II

WALT WHITMAN

WALT WHITMAN was older than one is apt to remember. He was born on Long Island in 1819, and he died in 1892. His life, then, was almost exactly contemporary with Lowell's. No two lives could have been much more different in condition. Lowell, the son of a minister, closely related to the best people of New England, lived all his life amid the gentlest academic and social influences in America. Whitman was the son of a carpenter and builder on the outskirts of Brooklyn; the only New England man of letters equally humble in origin was Whittier.

The contrast between Whitman and Whittier, however, is almost as marked as that between Whitman and Lowell. Whittier, the child of Quaker farmers in the Yankee country, grew up and lived almost all his life amid guileless influences. Whitman, born of the artisan class in a region close to the most considerable and corrupt centre of population on his native continent, had a rather vagrant youth and manhood. At times he was a printer, at times a school-master, at times editor of stray country newspapers, and by and by he took up his father's trade of carpenter and builder, erecting a number of small houses in his unlovely native region. Meanwhile he had rambled about the country and into Canada, much like those half-criminal wanderers whom we now call tramps; but in general until past thirty years old, he was apt to be within scent of the East River. The New York of which his erratic habits thus made the lower aspects so familiar to him was passing, in the last days of the Knickerbocker School, into

its metropolitan existence. The first edition of Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" appeared in 1855, the year which produced the "Knickerbocker Gallery."

nurse.

During the Civil War he served devotedly as an army After the war, until 1873, he held some small government clerkships at Washington. In 1873 a paralytic stroke brought his active life to an end; for his last twenty years he lived an invalid at a little house in Camden, New Jersey.

Until 1855, when the first edition of "Leaves of Grass " appeared in a thin folio, some of which he set up with his own hands, Whitman had not declared himself as a man of letters. From that time to the end he was constantly publishing his eccentric poetry, which from time to time he collected in increasing bulk under the old title. He published, too, some stray volumes of prose," Democratic Vistas," and the like. Prose and poetry alike seem permeated with a conviction that he had a mission to express and to extend the spirit of democracy, which he believed characteristic of his country. To himself, then, he seemed the inspired prophet of an America which he asserted to be above all things else the land of the people; few men have ever cherished a purpose more literally popular. His fate has been ironic. Though even in his lifetime he became conspicuous, it is doubtful whether any man of letters in his country ever appealed less to the masses. He was a prophet of democracy, if you like; but the public to which his prophecy made its way was at once limited, fastidiously overcultivated, and apt to be of foreign birth.

Beyond question Whitman had remarkable individuality and power. Equally beyond question he was among the most eccentric individuals who ever put pen to paper. The natural result of this has been that his admirers have admired him intensely; while whoever has found his work repellent has found it irritating. Particularly abroad, however, he has attracted much critical attention; and many critics have been disposed to maintain that his amorphous prophecies of democracy are

deeply characteristic of America. The United States, they point out, are professedly the most democratic country in the world; Whitman is professedly the most democratic of American writers; consequently he must be the most typical.

The abstract ideal of democracy has never been better summed up than in the well-known watchwords of republican France: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Disguised and distorted though these words may have been by a century of French Revolutionary excess, there is no denying that they stand for ideals essentially noble and inspiring. What is more, these ideals, which everywhere underlie the revolutionary spirit, have consciously influenced the nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic. In the progress of American democracy, however, one of these ideals has been more strenuously kept in mind than the other two. American democracy did not spring from abstract philosophising; it had its origin in the old conceptions of liberty and rights as maintained by the Common Law of England. Though no commonplace, then, has been more familiar to American ears than the glittering generality which maintains all men to be born equal, the practical enthusiasm of American democracy has been chiefly excited by the ideal of liberty. The theoretical democracy of Europe, on the other hand, has tended rather to emphasise the ideal of fraternity, which seems incidentally to include a sound thrashing for any brother who fails to feel fraternal; and still more this European democracy has tended increasingly to emphasise the dogma of human equality. Though this doubtless beautiful ideal eloquently appeals to many generous natures, it seems hardly to accord with the teachings either of natural law or of any recorded experience. Nothing, it maintains, ought really to be held intrinsically better than anything else. In plain words, the ideal of equality, carried to its extreme, asserts all superiority, all excellence, to be a phase of evil.

Now, Walt Whitman's gospel of democracy certainly in

cluded liberty and laid strong emphasis on fraternity. He liked to hail his fellow-citizens by the wild, queer name of "camerados," which, for some obscure reason of his own, he preferred to " comrades." The ideal which most appealed to ✓ him, however, was that of equality. Though he would hardly have assented to such orthodox terms, his creed seems to have been that, as God made everything, one thing is just as good as another. There are aspects in which such a proposition seems analogous to one which should maintain a bronze cent to be every whit as good as a gold eagle because both are issued by the same government from the same mint. At best, however, analogies are misleading arguments; and people who share Whitman's ideal are apt to disregard as superstitious any argument, however impressive, which should threaten to modify their faith in equality. It is a superstition, they would maintain, that some ways of doing things are decent and some not; one way is really just as good as another. It is a superstition that kings, nobles, and gentlemen are in any aspect lovelier than the mob. It is a superstition that men of learning are intellectually better than the untutored. It is a superstition which would hold a man who can make a chair unable consequently to make a constitution. It is a superstition that virtuous women are inherently better than street-walkers. is a superstition that law is better than anarchy. There are things, to be sure, which are not superstitions. Evil and baseness and ugliness are real facts, to be supremely denounced and hated; and incidentally, we must admit, few arraignments of the vulgarity and materialism which have developed in the United States are more pitiless than those which appear in > Whitman's "Democratic Vistas." The cause of these hurtful things, however, he is satisfied to find in the traces of our ancestral and superstitious devotion to outworn ideals of excellence. We can all find salvation in the new, life-saving ideal of equality. Let America accept this ideal, and these faults will vanish into that limbo of the past to which he would

It

gladly consign all superstitions. Among these, he logically, though reluctantly, includes a great part of the poetry of Shakspere; for Shakspere, undoubtedly a poet, was a poet of inequality, who represented the people as a mob. For all his genius, then, Shakspere was an apostle of the devil, another lying prophet of the superstition of excellence.

Even though excellence be a wicked and tyrannical ideal, however, democratic prophecy does not forbid the whole world equally to improve. Equalisation need not mean the reducing of all that is admirable to the level of what is base. It may just as well mean the raising of much that is base towards. the height of what is admirable. The superstition which has worked most sordid evil is that which denies human equality. Retract the denial, then; let human beings be equal, and the force which has most distorted mankind shall cease working. Then all alike may finally rise, side by side, into an equality superior to what has gone before. The prophets of equality are so stirred by dreams of the future that they half forget the horrors of present or past; and among prophets of equality v Walt Whitman has the paradoxical merit of eminence.

Now, this dogma of equality clearly involves a trait which has not yet been generally characteristic of American thought or letters, a complete confusion of values. In the early days of Renaissance in New England, to be sure, Emerson and the rest, dazzled by the splendours of that new world of art and literature which was at last thrown open, made small distinction between those aspects of it which are excellent and those which are only stimulating. At the same time they adhered as firmly as the Puritans themselves to the ideal of excellence; and among the things with which they were really familiar they pretty shrewdly distinguished those which were most valuable, either on earth or in heaven. With Walt Whitman, on the other hand, everything is confused.

Take, for example, a passage from his "Song of Myself," which contains some of his best-known phrases: