Part 17 (2/2)

Though Whitman boasts of his affiliation with the coar, the mean, the humdrum, by the breadth of his charity and sympathy and his tremendous ideality

Of worldliness, materialism, commercialism, he has not a trace; his only values are spiritual and ideal; his only standards are the essential and the enduring What Matthew Arnold called the Anglo-Saxon contagion, the bourgeois spirit, the worldly and sordid ideal, is entirely corrected in Whitman by the ascendant of the ethic and the universal His democracy ends in universal brotherhood, his patriotislorification of the oism issues at last in complete otherism

A race that can produce a man of his fibre, his continental type, is yet at its best estate Did one begin to see evil ohtening of the Arace without power, clearness without mass, intellect without character,--then take comfort froin to fear that the decay of maternity and paternity in our older coed the drying up of the race in its very sources? Then welcome to the rank sexuality and to the athletic fatherhood and motherhood celebrated by Whitman Did our skepticism, our headiness, our worldliness, threaten to eat us up like a cancer? did our hardness, our irreligiousness, and our passion for the genteel point to a fugitive, superficial race? was our literature threatened with the artistic degeneration,--running all to art and not at all to poere our communities invaded by a dry rot of culture? e fast beco deeper and deeper into the ”incredible sloughs of fashi+on and all kinds of dyspeptic depletion,”--the antidote for all these ills is in Walt Whitreat fullness and fertility, and an immense friendliness He supplements and corrects most of the special deficiencies and weaknesses tohich the As us back to nature again The perpetuity of the race is with the co out at the top, in our tiet fewer and fewer and poorer and poorer children Where struggle ceases, that family or race is doomed

”Now understand s that from any fruition of success, no reater struggle necessary”

In more primitive communities, the sap and vitality of the race were kept in the best reatest

War, adventure, discovery, favor virility Whitman is always and everywhere occupied with that which evity, manliness The scholar poets are occupied with that which makes for culture, taste, refinement, ease, art

”Leaves of Grass,” taken as a whole, aims to exhibit a modern, de and subduing our enor it off and on as a gar hi hi in the life of his body and the delights of his senses; and seeking to clinch, to develop, and to realize hih the shows and events of the visible world The poet seeks to interpret life from the central point of absolute abyse in nature hich Whitman perpetually identifies hiinal in hu upon hiuilty of a certain narrowness in preferring, or seeentleman

But the poet uses these elements only for checks and balances, and to keep our attention, in the e, fixed upon the fact that here are the final sources of our health, our power, our longevity The need of the pre-scientific age was knowledge and refinee is health and sanity, cool heads and good digestion And to this end the bitter and drastic remedies from the shore and the e ht, was inih excellence But, in holding up the averageup the broad, universal huo with them also As a matter of fact, are we not astonished ale reatness, true nobility and strength of soul, o with coe her, without at all weakening the qualities which he shares with universal hues and social refinements

He says that one of the convictions that underlie his ”Leaves” is the conviction that the ”crowning growth of the United States is to be spiritual and heroic,”--a prophecy which in our times, I confess, does not seely and anxiously toward the genteel social Gods, but quite the contrary In the library and parlor, he confesses he is as a gawk or one dureat middle-class ideal, which is mainly the ideal of our own people, Whither import than to have wealth and be respectable and in the e hi only half truths, as Mr Stedman has done, did he simply rest with the native as opposed to the cultivated, with brawn as opposed to brains What he does do, what the upshot of his teaching shows, is that he identifies himself with the masses, with those universal human currents out of which alone a national spirit arises, as opposed to isolated schools and coteries and a privileged few Whitman decries culture only so far as it cuts a man off from his fellows, clips away or effaces the sweet, native, healthy parts of hiets a bloodless, superstitious, infidelistic class ”The best culture,” he says, ”will always be that of theperceptions, and of self-respect” For the , which takes the bone and nerve building elements out of our bread The bread of life demands the coarse as well as the fine, and this is what Whitreat mass of the people, with the commoner, sturdier, huelo, or Reers He was not a product of the schools, but of the race

HIS RELATION TO HIS COUNTRY AND HIS TIMES

I

It has been said, and justly I think, that in Whitenuinely de like an ample scale Plenty of men of democratic tendencies and affiliations have appeared, but none that have carried the temper and quality of the people, the ions, or blended the sa personality and spirituality In recent English poetry the names of Burns and Wordsworth occur tolike Whitman's breadth of relation to thecosmic emotion Wordsworth's enius de the word to express, not a political creed, but the genius of modern civilization He s, but always does the poet stand apart, the recluse, the hers for purposes of his art Only through intellectual sympathy is he a part of what he surveys In Whithty, almost aristocratic He coolly confronts the old types, the ates him to the past He readjusts the standards, and esti from the human and democratic point of view In his scheme, the old traditions--the aristocratic, the scholastic, the ecclesiastical, the military, the social traditions--play no part He dared to look at life, past and present, from the American and scientific standpoint He turns to the old types a pride and complacency equal to their own

Indeed, we see in the character which Whitman has exploited and in the interest of which his poems are written, the democratic type fully realized,--pride and self-reliance equal to the greatest, and these matched with a love, a compassion, a spirit of fraternity and equality, that are entirely foreign to the old order of things

II

At first sight Whitman does not seem vitally related to his own country and people; he seems an anomaly, an exception, or like one of those etable world The Whitman ideal is not, and has never been, the conscious ideal of the mass of our people We have aspired entleured in British letters There seems to have been no hint or prophecy of such a land literature, unless it be in Eion of the abstract and not of the concrete Emerson's prayer was for the absolutely self-reliant ard to certain passages in the ”Leaves,” the sage withheld further approval of the work

We ins of Whitman, I think, in the deep world-currents that have been shaping the destinies of the race for the past hundred years orobstructions; in the e forward and taking possession of the world in their own right; in the triucraft and priestcraft; the growth of individualisust of the soul of man with forms and cereious hunger that flees the churches; the growing conviction that life, that nature, are not failures, that the universe is good, that man is clean and divine inside and out, that God is is and more lie back of Whitman, and hold a causal relation to him

III