'd by many, inaugurate a Religion 
 — I too, go to the wars." We have seen what 
 was the essence of that religion, its imper- 
 turbable optimism and unrestricted faith. We 
 axiight call it the Cosmic Enthusiasm, and hail 
 it as the dawn of a new spiritual day. But it 
 was not Christianity, any more than it was 
 Mohammedanism or Buddhism, or Graeco-Roman 
 Paganism. It has a character and essence of 
 its own, from which the notions of personal 
 Deity, of rewards and punishments for the in- 
 dividual, of salvation and damnation, of heaven 
 and hell, have been purged away. The secret 
 of Whitman, his inner wisdom, consists in 
 attaining an attitude of confidence, a sense of 
 .security, by depending on the great thought of 
 the universe, to which all things including our 
 particular selves are attached by an indubitable 
 link of vital participation. This religion corre- 
 sponds exactly to the Scientific Principia of the 
 modern age ; to the evolutionary hypothesis with 
 its display of an immense unfolding organism, to 
 
32 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 the correlation of forces and the conservation of 
 energy, which forbid the doubt of any atom 
 wasted, any part mismade or unaccounted for 
 eventually. 
 
 Sustained by this conception that nothing can 
 be ultimately lost, or doomed to pain, or anni- 
 hilated, in the universal frame, Whitman feels 
 strong enough to cry : 
 
 My foot is tenoned and mortised in granite, 
 I laugh at what you call dissolution, 
 And I know the amplitude of time. 
 
 In the poem of " Burial " he says : 
 
 You are not thrown to the winds — you gather certainly and 
 
 safely around yourself ; 
 Yourself ! Yourself ! Yourself, for ever and ever. 
 
 Innumerable passages might be culled from his 
 writings in which this sense of the immortality 
 of self, based by him on a purely scientific con- 
 ception of the universe, but inspired with the 
 fervour of faith, bursts forth in songs of jubila- 
 tion at the thought of death. Human life has 
 had infinite antecedents, and must expect an 
 infinite progression in the future. Millions of 
 years do not reckon in its course. Sooner or 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 3s 
 
 later, it will arrive at its fulfilment. The spec- 
 tacle of the stars at night cannot daunt a 
 robust spirit with the dread of its own nothing- 
 ness. On the contrary, the stars inflate his 
 bosom with the conviction that. 
 
 There is no stoppage, and never can be stoppage ; 
 
 If I, you, the world, and all beneath or upon their surfaces, 
 
 were this moment reduced to a pallid float, it would 
 
 not avail in the long run ; 
 We should surely bring up again where we now stand, 
 And as surely go as much farther, and then farther and 
 
 farther. 
 
 The thought of this continual progression of the 
 universe, to what end and for what purpose no 
 man knoweth, will for many persons be intoler- 
 able. But for Whitman it is exhilarating ; it is, 
 in other words, his religion. 
 
 My rendezvous is appointed — it is certain ; 
 The Lord will be there, and wait till I come, on perfect terms ; 
 (The great Camerado, the lover true for whom I pine, will 
 be there). 
 
 Whether this cosmic enthusiasm, which has 
 been expressed by Whitman with a passion of 
 self-dedication, a particularity of knowledge, and 
 a sublimity of imagination, unapproached by 
 
34 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 any poet-prophet since the death of Bruno, is 
 destined to reinforce the soul of man with faith, 
 and to inaugurate a new rehgion, I dare not 
 even pause to question. "We are told that it is 
 not calculated to inspire the ignorant with rap- 
 ture, to console the indigent and suffering by 
 suggestions of some mitigation of their lot. 
 
 Still I may point out that it is the only type of 
 faith which agrees with the conclusions and 
 determinations of science. To bear the yoke of 
 universal law is the plain destiny of human beings. 
 If we could learn to bear that yoke with gladness," 
 to thrill with vibrant fibres to the pulses of the 
 infinite machine we constitute — (for were it pos- 
 sible that the least of us should be eliminated, 
 annihilated, the whole machine would stop and 
 crumble into chaos) — if, I say, we could feel 
 pride and joy in our participation of the cosmic 
 life, then we might stand where Whitman stood 
 with "feet tenoned and mortised in granite." I 
 do not think it is a religion only for the rich, the 
 powerful, the wise, the healthy. For my own 
 part, I may confess that it shone upon me when 
 my life was broken, when I was weak, sickly, 
 poor, and of no account ; and that I have ever 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 35 
 
 lived thenceforward in the light and warmth of it. 
 In bounden duty toward Whitman, I make this 
 personal statement ; for had it not been for the 
 contact of his fervent spirit with my own, the 
 pyre ready to be lighted, the combustible 
 materials of modern thought awaiting the touch 
 of the fire-bringer, might never have leapt up 
 into the flame of life long faith and consolation. 
 During my darkest hours, it comforted me with 
 the conviction that I too played my part in the 
 illimitable symphony of cosmic life. When I 
 sinned, repined, sorrowed, suffered, it touched me 
 with a gentle hand of sympathy and understand- 
 ing, sustained me with the strong arm of assur- 
 ance that in the end I could not go amiss (for 
 I was part, an integrating part of the great whole) ; 
 and when strength revived in me, it stirred a 
 healthy pride and courage to effectuate myself, 
 to bear the brunt of spiritual foes, the slings 
 and arrows of outrageous fortune. For this reason, 
 in duty to my master Whitman, and in the hope 
 that my experience may encourage others to seek 
 the same source of inspiration, I have exceeded 
 the bounds of an analytical essay by pouring 
 forth my personal confession. 
 
Ill 
 
 The inscription prefixed to "Leaves of Grass, 
 opens thus : 
 
 Small is the theme of the following Chant, yet the greatest — 
 namely, Oke's SeiIf — that wondrous thing, a simple, 
 separate person. 
 
 In all his writings, Whitman has kept per- 
 sonality steadily in view, as the leading motive^ 
 of his poetic and prophetic utterance. He regards 
 wealth, material prosperity, culture, as nothing in 
 comparison with vigorous manhood and woman- 
 hood. " The greatest city is that which has the 
 greatest man or woman." " Nothing endures but 
 personal qualities." " The greater the reform 
 needed, the greater the personality you need to 
 accomplish it " Nations, consequently, rise or 
 fall, according to the quality of the persons who- 
 constitute them. Human beings are nothing, 
 possess nothing, enjoy nothing, except through,, 
 and by their self, their personality. To prove 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 37 
 
 this, to demonstrate what an incomparably pre- 
 cious thing a free and healthy personality, self- 
 centred, self-reliant, self-effectuated, is for the 
 owner of it, how it transcends every other posses- ^/ 
 sion which riches or learning can confer, be- 
 comes the first object of his teaching. Secondly ,|\ 
 he aims at showing that nations only thrive 
 and are strong by the character, the grit, the 
 well-developed personality, of their inhabitants. 
 Nothing can preserve a nation in prosperity, or 
 perpetuate its fame, except the spiritual elements 
 it has developed, as distinguished from brute 
 force or accumulated capital. 
 
 This is the point of view from which he says : 
 
 will effuse Egotism, and show it underlying all — and I will 
 be the bard of personality. 
 
 Through a want of sympathy and intelligence, 
 people have long time sneered or cavilled at this 
 proclamation of egotism. We must strive to 
 comprehend that Whitman does not thereby mean 
 selfishness. 
 
 In one of his sublimest flights of the imagina- 
 tion Whitman describes the evolution of man 
 out of primordial elements. He has absorbed 
 
38 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 the results of modern scientific speculation re- 
 garding planetary development and the gradual 
 emergence of life through its successive stages 
 on our globe. The picture is dashed in with 
 broad touches from " the huge first Nothing " 
 to the emergence of a conscious human soul. 
 
 I am an acme of things accomplished, and I am an encloser of 
 things to be. 
 
 Afar down I see the huge first Nothing — I know I was even 
 
 there ; 
 I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic 
 
 mist, 
 And took my time, and took no harm from the fetid carbon. 
 
 Long I was hugged close— long and long. 
 
 Immense have been the preparations for me, 
 Faithful and friendly the arms that have helped me. 
 
 Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful 
 
 boatmen ; 
 For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings ; 
 They sent influences to look after what was to hold me. 
 
 Before I was born out of my mother, generations guided 
 me 
 
 My embryo has never been torpid — nothing could over- 
 lay it. 
 
 For it the nebula cohered to an orb. 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 39 
 
 The long, low strata piled to rest it on, 
 Vast vegetables give it sustenance. 
 
 Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths, and 
 deposited it with care. 
 
 All forces have been steadily employed to complete and delight 
 
 me ; 
 Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul. 
 
 This passage will serve as a transition from 
 the theme of cosmic enthusiasm to what Whit- 
 man considered the main motive of his prophecy. 
 A man's self, his personality, being an inde- 
 structible integer of the universe, it follows that 
 each one of us contains within himself sympa- 
 thies with nature and sensibilities that link him 
 to the world he lives in. 
 
 I do not doubt but the majesty and beauty of the world are 
 
 latent in any iota of the world ; 
 I do not doubt I am limitless, and that the universes are 
 
 limitless — in vain I try to think how limitless. 
 
 So then, the method of self-effectuation, the 
 training and perfecting of personality, consists 
 in the effort ,to "tally nature," as Walt some- 
 what quaintly phrases it. The true man is 
 one : 
 
40 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 Who includes diversity, and is Nature, 
 
 Who is the amplitude of the earth, and the coarseness and 
 
 sexuality of the earth, and the great charity of the earth, 
 
 and the equilibrium also. 
 Who has not looked forth from the windows, the eyes for 
 
 nothing, or whose brain held audiences with messengers 
 
 for nothing ; 
 
 Who, out of the theory of the earth, and of his or her body, 
 understands by subtle analogies all other theories. 
 
 The theory of a city, a poem, and of the large politics of These 
 States. 
 
 This is the new meaning given to that much- 
 belauded and disparaged Greek phrase trjv Kara 
 ^vaiv, to hve according to Nature. Whitman 
 apphes it in a very particular sense : 
 
 Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons. 
 It is to grow in the open air, and to eat and sleep with the 
 earth. 
 
 You must test all the products of the human 
 mind by comparison with things in the world 
 around you, see how far they agree with what 
 you find in nature, whether they are applicable 
 to the " broadcast doings of the night and 
 day": 
 
 Now I re-examine philosophies and religions. 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 41 
 
 They may prove well ia lecture-rooms, and yet not prove at 
 
 all under the spacious clouds, and along the landscape 
 
 and flowing currents. 
 Here is realisation ; 
 Here is a man tallied — he realises here what he has in 
 
 him ; 
 The animals, the past, the future, light, space, majesty, love, 
 
 if they are vacant of you, you are vacant of them. 
 
 He who has imbued himself with nature, and 
 is at harmony with the world, is the proper 
 judge, and critic, and sayer of words. To the 
 would-be poet Whitman cries : 
 
 Can your performance face the open fields and the sea- 
 side ? 
 
 Will it absorb into me as I absorb food, air — to appear again 
 in my strength, gait, face ? 
 
 To the student of his own works he says : 
 
 If you would understand me, go to the heights or water- 
 shore ; 
 The nearest gnat is an explanation, and a drop or motion of 
 
 waves a key ; 
 The maul, the oar, the hand-saw, second my words. 
 
 No shuttered room or school can commune with me. 
 
 But roughs and little children know me better than 
 
 they. 
 The young mechanic is closest to me — he knows me well. 
 
42 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 The real poems, the real words, are not what 
 people say, but things in the world, actualities, 
 emotions, whereof words are but the shadows 
 and grey phantoms : 
 
 Human bodies are words, myriads of words ; 
 
 Air, soil, water, fire — these are words ; 
 
 The workmanship of souls is by the inaudible words of the 
 
 earth ; 
 I swear there is no greatness or power that does not emulate 
 
 those of the earth. 
 
 Logic and sermons never convince : 
 
 The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul ; 
 
 The real poems (what we call poems being merely pictures). 
 
 The poems of the privacy of the night, and of men like me. 
 
 Practising what he preaches, Whitman avers 
 that he never composed except in the open air, 
 and says of his own poems : 
 
 I have read these leaves to myself in the open air — I have 
 tried them by trees, stars, rivers. 
 
 In the prelude to one of his solemn diatribes 
 upon the cosmic unity which connects and 
 enfolds all creatures and all things, he represents 
 himself alone at night beside the sea, beneath 
 the stars, and then : 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 43 
 
 I think a thought of the clef of the universes, and of the 
 future. 
 
 This conception of the intimate relation which 
 exists between human personaUty and the ex- 
 ternal world, penetrates the whole of Whitman's 
 work. To cull further instances would be super- 
 fluous. But, in order to understand it and to 
 appreciate its application, three pieces ought to 
 be attentively studied. These are ; " The Song 
 of the Open Koad," "To Working-Men," "To 
 the Sayers of Words." 
 
 The great facts, then, are the universe and 
 personality. The world and man. Each self 
 alone, and for itself the measure of the world ; 
 trained and taught by nature more than by 
 churches and traditions ; by experience of life, 
 by conduct and emotion, more than by creeds 
 and formulas. Whitman insists upon the inde- 
 pendence and the arrogance of self, what the 
 Greeks called avrapKua, what the Germans call 
 Selbst-standigkeit. He will even sacrifice some 
 points of conduct and morality for this spinal 
 quality of self-reliance. Revolt against opinion, 
 rebellion against law, indulgence in untamed 
 proclivities, are even justified in certain cases. 
 
44 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 I am not the poet of goodness only — I do not decline to be 
 
 the poet of wickedness also. 
 What blurt is this about virtue and about vice ? 
 Evil propels me, and reform of evil propels me — I stand 
 
 indifferent ; 
 My gait is no fault-finder's or rejecter's gait ; 
 I moisten the root of all that has grown. 
 
 To enforce his doctrine of personality, Whitman 
 insists that everything which is, exists for the 
 individual. All doctrines, politics, civilisations, 
 poems, arts, music, are for him. Eeligions 
 have grown like leaves of grass from the 
 individual soul. Without you, without me, 
 without human personalities, where would all 
 these things be ? * 
 
 Whoever you are ! motion and reflection are especially for 
 
 you. 
 The divine ship sails the divine sea for you. 
 
 Whoever you are ! you are he or she for whom the earth is 
 
 solid and liquid. 
 You are he or she for whom the sun or moon hang in 
 
 the sky, 
 
 * In conversation with Mr. J. W. Wallace, Whitman declared that 
 his object in writing and publishing "Leaves of Grass" was "to 
 arouse that something in the reader we call character .... not to 
 describe things outside you — creeds, or bibles, or anything else — but 
 arouse that which is in you. It is in you." 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 45 
 
 For none more than you are the present and the past, 
 
 For none more than you is immortahty. 
 
 Each man to himself, and each woman to herself, such is 
 
 the word of the past and present, and the word of 
 
 immortality ; 
 No one can acquire for another — not one ! 
 Not one can grow for another — not one ! 
 
 In like manner, it is only through ourselves, 
 by what each one is and has become, that we 
 enjoy or suffer, enter iato our natural heritage 
 or are defrauded of our birthright. Consider, 
 then, of what vast importance it is for all of us 
 to maintain our personality in health and vigour, 
 to abstain from habits that warp or degrade, to 
 encourage the nobler and sweeter elements of 
 our nature. Though Whitman proclaims himself 
 the " poet of wickedness," he is well aware that 
 wrong conduct, perversity, meanness, uncleanli- 
 ness, are deleterious to self "The murder is to 
 the murderer, and comes back most to him ; the 
 theft is to the thief, the love is to the lover, 
 the gift is to the giver, and comes back most to 
 him ; it cannot fail." Whatsoever a man soweth, 
 that shall he also reap. The doer must suffer 
 for his deed. There is no act that has not ever- 
 lasting consequences to the agent. Each soul 
 
46 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 drees the doom of its own action and emotion. 
 We find no immorality in Whitman's gospel of 
 egotism. 
 
 Charity and personal force are the only investments worth 
 
 anything. 
 No specification is necessary — all that a male or female does 
 
 that is vigorous, benevolent, clean, is so much profit to 
 
 him or her, in the unshakable order of the universe, and 
 
 through the whole scope of it for ever. 
 
 The young man who composedly perilled his life and lost it, 
 has done exceedingly well for himself, without doubt. 
 
 He who never perilled his life, but retains it to old age in 
 riches and ease, has probably achieved nothing for him- 
 self worth mentioning. 
 
 Terrible is the doom of those who, by neglect- 
 ing their health of body and soul, by shutting up 
 their minds to natural influences, by truckling 
 to superstitions and serving false gods, injure 
 their own self They have lost the greatest joy 
 of living : 
 
 the joy of a manly self-hood ! 
 
 Personality — to be servile to none — to defer to none — not to 
 
 any tyrant, known or unknown, 
 To walk with erect carriage, a step springy and elastic, 
 To look with calm gaze, or with flashing eye. 
 To speak with a full sonorous voice, out of a broad chest. 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 47 
 
 To confront with your personality all the other personalities 
 of the earth. 
 
 That supremest of joys will be missed by 
 those who do not respect self as their sole and 
 indefeasible possession. 
 
 But what meaning does Whitman attach to 
 this word Personality ? How does he envisage 
 that phenomenon of self, which is the one thing 
 certain for each separate individual who thinks 
 and feels, and which he has therefore selected 
 as the main motive of his prophecy ? 
 
 Personality presents itself to him, as to 
 average man or woman, under the double aspect 
 of soul and body, and furthermore as differen- 
 tiated by sex. He appears to have believed 
 that in this life the soul is inextricably connected 
 with the body, so that whatever is done in the 
 body redounds to the advantage or disadvantage 
 of the soul. At the same time the fleshly body 
 is destined to dissolution. It is pronounced to be 
 " excrementitious," whereas the principle of self- 
 hood is indestructible, and the soul may be 
 transformed, but can never perish. 
 
 During this life, at any rate, the body 
 •constitutes a man and forms the channel of 
 
48 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 communication between his soul and outer 
 things.* 
 
 I too had received identity by my Body : 
 That I was, I knew was of my body — and what I should be, 
 I knew should be of my body. 
 
 The body has therefore a mystic value for 
 Whitman, not merely because of its exceeding 
 beauty and delightfulness, but also because it is 
 verily the temple of the divinest of all things we 
 know, the human soul. 
 
 If I worship one thing more than another, it shall be the 
 spread of my own body, or any part of it. 
 
 If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred. 
 
 And the glory and sweet of a man, is the token of manhood 
 
 untainted ; 
 And in man or woman, a clean, strong, firm-fibred body, is 
 
 beautiful as the most beautiful face. 
 
 The paramount importance of pure and whole- 
 some manhood or womanhood becomes apparent 
 when we reflect that : 
 
 All comes by the body — only health puts you rapport with the 
 
 * In conversation with Mr. J. W. Wallace at Camden, in the year 
 1891, Whitman spoke of "My favourite theory of physiological 
 development underlying all." 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 49 
 
 Again, though the actual form of flesh which 
 clothes us in this life be excrementitious, still 
 the body in some higher sense is not doomed 
 to die. 
 
 Of your real body, and any man's or woman's real body, 
 Item for item, it will elude the liands of the corpse-cleaners, 
 
 and pass to fitting spheres, 
 Carrying what has accrued to it from the moment of birth to 
 
 the moment of death. 
 
 Behold ! the body includes and is the meaning, the main 
 
 concern — and includes and is the soul ; 
 Whoever you are ! how superior and how divine is your 
 
 body, or any part of it. 
 
 Think of the soul ; 
 
 I swear to you that body of yours gives proportions to your 
 
 soul somehow to live in other spheres ; 
 I do not know how, but I know it is so. 
 
 No wonder, then, if Whitman, feeling thus, 
 exclaims at times that the distinction between 
 soul and body, so far as the individual is con- 
 cerned, vanishes away. 
 
 I have said that the soul is not more than the body. 
 And I have said that the body is not more than the soul ; 
 And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self is. 
 
 We may now ask what is Whitman's ideal of 
 human personality. Where does he find the 
 
so A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 best type of self, the manliest man, the most 
 womanly woman ? The answer to this question 
 is not far to seek, when we bear in mind what 
 we already know about his preference for open 
 life and nature. His hero is sure to be some 
 " nonchalant and natural person " ; not a man of 
 culture or a bookworm, but one who has been 
 born with a fine physique, capable of subduing 
 the external world to his own purpose, and 
 delighting in his labour ; a man of healthy in- 
 stincts and strong passions, vividly enjoying the 
 boon pleasures of life, and keenly responding to 
 the beauty and the wonder of the world. 
 
 The boy I love, the same becomes a man, not through derived 
 power, but in his own right, 
 
 "Wicked, rather than virtuous out of conformity or fear, 
 
 Fond of his sweetheart, relishing well his steak, 
 
 Unrequited love, or a slight, cutting him worse than sharp 
 steel cuts, 
 
 First-rate to ride, to fight, to hit the bull's-eye, to sail a skiff, 
 to sing a song, to play on the banjo, 
 
 Preferring scars, and the beard, and faces pitted with small- 
 pox, over all latherers. 
 
 And those well tanned to those that keep out of the sun.* 
 
 * This is rather like a fragment which I have translated from the 
 •works of the' little known German writer, Karl Heiurich Ulrichs : 
 Dearer to me is the lad village-born with sinewy members 
 Than the pale face of a fine town-bred effeminate youngling ; 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 51 
 
 This theme is repeated with endless variations. 
 The ground-thought recurs over and over again, 
 and will, in the sequel, be found to dominate all 
 his theory of the state politic. 
 
 Myself and mine gymastic ever, ' 
 
 To stand the cold or heat — to take good aim with a gun — to 
 
 sail a boat — to manage horses — to beget superb children, 
 To speak readily and clearly — to feel at home among common 
 
 people, 
 And to hold our own in terrible positions, on land and sea. 
 
 Not for an embroiderer ; 
 
 (There will always be plenty of embroiderers — I welcome them 
 
 also ;) 
 But for the fibre of things, and for inherent men and women. 
 
 Not to chisel ornaments. 
 
 But to chisel with free strokes the heads and limbs of 
 
 plenteous supreme Gods, that these States may realise 
 
 them, walking and talking. 
 
 Such men Whitman calls "athletes," and the 
 women he demands for the back-bone of a nation 
 
 Dearer to me is a groom, a tamer of horses, a hunter, 
 
 Yea, or a, sailor on board: but dear to me down to the heart's 
 
 depth, 
 D earest of all are the young, steel-thewed, magnificent soldiers — 
 Be it the massive form of a black-browed insolent guardsman, 
 Or a blue-eyed hussar with the down new-fledged on his firm lip — 
 Who with clanking spurs and martial tread when they meet me, 
 Know not how goodly they are, the sight of them how over- 
 whelming. 
 
52 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 must equally be "athletic." He is convinced 
 that in such personalities the soul reaches its 
 maximum of magnetic attraction and persuasive- 
 ness. 
 
 Here rises the fluid and attaching character ; 
 The fluid and attaching character is the freshness and sweet- 
 ness of man and woman ; 
 
 Toward the fluid and attaching character exudes the sweat 
 
 of the love of young and old ; 
 From it falls distilled the charm that mocks beauty and 
 
 attainments ; 
 Toward it heaves the shuddering longing ache of contact. 
 
 I and mine do not convince by arguments, similes, rhymes ; 
 We convince by our presence. 
 
 " To effuse magnetism," to attract and persuade 
 by merely being vigorous and sound and free, 
 is the crown and glory of a perfected personality. 
 
 Do you not see how it would serve to have such a body and 
 soul, that when you enter the crowd, an atmosphere of 
 desire and command enters with you, and every one is 
 impressed with your personality ? 
 
 Those severe and awful utterances, " A Hand- 
 Mirror," " To a President," " Of Persons Arrived 
 at High Positions," and some pregnant passages 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 53 
 
 from "A Leaf of Faces," point the opposite 
 lesson : how useless it is to have conquered 
 wealth, place, honours, if one has lost his own 
 soul, corrupted his own live body, neglected and 
 dishonoured his own self. 
 
IV 
 
 The transition from Personality to Sex offers no 
 difficulty. Sex, the passions, the affections, love, 
 are clearly the main things in life. 
 
 In his treatment of Love, Whitman distin- 
 guishes two broad kinds of human affection ; 
 the one being the ordinary sexual relation, the 
 other comradeship or an impassioned relation 
 between man and man. The former he describes 
 as " amativeness," the latter as " adhesiveness." 
 There is no reason why both forms of emotion 
 should not co-exist in the same person. Indeed 
 Whitman makes it plain that a completely en- 
 dowed individuahty, one who, as Horace might 
 have said, is "entirely rounded and without 
 ragged edges," will be highly susceptible of 
 both. The exact bearing of amativeness and 
 adhesiveness upon one another, and upon the 
 spiritual nature of the individual, has been 
 fuUy expressed in the following poem : 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 55 
 
 Fast-anchored eternal love ! woman I love ! 
 
 bride ! wife ! more resistless than I can tell, the thought 
 
 of you ! 
 Then separate, as disembodied or another born, 
 Ethereal, the last athletic reality, my consolation, 
 
 1 ascend, I float in the regions of your love, man, 
 O sharer of my roving life. 
 
 Since this is the most condensed and weighty 
 of Whitman's utterances upon the subject of 
 love, every word in it may be supposed to have 
 been carefully considered. It is not therefore 
 insignificant to notice that, in the edition of 
 1 860-6 1 , " primeval " stood for " fast-anchored " in 
 the first line, and " the purest born " for " or 
 another born " in the third line. 
 
 The section of his complete works which 
 deals exclusively with sexual love, is entitled 
 " Children of Adam." The frankness and the 
 rankness of the pieces composing this chapter 
 called down a storm of insults, calumnies, 
 unpopularity, on Whitman. Yet the attitude 
 which he assumed as poet and prophet demanded 
 this frankness, while the spirit of his treatment 
 deprived the subject-matter of its rankness. 
 
 His originality consisted, I have said, in giving 
 the idealism of poetry and powerful emotion to 
 
56 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 the blank results of modern science. Now it 
 is in the very nature of science to consider 
 nothing as "common or unclean," to accept all 
 the facts presented to its vision with indifference, 
 caring for nothing in the process of analysis 
 except the proof of reality, the elucidation of 
 truth. Science, in her wise impartiality, regards 
 morbid phenomena, disease and decay, crime 
 and aberration, as worthy of attention, upon 
 the same lines as healthy and normal products. 
 She knows that pathology is an indispensable 
 adjunct to the study of organic structure. 
 
 Sharing the scientific spirit in his quality of 
 poet, Whitman was not called to celebrate 
 what is unhealthy and abnormal in humanity. 
 That is a proper subject for the laboratory. 
 The poet's function is to stimulate and to 
 invigorate. It is his duty to insist upon what 
 is wholesome, the things in life which conduce 
 to organic growth, the natural instincts and 
 normal appetites upon which the continuation 
 of the species, the energy of the individual, 
 the welfare of the family, the fabric of the 
 commonwealth, eventually rest. Feeling thus, 
 and being penetrated with the scientific spirit, 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 57 
 
 Whitman was justified in claiming the whole 
 of healthy manhood and , womanhood for his 
 province. To exclude sex from his account of 
 human nature would have been absurd ; for 
 it is precisely sex by which men and women 
 are differentiated ; sex which brings them into 
 mutual relations of amativeness ; sex which 
 determines the preservation and the future of 
 the species. The inspiration which prompted 
 him, first among modern poets, to penetrate the 
 blank results of science with imagination and 
 emotion, led him inevitably to a frank treatment 
 of sexual relations. Each portion of the healthy 
 human body had for a thinker of his type to 
 be considered " sweet and clean." He could not 
 shrink from the facts of paternity and maternity, 
 these being the most important both for men 
 and women, and through them for society at 
 large. For him " the parts and poems of the 
 body " are not " of the body only, but of the 
 soul " — indeed " these are the soul." Following 
 the impulse which forced him to insist upon a 
 vigorous and healthy personality or self as the 
 fundamental integer of human life, he proceeded 
 to impress upon his nation the paramount duty 
 
58 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 of maintaining a robust and healthy breed. 
 Scientific pathology may be left to deal with 
 abnormalities and diseases. The social conscience 
 is sufficiently, if dimly, acquainted with those 
 evils. For the poet, who has accepted the 
 scientific point of view, it is enough to indicate 
 their wrongness. But he enjoys the privilege 
 of proclaiming the beauty and the goodness of 
 functions and organs which constitute the central 
 reality of human life. To recognise the dignity 
 of sex, to teach personalities, both male and 
 female, that they have the right to take a 
 pride in it, and that this pride is their duty, 
 was for a poet of Whitman's stamp a prime 
 consideration. Those mediaeval lies regarding 
 sexuTal sinfulness, those foolish panegyrics of 
 chaste abstinence, those base insinuations of 
 foul-minded priests, had to be swept away — 
 not by polemic or vituperation, but by a plain 
 proclamation of the truth which had been veiled 
 from sight so long. Delicacy in matters of sex 
 had become indelicacy by a false habit of 
 envisaging the fact. All falsehood is inconsistent 
 with science and injurious to the best interests 
 of society. 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 59 
 
 Having entered upon this region with the 
 objects I have hinted at — a recognition of funda- 
 mental truths, an acceptance of scientific as 
 opposed to theological principles, a deep sense of 
 personality, and a conviction that the mainten- 
 ance of the breed at its highest level ofefiiciency 
 is a prime condition of national well-being — 
 Whitman naturally treated the ordinary sexual 
 relations with a breadth and simplicity which 
 appear to more sophisticated minds as brutal. 
 He does not shrink from images and descriptions, 
 from metaphors and phi'ases, as closely borrowed 
 from the facts of sex as are his pictures of the 
 outer world, or his transcripts from the occu- 
 pations of mankind. Sex, being for him so 
 serious and excellent a thing, has the right to 
 equal freedom of speech with sunrise or sun- 
 setting, the stars in their courses, the woods 
 and fields, the industries of carpenter or type- 
 setter, the courage of soldiers, the inevitable 
 fact of death. Therefore he speaks plainly 
 about many things which hitherto were tacitly 
 ignored in poetry, or were touched upon by 
 seekers after obscene literary efiects. It is not 
 inconsequent that he should have been accused 
 
6o A STUDY OF AVALT WHITMAN 
 
 of indecency, because the things he talked of had 
 so long been held to be indecent. Wishing to 
 remove the stigma of indecency and obscenity, 
 which he rightly considered due to convention- 
 ally imported prejudices, he had to face the 
 misconstruction of those who could not compre- 
 hend his real intention. 
 
 Whitman thought and wrote habitually, not 
 with people of culture, refined tastes, literary and 
 social traditions in view, but for the needs and 
 aspirations of what he called " the divine aver- 
 age." He aimed at depicting robust and sane 
 humanity in his verse. He wanted to brace 
 character, and to create through his art-work a 
 type applicable to all sorts and coiiditions of men, 
 irrespective of their previous diflPerentiation by 
 specific temperament or class-association. For 
 this reason, his treatment of the sexual relations 
 will be felt by some persons not only to be crudely 
 frank in detail, but also to lack delicacy in its 
 general outlines. The overwhelming attractions 
 of sex, swaying the physique of men and women, 
 are broadly insisted upon. The intercourse 
 established in matrimony is regarded not so 
 much as an intellectual and moral union, but 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 6i 
 
 as an association for mutual assistance in the 
 labours of life, and for the production of noble 
 human specimens. It is an Adamic hygienic 
 view of marriage, satisfying the instincts of the 
 primeval man. Take this passage, in which he 
 describes the qualities of the help-mate for his 
 typical male. 
 
 Without shame the man I like knows and avows the delicious- 
 
 ness of his sex, 
 Without shame the woman I like knows and avows hers. 
 
 Now I will dismiss myself from impassive women, 
 
 I will go stay with her who waits for me, and with those 
 
 wom^en that are warm-blooded and sufficient for me ; 
 I see that they understand me, and do not deny me : 
 I see that they are worthy of me — I will be the robust 
 
 husband of these women. 
 
 They are not one jot less than I am, 
 
 They are tanned in the face by shining suns and blowing 
 
 winds, 
 Their flesh has the old divine suppleness and strength. 
 They know how to swim, row, ride, wrestle, shoot, run, strike , 
 
 retreat, advance, resist, defend themselves, 
 They are ultimate in their own right — they are calm, clear, 
 
 well-possessed of themselves. 
 
 I draw you close to me, you women ! 
 I cannot let you go, I would do you good, 
 I am for you, and you are for me, not only for our own sake, 
 but for others' sake ; 
 
62 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 Envelop'd in you sleep greater heroes and bards, 
 They refuse to awake at the touch of any man but me. 
 
 It is obvious, from this slightly humorous, but 
 pregnant, passage, that Whitman abandoned 
 those dregs of mediaeval sentimentalism and 
 platonism, v^hich filtering through the middle- 
 class minds of an unchivalrous modern age, have 
 resulted in commonplace notions about " the 
 weaker and the fairer sex," "vFoman's mission to 
 console and elevate," the " protection rendered by 
 the stronger to the frailer," "the feminine 
 ornament of our homes "- — notions and phrases 
 which the active-minded and able-bodied woman 
 of the present day repudiates, and from the 
 thraldom of which she is rapidly working out her 
 way toward freedom. Whitman, to use a phrase 
 of Clough, looked upon love as "fellow-service." 
 He recognised the woman's right to share alike 
 with man in labour and in privilege. And it was 
 not for nothing, as appears from some sentences 
 in the quotation, that he spoke in another place 
 about " the athletic American matron." * 
 
 * In the preface to the 1872 edition of " Leaves of Grass," Whitman 
 asserts that this book "is, in its intentions, the song of a great com- 
 posite democratic individual, male or female." 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 63 
 
 A theory- of sexual relations, so primitive, so 
 archetypal, so based and planted on the primal 
 needs and instincts, must of necessity lack much 
 of delicacy and fine gradations. It is, however, 
 bracing to return to this from the psychological 
 studies of the modern French school, from such 
 silly and nauseous lucubrations as Bourget's 
 " Physiologic de 1' Amour Moderne," from all that 
 stifling literature of " L' Amour Coupable," which 
 lands us at last, in nothing better than what 
 "Whitman calls " the sly settee, and the unwhole- 
 some adulterous couple." 
 
 There is an ^schylean largeness, a Lucretian 
 energy, in Whitman's " Children of Adam." Sex 
 is once again recognised ; not in its aspect of the 
 boudoir, the alcove, the brothel ; but as the bass- 
 note of the world, the universal Pan, unseen, yet 
 omnipresent, felt by aU, responded to by all, 
 without which the whole vast symphony of things 
 would have for man no value. By subtle associa- 
 tions, he connects the life of nature, in dewy 
 forests and night-winds, in scents of fruits and 
 pungent plants, in crushed herbs, and the rustling 
 of rain-drenched foliage against our faces, with 
 impressions of the sexual imagination. He finds 
 
64 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 the choicest images to shadow forth the acts 
 
 of sex. 
 
 The hairy wild bee that murmurs and hankers up and down 
 — that gripes the full-grown lady-flower, curves upon 
 her with amorous firm legs, takes his wiU of her, and 
 holds himself tremulous and tight till he is satisfied. 
 
 That is audacious, in spite of its consummate 
 style, a critic will exclaim. But the same critic, 
 being accustomed by habit to the exercise, reads 
 with equanimity the long-drawn paragraphs and 
 chapters which lay bare the latest secrets of the 
 " sly settee." The boudoir, the alcove, the 
 brothel, have come to be recognised as legitimate 
 subjects for analytical art. Even Bourget, even 
 CatuUe Mendes, are accepted and acclaimed. 
 From these taints of the city and civilisation 
 Whitman calls us away. He says in passing : 
 
 Have you seen the fool that corrupted his own live body ? or 
 the fool that corrupted her own live body ? 
 
 For they do not conceal themselves, and cannot conceal them- 
 selves. 
 
 Here and there he returns to this point and 
 repeats the warning. He insists upon the truth 
 that sins against the body, self-contamination, 
 uncleanly lusts and refinements of sensuality. 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 65 
 
 carry their own punishment. But he knows that 
 their analysis in literature, except for the pro- 
 fessed pathologist and psychiatrist, is harmful to 
 the manhood of a nation ; whereas the rehabita- 
 tion of healthy and legitimate functions restores 
 the natural man to a sense of his own dignity 
 and responsibility. Nor does Whitman neglect 
 that superflux of sense, which also claims a part 
 in human life, that phallic ecstasy of which the 
 pagan poets sang. A much-criticised piece from 
 " Children of Adam " puts the matter very 
 plainly. It is called "Native Moments," and 
 need not be enlarged upon. "Were we not 
 expressly told by him that it is useless to 
 extract a coherent system from his utterances, 
 we might be puzzled to explain the logical con- 
 nection of that poem with the rest of the 
 section. I take it that he recognised the right 
 and the necessity of " native moments " in that 
 free play of the normal senses which he is up- 
 holding. Only, the ground-thoughts which 
 penetrate the whole of his work upon this topic, 
 the pervading essence whereof will remain 
 longest with those who have imbibed its spirit, 
 are expressed in lines like these : 
 
66 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 If any thing is sacred, the human body is sacred, 
 
 And the glory and sweet of a man is the token of manhood 
 
 untainted ; 
 And in man or woman, a clean, strong, firm-fibred body is 
 
 beautiful as the most beautiful face. 
 
 If -^schylus could come again, he would re- 
 cognise Whitman's treatment of Aphrodite as 
 akin to these lines of his own : 
 
 Love throbs in holy heaven to wound the earth ; 
 And love stUl prompts the land to yearn for bridals ; 
 The rain that falls in rivers from the sky, 
 Impregnates earth, and she brings forth for men 
 The tlocks and herds and life of teeming Ceres ; 
 The bloom of forests by dews hymeneal 
 Is perfected : in all which things I rule. 
 
 If we are to have sex handled openly in 
 literature — and I do not see why we should not 
 have it, or how we are to avoid it — surely it is 
 better to be in the company of poets like 
 JEschylus and Whitman, who place human love 
 among the large and universal mysteries of 
 nature, than to dwell with theologians who con- 
 found its simple truth with sinfulness, or with 
 self-dubbed " psychologues " who dabble in its 
 morbid pruriencies. 
 
V 
 
 The section of Whitman's works which deals 
 with adhesiveness, or the love of comrades, 
 is fully as important, and in some ways more 
 difficult to deal with, than his " Children of 
 Adam." He gave it the title " Calamus," from 
 the root of a water-rush, adopted by him as 
 the symbol of this love.* Here the element of 
 spirituality in passion, of romantic feeling, and 
 of deep enduring sentiment, which was almost 
 conspicuous by its absence from the section on 
 sexual love, emerges into vivid prominence, and 
 lends peculiar warmth of poetry to the artistic 
 treatment. We had to expect so much from 
 the poem quoted by me at the commencement of 
 this disquisition. There Whitman described the 
 love of man for woman as " fast-anchor'd, eter- 
 nal " ; the thought of the bride, the wife, as 
 
 * Its botanical name is Acorns Calamus, We call it " sweet-rush " 
 or " sweet se 
 
68 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 " more resistless than I can tell." But for the 
 love of man for man he finds quite a different 
 class of descriptive phrases : " separate, disem- 
 bodied, another born, ethereal, the last athletic 
 reality, my consolation." He hints that we 
 have left the realm of sex and sense, and have 
 ascended into a different and rarer atmosphere, 
 where passion, though it has not lost its 
 strength, is clarified. " Largior hie aether, et 
 campos lumine vestit purpureo." 
 
 This emphatic treatment of an emotion whichi 
 is usually talked about under the vague and 
 formal term of friendship, gives peculiar import- 
 ance to " Calamus." No man in the modern^ 
 world has expressed so strong a conviction that 
 " manly attachment," " athletic love," " the high- 
 towering love of comrades," is a main factor in 
 human life, a virtue upon which society will have 
 to lay its firm foundations, and a passion equal 
 in permanence, superior in spirituality, to the 
 sexual affection. Whitman regards this emotion 
 not only as the " consolation" of the individual,, 
 but also as a new and hitherto unapprehended, 
 force for stimulating national vitality. 
 
 There is no softness or sweetness in his treat- 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 69 
 
 ment of this theme. His tone is sustained 
 throughout at a high pitch of virile enthusiasm, 
 which, at the same time, vibrates with acutest 
 feeHng, thrills with an undercurrent of the 
 tenderest sensibility. Not only the sublimest 
 thoughts and aspirations, but also the shyest, 
 most shame-faced, yearnings are reserved for 
 this love. At one time he exclaims : 
 
 I think it is not for life that I am chanting here my chant 
 
 of lovers — I think it must be for Death, 
 
 For how calm, how solemn it grows, to ascend to the atmo- 
 sphere of lovers, 
 
 Death or Hfe I am then indifferent — my soul declines to 
 prefer, 
 
 1 am not sure but the high soul of lovers welcomes death 
 
 most ; 
 Indeed, Death, I think now these leaves mean precisely the 
 
 same as you mean ; 
 Grow up taller, sweet leaves, that I may see ! Grow up out 
 
 of my breast ! 
 Spring away from the concealed heart there ! 
 Do not fold yourselves so, in your pink-tinged roots, timid 
 
 leaves ! 
 Do not remain down there so ashamed, herbage of my breast ! 
 
 The leaves are Whitman's emotions and the 
 poems they engender ; the root from which they 
 spring is " manly attachment," " athletic love," 
 
70 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 symbolised for him in the blushing root of the 
 pond-calamus which he plucked one day and 
 chose to be the emblem of the love of lovers : 
 
 here I last saw him that tenderly loves me — and returns 
 
 again, never to separate from me, 
 And this, O this shall henceforth be the token of comrades — 
 
 this Oalamiis-root shall. 
 Interchange it, youths, with each other ! Let none render it 
 
 back! 
 
 At another time, in minor key, he writes as 
 follows : 
 
 you when I often and silently come where you are, that I 
 
 may be with you ; 
 As I walk by your side, or sit near, or remain in the same 
 
 room with you. 
 Little you know the subtle, electric fire that for your sake is 
 
 playing within me. 
 
 These extracts were necessary, because there 
 is some misapprehension abroad regarding the 
 precise nature of what Whitman meant by 
 " Calamus." His method of treatment has, to a 
 certain extent, exposed him to misconstruction. 
 Still, as his friend and commentator, Mr. 
 Burroughs, puts it : " The sentiment is primitive^ 
 athletic, taking form in all manner of large and 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 71 
 
 homely out-of-door images, and springs, as any- 
 one may see, directly from the heart and 
 experience of the poet." The language has a 
 passionate glow, a warmth of devotion, beyond 
 anything to which the world is used in the 
 celebration of friendship. At the same time the 
 false note of insincerity or sensuousness is never 
 heard. The melody is in the Dorian mood — 
 recalling to our minds that fellowship in arms 
 which flourished among the Dorian tribes, and 
 formed the chivalry of pre-historic Hellas. 
 
 In the preface to the 1880 edition of " Leaves 
 of Grass " and " Two Rivulets," Whitman gives 
 his own explanation of " Calamus," and of the 
 feelings which inspired that section of his work. 
 
 SometliiDg more may be added — for, while I am about it,. 
 I would make a full confession. I also sent out " Leaves of 
 Grass" to arouse and set flowing in men's and women's 
 hearts, young and old, endless streams of living, pulsating 
 love and friendship, directly from them to myself, now and 
 ever. To this terrible, irrepressible yearning (surely more or 
 less down underneath in most human souls), this never- 
 satisfied appetite for sympathy and this boundless ofiering of 
 
 sympathy, thi'a nnjvprHal dfimnnrfltif^ nmnraVlfiKbip. this old. 
 
 eternal, vet ever-new interchange of adhesiveness, so fitly 
 emblematic of America, I hav e gi ven in that b ook, undi s- 
 guisedly, declaredly, the openest expression. Besides^ im-. 
 
72 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 portant as they are in my purpose as emotional expressions 
 for humanity, the spec ial meaning of the " Calamus." cluster 
 of "Leaves oT r|yaagi' (and more or less running through 
 the book and cropping out in " Drum Taps "), TnaiT^ly reai'dps 
 in its polit ical significance. In my opinion, it is by a ferven t 
 accepted developmeat of comradeship, the beautiful and san e 
 affection of man for man, la tent in all the young fellows, 
 north and south, east and west — ^it is by +.1ii'g, T any nnrl J!y 
 what goes directly and indirectly along with it. that th e 
 "United States of the future (I cannot too often repeat) are to 
 l3e the most effectually weiaea togetner. ip tf^malatpri annpnl^ 
 into a living union . ^ 
 
 This being so, Whitman never suggests that 
 comradeship may occasion the development of 
 physical desire. On the other h and, he d oes 
 n ot in set terms condemn desires, or warn hi s 
 disciples against their perils. There is indeed 
 a distinctly sensuous side to his conception of 
 adhesiveness. To a Western Boy he says : 
 
 If you be not silently selected by lovers, and do not sUently 
 
 select lovers, 
 ■Of what use is it that you seek to become elect of mine ? 
 
 Like Plato, in the PhcBclrus, Whitman de- 
 scribes an enthusiastic type of masculine emotion, 
 leaving its private details to the moral sense 
 and special inclination of the individuals con- 
 cerned. 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 73 
 
 The poet himself appears to be not wholly 
 unconscious that there are dangers and difficulties 
 involved in the highly-pitched emotions he is 
 praising. The; whole tenor of two carefully-toned 
 compositions, entitled " Whoever you are, Hold- 
 ing me now in hand," and " Trickle, Drops," 
 suggest an underlying sense of spiritual conflict. 
 The following poem, again, is sufficiently signifi- 
 cant and typical to call for literal transcription : 
 
 Earth, my likeness ! 
 
 Though you look so impassive, ample and spheric there, 
 
 I now suspect that is not all ; 
 
 I now suspect there is something fierce in you, eHgible to burst 
 
 forth ; 
 For an athlete is enamoured of me — and I of him, 
 But toward him there is something fierce and terrible in me, 
 
 eligible to burst forth, 
 I dare not tell it in word — not even in these songs. 
 
 The reality of Whitman's feeling, the intense 
 delight which he derives from the personal 
 presence and physical contact of a beloved man, 
 find luminous expression in " A Glimpse," 
 "Recorders ages hence," "When I heard at 
 the Close of Day," " I saw in Louisiana a Live- 
 Oak growing," " Long I thought that Know- 
 
74 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 ledge alone would suffice me,"* "0 Tan-faced 
 Prairie-Boy," and "Vigil Strange I kept on 
 the Field one Night."t 
 
 It is clear then that, in his treatment of 
 comradeship, or the impassioned love of man 
 for man. Whitman has struck a keynote, to 
 the emotional intensity of which the modern 
 world is unaccustomed. It therefore becomes 
 of much importance to discover the poet-prophet's 
 Stimmung — his radical instinct with regard to 
 the moral quality of the feeling he encourages. 
 Studying his works by their own light, and by 
 the light of their author's character, interpreting 
 each part by reference to the whole and in the 
 spirit of I the whole, an impartial critic will, I 
 think, be drawn to the conclusion that what 
 he calls the " adhesiveness " of comradeship is 
 meant to have no interblending with the 
 " amativeness " of sexual love. Personally, it is 
 undeniable that Whitman possessed a specially 
 keen sense of the fine restraint and continence, 
 the cleanliness and chastity, that are inseparable 
 
 * Not included in the " Complete Poems and Prose." It will be 
 found in " Leaves of Grass," Boston, 1860-61. 
 t The two last are from " Drum- Taps." 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 75 
 
 from the perfectly virile and physically complete 
 nature of healthy manhood. Still we have the 
 right to predicate the same ground-qualities in 
 the early Dorians, those founders of the martial 
 institution of Greek love ; and yet it is notorious 
 to students of Greek civilisation that the lofty 
 sentiment of their masculine chivalry was inter- 
 twined with much that is repulsive to modern 
 sentiment. 
 
 Whitman does not appear to have taken 
 some of the phenomena of contemporary morals 
 into due account, although he must have been 
 aware of them. Else he would have foreseen 
 that, human nature being what it is, we cannot 
 expect to eliminate all sensual alloy from 
 emotions raised to a high pitch of passionate 
 intensity, and* that permanent elements within 
 the midst of our society wiU imperil the absolute 
 purity of the ideal he attempts to establish. 
 It is obvious that those unenviable mortals 
 who are the inheritors of sexual anomalies, will 
 recognise their own emotion in Whitman's 
 " superb friendship, exalte, previously un- 
 known," which " waits, and has been always 
 waiting, latent in all men," the " something 
 
76 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 fierce iii me, eligible to burst forth," " ethereal 
 comradeship," " the last athletic reality." Had 
 I not the strongest proof in "Whitman's private 
 correspondence with myself that he repudiated 
 any such deductions from his " Calamus," I 
 admit that I should have regarded them as 
 justified ; and I am not certain whether his own 
 feelings upon this delicate topic may not have 
 altered since the time when " Calamus " was 
 fii'st composed. 
 
 These considerations do not, however, affect 
 the spiritual quality of his ideal. After acknow- 
 ledging, what Whitman omitted to perceive, 
 that there are inevitable points of contact 
 between sexual anomaly and his doctrine of 
 comradeship, the question now remains whether 
 he has not suggested the way whereby abnormal 
 instincts may be moralised and raised to higher 
 value. In other words, are those exceptional 
 instincts provided in " Calamus " with the 
 means of their salvation from the filth and mire 
 of brutal appetite ? It is diflScult to answer 
 this question ; for the issue involved is nothing 
 less momentous than the possibility of evoking 
 a new chivalrous enthusiasm, analogous to that 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 77 
 
 of primitive Hellenic society, from emotions 
 which are at present classified among the tur- 
 pitudes of human nature. 
 
 Let us look a little closer at the expression 
 which Whitman has given to his own feelings 
 about friendship. The first thing that strikes 
 us is the mystic emblem he has chosen for 
 masculine love. That is the water-plant, or 
 scented rush, called " Calamus," which springs 
 in wild places, " in paths untrodden, in the 
 growth by margins of pond- waters." He has 
 chosen these " emblematic and capricious blades " 
 because of their shyness, their aromatic perfume, 
 their aloofness from the patent life of the world. 
 He calls them " sweet leaves, pink-tinged roots, 
 timid leaves," " scented herbage of my breast." 
 Finally, he says :* 
 
 Here my last words, and the most baffling, 
 
 Here the frailest leaves of me, and yet my strongest-lasting. 
 
 Here I shade down, and hide my thoughts — I do not expose 
 
 them. 
 And yet they expose me more than all my other poems. 
 
 The manliness of the emotion which is thus 
 
 * This I cannot find in " Complete Poems and Prose." It is included 
 in the Boston edition, 1860-61, and the Camden edition, 1876. 
 
78 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 SO shyly, allegorically indicated, appears in the 
 magnificent address to soldiers at the close of 
 the great war : " Over the Carnage rose Pro- 
 phetic a Voice."* Its tenderness emerges in the 
 elegy on a slain comrade : t 
 
 Vigil for boy of responding kisses (never again on earth 
 
 responding) : 
 Vigil for comrade swiftly slain — vigil I never forget, how as 
 
 day brightened, 
 I rose from the chill ground, and folded my soldier well in his 
 
 blanket. 
 And buried him where he fell. 
 
 Its pathos and clinging intensity transpire 
 through the last lines of the following piece, 
 which may have been suggested by the legends 
 of David and Jonathan, AchiUes and Patroclus, 
 Orestes and Pylades -.t 
 
 » "Drum Taps." Complete Poems, p. 247. 
 
 f Ibid. p. 238. 
 
 t " Leaves of Grass." Complete Poems, p. 107. Since writing the 
 above, I have been privileged to read a. series of letters addressed by- 
 Whitman to a young man, whom I will call P., and who was tenderly 
 beloved by him. They throw a flood of life upon " Calamus," and are 
 superior to any commentary. It is greatly to be hoped that they 
 may be published. Whitman, it seems, met P. at Washington not long 
 before the year 1869, when the lad was about eighteen years of age. 
 They soon became attached. Whitman's friendship being returned 
 with at least equal warmth by P. The letters breathe a purity and 
 simplicity of affection, a naiveU and reasonableness, which are very 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 79 
 
 When I peruse the conquered fame of heroes, and the victories 
 of mighty generals, 
 
 I do not envy the generals, 
 
 Nor the President in his Presidency, nor the rich in his great 
 house ; 
 
 But when I read of the brotherhood of lovers, how it was with 
 them, 
 
 How through life, through dangers, odium, unchanging, long 
 and long. 
 
 Through youth, and through middle and old age, how un- 
 faltering, how affectionate and faithful they were, 
 
 Then I am pensive — I hastily put down the book, and walk 
 away, filled with the bitterest envy. 
 
 But Whitm an does not conceive of comradeship 
 as a merely personal possession, delip^htful to the 
 friends it links in bonds of amity. He regards it 
 
 eventually as a social and politic al virtue. Thi s 
 hum an emotion is destined to cement society and 
 t o render commonwealths inviolable. Reading 
 
 remarkable considering the unmistakable intensity of the emotion. 
 Throughout them, Whitman shows the tenderest and wisest care for 
 his young friend's welfare, helps him in material ways, and bestows 
 upon him the best advice, the heartiest encouragement, without 
 betraying any sign of patronage or preaching. Illness soon attacked 
 Walt. He retired to Camden, and P., who was employed as " baggage- 
 master on the freight-trains" of a railway, was for long unable to 
 visit him. There is something very wistful in the words addressed 
 from a distance by the aging poet to this " son of responding kisses." 
 I regret that we do not .possess P.'s answers. Yet, probably, to most 
 readers, they would not appear highly interesting ; for it is clear he 
 was only an /artless and uncultured workman. 
 
8o A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 some of his poems, we are carried back to ancient 
 Greece — to Plato's Symposium, to Philip gazing; ' 
 on th e R3, creH ha.nH of Th phiir" Qf+Q^ +1t^ ^g^t "•*" 
 _Chaeronea.* 
 
 I dream'd in a dream, I saw a city invincible to the attacks of 
 
 the whole of the rest of the earth ; 
 I dream'd that was the new City of Friends ; 
 Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love — it 
 
 led the rest ; 
 It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city, 
 And in all their looks and words. 
 
 And again : t 
 
 •^ I believe the main purport of These States is to found a superb 
 
 friendship, exalte, previously unknown, 
 •^ Because I perceive it waits, and has been always waiting, 
 
 latent in all men. 
 
 And once again : \ 
 
 Come, I will make the continent indissoluble ; 
 
 I will make the most splendid race the sun ever yet shone 
 
 upon; 
 I will make divine magnetic lands, 
 With the love of comrades, 
 
 With the life-long love of comrades. 
 
 * Complete Poems, p. 109. Compare, " I hear it was charged against 
 me," ibid. p. 107. 
 
 f Complete Poems, p. no. 
 
 + Camden edition, 1876, p. 127. Complete Poems, p. 99. Compare 
 " Democratic Vistas," Complete Prose, p. 247, note. 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 8i 
 
 I will plant companionship thick as trees all along the rivers- 
 of America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and 
 all over the prairies ; 
 I will make inseparable cities, with their arms about each 
 other's necks ; 
 
 By the love of comrades. 
 
 By the manly love of comrades. 
 
 For you these from me, Democracy, to serve you ma 
 
 Jemme ! 
 For you, for you I am trilling these songs. 
 
 We may return from this analysis to the 
 inquiry whether anything like a new chivalry 
 is to be expected from the doctrines of "Cala- 
 mus," which shall in the future utilise for noble 
 purposes some of those unhappy instincts which 
 at present run to waste in vice and shame. 
 It may be asked what these passions have in 
 common with the topic of Whitman's prophecy ? 
 They have this in common with it. .ffiilit; 
 man recognises among the sacred emotions and 
 social virtues, destined ^o regenerate poli- 
 tical life and to cement nations, an intense, 
 jealous, throbbing, sensitive, expectant love 
 oT man Jor man : a love which yearns in 
 absence, droops under the sense of neglect, re- 
 vives at the return of the fteioved : a love th^t 
 
82 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 finds honest delight in hand- touch, meeting lip s, 
 Kburs of privacy, cl ose personal contact. He pr o- 
 claims this love to be not only a daily fact in th e 
 present, but also a saving and ennobling aspir a- 
 t ion. While he "7;prp°°^y ^'^pnf iiates. diso wns, 
 and brands a s " d amnable " all " morbid infer- 
 ences " which ma y be drawn by malevolence or 
 vicious cunning from his doctrine, he is prepa red 
 to extend the gospel of comradeship to the whol e 
 human race. He expects democracy, the new 
 social and political medium, the new religious 
 ideal of mankind, to develop and extend " that 
 fervid comradeship," and by its means to counter- 
 balance and to spiritualise what is vulgar and 
 materialistic in the modern world. " Democracy," 
 he maintains, " infers such loving comradeship, 
 as its most inevitable twin or counterpart, with- 
 out which it will be incomplete, in vain, and 
 incapable o f perpetuating itself."* 
 
 If this be not a dream, if he is right in believ- 
 ing that " threads of manly friendship, fond and 
 loving, pure and sweet, strong and life-long, 
 carried to degrees hitherto unknown," will pene- 
 
 * These prose passages are taken from " Democratic Vistas," cited 
 above, p. 94, note. 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 83 
 
 trate the organism of society, " not only giving 
 tone to individual character, and making it unpre- 
 cedentedly emotional, muscular, heroic, and refined, 
 but having deepest relations to general politics " 
 — then are we perhaps justified in foreseeing 
 here the advent of an enthusiasm which shall 
 rehabilitate those outcast instincts, by giving 
 them a spiritual atmosphere, an environment of 
 recognised and healthy emotions, wherein to 
 expand at liberty and purge away the grossness 
 and the madness of their pariahdom ? 
 
 This prospect, like all ideals, until they are 
 realised in experience, may seem fantastically 
 visionary. Moreover, the substance of human 
 nature is so mixed that it would perhaps be fana- 
 tical to expect from Whitman's chivah-y of " ad- 
 hesiveness," a more immaculate purity than was 
 attained by the mediaeval chivalry of " amative- 
 ness." Nevertheless, that mediaeval chivalry, the 
 great emotional product of feudalism, though it 
 fell short of its own aspiration, bequeathed in- 
 calculable good to modern society by refining and 
 clarifying the crudest of male appetites. In like 
 manner, this democratic chivalry, announced by 
 Whitman, may be destined to absorb, control, and 
 
84 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 elevate those darker, more mysterious, apparently 
 abnormal appetites, which we know to be widely 
 diffused and ineradicable in the ground-work of 
 human nature. 
 
 Returning from the dream, the vision of a 
 future possibility, it will, at any rate, be conceded 
 that Whitman has founded comradeship, the 
 enthusiasm which binds man to man in fervent 
 love, upon a natural basis. Eliminating classical 
 associations of corruption, ignoring the perplexed 
 questions of a guilty passion d oomed by law an d 
 popu lar antipathy to failure, he begins anew with 
 sound and primitive human ity. There he discovers 
 "a superb friendship, exalte, previously unknown." 
 He perceives tha t " it waits, and ha s beerTalways 
 waiting, latent in all men." His method of treat- 
 ment, fearless, and uncowed by any thought of 
 evil, his touch upon the matter, chaste and whole- 
 some and aspiring, reveal the possibility of 
 restoring in all innocence to human life a portion 
 of its alienated or unclaimed moral birthright. 
 
 It were well to close upon this note. The half, 
 as the Greeks said, is more than the whole ; and 
 the time has not yet come to raise the question 
 whether the love of man for man shall be elevated 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 85 
 
 through a hitherto unapprehended chivalry to 
 nobler powers, even as the barbarous love of man 
 for woman once was. This question at the present 
 moment is deficient in actuality. The world 
 cannot be invited to entertain it. 
 
VI 
 
 The passages which have been quoted in illus- 
 tration of Whitman's views regarding man and 
 the universe, and the paramount importance of 
 self or personality, leaves no doubt as to how he 
 must have treated the subject of " Democracy." 
 
 The inscription placed upon the forefront of 
 " Leaves of Grass," contains this paragraph : 
 
 Nor cease at the theme of One's-Self . I speak the word of 
 the modern, the word en-masse. 
 
 In another place, he says : 
 
 My comrade ! 
 
 For you, to share with me two greatnesses — a third one, rising 
 
 inclusive and more resplendent, 
 The greatness of Love and Democracy — and the greatness of 
 
 Religion. 
 
 Whitman's comrade, the athlete, the " non- 
 chalant and natural," the "powerful uneducated 
 person," whom his heart desires, enters into 
 full enjoyment of self through love and liberty. 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 87 
 
 both blending in that subHmer conception of the 
 cosmos and our place in it, which forms the 
 groundwork of religion. 
 
 What the word " En-Masse " means for Whit- 
 man is expressed at large throughout his writings. 
 It corresponds to another of his chosen phrases, 
 " the divine average," " ever the most precious 
 in the common." An exact light is thrown upon 
 it by the following passage : 
 
 I speak the pass-word primeval — I give the sign of Democracy ; 
 By God ! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their 
 counterpart of on the same terms. 
 
 Thus Democracy implies the absolute equality 
 of heritage possessed by every man and woman 
 in the good and evil of this life. It also involves 
 the conception that there is nothing beautiful 
 or noble which may not be discovered in the 
 simplest human being. As regards physical 
 structure : * 
 
 Whoever you are ! how superb and how divine is your body, or 
 any part of it. 
 
 As regards emotions and passions which throb 
 and pulsate in the individual : t 
 
 * starting from " Paumanok," 14. t " Walt Whitman," 33. 
 
88 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 Wherever the human heart beats with terrible throes out of 
 its ribs. 
 
 " Whoever " and " wherever " are the emphatic 
 words in these quotations. The human body in 
 itself is august ; the heart has tragedy implicit 
 in its life-beats. It does not signify whose body, 
 ov whose heart. Here, there, and everywhere, the 
 seeing eye finds majesty, the sentient intelligence 
 detects the stuff of drama. 
 
 The same principle is applied to the whole 
 sphere of Nature. Miracles need not be sought 
 in special occurrences, in phenomena which 
 startle us out of our ordinary way of regarding 
 the universe : * 
 
 To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, 
 
 Every inch of space is a miracle, 
 
 Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with 
 
 the same. 
 Every cubic foot of the interior swarms with the same ; 
 Every spear of grass — the frames, limbs, organs of men and 
 
 women, and all that concern them, 
 All these to me are unspeakable miracles. 
 
 At this point science shakes hands with the 
 democratic ideal : for science proves that the 
 
 * " Miracles.' 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 89 
 
 smallest atom, the most insignificant vibrio, the 
 most repulsive microbe, partakes of the universal 
 life no less than do the so-called lords of 
 creation. We are not forced to gaze upon the 
 starry heavens, or to shudder at islands over- 
 whelmed by volcanic throes, in order to spy out 
 the marvellous. Wonders are always present in 
 the material world as in the spiritual : * 
 
 A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the 
 metaphysics of books. 
 
 The heroic lies within our reach, if we but stretch 
 a finger forth to touch it : t 
 
 Lads ahold of fire-engines and hook-and-ladder ropes no less 
 
 to me than the Gods of the antique wars ; 
 Minding their voices peal through the crash of destruction, 
 Their brawny limbs passing safe over charred laths — their 
 
 white foreheads whole and unhurt out of the flames. 
 
 Whitman expels miracles from the region of 
 mysticism, only to find a deeper mysticism in 
 the world of which he forms a part, and miracles 
 in commonplace occurrences. He dethrones the 
 gods of old pantheons, because he sees God every- 
 where around him. He discrowns the heroes of 
 
 * "Walt Whitman,'' 154. ^ + Ihid. ^i. 
 
90 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 myth and romance ; but greets their like again 
 among his living comrades. What is near to his 
 side, beneath his feet, upon the trees around 
 him, in the men and women he consorts with, 
 bears comparison with things far off and rarities 
 imagined : * 
 
 I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of 
 the stars 
 
 And the running blackberry would adorn the parlours of 
 heaven 
 
 And I could come every afternoon of my life to look at the 
 farmer's girl boiling her iron tea-kettle and baking short- 
 cake. 
 
 It is the faculty of the seer, of one who has 
 understood the wonder of the world, whose 
 eyes pierce below the surface, to recognise 
 divinity in all that lives and breathes upon our 
 planet : t 
 
 Painters have painted their swarming groups, and the centre 
 
 figure of all ; 
 From the head of the centre figure spreading a nimbus of 
 
 gold-coloured light ; 
 But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its 
 
 nimbus of gold-coloured light ; 
 From my hand, from the brain of every man and woman it 
 
 streams, effulgently flowing for ever. 
 
 * " Walt Whitman," 31. f " Leaves of Grass," 4. 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 91 
 
 Pursuing this line of thought into the region of 
 plastic art, we find the elements of dignity and 
 beauty apparent in all shapes of sane and healthy 
 manhood : * 
 
 The expression of the face balks accounts ; 
 
 But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his 
 
 face, 
 It is in his Umbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of 
 
 his hips and wrists ; 
 It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist 
 
 and knees — dress does not hide him ; 
 The strong, sweet, supple quality he has, strikes through the 
 
 cotton and flannel. 
 To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps 
 
 more; 
 You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and 
 
 shoulder-side. 
 
 Minor passages from Whitman's writings might 
 be culled in plenty, which illustrate these general 
 principles. He is peculiarly rich in subjects 
 indicated for the sculptor or the painter, glowing 
 with his own religious sense of beauty inherent 
 in the simplest folk : t 
 
 The beauty of all adventurous and daring persons. 
 The beauty of wood-boys and wood-men, with their clear, 
 untrimmed faces. 
 
 * " I sing the Body Eleotrio," 2. 
 
 t " Song of the Broad Axe," 3 ; " Walt Whitman," 33 ; ibid. 13. 
 
92 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 Coming Lome with the silent and dark-cheeked bush-boy- 
 riding behind him at the drape of the day. 
 
 The negro holds firmly the reins of his four horses — the block 
 
 sways underneath on its tied-over chain ; 
 The negro that drives the dray of the stone-yard — steady and 
 
 tall he stands, poised on one leg on the string-piece ; 
 His blue shirt exposes his ample neck and breast, and loosens 
 
 over his hip-band ; 
 His glance is calm and commanding — he tosses the slouch of 
 
 his hat away from his forehead ; 
 The sun falls on his crispy hair and moustache — falls on the 
 
 black of his polished and perfect limbs. 
 
 Detached from their context, the paragraphs 
 which I have quoted suffer from apparent 
 crudity and paradox. It is only by absorbing 
 Whitman's poems in copious draughts, as I 
 have elsewhere said, by submitting to his 
 manner and sympathising with his mood, that 
 a conception can be formed of the wealth with 
 which he scatters plastic suggestions, and of 
 the precision with which he notes down line 
 and colour. 
 
 The essence of the democratic spirit, so far as 
 Whitman helps us to understand it, has been 
 sufficiently indicated. The divine in nature and 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 93 
 
 humanity is everywhere, if we can penetrate the 
 husk of commonplace and reach the poetry of 
 things. There are, indeed, degrees in its mani- 
 festation. Special revelations, as in the life of 
 Buddha or of Christ, for instance, do not rank 
 in the same class with the "ever recurring 
 miracle of the sunrise." The heroism of an 
 engine-driver, performing his duty, has not 
 exactly the same moral quality, the same com- 
 plexity of spiritual forces in play together at 
 one moment, as the self-dedication of Menoi- 
 keus for the welfare of his native city, or the 
 oblation of their lives by Cratinus and Aristo- 
 demus in order to save Athens from a godsent 
 plague. 
 
 The pioneer of democratic enthusiasm wishes 
 mainly to remind the world that our eyes have 
 too long been blinded to one cardinal truth — 
 the truth that virtues and beauties, wherever 
 found, are of like quality, and their essence 
 equally divine. Whitman insists upon this truth 
 in a passage, which sounds paradoxical, but the 
 grotesqueness of which is calculated to arouse 
 intelligence:* 
 
 * " Walt Whitman," 41. 
 
94 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 Three scythes at harvest whizzing in a row from three lusty 
 angels with shirts bagged out at their waists ; 
 
 The snag-toothed hostler, with red hair, redeeming sins past 
 and to come, 
 
 Selling all he possesses, travelling on foot to fee lawyers for 
 his brother, and sit by him while he is tried for forgery. 
 
 The resplendent manhood of Michael, Gabriel, 
 Raphael, " starred from Jehovah's gorgeous 
 armoury," is of like quality with that of the 
 three reapers. Do what we will, our imagination 
 cannot transcend the stalwart strength of thews 
 and sinews. We can clothe this strength with 
 grace, gift it with ethereal charm, inspire it 
 with ideal fancy, wrap it around in religious 
 mystery. But the beautiful, strong body of 
 the man remains the central fact for art. In 
 like manner, the spirit of Christ revives in the 
 poor, ugly drudge, " despised and rejected of 
 men," like Paul " of presence weak, of speech 
 contemptible," who devotes his substance and 
 his time to support and, if possible, to save an 
 erring brother. 
 
 This piercing through gauds and trimmings, 
 this unmasking and unbaring of appearances, 
 this recognition of divinity in all things, is the 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 95 
 
 secret of the democratic spirit. It is not 
 altogether difierent from what Jesus meant 
 when he said : " Inasmuch as ye have done it 
 to one of the least of these, ye do it unto me." 
 Nor does the supreme doctrine of redemption 
 through self-sacrifice and suffering lose in 
 significance if we extend it from One, imagined 
 a pitiful and condescending God, to all who for 
 a worthy cause have endured humiliation, pain, 
 an agonising death. Not to make Christ less, 
 but to make him the chief of a multitude, the 
 type and symbol of triumphant heroism, do we 
 think of the thousands who have died on battle- 
 fields, in torture-chambers, at the stake, from 
 lingering misery, as expiators and redeemers, in 
 whom the lamp of the divine spirit shines clearly 
 for those who have the eyes to see. 
 
 This exposition of democracy shows that 
 Whitman regarded it not merely as a political 
 phenomenon, but far more as a form of religious 
 enthusiasm. That being the case, his treatment 
 of democracy includes far-reaching speculations 
 on the literature and art required by the 
 sovereign people, on the creation of national 
 <;haracter, and on the proper place of what is 
 
96 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 called culture in a noble scheme of public 
 education. 
 
 These problems have so vital an importance 
 for England and Europe, as well as for America, 
 that it will be well to discuss them fully, and 
 to see what assistance toward their solution 
 can be found in Whitman's writings. 
 
 There are two aspects under which the problem 
 of democratic art must be regarded. In the first 
 place, we have to ask what sort of art, including 
 literature under this title, democracy requires. 
 To this question Whitman, in his " Democratic 
 Vistas," gives an answer : turbid in expression, far 
 from lucid, but pregnant with sympathetic intelli- 
 gence of the main issues. In the second place, 
 we have to ask what elements are furnished to the 
 artist by the people, which have not already been 
 worked out in the classical and feudal forms and 
 their derivatives. Whitman attempts to supply 
 us with an answer to this second question also, 
 not in his speculative essays, but in the mass of 
 imaginative compositions which he designates by 
 the name of poems or notes for poems. His report 
 upon both topics may be postponed for the 
 moment, while we revert to the revolution effected 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 97 
 
 by the romantic movement of a hundred years 
 ago. It behoves us to review the clearance of 
 obsolete obstructions, and to survey the new- 
 ground gained, whereon our hopes are founded of 
 a future reconstruction. 
 
 Delivered from scholastic traditions regarding 
 style and the right subjects to be handled — 
 delivered from pedantry and blind reactionary 
 fervour — delivered from dependence upon aristo- 
 cratic and ecclesiastical authority — sharing the 
 emancipation of the intellect by modern science 
 and the enfranchisement of the individual by 
 new political conceptions — the poet or the artist 
 is brought immediately face to face with the 
 wonderful fresh world of men and things he has 
 to interpret and to recreate. The whole of 
 nature, seen for the first time with sane eyes, 
 the whole of humanity, liberated for the first 
 time from caste and class distinctions, invite 
 his sympathy. Now dawns upon his mind the 
 beauty, the divinity, which lies enfolded in the 
 simplest folk, the commonest objects presented to 
 his senses. He perceives the dignity of humble 
 occupations, the grace inherent in each kind of 
 labour well performed. He discovers that love 
 
98 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 is a deity in the cottage no less than in king's 
 chambers ; not with the supercilious condescen- 
 sion of Tasso's " Aminta " or Guarini's " Pastor 
 Fido," but with a reverent recognition of the 
 prcBsens deus in the heart of every man and 
 woman. In order to make Florizel and Perdita 
 charming, it is no longer necessary that they 
 should be prince and princess in disguise ; nor 
 need the tale of " Daphnis and Chloe " now be 
 written with that lame conclusion of lost children 
 restored to wealthy high-born parents. Heroism 
 steps forth from the tent of Achilles ; chivalry 
 descends from the arm-gaunt charger of the 
 knight ; loyalty is seen to be no mere devotion 
 to a dynasty ; passionate friendship quits the 
 brotherhood of Pylades and the dear embraces 
 of Peirithous. None of these high virtues be- 
 longing to heroic and chivalrous society are 
 lost to us. On the contrary, we find them 
 everywhere. They are brought within reach, 
 instead of being relegated to some remote region 
 in the past, or deemed the special property of 
 privileged classes. The engine-driver steering 
 his train at night over perilous viaducts, the life- 
 boat man, the member of a fire-brigade assailing 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 99 
 
 houses toppling to their ruin among flames ; these 
 are found to be no less heroic than Theseus grap- 
 pling the Minotaur in Cretan labyrinths. And so 
 it is with the chivalrous respect for womanhood 
 and weakness, with loyal self- dedication to a prin- 
 ciple or cause, with comradeship uniting men in 
 brotherhood, with passion fit for tragedy, with 
 beauty shedding light from heaven on human 
 habitations. They were thought to dwell far off 
 in antique fable or dim mediaeval legend. They 
 appeared to our fancy clad in glittering armour, 
 plumed and spurred, surrounded with the aureole 
 of noble birth. We now behold them at our 
 house-doors, in the streets and fields around us. 
 Conversely, our eyes are no longer shut to the 
 sordidness and baseness which royal palaces and 
 princely hearts may harbour — to the meanness of 
 the Court of the Valois, to the vulgarity of the 
 Court of Charles II., to the vile tone of a Prince 
 Regent, to the dishonour, dishonesty, and dis- 
 loyalty toward women which have always, more 
 or less, prevailed in so-called good society. 
 
 This extended recognition of the noble and the 
 lovely qualities in human life, the qualities upon 
 which pure poetry and art must seize, is due 
 
100 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 partially to what we call democracy. But it ' 
 implies something more than that word is 
 commonly supposed to denote — a new and more 
 deeply religious way of looking at mankind, a 
 gradual triumph after so many centuries of the 
 spirit which is Christ's, an enlarged faculty for 
 piercing below externals and appearances to the 
 truth and essence of things. God, the divine, 
 is recognised as immanent in nature, and in 
 the soul and body of humanity ; not external 
 to these things, not conceived of as creative 
 from outside, or as incarnated in any single 
 personage, but as all-pervasive, all-constitutive, 
 everywhere, and inspiring all. That is the 
 democratic philosophy ; and science has contri- 
 buted in no small measure to produce it. 
 
 Meanwhile, we need not preach the abandon- 
 ment of high time-honoured themes. Why should 
 we seek to break the links which bind us to the 
 best of that far past from which we came ? 
 Achilles has not ceased to be a fit subject for 
 poem or statue, because we discern heroism in an 
 engine-driver. Lovely knights and Flora Mac- 
 donald, Peirithous and Pylades, King Cophetua 
 and Burd Helen, abide with all the lustre of 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN loi 
 
 their strength and grace and charm. They have 
 lost nothing because others have gained — because 
 we now acknowledge that the chivalry, the 
 loyalty, the comradeship, the love, the pathos, 
 which made their stories admirable, are shared 
 by living men and women, whose names have not 
 been sounded through fame's silver trumpet. 
 
 I have hitherto touched but lightly upon the 
 extension of the sphere of beauty which may be 
 expected from democratic art. Through it we 
 shall be' led to discover the infinite varieties of 
 lovely form which belong peculiarly to the 
 people. Caste and high birth have no monopoly 
 of physical comeliness. It may even be main- 
 tained that social conditions render it impossible 
 for them to display more than a somewhat 
 limited range of beauty. Goethe, I think, 
 defined good society as that which furnished no 
 material for poetry. We might apply this 
 paradox to plastic art, and say that polished 
 gentlemen and ladies do not furnish the best 
 materials for sculpture and painting. How 
 hardly shall they who wear evening clothes 
 and ball-dresses enter into the kingdom of the 
 grandest plastic art ! The sculpture of Pheidias, 
 
102 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 the fresco of Buonarroti, demand suggestions 
 from the body, indications of the nude. The 
 sublimest attitudes of repose imply movements 
 determined by specific energy. There is a 
 characteristic beauty in each several kind of 
 diurnal service, which waits to be elucidated. 
 The superb poise of the mower, as he swings his 
 scythe ; the muscles of the blacksmith, bent for 
 an unerring stroke upon the anvil ; the bowed 
 form of the reaper, with belt tightened round his 
 loins ; the thresher's arm uplifted, while he 
 swings the flail ; the elasticity of oarsmen rising 
 from their strain against the wave ; the jockey's 
 grip across his saddle ; the mountaineer's slow, 
 swinging stride ; the girl at the spinning-wheel, 
 or carrying the water-bucket on her head, or 
 hanging linen on the line, or busied with her 
 china-closet : in each and every motive of this 
 kind — and the list might be indefinitely pro- 
 longed, for all trades and occupations have some 
 distinguishing peculiarity— there appears a specific 
 note of grace inalienable from the work per- 
 formed. The artists of previous ages did not 
 wholly neglect this truth. Indeed, they were 
 eager to avail themselves of picturesque sugges- 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 103 
 
 tions on the lines here indicated. Yet they used 
 these motives mainly as adjuncts to themes of 
 more attractive import, and subordinated them 
 to what was deemed some loftier subject. Con- 
 sequently, these aspects of life did not receive 
 the attention they deserve ; and the stores of 
 beauty inherent in human industries have been 
 only partially developed. It is the business of 
 democratic art to unfold them fully. The time 
 has come when the noble and beautiful qualities 
 of the people demand a prominent place among 
 worthy artistic motives. 
 
 An arduous task lies before poetry and the 
 arts, if they are to bring themselves into proper 
 relation with the people ; not, as is vulgarly 
 supposed, because the people will debase their 
 standard, but because it will be hard for them 
 to express the real dignity, and to satisfy the 
 keen perceptions and the pure taste of the 
 people. 
 
 There is a danger lest the solution of this 
 problem should suffer from being approached too 
 consciously. What we want is simplicity, emo- 
 tional directness, open-mindedness, intelligent 
 sympathy, keen and yet reverent curiosity, the 
 
104 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 scientific combined with the religious attitude 
 toward fact. It will not do to be doctrinaire or 
 didactic. Patronage and condescension are the 
 worst of evils here. The spirit of Count Tolstoi, 
 if that could descend in some new Pentecost, 
 would prepare the world for democratic art. 
 
 Above all things, the middle-class conception 
 of life must be transcended. Decency, comfort, 
 sobriety, maintenance of appearances, gradual 
 progression up a social ladder which is scaled by 
 tenths of inches, the chapel or the church, the 
 gig or the barouche, the growing balance at one's 
 bankers, the addition of esquire to our name or 
 of a red rosette to our button-hole, the firm 
 resolve to keep well abreast with next-door 
 neighbours, if not ahead of them, in business and 
 respectability — aU these things, which charac- 
 terise the middle-class man wherever he appears, 
 are good in their way. It were well that the 
 people should incorporate these virtues. But 
 there are corresponding defects in the bour- 
 geoisie which have to be steadily rejected — an 
 unwillingness to fraternise, an incapacity for 
 comradeship, a habit of looking down on so-called 
 inferiors, a contempt for hand-labour, a confusion 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 105 
 
 of morality with prejudice and formula, a ten- 
 dency to stifle religion in the gas of dogmas and 
 dissenting shibboleths, an obstinate insensibility 
 to ideas. Snobbery and Pharisaism, in one form 
 or another, taint the middle-class to its core. 
 Self-righteousness and personal egotism and 
 ostrich-fear corrode it. We need to deliver our 
 souls from these besetting sins, and to rise above 
 them into more ethereal atmosphere. The man 
 of letters, the artist, who would fain prove him- 
 self adequate to democracy in its noblest sense, 
 must emerge from earthy vapours of complacent 
 self and artificial circumstance and decaying 
 feudalism. It is his privilege to be free, and to 
 represent freedom. It is his function to find a 
 voice or mode of utterance, an ideal of form, 
 which shall be on a par with nature delivered 
 from unscientific canons of interpretation, and 
 with mankind delivered from obsolescent class- 
 distinctions. 
 
 The most perplexing branch of the inquiry has 
 to be affronted, when we ask the question : 
 What kind of literature and art is demanded 
 by democracy ? How is art to prove its power 
 by satisfying the needs and moral aspirations 
 
io6 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 of the people who are sovereign in a democratic 
 age? 
 
 The conditions under which art exists at the 
 present time render a satisfactory answer to 
 this question well-nigh impossible. In the past 
 epochs, Greek, Mediaeval, Italian, Elizabethan, 
 Louis Xiy., Persian, Japanese, the arts had a 
 certain unconscious and spontaneous rapport 
 with the nations which begat them, and with 
 the central life-force of those nations at the 
 moment of their flourishing. Whether that 
 central energy was aristocratic, as in Hellas ; 
 or monarchic, as in France ; or religious, as in 
 mediaeval Europe ; or intellectual, as in Henais- 
 sance Italy ; or national, as in Elizabethan 
 England ; or widely diffused like a fine gust 
 of popular intelligence, as in Japan ; signified 
 comparatively little. Art expressed what the 
 people had of noblest and sincerest, and was 
 appreciated by the people. No abrupt division 
 separated the nation from the poets who gave 
 a voice to the nation. The case is altered now. 
 On the one hand we have huge uncultivated 
 populations, trained to mechanical industries 
 and money-making, aggregated in unwieldy 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 107 
 
 cities or distributed over vast tracts of imper- 
 fectly subdued territory, composed of hetero- 
 geneous racial elements, the coUuvies omnium 
 gentium, reduced by commerce and science and 
 politics to a complex of shrewdly-acting, keenly- 
 trafficking, dumbly-thinking personalities, bound 
 together by superficial education in the com- 
 monest rudiments of knowledge, without strong 
 national notes of difference, and without any 
 specific bias toward a particular form of self- 
 expression. On the other hand we have 
 cosmopolitan men of letters, poets, painters, 
 sculptors, architects, living for the most part 
 upon the traditions of the past, working these 
 up into new shapes of beauty with power and 
 subtlety, but taking no direct hold on the 
 masses, of whom they are contentedly ignorant, 
 manifesting in no region of the world a marked 
 national type of utterance, embodying no 
 religion in their work, destined apparently to 
 bequeath to the future an image of the nine- 
 teenth century in its confused Titanic energy, 
 diffused culture, and mental chaos. 
 
 Is Democratic Art possible in these circum- 
 stances ? Can we hope that the^ men who 
 
io8 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 write poems, paint pictures, carve statues, shall 
 
 enter once again into vital rapport with the 
 
 people who compose the nations — the people 
 
 who are now so far more puissant and important 
 
 than they ever were before in the world's 
 
 history ? Is there to be any place for art in 
 
 the real life of the future ? Or are we about 
 
 to realise the dream of Dupont in De Musset's 
 
 satirical dialogue ? 
 
 Sur deux rayons de fer un chemin magnifique 
 De Paris a Peking ceindra ma republique. 
 La, cent peuples divers, confondant leur jargon, 
 Feront une Babel d'un colossal wagon. 
 L^, de sa roue en feu le coche humanitaire 
 Usera jusqu'aux os les muscles de la terre. 
 Du haut de ce vaisseau les hommes stupefaits 
 Ne verront qu'une mer de choux et de navets. 
 Le monde sera propre et net comme une ecuelle ; 
 L'humanitairerie en fera sa gamelle, 
 Et le globe rase, sans barbe ni cheveux, 
 Comme un grand potiron roulera dans les cieux. 
 
 In a word, do the people, in this democratic 
 age, possess qualities which are capable of 
 evoking a great art from the sympathy of men 
 of genius ? Or is art destined to subside lower 
 and lower into a kind of Byzantine decrepitude, 
 as the toy of a so-called cultivated minority ? 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 109 
 
 It is questionable whether Whitman will help 
 us to see light in these perplexities. Yet he 
 has a burning belief in democracy ; and, what 
 is more, he is one of the very few great writers 
 of our epoch who was born among the people, 
 who lived with the people, who understood 
 and loved them thoroughly, and who dedicated 
 his health and energies to their service in a 
 time of overwhelming national anxiety. 
 
 Whitman was firmly persuaded that the real 
 greatness of a nation or an epoch has never 
 been, and can never be, tested by material 
 prosperity. The wealth and strength, the 
 mechanical industries, the expansive vigour, 
 the superabundant population, of a State, con- 
 stitute its body only. These will impose upon 
 the world, control the present, and be a fact 
 to reckon with for many generations. Yet 
 these must eventually pass away, and sink into 
 oblivion, unless the race attains to consciousness 
 and noble spiritual life. Literature and art 
 compose the soul which informs that colossal 
 body with vitality, and which will continue to 
 exist after the material forces of the race 
 have crumbled into nothingness. Hellas lives 
 
no A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 ideally in Homer, Pheidias, --Eschylus ; Israel, 
 in the Prophets and the Psalms ; the Middle 
 Ages, in Dante ; Feudalism, in Shakespeare. 
 But where is Phcenicia, where is Carthage ? 
 Nothing survives to symbolise their great- 
 ness, because they lacked ideas and ideal 
 utterance. 
 
 In America, Whitman finds the material 
 conditions of a puissant nation ; but he does 
 not find the spirit of a nation. The body is 
 there, growing larger and grander every day, 
 for ever acquiring fresh equipments and more 
 powerful appliances. Meanwhile the soul, the 
 ideality of art and literature, commensurate with 
 this gigantic frame, is wanting. 
 
 Viewed, to-day, from a point of view sufficiently over- 
 arching, the problem of humanity all over the civilised world 
 is social and religious, and is to be finally met and treated by 
 literature. The, •priest departs, the divine literatus comes* 
 Never was anything more wanted than, to-day, and here in 
 The States, the poet of the modern is wanted, or the great 
 literatus of the modern.t 
 
 * These and all other italics are mine ; intended to direct atten- 
 tion to the main points as I conceive them, in my quotations from 
 Whitman. 
 
 t This and the following extracts are taken from "Democratic 
 Vistas." 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN iii 
 
 "What is our religion ? he asks. "A lot of 
 churches, sects, &c., the most dismal phantasms 
 I know, usurp the name of religion." 
 
 What is our national prosperity ? " The magi- 
 cian's serpent in the fable ate up all the other 
 serpents : and money-making is our magician's 
 serpent, remaining to-day sole master of the 
 field." 
 
 What does our huge material expansion amount 
 to ? " It is as if we were somehow being en- 
 dowed with a vast and more and more thoroughly 
 appointed body, and then left with little or no 
 soul." 
 
 What are our cities ? "A sort of dry and flat 
 Sahara appears — these cities crowded with petty 
 grotesques, malformations, phantoms, playing 
 meaningless antics." 
 
 What is our boasted culture ? " Do you 
 term that perpetual, pistareen, paste-pot work 
 American art, American drama, taste, verse ? " 
 Instead of poets corresponding to the pitch and 
 vigour of the race, he sees " a parcel of dandies 
 and ennuyees, dapper little gentlemen from 
 abroad, who flood us with their thin sentiment 
 of parlours, parasols, piano-songs, tinkling rhymes. 
 
112 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 the five-hundredth importation, or whimpering 
 and crying about something, chasing one 
 aborted conceit after another, and for ever 
 occupied in dyspeptic amours with dyspeptic 
 women."* 
 
 After this fashion, with superfluous reiteration, 
 and considerable asperity. Whitman pours forth 
 his deep-felt conviction of America's spiritual 
 inadequacy. 
 
 But what does he demand in lieu of those 
 " most dismal phantasms, which usurp the name 
 of religion " ; in lieu of " the magician's serpent, 
 money-making " ; in lieu of the " Sahara of 
 frivolous and petty cities " ; in lieu of " paste-pot 
 work," and " dapper little gentlemen," and 
 " tinkling rhymes," and " dyspeptic amours " ? 
 Democracy in the cradle, in its stronghold, as it 
 seems, is infected with these congenital diseases. 
 Let us attempt to analyse what he proposes, and 
 how he thinks the vital forces of the future are to 
 be developed. 
 
 Whitman maintains that the cardinal elements 
 
 * " Dyspeptic amours with dyspeptic women," is a fine motto for 
 the American Society novel. So is another of Whitman's phrases : 
 " The sly settee and the adulterous, unwholesome couple," for the 
 modern French novel. 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 115 
 
 of national greatness are robust character, inde- 
 pendent personality, sincere religiousness. He 
 contends that the democratic idea, properly 
 grasped, and systematically applied to conduct, 
 will suffice to reconstitute society upon a sound 
 basis, and to supply the modern nations with the 
 ideality they lack. 
 
 Of all this, and these lamentable conditions, to breathe into 
 them the breath recuperative of sane and heroic life, I say a 
 new founded literature, not merely to copy and reflect existing 
 surfaces, or pander to what is called taste — not only to amuse, 
 pass away time, celebrate the beautiful, the refined, the past, 
 or exhibit technical, rhythmic, or grammatical dexterity — but 
 a literature underlying life, religious, consistent with science, 
 handling the elements and forces with competent power, teaching 
 and training men — and, as perhaps the most precious of its 
 results, achieving the redemption of woman out of those 
 incredible holds and webs of silliness, millinery, and every 
 kind of dyspeptic depletion — and thus insuring to The States 
 a strong and sweet female race, a race of perfect mothers — is 
 what is needed. 
 
 In culture, as it at present exists, the forces 
 are alien and antagonistic to democracy. There- 
 fore Whitman attacks it vigorously in a long 
 polemical argument : 
 
 Dominion strong is the body's; dominion stronger is the 
 
 H 
 
ii4 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 mind's. What has filled, and fills to-day our intellect, our 
 fancy, furnishing the standards therein, is yet foreign. The 
 great poems — Shakespeare included — are poisonous to the idea 
 ■of the pride and dignity of the common people, the life-blood 
 of Democracy. The models of our literature, as we get it 
 from other lands, ultramarine, have had their birth in courts, 
 and basked and grown in castle sunshine; all smells of princes' 
 favours. Of workers of a certain sort, we have, indeed, plenty, 
 contributing after their kind ; many elegant, many learned, all 
 complacent. But, . touched by the national test, or tried by 
 the standards of Democratic personality, they wither to ashes. 
 I say I have not seen a single writer, artist, lecturer, or what 
 not, that has confronted the voiceless, but ever erect and 
 active, pervading, underlying will and typic aspiration of the 
 land, in a spirit kindred to itself. 
 
 Culture is good enough in its way ; but it 
 is not what forms a manly personality, a sound 
 and simple faith. "As now taught, accepted, 
 and carried 'out, are not the processes of culture 
 rapidly creating a class of supercilious infidels, 
 who believe in nothing f Shall a man lose him- 
 self in countless masses of adjustments, and be so 
 so shaped with reference to this, that, and the 
 other, that the simply good and healthy, and 
 brave parts of him are reduced and chipped away, 
 like the bordering of box in a garden ? You can 
 ■cultivate corn and roses, and orchards ; but who 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 115 
 
 shall cultivate the primeval forests, the mountain 
 peaks, the ocean, and the tumbling gorgeousness 
 of the clouds ? Lastly, is the readily given reply 
 that culture only seeks to help, systematise, and 
 put in attitude the elements of fertility and 
 power, a conclusive reply ? " The only culture 
 useful to democracy is bound to aim less at polish 
 and refinement of taste than at the bracing of 
 character. " It must have for its spinal meaning 
 the formation of typical personality of character, 
 eligible to the uses of the high average of men — 
 and not restricted by conditions ineligible to the 
 masses. The best culture will always be that of 
 the manly and courageous instincts, and loving 
 perceptions, and of self-respect." 
 
 Since you cannot cultivate the primeval forests, 
 and so forth, you must study and assimilate them. 
 Since the people do not need to be refined in 
 taste, but to be braced in character, you must 
 penetrate their character and reproduce it in 
 ideal conceptions. The right formative influences 
 for modern literature and art have therefore to 
 be sought in the people themselves ; in the 
 principles of independence and equality, of free- 
 dom, brotherhood, and comradeship, which are 
 
ii6 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 inherent in democracy, and by right of which 
 democracy enfolds a religious ideal comparable 
 to the spiritual liberty of the Gospel. 
 
 Did you, too, friend, suppose Democracy was only for elec- 
 tions, for politics, or for a party name ? I say Democracy is 
 only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower 
 and fruits in manners, in the highest forms of interaction 
 between men, and their beliefs — in Religion, Literature, 
 colleges and schools — Democracy in all public and private 
 life, and in the Army and Navy. I have intimated that, as 
 a paramount scheme, it has yet few or no full realisers and 
 believers. I do not see, either, that it owes any serious 
 thanks to noted propagandists or champions, or has been 
 
 essentially helped, though often harmed, by them It 
 
 is not yet, there or anywhere, the fully received, the fervid, 
 the absolute faith. I submit, therefore, that the fruition of 
 Democracy on aught like a grand scale, resides altogether in 
 the future. 
 
 Meanwhile, for those who believe that national 
 greatness can only be tested by the spirit which a 
 people manifests, it remains to fix attention firmly 
 on the permanent and indestructible significance 
 of arts and letters : 
 
 The literature, songs, sesthetica, &c., of a country ore of 
 importamce principally because they furnish the •materials and 
 suggestions oj personality for the women and men of tliat country, 
 and enforce them in a thousand effective ways. 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 117 
 
 But what has culture, as yet, done to strengthen 
 the personality of the millions of America ? 
 
 When I mix with these interminable swarms of alert turbu- 
 lent, good-natured, independent citizens, mechanics, clerks, 
 young persons — at the idea of this mass of men, so fresh and 
 free, so loving and so proud, a singular awe falls upon me. I 
 feel, with dejection and amazement, that among our geniuses 
 and talented writers or speakers, few or none have yet really 
 spoken to this people, or created a single image-making work 
 that could be called for them — or absorbed the central spirit 
 and the idiosyncrasies which are theirs, and which, thus, 
 in highest ranges, so far remain entirely uncelebrated, un- 
 expressed. 
 
 Yet I have dreamed, merged in that hidden-tangled problem 
 of our fate, whose long unravelling stretches mysteriously 
 through time — dreamed out, portrayed, hinted already — a little 
 or a larger band — a band of brave and true, unprecedented 
 yet — armed and equipped at every point — the members sepa- 
 rated, it may be, by different dates and states, or south or 
 north, or east, or west — Pacific or Atlantic — a year, a century 
 here, and other centuries there — but always one compact in 
 soul, conscience-conserving, God-inculcating, inspired achievers, 
 not only in Literature, the greatest art, but achievers in all 
 art — a new, undying order, dynasty, from age to age trans- 
 mitted — a band, a class, at least as fit to cope with current 
 years, our dangers, needs, as those who, for their times, so 
 well, in armour or in cowl, upheld and made illustrious, the 
 feudal, priestly world. To offset chivalry, indeed, those 
 vanquished countless knights, and the old altars, abbeys, all 
 their priests, ages and strings of ages, a knightlier and more 
 sacred cause to-day demands, and shall supply, in a New 
 
ii8 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 World, to larger, grander work, more than the counterpart 
 and tally of them. 
 
 So far I have followed "Whitman in his polemic 
 against the culture of his country and this cen- 
 tury. Many of his prophetic utterances will 
 appear inapplicable to Europe. Yet democracy, 
 whelbher we like it or not, has to be faced and 
 accepted in the Old as well as the New World. 
 Here, therefore, as across the Atlantic, democracy 
 is bound to produce an ideal of its own, or to 
 "prove the most tremendous failure of time." 
 Here, as there, " long enough have the people 
 been listening to poems in which common 
 humanity, deferential, bends low, humiliated, 
 acknowledging superiors." And yet, here, as 
 there, the people have arrived at empire. It is 
 no longer possible to apostrophise them in the 
 words of Campanella's famous sonnet : 
 
 The people is a beast of muddy brain 
 
 That knows not its own strength, and therefore stands 
 Loaded with wood and stone ; the powerless hands 
 Of a mere child guide it with bit and rein ; 
 
 One kick would be enough to break the chain ; 
 
 But the beast fears, and what the child demands 
 It does ; nor its own terror understands. 
 Confused and stupefied by bugbears vain. 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 119 
 
 Most ■wonderful ! with its own hand it ties 
 
 And gags itself — gives itself death and war 
 For pence doled out by kings from its own store. 
 
 Its own are all things between earth and heaven ; 
 But this it knows not ; and if one arise 
 To tell this truth, it kills him unforgiven. 
 
 In Europe, again, as in America, the founts of 
 earlier inspiration are failing. Classical antiquity 
 and romance cannot supply perennial nutriment 
 for modern art. The literary revolution which 
 marked the advent of the romantic and the 
 scientific genius, dethroned those elder deities 
 and threw the sanctuary of the spirit open. 
 Science, the sister of democracy, brings man 
 face to face with nature, and with God in 
 nature. A more ethereal spirituality than has 
 yet been dreamed of begins to penetrate our 
 conceptions of the universe, of law, of duty, of 
 human rights and destinies. Art and literature, 
 if they are to hold their own, must adapt them- 
 selves to these altered conditions. They must 
 have a faith — not in their own excellence as art,, 
 and in their several styles and rhythms — but in 
 their mission and their power to present the 
 puissance of the age, its religion and its character. 
 
120 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 with the same force as the Greek sculptors pre 
 sented paganism and the Italian painters pre- 
 sented mediaeval catholicity. If they cannot 
 ascend to this endeavour they are lost. 
 
 " Literature, strictly considered," says Whit- 
 man, "has never recognised the People, and, 
 
 whatever may be said, does not to-day 
 
 I know nothing more rare, even in this country, 
 than a fit scientific estimate and reverent appre- 
 ciation of the People — of their measureless wealth 
 of latent power and capacity, their vast artistic 
 contrasts of lights and shades, with, in America, 
 their entire reliability in emergencies, and a 
 certain breadth of historic grandeur, of peace or 
 war, far surpassing all the vaunted samples of 
 book-heroes, or any haut-ton coteries, in all the 
 records of the world." 
 
 This assertion he proceeds to support by 
 reference to the great American War. " Pro- 
 bably no future age can know, but I well know, 
 how the gist of this fiercest and most resolute of 
 the world's warlike contentions resided exclu- 
 sively in the unnamed, unknown rank and file ; 
 and how the brunt of its labour of death was, to 
 all essential purposes. Volunteered." " Grand 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 121 
 
 common stock ! to me the accomplished and 
 convincing growth, prophetic of the future ; proof 
 undeniable to sharpest sense of "perfect heauty, 
 tenderness, and pluck, that never feudal lord, nor 
 Greek, nor Roman breed yet rivalled." 
 
 We now understand what Whitman means by 
 " the divine average "; why he exclaims : " Ever 
 the most precious in the common. Ever the fresh 
 breeze of field, or hill, or lake is more than any 
 palpitation of fans, though of ivory, and redolent 
 with perfume ; and the air is moi'e than the 
 costliest perfumes." 
 
 Finally, something must be said about Whit- 
 man's attitude towards the past. His polemic 
 against contemporary culture, his firm insistence 
 upon the fact that " the mind, which alone 
 builds the permanent edifice, haughtily builds 
 for itself," and that consequently a great nation 
 like America, a new principle like Democracy, 
 is bound to find its own ideal expression or "to 
 prove the most tremendous failure of time "■ — all 
 this may blind us to his reverence for the arts 
 and literatures of races and of ages which have 
 passed away. How easy it would be to assume 
 a contempt for history in Whitman is clear 
 
122 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 enough to students of his writings. From the 
 pages which he dedicates to the 'ise and value 
 of bygone literatures it will be sufficient to ex- 
 tract the following paragraph : 
 
 Gathered by geniuses of city, race, or age, and put by them 
 in the highest of art's forms, namely, the literary form, the 
 peculiar combinations, and the outshows of that city, race, 
 and age, its particular modes of the universal attributes and 
 passions, its faiths, heroes, lovers and gods, wars, traditions, 
 struggles, crimes, emotions, joys (or the subtle spirit of these), 
 having been passed on to us to illumine our own selfhood and 
 its experiences — what they supply, indispensable and highest, 
 if taken away, nothing else in all the world's boundless store- 
 houses could make up to us or ever return again. 
 
 This is an emphatic re-assertion of the principle 
 that " dominion strong is the body's ; dominion 
 stronger is the mind's." Not for an age or nation, 
 but for all humanity and all time, abides the 
 truth that material strength and greatness are 
 but bone, and thew, and sinew ; literature and 
 art constitute the soul. Therefore the prophets, 
 poets, thinkers, builders, sculptors, painters, 
 musicians of past ages and of foreign lands, abide 
 imperishable, shining like suns and stars fixed 
 in the .firmament of man's immortal mind. 
 Stupendous are they, indeed, but distant, un- 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 123 
 
 familiar; appealing indirectly to modern hearts 
 and brains. Our admiration for them, the use 
 we make of them, the lessons we learn from them, 
 must not degrade us into the frivolity of imitative 
 culture. We have to bear steadfastly in mind 
 that it is our duty to emulate them by creating 
 corresponding monuments of our own spirit, suns 
 and stars which shall shine with them " in the 
 spaces of that other heaven, the kosmic intellect, 
 the soul." 
 
 Ye powerful and resplendent ones ! ye were, in your 
 atmospheres, grown not for America, but rather for her foes, 
 the feudal and the old — while our genius is Democratic and 
 modern. Yet could ye, indeed, but breathe your breath of life 
 into our New World's nostrils — not to enslave us, as now, but, 
 for our needs, to breed a spirit like your own — perhaps (dare 
 we say it ?) to dominate, even destroy, what yourselves have 
 left ! On your plane, and no less, but even higher and wider, 
 wUl I meet and measure for our wants to-day and here. I 
 demand races of orbic bards, with unconditional, uncompro- 
 mising sway. Come forth, sweet democratic despots of the 
 west! 
 
 Thus, the upshot of Walt Whitman's message 
 is that the people, substantial as they are, and 
 full of all the qualities which might inspire a 
 world-literature, have up to the present time 
 
124 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 found no representative in poetry and art. The 
 sacer vates of democracy has not appeared. 
 " The fruition of Democracy, on aught hke a 
 grand scale, resides altogether in the future." 
 
 This is not the place to inquire how far 
 Whitman has himself fulfilled the conditions of 
 writing for the people. Judged by his acceptance 
 in America, he can hardly be said to have sucr 
 ceeded in his own lifetime. The many-headed 
 beast there, if it has not literally " trampled him 
 in gore," turns a deaf ear to his voice, and treats 
 him with comparative indifference. Hitherto he 
 has won more respect from persons of culture 
 in Great Britain than from the divine average 
 of The States. 
 
VII 
 
 When, at the age of thirty-five, Whitman re- 
 solved '■' to strike up the songs of the New World," 
 he had formed the opinion that America — and 
 America, as we have seen, with him is equivalent 
 to Democracy — demanded a wholly new type of 
 poetry. It would not do for the poet to go on 
 using the rhymes and metres and stanzas which 
 had become stale in the Old World, and were 
 being imitated by feeble folk of culture on the 
 other side of the Atlantic. Themes so vast, a 
 people so gigantic, a future so illimitable, called 
 for corresponding forms of artistic expression. 
 But, what was most important, the would-be poet 
 had to assume a new attitude towards literature, 
 and to regard his duties with a different kind of 
 seriousness. 
 
 The first edition of " Leaves of Grass " appeared 
 in 1855, after two years of anxious preparation. 
 It is a thin quarto volume, containing a few of 
 
126 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 Whitman's most important poems, and a long 
 prose preface. In the preface, which is remark- 
 able for fervid eloquence and cultivated thought, 
 he expressed his theory of the poetry adapted 
 to Democracy and America. The germ of 
 all his subsequent work, with the exception 
 of " Calamus," may be found in this pregnant 
 essay, and not a few of his later poems are 
 simple expansions of its themes. Here, then, 
 we have in a condensed form what may 
 be called his "poetics." At the same time, 
 those first essays in poetical literature which 
 followed — especially the long piece afterwards 
 entitled " Walt Whitman " — gave a sample of 
 the manner in which he intended to carry his 
 doctrines into practice. That he was seriously 
 attempting to create a new style for America, 
 and to suggest, at any rate, what might be left 
 for other bards to perfect, appears from the pre- 
 face to the edition of 1872. Here he says : " The 
 impetus and ideas urging me, for some years past, 
 to an utterance, or attempt at utterance, of New 
 World songs, and an epic of Democracy, having 
 already had their published expression, as well as 
 I can expect to give it, in ' Leaves of Grass,' the 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 127 
 
 present and future pieces from me are really but 
 the surplusage forming after that volume, or the 
 wave eddjdng behind it." His main object had, 
 in fact, been attained when the edition of 1867, 
 including " Drum Taps," appeared. 
 
 Later on, in the preface of 1872, he adds ; "T 
 have been more anxious, anyhow, to suggest the 
 songs of vital endeavour and manly evolution, 
 and furnish something for races of outdoor 
 athletes, than to make perfect rhymes, or reign 
 in the parlours. I ventured from the beginning 
 in my own way, taking chances, and would keep 
 on venturing." 
 
 Following the prose manifesto of 1855, and 
 taking it paragraph by paragraph, we may now 
 discuss Whitman's conception of the ideal De- 
 mocratic bard, and pause from time to time 
 to consider how closely he approached his own 
 standard. He begins with a panegyric of Ame- 
 rica, which is certainly justified by the largeness 
 of that continent, the variety of climates it in- 
 cludes, and the teeming populations who inhabit 
 it. Still, methinks, the eagle screams too loudly, 
 the " barbaric yawp " is too apparent in this 
 opening strain of jubilation. The Americans 
 
128 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 may, indeed, be destined to be "the race of 
 races " ; but hitherto they have done mighty 
 httle for the furtherance of spirituality, being 
 principally occupied with commercial speculation, 
 wire-pulling at elections, and doubtful doings in 
 Wall Street. For aught they have as yet 
 achieved, it is possible that they will never get 
 further than Carthage of old did. When we 
 reflect what " the small theatre of the antique, 
 and the aimless sleep-walking of the Middle 
 Ages," to use Whitman's words, bequeathed to 
 us of spiritual revelations, and compare these 
 with the null or zero of American productivity, 
 we could have preferred a more becoming 
 modesty, or a salutary depression, at the outset. 
 But that is not Whitman's opinion. He has a 
 firm faith in national personality, and is not 
 daunted by the poverty of national attainment.* 
 And, as we have already seen, he elsewhere 
 confesses that the democratic bard has not 
 appeared. 
 
 * It is right to add that at the close of his life, in conversation 
 with J. W. Wallace, he observed : " There is nowhere in the world the 
 demonism, the foulness, the corruption we have here in America. 
 I know that the average bulk en masse is sound. But this is the 
 danger." 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 129 
 
 The first great quality of the bard is faith. 
 " The times straying toward infidelity and con- 
 fections and persiflage he withholds by steady 
 faith.'' He will find a responsive virtue in the 
 proletariate. " Faith is the antiseptic of the 
 soul — -it pervades the common people and pre- 
 serves them, they never give up believing, and 
 expecting, and trusting. There is that inde- 
 scribable freshness and unconsciousness about an 
 illiterate person that mocks the power of the 
 noblest expressive genius." 
 
 The second great quality of the bard is 
 simplicity and candour. He must recognise 
 the fact that others can perceive beauty as well 
 as he does, but that it is his duty to seize 
 upon the facts of the universe and to reveal 
 their inner life, the abiding relations they 
 contain. It is not merely his duty to see, and 
 to invest what he has seen with rh3maes and 
 rhetorical ornaments, but to realise, and to 
 present what he has realised, with flawless 
 accuracy. " Without effort, and without ex- 
 posing in the least how it is done, the greatest 
 poet brings the spirit of any, or all, events, 
 and passions, and scenes, and persons, some 
 
 I 
 
I30 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 more and some less, to bear on your individual 
 character as you hear or read. To do this -well 
 is to compete with the laws that pursue and 
 follow time." Therefore the poet of Democracy 
 wiU not stop at description or the epic. His 
 expression is to be "transcendent and new, 
 indirect and not direct." What that means, 
 Whitman has more fully set forth in the poem 
 called " Introductions," where he contrasts the 
 mere singer with the real poet. 
 
 The words of the singers are the hours or minutes of the 
 light or dark — but the words of the maker of poems are 
 the general light and dark ; 
 The maker of poems settles justice, reality, immortality, 
 His insight and power encircle things and the human race, 
 He is the glory and extract, thus far, of things, and of the 
 human race. 
 
 The singers do rot beget — only the Poet begets. 
 
 Thus it appears that the distinctive faculty 
 of the bard is intuition into the essential 
 realities, penetrative imagination, combined with 
 the power of communicating what he has 
 discovered of vital truth through words. His 
 relation toward the mere singer is that of the 
 Imagination to the Fancy. 
 
 The advice given by Whitman to one who 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 131 
 
 woiild place himself in the proper attitude for 
 making poems, and presumably also for com- 
 prehending them when made, is contained in 
 the following characteristic paragraph. 
 
 This is what you shall do : Love the earth and sun and the 
 animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, 
 stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and 
 labour to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, 
 have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your 
 hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number 
 of men — go freely with powerful uneducated persons and 
 with the young, and with the mothers of families — re-examine 
 all you have been told in school or church or in any book, 
 and dismiss whatever insults your own soul ; and your very 
 flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not 
 only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, 
 and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and 
 joint of your body. The poet shall not spend his time in 
 unneeded work. He shall know that the ground is already 
 plough'd and manured ; others may not know it, but he 
 shall. He shall go directly to the creation. His trust shall 
 master the trust of everything he touches — and shall master 
 all attachment. 
 
 The next great quality of the bard is a recog- 
 nition of equality. " The messages of great poems 
 to each mg-n and woman are, come to us on equal 
 terms, only then can you understand us. We are 
 no better than you, what we enclose you enclose, 
 
132 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 what we enjoy, you may enjoy." He will be 
 "marked for generosity and affection, and for 
 encouraging competitors." Liberal and open to 
 all influences, according preference to no one class, 
 no special subject, no single element of the State. 
 
 The bard will not be intimidated by exact 
 science, but will find in it " always his encourage- 
 ment and support." Before his enlightened eyes 
 the supernatural " departs as a dream." It is 
 only nature, life, the body, the soul, that exhibit 
 miracles ; and these miracles are ever-recurrent, 
 innumerable. Humanity must be studied and 
 represented as it is, not as it ought to be accord- 
 ing to some preconceived canon of perfection. It 
 must be recognised that God is ultimately respon- 
 sible for everything we discover in the universe. 
 " "Whatever would put God in a poem or system 
 of philosophy as contending against some being 
 or influence, is of no account." 
 
 Furthermore, following the same line of thought, 
 fiction and romance disappear before " genuine- 
 ness." "As soon as histories are properly told, 
 no more need of romances." The actual beauty 
 of the human form is superior to wayward crea- 
 tions of the plastic fancy. There is no pleasure, 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 133 
 
 no joy, beyond that which a healthy soul in a 
 healthy body may daily make its own. The poet 
 will show that riches do not place their possessor 
 at an advantage with regard to real pleasure, real 
 joy ; that the ownership of an extensive library 
 does not enable a man to acquire intellectual 
 stores of happiness beyond the scope of any one 
 who can open and read the books ; that to be the 
 master of a park, a forest, a picture-gallery, will 
 not help an insensible person to relish natural or 
 sesthetic beauty. Any one who passes through 
 the park, the gallery, the forest, with eyes to see 
 and senses to perceive, is more the owner of them 
 than their purchaser, if peradventure he be a 
 dullard. 
 
 Another main requisite of the bard is " the idea 
 of political liberty." Poets " are the voice and 
 exhibition of liberty." Since the bard in question 
 is the Bard of Democracy, this amounts to an 
 identical proposition, and requires no comment. 
 In this connection, however, I may note that the 
 poet has to make himself familiar with the whole 
 of America — its lands, rivers, lakes, fauna, flora, 
 men and women, trades, arts, occupations, &c. — 
 and also to "flood himself with the immediate 
 
134 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 age as with vast oceanic tides. If he be not 
 himself the age transfigured, and if to him is not 
 opened the eternity which gives simiHtude to all 
 periods, and locations, and processes, and animate 
 and inanimate forms, and which is the bond of 
 time, and rises up from its inconceivable vague- 
 ness and infiniteness in the swimming shapes of 
 to-day, and is held by the ductile anchors of life, 
 and makes the present spot the passage from what 
 was to what shall be, and commits itself to the 
 representation of this wave of an hour, and this 
 one of the sixty beautiful children of the wave, 
 let him merge in the general run, and wait his 
 development." 
 
 Then follows a very curious passage regarding 
 the fundamental constituents of the true bard, 
 which must be transcribed in the author's words : 
 
 Extreme caution or prudence, the soundest organic health, 
 large hope and compariiion and fondnets for women and 
 children, large alimentiveness and destructiveness and caus- 
 ality, with a perfect sense of the oneness of nature, and the 
 propriety of the same spirit applied to human affairs, are 
 called up of the float of the brain of the world to be parts of 
 the greatest poet from his birth out of his mother's womb, and 
 from her birth out of her mother's. 
 
 There are so many different things, and apparently 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 135 
 
 SO disparate, jumbled together in this sentence 
 that it offers hopeless difficulties to the commen- 
 tator. We understand indeed what Whitman 
 means by health, alimentiveness, even destruc- 
 tiveness. But how are these qualities combined 
 with causality ? Then, again, hope and a fond- 
 ness for women and children are intelligible. But 
 why are they coupled with comparison ? [It looks 
 almost as though causality and comparison were 
 borrowed from the jargon of phrenology.] What 
 is meant by a sense of the oneness of nature, and 
 the application of nature's lessons to human 
 affairs, has already been explained above. For 
 the rest, as regards caution or prudence, Whit- 
 man in what follows offers a noble interpretation. 
 " Caution seldom goes far enough. It has been 
 thought that the prudent citizen was the citizen 
 who applied himself to solid gains, and did well 
 for himself and his family, and completed a lawful 
 life without debt or crime." Whitman, like 
 Christ in the Gospels, points out that this man 
 is in reality very imprudent. 
 
 Beyond the independence cf a little sum laid aside for 
 burial-money, and of a few clap-boards around and shingles 
 overhead on a lot of American soil own'd, and the easy dollars 
 
136 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 that supply the year's plain clothing and meals, the melan- 
 choly prudence of the abandonment of such a great being as 
 a man is, to the toss and pallor of years of money-making, 
 with all their scorching days and icy nights, and all their 
 stifling deceits and underhand dodgings, or infinitesimals of 
 parlours, or shameless stuffing while others starve, and all the 
 loss of the bloom and odour of the earth, and of the flowers 
 and atmosphere, and of the sea, and of the true taste of the 
 women and men you pass or have to do with in youth or 
 middle age, and the issuing sickness and desperate revolt at 
 the close of a life without elevation or naivete (even if you 
 have achiev'd a secure 10,000 a year, or election to Congress 
 or the Governorship), and the ghastly clatter of a death 
 without serenity or majesty, is the great fraud upon modern 
 civilisation and forethought, blotching the surface and system 
 which civilisation undeniably drafts, and moistening with 
 tears the immense features it spreads and spreads with such 
 velocity before the reach'd kisses of the soul. 
 
 Thus extreme caution or prudence consists in 
 
 living for the soul, immortality, the life beyond 
 
 the grave, the constitution of a permanent and 
 
 noble spiritual self, the eternal things and abiding 
 
 relations of the universe. It is, in fact, what 
 
 Whitman means by religion ; and since we have 
 
 returned to this which was the starting-point of 
 
 our inquiry, I cannot refrain from inserting here 
 
 a long paragraph (from the Preface, 1872), in 
 
 which he expounds at length his views regarding 
 
 the religion of the future : 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 137 
 
 When I commenced, years ago, elaborating the plan of my 
 poems, and continued turning over that plan, and shifting it 
 in my mind through many years (from the age of twenty-eight 
 to thirty-five), experimenting much, and writing and aban- 
 doning much, one deep purpose underlay the others, and 
 has underlain it and its execution ever since — and that has 
 been the religious purpose. Amid many changes, and a 
 formulation taking far different shape from what I at first 
 supposed, this basic purpose has never been departed from in 
 the composition of my verses. Not of course to exhibit 
 itself in the old ways, as in writing hymns or psalms with 
 an eye to the church-pew or to express conventional pietism, 
 or the sickly yearnings of devotees, but in new ways, and 
 aiming at the widest sub-bases and inclusions of humanity, 
 and tallying the fresh air of sea and land. I will see (said 
 I to myself) whether there is not, for my purposes as poet, 
 a religion, and a sound religious germenancy in the average 
 human race, at least in their modern development in the 
 United States, and in the hardy common fibre and native 
 yearnings and elements, deeper and larger, and affording 
 more profitable returns than all mere sects or churches — as 
 boundless, joyous, and vital as Nature itself — a germenancy 
 that has too long been unencouraged, unsung, almost un- 
 known. With science, the old theology of the East, long in 
 its dotage, begins evidently to die and disappear. But (to my 
 mind) science — and maybe such will prove its principal 
 service — as evidently prepares the way for One indescribably 
 grander — Time's young but perfect offspring — the new 
 theology — heir of the West — lusty and loving, and wondrous 
 beautiful. For America, and for to-day, just the same as 
 any day, the supreme and final science is the science of God 
 — what we call science being only its minister — as Democracy 
 
138 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 is, or shall be also. And a poet of America (I said) must fill 
 himself with such thoughts, and chant his best out of them. 
 And as those were the convictions and aims, for good or bad, 
 of " Leaves of Grass," they are no less the intention of this 
 volume. As there can be, in my opinion, no sane and 
 complete personality, nor any grand and electric nationality, 
 without the stock element of religion imbuing all the other 
 elements (like heat in chemistry, invisible itself, but the life 
 of aU visible life), so there can be no poetry worthy the name 
 without that element behind all. The time has certainly 
 come to begin to discharge the idea of religion in the United 
 States from mere ecclesiasticism, and from Sundays and 
 churches and church-going, and assign it to that general 
 position, chiefest and most indispensable, most exhilarating, 
 to which the others are to be adjusted, inside of all human 
 character and education and affairs. The people, especially 
 the young men and women, of America, must begin to learn 
 that religion (like poetry) is something far, far different from 
 what they supposed. It is, indeed, too important to the 
 power and perpetuity of the New World to be consign'd 
 any longer to the churches, old or new. Catholic or Protestant 
 — Saint this, or Saint that. It must be consign'd henceforth 
 to Democracy en masse, and to literature. It must enter 
 into the poems of the nation. It must make the nation. 
 
VIII 
 
 Speaking broadly then, Whitman's conception of 
 the ideal Bard of Democracy implies the following 
 main qualities or properties. He must be possessed 
 of perfect physical health, and the normal appe- 
 tites and instincts. He must be in large and 
 vital sympathy with his own nation and his own 
 age. He must have illimitable faith and optimistic 
 confidence. He must comprehend the heart of the 
 people, recognise their nobility, base his trust in 
 the future upon their sterling virtues and their 
 spirituality. He must be a passionate lover of 
 liberty, a believer in the equality of all men and 
 women as regards their capacity for comprehend- 
 ing and enjoying what he comprehends and enjoys. 
 He must derive his aliment and inspiration from 
 science, nature, fact ; aiming at truth and candour ; 
 preferring the genuine to the fictitious ; denying 
 the supernatural, and finding the only divine 
 known to us in things submitted to our percipient 
 
I40 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 senses. The final result of this attitude will be 
 to make him religious in a higher and intenser 
 degree than any creed or dogma yet has made a 
 man to be. As regards his special function in 
 literature, he must be gifted with imagination 
 penetrative to the soul and life of fundamental 
 realities, and in his expression must be as simple, 
 as suggestive, as inevitable, as a natural object. 
 He will aim at creating a new and independent 
 vehicle of language, suitable to the quality of his 
 personal perception. 
 
 That Whitman described himself in this ideal 
 picture of the bard — or rather, perhaps, that he 
 strenuously attempted to live up to the concep- 
 tion he had formed, and to exemplify his teaching 
 in his published works — will be apparent to all 
 who have studied him with attention. With 
 regard to physical health. Whitman, when he 
 composed " Leaves of Grass," was almost repul- 
 sively and obtrusively healthy. After the ex- 
 periences of the war, his health failed ; but 
 though there entered a certain wistfulness and 
 subdued tone into his poetry at this period, he 
 never altered its form. " His self-assertion," as 
 Mr. W. M. Eossetti observed, "is boundless: 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 141 
 
 jet not always to be understood as strictly or 
 merely personal to himself, but sometimes as 
 vicarious, the poet speaking on behalf of all 
 men, and every man and woman." That is 
 well said. The " I " of Whitman is not merely 
 his particular "Ego," but also the "personality" 
 of that " Democratic Individual " he strove to 
 create, and endowed with vocal organs. All 
 the same, it must be admitted that the utter- 
 ances of the ideal " self" would have been 
 more solemn and more impressive, if Whitman 
 had pitched them at a somewhat lower tone. 
 He screams, brags, swears, blusters, asseverates, 
 bullies, thumps the pulpit-cushion, stamps the 
 platform. And all this "blatant ebullience," as 
 it has been well described, indicates " a fault 
 of debility, not an excess of strength." The 
 worst thing, and the most obvious, which can 
 be said against " Leaves of Grass " is that it 
 is throughout impaired by forcible-feebleness. 
 Partly due, no doubt, to the doctrinaire atti- 
 tude assumed by the author as the would-be 
 prophet of a new gospel and the founder of a 
 new method. Partly due, also, to the arro- 
 gance of the athletic temperament. We cannot 
 
142 A STUDY OF, WALT WHITMAN 
 
 but regret that this accent of swagger had not 
 been toned down, since it remains in permanent 
 discord with the essential sublimity of "Whit- 
 man's thought, the grandeur of his imagination, 
 aiid the not unfrequent magnificence of his 
 diction. 
 
 In all the other qualities of the democratic 
 bard, Walt Whitman cannot be said to have 
 fallen far short of his own ideal. For expressing 
 America, the length, and breadth, and vastness 
 of " These States," he was well equipped by 
 the " Wander-jahren " of his earlier manhood. 
 During those years of travel and of varied 
 energy he practised many arts and crafts, and 
 came into close relations with all kinds of men 
 and women. If not in actual excesses, at any 
 rate by sympathy and observation, he " sounded 
 all experiences of life, with all their passions, 
 pleasures, and abandonments." He felt the 
 pulse of that enormous and promiscuous nation- 
 ality. He fraternised with the people, not in 
 his birth-place merely, nor in New England or 
 New York, but in the South, the West, studying 
 all types, selecting from each class of workers 
 and of able craftsmen those characteristics 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 143 
 
 which he afterwards fused into his " Democratic 
 Individual." It was inevitable that he should 
 leave certain salient qualities out of his account, 
 and that the ideal portrait should be defective 
 in some softening and spiritually elevating 
 traits ; for no man, sincerely studying nature 
 and the world, can avoid the necessity under 
 which he lies of importing his own predilections, 
 proclivities, personal instincts into the amalgam 
 of his art. For the completion of this task 
 there never failed in Whitman large and 
 liberal sympathies, the recognition of truth and 
 goodness, wheresoever to be found, hearty love, 
 affection of the purest, willingness to share on 
 equal terms with all his fellows, to learn from 
 the simplest, to discern divinity in the most 
 abject, to place himself upon the level of " the 
 average," and to ascend therefrom (as Antaeus 
 rose from contact with Mother Earth) inspired, 
 invigorated, able to affront the stars and 
 commune with the thought of death. Should 
 a Hercules of cultiu-e, or of any superior creed, 
 be sent to strangle Whitman, the demigod will 
 have to lift him high in air above that vital 
 contract with the ground-pan of humanity. His 
 
144 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 secret as a democratic bard lies in this living 
 and unselfish love of man, body and soul, bred 
 by a generous unenvious commerce with his 
 kindred. The faith he preached as a saving 
 and preservative virtue, and which he discovered, 
 or seemed to discover, abroad among the people, 
 abounded in his own breast. He was born with 
 a robust confidence, and with imperturbable 
 optimism. This believing and sanguine spirit 
 survived, not only the experiences of his Wander- 
 jahren, when he must have seen sad things 
 enough to shake another's confidence, but also 
 the dire events of the great war, the very 
 saddest aspects of which he daily studied 
 during his occupation as a hospital nurse. 
 Inborn in the man, it was nourished and sus- 
 tained by exact science — that is to say, by 
 what he learned about the system of the 
 universe, and by the interpretation he put 
 upon that knowledge. Religion grew for him 
 from roots which have proved poisonous to 
 other souls. Herein, again, he showed his 
 adequacy to his own conception of the poet. 
 Faith and optimism prevailed against the mani- 
 fold apparent inducements to despair of human 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 145 
 
 nature, and to pronounce our world the worst 
 possible product of some unconscious power for 
 evil. The penetrative imagination he demanded 
 from his poet enabled him to pierce the core of 
 science, and to emerge from the contemplation of 
 a homogeneous and everlastingly enduring uni- 
 verse into the conviction that no part of it can be 
 destroyed or unaccounted for. That is no senti- 
 mental dream, no sybarite's self-indulgent escape 
 from poignant realities of pain and misery into 
 vague visions. It is the logical deduction from 
 the facts of the world as science sets them forth, 
 drawn by one who knows the world at least in 
 one case to be good to live in, and who has 
 thoroughly absorbed the meaning of its essential 
 and coherent unity. As the test and pledge of 
 Whitman's sincerity, the last period of his life — a 
 life broken in the finest years of manhood by self- 
 sacrifice for others during the Great War- 
 remains for ever valuable. Instead of shrinking 
 or quailing under the paralysis and poverty which 
 afflicted him so long, his spirit rose and dilated. 
 He never ceased to love and hope. The religion 
 which he framed in ardent youth and arrogant 
 adolescence, sustained him to the last. We have 
 
T46 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 to be thankful that it was put to proof in this 
 way, although we may have wished that one to 
 -whom the world owes so much had been spared 
 suffering and privation. For no one now can say 
 that Whitman's religion was the idle plaything of 
 a lusty, omnivorously enjoying, morally careless, 
 exceptionally fortunate child of nature. St. Paul 
 spoke one of the deepest truths which have been 
 ever uttered when he wrote : " And now abideth 
 Faith, Hope, and Love, these three. But the 
 greatest of these is Love." Whitman loved 
 greatly, and sacrificed his life to the love he 
 felt for suffering humanity. The orthodox Chris- 
 tian may go to Whitman in order to discover 
 that the cardinal virtues can survive the decay 
 of Christian dogma, and inspire one for whom 
 the cosmic enthusiasm was the sole source of 
 consolation. 
 
IX 
 
 I WOULD fain close upon this note, for I have 
 already declared what I feel to be incontestably 
 great in Whitman. Yet it still remains to con- 
 sider in what way he performed the bard's 
 functions of initiating new forms in literature, 
 and pioneering for an art commensurate with 
 the magnificence of America. 
 
 Here it serves nothing to inquire whether 
 he was justified in supposing that he had 
 written poetry. It is clear that in a certain 
 and technical sense he did not write poetry, 
 because he did not use metre and rhyme. It 
 is also clear that, except in his Prefaces, 
 Democratic Vistas, Specimen Days, and so 
 forth, he did not attempt to write prose. When 
 he did write prose in " Leaves of Grass " and 
 " Drum Taps," he did so involuntarily, and just 
 as Dante in the "Paradiso," and Milton in the 
 " Paradise Lost," and Lucretius in " De Rerum 
 
148 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 Natura," unwillingly wrote prose at intervals. 
 Therefore, it may be inferred — and one flings 
 the suggestion with equanimity to cavillers — 
 that what he did write in his masterpiece of 
 literature was neither flesh nor fowl nor good 
 red herring. It is not verse, it is not (except 
 involuntarily) prose. 
 
 But is there no poetry outside the region of 
 rhyme and verse ? Was Sir Philip Sidney, 
 the first accomplished critic in our language, so 
 far wrong in his contention that "apparelled 
 verse is but an ornament, and no cause to 
 poetry ; since there have been many most 
 excellent poets that have never versified, and 
 now swarm many versifiers who need never 
 answer to the name of poets ? " Are we all 
 wrong in thinking that, when we read Job, 
 the Psalms, the Prophets, the Song of Solomon, 
 in our English version, we are reading the 
 sublimest, the sweetest, the strongest, the most 
 sensuous poetry that was ever written ? 
 
 To my mind Whitman did indubitably pro- 
 duce poetry, and poetry of a very high order. 
 According to the theory he had formed before 
 he began to " strike up the songs of the New 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 149 
 
 World," he deliberately rejected rhyme, metre, 
 the set stanza, all the " Ars Poetica " of his 
 predecessors.* In art it is exceedingly difficult 
 to break with tradition, to innovate with success. 
 And doctrine, the obedience to a settled theory, 
 is inimical to pure spontaneous singing. From 
 the outset Whitman was hampered by his 
 
 * It must be remembered that Whitman protested against his 
 works being judged from the point of view of "literature." he 
 says moreover : " I have not only not bothered much about style, 
 form, art, &c., but confess to more or less apathy (I believe I have 
 sometimes caught myself in decided aversion) toward them through- 
 out, asking nothing of them but negative advantages — that they 
 should never impede me, and never under any circumstances, or for 
 their own purposes only, assume any mastery over me." That is a 
 sensible and intelligible account of his theory and practice. Yet he 
 calls his collected works, " Complete Poems and Prose of Walt 
 Whitman"! he speaks of the former often as "Songs," "Chants," 
 " Carols," and so forth. The critic is therefore compelled to treat 
 them as products of art. But this is just what the disciples of 
 Whitman do not like our doing. In a private letter to the aged 
 master, his friend and biographer, Dr. Bucke, remarks concerning 
 my " Essays Speculative and Suggestive " (in which there was an 
 essay on Democratic Art, partly incorporated into this study) that 
 " Symonds (like the rest) seems to be so mentally and unconsciously 
 occupied with form that he is more or less blinded to substance." 
 Mr. Robert Buchanan has told us that he was first attracted to 
 Whitman because his work was not " mere literature," because he 
 had broken with the tradition of artistic form. But, for all that. 
 Whitman has form, a very peculiar and individual style, an art 
 of expression which none of his followers — not even the genial 
 Edward Carpenter, whose "Toward Democracy" is not only the best 
 interpretation of Whitman's spirit, but also the best imitation of his 
 manner — have been able to copy without enfeebling or parodying its 
 characteristics. 
 
ISO. A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 system, and he was not quite strong enough to 
 create by a single fiat the new perfect form 
 he aimed at. He resolved to rely on rhythm, 
 and on the coinage of phrases which should 
 exactly suit the matter or the emotion to be 
 expressed. 
 
 The countless clear and perfect [phrases he 
 invented, to match most delicate and evanescent 
 moods of sensibility, to picture exquisite and 
 broad efiects of natural beauty, to call up 
 poignant or elusive feelings, attest to his artistic 
 faculty of using language as a vehicle for 
 thought. They are hung, like golden medals of 
 consummate workmanship and incised form, in 
 rich clusters over every poem he produced. And, 
 what he aimed at above all, these phrases are 
 redolent of the very spirit of the emotions they 
 suggest, communicate the breadth and largeness 
 of the natural things they indicate, embody the 
 essence of realities in living words which pal- 
 pitate and burn for ever. 
 
 I do not think it needful to quote examples. 
 Those who demur and doubt may address them- 
 selves to an impartial study of his writings. It 
 is enough for me, trained in Greek and Latin 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 151 
 
 classics, in the literatures of Italy and France 
 and Germany and England, who have spent my 
 life in continuous addiction to literature, and 
 who am the devotee of what is powerful and 
 beautiful in style— it is enough for me to pledge 
 my reputation as a critic upon what I have 
 asserted. 
 
 I have already admitted that his self-assertion 
 and tumidity are drawbacks to his art. Fur- 
 thermore it must be confessed that the lists of 
 things, of peoples, of places, he is wont to make, 
 exhaust our powers of attention. We tire of 
 uncouth paragraphs, each clause of which begins 
 with " Oh," or " See," " I see," " I hear," " I 
 swear," or " Shapes arise." We long for humour, 
 which is almost totally absent in his work, to 
 relieve its seriousness and self-complacency. We 
 are jarred by his ungrammatical constructions 
 and crude agglutinations of jaw- breaking sub- 
 stantives. His ill-assimilated French or Spanish 
 phrases — imported in obedience to the system, 
 because America includes so many nations — 
 hurt our ear. We could gladly dispense with 
 etui, trottoir, habitans, eleve, allons, accouche, 
 mon enfant, and so forth, in compositions which 
 
1 52 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 after all are written in the English mother- 
 tongue. Let us, however, be thankful that he 
 did not think fit to borrow also from the German 
 dictionary ! Finally, we could desire more of 
 dramatic power and a juster sense of composition 
 in creating balanced wholes. 
 
 But when all this has been conceded, we 
 return to the position, and declare it to be 
 impregnable and unchallenged, that Whitman, 
 working under the conditions of his chosen style, 
 has produced long series of rhythmic utterances, 
 strung together and governed by an inner law 
 of melody, capable of transposition, augmenta- 
 tion, and diminution at the author's will, which 
 have the magnetic charm of nature, the attrac- 
 tion of his own "fluid and attaching" personality. 
 
 In his happiest moments these periods are 
 perfect poems, to alter which would be to ruin 
 them. Not a word is then superfluous ; not an 
 epithet, but adds to the rhetorical effect ; and 
 when the climax is attained, our sense of music, 
 and far more of vitalising imaginative potency, 
 is fully satisfied. 
 
 Let those who doubt these words, or do not 
 know Walt Whitman's writings, devote them- 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 153 
 
 selves to the careful study of " When Lilacs last 
 in the Door- Yard Bloomed," " Vigil Strange I kept 
 on the Field One Night," "The Singer in the 
 Prison," " Sleep-Chasings," " A Leaf of Faces," 
 " A Word Out of the Sea," and those passages 
 from the poem called " Walt Whitman," which 
 besfin with the lines " I am he that walks with 
 the tender and growing night," and " You sea ! 
 I resign myself to you also.^' 
 
X 
 
 I AM aware how futile it is to attempt a full 
 interpretation of Walt Whitman. There is some- 
 thing in him which eludes all efforts at descrip- 
 tion. No analytical process can be successfully, 
 exhaustively applied to him. Nor is this the 
 fault of his students and expositors. It springs 
 from the quality of his work. As Colonel 
 IngersoU, his steadfast friend and eulogist, has 
 said : " In everything a touch of chaos, lacking 
 what is called form, as clouds lack form, but not 
 lacking the splendour of sunrise or the glory of 
 sunset." Then, too, there is a something in his 
 poetry, the best of it, the spiritual essence, the 
 ethereal, harmonising medium of its many in- 
 congruities, which evanesces in the crucible of 
 criticism. It follows, therefore, that in writing 
 of him every one has failed to introduce him 
 adequately to the public. A blowing of the 
 brazen trumpet, or a petty patronage, these are 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 155 
 
 the two contradictory errors into which his well- 
 wishers, even though they happen to be subtle 
 writers, fail when they attempt to set forth what 
 they feel about him. 
 
 I am not sure whether a loose, disjointed 
 method, the mere jotting down of notes, would 
 not be the best way of illustrating so intangible 
 an author. And then I think of many metaphors 
 to express a meaning irreducible to propositions. 
 
 He is Behemoth, wallowing in primeval jungles, 
 bathing at fountain-heads of mighty rivers, crush- 
 ing the bamboos and the crane-brakes under him, 
 bellowing and exulting in the torrid air. He is 
 a gigantic elk or buffalo, trampling the grasses 
 of the wilderness, tracking his mate with irre- 
 sistible energy. He is an immense tree, a kind 
 of Ygdrasil, stretching its roots deep down into 
 the bowels of the world, and unfolding its magic 
 boughs through all the spaces of the heavens. 
 His poems are even as the rings in a majestic 
 oak or pine.* He is the circumambient air, in 
 which float shadowy shapes, rise mirage-towers, 
 and palm-groves ; we try to clasp their visionary 
 
 * Whitman said to J. W. Wallace : " I have felt to make my book a 
 succession of growths, like the rings of trees." 
 
iS6 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 forms ; they vanish into ether. He is the globe 
 itself; all seas, lands, forests, climates, storms, 
 snows, sunshines, rains of universal earth. He 
 is all nations, cities, languages, religions, arts, 
 creeds, thoughts, emotions. He is the beginning 
 and the grit of these things, not their endings, 
 lees, and dregs. Then he comes to us as lover, 
 consoler, physician, nurse ; most tender, fatherly, 
 sustaining those about to die, lifting the children, 
 and stretching out his arms to the young men. 
 What the world has he absorbs. For him there 
 is no schism in the universe, no force opposed to 
 God or capable of thwarting Him, no evil inera- 
 dica;ble by the soul, no limit set on human 
 aspiration. Vice and disease he rebukes and 
 pities. They are tainted, defective, miserable : 
 yet not to be screamed at ; rather to be cured 
 and healed. He knows that purity is best, and 
 health is best. But he also shows that what 
 false modesty accounted unclean is the cleanest 
 and the healthiest of all. In his return to nature 
 he does not select inanimate nature, or single out 
 the savage state. He takes man first, as the 
 height and head of things ; and after man the 
 whole tract that human feet can traverse or 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 157 
 
 human thought explore. Cities, arts, occupations, 
 manufactures, have a larger place in his poetry 
 than rivers or prairies; for these are nearer to 
 man, more important to his destiny and educa- 
 tion. He is the poet of fact, of the real, of 
 what exists, of the last true, positive, and sole 
 ontology. 
 
 After all, the great thing is, if possible, to 
 induce people to study Whitman for themselves. 
 I am convinced that, especially for young men, 
 his spirit, if intelligently understood and sym- 
 pathised with, must be productive of incalculable 
 good. This, I venture to emphasise by relating 
 what he did for me. I had received the ordinary 
 English gentleman's education at Harrow and 
 Oxford. Being physically below the average in 
 health and strength, my development proceeded 
 more upon the intellectual than the athletic side. 
 In a word, I was decidedly academical, and in 
 danger of becoming a prig. What was more, 
 my constitution in the year 1865 seemed to have 
 broken down, and no career in life lay open to 
 me. In the autumn of that year, my friend 
 Frederic Myers read me aloud a poem from 
 " Leaves of Grass." We were together in his 
 
158 A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge and ; I can 
 well remember the effect of his sonorous voice 
 rolling out sentence after sentence, sending 
 electric thrills through the very marrow of my 
 mind.* I immediately procured the Boston edi- 
 tion of 1860-61, and began to study it atten- 
 tively. It cannot be denied that much in 
 Whitman puzzled and repelled me. But it was 
 the sesthetic, not the moral, sensibility that 
 suffered; for I felt at once that his method of 
 treating sexual things (the common stumbling- 
 block to beginners) was the right one, and 
 wished that I had come across " Children of 
 Adam" several years earlier. My academical 
 prejudices, the literary instincts trained by two 
 decades of Greek and Latin studies, the refine- 
 ments of culture, and the exclusiveness of 
 aristocratic breeding, revolted against the un- 
 couthness, roughness, irregularity, coarseness, of 
 the poet and his style. But, in course of a 
 short time. Whitman delivered my soul of these 
 debilities. As I have elsewhere said in print, he 
 
 * It was a piece from " Calamus," beginning " Long I thought that 
 that knowledge alone would suffice me." Curiously enough, this has 
 been omitted from subsequent editions, for what reasons I know 
 not. 
 
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 159 
 
 taught me to comprehend the harmony between 
 the democratic spirit, science, and .that larger 
 rehgion to which the modern world is being 
 led by the conception of human brotherhood, 
 and by the spirituality inherent in any really 
 scientific view of the universe. He gave body, 
 concrete vitality, to the religious creed which 
 I had been already forming for myself upon the 
 study of Goethe, Greek and Roman Stoics, 
 Giordano Bruno, and the founders of the 
 evolutionary doctrine. He inspired me with 
 faith, and made me feel that optimism was 
 not unreasonable. This gave me great cheer 
 in those evil years of enforced idleness and 
 intellectual torpor which my health imposed 
 upon me. Moreover, he helped to free me 
 from many conceits and pettinesses to which 
 academical culture is liable. He opened my 
 eyes to the beauty, goodness and greatness 
 which may be found in all worthy human 
 beings, the humblest and the highest. He 
 made me respect personality more than attain- 
 ments or position in the world. Through him, 
 I stripped my soul of social prejudices. 
 'Through him, I have been able to fraternise 
 
i6o A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN 
 
 in comradeship with men of all classes and 
 several races, irrespective of their caste, creed, 
 occupation, and special training. To him I 
 owe some of the best friends I now can claim 
 — sons of the soil, hard- workers, "natural and 
 nonchalant," " powerful uneducated " persons. 
 
 Only those who have been condemned by 
 imperfect health to take a back-seat in life so 
 far as physical enjoyments are concerned, and 
 who have also chosen the career of literary 
 study, can understand what is meant by the 
 deliverance from foibles besetting invalids and 
 pedants for which I have to thank Walt 
 Whitman. 
 
 What he has done for me, I feel he will do 
 for others — for each and all of those who take 
 counsel with him, and seek from him a solution 
 of difficulties differing in kind according to the 
 temper of the individual — if only they approach 
 him in the right spirit of confidence and open- 
 mindedness. 
 
 Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON AND CO. 
 
 London and Edinburgh,