Part 13 (2/2)

It is to exploit and enforce and illustrate this type or character that ”Leaves of Grass” is written The poems are the drama of this new democratic man This type Whitman finds in himself He does not have to create it as Shakespeare did Hamlet or Lear; he has only to discover it in hiives it free utterance His work is, therefore, as he says, the poee,--written as upon the face of the continent, written in the types and events he finds on all sides He sees hiood, and he sees all men in himself All the stupendous claiotism is vicarious and embraces the world It is not the private individual Walt Whitman that makes these stupendous claienius of American democracy He is not to discuss a question He is to outline a character, he is to incarnate a principle

The essayist or philosopher iven idea,--ive us the thing itself, the concrete flesh-and-blood reality Whitman is not only to make this survey, to launch this criticis human personality, and enable us to see the world of h its eyes What with the scientist, the philosopher, is thought, must be emotion and passion with hireatnesses, and a third one rising inclusive and reatness of Love and Deion”--

notimpulses He is to show the spirit of absolute, i, i a all the joys and abandon the oracles from the American point of view And the utterance launched forth is to be imbued with poetic passion

Whitman always aims at a complete human synthesis, and leaves his reader to make of it what he can It is not for the poet to qualify and explain

He seeks to reproduce his whole nature in a book,--reproduce it with all its contradictions and carnalities, the good and the bad, the coarse and the fine, the body and the soul,--to give free swing to hi to natural checks and coood result at last, but not at all disturbed if you find parts of it bad as in creation itself

Histhat of the poet, and not that of thethis virtue and that, giving parts and fragive all, not abstractly, but concretely, synthetically

To a common prostitute Whitman says:--

”Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you; Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you, and the leaves to rustle for you, do listen and rustle for you”

We are housed in social usages and lae are sheltered and warmed and comforted by conventions and institutions and numberless traditions; their value no one disputes But for purposes of his own Whitnores thereat out-of-doors of absolute nature; his standards are not found inside of any four walls; he contemplates life, and would quicken it in its fundamentals; his survey is from a plane whence our arts and refinements and petty distinctions disappear He sees the evil of the world no less necessary than the good; he sees death as a part of life itself; he sees the body and the soul as one; he sees the spiritual always issuing from the material; he sees not one result at last lamentable in the universe

IV

Unless, as I have already said, we allow Whitman to be a law unto himself, we can make little of him; unless we place ourselves at his absolute point of view, his work is an offense and withoutThe only question is, Has he a law, has he a steady and rational point of view, is his work a consistent and well-organized whole? Ask yourself, What is the point of view of absolute, uncoood and sound; things are as they should be or must be; there are no conceivable failures; there is no evil in the final analysis, or, if there is, it is necessary, and plays its part also; there is nothan there is now, no more heaven or hell than we find or uess the celestial laws are yet to be work'd over and rectified?”

It has been urged that Whitman violates his own canon of the excellence of nature But what he violates is more a secondary or acquired nature He violates our social conventions and instincts, he exposes e cover up; but the spirit of his undertaking demanded this of him Remember that at all hazards he is to let nature--absolute nature--speak; that he is to be the poet of the body as well as of the soul, and that no part of the body of a man or woman, ”hearty and clean,” is vile, and that ”none shall be less falory is, that he never flinched or hesitated in following his principle to its logical conclusions,--””

It was an heroic sacrifice, and atones for the sins of us all,--the sins of perverting, denying, abusing the ans and functions of our bodies

V

In Whitman we find the most complete identification of thehe portrays Not merely does he portray America,--he speaks out of the American spirit, the spirit that has broken irrevocably with the past and turns joyously to the future; he does not praise equality, he illustrates it; he puts himself down beside the lowest and most despised person, and calls him brother

”You felons on trial in courts, You convicts in prison-cells, you sentenced assassins chain'd and handcuff'd with iron, Who am I too that I am not on trial or in prison?

Me ruthless and devilish as any, that my wrists are not chain'd with iron, or ive a little charity, he gives hiht; he does not write a treatise on de in heaven and on earth, and redistributes the prizes fro the praises of science, but he launches his poems always from the scientific view of the world, in contradistinction to the old theological and mythical point of view It is always the exaives us Few precepts, no sermon, no reproof Does he praise candor? No, he is candor; he confesses to everything; he shows us the in of his mind We know him better than we know our nearest friends Does he exalt the pride of ain he illustrates it: he is egoism; he makes the whole universe revolve around hioes out of hiocentric method of treatment is what characterizes hi, he carves nothing, but y Wave after wave radiates froet always is Walt Whitman Our attention is never fixed upon the writer, but always upon theone with his subject, and speaking out of it, is always the uishes the artist from the mere thinker or prose-writer

The latter tells us about a thing; the for itself

If Whitman had put his criticisument or essay, the world would have received it very differently As an intellectual statement or proposition, we could have played with it and tossed it about as a ball in a game of shuttlecock, and dropped it e tired of it, as we do other criticisave it to us as afor us It is easier to deal with a theory than with the concrete reality A e, and will not be easily put aside