They have no idea of an honest, pure passion, glorying in its strength--intense, intoxicated with the beautiful, giving even to inanimate things pulse and motion, and that transfigures, ennobles, and idealizes the object of its adoration.
They do not walk the streets of the city of life--they explore the sewers; they stand in the gutters and cry "Unclean!" They pretend that beauty is a snare; that love is a Delilah; that the highway of joy is the broad road, lined with flowers and filled with perfume, leading to the city of eternal sorrow.
Since the year 1855 the American people have developed; they are somewhat acquainted with the literature of the world. They have witnessed the most tremendous of revolutions, not only upon the fields of battle, but in the world of thought. The American citizen has concluded that it is hardly worth while being a sovereign unless he has the right to think for himself.
And now, from this height, with the vantage-ground of to-day, I propose to examine this book and to state, in a general way, what Walt Whitman has done, what he has accomplished, and the place he has won in the world of thought.
II. THE RELIGION OF THE BODY.
WALT WHITMAN stood when he published his book, where all stand to-night, on the perpetually moving line where history ends and prophecy begins.
He was full of life to the very tips of his fingers--brave, eager, candid, joyous with health. He was acquainted with the past. He knew something of song and story, of philosophy and art; much of the heroic dead, of brave suffering, of the thoughts of men, the habits of the people--rich as well as poor--familiar with labor, a friend of wind and wave, touched by love and friendship, liking the open road, enjoying the fields and paths, the crags, friend of the forest--feeling that he was free--neither master nor slave; willing that all should know his thoughts; open as the sky, candid as nature, and he gave his thoughts, his dreams, his conclusions, his hopes and his mental portrait to his fellow-men.
Walt Whitman announced the gospel of the body. He confronted the people.
He denied the depravity of man. He insisted that love is not a crime; that men and women should be proudly natural; that they need not grovel on the earth and cover their faces for shame, He taught the dignity and glory of the father and mother; the sacredness of maternity.
Maternity, tender and pure as the tear of pity, holy as suffering--the crown, the flower, the ecstasy of love!
People had been taught from Bibles and from creeds that maternity was a kind of crime; that the woman should be purified by some ceremony in some temple built in honor of some god. This barbarism was attacked in "Leaves of Grass."
The glory of simple life was sung; a declaration of independence was made for each and all.
And yet this appeal to manhood and to womanhood was misunderstood. It was denounced simply because it was in harmony with the great trend of nature. To me, the most obscene word in our language is celibacy.
It was not the fashion for people to speak or write their thoughts.
We were flooded with the literature of hypocrisy. The writers did not faithfully describe the worlds in which they lived. They endeavored to make a fashionable world. They pretended that the cottage or the hut in which they dwelt was a palace, and they called the little area in which they threw their slops their domain, their realm, their empire. They were ashamed of the real, of what their world actually was. They imitated; that is to say, they told lies, and these lies filled the literature of most lands.
Walt Whitman defended the sacredness of love, the purity of passion--the passion that builds every home and fills the world with art and song.
They cried out: "He is a defender of passion--he is a libertine! He lives in the mire. He lacks spirituality!"
Whoever differs with the multitude, especially with a led multitude--that is to say, with a multitude of taggers--will find out from their leaders that he has committed an unpardonable sin. It is a crime to travel a road of your own, especially if you put up guide-boards for the information of others.
Many, many centuries ago Epicurus, the greatest man of his century, and of many centuries before and after, said: "Happiness is the only good; happiness is the supreme end." This man was temperate, frugal, generous, noble--and yet through all these years he has been denounced by the hypocrites of the world as a mere eater and drinker.
It was said that Whitman had exaggerated the importance of love--that he had made too much of this passion. Let me say that no poet--not excepting Shakespeare--has had imagination enough to exaggerate the importance of human love--a passion that contains all heights and all depths--ample as space, with a sky in which glitter all constellations, and that has within it all storms, all lightnings, all wrecks and ruins, all griefs, all sorrows, all shadows, and all the joy and sunshine of which the heart and brain are capable.
No writer must be measured by a word or paragraph. He is to be measured by his work--by the tendency, not of one line, but by the tendency of all.
Which way does the great stream tend? Is it for good or evil? Are the motives high and noble, or low and infamous?
We cannot measure Shakespeare by a few lines, neither can we measure the Bible by a few chapters, nor "Leaves of Grass" by a few paragraphs. In each there are many things that I neither approve nor believe--but in all books you will find a mingling of wisdom and foolishness, of prophecies and mistakes--in other words, among the excellencies there will be defects. The mine is not all gold, or all silver, or all diamonds--there are baser metals. The trees of the forest are not all of one size. On some of the highest there are dead and useless limbs, and there may be growing beneath the bushes weeds, and now and then a poisonous vine.
If I were to edit the great books of the world, I might leave out some lines and I might leave out the best. I have no right to make of my brain a sieve and say that only that which passes through belongs to the rest of the human race. I claim the right to choose. I give that right to all.
Walt Whitman had the courage to express his thought--the candor to tell the truth. And here let me say it gives me joy--a kind of perfect satisfaction--to look above the bigoted bats, the satisfied owls and wrens and chickadees, and see the great eagle poised, circling higher and higher, unconscious of their existence. And it gives me joy, a kind of perfect satisfaction, to look above the petty passions and jealousies of small and respectable people, above the considerations of place and power and reputation, and see a brave, intrepid man.
It must be remembered that the American people had separated from the Old World--that we had declared not only the independence of colonies, but the independence of the individual. We had done more--we had declared that the state could no longer be ruled by the church, and that the church could not be ruled by the state, and that the individual could not be ruled by the church.
These declarations were in danger of being forgotten. We needed a new voice, sonorous, loud and clear, a new poet for America, for the new epoch, somebody to chant the morning song of the new day.
The great man who gives a true transcript of his mind, fascinates and instructs. Most writers suppress individuality. They wish to please the public. They flatter the stupid and pander to the prejudice of their readers. They write for the market, making books as other mechanics make shoes. They have no message, they bear no torch, they are simply the slaves of customers.
The books they manufacture are handled by "the trade;" they are regarded as harmless. The pulpit does not object; the young person can read the monotonous pages without a blush--or a thought.
On the title pages of these books you will find the imprint of the great publishers; on the rest of the pages, nothing. These books might be prescribed for insomnia.
III.
Men of talent, men of business, touch life upon few sides. They travel but the beaten path. The creative spirit is not in them. They regard with suspicion a poet who touches life on every side. They have little confidence in that divine thing called sympathy, and they do not and cannot understand the man who enters into the hopes, the aims and the feelings of all others.
In all genius there is the touch of chaos--a little of the vagabond; and the successful tradesman, the man who buys and sells, or manages a bank, does not care to deal with a person who has only poems for collaterals; they have a little fear of such people, and regard them as the awkward countryman does a sleight-of-hand performer.
In every age in which books have been produced the governing class, the respectable, have been opposed to the works of real genius. If what are known as the best people could have had their way, if the pulpit had been consulted--the provincial moralists--the works of Shakespeare would have been suppressed. Not a line would have reached our time. And the same may be said of every dramatist of his age.
If the Scotch Kirk could have decided, nothing would have been known of Robert Burns. If the good people, the orthodox, could have had their say, not one line of Voltaire would now be known. All the plates of the French Encyclopedia would have been destroyed with the thousands that were destroyed. Nothing would have been known of D'Alembert, Grimm, Diderot, or any of the Titans who warred against the thrones and altars and laid the foundation of modern literature not only, but what is of far greater moment, universal education.
It is not too much to say that every book now held in high esteem would have been destroyed, if those in authority could have had their will.
Every book of modern times that has a real value, that has enlarged the intellectual horizon of mankind, that has developed the brain, that has furnished real food for thought, can be found in the Index Expurgatorius of the Papacy, and nearly every one has been commended to the free minds of men by the denunciations of Protestants.
If the guardians of society, the protectors of "young persons," could have had their way, we should have known nothing of Byron or Shelley.
The voices that thrill the world would now be silent. If authority could have had its way, the world would have been as ignorant now as it was when our ancestors lived in holes or hung from dead limbs by their prehensile tails.
But we are not forced to go very far back. If Shakespeare had been published for the first time now, those divine plays--greater than continents and seas, greater even than the constellations of the midnight sky--would be excluded from the mails by the decision of the present enlightened postmaster-general.
The poets have always lived in an ideal world, and that ideal world has always been far better than the real world. As a consequence, they have forever roused, not simply the imagination, but the energies--the enthusiasm of the human race.
The great poets have been on the side of the oppressed--of the downtrodden. They have suffered with the imprisoned and the enslaved, and whenever and wherever man has suffered for the right, wherever the hero has been stricken down--whether on field or scaffold--some man of genius has walked by his side, and some poet has given form and expression, not simply to his deeds, but to his aspirations.
From the Greek and Roman world we still hear the voices of a few.
The poets, the philosophers, the artists and the orators still speak.
Countless millions have been covered by the waves of oblivion, but the few who uttered the elemental truths, who had sympathy for the whole human race, and who were great enough to prophesy a grander day, are as alive to-night as when they roused, by their bodily presence, by their living voices, by their works of art, the enthusiasm of their fellow-men.
Think of the respectable people, of the men of wealth and position, those who dwelt in mansions, children of success, who went down to the grave voiceless, and whose names we do not know. Think of the vast multitudes, the endless processions, that entered the caverns of eternal night, leaving no thought, no truth as a legacy to mankind!
The great poets have sympathized with the people. They have uttered in all ages the human cry. Unbought by gold, unawed by power, they have lifted high the torch that illuminates the world.
IV.
Walt Whitman is in the highest sense a believer in democracy. He knows that there is but one excuse for government--the preservation of liberty, to the end that man may be happy. He knows that there is but one excuse for any institution, secular or religious--the preservation of liberty; and that there is but one excuse for schools, lor universal education, for the ascertainment of facts, namely, the preservation of liberty. He resents the arrogance and cruelty of power. He has sworn never to be tyrant or slave. He has solemnly declared:
"_I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy, By God!
I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms_."
This one declaration covers the entire ground. It is a declaration of independence, and it is also a declaration of justice, that is to say, a declaration of the independence of the individual, and a declaration that all shall be free. The man who has this spirit can truthfully say:
"_I have taken off my hat to nothing known or unknown. I am for those that have never been master'd._"