Chapter II: • The Culture of the Seventies (2)

In his somewhat truculent pose of democratic undress Whitman was a singular figure for a poet, and especially an American poet. The amplitude and frankness and sincerity of his rich nature were an affront to every polite convention of the day. Endowed with abundant sensuousness and catholic sympathies, he took impressions as sharply as wax from the etcher’s hand; and those impressions he transcribed with the careful impartiality of the modern expressionist. His sensitive reactions to experience were emotional rather than intellectual. A pagan, a romantic, a transcendentalist, a mystic--a child of the Enlightenment yet heeding the lessons of science and regarding himself as a realist who honored the physical as the repository of the spiritual--to an amazing degree he was an unconscious embodiment of American aspiration in the days when the romantic revolution was at flood tide. His buoyant nature floated easily on the turbulent stream of national being, and his songs were defiant chants in praise of life--strong, abundant, procreative--flowing through the veins of America.

Oracular and discursive, Whitman lived and moved in a world of sensuous imagery. His imagination was Gothic in its vast reaches. Thronging troops of pictures passed before him, vivid, vital, transcripts of reality, the sharp impress of some experience or fleeting observation--his own and no one’s else, and therefore authentic. Delighting in the cosmos he saw reflecting its myriad phases in the mirror of his own ego, he sank into experience joyously like a strong swimmer idling in the salt waves. Borne up by the caressing waters, repressing nothing, rejecting nothing, he found life good in all its manifestations. As an Emersonian he was content to receive his sanctions from within, and as he yielded to the stimulus of the environing present his imagination expanded, his spirits rose to earth’s jubilee, his speech fell into lyric cadences, and from the exalted abandon of egoistic experience there issued a strong rich note of the universal. His like had not before appeared in our literature for the reason that the childlike pagan had not before appeared. Emerson with his serene intelligence almost disencumbered of the flesh, and Hawthorne with his dessicating skepticisms that left him afraid of sex, were the fruits of a Hebraized culture that Puritan America understood; but Walt Whitman the caresser of life, the lover who found no sweeter fat than stuck to his own bones, was incomprehensible, and not being understood, it was inevitable that he should be inexorably damned. The most deeply religious soul that American literature knows, the friend and lover of all the world, the poet of the democratic ideal to which, presumably, America was dedicated, Whitman was flung into outer darkness by the moral custodians of an age that knew morality only from the precepts of the fathers.

The early stages of Whitman’s intellectual development are obscure, but that in his twenties he caught most of the infections of the times, literary, political, and social, is clear enough. The young printer-editor in frock coat and tall hat, with cane and boutonnière, who often joined the Bohemian society at Pfaff’s restaurant, was a callow romantic, practicing the conventional literary arts of the time, writing formal verse, spinning romantic tales,[547] and seeking to approve himself a reputable littérateur. But the passion of reform was already stirring within him and a succession of causes--temperance, anti-capital-punishment, abolitionism--recruited his pen. As a child of Manhattan and of the Jacksonian revolution it was inevitable that his first great passion should have been political, and when in the late forties he found a suitable vehicle of expression in the _Brooklyn Eagle_, his native Jeffersonianism took stock of current political programs. His political master was the radical equalitarian William Leggett--whose praises in after life he never stinted--and from Leggett and the _Evening Post_, supplemented by Fanny Wright and Tom Paine and other disreputable influences, he seems to have got the first clear expression of the sweeping democratic postulates on which later he was to erect his philosophy. The times were stirring everywhere with revolution and on Manhattan Island Locofocoism, with the newfangled matches, ten years before had started its little local bonfire by way of preparation for a general conflagration that should consume the accumulated mass of wrong and injustice. The ardent young Whitman was deeply infected with Locofoco enthusiasm and his editorials for the _Eagle_ were the pronouncements of an extreme left-wing Democrat, as became a disciple of Leggett.

In this early phase of his democracy he fixed his hopes on the great West where, he believed, a freer and more democratic America was taking shape. He was an expansionist, full of ardent hopes, an apostle of “manifest destiny.” In such lesser matters as finance and governmental subsidies he was a good Jacksonian, following Old Bullion Benton in his preference for hard money and dislike of shin-plasters. He was opposed to the bankers and monopolists. He called himself a “free-trader by instinct,” and so late as 1888 he said, “I object to the tariff primarily because it is not humanitarian--because it is a damnable imposition upon the masses.”[548] But these lesser things were inconsequential in comparison with the great objective towards which America was moving--the ever-widening freedom of men in society. “There must be,” he wrote in those early years, “continual additions to our great experiment of how much liberty society will bear.”[549] On that grand theme he was never tired of speaking. With Tom Paine he believed that just government was a simple thing, fitted to the capacity of many heads; it is made complex to hide its dishonesty. After commenting on the “once derided, but now widely worshipped doctrines which Jefferson and the glorious Leggett promulgated,” he went on:

... this one single rule, rationally construed and applied, is
enough to form the starting point of all that is necessary in
government: _to make no more laws than those useful for preventing
a man or body of men from infringing on the rights of other men_.

And again:

There is not a greater fallacy on earth than the doctrine of
_force_, as applied in government.... Sensible men have long seen
that the best government is that which governs least.[550]

Such comments, of course, are only familiar echoes of the Enlightenment--echoes that run through all the thinking of the naturistic school, from Godwin and Paine to Channing and Emerson and Thoreau. In the minds of the children of the Enlightenment the creative ideal of individualism was always pointing toward the ultimate end of philosophic anarchism, and Whitman with his assured faith in the average man accepted the Godwinian political theory as naturally as did Thoreau. What other politics, indeed, was possible for those who built upon the postulates of the innate excellence of human nature and the measureless potentialities of men when vicious social codes have been swept away and the plastic clay is molded by a kindly environment? The perfectibility of man was no romantic dream to the disciples of the French school, but a sober statement of sociological fact, based on a rationalistic psychology; and Whitman was convinced that he was a competent realist in thus envisaging the social problem. If man’s instincts are trustworthy, what justification is there for narrow repressions laid on his freedom? Hitherto those repressions have only maimed and distorted him, encouraging his baser rather than his better impulses; and before he can realize his potentialities he must put away all external compulsions and learn to rely solely upon himself. Hence the immediate objective of the democratic revolution was individual freedom, the breaking of all chains, to the end that free men may create a society worthy of them.

So it was as a revolutionary that Whitman began his work; and a revolutionary he remained to the end, although in his last years he chose to call himself an evolutionist. A born rebel, he was always preaching the gospel of rebellion. “I am a radical of radicals,” he said late in life, “but I don’t belong to any school.”[551] It was this revolutionary spirit that made him the friend of all rebellious souls past and present. “My heart is with all you rebels--all of you, today, always, wherever: your flag is my flag,”[552] he said to a Russian anarchist; and it was this sympathy that enabled him to understand Fanny Wright and Tom Paine and Priestley, who “have never had justice done them.”[553] “The future belongs to the radical,” and so _Leaves of Grass_--he says in “Starting from Paumanok”--“beat the gong of revolt.” Conventional law and order he frankly despised and those individuals who sought their own law and followed it awoke his admiration. Thoreau’s “lawlessness” delighted him--“his going his own absolute road let hell blaze all it chooses.” It is a coward and a poltroon who accepts his law from others--as true of communities as it is true of individuals. He was a good Jeffersonian in his fear of Federalistic consolidation that must put an end to local rights and freedoms.

To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States,
_Resist much, obey little_,
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
... no nation, state, city of this earth, ever afterward resumes
its liberty.[554]

I am for those that have never been master’d,
For men and women whose tempers have never been master’d,
For those whom laws, theories, conventions can never master.[555]

This is the spirit of the radical forties when men were prone to repudiate their allegiance to the political state; when left-wing Abolitionists were dissolving the Union by resolutions; and transcendentalists were proclaiming the doctrine of nullification of unrighteous law. It had come out of the Jacksonian upheaval, but it was daily discovering fresh sanctions as the anarchistic premises of the Enlightenment were more adequately explored and the revolutionary spirit of Europe broke in upon America. During these turbulent years Whitman’s great plan was in gestation, but before _Leaves of Grass_ came to print in the first slender edition of 1855 other influences had been at work, confirming his earlier views, endowing them with lyric passion and expanding them into a grandiose whole. Those influences would seem to have been the fervid emotionalism of the fifties, the monistic idealism of the transcendental school, and the emerging scientific movement. On the whole perhaps it was the first, with its vague and expansive Utopianism, that bit most deeply, stimulating his rich pagan nature to unconventional frankness and encouraging him to throw off the inhibitions of a Puritan ethicism that held American thought in narrow bondage. The rude and ample liberalisms that so shocked his early readers were in no sense peculiar to Whitman, despite common opinion, but the expression of the surging emotionalism of the times, and _Leaves of Grass_, can best be understood by setting its frank paganism against the background of the lush fifties.

* * * * *

With its Calvinistic antecedents--Scotch-Irish and Huguenot as well as New England Puritan--America had always been unfriendly to a pagan evaluation of man’s duties and destiny, and the revolutionary movement of the forties had been kept within sober ethical bounds. John Humphrey Noyes was probably the most radical American of the times, yet the Perfectionism of his earlier years, with its ascetic religiosity, bore little resemblance to the later communism of the Oneida Community. But the liberalism of the fifties was casting off all Hebraic restraints and running wild, proclaiming a new heaven about to appear on the free continent of America, and bidding the youth of the land live joyously as children of the earth. Paganism for the first time lifted up its head and surveyed the American scene--a youthful paganism, lusty and vigorous, that suggested amazing applications of the respectable doctrines of freedom and individuality, to the scandal of older-fashioned folk. From the free spaces of the West, carried on the tide of the Gold Rush, had come a spontaneous reaction from the earlier repressions. Liberalism was passing from the political to the social--a free welling-up of repressed desires, a vast expansiveness. Too long had the natural human emotions been under the ban of asceticism; too long had a God of wrath dispossessed a God of love. Life is good in the measure that it is lived fully, and to live fully is to live in the flesh as well as the spirit. Emerson the prophet of the earlier decade had suffered from an extreme unfleshliness; Whitman the prophet of the fifties would recover the balance. As the current of emotionalism gathered force a frank _joie de vivre_ submerged the old reticences; candor, frankness, a very lust of self-expression, was the new law for free men and women--a glorification of the physical that put to rout the traditional Hebraisms. A riotous sentimentalism ran about the land until it seemed to timid souls as if liberty were quite running away with decency. Freedom for black slaves was one thing, but freedom for women--the loosening of social convention--suggested terrifying eventualities like free love and the disruption of the family. They would countenance no such immoral freedom and under the leadership of young Anthony Comstock the forces of reticence and respectability made ready to do battle with the new liberalisms.

It was not alone Walt Whitman who threw down the gage to the Comstockian watchmen in the gates. The apostle of the new freedom, the high priest of emotional liberalism, was Henry Ward Beecher, lately come out of the West, who from the pulpit of Plymouth Church swept his thousands of idolizing followers along the path of Utopian emotionalism. With a rich amplitude and golden vagueness of metaphor he preached the new gospel. From his lips flowed a lyric chant, a vast paean, a very shout in praise of liberty and love, of godlike man and a manlike God. “Life--affirmative, immediate, in a highly ornamented Mayday world--he acknowledged and commemorated life!”[556] He bathed in a “perpetual tropical luxuriance of blessed love.” “I never knew how to worship until I knew how to love,” he cried; “and to love I must have something ... that touching my heart, shall not leave the chill of ice but the warmth of summer.” Like a good Emersonian he discarded reason--the discipline of the ancestral Calvinism--to follow the “secret chords of feeling,” the “heart’s instincts, whose channels you may appoint but whose flowing is beyond control.” A “magnificent pagan”--so Thoreau called him--he reveled in sensuous beauty. His emotions mounted as he contemplated this new land, this new people, the golden future that beckoned--with all shackles broken, dedicated to freedom, warm and palpitating from abundant life--a radiant world of lovely women and manly men. He dwelt on Pisgah and from the heights looked out on a divine democracy. “The life of the common people is the best part of the world’s life,” he exclaimed; “the life of the common people is the life of God.” And to his congregation intoxicated with his rhetoric he shouted, “Ye are gods! You are crystalline, your faces are radiant!”[557] And the end and outcome envisaged by this prophet of the American Idea was a vaguely grandiose fellowship, not of the Saints alone, but of all the thronging children of men, for of such is God’s kingdom of this world.

As such lyric chants fell on Whitman’s ears, they must have quickened the ferment of thought that was eventually to clarify for him the ideal of democracy, exalting it by making it warm and human and social. The old Jacksonian leveling had been negative; its freedoms had been individual, its anarchism selfish and unsocial. The great ideal of the fellowship had been lost in the scramble for rights. Even transcendental democracy had narrowed its contacts. The hermit Thoreau in his cabin at Walden Pond was no symbol of a generous democratic future. In the struggle for liberty and equality the conception of fraternity had been denied and the golden trinity of the Enlightenment dismembered. It was this idea of fraternity, made human and hearty by his warm love of men and women, that Whitman got from the expansive fifties and built into his thinking. The conception of solidarity, then entering the realm of proletarian thought through the labors of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, was his response to the new times--a response that infused his democratic faith with a glowing humanism. Democracy spiritualized by Channing and Emerson and Parker had suffered limitations from their lingering Hebraisms--the Puritan passion for righteousness had imposed strict ethical bounds on the democratic will. In Thoreau it had been subjected to caustic skepticisms--the transcendental individualist quizzically asked, “What _is_ your people?” and refused to subject himself to the mass. But in Whitman all limitations and skepticisms were swept away by the feeling of comradeship. Flesh is kin to flesh, and out of the great reserves of life is born the average man “with his excellent good manliness.” Not in distinction but in oneness with the whole is found the good life, for in fellowship is love and in the whole is freedom; and love and freedom are the law and the prophets. The disintegrations of the earlier individualism must be succeeded by a new integration; fear and hate and jealousy and pride have held men apart hitherto, but love will draw them together. After all solidarity--the children of America merging in the fellowship, sympathetic, responsive, manlike yet divine, of which the poet should be the prophet and literature provide the sermons.

It was a noble conception--washing away all the meanness that befouled Jacksonian individualism--and it somewhat slowly found its way to parity with his first master conception, the universal ego, and settled into place in those later opening lines of _Leaves of Grass_:

One’s-self I sing, a simple separate person,
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.[558]

Then came the war to strengthen his faith in the common man. As he watched the soldiers marching, fighting, suffering, he was deeply impressed with their courage, patience, kindness, manliness, and came to reverence the deep wellspring of national being from which issued such inexhaustible waters. It was not the few but the many that gave him hope. “I never before so realized the majesty and reality of the American people _en masse_,” he wrote of some regiments returning from the front. “It fell upon me like a great awe.”[559] And as he contemplated this fecund people, with its sons and daughters issuing strong and wholesome from every part of the land, there came to him a new conception of unity--the Union that Lincoln loved--the drawing together into an indissoluble whole of the far-flung commonwealths--a realization of the perfect State where reign liberty, equality, fraternity. Solidarity had taken on a political complexion but its life-blood was in the veins of a free people.

But pagan though he was in his deeper nature, a child of the emotional fifties, he was a transcendentalist also and his democratic philosophy, as it took shape, bears unmistakable marks of the New England school, supplemented perhaps by Quakerism. His well-known comment, “I was simmering and simmering; it was Emerson brought me to boil,” suggests much, and in particular that the Enlightenment as it had come to him through the Jeffersonian heritage was supplemented and spiritualized by the Enlightenment as it had taken special form in passing through the transcendental mind. To this latter source must be traced the philosophic monism that served to draw his speculations together--a mystic sense of the divine oneness of life that took his major postulates in golden hands and fused them into a single spiritual whole. Thus instructed the “great Idea, the idea of perfect and free individuals,” became curiously Emersonian in all its amplifications. There is the same glorification of consciousness and will, the same exaltation of the soul, the same trust in the buried life that men call instinct, the same imperious call to heed the voice of innate Godhood; and round and about this “perfect and free individual” is a mystical egocentric universe wherein the children of men may luxuriate in their divinity. The body is excellent as the soul is excellent; away, therefore, with all shamefacedness--the mean secretiveness, the putting of fingers to the lips in presence of the naked, the lies in presence of open palpable fact! For if this be indeed God’s universe, and He is in and through it all, the children of Adam may stand in His presence unafraid--nay, rather with pride in their own excellence. “I exist as I am, that is enough,” for “Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from.”

Whitman not only accepted Emerson with ungrudging loyalty but he dwelt much with Hegel and the German idealists, and with their help he penetrated curiously to the core of things, discovering there an inner spiritual reality that is the abiding substance behind the external manifestation. He had come upon food to sustain his faith in presence of the mean and base that compassed him about, and the puzzling contradictions of life no longer troubled him. If man be perfectible, if he be indeed a child of God though still in his infancy, how glorious must be the future toward which he is pressing! The evil will pass and the good remain.

Roaming in thought over the Universe, I saw the little that is Good
steadily hastening towards immortality,

And the vast all that is call’d Evil I saw hastening to merge
itself and become lost and dead.[560]

When he turned from the oracular utterance of _Leaves of Grass_ to sober exposition, he phrased it thus:

There is, apart from mere intellect ... a wondrous something that
realises without argument ... an intuition of the absolute balance,
in time and space, of the whole of this multifarious, mad chaos of
fraud, frivolity, hoggishness--this revel of fools, and incredible
make-believe and general unsettledness, we call the _world_; a
soul-sight of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the
whole congeries of things, all history and time, and all events
however trivial, however momentous, like a leash’d dog in the hands
of the hunter.[561]

To discover this divine clue and be drawn by the unseen thread into the orbit of things, to suffer the Me--the “human identity of understanding, emotions, spirit”--to fuse with the Not Me--“the whole of the material, objective universe and laws, with what is behind them in time and space”--became therefore for Whitman the grand objective of man’s life and effort. This for him was the sum and substance of religion, which was no other than the binding of the individual back upon the whole. “A vast similitude interlocks all.” And so from his conception of social solidarity he went forward to the conception of spiritual solidarity, and discovered religion to be the crown and glory of the “American Idea.” Walt Whitman and America were to be the prophets of religion. “Easily at home in a natural world of prodigious brightness and scale, he ... saw ‘the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon,’ and was urging the life of instinct and impulse. Love was the key--taking form and in ‘Starting from Paumanok’ he asserted his Love, Democracy, Religion--a new religion.”[562] His message was purpose.

The soul,
Forever and forever--longer than soil is brown and solid--longer than
water ebbs and flows.

I will make the poems of materials, for I think they are to be the
most spiritual poems,
And I will make the poems of my body and of mortality,
For I think I shall then supply myself with the poems of my soul and
of immortality.

I will make a song for these States that no one State may under any
circumstances be subjected to another State,

* * * * *

I will sing the song of companionship,

* * * * *

I will write the evangel-poem of comrades and of love,

* * * * *

I am the credulous man of qualities, ages, races,
I advance from the people in their own spirit,

* * * * *

I, too, following many and follow’d by many, inaugurate a
religion, ...

* * * * *

Each is not for its own sake,
I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky are for religion’s
sake.

I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough,
None has ever yet adored or worship’d half enough,
None has begun to think how divine he himself is, and how certain the
future is.

* * * * *

I say that the real and permanent grandeur of these States must be
their religion,
Otherwise there is no real and permanent grandeur;

* * * * *

My comrade!
For you to share with me two greatnesses, and a third one rising
inclusive and more resplendent,
The greatness of Love and Democracy, and the greatness of
Religion.[563]

But this new religion of the mystical Whitman, in harmony with post-transcendental thought, was deeply impregnated with the spirit of science. He was in the very fullness of his powers when the conception of evolution came to him and he greeted it gladly, weaving it into all his thinking and discovering in it a confirmation of his idealistic philosophy. It was the evolution of Herbert Spencer, it must be remembered, that Whitman accepted--teleological, buoyantly optimistic, dominated by the conception of progress, shot through with the spirit of the Enlightenment; and such an evolution was a confirmation and not a denial of his transcendental premises. It supplemented rather than contradicted the tenets of his faith. Like Emerson as he saw the bounds of the material universe slowly pushed back by science he discovered amidst the constant change the presence of growth, development, the natural passage from the simple to the complex; and like Theodore Parker he felt that this slow unfolding was no other than the unfolding of God, making Himself evident and unmistakable to man. Evolution was God’s great plan. “The law over all, the law of laws, is the law of successions,” he was persuaded; “for what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?” But noble as is the evidence of God’s work discoverable by science, the soul is not content to rest with such evidence; it must seek out the reality behind the manifestation; and for this work the poet alone is fitted. The poet must complete the work of the scientist. The noble “Passage to India” is a lovely chant of human progress, the adventurous soul conquering the earth; but it must not pause there; it must seek God through the universe until it finds Him, and “Nature and Man shall be disjoin’d and diffused no more,” and “All these hearts as of fretted children shall be sooth’d.”

Bathe me O God in thee, mounting to thee,
I and my soul to range in range of thee.[564]

It was in this profoundly religious spirit that Whitman accepted science, built it into his poetry, rested confidently upon it; and it is this spirit that explains his formal statement in the “Song of Myself.”

I accept Reality and dare not question it,
Materialism first and last imbuing.

Hurrah for positive science! long live exact demonstration!
Fetch stonecrop mixt with cedar and branches of lilac,
This is the lexicographer, this the chemist, this made a grammar
of the old cartouches,
These mariners put the ship through dangerous unknown seas,
This the geologist, this works with the scalpel, and this is
the mathematician.

Gentlemen, to you the first honors always!
Your facts are useful, and yet they are not my dwelling,
I but enter by them to an area of my dwelling.[565]

Equipped with such a philosophy and supported by such a faith Whitman accepted the twin duties laid upon him: to make clear to America her present failure in the great adventure--how far she had fallen short hitherto of any adequate democratic reality; and to mark out afresh the path to the Canaan of democratic hopes--reviving the early hopes of the Enlightenment and drawing in lovelier colors the democratic Utopia dreamed of for a hundred years. To be both critic and prophet--that he conceived to be his mission, a mission that he was faithful to for upwards of forty years. For the first duty he was admirably equipped. No other knew this America so intimately or so broadly--had penetrated so lovingly to the common heart and read so clearly its secret hopes and fears. That America was not yet a democracy--was very far indeed from a democracy--that it was a somewhat shoddy _bourgeois_ capitalistic society shot through with cant and hypocrisy and every meanness, he saw with calm, searching eyes. No contemporary critic, not Godkin, not Emerson, saw more clearly the unlovely reality or dealt with it more scathingly, not only in _Leaves of Grass_ but especially in his prose writings and in casual talk. Amongst scores of such passages a single one must serve for illustration.

I say that our New World democracy, however great a success in
uplifting the masses out of their sloughs, in materialistic
development, products, and in a certain highly-deceptive
superficial popular intellectuality, is, so far, an almost complete
failure in its social aspects, and in really grand religious,
moral, literary, and esthetic results.... Shift and turn the
combinations of the statement as we may, the problem of the future
of America is in certain respects as dark as it is vast. Pride,
competition, segregation, vicious wilfulness, and license beyond
example, brood already upon us. Unwieldy and immense, who shall
hold in behemoth? who bridle leviathan? Flaunt it as we choose,
athwart and over the roads of our progress loom huge uncertainty,
and dreadful threatening gloom. It is useless to deny it: Democracy
grows rankly up the thickest, noxious, deadliest plants and
fruits of all--brings worse and worse invaders--needs newer,
larger, stronger, keener compensations and compellers. Our lands
embracing so much ... hold in the breast that flame also, capable
of consuming themselves, consuming us all.... Even today, amid
these whirls, incredible flippancy, and blind fury of parties,
infidelity, entire lack of first-rate captains and leaders,
added to the plentiful meanness and vulgarity of the ostensible
masses--that problem, the labor question, beginning to open like
a yawning gulf, rapidly widening every year--what prospect have
we? We sail a dangerous sea of seething currents, cross and
under-currents, vortices,--all so dark and untried.[566]

As a realist Whitman granted the worst charges of the critics of democracy, but he probed deeper and brought other facts to light that modified the equation. It was the difficult question the old Federalists had posed and that Carlyle had lately revived--the question, is not this meanness inseparable from democracy? is not your people in fact a great beast, requiring the lash and the curb? It was the crux of the long debate over democracy and to it Whitman gave anxious and frequent consideration. In fighting the battle of 1790 over again, like Jefferson he rested his case on the native integrity and measureless potentiality of the “bulk-people”--they are the deep soil from which spring the abundant fruits and flowers of civilization. Gentle-nurtured folk do not understand this--they do not like the rank qualities of vital being. Matthew Arnold “always gives you the notion that he hates to touch the dirt--the dirt is so dirty! But everything comes out of the dirt--everything: everything comes out of the people ... not university people, not F.F.V. people: people, people, just people!” In the rude, vital, natural man is the inexhaustible wellspring of good and evil; “He’s got it all ... not only the cruel, beastly, hoggish, cheating, bedbug qualities, but also the spiritual--the noble--the high-born”;[567] in “some ways” he is a “devil of a fellow,” but he is not “all devil or even chiefly devil.”[568] And because he is not chiefly devil such love and beauty and justice and comradeship as there is in the world, such progress in civilization as has been made hitherto, have been possible--how otherwise? If he has journeyed thus far out of the primeval slime, what bounds shall be set to his eventual journeyings? Why put out one’s eyes with a mere handful of years?

So Whitman projected his democratic commonwealth far into the future; he would not have us believe that it had been realized here in America. Political democracy, the struggle for political rights that had engaged America hitherto, was only negative, a necessary preliminary to the ultimate reality. “I submit,” he said, “that the fruition of democracy, on aught like a grand scale, resides altogether in the future,” and its realization depends upon the use to which the people put their freedom. If from it emerges a proud and self-conscious individualism--“the quality of Being, in the object’s self, according to its own central idea and purpose, and of growing therefrom and thereto--not criticism by other standards, and adjustments thereto”--then democracy on a grand scale will be possible and the self-reliant citizen will take his place in a free creative society. The ideal of the growing man, and the ideal of the perfect State--broadly social rather than narrowly political--these were his twin ideals; and the tie that is to bind men together in spontaneous solidarity is love. How characteristic is his sketch of the perfect city, and how deeply saturated with the Enlightenment! There is wanting only a physiocratic economics to make it perfect.

A great city is that which has the greatest men and women,

* * * * *

Where the city stands with the brawniest breed of orators and bards,
Where the city stands that is belov’d by these, and loves them in
return and understands them.
Where no monuments exist to heroes but in the common words and deeds,
Where thrift is in its place, and prudence is in its place,
Where the men and women think lightly of the laws,
Where the slave ceases and the master of slaves ceases,
Where the populace rise at once against the never-ending audacity of
elected persons,

* * * * *

Where outside authority enters always after the precedence of inside
authority.
Where the citizen is always the head and ideal, and President, Mayor,
Governor and what not, are agents for pay,
Where children are taught to be laws to themselves, and to depend on
themselves.
Where equanimity is illustrated in affairs,

* * * * *

Where the city of faithfulest friends stands,
Where the city of the cleanliness of the sexes stands,

* * * * *

There the great city stands.[569]

Individualism, solidarity--on such strong bases he erected his ideal democracy, and the heaven-reaching temple will be overlaid with the rich arts and graces of a civilization worthy at last of the name. Such was the Enlightenment as it came to flower in the passionate idealism of Walt Whitman--a dream that was mocked and flouted and nullified by the Drews and Fisks and Goulds--the “hoggish, cheating, bedbug qualities” of a generation that scorned him for a beast. Even his stout faith was shaken at times by the infidelities of the Gilded Age. He was troubled by the gap that opened between the free individual and the perfect State. “I seem to be reaching for a new politics--for a new economy,” he confessed in 1888; “I don’t quite know what, but for something.”[570] Although he protested, “The older I grow ... the more I am confirmed in my optimism, my democracy,” he projected his hopes farther into the future. He sympathized with the socialists but he was not one of them. His revolutionary ardor abated and he preferred in later years to call himself an evolutionist.[571] “Be radical--be radical,” he said to Traubel, “be not too damned radical.”[572] With his catholic sympathies that refused all bitterness he could not be a partisan--“after the best the partisan will say something better will be said by the man.”[573]

So in the twilight of the romantic revolution Whitman quietly slipped away. The great hopes on which he fed have been belied by after events--so his critics say;[574] as the great hopes of the Enlightenment have been belied. Certainly in this welter of today, with science become the drab and slut of war and industrialism, with sterile money-slaves instead of men, Whitman’s expansive hopes seem grotesque enough. Democracy may indeed be only a euphemism for the rulership of fools. Yet in a time of huge infidelities, in the dun breakdown and disintegration of all faiths, it is not wholly useless to recall the large proportions of Walt Whitman, his tenderness, his heartiness, his faith, his hope. There was in him no weak evasion, no sniveling over the shards of the goodly vessel broken at the well, but even when “old, alone, sick, weak-down, melted-worn with sweat,” a free and joyous acceptance of life.

Thanks in old age--thanks ere I go,

For health, the midday sun, the impalpable air--for life, mere life,

* * * * *

For all my days--not those of peace alone--the days of war the same,

For gentle words, caresses, gifts from foreign lands.

For shelter, wine and meat--for sweet appreciation,

* * * * *
For beings, groups, love, deeds, words, books--for colors, forms,

For all the brave strong men--devoted, hardy, men--who’ve forward
sprung in freedom’s help, all years, all lands,

For braver, stronger, more devoted men--(a special laurel ere I go,
to life’s war’s chosen ones,

The cannoneers of song and thought--the great artillerists--the
foremost leaders, captains of the soul:)

As soldier from an ended war return’d--As traveler out of myriads,
to the long procession retrospective.

Thanks--joyful thanks!--a soldier’s, traveler’s thanks.[575]

A great figure, the greatest assuredly in our literature--yet perhaps only a great child--summing up and transmitting into poetry all the passionate aspirations of an America that had passed through the romantic revolution, the poet of selfhood and the prophet of brotherhood, the virile man and the catholic lover--how shall Walt Whitman become dumb or cease to speak to men unless the children of those who are now half-devil and half-God shall prove to be wholly devil--or wholly moron?

III • The Backwash of the Frontier--Mark Twain

As Whitman contemplated the feeble literature purveyed by the worshipers of the genteel he asked with some irritation: “What is the reason in our time, our lands, that we see no fresh local courage, sanity, of our own--the Mississippi, stalwart Western men, real mental and physical facts, Southerners, etc., in the body of our literature?” That was in 1870 and the answer was at hand in the person of Mark Twain. Here at last was an authentic American--a native writer thinking his own thoughts, using his own eyes, speaking his own dialect--everything European fallen away, the last shred of feudal culture gone, local and western yet continental. A strange and uncouth figure in the eyes of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, yet the very embodiment of the turbulent frontier that had long been shaping a native psychology, and that now at last was turning eastward to Americanize the Atlantic seaboard. Yet in spite of a rare vein of humor, the outcropping of a rich and whimsical imagination, he made his way slowly to polite recognition. For years he was regarded by authoritative critics as little more than a buffoon, an extravagant fun-maker with a broad streak of western coarseness; and it was not till near the end, when he had long been an international figure, that the culture of the East accepted him. It was Howells then who pronounced him “the sole, the incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature ... the very marrow of Americanism.”

Just as that judgment was at the time, it needs qualification now. The marrow of Americanism is not the same substance from generation to generation. The outer environing life of a people works itself slowly into the bones and brings about subtle changes. Mark Twain was indubitably an embodiment of three centuries of American experience--frontier centuries, decentralized, leveling, individualistic; but the Americanism that issued from them came to its flower and was quickly succeeded by another kind as the fields of experience were re-plowed by industrialism and sowed to a different grain. Mark Twain was the child of a frontier past--as Lincoln was, as the Gilded Age was--and the America of today could no more breed him than it could breed Lincoln, or Greeley, or Whitman; his Americanism was the reflection of an environment that is no longer ours, in the slack folk-ways of the frontier that we have outgrown. Child of the Southwest in its early boom days, he was cradled in profitless schemes and nourished on dreams of vast potential wealth. The frontier spirit was an effervescence in his blood and golden expectations flung their mirage over the drab reality. As a boy he took impress from a kindly, ignorant, slave-holding, Calvinistic village world, and he quitted the slattern village life to plunge into the picturesque traffic of the Mississippi in the boom days when every river pilot drove his boat full steam ahead. Then the Far West of silver mines and the Golden Gate took him in hand--a gambling, romantic, optimistic frontier, feverish with flush times, “a beggar’s revel of potential millionaires without the price of a square meal.”[576] And finally this buoyant, irreverent adolescent was taken in hand by the Far East: by New England respectability in the persons of Olivia Langdon of Elmira, William Dean Howells of Cambridge, Twitchell and Warner of Hartford; and by New York in the persons of Carnegie and Gilder and Whitelaw Reid and Henry H. Rogers, to be made over into a man of the world.

Such were his origins and his schooling. All his life he remained a boy, with the imitativeness of youth, and yet with something deep within him that cherished its own integrity. Quick to take color from his environment and at home in crowds, he lived nevertheless in the solitude of his own heart. Acutely conscious of his rough western ways, he admired the culture of the Langdons and the refined art of Howells, and he wanted to be approved by them. A kinsman of Beriah Sellers, he delighted in the great barbecue and wanted to carve great portions for himself, to heap up his plate as others were doing. His reactions to experience were always emotional. He was not a Walt Whitman to penetrate curiously to the core of his own being and grow thence outwardly, content to wait till the world came round to him. He loved to make a splurge, to be talked of, to be in the public eye, to live on an ample scale; he accepted the world’s standards and wished to be measured by them. It was characteristic of the frontier. Wanting other standards, the frontier measured success by obvious material standards. Its aggressive individualism was never spiritual or intellectual or cultural. So with all his heritage of generations of frontier individualism he never achieved an intellectual or spiritual unity, an untroubled conscious integrity, as Emerson did and Whitman did. He never was at home in the world of catholic thought, but all his life he suffered from the petty inhibitions of his origins. He could not throw off the frontier--its psychology and its morality were too deeply intertwined with his primitive self; and the result was a harassing inner conflict that left him maimed.

Yet with all his shortcomings--because of them indeed--Mark Twain is an immensely significant American document. He is a mirror reflecting the muddy cross-currents of American life as the frontier spirit washed in, submerging the old aristocratic landmarks. To know Mark Twain is to know the strange and puzzling contradictions of the Gilded Age. With unconscious fidelity he reveals its crudity, its want of knowledge, discipline, historical perspective; its intellectual incapacity to deal with the complexities of a world passing through the twin revolutions of industrialism and science. And he reflects with equal fidelity certain other qualities that go far to redeem the meanness: a great creative power; an eager idealism, somewhat vague but still fine; a generous sympathy; a manly independence that strove to think honestly; a passionate hatred of wrong and injustice and an honest democratic respect for men as men. A significant if not an unsoiled or heroic document!

That in his later years an impassable gulf opened between Mark Twain and his generation, that the buoyant humorist of the seventies ripened into the bitter satirist of the nineties, is a matter that has been much remarked upon. The fact is clear enough but the explanation is not so clear. In part no doubt--as Van Wyck Brooks has pointed out--the change resulted from a thwarting of the creative artist by a disastrous surrender to the ideals of the Gilded Age; in part, also, it was the inevitable toll exacted by the passing years. A humane and generous spirit cannot long watch with indifference the motley human caravan hastening to eternity--cannot find food for laughter alone in the incredible meanness and folly of men cheating and quarreling in a wilderness of graves. Tenderness, chivalry, love of justice, are poor bucklers to withstand the blows of fate, and Mark Twain had little skill in defense. The humorist like the poet is sensitively responsive to life and the scars multiply fast. Endowed with a nature not unlike Swift’s in its fierce rage at inhumanity, not unlike Sir Philip Sidney’s in its romantic chivalry, he was not a stoic to endure with equanimity. He was foredoomed to suffer vicariously. The comment he wrote Howells in 1899 throws a white light on the man. “I have been reading the morning paper,” he said. “I do it every morning--well knowing that I shall find in it the usual depravities and basenesses and hypocrisies and cruelties that make up civilization, and cause me to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human race.”

Yet granting so much, and granting also a morbid conscience that harassed him with self-condemnation--“What a man sees in the human race is merely himself in the deep and honest privacy of his own heart”--it still remains true that the bleakness of his later years was due in part, at least, to the insubstantial dwelling he chose to live in. The architects of the Gilded Age were jerry-builders, and Mark Twain found his jerry-built house a poor protection against the winter winds. It was perhaps not greatly his fault that he built so flimsily. He was too willing to be caught in the web of material things. He could not reach out for companionship with the great earth. Hamlin Garland in a bleak Dakota shack found help and comfort in the philosophy of Taine, but Mark Twain could not get outside his own skin. He could not break a path through the provincialism of his environment. He was held prisoner to his own thoughts and his only release was through the window of imagination. When harassed beyond endurance he sought release in writing that hid the evidence of his rebellion. What would Livy say, what would the American public say, if they knew he had come to deny all the tribal gods!

There is no more pathetic figure in American literature than Mark Twain, alone and solitary amid the blatant American crowd, living in a dreary wash of speeches and banquets, spinning the threads of a rebellious philosophy out of his own bowels, unaware of what others were spinning, regarding himself as a dangerous fellow and stowing away in his strong-box intellectual bombs that he thought too explosive for the Gilded Age to play with. In his intellectual isolation he could not take the measure of his speculations and he did not realize how common were such conclusions--that his own generation indeed, under the tutelage of the physical sciences, was fast drifting in the same direction, and that the clouds of pessimism were obscuring for many the brighter horizons of an earlier day. If he had known Henry Adams as intimately as he knew Henry H. Rogers, very likely his eyes would have been opened to many things that would have done him good. As it was he knew only that his speculations ran counter to the formal creed of his middle-class neighbors and friends. To deny the dogmas of the conventional orthodoxy and in the face of a smug optimism to assert a mechanistic pessimism, was an unpleasant business that he would have avoided if he could.

But he couldn’t avoid it wholly, and in that fact is to be found the thread that runs through his later life, giving to it such unity and coherence as it possessed. It is this: here was a thoroughly honest mind, that hated all sham and quackery and humbug, and a singularly warm heart, that hated all wrong and cruelty and injustice; and this honest mind and chivalrous heart, deceived and led astray by the mass _mores_, espoused and defended such fragments of ideals, such bits of truth, as he came upon in his solitary brooding, until driven from one stronghold after another he came to doubt the adequacy of all strongholds and took refuge in a black pessimism--God is a malignant being, the universe is a machine, and man is a creature of determinism. It was a fierce and stark reaction from the emotionalism of the fifties--from Beecher’s God of love and Whitman’s religion of democracy. His earlier loyalty to half-gods had brought him at last to deny all the gods. And so a maimed giant, stumbling and uncertain, he made such way as he could; and his journeyings wrung from him many a fierce comment that his generation did not understand.

When the milk of western humor curdled in his veins, a Mark Twain emerged who was a puzzle to the Gilded Age. A humorist who was a good Republican and business man, the Gilded Age could understand; but a satirist who launched his shafts at sacred things--at evangelical religion, the Republican party, the government at Washington, the damned human race itself--it could not understand. The professional fun-maker had outgrown his audience. Expecting the familiar exaggeration, they accounted his bitterest sally a characteristic whimsy, and laughed when he commented bitterly on “this plodding sad pilgrimage, this pathetic drift between the eternities,” or when he exclaimed, “Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of Humor is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.” But the significant thing is that in the end the tyrannizing _mores_ did not conquer, they did not destroy him wholly; but such convictions as he had hewn from puzzling experience, however bleak or repellent they might be, he clung to firmly, desperately, and at last flung them in the face of the Gilded Age that had kept him prisoner.

The slow drift of Mark Twain’s thought from humor to satire--it smacks of Philistinism to call it progress with its many false alarums and excursions and its huge frontier wastefulness--is plain enough to anyone who will take the trouble to chart his course. Roughly it falls into definite stages: the swaggering gayety of western youth in _Innocents Abroad_ and _Roughing It_--the mood of flush times, down-grade with the brakes off; then a gay plunge into satire in _The Gilded Age_; then the West recalled in middle life--_Tom Sawyer_, _Life on the Mississippi_, _Huckleberry Finn_--living over again a youth that is gone; then an excursion into the Middle Ages--_The Prince and the Pauper_ and _A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court_--a romantic flare-up of the democratic passions of the Enlightenment; then the search for the ideal in _Joan of Arc_--the dream of the perfect woman, the Domnei of James Branch Cabell; and finally _The Mysterious Stranger_ and _What is Man?_--a fierce satire of disillusion, the cry of an idealist who realizes at last how greatly he has been cheated by his dreams.

That he should have begun by burlesquing life was itself a broad sign of his frontier origins. Since the first crossing of the Allegheny Mountains a swaggering extravagance of speech had been a hallmark of the Westerner. In part this swagger was an unconscious defense-mechanism against the drabness of frontier life; and in part it was the spontaneous expression of new experiences in an untrammeled world, the spirit of wilderness-leveling. Its procreative source would seem to have been the Ohio River where the rough flatboatmen bequeathed the Mike Fink legend to literature; and it expanded in the huge Davy Crockett hoax--a hoax that would have tickled the ribs of Mark Twain had he traced its genesis and progress, as a colossal example of how the damned human race loves to be humbugged. It developed further in Gus Longstreet’s _Georgia Scenes_ with its grotesque Ransy Sniffle--sorriest of backwoods heroes, too mean-spirited to ruffle like Canebrake Davy; and in Joseph Baldwin’s _Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi_, with its greasy frontier blackguard, Colonel Simon Suggs.