This side of truth is very present to Whitman; it is this
that he means when he tells us that "To glance with an eye
confounds the learning of all times."  But he is not unready.
He is never weary of descanting on the undebatable conviction
that is forced upon our minds by the presence of other men,
of animals, or of inanimate things.  To glance with an eye,
were it only at a chair or a park railing, is by far a more
persuasive process, and brings us to a far more exact
conclusion, than to read the works of all the logicians
extant.  If both, by a large allowance, may be said to end in
certainty, the certainty in the one case transcends the other
to an incalculable degree.  If people see a lion, they run
away; if they only apprehend a deduction, they keep wandering
around in an experimental humour.  Now, how is the poet to
convince like nature, and not like books?  Is there no actual
piece of nature that he can show the man to his face, as he
might show him a tree if they were walking together?  Yes,
there is one: the man's own thoughts.  In fact, if the poet
is to speak efficaciously, he must say what is already in his
hearer's mind.  That, alone, the hearer will believe; that,
alone, he will be able to apply intelligently to the facts of
life.  Any conviction, even if it be a whole system or a
whole religion, must pass into the condition of commonplace,
or postulate, before it becomes fully operative.  Strange
excursions and high-flying theories may interest, but they
cannot rule behaviour.  Our faith is not the highest truth
that we perceive, but the highest that we have been able to
assimilate into the very texture and method of our thinking.
It is not, therefore, by flashing before a man's eyes the
weapons of dialectic; it is not by induction, deduction, or
construction; it is not by forcing him on from one stage of
reasoning to another, that the man will be effectually
renewed.  He cannot be made to believe anything; but he can
be made to see that he has always believed it.  And this is
the practical canon.  It is when the reader cries, "Oh, I
know!" and is, perhaps, half irritated to see how nearly the
author has forestalled his own thoughts, that he is on the
way to what is called in theology a Saving Faith.

Here we have the key to Whitman's attitude.  To give a
certain unity of ideal to the average population of America -
to gather their activities about some conception of humanity
that shall be central and normal, if only for the moment -
the poet must portray that population as it is.  Like human
law, human poetry is simply declaratory.  If any ideal is
possible, it must be already in the thoughts of the people;
and, by the same reason, in the thoughts of the poet, who is
one of them.  And hence Whitman's own formula: "The poet is
individual - he is complete in himself: the others are as
good as he; only he sees it, and they do not."  To show them
how good they are, the poet must study his fellow-countrymen
and himself somewhat like a traveller on the hunt for his
book of travels.  There is a sense, of course, in which all
true books are books of travel; and all genuine poets must
run their risk of being charged with the traveller's
exaggeration; for to whom are such books more surprising than
to those whose own life is faithfully and smartly pictured?
But this danger is all upon one side; and you may judiciously
flatter the portrait without any likelihood of the sitter's
disowning it for a faithful likeness.  And so Whitman has
reasoned: that by drawing at first hand from himself and his
neighbours, accepting without shame the inconsistencies and
brutalities that go to make up man, and yet treating the
whole in a high, magnanimous spirit, he would make sure of
belief, and at the same time encourage people forward by the
means of praise.


II.


We are accustomed nowadays to a great deal of puling over the
circumstances in which we are placed.  The great refinement
of many poetical gentlemen has rendered them practically
unfit for the jostling and ugliness of life, and they record
their unfitness at considerable length.  The bold and awful
poetry of Job's complaint produces too many flimsy imitators;
for there is always something consolatory in grandeur, but
the symphony transposed for the piano becomes hysterically
sad.  This literature of woe, as Whitman calls it, this
MALADIE DE RENE, as we like to call it in Europe, is in many
ways a most humiliating and sickly phenomenon.  Young
gentlemen with three or four hundred a year of private means
look down from a pinnacle of doleful experience on all the
grown and hearty men who have dared to say a good word for
life since the beginning of the world.  There is no prophet
but the melancholy Jacques, and the blue devils dance on all
our literary wires.

It would be a poor service to spread culture, if this be its
result, among the comparatively innocent and cheerful ranks
of men.  When our little poets have to be sent to look at the
ploughman and learn wisdom, we must be careful how we tamper
with our ploughmen.  Where a man in not the best of
circumstances preserves composure of mind, and relishes ale
and tobacco, and his wife and children, in the intervals of
dull and unremunerative labour; where a man in this
predicament can afford a lesson by the way to what are called
his intellectual superiors, there is plainly something to be
lost, as well as something to be gained, by teaching him to
think differently.  It is better to leave him as he is than
to teach him whining.  It is better that he should go without
the cheerful lights of culture, if cheerless doubt and
paralysing sentimentalism are to be the consequence.  Let us,
by all means, fight against that hide-bound stolidity of
sensation and sluggishness of mind which blurs and
decolorises for poor natures the wonderful pageant of
consciousness; let us teach people, as much as we can, to
enjoy, and they will learn for themselves to sympathise; but
let us see to it, above all, that we give these lessons in a
brave, vivacious note, and build the man up in courage while
we demolish its substitute, indifference.

Whitman is alive to all this.  He sees that, if the poet is
to be of any help, he must testify to the livableness of
life.  His poems, he tells us, are to be "hymns of the praise
of things."  They are to make for a certain high joy in
living, or what he calls himself "a brave delight fit for
freedom's athletes."  And he has had no difficulty in
introducing his optimism: it fitted readily enough with his
system; for the average man is truly a courageous person and
truly fond of living.  One of Whitman's remarks upon this
head is worth quotation, as he is there perfectly successful,
and does precisely what he designs to do throughout: Takes
ordinary and even commonplace circumstances; throws them out,
by a happy turn of thinking, into significance and something
like beauty; and tacks a hopeful moral lesson to the end.


"The passionate tenacity of hunters, woodmen, early risers,
cultivators of gardens and orchards and fields, he says, the
love of healthy women for the manly form, seafaring persons,
drivers of horses, the passion for light and the open air, -
all is an old unvaried sign of the unfailing perception of
beauty, and of a residence of the poetic in outdoor people."


There seems to me something truly original in this choice of
trite examples.  You will remark how adroitly Whitman begins,
hunters and woodmen being confessedly romantic.  And one
thing more.  If he had said "the love of healthy men for the
female form," he would have said almost a silliness; for the
thing has never been dissembled out of delicacy, and is so
obvious as to be a public nuisance.  But by reversing it, he
tells us something not unlike news; something that sounds
quite freshly in words; and, if the reader be a man, gives
him a moment of great self-satisfaction and spiritual
aggrandisement.  In many different authors you may find
passages more remarkable for grammar, but few of a more
ingenious turn, and none that could be more to the point in
our connection.  The tenacity of many ordinary people in
ordinary pursuits is a sort of standing challenge to
everybody else.  If one man can grow absorbed in delving his
garden, others may grow absorbed and happy over something
else.  Not to be upsides in this with any groom or gardener,
is to be very meanly organised.  A man should be ashamed to
take his food if he has not alchemy enough in his stomach to
turn some of it into intense and enjoyable occupation.

Whitman tries to reinforce this cheerfulness by keeping up a
sort of outdoor atmosphere of sentiment.  His book, he tells
us, should be read "among the cooling influences of external
nature;" and this recommendation, like that other famous one
which Hawthorne prefixed to his collected tales, is in itself
a character of the work.  Every one who has been upon a
walking or a boating tour, living in the open air, with the
body in constant exercise and the mind in fallow, knows true
ease and quiet.  The irritating action of the brain is set at
rest; we think in a plain, unfeverish temper; little things
seem big enough, and great things no longer portentous; and
the world is smilingly accepted as it is.  This is the spirit
that Whitman inculcates and parades.  He thinks very ill of
the atmosphere of parlours or libraries.  Wisdom keeps school
outdoors.  And he has the art to recommend this attitude of
mind by simply pluming himself upon it as a virtue; so that
the reader, to keep the advantage over his author which most
readers enjoy, is tricked into professing the same view.  And
this spirit, as it is his chief lesson, is the greatest charm
of his work.  Thence, in spite of an uneven and emphatic key
of expression, something trenchant and straightforward,
something simple and surprising, distinguishes his poems.  He
has sayings that come home to one like the Bible.  We fall
upon Whitman, after the works of so many men who write
better, with a sense of relief from strain, with a sense of
touching nature, as when one passes out of the flaring, noisy
thoroughfares of a great city into what he himself has
called, with unexcelled imaginative justice of language, "the
huge and thoughtful night."  And his book in consequence,
whatever may be the final judgment of its merit, whatever may
be its influence on the future, should be in the hands of all
parents and guardians as a specific for the distressing
malady of being seventeen years old.  Green-sickness yields
to his treatment as to a charm of magic; and the youth, after
a short course of reading, ceases to carry the universe upon
his shoulders.


III.


Whitman is not one of those who can be deceived by
familiarity.  He considers it just as wonderful that there
are myriads of stars, as that one man should rise from the
dead.  He declares "a hair on the back of his hand just as
curious as any special revelation."  His whole life is to him
what it was to Sir Thomas Browne, one perpetual miracle.
Everything is strange, everything unaccountable, everything
beautiful; from a bug to the moon, from the sight of the eyes
to the appetite for food.  He makes it his business to see
things as if he saw them for the first time, and professes
astonishment on principle.  But he has no leaning towards
mythology; avows his contempt for what he calls "unregenerate
poetry;" and does not mean by nature


"The smooth walks, trimmed hedges, butterflies, posies, and
nightingales of the English poets, but the whole orb, with
its geologic history, the Kosmos, carrying fire and snow,
that rolls through the illimitable areas, light as a feather
though weighing billions of tons."


Nor is this exhaustive; for in his character of idealist all
impressions, all thoughts, trees and people, love and faith,
astronomy, history, and religion, enter upon equal terms into
his notion of the universe.  He is not against religion; not,
indeed, against any religion.  He wishes to drag with a
larger net, to make a more comprehensive synthesis, than any
or than all of them put together.  In feeling after the
central type of man, he must embrace all eccentricities; his
cosmology must subsume all cosmologies, and the feelings that
gave birth to them; his statement of facts must include all
religion and all irreligion, Christ and Boodha, God and the
devil.  The world as it is, and the whole world as it is,
physical, and spiritual, and historical, with its good and
bad, with its manifold inconsistencies, is what he wishes to
set forth, in strong, picturesque, and popular lineaments,
for the understanding of the average man.  One of his
favourite endeavours is to get the whole matter into a
nutshell; to knock the four corners of the universe, one
after another, about his readers' ears; to hurry him, in
breathless phrases, hither and thither, back and forward, in
time and space; to focus all this about his own momentary
personality; and then, drawing the ground from under his
feet, as if by some cataclysm of nature, to plunge him into
the unfathomable abyss sown with enormous suns and systems,
and among the inconceivable numbers and magnitudes and
velocities of the heavenly bodies.  So that he concludes by
striking into us some sense of that disproportion of things
which Shelley has illuminated by the ironical flash of these
eight words: The desire of the moth for the star.

The same truth, but to what a different purpose!  Whitman's
moth is mightily at his ease about all the planets in heaven,
and cannot think too highly of our sublunary tapers.  The
universe is so large that imagination flags in the effort to
conceive it; but here, in the meantime, is the world under
our feet, a very warm and habitable corner. "The earth, that
is sufficient; I do not want the constellations any nearer,"
he remarks.  And again: "Let your soul stand cool and
composed," says he, "before a million universes."  It is the
language of a transcendental common sense, such as Thoreau
held and sometimes uttered.  But Whitman, who has a somewhat
vulgar inclination for technical talk and the jargon of
philosophy, is not content with a few pregnant hints; he must
put the dots upon his i's; he must corroborate the songs of
Apollo by some of the darkest talk of human metaphysic.  He
tells his disciples that they must be ready "to confront the
growing arrogance of Realism."  Each person is, for himself,
the keystone and the occasion of this universal edifice.
"Nothing, not God," he says, "is greater to one than oneself
is;" a statement with an irreligious smack at the first
sight; but like most startling sayings, a manifest truism on
a second.  He will give effect to his own character without
apology; he sees "that the elementary laws never apologise."
"I reckon," he adds, with quaint colloquial arrogance, "I
reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house
by, after all."  The level follows the law of its being; so,
unrelentingly, will he; everything, every person, is good in
his own place and way; God is the maker of all and all are in
one design.  For he believes in God, and that with a sort of
blasphemous security.  "No array of terms," quoth he, "no
array of terms can say how much at peace I am about God and
about death."  There certainly never was a prophet who
carried things with a higher hand; he gives us less a body of
dogmas than a series of proclamations by the grace of God;
and language, you will observe, positively fails him to
express how far he stands above the highest human doubts and
trepidations.

But next in order of truths to a person's sublime conviction
of himself, comes the attraction of one person for another,
and all that we mean by the word love:-


"The dear love of man for his comrade - the attraction of
friend for friend,
Of the well-married husband and wife, of children and
parents,
Of city for city and land for land."


The solitude of the most sublime idealist is broken in upon
by other people's faces; he sees a look in their eyes that
corresponds to something in his own heart; there comes a tone
in their voices which convicts him of a startling weakness
for his fellow-creatures.  While he is hymning the EGO and
commencing with God and the universe, a woman goes below his
window; and at the turn of her skirt, or the colour of her
eyes, Icarus is recalled from heaven by the run.  Love is so
startlingly real that it takes rank upon an equal footing of
reality with the consciousness of personal existence.  We are
as heartily persuaded of the identity of those we love as of
our own identity.  And so sympathy pairs with self-assertion,
the two gerents of human life on earth; and Whitman's ideal
man must not only be strong, free, and self-reliant in
himself, but his freedom must be bounded and his strength
perfected by the most intimate, eager, and long-suffering
love for others.  To some extent this is taking away with the
left hand what has been so generously given with the right.
Morality has been ceremoniously extruded from the door only
to be brought in again by the window.  We are told, on one
page, to do as we please; and on the next we are sharply
upbraided for not having done as the author pleases.  We are
first assured that we are the finest fellows in the world in
our own right; and then it appears that we are only fine
fellows in so far as we practise a most quixotic code of
morals.  The disciple who saw himself in clear ether a moment
before is plunged down again among the fogs and complications
of duty.  And this is all the more overwhelming because
Whitman insists not only on love between sex and sex, and
between friends of the same sex, but in the field of the less
intense political sympathies; and his ideal man must not only
be a generous friend but a conscientious voter into the
bargain.

His method somewhat lessens the difficulty.  He is not, the
reader will remember, to tell us how good we ought to be, but
to remind us how good we are.  He is to encourage us to be
free and kind, by proving that we are free and kind already.
He passes our corporate life under review, to show that it is
upheld by the very virtues of which he makes himself the
advocate.  "There is no object so soft," he says somewhere in
his big, plain way, "there is no object so soft but it makes
a hub for the wheel'd universe."  Rightly understood, it is
on the softest of all objects, the sympathetic heart, that
the wheel of society turns easily and securely as on a
perfect axle.  There is no room, of course, for doubt or
discussion, about conduct, where every one is to follow the
law of his being with exact compliance.  Whitman hates doubt,
deprecates discussion, and discourages to his utmost the
craving, carping sensibilities of the conscience.  We are to
imitate, to use one of his absurd and happy phrases, "the
satisfaction and aplomb of animals."  If he preaches a sort
of ranting Christianity in morals, a fit consequent to the
ranting optimism of his cosmology, it is because he declares
it to be the original deliverance of the human heart; or at
least, for he would be honestly historical in method, of the
human heart as at present Christianised.  His is a morality
without a prohibition; his policy is one of encouragement all
round.  A man must be a born hero to come up to Whitman's
standard in the practice of any of the positive virtues; but
of a negative virtue, such as temperance or chastity, he has
so little to say, that the reader need not be surprised if he
drops a word or two upon the other side.  He would lay down
nothing that would be a clog; he would prescribe nothing that
cannot be done ruddily, in a heat.  The great point is to get
people under way.  To the faithful Whitmanite this would be
justified by the belief that God made all, and that all was
good; the prophet, in this doctrine, has only to cry "Tally-
ho," and mankind will break into a gallop on the road to El
Dorado.  Perhaps, to another class of minds, it may look like
the result of the somewhat cynical reflection that you will
not make a kind man out of one who is unkind by any precepts
under heaven; tempered by the belief that, in natural
circumstances, the large majority is well disposed.  Thence
it would follow, that if you can only get every one to feel
more warmly and act more courageously, the balance of results
will be for good.

So far, you see, the doctrine is pretty coherent as a
doctrine; as a picture of man's life it is incomplete and
misleading, although eminently cheerful.  This he is himself
the first to acknowledge; for if he is prophetic in anything,
it is in his noble disregard of consistency.  "Do I
contradict myself?" he asks somewhere; and then pat comes the
answer, the best answer ever given in print, worthy of a
sage, or rather of a woman: "Very well, then, I contradict
myself!" with this addition, not so feminine and perhaps not
altogether so satisfactory: "I am large - I contain
multitudes."  Life, as a matter of fact, partakes largely of
the nature of tragedy.  The gospel according to Whitman, even
if it be not so logical, has this advantage over the gospel
according to Pangloss, that it does not utterly disregard the
existence of temporal evil.  Whitman accepts the fact of
disease and wretchedness like an honest man; and instead of
trying to qualify it in the interest of his optimism, sets
himself to spur people up to be helpful.  He expresses a
conviction, indeed, that all will be made up to the victims
in the end; that "what is untried and afterward" will fail no
one, not even "the old man who has lived without purpose and
feels it with bitterness worse than gall."  But this is not
to palliate our sense of what is hard or melancholy in the
present.  Pangloss, smarting under one of the worst things
that ever was supposed to come from America, consoled himself
with the reflection that it was the price we have to pay for
cochineal.  And with that murderous parody, logical optimism
and the praises of the best of possible words went
irrevocably out of season, and have been no more heard of in
the mouths of reasonable men.  Whitman spares us all
allusions to the cochineal; he treats evil and sorrow in a
spirit almost as of welcome; as an old sea-dog might have
welcomed the sight of the enemy's topsails off the Spanish
Main.  There, at least, he seems to say, is something obvious
to be done.  I do not know many better things in literature
than the brief pictures, - brief and vivid like things seen
by lightning, - with which he tries to stir up the world's
heart upon the side of mercy.  He braces us, on the one hand,
with examples of heroic duty and helpfulness; on the other,
he touches us with pitiful instances of people needing help.
He knows how to make the heart beat at a brave story; to
inflame us with just resentment over the hunted slave; to
stop our mouths for shame when he tells of the drunken
prostitute.  For all the afflicted, all the weak, all the
wicked, a good word is said in a spirit which I can only call
one of ultra-Christianity; and however wild, however
contradictory, it may be in parts, this at least may be said
for his book, as it may be said of the Christian Gospels,
that no one will read it, however respectable, but he gets a
knock upon his conscience; no one however fallen, but he
finds a kindly and supporting welcome.


IV.


Nor has he been content with merely blowing the trumpet for
the battle of well-doing; he has given to his precepts the
authority of his own brave example.  Naturally a grave,
believing man, with little or no sense of humour, he has
succeeded as well in life as in his printed performances.
The spirit that was in him has come forth most eloquently in
his actions.  Many who have only read his poetry have been
tempted to set him down as an ass, or even as a charlatan;
but I never met any one who had known him personally who did
not profess a solid affection and respect for the man's
character.  He practises as he professes; he feels deeply
that Christian love for all men, that toleration, that
cheerful delight in serving others, which he often celebrates
in literature with a doubtful measure of success.  And
perhaps, out of all his writings, the best and the most human
and convincing passages are to be found in "these soil'd and
creas'd little livraisons, each composed of a sheet or two of
paper, folded small to carry in the pocket, and fastened with
a pin," which he scribbled during the war by the bedsides of
the wounded or in the excitement of great events.  They are
hardly literature in the formal meaning of the word; he has
left his jottings for the most part as he made them; a homely
detail, a word from the lips of a dying soldier, a business
memorandum, the copy of a letter-short, straightforward to
the point, with none of the trappings of composition; but
they breathe a profound sentiment, they give us a vivid look
at one of the sides of life, and they make us acquainted with
a man whom it is an honour to love.

Whitman's intense Americanism, his unlimited belief in the
future of These States (as, with reverential capitals, he
loves to call them), made the war a period of great trial to
his soul.  The new virtue, Unionism, of which he is the sole
inventor, seemed to have fallen into premature unpopularity.
All that he loved, hoped, or hated, hung in the balance.  And
the game of war was not only momentous to him in its issues;
it sublimated his spirit by its heroic displays, and tortured
him intimately by the spectacle of its horrors.  It was a
theatre, it was a place of education, it was like a season of
religious revival.  He watched Lincoln going daily to his
work; he studied and fraternised with young soldiery passing
to the front; above all, he walked the hospitals, reading the
Bible, distributing clean clothes, or apples, or tobacco; a
patient, helpful, reverend man, full of kind speeches.

His memoranda of this period are almost bewildering to read.
From one point of view they seem those of a district visitor;
from another, they look like the formless jottings of an
artist in the picturesque.  More than one woman, on whom I
tried the experiment, immediately claimed the writer for a
fellow-woman.  More than one literary purist might identify
him as a shoddy newspaper correspondent without the necessary
faculty of style.  And yet the story touches home; and if you
are of the weeping order of mankind, you will certainly find
your eyes fill with tears, of which you have no reason to be
ashamed.  There is only one way to characterise a work of
this order, and that is to quote.  Here is a passage from a
letter to a mother, unknown to Whitman, whose son died in
hospital:-


"Frank, as far as I saw, had everything requisite in surgical
treatment, nursing, etc.  He had watches much of the time.
He was so good and well-behaved, and affectionate, I myself
liked him very much.  I was in the habit of coming in
afternoons and sitting by him, and he liked to have me -
liked to put out his arm and lay his hand on my knee - would
keep it so a long while.  Toward the last he was more
restless and flighty at night - often fancied himself with
his regiment - by his talk sometimes seem'd as if his
feelings were hurt by being blamed by his officers for
something he was entirely innocent of - said `I never in my
life was thought capable of such a thing, and never was.'  At
other times he would fancy himself talking as it seem'd to
children or such like, his relatives, I suppose, and giving
them good advice; would talk to them a long while.  All the
time he was out of his head not one single bad word, or
thought, or idea escaped him.  It was remark'd that many a
man's conversation in his senses was not half so good as
Frank's delirium.

"He was perfectly willing to die - he had become very weak,
and had suffer'd a good deal, and was perfectly resign'd,
poor boy.  I do not know his past life, but I feel as if it
must have been good.  At any rate what I saw of him here,
under the most trying circumstances, with a painful wound,
and among strangers, I can say that he behaved so brave, so
composed, and so sweet and affectionate, it could not be
surpassed.  And now, like many other noble and good men,
after serving his country as a soldier, he has yielded up his
young life at the very outset in her service.  Such things
are gloomy - yet there is a text, `God doeth all things
well,' the meaning of which, after due time, appears to the
soul.

"I thought perhaps a few words, though from a stranger, about
your son, from one who was with him at the last, might be
worth while, for I loved the young man, though I but saw him
immediately to lose him."


It is easy enough to pick holes in the grammar of this
letter, but what are we to say of its profound goodness and
tenderness?  It is written as though he had the mother's face
before his eyes, and saw her wincing in the flesh at every
word.  And what, again, are we to say of its sober
truthfulness, not exaggerating, not running to phrases, not
seeking to make a hero out of what was only an ordinary but
good and brave young man?  Literary reticence is not
Whitman's stronghold; and this reticence is not literary, but
humane; it is not that of a good artist but that of a good
man.  He knew that what the mother wished to hear about was
Frank; and he told her about her Frank as he was.


V.


Something should be said of Whitman's style, for style is of
the essence of thinking.  And where a man is so critically
deliberate as our author, and goes solemnly about his poetry
for an ulterior end, every indication is worth notice.  He
has chosen a rough, unrhymed, lyrical verse; sometimes
instinct with a fine processional movement; often so rugged
and careless that it can only be described by saying that he
has not taken the trouble to write prose.  I believe myself
that it was selected principally because it was easy to
write, although not without recollections of the marching
measures of some of the prose in our English Old Testament.
According to Whitman, on the other hand, "the time has
arrived to essentially break down the barriers of form
between Prose and Poetry . . . for the most cogent purposes
of those great inland states, and for Texas, and California,
and Oregon;" - a statement which is among the happiest
achievements of American humour.  He calls his verses
"recitatives," in easily followed allusion to a musical form.
"Easily-written, loose-fingered chords," he cries, "I feel
the thrum of your climax and close."  Too often, I fear, he
is the only one who can perceive the rhythm; and in spite of
Mr. Swinburne, a great part of his work considered as verses
is poor bald stuff.  Considered, not as verse, but as speech,
a great part of it is full of strange and admirable merits.
The right detail is seized; the right word, bold and
trenchant, is thrust into its place.  Whitman has small
regard to literary decencies, and is totally free from
literary timidities.  He is neither afraid of being slangy
nor of being dull; nor, let me add, of being ridiculous.  The
result is a most surprising compound of plain grandeur,
sentimental affectation, and downright nonsense.  It would be
useless to follow his detractors and give instances of how
bad he can be at his worst; and perhaps it would be not much
wiser to give extracted specimens of how happily he can write
when he is at his best.  These come in to most advantage in
their own place; owing something, it may be, to the offset of
their curious surroundings.  And one thing is certain, that
no one can appreciate Whitman's excellences until he has
grown accustomed to his faults.  Until you are content to
pick poetry out of his pages almost as you must pick it out
of a Greek play in Bohn's translation, your gravity will be
continually upset, your ears perpetually disappointed, and
the whole book will be no more to you than a particularly
flagrant production by the Poet Close.

A writer of this uncertain quality was, perhaps, unfortunate
in taking for thesis the beauty of the world as it now is,
not only on the hill-tops but in the factory; not only by the
harbour full of stately ships, but in the magazine of the
hopelessly prosaic hatter.  To show beauty in common things
is the work of the rarest tact.  It is not to be done by the
wishing.  It is easy to posit as a theory, but to bring it
home to men's minds is the problem of literature, and is only
accomplished by rare talent, and in comparatively rare
instances.  To bid the whole world stand and deliver, with a
dogma in one's right hand by way of pistol; to cover reams of
paper in a galloping, headstrong vein; to cry louder and
louder over everything as it comes up, and make no
distinction in one's enthusiasm over the most incomparable
matters; to prove one's entire want of sympathy for the
jaded, literary palate, by calling, not a spade a spade, but
a hatter a hatter, in a lyrical apostrophe; - this, in spite
of all the airs of inspiration, is not the way to do it.  It
may be very wrong, and very wounding to a respectable branch
of industry, but the word "hatter" cannot be used seriously
in emotional verse; not to understand this, is to have no
literary tact; and I would, for his own sake, that this were
the only inadmissible expression with which Whitman had
bedecked his pages.  The book teems with similar
comicalities; and, to a reader who is determined to take it
from that side only, presents a perfect carnival of fun.

A good deal of this is the result of theory playing its usual
vile trick upon the artist.  It is because he is a Democrat
that Whitman must have in the hatter.  If you may say
Admiral, he reasons, why may you not say Hatter?  One man is
as good as another, and it is the business of the "great
poet" to show poetry in the life of the one as well as the
other.  A most incontrovertible sentiment surely, and one
which nobody would think of controverting, where - and here
is the point - where any beauty has been shown.  But how,
where that is not the case? where the hatter is simply
introduced, as God made him and as his fellow-men have
miscalled him, at the crisis of a high-flown rhapsody?  And
what are we to say, where a man of Whitman's notable capacity
for putting things in a bright, picturesque, and novel way,
simply gives up the attempt, and indulges, with apparent
exultation, in an inventory of trades or implements, with no
more colour or coherence than so many index-words out of a
dictionary?  I do not know that we can say anything, but that
it is a prodigiously amusing exhibition for a line or so.
The worst of it is, that Whitman must have known better.  The
man is a great critic, and, so far as I can make out, a good
one; and how much criticism does it require to know that
capitulation is not description, or that fingering on a dumb
keyboard, with whatever show of sentiment and execution, is
not at all the same thing as discoursing music?  I wish I
could believe he was quite honest with us; but, indeed, who
was ever quite honest who wrote a book for a purpose?  It is
a flight beyond the reach of human magnanimity.

One other point, where his means failed him, must be touched
upon, however shortly.  In his desire to accept all facts
loyally and simply, it fell within his programme to speak at
some length and with some plainness on what is, for I really
do not know what reason, the most delicate of subjects.
Seeing in that one of the most serious and interesting parts
of life, he was aggrieved that it should be looked upon as
ridiculous or shameful.  No one speaks of maternity with his
tongue in his cheek; and Whitman made a bold push to set the
sanctity of fatherhood beside the sanctity of motherhood, and
introduce this also among the things that can be spoken of
without either a blush or a wink.  But the Philistines have
been too strong; and, to say truth, Whitman has rather played
the fool.  We may be thoroughly conscious that his end is
improving; that it would be a good thing if a window were
opened on these close privacies of life; that on this
subject, as on all others, he now and then lets fall a
pregnant saying.  But we are not satisfied.  We feel that he
was not the man for so difficult an enterprise.  He loses our
sympathy in the character of a poet by attracting too much of
our attention in that of a Bull in a China Shop.  And where,
by a little more art, we might have been solemnised
ourselves, it is too often Whitman alone who is solemn in the
face of an audience somewhat indecorously amused.


VI.


Lastly, as most important, after all, to human beings in our
disputable state, what is that higher prudence which was to
be the aim and issue of these deliberate productions?

Whitman is too clever to slip into a succinct formula.  If he
could have adequately said his say in a single proverb, it is
to be presumed he would not have put himself to the trouble
of writing several volumes.  It was his programme to state as
much as he could of the world with all its contradictions,
and leave the upshot with God who planned it.  What he has
made of the world and the world's meanings is to be found at
large in his poems.  These altogether give his answers to the
problems of belief and conduct; in many ways righteous and
high-spirited, in some ways loose and contradictory.  And yet
there are two passages from the preface to the LEAVES OF
GRASS which do pretty well condense his teaching on all
essential points, and yet preserve a measure of his spirit.


"This is what you shall do," he says in the one, "love the
earth, and sun, and animals, despise riches, give alms to
every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy,
devote your income and labour to others, hate tyrants, argue
not concerning God, have patience and indulgence towards the
people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to
any man or number of men; go freely with powerful uneducated
persons, and with the young, and mothers of families, read
these leaves (his own works) in the open air every season of
every year of your life; re-examine all you have been told at
school or church, or in any book, and dismiss whatever
insults your own soul."

"The prudence of the greatest poet," he adds in the other -
and the greatest poet is, of course, himself - "knows that
the young man who composedly perilled his life and lost it,
has done exceeding well for himself; while the man who has
not perilled his life, and retains it to old age in riches
and ease, has perhaps achieved nothing for himself worth
mentioning; and that only that person has no great prudence
to learn, who has learnt to prefer real long-lived things,
and favours body and soul the same, and perceives the
indirect surely following the direct, and what evil or good
he does leaping onward and waiting to meet him again, and who
in his spirit, in any emergency whatever, neither hurries nor
avoids death."


There is much that is Christian in these extracts,
startlingly Christian.  Any reader who bears in mind
Whitman's own advice and "dismisses whatever insults his own
soul" will find plenty that is bracing, brightening, and
chastening to reward him for a little patience at first.  It
seems hardly possible that any being should get evil from so
healthy a book as the LEAVES OF GRASS, which is simply
comical wherever it falls short of nobility; but if there be
any such, who cannot both take and leave, who cannot let a
single opportunity pass by without some unworthy and unmanly
thought, I should have as great difficulty, and neither more
nor less, in recommending the works of Whitman as in lending
them Shakespeare, or letting them go abroad outside of the
grounds of a private asylum.



CHAPTER IV - HENRY DAVID THOREAU: HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS



I.


THOREAU'S thin, penetrating, big-nosed face, even in a bad
woodcut, conveys some hint of the limitations of his mind and
character.  With his almost acid sharpness of insight, with
his almost animal dexterity in act, there went none of that
large, unconscious geniality of the world's heroes.  He was
not easy, not ample, not urbane, not even kind; his enjoyment
was hardly smiling, or the smile was not broad enough to be
convincing; he had no waste lands nor kitchen-midden in his
nature, but was all improved and sharpened to a point.  "He
was bred to no profession," says Emerson; "he never married;
he lived alone; he never went to church; he never voted; he
refused to pay a tax to the State; he ate no flesh, he drank
no wine, he never knew the use of tobacco and, though a
naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun.  When asked at
dinner what dish he preferred, he answered, `the nearest.'"
So many negative superiorities begin to smack a little of the
prig.  From his later works he was in the habit of cutting
out the humorous passages, under the impression that they
were beneath the dignity of his moral muse; and there we see
the prig stand public and confessed.  It was "much easier,"
says Emerson acutely, much easier for Thoreau to say NO than
YES; and that is a characteristic which depicts the man.  It
is a useful accomplishment to be able to say NO, but surely
it is the essence of amiability to prefer to say YES where it
is possible.  There is something wanting in the man who does
not hate himself whenever he is constrained to say no.  And
there was a great deal wanting in this born dissenter.  He
was almost shockingly devoid of weaknesses; he had not enough
of them to be truly polar with humanity; whether you call him
demi-god or demi-man, he was at least not altogether one of
us, for he was not touched with a feeling of our infirmities.
The world's heroes have room for all positive qualities, even
those which are disreputable, in the capacious theatre of
their dispositions.  Such can live many lives; while a
Thoreau can live but one, and that only with perpetual
foresight.

He was no ascetic, rather an Epicurean of the nobler sort;
and he had this one great merit, that he succeeded so far as
to be happy.  "I love my fate to the core and rind," he wrote
once; and even while he lay dying, here is what he dictated
(for it seems he was already too feeble to control the pen):
"You ask particularly after my health.  I SUPPOSE that I have
not many months to live, but of course know nothing about it.
I may say that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and
regret nothing."  It is not given to all to bear so clear a
testimony to the sweetness of their fate, nor to any without
courage and wisdom; for this world in itself is but a painful
and uneasy place of residence, and lasting happiness, at
least to the self-conscious, comes only from within.  Now
Thoreau's content and ecstasy in living was, we may say, like
a plant that he had watered and tended with womanish
solicitude; for there is apt to be something unmanly,
something almost dastardly, in a life that does not move with
dash and freedom, and that fears the bracing contact of the
world.  In one word, Thoreau was a skulker.  He did not wish
virtue to go out of him among his fellow-men, but slunk into
a corner to hoard it for himself.  He left all for the sake
of certain virtuous self-indulgences.  It is true that his
tastes were noble; that his ruling passion was to keep
himself unspotted from the world; and that his luxuries were
all of the same healthy order as cold tubs and early rising.
But a man may be both coldly cruel in the pursuit of
goodness, and morbid even in the pursuit of health.  I cannot
lay my hands on the passage in which he explains his
abstinence from tea and coffee, but I am sure I have the
meaning correctly.  It is this; He thought it bad economy and
worthy of no true virtuoso to spoil the natural rapture of
the morning with such muddy stimulants; let him but see the
sun rise, and he was already sufficiently inspirited for the
labours of the day.  That may be reason good enough to
abstain from tea; but when we go on to find the same man, on
the same or similar grounds, abstain from nearly everything
that his neighbours innocently and pleasurably use, and from
the rubs and trials of human society itself into the bargain,
we recognise that valetudinarian healthfulness which is more
delicate than sickness itself.  We need have no respect for a
state of artificial training.  True health is to be able to
do without it.  Shakespeare, we can imagine, might begin the
day upon a quart of ale, and yet enjoy the sunrise to the
full as much as Thoreau, and commemorate his enjoyment in
vastly better verses.  A man who must separate himself from
his neighbours' habits in order to be happy, is in much the
same case with one who requires to take opium for the same
purpose.  What we want to see is one who can breast into the
world, do a man's work, and still preserve his first and pure
enjoyment of existence.

Thoreau's faculties were of a piece with his moral shyness;
for they were all delicacies.  He could guide himself about
the woods on the darkest night by the touch of his feet.  He
could pick up at once an exact dozen of pencils by the
feeling, pace distances with accuracy, and gauge cubic
contents by the eye.  His smell was so dainty that he could
perceive the foetor of dwelling-houses as he passed them by
at night; his palate so unsophisticated that, like a child,
he disliked the taste of wine - or perhaps, living in
America, had never tasted any that was good; and his
knowledge of nature was so complete and curious that he could
have told the time of year, within a day or so, by the aspect
of the plants.  In his dealings with animals, he was the
original of Hawthorne's Donatello. He pulled the woodchuck
out of its hole by the tail; the hunted fox came to him for
protection; wild squirrels have been seen to nestle in his
waistcoat; he would thrust his arm into a pool and bring
forth a bright, panting fish, lying undismayed in the palm of
his hand.  There were few things that he could not do.  He
could make a house, a boat, a pencil, or a book.  He was a
surveyor, a scholar, a natural historian.  He could run,
walk, climb, skate, swim, and manage a boat.  The smallest
occasion served to display his physical accomplishment; and a
manufacturer, from merely observing his dexterity with the
window of a railway carriage, offered him a situation on the
spot.  "The only fruit of much living," he observes, "is the
ability to do some slight thing better."  But such was the
exactitude of his senses, so alive was he in every fibre,
that it seems as if the maxim should be changed in his case,
for he could do most things with unusual perfection.  And
perhaps he had an approving eye to himself when he wrote:
"Though the youth at last grows indifferent, the laws of the
universe are not indifferent, BUT ARE FOR EVER ON THE SIDE OF
THE MOST SENSITIVE."


II.


Thoreau had decided, it would seem, from the very first to
lead a life of self-improvement: the needle did not tremble
as with richer natures, but pointed steadily north; and as he
saw duty and inclination in one, he turned all his strength
in that direction.  He was met upon the threshold by a common
difficulty.  In this world, in spite of its many agreeable
features, even the most sensitive must undergo some drudgery
to live.  It is not possible to devote your time to study and
meditation without what are quaintly but happily denominated
private means; these absent, a man must contrive to earn his
bread by some service to the public such as the public cares
to pay him for; or, as Thoreau loved to put it, Apollo must
serve Admetus.  This was to Thoreau even a sourer necessity
than it is to most; there was a love of freedom, a strain of
the wild man, in his nature, that rebelled with violence
against the yoke of custom; and he was so eager to cultivate
himself and to be happy in his own society, that he could
consent with difficulty even to the interruptions of
friendship.  "SUCH ARE MY ENGAGEMENTS TO MYSELF that I dare
not promise," he once wrote in answer to an invitation; and
the italics are his own.  Marcus Aurelius found time to study
virtue, and between whiles to conduct the imperial affairs of
Rome; but Thoreau is so busy improving himself, that he must
think twice about a morning call.  And now imagine him
condemned for eight hours a day to some uncongenial and
unmeaning business!  He shrank from the very look of the
mechanical in life; all should, if possible, be sweetly
spontaneous and swimmingly progressive.  Thus he learned to
make lead-pencils, and, when he had gained the best
certificate and his friends began to congratulate him on his
establishment in life, calmly announced that he should never
make another.  "Why should I?" said he "I would not do again
what I have done once."  For when a thing has once been done
as well as it wants to be, it is of no further interest to
the self-improver.  Yet in after years, and when it became
needful to support his family, he returned patiently to this
mechanical art - a step more than worthy of himself.

The pencils seem to have been Apollo's first experiment in
the service of Admetus; but others followed.  "I have
thoroughly tried school-keeping," he writes, "and found that
my expenses were in proportion, or rather out of proportion,
to my income; for I was obliged to dress and train, not to
say think and believe, accordingly, and I lost my time into
the bargain.  As I did not teach for the benefit of my
fellow-men, but simply for a livelihood, this was a failure.
I have tried trade, but I found that it would take ten years
to get under way in that, and that then I should probably be
on my way to the devil."  Nothing, indeed, can surpass his
scorn for all so-called business.  Upon that subject gall
squirts from him at a touch.  "The whole enterprise of this
nation is not illustrated by a thought," he writes; "it is
not warmed by a sentiment; there is nothing in it for which a
man should lay down his life, nor even his gloves."  And
again: "If our merchants did not most of them fail, and the
banks too, my faith in the old laws of this world would be
staggered.  The statement that ninety-six in a hundred doing
such business surely break down is perhaps the sweetest fact
that statistics have revealed."  The wish was probably father
to the figures; but there is something enlivening in a hatred
of so genuine a brand, hot as Corsican revenge, and sneering
like Voltaire.