, -#., 
 
 
 ^ 
 
 V'^-'L'S 
 
 im 
 
 ->^^Er 
 
 ^<^l 
 
 ,^ 
 
 ,^ 
 
R31 + 
 
 r 
 
 The date shows when this volume was tak^. 
 
 To renew this book copy the call No. and give to 
 
 subi 
 
 the librarian 
 
 €50rttril 
 
 ||/^B4^-^Mt3|-^ HOME USE RULES. 
 All Botks subject to Recall 
 
 '^year for inspection and 
 
 repairs. 
 
 Students must re- 
 turn all books before 
 leaving town. Officers 
 shoulQ arrange for the 
 return of books wanted 
 during their absence 
 1 from town. 
 
 Books needed by 
 more ttian one person 
 are held on the reserve 
 list. . ^. 
 
 , Volumes of periodi- 
 cals and of pamphlets 
 are held in the library 
 as mudi as possible. 
 For special purposes 
 they are given lOut for , 
 a limited time. 1 
 
 Borrowers should 
 not use their library I 
 privileges for the bene- 
 fit of other persons. 
 " Books of spedal 
 value and gift books, 
 when the giver wishes 
 it, are not .allowed to 
 circulate. 
 
 Readers are askedfto 
 report all cases of books 
 marked or mutilated. 
 
 Do" not deface books by marks and writing. 
 
 A^WS-^BO... 
 
 -i7-b2I.i3 
 
 6561 
 
WALT WHITMAN 
 
 AND 
 
 THE GERMANS 
 
 RICHARD RIETHMUELLER, Ph. D. 
 
 Cornell University Library 
 PS 3233.R37 
 
 Walt Whitman and the Germans.a studybv .R 
 
 3 1924 022 225 316 «,i.....i 
 
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/cu31924022225316 
 
Walt Whitman and the Germans 
 
 A STCDY 
 
 RICHARD RIETHMUELLER, Ph. D. 
 
 Harrison Research Fellow in Germanics 
 
 University of Pennsylvania 
 
 AMERICANA GERMANICA PRESb 
 
 PHILADELPHIA 
 
 (Reprinted from ©etmati ametlcan annala, Vol. iv.) 
 
 ipoe 
 
 L.U. 
 
A-e-lSH^o 
 
 This study when completed will include 
 
 1. The German Influence on Whitman 
 
 2. The Influence of Whitman in Germany 
 
 and will appear as a number of the monograph series, Americana 
 Germanica. 
 
To 
 
 The German Department of the 
 
 University of Pennsylvania 
 
 As A Token of Gratitude 
 
Motto : 
 
 Only a few hints, a few diffused faint clews and indirections 
 I seek for my own use to trace out here ! 
 
 — Leaves of Grass, p. 14. 
 
 WALT WHITMAN AND THE GERMANS. 
 
 The problem of Walt Whitman, both in the poet's life- 
 time and soon after his death, found widely different interpre- 
 tations. His admirers extolled him to the very skies, his ene- 
 mies freely lavished upon him cheap scorn or malicious 
 slander. Yet the stream of criticism soon ran dry, and only 
 now and then a faint voice is raised in unbiased circles, as it 
 were, to justify the " good gray poet's " prophecy : " My words 
 itch at your ears till you understand them."^ The recognition 
 and imitation which Whitman found in Germany invite criti- 
 cism once more. At the very outset, we reject all insinuations 
 of membership in the Whitman Fellowship or of thoughtless 
 repetition of the German glorification of the poet's figure and 
 works. In our investigation into a new phase of the Whitman 
 problem we refrain from all final criticism of the poet's life- 
 work, although in the course of our presentation, hints for a 
 critical treatment of the problem will be suggested. 
 
 As for broad-minded cosmopolitanism, Walt Whitman 
 stands unparalleled in the history of American literature. 
 Young Schiller gushingly embraced the whole world, so 
 
 ^LoGts. All citations of Whitman's poetry are taken from Leaves of 
 Grass {LoG), including Sands at Seventy, Good-Byemy Fancy, Old Age 
 Echoes, and A Backward Glance, etc., Boston ; Small, Maynard & Co., 1904 
 (cited as LoG). For citations from Whitman's prose see Complete Prose 
 Works, dto, 1901. 
 
 (3) 
 
4 M^ali Whitman and the Germans. 
 
 Whitman extends his ecstatic " Salut au Monde "^ and " Good- 
 will between the common people of all Nations 1 '" To for- 
 eign lands he dedicates his poems that they, too, may behold 
 in them what they wanted.* With the twirl of his tongue he 
 " encompasses worlds and volumes of worlds."^ On his voy- 
 age "to every land, to every sea," he starts, a"williijg learner 
 of all, teacher of all and lover of all."* 
 
 For Whitman clearly recognized that "of many debts in- 
 calculable, haply our New World's chieftest debt is to old 
 poems."' Little credit he claims for this New World, in spite 
 of its great material and political achievements, but "how 
 much to the Old, Old World ! "* Cheerfully he receives " those 
 precious legacies " and tries " to give them ensemble," to 
 mould them into "modern American physiognomy."' "Amer- 
 ica does not repel the past, or what the past has produced 
 under its forms, or amid other politics, or the idea of castes, or 
 the old religions — accepts the lesson with calmness — is not 
 impatient because the slough still sticks to opinions and man- 
 ners and literature, while the life which served its requirements 
 has passed into the new life of the'new forms."'" 
 
 Whitman knows that " these States are entirely held pos- 
 session of by foreign lands," that they are " still importing the 
 distant, the partial, and the dead."" But that does not dis- 
 courage nor does it humiliate his national pride : " The New 
 World receives with joy the poems of the antique, with Euro- 
 pean feudalism's rich fund of epics, plays, ballads" and 
 " holds them, indeed, as indispensable studies, influences. 
 
 'LoG 1 12- 120. 
 
 ^Prose, 432. 
 
 *Z,oC 50. 
 *LoG 15. 
 ''LoG 414. 
 «ZoG 158. 
 ^ Prose, 330. 
 
 'J^rose, 330. 
 
 '"Prose, 256, cp. also Lo G 266. 
 
 ^'Prnsi'. 1x1. 
 
 '^'Prose, 237 
 
Wa/i Whitman and the Germans. 5 
 
 records, comparisons."'^ How wrong the ungracious charges 
 of want of special originality are ! "America may well be 
 reverently thankful — can never be thankful enough" for the 
 great examples of foreign nations. For " ere the New World 
 can be worthily original and announce herself and her own 
 heroes she must be well saturated with the originality of others, 
 and respectfully consider the heroes '"* of foreign lands. 
 America, this huge world of peoples, climates, idiocrasies and 
 geographies, this immense sifting- and mixing-box of genera- 
 tions and years and races, will never have a national litera- 
 ture until it has fully absorbed the foreign literatures and blended 
 them into an ensemble that is the " tap-root" of any National 
 Literature." 
 
 Whitman's own productions could not possibly have 
 emerged or been fashioned or completed in any other milieu, 
 nor in any other era than that of this immense, unprecedented, 
 experimental union, the United States." The poet sees clearly 
 enough that all the prevalent books and library poets have only 
 followed and "doppelgang'd"" the foreign examples. Modestly 
 enough he admits that his own products are really the thoughts 
 of all men in all ages and lands, that they are not original 
 with him.'* He, himself " conned old times," he " sat studying 
 at the feet of the great masters,"" and he respectfully credits 
 them for what they bequeathed to him.^" But this intelligence 
 is to him a mighty stimulus toward originality. His national 
 pride soars to prophetic heights : " The immortal poets of Asia 
 
 '^'^ November Boughs ; Philadelphia, David McKay, i8S8, p. ii (cited as 
 Nov. B). In case of "A backward glance over travel'd roads," not given in 
 prose works. 
 
 ^^Prose, 187. 
 
 ^^dto. 
 
 '^ Prose, 490 and 493. 
 
 '^''Nov. B., 9. 
 
 ^'^ Prose, 144, cp. Heine's poem, "Der Doppelganger." 
 
 '^^LoG 43 ; Prose, 218. 
 
 i»Z<?G2o; 4. 
 
 ■^LoGio; 5. 
 
6 Wali Whitman and the Germans. 
 
 and Europe have done their work," America at last " brings 
 its own styles."^* American independence will not be a reality 
 until American literature has freed itself completely from foreign 
 standards and influences,^^ and with exuberant shouts of joy, 
 Whitman hails the coming original poet who will, as he him- 
 self tried to, announce the " native expression-spirit, getting 
 into form, adult, and through mentality, for these States, self- 
 contained, different from others, more ' expansive, more rich 
 and free." Then the American national spirit will " be evi- 
 denced by original authors and poets to come, by native 
 superber tableaux and growths of languages, songs, operas, 
 orations, lectures, architecture."^' What a commentary on the 
 literary spirit of modern America, that such a fervent appeal to 
 her honor has met with no response ! 
 
 Whitman's admitted indebtedness to foreign productions 
 explains the aim and scope of the present investigation : to ex- 
 amine, how far he was acquainted with the Germans, how 
 highly he estimated the German spiritual life, and, partly, how 
 the German literary and philosophicaljproductions influenced 
 his works.^'" Considering the world-wide flight of Whitman's 
 mind, this inquiry may seem almost petty ; more than once 
 the mention of German lands, poets, philosophers, musicians 
 is grouped together with those of scores of other nations. Yet 
 the passages where he treats of German representatives inde- 
 pendently are frequent enough. In tracing such passages we 
 may furnish a modest literary and cultural-historical document 
 and add our small share to the stores of the German American 
 Annals. 
 
 Walt Whitman has no directly German branch in his 
 family tree. Yet his mother, Louisa van Velsor, descended 
 
 ^'ZoG 265 ; 5 
 ''■''■Prose, 237. 
 ^^Prose, 236. 
 
 tion 
 
 "rrose, 23b. 
 
 "a A paper now in preparation will investigate the recognition and imita- 
 
 that Whitman's work has found among the Germans, 
 
U^a/i Whitman and the Germans. 7 
 
 from Dutch immigration. From early boyhood he reveled, 
 according to his own statement,^* in romance reading of all 
 kind and, with sorties in very many directions, a most omniv- 
 orous novel-reader, devoured everything he could get. 
 Gabriel Sarrazin rightly stresses Whitman's extensive reading : 
 " Non seulementil n'etait point un illettre, mais il avait lu tout 
 ce que nous avons lu nous-m^mes."^' A passage in Specimen 
 Days^ "My first reading," may lead us to believe that 
 Whitman took up the reading of Walter Scott about 1830, 
 that is, as a boy of eleven. Yet the chapter on " Growth- 
 Health-Work "^ and a supplementary remark in November 
 Boughs^ make it probable that not before 1835, as a youth of 
 sixteen, he got into possession of his "stout, well-crammed 
 one thousand page octavo volume, containing Walter Scott's 
 poetry entire." Through " this inexhaustible mine and treas- 
 ury of poetic forage " he became interested in the "Ballads 
 from the German," which are very likely his first acquaintance 
 with German literature. His interest in the German ballad is 
 shown in a citation of the " old German legend of the King's 
 bell," expressing the same idea as that of Byron, that he had 
 had but three happy hours in his life. This ballad has been 
 enlarged into a narrative poem by Richard Henry Stoddard in 
 The King's Bell, New York, 1866, which Whitman had proba- 
 bly read.^' 
 
 In his works Whitman gives no direct clew as to whether 
 he ever acquired a reading knowledge of the German lan- 
 guage ; from occasional, yet very rare citations, and from his 
 acquaintance with German Americans it seems not impossi- 
 ble. Referring to Whitman's unfortunate habit of intermixing 
 ill-assimilated French and Spanish words and phrases, 
 
 '^^ Prose, 9 and 10. 
 
 '^Gabriel Sarrazin, La Renaissance de la Poisie Anglaise ; Paris, 1889 ; 
 236- 
 ^Prose, 9. 
 ^"^ Prose, 10. 
 ^Nov. B. 12. 
 "Prose, 86. 
 
8 I1/alt Whitman arid the Germans. 
 
 Symonds says, speaking pro domo of his English mother- 
 tongue : " Let us be thankful that he did not think fit to bor- 
 row also from the German dictionary ! "'" Indeed, we appre- 
 ciate it highly that Whitman desisted from using the German 
 vocabulary, drawing instead from the inexhaustible fountain of 
 German intellect. 
 
 Among his " Pieces in early youth " Whitman tells in the 
 "Boy Lover" a most pathetic love story, which he pictures as 
 having been experienced by himself." As a law student, the 
 poet, with his brother, Matthew, and two other students, 
 Wheaton and Brown, used to visit a little inn on the banks 
 of the North River, that was kept by an elderly widow of Swiss 
 descent. Her daughter, Ninon, a girl of sixteen, with blue 
 eyes and light hair, was the chief attraction for the young 
 friends, who soon loved her to the very depth of passion. 
 Margery, a stately old woman — half companion, half servant 
 — served the ale in silvern tankards, and the clean, homelike 
 inn was frequently visited by French and Germans. But one 
 Wednesday, when the happy four occupied their seats again 
 round the same clean, white table, Ninon failed to appear. 
 Margery made no answer to their hints as to her whereabouts. 
 At last, Wheaton inquires, but Margery turns as pale as ashes 
 and disappears. After a quarter of an hour she returns and 
 conducts them back of the house to a cluster of trees. There 
 she stops and, pointing with her finger, she speaks in tones 
 calm and low : " Ninon is there ! " There was a grave, newly 
 made. The poet feels a deadly sickness coming over him, but 
 hearing a stifled exclamation and looking round, he sees 
 Brown leaning against a tree, his cheeks bloodless as chalk. 
 Wheaton had fallen, sobbing like a child and wringing his 
 hands. Only Matthew keeps the same placid face, the same 
 untrembling fingers, but the seventh day after that dreadful 
 visit the poet saw the clay-cold corpse of his brother carried to 
 
 '"John Addington Symonds, Walt Whitman ; A Study; London, 1893, 
 p. 152- 
 
 ^^Prose, 354-359- 
 
H^ali H'hitman and the Germans. 9 
 
 the repose of the churchyard. To whom does it not occur 
 instantly : here we have Uhland's ballad of " Es zogen drei 
 Burschen wohl iiber den Rhein," transposed to the banks of 
 the Hudson — the American Rhine ? 
 
 In the many stages of his eventful life, Whitman made 
 the acquaintance of Germans. From some acquainted with 
 dialects he must have heard the " Swiss proverb," otherwise 
 unfamiliar to us : " My own pail to milk in,"^^ in the sense of the 
 English saying : " I had my own fish to fry." Neither the 
 Swiss Idiotikon nor any other collection of German proverbial 
 sayings seems to know the proverb. Among the prominent 
 Brooklyn citizens between 1830 and 1840, Whitman mentions 
 Gabriel Furman, John Dikeman and Adrian Hegemann,^^ 
 and among the soldiers he nursed at Washington in 1865, 
 Manvill Winterstein, of Ohio.'* Among the subscribers for 
 Leaves of Grass, in 1876, he gives the names of Hubert Her- 
 komer, the painter, and Franz Hueffer, the musical writer.^' At 
 the complimentary dinner, given in honor of Walt Whitman 
 at Camden, on May 31, 1S89, letters of Felix Adler, former 
 professor of Hebrew and Oriental literature at Cornell, organ- 
 izer of the Society for Ethical Culture, and of Rudolf Schmidt, 
 of Copenhagen, were read.'* From Donaldson's conversa- 
 tions with Whitman'' it appears that the poet visited PfafE's 
 restaurant at New York for years, and after an intermission 
 from 1862 to 1864-65, and from 1865 to 1 881, he visited it once 
 again in August, 1881. On the same occasion Whitman 
 praises some of the German peculiarities of that place, its bill 
 of fare, etc., and recounts the names of the well-known " Bo- 
 hemians," among whom were quite famous literary authorities. 
 
 "Prose, 182. 
 
 ^^ Prose, II. 
 
 ^ Prose, 71. 
 
 ^^Prose, 519. 
 
 ^Camden's Compliment to Walt Whitman; Ed. Horace L. Traubel, Phila- 
 delphia, 1889, pp. 63 and 53. 
 
 ''Thomas Donaldson, Walt Whitman, The man; New York, 1896, pp. 
 201.206-209. 
 
lo U'ali Whitman and the Germans. 
 
 both men and women. Besides this very humorous and highly- 
 interesting chat that recalls Murger's " Vie de Boheme," Whit- 
 man begins one of his Specimen Days (August 1 6, 1 88 1), by " an 
 excellent breakfast at Pfaff's restaurant, Twenty-fourth street." 
 Pfafi is an old friend of his from ante-bellum times (1859 and 
 '60), " and, first opening a big fat bottle of the best wine in the 
 cellar," loves to talk with Walt of the old times, the old friends 
 and frequenters, most of whom were dead then. "And there," 
 the poet continues, " Pfaff and I, sitting opposite each other 
 at the little table,"gave a remembrance to them in a style that 
 they would have themselves fully confirmed, namely, big, 
 brimming, filled-up champagne glasses, drained in abstracted 
 silence, very leisurely, to the last drop." And in order to pre- 
 vent any spiteful reproach of extravagance, he adds : " Pfafi 
 is a generous German restaurateur, silent, stout, jolly, and I 
 should say the best selecter of champagne in America."^* 
 
 In Camden, Whitman used to visit the primitive printing 
 office of his friend, WiUiam Kurtz, on Federal street.^' In the 
 Specimen Days he inserts an extract of a letter to a German 
 friend, in which, after commenting on his health, he states with 
 peculiar satisfaction as a principal accomplishment of his life : 
 "I have the most devoted and ardent of friends."*" A talk, 
 which Whitman had with a German spiritualist, inspired him 
 to the optimistic ode : " Continuities. Nothing is ever really 
 lost."*i 
 
 His visit to St. Louis, October till December, 1879, brings 
 him to the conclusion that this city fuses native and foreign 
 qualities to perfection, that " its American electricity goes well 
 with its German phlegm."*^ In a similar sense, he calls the 
 Saxon element " the fiber from which twain the best current 
 
 ^^Prose, 181. 
 ^^ Prose, 189. 
 *" Prose, 190. 
 *^LoG 396. 
 "Prose, 148. 
 
Willi Whitman and the Germans. 1 1 
 
 Stock of England springs. "^^ Our poet likes well the American 
 " polyglot construction stamp," and with curious interest notices 
 " German papers published, plays acted, speeches made in all 
 languages." Yet in Ihis later years he complains that in the 
 leading traits of these States which have originated from for- 
 eign stock, " the British and the German, valuable as they are 
 in the concrete, already threaten excess," and wishes for soijie- 
 thing to counterbalance them.** To be sure, in turning his 
 eyes to the Spanish element in our nationality. Whitman made 
 a grave mistake, as history was to prove soon afterwards. 
 
 While watching the departing of the big steamers from 
 New York, the observant poet beholds the German vessels, 
 " Donau " and " Helvetia,"*^ and among the flags of different 
 nations flying from the white-sailed schooners and sloops that 
 glide up or down the Delaware river, he observes " the banner 
 of the great North German empire."*^ 
 
 Casting his all-beholding eyes over the former la!nds, 
 " from which American students may well derive profit," Whit- 
 man stops for a moment at " the German intellect ; "*' he 
 strongly recommends all the young men to overhaul the litera- 
 ture of Germany.** In the " aggregate and [electric globe or 
 universe" in which, "without relation as they may seem at 
 first sight, the whole earth's poets combine," " the Teutonic 
 old and new have their place."*" To the poet, who " respects 
 Teutonia,'"''' it " seems there are other men in other lands 
 yearning and thoughtful, in Germany."" The "Answerer " 
 is claimed by all nations: "The German is sure." '^ In the 
 
 ^^Prose, 283. 
 '^Prose, 388. 
 *^ Prose, 129. 
 *^ Prose, 117. 
 "Prose, 319. 
 ^ Prose, 321. 
 ^^ Prose, 424. 
 ^LoG 192 ; 2. 
 "ZoG 106. 
 ^^LoG 136. 
 
1 2 JValt Whitman and the Germans. 
 
 "Sleepers" the wandering poet has a vision of the migration 
 of nations, endlessly floating, "the Swiss foots it toward 
 his hills, the Prussian goes his way."" The Mississippi re- 
 minds him of the "Danube in Europe," but it cannot compare 
 with " earth's most important stream.""^ In his cosmopolitan 
 orgies, the " Salut au Monde," where the whole globe is spread 
 out before the poet's clairvoyant mind, the mountain peaks of 
 "the Styrian Alps and the Karnac Alps" rise;'' steamers lie wait- 
 ing at Hamburg and Bremen ;'* " others traverse the Zuyder 
 Zee or the Scheld ;"'' the Danube, the Oder fliow in long lines ;'* 
 the cliffs, glaciers, torrents, valleys of Switzerland appear un- 
 der the isolation of the long winter.'' The poet sees himself as 
 an inhabitant of Vienna, Berlin, Berne, Frankfort, Stuttgart '^ 
 he addresses " the liberty-lover of the Netherlands," the stock, 
 whence he himself descended, the Prussian, the sturdy Aus- 
 trian, the farmer of Styria, the neighbour of the Danube, the 
 workingman of the Rhine, the Elbe and the Weser, the Bava- 
 rian, Swabian, Saxon." He admires the triumph of German 
 engineering, the iGothard tunnel.*^ With him we trace the 
 paths of the irruptions of the Goths ; we follow the hardy 
 pirates of the Baltic on their daring course. 
 
 With German history Whitman occupied himself but little. 
 Of Frederic the Great he only makes a passing mention.*' In 
 his " commonplace book, filled with favorite excerpts," he 
 jotted down Metternich's remarkable criticism on Napoleon." 
 
 "Z0C330. 
 
 ^*Prose, 143. 
 "■"■LoG 114. 
 =«ZoG 115. 
 
 "Wo. 
 
 '^LoG 117. 
 ^dto. 
 
 ^^LoG 118. 
 ''■'LoG 163. 
 "^ Prose, 458. 
 ^Prose, 178. 
 
H'alt Whitman and the Germans. 1 3 
 
 Commenting on the attitude of foreign governments during 
 the Civil War, he blames, not altogether justly, Germany, to- 
 gether with Britain, France and Spain for her unfriendly 
 demeanor.^ 
 
 The humiliation of France by the united German 
 States came like a great shock to Walt Whitman's artistic 
 sense. France, that was to him the stronghold of aspirations 
 toward the ideal of brotherhood, had fallen ; " the proud ship 
 that led the fleet so long" drifted, "a mastless hulk," the 
 bright " star of France " lay smitten — and with wonderful 
 notes the poet pours forth his doleful sympathy, and reaches 
 the zenith of his dithyramb in the prophecy : 
 
 "Again thy star, O France, fair lustrous star, 
 In heavenly peace clearer, more bright than ever, 
 Shall beam immortal."^* 
 
 History, that has never been Whitman's forte, history has 
 not justified, nor scarcely will ever justify, the reveries in 
 which our aesthetic enthusiast reveled. He overlooked en- 
 tirely that the France of his favorite fantasy had changed, a 
 century before, that not " rage divine for liberty," not the 
 struggle against " the tyrant and the priest " had brought 
 about the fatal war, but the arrogance of a shortsighted and 
 ambitious monarch who felt his throne shake. Significantly 
 enough, the poet does not find one word of censure against 
 Germany, but on another occasion he confesses that he " gets 
 a curious nourishment and lift from all those grand old veter- 
 ans," like von Moltke.*'' Indeed, on March 10, 1888, Whitman 
 published a poem in memory of the death of the founder of the 
 new German Empire, Emperor William the Great, which in its 
 heartfelt intuition and in comprehension of the deceased hero's 
 character is only excelled by Detlev von Liliencron's elegy. 
 
 '■^Prose, 58. 
 
 '^LoGiorj, cp. LoG, 188-189. 
 
 ^'' Prose, 486. 
 
14 IVali Whitman and the Germans. 
 
 The poem must have been composed immediately after the 
 news of William's death was promulgated.^' It is entitled 
 The Dead Emperor. ^^ 
 
 To-day, with bending head and eyes, thou, too, Columbia, 
 Less for the ."mighty crown laid low in sorrow — less for the 
 
 Emperor, 
 Thy true condolence breath est, sendest out o'er many a salt 
 
 sea mile, 
 Mourning a good old man — a faithful shepherd, patriot. 
 
 This poem, according to a 'recent article of Horace Trau- 
 bel,*^° brought Whitman some excited correspondence. 
 
 Whitman's familiarity with German literature is not at all 
 surprising. His comprehensive mind afiectionately absorbed 
 the great literary ideas of the German countries, and rejected 
 or moulded them to fit his compass of a national American lit- 
 erature. 
 
 Above we have tried to show how fully our poet 
 acknowledged the inheritance of foreign literatures and 
 how highly he valued their influence. Yet in his strong 
 autochthonic, American pride, he foresaw the dawn of a 
 genuine, national American literature, that will outshine all 
 the brilliant stars on the foreign sky. While he looks 
 back to the grand edifice of the Old World, he sees the foun- 
 dation stone laid to the glorious temple of American poetry, 
 "more picturesque than Rhenish castle-keeps."'^" 
 
 For comparisons he recurs to German examples : Thomas 
 Carlyle " belongs to our own branch of the stock, altogether 
 Gothic."" "Kant, Goethe mark the era of Robert Burns."" 
 
 "'Emperor William died on March 9, 1888. 
 
 «9ZoG402. 
 
 «'a Century Magazine ; November issue, Vol. LXXI, No. i p 82-08 
 Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, (p. 88.) ' ' 
 
 '"'LoG 160. 
 ''^Prose, 160. 
 ''^Prose, 395. 
 
I Fait Whitman and the Germayis. 15 
 
 " Elias Hicks is curiously contemporary with the long life of 
 Goethe," with Kant, Fichte and Hegel." In Whittier "lives 
 the splendid rectitude and ardor of Luther."" Longfellow is 
 the "poet of the mellow twilight of the past in Germany." His 
 translations of many German and Scandinavian pieces "are 
 said to be better than the vernaculars.'"' 
 
 Monumental; as he was in appearance, — Sidney H. 
 Morse's bust" always reminds me of Michel Angelo's Moses, — 
 in style, in thought, he looked up to the zeniths of German 
 poetry, to the everlasting monuments of the Germanic mind, 
 the Edda, the Nibelungen, Goethe. 
 
 Like Wagner and Nietzsche, Whitman is curiously at- 
 tracted toward the myth. " The altitude of literature and poetry 
 has always been religion." The Edda of Snorro (sic), with its 
 " religious tone, the consciousness of mystery, the recognition 
 of the future, of the unknown, of Deity over and under all ex- 
 hibits literature's real heights and elevations, towering up like 
 the great mountains of the earth."" The poet sees " the places 
 of the sagas ; "'* he " knows the skald, the saga, the myth."" 
 H^ prints an extract from a friend's criticism of a young man 
 who had just passed away, that well befits young Whitman's 
 own character : " He had the sweetness of a child, and the 
 strength and courage and readiness of a young Viking."^" In 
 his Pantheon, the iridescent gloom of Germanic mythology is 
 reflected : Odin is throned between Zeus, Buddha and Allah,*^ 
 and his worshippers merrily circulate the skull-cup filled with 
 
 ''^Prose, 458. 
 
 ''^ Prose, 174. 
 
 ''^Prose, 186. 
 
 "'A picture of this bust is inserted as frontispiece in Camden's Compliments 
 (cp. note 36). The original in clay, modeled in 1887, is to be seen at Whitman's 
 house, at Camden, on Mickle street. 
 
 ''''Prose, 242-3 note. 
 
 -'^LoG 116, 
 
 "X(3Gi92, cp. ZoC 414-5. 
 
 *^Prose, 102. 
 
 "Z<?G 67. 
 
1 6 IValt Whitman and the Germans. 
 
 mead.*^ The sullen landscape of the Eddas, is pictured with 
 fir-trees torn by northern blasts, granite bowlders and cliffs, 
 meadows, lakes and burial-cairns and barrows by the marge 
 of restless oceans, from which the dead men's spirits rise and 
 gaze on the tossing billows.^' 
 
 Among the great, undying songs which each foreign 
 country has contributed "to help vitalize and increase the 
 valor, wisdom and elegance of humanity, from the points of 
 view attained by it up to date," Whitman states as "integral 
 sign or landmarkl" the Old German Nibelungen,*' which he 
 " went over thoroughly."*" Occasional recurrences prove how' 
 deeply he had really absorbed this epic. Like " the Scandi- 
 navian Eddas and all the most distinctive poems," the "Nibel- 
 ungen probably had their rise in great historic perturbations, 
 which they came in to sum up and confirm."*^ Great poets, 
 who, according to their calling have toiled in the field of fash- 
 ioning types of men and women, of furnishing the materials 
 and suggestions of personality, have shaped the magnificent 
 types of "Siegfried and Hagen," " Brunhelde and Chriem- 
 hilde."*' The same literature that formed the standards of so- 
 ciety, personality, politics and religion of the early Germanic 
 times " was afterwards the main support of chivalry, the feudal, 
 ecclesiastic, dynastic world," formed and held together its 
 osseous structure for hundreds, thousands of years, preserved 
 its flesh and blood, gave it "form and decision, rounded it out 
 and so saturated it in the conscious and unconscious blood, 
 breed, belief and intuitions of men, that it still prevails powerful 
 to this day, in defiance of the mighty changes of time."*' So 
 "the European continental poems of Walter of Aquitania, and 
 
 »=ZoG 69. 
 
 '*Prose, 328. 
 *° Nov. B. , 13. 
 »^ Prose, 393. 
 ''''Prose, 222, note. 
 ^'Prose, 200. 
 
Wait Whitman and the Germans. 1 7 
 
 the Nibelungen, of pagan stock, but monkish-feudal redac- 
 tion "*' permeated the German mode of thinking to the very 
 marrow. 
 
 From the skalds, and the Nibelungen, Whitman, in a short 
 note, passes over to the minnesingers.'" 
 
 Whitman could not escape the mighty spell of Goethe.'"* 
 In his imposing figure Whitman saw the incarnation of the 
 great individual and poet, whose coming in America was one 
 of his favorite dreams. In Goethe he beheld " genius, health, 
 beauty of person, riches, rank, renown and length of days, all 
 combining and centering in one case.'"^ In Goethe's poems 
 rang the undying sound of a great era ; from his works flowed 
 forth a powerful symphony of the comprehension of God and 
 the world. "^ His divine genius impressed its everlasting mark 
 on present and future ages.'* As if the gods wished to brand 
 him with a symbol of immortality in this world, they bestowed 
 upon him the gift of long life.'* 
 
 To Goethe's Faust Whitman looks up as to a model of 
 priceless value, as to the loftiest example of a created type of 
 mankind. ^^ In the gloomiest days of American history, after 
 the first failures of the North in the Civil War, " when our 
 Nationality seemed hung in pall of doubt, perhaps death," our 
 visionary poet finds no better expression for the " sneers of 
 foreign lands and attaches" that were stirring into the nation's 
 frightened face, than "Mephistophelean."'" 
 
 In more than one instance Whitman's philosophy, if we 
 may term it thus, brings to our mind remembrances of the 
 
 ^ Prose, 201, note. 
 
 ^LoG AiS- 
 
 "o For information on Goethe, as well as on the entire field of German phil- 
 osophy of the Nineteenth Ctnta.ry,ihc" Journal of Speculative Philosophy," 
 edited by Whitman's personal friend, W. T. Harris, offers rich material. 
 
 ^^Prose, 486. 
 
 ^■'Prose, 328. 
 
 ^^ Prose, 395 and 458. 
 
 ^^Prose, 458. 
 
 ^' Prose, 221. 
 
 '^Prose, 304. 
 
1 8 Wa^i Whitman and the Germans. 
 
 Faustian creed. The necessity and justification of evil, indis- 
 pensable for keeping the equilibrium in the spiritual energy of 
 mankind (a theme that has recently again been treated in E. 
 von Grotthuss's remarkable book Segen der Sunde), is a postu- 
 late for Whitman's view of the world,"^ as well as for Goethe's 
 Faust. A man cannot strive without erring ; evil rather 
 purges him for purer ideals. As in Goethe's "Prolog im 
 Himmel," the " evil spirit that eternally denies " is acknowl- 
 edged by the Lord as a valuable accessory in preserving man- 
 kind from idle security and ennervation, so Satan, defiant, war- 
 like, boisterous and sly though he be, is by Whitman included, 
 together with Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in the "Square 
 Deific.""' Inactivity and lack of opposition against the moral 
 and physical evil mean stagnation ; in the " Prolog" the Lord 
 says : 
 
 " Des Menschen Thatigkeit kann allzuleicht erschlaffen, 
 
 Er liebt sich bald die unbedingte Ruh, 
 
 Drum geb' ich gern ihm den Gesellen zu, 
 
 Der reizt und wirkt und muss als Teufel schaffen." 
 
 and Whitman : " He who has never perilled his life, but retains 
 it to old age in riches and ease, has probably achieved nothing 
 for himself worth mentioning," and " Evil propels me and 
 refdrm of evil propels me."^^ 
 
 Curiously enough, Whitman assigns the feminine gender 
 to the Holy Spirit : " Santa Spirita — leaping easily above hell." 
 This is certainly not accidental, as Symonds would have it.'"" 
 Has not a reminiscence of Goethe's closing words been linger- 
 ing in the poet's mind : " Das Ewig WeibHche zieht uns 
 hinan " ? Is not his " Santa Spirita" the same hardly defina- 
 ble, yet inviolable feminine that brings final harmony in the 
 " Square Deific " as in Goethe's spirit-world ? 
 
 'xp. esp. LoG 337, 342, 376, also Prose, 242 and 243, notes. 
 »*Z,oC 339-40. 
 
 »»Z.oG 46- 
 "."Symonds, p. 25 f. 
 
M^ali Whitman and the Germans. 19 
 
 Whitman, like Goethe, conceives God as inseparable from 
 the universe.'" Before the court of the intellect, everything is 
 necessary, because divine, everything, even the vice and the 
 crime. A comparison with Jacob Boehme, farfetched as it may 
 seem, suggests itself to our mind. Whitman knew Jacob 
 Boehme's philosophy, if it were only through Joseph Gostwick's 
 book on German Culture and Christianity, London, 1882.'^"^ 
 Jacob Boehme, with his pantheistic tendencies, considers the 
 evil as a promoter of good, as the stimulus to struggle and 
 victory ; for nothing can be ultimately lost or destroyed. 
 Traces of Boehme's ideas are perceptible in Goethe and Whit- 
 man alike. We only need to think of the chorus of the angels 
 that receives Faust in heaven or the Chorus mysticus : 
 
 "Alles Vergangliche 
 1st nur ein Gleichnis." 
 
 and Whitman's "Nothing is ever really lost, or can be 
 lost."i"=' 
 
 Boehme's indirect influences on Whitman through the 
 philosophies of Kant, Schelling and Hegel will be discussed 
 later. 
 
 Like Goethe, Whitman has been charged with paganism, or 
 even atheism. Both charges are equally unreasonable and un- 
 just, and have been definitely repelled by sound critics. The 
 terms that Goethe applied to his creed in conversation with 
 Lavater, hold good for Whitman too : He is by no means anti- 
 Christian, not even un-Christian, but indeed non-Christian. The 
 . motley variety of churches, creeds and sects, each claiming in its 
 advertisements to be the right and only-saving, was repulsive 
 to these profound and tolerant thinkers. After traversing the 
 heighths and depths of human life and thought, Faust arrives 
 at the cognition : 
 
 ^"^LoG 67. 
 '^"''Prose, 169, note. 
 i"'ZoG396, 
 
20 I Valt Whitman ayid the Germans. 
 
 " Nach druben ist die Aussichtuns verrannt ; 
 Thor ! wer dorthin die Augen blinzelnd richtet, 
 Sich iiber Wolken seinesgleichen dichtet 1 
 Er stehe fest und sehe hier sich um ; 
 Dem Tiichtigen ist diese Welt nicht stumm. 
 Was braucht er in die Ewigkeit zu schweifen ! 
 Was er erkennt, lasst sich ergreifen." 
 
 Equally Whitman advises :"* 
 
 " I say to mankind, Be not curious about God, 
 For I who am curious about each am not curious about God. 
 Why should I wish to see God better than this day ? " 
 
 and again •}'^' 
 
 "Argue not concerning God ! " 
 
 Only the human cognisance of the divine aims in the real 
 world, only the human will and action will call forth the man- 
 ifestation of Deity, will create a universal human religion. This 
 idea explains Goethe's word, postulated by Kant's Critique 
 of Practical Reason : " If there were no God now, we should 
 have to invent one" (Eckermann). Neither does Whitman 
 deny God : 
 
 " No array of terms can say how much I am at peace with God. 
 I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is 
 signed by God's name.'""" 
 
 Whitman claims to be the poet of American Democracy. 
 His personality and his works are inconceivable without the 
 national, political and social background of the New World. 
 He absorbed and again poured out the " profoundest mean- 
 ings of that place, race and nationaUty" called America; his 
 
 ^"^LoG 76. 
 ^"^Prose, 259. 
 ^<^LoG 76. 
 
U'alt WhitTnan and the Get mans. 21 
 
 spirit and form depend on American associations and identi- 
 ties 'y^ his poetic aim is first and foremost patriotic, national. 
 No wonder, then, if Goethe's apparent lack of patriotism 
 strikes Whitman as strange. " The Goethean theory and les- 
 son," he says "(if I may briefly state it so), of the exclusive suf- 
 ficiency of artistic, scientific, literary equipment to the 
 character, irrespective of any strong claims of the political ties 
 of nation, state or city, could have answered under the con- 
 ventionality and pettiness of Weimar, or the Germany, or even 
 Europe, of those times ; but it will not do for America to-day 
 at all.'""* From this point of view Whitman speaks of " the 
 German Goethe in his little classical court gardens."'"' 
 
 The national element, or again proving that extremes 
 meet, its reverse, is the touch-stone for great literature : " In 
 estimating first-class song, a sufficient Nationality, or, on the 
 other hand, what may be called the negative and lack of it (as 
 in Goethe's case it sometimes seems to me), is often, if not 
 always, the first element.""" 
 
 In a conversation of April 22, 1888,"°" Whitman said in 
 reference to the Goethe-Carlyle correspondence, that Traubel 
 showed him : " This Goethe-Carlyle business seems to have 
 been an affair of respect rather than of love. It was not beau- 
 tiful to me, like Goethe's love for Schiller, like Schiller's love 
 for Goethe." While expressing his hatred for literature as a 
 profession, Whitman says: "Even Goethe and Schiller,-^exalted 
 men, both, very, very — were a little touched by the professional 
 consciousness." . 
 
 Whitman possessed a deep insight into the course of 
 Goethe's spiritual development. Although he does not men- 
 tion Herder as his own teacher, Herder's influence upon 
 Whitman, especially in his critical essays on national litera- 
 
 ^^ Prose, 237-240. 
 
 ^"^ Prose, 490-491. 
 
 ^o^Prose, 290. 
 
 ™Nov.B.,<). 
 
 ""a Century Magazine, Vol. LXXI, No. I, p. 82. 
 
22 M'alt Whitman and the Germans. 
 
 ture, is unmistakable. The single passage, in which he speaks 
 of Herder, clearly discloses our poet's indebtedness to the Ger- 
 man poet-philosopher : " Herder taught to the young Goethe, 
 that really great poetry is always (like the Homeric or Biblical 
 canticles), the result of a national spirit, and not the privilege 
 of a polished and select few.'"" 
 
 In passage after passage we can follow the conformity of 
 Whitman's ideas on the origin and the aim of poetry with 
 those of Herder. Herder's chief interest was centered in 
 poetry. In all his critical treatises. Whitman invariably comes 
 back to poetry : " The problem of humanity all over the civi- 
 lized world is to be finally met and treated by literature.""^ 
 " Over all literature dominates.""^ " The known universe has 
 one complete lover, and that is the greatest poet.""* " Vital to 
 any aspiring Nationality must ever be its autochthonic song.""'^ 
 " The topmost proof of a race is its own born poetry.""" Many 
 perhaps even more striking passages might be cited. Herder 
 had started from Hamann's proposition : " Poetry is the 
 mothertongue of the human race." The first language was 
 only a collection of the elements of poetry. What Herder says 
 about these elements might well have been written by a critic 
 of the Leaves of Grass : " Eine Nachahmung der tonenden, 
 handelnden, sich regenden Natur ; — die Natursprache aller 
 Geschopfe, vom Verstande in Laute gedichtet, in Bilder von 
 Handlung, Leidenschaft und lebender Einwirkung personifi- 
 ziert." If the origin of poetry and of language, so Herder 
 continues, is one, poetry cannot be the privilege of a few 
 finely educated men ; it must be a gift for the world and for 
 the peoples. Poetry ranks the higher, the nearer the nation 
 or the individual, that composes it, stands in its relation to 
 
 "'Nov. B., i8. 
 
 '''' Prose, 20 1. 
 
 "^Pyose, 202. 
 
 ''*Prose, 259. 
 
 ^'^ Prose, 493. " 
 
 ™Prose, 281. 
 
Walt Whitman and the Germans. 23 
 
 nature ; that is the reason why the most glorious productions 
 are those of the oldest peoples, and of the children of nature, 
 like Moses and Homer. For culture is dangerous for poetry. 
 Culture has weakened our eyes, lamed our hands ; it has made 
 us lose the pregnancy of thought and expression, the flexibility 
 and sincerity of sentiment, all of which the old heroes of litera- 
 ture possessed. But not by imitating these great masters may 
 we expect to raise our literature to a higher and nobler plane, 
 but only by learning from them the art how to write poetry. 
 These poets knew how to absorb and reflect their own nature 
 and history, the current thoughts and the language. We must 
 become imitators of ourselves — we must be original. After 
 the above citations bearing upon this phase, we discontinue to 
 give parallel passages from Whitman's works, for we would 
 have to reprint all of Democratic Vistas, the Preface to Leaves 
 of Grass, Poetry in Atnerica To-day and American National 
 Literature. The almost literal coincidence of ideas is evident. 
 To stress our point, we may add that Whitman shares with 
 Herder the admiration of Homer and Shakespeare, and the 
 enthusiastic valuation of the Bible as a work of art. Herder 
 calls Homer " Ganz Natur " ; so Whitman, who secured for 
 himself " the best translated versions he could get of Homer," 
 read the Iliad in Buckley's prose version for the first time 
 thoroughly " in a sheltered hollow of rocks and sand, with 
 the sea on each side." He wonders why he was not over- 
 whelmed by its mightiness. Likely, because he " read them 
 . . . in the full presence of Nature.""'' " Why tower. Whitman 
 asks, in reminiscence, above all the nations of the earth, two 
 special lands, petty in themselves, yet inexpressibly gigantic, 
 beautiful, columnar ? Immortal Judah lives, and Greece im- 
 mortal lives, in a couple of poems.""" Whitman's The Bible 
 as Poetry^^^ and Herder's Vom Geiste der ebraischen Poesie might 
 well be compared at length. 
 
 "'TVoz/. B., 13. 
 ^^^Prose, 200. 
 ^"^ Prose, 381-384. 
 
24 JVa/t Whitman and the Germans. 
 
 The temptation is great to compare Whitman's philosophi- 
 cal speculations with Herder's pantheistic view of the world 
 and his principal of humanity. Yet, despite many instances 
 of accordance, such an investigation would lead us too far into 
 the realm of philosophic conjecture ; moreover, we have not, as 
 in the former instances, any direct indication whatsoever that 
 Whitman had acquainted himself with that side of Herder's 
 work. 
 
 Despite the vast currency that Schiller's ideas have had in 
 America, according to the recent proofs offered by American 
 scholars, they have left no trace in Whitman's works. 
 
 Neither of the two record-lists of plays and operas at- 
 tended,'^" nor the rest of his works contain any clew to whether 
 Whitman ever saw any of Schiller's dramas nor any other 
 German play. 
 
 Schiller's doctrine and practice of sesthetics and form of 
 poetry were incompatible with Whitman's views. A certain 
 similarity between the young Schiller's Shaftesburyean eudae- 
 monism and demand of general brotherhood and Whitman's 
 ideas of comradeship and universal humanity are merely inci- 
 dental. Schiller's name is found in Whitman's works only 
 twice, first in an insignificant enumeration of " old chants,'"^' 
 second in a reflection upon Edgar Allen Poe's significance."^ 
 Poe appears to be the absolute contrast and contradiction, but 
 thereby a fine exemplification of that type of personality that 
 leads " a perfect and noble life," is " morally without flaw, 
 happily balanced in activity, physically sound and pure," with 
 a due proportion of the emotional element, a type " unhasting, 
 unresting, untiring to the end." "And yet there is another 
 shape of personality dearer far to the artist-sense, which likes 
 the play of strongest lights and shades, where the perfect char- 
 acter, the good, the heroic, although never attained, is never 
 
 '"XoC 415. 
 "i/Vojtf, 149. 
 "Wo. 
 
JVa/i Whitmaji and the Germans. 25 
 
 lost sight of, but through failures, sorrows, temporary down- 
 falls, is returned to again and again, and while often violated, 
 is passionately adhered to as long as mind, muscle, voice, obey 
 the power we call volition. This sort of personality we see in 
 . . . Schiller."^^^ These lines, showing Whitman's deep pen- 
 etration of Schiller's character and life work, are well worth 
 registering in the volume of foreign appreciation of Schiller. 
 
 From his scant allusions, it is impossible to say in how 
 high or mean estimation Whitman held Heine. One citation 
 sounds rather depreciatory : " For American literature we want 
 mighty authors, not even Carlyle- 'and Heine-like, born and 
 brought up in (and more or less essentially partaking and 
 giving out) the vast abnormal ward or hysterical sick-chamber 
 which in many respects Europe, with all its glories, would 
 seem to be.""* We notice a reminiscence of the fetid breath 
 that issued from Heine's " Mufhger Matratzengruft." Another 
 time Whitman simply repeats a remark of Heine : " It even 
 seems to me, said H. Heine, more invigorating to accomplish 
 something bad than something empty ."^^'' 
 
 We certainly cannot go very wrong by presuming that 
 Eduard Bertz is meant by that " profound German critic" who 
 complained " that, compared with the luxuriant and well- 
 accepted songs of the world, there is about Whitman's verse a 
 certain coldness, severity, absence of spice, polish, or of 
 consecutive meaning and plot.""" Whitman explains this 
 censure by his book being autobiographic at bottom and his 
 descent from Quaker stock. Eduard Bertz"'^ was an excellent 
 connoisseur of American literature and was personally ac- 
 quainted with Walt Whitman.^"" 
 
 vapyQ^e, 13-14 and 514-519. 
 "^Prose, 493. 
 "^Prose, 525. 
 ^^^Prose, 482. 
 
 '"About Bertz's works and life, cp. Martin Maack, Dichter-Lexicon, 
 Liibeck, 1896, p. 169. 
 
 "'" His article written in the eighties will be considered in another paper. 
 
26 IVaii Whitman and the Germans. 
 
 Into the field of German science Whitman hardly entered. 
 In his amateur attempt at linguistic research : Slang in 
 America^'^ he does homage to the efforts of German philolo- 
 gists. " The honest'delving, as of late years, by the German 
 and British workers in comparative philology, has pierced and 
 dispersed many of the falsest bubbles of centuries ; and will 
 disperse many more." As an example, he quotes the long 
 recorded belief that the Scandinavian heroes used to drink out 
 of the skulls of their slain enemies. " Later investigation 
 proves the word taken for skulls to mean horns of beasts slain 
 in hunt.'"^^ 
 
 With interest, but not without scepticism, Whitman fol- 
 lowed the excavations of Schliemann. " In the letters we get 
 from Dr. Schliemann (interesting but fishy) about his excava- 
 tions there in the far-off Homeric area, I notice cities, ruins, 
 etc., as he digs them out of their graves, are certain to be in 
 layers — that is to say, upon the foundations of an old concern, 
 very far down, indeed, is always another city or set of ruins, 
 and upon that another superadded — and sometimes upon that 
 still another — each representing either a long or rapid stage 
 of growth and development, different from its predecessor, but 
 unerringly growing out of and resting on it.""" With unin- 
 tentional humor he goes on to compare these pre-hellenic strata 
 with the social development of— Boston. 
 
 Whitman was little occupied with speculations on Eupo- 
 pean or German plastic art. For this, the very opportunities 
 of visiting satisfactory galleries was wanting. At the great Ex- 
 position of 1853 at New York, he had access to "a very large 
 and copious exhibition gallery of paintings, hundreds of 
 pictures from Europe, many masterpieces — all an exhaustless 
 study.'"" Yet the lack of methodical training in the art of 
 
 ""/Voji?, 406-410. 
 ^'^ Prose, 407. 
 ^"'Prose, 172. 
 i^i Prose, 505. 
 
Wa/t Whitman and the Germans. 27 
 
 viewing pictures is very noticeable from the writer's naive re- 
 mark, that he thought the canvasses were " shown best at 
 night." 
 
 The magnificent beauties of the canons, with which all 
 the " marble temples and sculptures from Phidias to Thor- 
 waldsen " cannot compete, the grandiose art-features of the 
 West, that place " the ruins of feudal castles, or Coliseum re- 
 mains, or kings' palaces " in the shade, made him gladly dis- 
 pense with a journey to Europe."^ Whitman certainly un- 
 derrated the importance of plastic art for the spiritual growth 
 of a Nation. " Painting, sculpture, and the dramatic theatre 
 no longer play an indispensable or even an important part in 
 the workings and mediumship of intellect, utility or even high 
 aesthetics.""' Nevertheless, his criticism on Millet's pictures, 
 which he saw in 188 1, at Boston, in the house of Quincy Shaw, 
 surpasses in its profound comprehension many of the nagging 
 verdicts of professional specialists. He exclaims in rapture : 
 " Will Ameyca ever have such an artist out of her own gesta- 
 tion, body, soul ? "'=** 
 
 The American's preference for dimension over beauty 
 has often been ridiculed by native and foreign humorists. If 
 this is really a national trait, Whitman is a true native of 
 America. For his admiration for Thorwaldsen's "Apostles" 
 expresses itself in the only term : " Colossal in size.""'^ What 
 if Whitman had seen Klinger's statue of Beethoven, whom he 
 so deeply admired ! 
 
 Although in Whitman's estimation literature dominates in 
 the civilization of to-day, he is an ardent lover and strong ad- 
 vocate of music, " Music, the combiner, nothing more sensu- 
 ous, a god, yet completely human, advances, prevails, holds 
 highest place ; supplying in certain wants and quarters what 
 
 ii-iprose, 138 ; see also 135-6. 
 
 is^Prose, 201. 
 
 ^^*Prose, 174. 
 
 ii!> Prose, 505. 
 
28 WdK Wkitmaii and the Germans. 
 
 nothing else could supply.""^ With all the "lacks and wants 
 yet,"^"it is most deplorable that America has not " contributed 
 any characteristic music, the finest tie of nationality." In 
 writing these last words Whitman possibly thought of the 
 German Volkslied, " the German airs of friendship, wine and 
 love," as he styles it,'^* that has proved such a powerful cement 
 amongst Germans, more than racial, national and linguistic 
 affinity. In " Proud Music of the Storm " the poet intonates 
 a passionate paean on music, comparable only with Schiller's 
 hymn: "DieMacht des Gesanges." In the proud music of 
 the winds, in their scale from the raging tempest to the soft 
 sweet lisp, he perceives the " German organ majestic,'"'*' and 
 the " minnesingers singing their lays of love.""" 
 
 "I hear those odes, symphonies, operas, 
 
 I hear in the William Tell the music of an aroused and angry 
 people, 
 
 I hear Meyerbeer's Huguenots, the Prophet, or Robert, 
 
 Gounod's Faust, or Mozart's Don Juan}*^ 
 
 I hear, under the high roof of some colossal hall, the sympho- 
 nies, oratorios of Beethoven, Handel, or Haydn, 
 
 The Creation in billows of godhood laves me.'"" 
 
 And through all this sea of melodies, German by their 
 composer or their subject, rings " Luther's strong hymn, Eine 
 feste Burg is t unser Gott."^*^ 
 
 A most delicate " Stimmung " of Whitman's "A contralto 
 voice '"" is tuned to Luther's defiant hymn : "As I sat out front 
 
 '^^^ Prose, 20 1 -202. 
 ^" Prose, 328-9. 
 ^^'^LoG iT2 ; 3. 
 "'Zo 6-315. 
 
 '"LoGiiz;^. 
 
 "»ZoG3i4;5. 
 ^*^dto. 
 ^^*Prose, 152. 
 
Walt Whitman and the Germans. 29 
 
 on the walk, in the evening-air, the church-choir and organ on 
 the corner opposite gave Luther's hymn, Einfeste berg (sic), 
 very finely. The air was borne by a rich contralto." Haydn, 
 Beethoven, Mozart and Weber are again referred to as " work- 
 ing out their harmonic compositions" contemporaneously with 
 Elias Hicks."* From 1835 till i860 or '61 Whitman, accord- 
 ing to his own statement, frequented the plays and operas, but 
 besides " Freischiitz," he only enumerates French and Italian 
 operas, which were most popular in those years, in his two rec- 
 ords.''^ Whitman realized that his musical training was rather 
 defective, and openly admits it : " The experts and musicians 
 of my present friends claim that the new Wagner and his 
 pieces belong far more truly to me, and I to them. Very likely. 
 But I was fed and bred under the, Italian dispensation, and ab- 
 sorbed it, and doubtless show it.""'' One might well question 
 whether Wagner's romantic and feudal operas, with their un- 
 precedented style of music, would have met the unrestrained 
 approval of the Italy-schooled poet of Democracy. We could 
 not conclude this paragraph with anything more fitting than 
 by calling the attention of every ardent admirer of Beethoven 
 to that resonance of the septette, which our poet transposed 
 into words after attending a concert at the opera house of 
 Philadelphia, on February 11, 1880:"^ "I was carried away, 
 seeing, absorbing many wonders." 
 
 Whitman has not developed any system of philosophy, 
 although at times he flattered himself with the thought of 
 being a philosopher. What his abstractions really are may be 
 best termed with his own words : " Crude gossip of philoso- 
 phy.""' All of Whitman's critics have indeed despaired or 
 
 ^*^Prose, 458. 
 
 "*Cp. note 123. 
 
 ^^Trose, 515 ; also Prose, 287. 
 
 ^*»Prose, 151. 
 
 ^^^ Prose, 159. 
 
30 IVa/f Whitmaji and the Germans. 
 
 failed to analyze Whitman's philosophical creed or to con- 
 struct any organic system of his thoughts. Perhaps Symonds 
 hits it nearest by saying : " It is useless to extract a coherent 
 scheme of thought from his voluminous writings. "''''' Whitman 
 decidedly overestimated his significance as philosopher, and 
 we can understand how Robert Louis Stevenson was humor- 
 ously impressed by passages like this : 
 
 " Who is that would become my follower ? 
 
 Who would sign himself a candidate for my affections ? 
 
 The way is suspicious, the result uncertain, perhaps de- 
 structive, 
 
 You would have to give up all else. I alone would expect to 
 be your sole and exclusive standard, 
 
 Your novitiate would even then be long and exhausting, 
 
 The whole past theory of your life and all conformity to the 
 lives around you would have to be abandoned.'"'^' 
 
 Stevenson finally becomes impatient with such oracling : 
 " It is the language of a transcendental common sense, such as 
 Thoreau held and sometimes uttered. But Whitman, who has 
 a somewhat vulgar inclination for technical talk and the jargon 
 of philosophy, is not content with a few pregnant hints ; he 
 must put the dots upon his i's ; he must corroborate the 
 songs of Apollo by some of the darkest talk of human meta- 
 physics.'"-^^ 
 
 Not always Whitman soars up so high as to say : "I 
 know I was never measured and never will be meas- 
 ured."^''' In less visionary moments he admits : " I have no 
 philosophy.'"'* 
 
 ""Symonds, p. 12. 
 
 "i^oG 97. 
 
 "''Robert Louis Stevenson, Vol. XIV, Familiar studies 0/ men and books 
 New York, 1896, p. loi. 
 
 '"ZoC 75 ; 46. 
 
Wa/t Whitman and the Germans. 31 
 
 " Do I contradict myself ? 
 Very well then I contradict myself."*^'^ 
 
 But he immediately adds, vindicating, excusing, limiting : 
 " I am large ; I contain multitudes." 
 
 The want of a philosophical system is confirmed by 
 Horace Traubel's recent and very valuable contribution of 
 Whitman's conversations. On May 15, 1888, when asked by 
 Brinton : " You give us no consistent philosophy," Whitman re- 
 plied : " I guess I don't — I should not desire to do so." Trau- 
 bel remarked : " Plenty of philosophy, but not a philosophy," 
 to which Whitman answered : "That's better — that's morethe 
 idea.""='^ 
 
 When referring to " Passage to India," Whitman similarly 
 remarked : " There is more of me, the essential ultimate me, 
 in that than in any of the poems. There is no philosophy, 
 consistent or inconsistent, in that poem — there Brinton would 
 be right. But the burden of it is evolution — the one- thing 
 escaping the other — the unfolding of cosmic purposes." 
 
 Sometimes Whitman's meditations sound like the stam- 
 mering of an infant unable to perceive and arrange in his mind 
 the vast mass of impressions that obtrude themselves upon 
 him : " I cannot say to any person what I hear — I cannot say 
 it to myself — it is very wonderful.""" Yet nothing like the 
 humble confession: "scio nescire " of the overthrown prome- 
 thean classic philosopher quivers in Whitman's words : " I per- 
 ceive I have not really understood anything.'"" In his feeling 
 of impotency he scorns philosophy : " Philosophies — they may 
 prove well in lecture-rooms.""' "A morning-glory at my 
 window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.""' 
 
 Without much discrimination, Whitman accepts all the 
 
 ^^LoG 78 ; SI ; cp. LoG 132. 
 
 >*'» Century Magazine, Vol. LXXI, No. I. p. 91. 
 
 ^^''LoG 203. 
 '^^LoG 123. 
 is'ZoG 49. 
 
^2 M'd/i Whitman and the Germans. 
 
 philosophical schemes handed down to him from ages 
 gone by : 
 
 '■ I adopt each theory, myth, god and demi-god. 
 I believe, materialism is true and spiritualism is true. I re- 
 ject no part."'"" 
 
 In the cycle called " Calamus," Whitman furnished the 
 best disclosure for his philosophical fancies : 
 
 " Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose 
 them. 
 And yet they expose me more than all my other poems.'"" 
 
 When he raises the mystic curtain of his obscure termi- 
 nology, the base of his thought clearly appears. It is essentially 
 Christian : Universal love. 
 
 Whitman himself felt how deeply rooted he was in Chris- 
 tian ideas, and the recent publication of Horace Traubel con- 
 firms this statement by one of Whitman's own utterances : " I 
 believe in immortality, and by that I mean identity. I know 
 I have arrived at this result more by what may be called feel- 
 ing than formal reason — but I believe it : yes, I know it. I am 
 easily put to flight, I assure you, when attacked, but I return 
 to faith, inevitably — believe it, and stick to it to the end.'""" 
 
 The base of all metaphysics is 
 
 "The dear love of man for his comrade, the attraction of 
 
 friend to friend, 
 Of the well-married husband and wife, of the children and 
 
 parents, 
 Of city for city and land for land."^'' 
 
 ""/.oCiga; 2. 
 
 "^^ZoG 108. 
 
 ""» Century Magazine, Vol. LXXi, No. I, p. 85, 
 
 "=^ioG 102. 
 
JVa/t Whitman and the Gertnans. 33 
 
 To love others you must love yourself,"' love your body 
 as much as your soul/*^ love nature and the earth, for 
 you are part of it.'^° Master yourself, " your general inferior 
 self by the superior self,""" thus helping to produce free ath- 
 letic, great persons,"'' to guarantee for American "libertadand 
 the divine average,""' " the height to be superb humanity "'™ 
 — that is Whitman's philosophy of practical optimism in a nut- 
 shell. 
 
 Now, it lies beyond the scope of this inquiry to try to 
 bring system into Whitman's medley of philosophical thoughts 
 and reminiscences. Whitman is autoraath, and as such is 
 badly deficient in exact method. In his extensive reading he 
 was struck now and then by an idea that startled and pleased 
 him, and he sooner or later made use of it in his own writings. 
 Only the vagueness and the universal swoop of his ideas ren- 
 ders this mosaic-method less frequently and less disagreeably 
 felt. Gabriel Sarrazin"" expressed involuntarily a similar idea 
 more cautiously : " En Europe, on pourrait le rapprocher des 
 metaphysiciens allemands, disciples et renouvateurs de Spin- 
 oza ; plus d'un trait semble I'unir a Herder, 4 Hegel, a Schel- 
 ling, surtout au bizarre, chaotique et sublime Jean-Paul. De 
 ceux-ci a lui, il y a cependant encore toute la distance du philo- 
 sophe au poete, du docteur au derviche." Sarrazin's suggestion 
 brings us back to our particular point : How far acquainted 
 Whitman was with the German philosophers. We must leave 
 it as the task of a special investigation to determine how much 
 of Whitman's philosophical ideas lay in the air, how far the 
 irruption of Buddhism into this country, how far the Concord 
 
 ^^'^LoG 24 ; 12.273 ; 15.275; 18.397. 
 
 '«/,oG76;48. 
 
 "»ZoG54;32. 
 
 '^'^Prose, 246. 
 
 '6'ZoG265;3- 
 
 "»Zo<7 303.369.370 ; Prose, 221.225.226.523-4. 
 
 ^'■^LoG 415 ; Prose, 240.242-3. 
 
 ""Gabriel Sarrazin, La Renaissance, p. 239. 
 
34 Walt Whitman and the Germans. 
 
 School, Emerson"' and Carlyle'" influenced Whitman, and 
 to what extent the former, on their part, are indebted to the 
 Germans. 
 
 Whitman's respect for the Kantian and Post-Kantian ideal- 
 istic school of philosophy was most profound.'"" In the agitated 
 and usually unclear mirror of his work, the brilliancy of the con- 
 stellation Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel is reflected in dim, in- 
 distinct shape. It is therefore advisable to confine ourselves to 
 a statement of his acquaintance with these philosophers rather 
 than to draw final conclusions as to their formative influence 
 upon Whitman's sphere of ideas. 
 
 Whitman's familiarity with the idealistic philosophers of 
 " profound Germany'"" is as unquestionable as numerous are 
 the illustrative quotations of his 
 
 " Having studied the new and antique, the Greek and Ger- 
 manic systems. 
 
 Kant having studied and stated, Fichte and Schelling and 
 Hegel.'"^^ 
 
 Indispensable as the literary and religious inheritance of 
 ages gone by, " the wonderous German and other metaphysi- 
 cians of that time '"'^ stand as warranters of the freer, grander, 
 new American poetry to come, burn as guiding beacons 
 through all the nights of groping and experimenting that 
 hardly ever enveloped a country in denser darkness than the 
 modern literary America. In the overwhelming feeling of his 
 inadequacy, our poet lifts up his eyes " to such as German 
 Kant and Hegel, where they, though near us, leaping over the 
 ages, sit again, impassive, imperturbable, like the Egyptian 
 gods.'"^^ 
 
 "^Especially his " Self reliance." Prose, 181-3.173.189-190.314-317. 
 
 '"'^Prose, 160-170. 
 
 '"a cp. note gc . 
 
 '"^Prose, 294. 
 
 "*ZoC loi, cp. /V-o.rir, 458. 
 
 "'Prose, 322. 
 
 wiprose, 233. 
 
Wali Whitman and the Germans. 35 
 
 In his curious one-sidedness this apocalyptic psalmist of 
 America perceives the altitude of literature and poetry in 
 religion. From his point of view the " invaluable contributions 
 of Leibnitz, Kant and Hegel " appear as sacred poetry. They 
 " exhibit literature's [not philosophy's] real heights and eleva- 
 tions," because the " religious tone, the recognition of the 
 future, of the unknown, of Deity over and under all, and of the 
 divine purpose, are never absent, but indirectly give tone to 
 all.'"" 
 
 Whitman's allusions to Kant, scarce and brief though they 
 be, go to prove a close study of the Konigsberg philosopher. ^'^ 
 In his analysis of the character of the "Konigsberg sage," 
 Whitman is not quite happy. The genial bachelor, who 
 (though he was a much desired, lively and ingenious compan- 
 ion) sought ^quiet and seclusion, in order to fulfill his world- 
 important mission, may submit to the attribute of " never- per- 
 turbed placidity."^''' but " stomachic phlegm " can never be 
 applied to Kant, who wrested from his small and feeble body 
 a life of eighty years, full of untiring energy and work, in his 
 pedantic punctuality similar to Frederic the Great. Whitman 
 is more successful in the comprehension of Kant's importance 
 as the founder of modern philosophy. Kant's position is be- 
 tween sensationalism and intellectualism ; in other words, the 
 doctrine, which to us now seems a matter of course, that the 
 transcendental world, the realm beyond the phenomenal is 
 inaccessible to human reason, is Kant's creation. Now, we 
 know how far truth can be obtained through human reason, 
 and how the noumenal world stands related to the phenom- 
 
 ^"^"^ Prose, 242-3 note. 
 
 '™The author is much indebted to Fischer (E. K. B.), Geschichte der 
 neuer en Philosophic, Vol. IV-VIII; Zeller (Eduard), Gesch. der D. Philosophie, 
 Vol. XIII ; Windelband ( Wilh.), Gesch. d. neueren Philosophie, 2 Vol., 1878-80; 
 Weber (Alfred), History of Philosophy (trans, by F. Thilby, New York, 1897 ; 
 Kiihnemann (Eugen), Kant'mKunstwart, XVII, Heft 11, and to manuscripts 
 taken in the lectures of Prof. Dr. v. Sigwart and v. Pfleiderer at Tubingen Uni- 
 versity. 
 
 ™Prose, 165. 
 
36 H'a/i Whitman and the Germans. 
 
 enal world. In this respect Whitman can say : Kant "under- 
 stood his own limits, and stopped when he got to the end of 
 them." Kant arrived at the moment when, inspired by the 
 discoveries of science, the human mind had soared up to a 
 daring flight. No secret of thie phenomena nor the noumena 
 seemed inaccessible to philosophy, after man had begun to 
 unfold the world's systems by mathematical thought. But, 
 while the exact science advanced, philosophy dissipated its 
 power in endless controversies. Then Kant based philosophy 
 upon analysis of human thought and human experience, and 
 thus did much directly or indirectly toward strengthening the 
 self-consciousness of modern man. Kant's " labors have left 
 the ground fully prepared ever since — and greater service was 
 probably never performed by mortal man." Human reason 
 Stands hopeless before the universe of nature. When shall we 
 get into possession of the great unity of knowledge, to perceive 
 this infinite world ? Or is nature at all intelligible to the 
 human mind ? When can we boast of having found the truth 
 by the speculation of our reason ? These questions are the fun- 
 damental bases and pursuits of the thinkers of all eras and 
 nations. Whitman puts it : " What is the fusing explanation 
 and tie — what the relation between the (radical, democratic) Me, 
 the human identity of understanding, emotions, spirit etc., on 
 the one side, of and with the (conservative) Not Me, the whole 
 of the material objective universe and law, with what is behind 
 them in time and space, on the other side?"'^" In one of the 
 darkest hours of Faustian despair, the outcry escapes the 
 poet's mouth :'"' 
 
 " Of the terrible doubt of appearances. 
 Of the uncertainty after all, that we may be deluded, 
 
 That may-be reliance and hope are but speculations after 
 all, 
 
 vaprose, 167. 
 "'Z,oC loi, 
 
Walt IVhitmajt and the Germans. 37 
 
 That may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful fable 
 only, 
 May-be the things I perceive are only apparitions, and the 
 real something has yet to be known. 
 
 I cannot answer the question of appearances or that of iden- 
 tity beyond the grave." 
 
 From Kant, Whitman receives no answer to this question 
 satisfactory to him. For Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason 
 demonstrates the incompetence of theoretical reason beyond 
 the domain of experience, and the futility of metaphysics, con- 
 sidered as the science of the absolute. " Immanuel Kant, 
 though he explained, or partially explained, as may be said, 
 the laws of the human understanding, left this question an 
 open one.""^ 
 
 Kant distinguishes in every idea a material element, which 
 is furnished a posteriori by the senses, and a formal element, 
 furnished a priori by thought. It is the Ego, the perceiving 
 and thinking subject, that makes the phenomenon what it is. 
 The phenomenon is the product of reason ; it is reason which 
 prescribes its laws to the sensible universe ; it is reason that 
 makes the Kosmos.'*^ This is what Whitman means, though 
 he expresses it in indistinct terms, by saying : " The objects in 
 Nature, the themes of aestheticism, and all special exploitations 
 of the mind and soul, involve not only their own inherent 
 quality, but the quality, just as inherent and important, of their 
 point of view (according to Immanuel Kant, the last essential 
 reality, giving shape and significance to all the rest.")'** 
 
 Now we leave it to specialists to trace out the Kantian ele- 
 ments in Whitman's philosophy. We must however point out 
 that Whitman's ethics are strongly blended with Kantian 
 ethics: Kant, by showing the limits of human knowledge^ 
 transfers the centre of gravity from human perception 10 human 
 
 ^^^Prose, 167. 
 
 i^'Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 389 ; Prolegomena, pp. 44, 51, 85. 
 
 ^^''Nov. B., 10. 
 
38 Walt Whitman and the Germans. 
 
 action. The categorical imperative of duty directs human 
 power and energy to moral practice. It does not handicap 
 man, but while preaching the sermon of duty it preaches the 
 gospel of liberty. Man is the legislator of his own existence. 
 Every human being sets a new world's rule. No man must 
 allow himself to be used only for other people's purposes, but 
 must be always conscious of his own purpose in life. This is 
 the last aim, toward which all social bodies, state organiza- 
 tions and national institutions strive. Free, great personali- 
 ties are the pursuit of history. The holiness and the liberty of 
 life consists in the fulfilment of duty, the greatness of man must 
 be judged by his task in the world's history ; such are the 
 strivings of a nation which seeks her pride in furthering noble 
 humanity. Moral life gives itself its laws, without command 
 from outside. Upon such premises stands the ideal of theological 
 morality and of modern European culture. Only the man, 
 who is moral, not on account of outside influences, will under- 
 stand religious life ; for religion refers us to a superior world 
 of nobler humanity, which we can neither see nor prove. But 
 we believe in it, and this belief, undogmatic as it were, is the 
 source of our moral deeds and shows itself in our moral 
 actions. Any one familiar with Democratic Vistas will mark 
 the analogy with the train of thoughts we have just followed 
 out. 
 
 It is strange that Whitman, who calls his ego the " Cos- 
 mos ", '^ does not allude more to Fichte, who drew the neces- 
 sary conclusion from Kant's intimation, that the mysterious 
 unknown concealed behind the phenomena of sense might 
 possibly be identical with the unknown in ourselves. Yet we 
 see, that Whitman had fully grasped the motive power in 
 Fichte's system, from his allusion : " Doubtless there comes 
 a time, when one feels through his whole being, and pronoun- 
 cedly the emotional part, that identity between himself sub- 
 
 ^^"LoG 48. 
 
Walt Whitman and the Germans. 39 
 
 jectively and Nature objectively which Schelling and Fichte 
 are so fond of pressing." ^'^ 
 
 Whitman'^could dispense with Fichte the more easily as 
 Schelling had anticipated the main idea of Fichte's later 
 development, saying 1795 in "Vom Ich als Princip der Philo- 
 sophic Oder Uber das Unbedingte im menschhchen Wissen'' : 
 " The ego is the absolute." Schelling's doctrine is : the aim 
 of transcendental philosophy consists in starting from the 
 subject as from the original and absolute, in letting the object 
 come into existence by the Ego, and in conceiving the world 
 as a continuous history of self-consciousness. The same reason 
 that led Schelling away from Fichte's " Wissenschaftslehre," 
 would attract Whitman toward Schelling: Natural science, 
 the amplification of Schelling's philosophy of science into 
 speculative philosophy of nature. In Schelling's philosophy 
 of freedom. Whitman found a support for his justification of 
 the evil in this world. Schelling's philosophy of identity, 
 originating through the tendency of combining philosophy of 
 nature and transcendental philosophy, and of deriving both 
 from a common higher principle, necessarily turned to theo- 
 sophy. The absolute, which Kant had declared " forbidden 
 fruit," and the problem of evil in the world attracted Schell- 
 ing's curiosity ; under the ^influence of Jacob Bohme he 
 becomes a theosophist. If the world is to be explained out 
 of God, evil also must be explained through God. So there 
 must be something in God, that is not God himself, but nature 
 in God, the unconscious in God, the unenlightened will. This 
 dark principle, the natural self-will (" Eigenwille,") has become 
 predominant in the light principle, the universal will. This 
 predominance came into action by the creation of the personal 
 being, that has the power of giving in to the self-will, to the 
 onset of desires. It is therefore not a lack or a weakness, 
 upon which the evil is based, but the freedom of man, who 
 has only perverted the godlike principles. Since the existence 
 
 ^^ Prose, 98. 
 
40 IVa/i Whitman and the Germans. 
 
 of evil is not compatible with God's personality, evil is pre- 
 destined by man's own free will and is to be finally overcome. 
 As we have seen above, Whitman in this respect goes even 
 further than Schelling/*' He is consequently not fully satisfied 
 with Schelling's answer to the question what the relations 
 between the Me and the Not — Me are : " Schelling's answer, or 
 suggestion of answer, is (and very valuable and important, as 
 far as it goes) that the same general and particular intelli- 
 gence, passion, even the standards of right and wrong, 
 which exist in a conscious and formulated state in man, exist 
 in an unconscious state, or in perceptible analogies, throughout 
 the entire universe of external Nature, in all its objects large 
 or small, and all its movements and processes — thus making 
 the impalpable human mind, and concrete nature, notwith- 
 standing their duality and separation, convertible, and in 
 centrality and essence one." ^^^ 
 
 To Hegel, Whitman ascribes a profound impulse. In 
 Hegel's philosophy, that is, without any doubt, the most com- 
 prehensive and complete synthesis that human mind ever 
 established, Whitman found points of contact with all the 
 wide provinces of his own capacious mind. The personal 
 acquaintance with the chief representative of the Hegelian 
 movement in America, W. T. Harris, Editor of the Journal for 
 Speculative Philosophy, founded in 1876,'^' gave to Whitman's 
 Hegelian studies a personal centre of attraction. In Harris's 
 Journal, translations of Hegel's works were offered, partly by 
 the editor himself (ch. i. 2. 3. of " Phaenomenologie des Geis- 
 tes" in vol. 2, " Wissenschaft der Logik" in vol. 2.), partly 
 by W. M. Bryant, Sue A. Longwell, F. L. Soldan, Edwin D. 
 Mead and others (vol. 4-7, 11- 13, 15-21), and we can well pre- 
 sume that the reading of this magazine inspired Whitman 
 to his aphorism :*'" 
 
 ^f Prose, 2/^z. 
 ^^Prose, 168. 
 
 w^Prose, 183. The author is indebted to Stirling (J. H. ) , Secret 0/ Hegel, 
 1865. ■ 
 
 ™Xo(7 2i6. 
 
IValt Whitman and the Germans. 4 1 
 
 Roaming in thought. (After reading Hegel). 
 Roaming in thought over the Universe, I saw the little 
 
 that is Good steadily hastening towards immortality, 
 And the vast all that is called Evil I saw hastening to 
 
 merge itself and become lost and dead. 
 
 In criticizing Carlyle from the American point of view,"' 
 Whitman offsets the Scotchman's speculations on humanity and 
 politics by the " far more profound " treatment of these themes 
 by G. F. Hegel,"^ which puts the German in a most brilliant 
 light. May it suffice for our purposes to render in the follow- 
 ing Whitman's conception of Hegel. 
 
 In Whitman's treatment of Democratic freedom, the 
 acquaintance with Hegel's theory of the Objective Mind or 
 Society, as he laid it down in Encyclopedia^'^^ is obvious. 
 Whitman directly calls Hegel his " great authority." For 
 Hegel, the mind like nature is subject to the law of develop- 
 ment. Man's mind is made up by consciousness and freedom, 
 but the individual consciousness finds its realization in the 
 recognition, that others are his equal, that they too share 
 reason, freedom and spirituality, that the fellow-creatures' 
 freedom is the law and the limit of his own freedom. The 
 subjective mind yields to the objective mind, to Society. The 
 bases of Society are marriage and legal punisment, for these 
 two are the safe-guards of morality. Yet family alone is 
 based on egoism and particularism, for it only protects indi- 
 vidual interests. The State is the highest stronghold for the 
 moral law, for the idea of the good. The most perfect form 
 of government is, however, not the Republic, for it exaggerates 
 the importance of the individual. Because they sacrificed the 
 idea of the good to the individual, to family and to caste, the 
 republics of antiquity ended in monarchies. 
 
 ^^^Prose, 163-170. 
 ^^Trose, 164. 
 ^^'-Encyclopadie, § 482, ff. 
 
42 Wait Whitman and the Germans. 
 
 Whitman too annotates that Hegel did not " consider the 
 United States worthy of serious mention ". Yet he upholds that 
 all his principal works might not inappropriately be this day 
 collected and bound up under the conspicuous title : " Specu- 
 lations for the use of North America, and Democracy there, 
 with the relations of the same to metaphysics, including Les- 
 sons and Warnings (encouragements too, and of the vastest) 
 from the Old World to the New "."* It is a proof of the irony 
 of history and the ambiguity of Hegel's system, that the " Prus- 
 sian State and Court philosopher " should find his chief 
 apostles to-day in the American Republic. In Hegel's philos- 
 ophy Whitman found the most substantial answer to his ques- 
 tion as to the relation between the Me and the Not-Me, a co- 
 herent metaphysical system, which, while he admits, " that the 
 brain of the future may add to, revise and even entirely re- 
 construct it, any rate beams forth to-day, in its entirety, illum- 
 inating the thought of the universe, and satisfying the mystery 
 thereof to the human mind, with a more consoling scientific 
 assurance than any yet." After this Whitman goes on to re- 
 count Hegel's system "a little freely " to be sure, because he 
 considers it as " presenting the most thoroughly American 
 points of view." According to Hegel the whole earth with its 
 infinite variety of the present, past and future is a product of 
 Creative Thought. Even the numberless apparent failures 
 and contradictions are held together by central unity and are 
 but radiations of one consistent and eternal purpose. All this 
 development tends toward the permanent utile and morale. 
 As life is the incessant effort of the visible Universe and death 
 only the invisible side of the same, so the utile, so truth and 
 health are the unseen, but immutable laws of the universe, 
 and vice and disease, with all their perturbations, are but tran- 
 sient, even if ever so prevalent expressions. In this respect 
 Whitman says of Whittier that he " stands for morality, 
 
 ^Prose, 164 note 
 
tVali Whitman and the Germans. 43 
 
 HOt in any all-accepting philosophic or Hegelian sense, but 
 filtered through a Puritanical or Quaker filter. ""' 
 
 As to politics, Hegel considers not any one party or any 
 one form of government as absolutely and exclusively true. 
 Truth consists in the just relations of objects to each other. A 
 majority or democracy may rule as outrageously as an oligarchy 
 or despotism — though far less likely to do so. Whitman 
 entirely overlooks Hegel's strong advocation of the monarchy 
 as the normal political form. The free sovereign person of the 
 ruler is the embodiment, the adequate expression of the 
 national idea. The State, unless personified in a monarch, is 
 only an abstraction. The prince is the State made man, the 
 depository of its power, of its political traditions, impersonal 
 reason become personal will."^ Evil is either the violation of 
 the relation of subjects to each other, or of the moral law. But 
 evil, the specious, the unjust, the cruel, the unnatural, although 
 it is inevitable in the divine scheme, as shade is to light, is 
 only temporary. The constitution of the divine scheme brands 
 it as partial and inconsistent, and warrants, although evil may 
 have a great majority and cause great suffering, that it is 
 doomed to final failure, will " merge itself and become lost and 
 dead."'^' 
 
 Hegel's view on theology was conveyed to Whitman 
 largely by Joseph Gostwick's German Culture and Christi- 
 anityP^ Hegel translates theology into science. All the 
 apparent contradictions in the statement of the Deific nature 
 by different ages, nations, churches are but fractional, imper- 
 fect, distorted expressions of one essential unity. " In short, 
 Whitman sums up, that thinker and analyzer and overlooker 
 who, by an inscrutable combination of trained wisdom and 
 natural intuition, most fully accepts in perfect faith the moral 
 
 ^^'^ Prose, 485'. 
 
 ""Cp. Weber, p. 517. 
 
 "'ZoG 216. 
 
 "'Joseph Gostwick, German Culture and Christianity, London, 1882. 
 
44 iVa/t Whitman and the Germans. 
 
 unity and sanity of the creative scheme, in history, science, 
 and all life and time, present and future, is both the truest cos- 
 mical devotee or religioso, and the profoundest philosopher." 
 
 In speaking of Schelling, Whitman showed no sign that 
 he had noticed the prominent position that aesthetics take in 
 Schelling's system. The under-current of Hegel's philosophy 
 of art is strongly felt in the passages where Whitman delights 
 in picturing the great American poets to come.'"' According 
 to Hegel, art is the anticipated triumph of mind over matter ; 
 poetry, the epitome and quintessence of all the arts, is a union 
 of divine and human elements so intimate that the dogma of 
 divine transcendency is actually cancelled by it. " America 
 needs a class of bards who will link and tally the rational 
 physical being of man, with the ensembles of time and space, 
 and with this vast and multiform show, Nature, ' consistent 
 with the Hegelian formulas. ' "^'"' 
 
 May these few lines suffice to mark the chief points of 
 influence of the Hegelian system on Whitman's philosophical 
 creed, the systematic exposition of which would form a most 
 grateful though difficult task for an American specialist 
 Whitman's, extravagance and exalted vagueness of composi- 
 tion will be a serious impediment for the appreciation of his 
 philosophical works. Whitman's own summary gives the 
 final clew to his attitude toward philosophy in general and 
 toward the German modern critical philosophy in particular : 
 " While the contributions which German Kant and Fichte and 
 Schelling and Hegel have bequeathed to humanity are indis- 
 pensable to the erudition of America's future, I should say that 
 in all of them, and the best of them, when compared with the 
 lightning flashes and flights of the old prophets and exaltes, the 
 spiritual poets and poetry of all lands (as in the Hebrew Bible), 
 there seems to be, nay certainly is, something lacking — some- 
 thing cold, a failure to satisfy the deepest emotions of the soul 
 
 "'" Democratic Vistas," Prose, 197-250. 
 ^'^Prose, 245: 
 
Walt Whitman and the Germans. 45 
 
 — a want of living glow, fondness, warmth, which the oXdexaltes 
 and poets supply, and which the keenest modern philosophers 
 so far do not." ^"^ 
 
 The problem of Walt Whitman, which we have tried to 
 view in a new light, is a strong argument for the absorptive 
 power of the American spirit. Whether one consents to con- 
 sider him as a typical expression of that spirit or not, his works 
 certainly bear most striking witness to the influence of the 
 German upon the American mind ; and to this undoubtedly is 
 to be largely ascribed the German interest in Walt Whitman. 
 I close this study with a sonnet of my friend. Dr. William 
 Ellery Leonard, the spirit of which appears to me a valuable 
 guide for any critical treatment of the Whitman problem : 
 
 Walt Whitman. 
 
 In Washington, in war-times, once I read. 
 
 When down the street the good gray poet came — 
 A roving vagabond unknown to fame — 
 
 From watches by the dying and the dead. 
 
 The old slouch hat upon his shaggy head. 
 His eyes aglow with earth's immortal flame, 
 Lincoln, who marked him from the window frame, 
 
 The judge of men, the deep-eyed Lincoln said : 
 
 "That is a man ". What poet hath juster meed. 
 Whose laurelled image to the morning stands. 
 Bronze o'er autumnal plains of elder lands — 
 
 In life, in death, that was a man indeed. — 
 
 O ye who 'gainst him lift your righteous hands, 
 
 And ye, the fops that ape his manhood, heed ! 
 
 University of Pennsylvania. RICHARD Riethmuller. 
 
 '"'Prose, 169-170.