Chapter XV: Faith Founded Upon a Rock

I

Probably that overwhelming calamity, the World War, set more good people adrift upon the sea of religious doubt and skepticism than all the accumulated evils of the past ten centuries. Men were everywhere outspoken in their want of faith in the Providence in which they had so long trusted. I heard of an English clergyman who declared that if the Germans won in the war he would never open his Bible again. Another English parson, with the thought of the war weighing upon him, published a volume of discourses which he called “The Justification of God.” But judging from my own experiences with the book, the lay mind will find the grounds for justification as hard a riddle to read as the original one.

Only a faith founded upon the rock of natural law can weather such a storm as the world passed through in the Great War, but unfortunately such a faith is possible to comparatively few--the faith that the universe is radically good and beneficent, and that the evils of life grow upon the same tree with the good, and that the fruits called evil bear only a small proportion to those called good. Persons who do not read the book of nature as a whole, who do not try their faith by the records of the rocks and the everlasting stars, who are oblivious to the great law of evolution which has worked out the salvation of man and of all living things, through good and ill report, through delays and sufferings and agonies incalculable, but the issues of which have been unfailing, who do not see the natural universal order working in the fiery ordeal through which all nations during the historic period have passed, who have not learned that the calamities of men and of peoples are not the result of the wrath of some offended divinity, but the ups and downs in the long, hard road of human development, and that, in the nature of things, justice is meted out to all men--if not in a day, then in a year, or in a thousand years; if not to the individual, then to his family, or to his race--those who take no account of all these things soon lose their reckoning in times like ours.

Every good deed, every noble thought, counts in the counsels of the Eternal. Every bad deed, every ignoble thought, counts also. But the stream tends to purify itself; the world is thus made; evil is real, but short-lived; the remedial forces of life and nature burn it up or convert it into good. Our fertile landscapes are the result of the wear and tear of geologic ages; fire, flood, tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanoes, have all had a share in shaping them. Decay and death have fed the sources of life. Our own history as a people and the history of the European countries exhibit a like contrast and mingling of good and evil. We are too personal in our estimates, too limited in our perspectives; thoughts of our own comforts and private aims are too much with us. We must give Providence the advantage of a wiser perspective.

The thoughtful mind, capable of viewing these things on a bigger scale, does not need a world calamity to reveal the unsatisfactory character of the reigning gods. The daily course of events does that. Infantile paralysis, for example, with its long train of the crippled, unoffending children, or a man being slowly eaten up with cancer, or a mother losing her life in trying to save her child from flood and fire, and scores of other similar things, show what a thin veneer our theology puts upon ugly facts.

Our ecclesiastical faith must be housed in churches and kept warm by vestments. The moment we take it out into the open and expose it to unroofed and unwarmed universal nature, it is bound to suffer from the cosmic chill. For my part, I do not have to take my faith in out of the wet and the cold. It is an open-air faith, an all-the-year-round faith; neither killing frosts nor killing heats disturb it; not tornadoes nor earthquakes nor wars nor pestilence nor famine make me doubt for one moment that the universe is sound and good. The forces which brought us here and provided so lavishly for our sustenance and enjoyment; that gave us our bodies and our minds; that endowed us with such powers; that surrounded us with such beauty and sublimity; that brought us safely through the long and hazardous journey of evolution; that gave us the summer sun, the midnight skies, and the revolving seasons; that gave human love and fellowship and coöperation, childhood, motherhood, and fatherhood, and the sense of justice and mercy, are beneficent and permanent forces. They are directed to me personally because they are directed to all that live; they are the cause of the living, the essence and the sum of all life of the globe. I do not mind if you call them terrestrial forces; the terrestrial and the celestial are one. I do not mind if you call them material forces; the material and the spiritual are inseparable. I do not mind if you call this view the infidelity (or atheism) of science; science, too, is divine; all knowledge is knowledge of God.

I have never taken shelter in any form of ecclesiasticism. I have never tried to clothe myself in the delusive garments of a superstitious age. I have never pinned my faith to a man-made God, however venerable. I have inured my mind to the open air of the universe, to things as they are, to the dealings of a Power that exacts an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth; a power that deals on the square. Those apparent outlaws of the heavens, the comets, do not disturb the naturist; sidereal space strewn with dead worlds and burnt-out suns do not disturb him; the spectacle of the great planets rolling through space void of life for untold millions of years, does not disturb him; and if life should never come to them, and should ultimately disappear from the earth, he would not lose faith; he could behold Europe drenched with the blood of a needless, wicked war and not lose faith; he could see civilization retarded and the unjust cause triumph, and still know that the Creative Energy has our good at heart and always will have it.

II

The demand of our day is for a scientific religion--an attitude of mind toward creation begotten by knowledge, in which fear, personal hopes, individual good, and the so-called “other world,” play little part. Virtuous actions, upright conduct, heroic character, the practice of the Golden Rule, are seen to be their own reward, and the security of the future is in well-doing and well-being in the present. This is not religion in the old ecclesiastical sense, but in the new scientific sense; a religion that moves us to fight vice, crime, war, intemperance, for self-preservation and in brotherly love, and not in obedience to theological dogma or the command of a God; a religion that opens our eyes to the wonder and beauty of the world, and that makes us at home in this world. The old religion is a tree that has borne its fruit. It is dying at the top; it is feeble at the root. It no longer touches men’s lives as of old. The great things that are done to-day are not done in the name of religion, but in the name of science, of humanity, of civilization. The brotherhood that has force and meaning is no longer a sectarian brotherhood; it is larger than all the churches combined.

The naturist must see all things in the light of his experiences in this world. He experiences no miracles; he sees the cosmic energy as no respecter of persons; he sees the rains falling alike upon the just and the unjust; he sees the vast, impartial, undiscriminating movements of Nature all about him; he learns that the land cannot sustain life without the fertilizing rains, yet he beholds the clouds pouring out their bounty into the sea just as freely as upon the land; he beholds the inorganic crushing the organic all about him, and yet he knows that the latter is nothing without the former.

If God and the universal cosmic forces are one, how surely is God on both sides in all struggles, all causes, all wars, righteous and unrighteous! We behold warring nations praying to the same God for victory; we see this same God now apparently favoring one side, now the other, and we are bewildered. Our theology takes us beyond soundings. But the naturist is not bewildered; he can read the riddle and reconcile the contradictions. Napoleon (if it was Napoleon) was right when he said that God was on the side of the heaviest artillery--the more power, the more God.

This may be a hard, chilling gospel; it is like going naked into the storm; but how can we deny it? Can we refuse to face it?

XV

THE POET OF THE COSMOS

The world has had but one poet of the cosmos, and that was Whitman. His mind, his sympathies, sweep through a wider orbit than those of any other. I am bold enough to say frankly that I look upon him as the greatest personality--not the greatest intellect, but the most symbolical man, the greatest incarnation of mind, heart, and soul, fused and fired by the poetic spirit--that has appeared in the world during the Christian era.

In his lines called “Kosmos” he describes himself:

“Who includes diversity, and is Nature,
Who is the amplitude of the earth, and the coarseness and
sexuality of the earth, and the great charity of the
earth, and the equilibrium also,
Who has not look’d forth from the windows, the eyes, for
nothing, or whose brain held audience with messengers
for nothing,
Who contains believers and disbelievers, who is the most
majestic lover,
Who holds duly his or her triune proportion of realism,
spiritualism, and of the esthetic, or intellectual,
Who, having consider’d the body, finds all its organs and
parts good,
Who, out of the theory of the earth, and of his or her body,
understands by subtle analogies all other theories,
The theory of a city, a poem, and of the large politics of
these States;
Who believes not only in our globe with its sun and moon, but
in other globes with their suns and moons,
Who, constructing the house of himself or herself, not for a day
but for all time, sees races, eras, dates, generations,
The past, the future, dwelling there, like space, inseparable
together.”

Let me say at once that, whatever else “Leaves of Grass” may be, it is not poetry as the world uses that term. It is an inspired utterance, but it does not fall under any of the usual classifications of poetry. Lovers of Whitman no more go to him for poetry than they go to the ocean for the pretty shells and pebbles on the beach. They go to him for contact with his spirit; to be braced and refreshed by his attitude toward life and the universe; for his robust faith, his world-wide sympathies, for the breadth of his outlook, and the wisdom of his utterances.

Whitman is first and last a seer and a philosopher, but his philosophy is incarnated in a man; it is fluid and alive; it breathes and talks, and loves and breeds; it nurses the sick and wounded soldiers in the hospitals; it makes him the friend and brother of all types of humanity, of the outcast woman not less than of the man or woman of perfect blood:

“Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you.
Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves
to rustle for you, do my words refuse to glisten and
rustle for you.
* * * * *
“Whoever you are! you are he or she for whom the earth is solid
and liquid,
You are he or she for whom the sun and moon hang in the sky,
For none more than you are the present and the past,
For none more than you is immortality.”

My studies of nature and of the universe help me to understand Whitman much more than does my reading of literature itself.

Whitman is rapt and thrilled when he looks up to the midnight sky. His very style is orbicular and concentric. The scientific aspects of astronomy do not engage him for a moment, any more than they did the old Hebrew prophets; his science becomes human emotion. He is the human soul matching itself against the starry hosts, coping with them and absorbing them:

“This day before dawn I ascended the hill and look’d at the
crowded heaven,
And I said to my spirit, _When we become the enfolders of those
orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of everything in
them, shall we be filled and satisfied then?_
And my spirit said, _No, we but level that lift to pass and
continue beyond._”

Is there not more than astronomy in these passages?

“I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems,
And all I can see multiplied as high as I can cypher edges but
the rim of the farther system.
Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding,
Outward and outward and forever outward.
My sun has his sun and round him obediently wheels,
He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit,
And greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside
them.”

Again he says:

“It is no small matter, this round and delicious globe, moving
so exactly in its orbit for ever and ever, without one
jolt, or the untruth of a single second.”

He is filled with “the great thoughts of space and eternity,” and common things assume new meanings in his eyes:

“I lie abstracted and hear the meanings of things and the
reason of things.
They are so beautiful I nudge myself to listen.”

Who before Whitman ever drew his poetic, his æsthetic, and ethical standards from the earth, from the sexuality, from the impartiality of the earth, or his laws for creations from the earth? Only the wisest readers are prepared for their unliterary flavor:

“I swear there can be no greatness or power that does not
emulate those of the earth.
There can be no theory of any account unless it corroborates
the theory of the earth.
No politics, song, religion, behavior, or what not, is of
account, unless it compare with the amplitude of the earth,
Unless it face the exactness, vitality, impartiality, rectitude
of the earth.”

We all see in Whitman, as we see in Nature, what we bring the means of seeing. Readers of him are likely to see their own limitations for the limitations of Whitman. It is as if we thought that the length of our sounding-line was the measure of the ocean’s depth. It may be so, but it is not always so. A man of strict moral and ethical ideas, according to conventional standards, will find Whitman rank with original sin. Is not Nature rank with the same form of evil? Whitman did not shrink from natural tests. Naturalism was the essence of his religion.

“Nothing out of place is good, nothing in its place is bad.”

But the good in Nature is vastly more than the evil, else you and I would not be here, and the good in Whitman is vastly more than the evil, or he would have been forgotten long ago.

Evil, as we use the term, attends all great things. Evil--some man’s evil--comes out of the sunshine, the rains, the protecting snows. One of our poets objects to Whitman’s saying that evil is just as perfect as good. Whitman does not say it is just as desirable, but just as perfect. Are not these things we call evil perfect--snakes, nettles, thorns, volcanoes, earthquakes? Is not a fungus as perfect as a rose?--a toad as perfect as a bird? Each obeys its own law. The germs of typhoid fever and of pneumonia are just as perfect as the germs that favor us. Whitman said:

“I permit to speak at every hazard Nature without check, with
original energy.”

The hazards are great, but the stakes are great also. Readers who cannot stand an utterance of this sort should go to Pollock’s “Course of Time,” or Young’s “Night Thoughts,” or Dr. Holland’s “Bitter Sweet.”

Whitman bares his mind and soul to us as he bares his body. There are no masks or disguises. His inmost heart is as nude as his anatomy. Nothing is dressed up. No fashionable tailoring at all. There is nowhere the air of the studied, the elaborated. When other poets stand before the mirror, Whitman looks off at the landscape, or goes and bathes and admires himself. Or, to vary the image, when other poets distill perfumes, Whitman aims to give us the fresh breath of the unhoused air. In this respect he stands alone among modern English-speaking poets. He is the air of the hills and the shore, and not of a flower garden, or of a June meadow, or of parlors. That is what disappoints people. He aims at beauty no more than a wood or a river or a lake or a jungle does. His aim is to tally Nature.

It was my rare good fortune to know this quiet, sympathetic, tolerant man for more than thirty years, and to walk or saunter with him at all seasons and hours. Often at night he would stop and gaze long and silently at the stars, and then resume his walk. He was an easy-going, lethargic man--nothing strenuous about him, never in a hurry, never disturbed or excited, always in good humor, cleanly, clad in gray, with a fresh, florid complexion, large, broad, soft hands, blue-gray eyes, gray-haired and gray-bearded. He was fond of children and old people. What a contrast were his placid and easy-going ways to the astronomic sweep and power of his poems, his spirit darting its solar rays to the utmost bounds of the universe. When I was with him I did not feel his mighty intellect, I felt most his humanity, his primitive sympathy, the depth and intensity of his new democratic character, perhaps also that in him which led Thoreau to say that he suggested something a little more than human.

Whitman’s attitude toward Nature stands out in contrast to that of all other poets, ancient or modern. It was not that of the poet who draws his themes from Nature, or makes much of the gentler and fairer forms of wood and field, spring and summer, shore and mountain, as has been so largely the custom of poets from Virgil down. Take all the Nature lyrics and idyls out of English and American poetry, and how have you impoverished it, how many names would suffer! Nor does Whitman’s attitude in any degree conform to the worshipful attitude of Wordsworth and so many other poets since his time. He did not humanize Nature or read himself into it; he did not adorn it as a divinity; he did not see through it as through a veil to spiritual realities beyond, as Emerson so often does; he did not gather bouquets, nor distill the wild perfumes in his pages; he did not fill the lap of earth with treasures not her own--all functions of true poetry, we must admit, and associated with great names. Yet he made more of Nature than any other poet has done; he saw deeper meanings in her for purposes of both art and life; but it was Nature as a whole--not the parts, not the exceptional phases, but the total scheme and unfolding of things.

He sings more in terms of personality, of democracy, of nationalism, of sex, of immortality, of comradeship; more of the general, the continuous, the world-wide; more of wholes and less of parts, more of man and less of men. His religion takes no account of sects and creeds, but arises from the contemplation of the soul, of the Eternal, of the universe. We do not get the solace and the companionship with rural nature in Whitman that we get in the modern nature poets. With them we admire the “violet by a mossy stone,” or the pretty shell on the seashore; with Whitman we saunter on the hills, or inhale the salt air of the seashore, or our minds open under the spread of the midnight skies--always the large, the elemental, the processional, the modern. The scholarly, the elaborated, the polished, the architectural, the Tennysonian perfume and technique, the Wordsworthian sweet rusticity and affiliation with fells and groves, the Emersonian mysticism and charm of the wild and the sequestered, were not for him or in him; nor the epic grandeur of Milton, the dramatic power of Shakespeare, nor, usually, the lyric thrill of many of the minor poets. You embark on an endless quest with Whitman; not on a picnic, nor a “day off,” but a day-by-day and a night-by-night journey through the universe:

“I tramp a perpetual journey,
My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut
from the woods.
No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,
I have no chair, no church, no philosophy,
I lead no man to a dinner table, library, or exchange,
But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,
My left hand hooking you round the waist,
My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the
public road,

Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it for yourself.”

He who can bring to Whitman’s rugged and flowing lines anything like the sympathy and insight that beget them, will know what I mean. Our modern nature poets are holiday flower-gatherers beside this inspired astronomer, geologist, and biologist, all in one, sauntering the streets, loitering on the beach, roaming the mountains, or rapt and silent under the midnight skies. When, now, in my old age, I open his pages again and read the “Song of the Open Road,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “The Song of the Broad-Axe,” “This Compost,” “Walt Whitman,” “Great are the Myths,” “Laws for Creation,” and scores of others, I seem to be present at the creation of worlds. I am in touch with primal energies. I am borne along by a tide of life and power that has no parallel elsewhere in literature. It is not so much mind as it is personality, not so much art as it is Nature, not so much poetry as it is the earth, the sky. Oh, the large, free handling, the naked grandeur, the elemental sympathy, the forthrightness, and the power! Not beauty alone, but meanings, unities, profundities; not merely the bow in the clouds, but the clouds also, and the sky, and the orbs beyond the clouds. A personal, sympathetic, interpretive attitude toward the whole of Nature, claiming it all for body and mind, drawing out its spiritual and æsthetic values, forging his laws for creation from it, trying his own work by its standards, and seeking to emulate its sanity, its impartiality, and its charity.

Whitman wrote large the law of artistic productions which he sought to follow:

“All must have reference to the ensemble of the world, and the
compact truth of the world;
There shall be no subject too pronounced--all works shall
illustrate the divine law of indirections.
What do you suppose creation is?
What do you suppose will satisfy the Soul, except to walk free,
and own no superior?
What do you suppose I would intimate to you in a hundred ways,
but that man or woman is as good as God?
And that there is no God any more divine than Yourself?
And that that is what the oldest and newest myths finally mean?
And that you or any one must approach creations through such
laws?”

Whitman’s standards are always those of Nature and of life. Emerson hung his verses in the wind--a good thing to get the chaff out of poetry or wheat. Whitman brings his, and all art, to the test of the natural, universal standards. He read his songs in the open air to bring them to the test of real things; he emulated the pride of the level he planted his house by. Always is his eye on the orbs, and on the earth as a whole:

“I feel the globe itself swift swimming through space.
I will confront the shows of day and night,
I will see if I am to be less real than they are.”

He would have his songs tally “earth’s soil, trees, winds, waves.”

“Can your performance face the open fields and the seaside?”

he demands of those who would create the art of America.

His poems abound in natural images and objects, but there is rarely a trace of the method and spirit of the so-called nature poets, some of whom bedeck Nature with jewelry and finery till we do not know her.

In one of his nature jottings, written in 1878 at his country retreat not far from Camden, New Jersey, he speaks thus of the emotional aspects and influences of Nature:

I too, like the rest, feel these modern tendencies (from all
the prevailing intellections, literature, and poems) to turn
everything to pathos, ennui, morbidity, dissatisfaction, death.
Yet how clear it is to me that those are not the born results,
influences of Nature at all, but of our own distorted, sick, or
silly souls. Here amid this wide, free scene, how healthy, how
joyous, how clean and vigorous and sweet!

I do not wonder that Whitman gave such a shock to the reading public sixty years ago. This return, in a sense, to aboriginal Nature, this sudden plunge into the great ocean of primal energies, this discarding of all ornamentation and studied external effects of polish and elaboration, gave the readers of poetry a chill from which they are not yet wholly recovered. The fireside, the library corner, the seat in the garden, the nook in the woods: each and all have their charm and their healing power, but do not look for them in Walt Whitman. Rather expect the mountain-tops, the surf-drenched beach, and the open prairies. A poet of the cosmos, fortified and emboldened by the tremendous discoveries and deductions of modern science, he takes the whole of Nature for his province and dominates it, is at home with it, affiliates with it through his towering personality and almost superhuman breadth of sympathy.

The egotism of Whitman was like the force of gravity, like the poise of the earth, the centrality of the orbs. Nothing could disturb it, no burden was too great for it to bear. He seemed always to have in mind the self-control and the _insouciance_ of Nature. He would fain try himself by the self-balanced orbs. His imagination was fired by the undemonstrative earth; he would be as regardless of observation as it was. He was moved by the unsophisticated freshness of Nature. He saw that the elemental laws never apologized; he would emulate the level he planted his house by:

“these shows of the day and night,
I will know if I am to be less than they are.”

He will not be outfaced by irrational things:

“I will see if I have no meanings, while the houses and ships
have meanings,
I will see if the fishes and birds are to be enough for
themselves, and I not to be enough for myself.
I match my spirit against yours, you orbs, growths, mountains,
brutes.
Copious as you are, I absorb you all in myself, and become the
master myself.”

It is these cosmic and natural-universal standards to which Whitman appeals, that mark him off from all other poets or bards who have yet appeared, and which, I hope, justify me in singling him out and giving him a place in this volume.

THE END

The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U . S . A

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been
corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences within
the text and consultation of external sources.

Some hyphens in words have been silently removed, some added,
when a predominant preference was found in the original book.

Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text,
and inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained.

Pg 182: ‘Java man of Du Bois’ replaced by ‘Java man of Dubois’.