Part 3 (2/2)
”... in truth Is but another name for absolute power, And clearest insight, amplitude of mind And reason in her most exalted mood.”
Let Walt Whitman speak for us:
”And I know I am solid and sound; To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow: All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.
”I know I am deathless; I know this...o...b..t of mine cannot be swept by the carpenter's compa.s.s; I know I shall not pa.s.s like a child's carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night.
”I know I am august; I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood; I see that the elementary laws never apologize; (I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by, after all.)
”I exist as I am--that is enough; If no other in the world be aware I sit content; And if each one and all be aware, I sit content.
”One world is aware, and by far the largest to me, and that is myself; And whether I come to my own to-day, or in ten thousand or ten million years, I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.
”My foothold is tenon'd and mortis'd in granite; I laugh at what you call dissolution; And I know the amplitude of time.”
What lies through the portal of death is hidden from us; but the laws that govern that unknown land are not all hidden from us, for they govern here and now; they are immutable, eternal.
”Of and in all these things I have dream'd that we are not to be changed so much, nor the law of us changed, I have dream'd that heroes and good doers shall be under the present and past law, And that murderers, drunkards, liars, shall be under the present and past law, For I have dream'd that the law they are under now is enough.”
And the law not to be eluded is the law of consequences, the law of silent teaching. That is the meaning of disease, pain, remorse. Slow to learn are we; but success is a.s.sured with limitless Beneficence as our teacher, with limitless time as our opportunity. Already we begin--
”To know the Universe itself as a road--as many roads As roads for travelling souls.
For ever alive; for ever forward.
Stately, solemn, sad, withdrawn, baffled, mad, turbulent, feeble, dissatisfied; Desperate, proud, fond, sick; Accepted by men, rejected by men.
They go! they go! I know that they go, but I know not where they go.
But I know they go toward the best, toward something great; The whole Universe indicates that it is good.”
Going somewhere! And if it is impossible for us to see whither, as in the nature of things it must be, how can we be adequate judges of the way? how can we but often grope and be full of perplexity? But we know that a smooth path, a paradise of a world, could only nurture fools, cowards, sluggards. ”Joy is the great unfolder,” but pain is the great enlightener, the great stimulus in certain directions, alike of man and beast. How else could the self-preserving instincts, and all that grows out of them, have been evoked? How else those wonders of the moral world, fort.i.tude, patience, sympathy? And if the lesson be too hard comes Death, come ”the sure-enwinding arms of Death” to end it, and speed us to the unknown land.
”... Man is only weak Through his mistrust and want of hope,”
wrote Wordsworth. But man's mistrust of himself is, at bottom, mistrust of the central Fount of power and goodness whence he has issued. Here comes one who plucks out of religion its heart of fear, and puts into it a heart of boundless faith and joy; a faith that beggars previous faiths because it sees that All is good, not part bad and part good; that there is no flaw in the scheme of things, no primeval disaster, no counteracting power; but orderly and sure growth and development, and that infinite Goodness and Wisdom embrace and ever lead forward all that exists. Are you troubled that He is an unknown G.o.d; that we cannot by searching find Him out? Why, it would be a poor prospect for the Universe if otherwise; if, embryos that we are, we could compa.s.s Him in our thoughts:
”I hear and behold G.o.d in every object, yet understand G.o.d not in the least.”
It is the double misfortune of the churches that they do not study G.o.d in His works--man and Nature and their relations to each other; and that they do profess to set Him forth; that they wors.h.i.+p therefore a G.o.d of man's devising, an idol made by men's minds it is true, not by their hands, but none the less an idol. ”Leaves are not more shed out of trees than Bibles are shed out of you,” says the poet. They were the best of their time, but not of all time; they need renewing as surely as there is such a thing as growth, as surely as knowledge nourishes and sustains to further development; as surely as time unrolls new pages of the mighty scheme of existence. n.o.bly has George Sand, too, written: ”Everything is divine, even matter; everything is superhuman, even man. G.o.d is everywhere. He is in me in a measure proportioned to the little that I am. My present life separates me from Him just in the degree determined by the actual state of childhood of our race. Let me content myself in all my seeking to feel after Him, and to possess of Him as much as this imperfect soul can take in with the intellectual sense I have. The day will come when we shall no longer talk about G.o.d idly; nay, when we shall talk about Him as little as possible. We shall cease to set Him forth dogmatically, to dispute about His nature. We shall put compulsion on no one to pray to Him, we shall leave the whole business of wors.h.i.+p within the sanctuary of each man's conscience. And this will happen when we are really religious.”
In what sense may Walt Whitman be called the Poet of Democracy? It is as giving utterance to this profoundly religious faith in man. He is rather the prophet of what is to be than the celebrator of what is. ”Democracy,”
he writes, ”is a word the real gist of which still sleeps quite unawakened, notwithstanding the resonance and the many angry tempests out of which its syllables have come from pen or tongue. It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten because that history has yet to be enacted. It is in some sort younger brother of another great and often used word, Nature, whose history also waits unwritten.” Political democracy, now taking shape, is the house to live in, and whilst what we demand of it is room for all, fair chances for all, none disregarded or left out as of no account, the main question, the kind of life that is to be led in that house is altogether beyond the ken of the statesmen as such, and is involved in those deepest facts of the nature and destiny of man which are the themes of Walt Whitman's writings. The practical outcome of that exalted and all-accepting faith in the scheme of things, and in man, toward whom all has led up and in whom all concentrates as the manifestation, the revelation of Divine Power is a changed estimate of himself; a higher reverence for, a loftier belief in the heritage of himself; a perception that pride, not humility, is the true homage to his Maker; that ”n.o.blesse oblige” is for the Race, not for a handful; that it is mankind and womankind and their high destiny which constrain to greatness, which can no longer stoop to meanness and lies and base aims, but must needs clothe themselves in ”the majesty of honest dealing”
(majestic because demanding courage as good as the soldier's, self-denial as good as the saint's for every-day affairs), and walk erect and fearless, a law to themselves, sternest of all lawgivers. Looking back to the palmy days of feudalism, especially as immortalized in Shakespeare's plays, what is it we find most admirable? what is it that fascinates? It is the n.o.ble pride, the lofty self-respect; the dignity, the courage and audacity of its great personages. But this pride, this dignity rested half upon a true, half upon a hollow foundation; half upon intrinsic qualities, half upon the ignorance and brutishness of the great ma.s.ses of the people, whose helpless submission and easily dazzled imaginations made stepping-stones to the elevation of the few, and ”hedged round kings,”
with a specious kind of ”divinity.” But we have our faces turned toward a new day, and toward heights on which there is room for all.
”By G.o.d, I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms”
is the motto of the great personages, the great souls of to-day. _On the same terms_, for that is Nature's law and cannot be abrogated, the reaping as you sow. But all shall have the chance to sow well. This is pride indeed! Not a pride that isolates, but that can take no rest till our common humanity is lifted out of the mire everywhere, ”a pride that cannot stretch too far because sympathy stretches with it”:
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