WHITMAN AS PROPHET

DR. R. MAURICE BUCKE, in his “Memories of Walt Whitman,”[5] speaking of the years 1853-55, and of the inception of “Leaves of Grass,” says, “A very few years before these dates we find Walt Whitman writing tales, essays, sketches, and even poems, which are in no way distinguishable from that ‘mighty tide of ditch water’ which Carlyle tells us flows day by day from the power-presses of civilisation. All at once he writes the greatest book of a great century. Where did he get the stuff to put in it? How did he get it all in a minute, as it were? Or, if it was in him before, why did it not show itself? My memories of Walt Whitman include many talks, in which I did my best to obtain light upon these and related problems. Generally, he would pass over the subject with a half-answer or a return question; at other times he would be more explicit, as he was one day in the summer of 1886, when he said—‘Leaves of Grass was there, though unformed, all the time, in whatever answers as the laboratory of the mind. I was more or less conscious of it, and thought often of taking action in that direction. But, you can understand, there was much to deter—that until the impulse to move had become very strong, nothing would be done. I could clearly see that such an enterprise would meet with little favor—at all events at first—that it would be hooted at (as it was) and perhaps hooted down. The Democratic Review essays and tales came from the surface of the mind, and had no connection with what lay below—a great deal of which indeed was below consciousness. At last came the time when the concealed growth had to come to light, and the first edition of Leaves of Grass was written and published.’”

This phrase, “the concealed growth had to come to light,” thus preserved for us by Dr. Bucke, helps much towards the appreciation of the prophetic and unexpected character of “Leaves of Grass.” We do not of course understand why out of green foliage and branches a sudden and unexpected blossom—yet evidently long prepared in the heart of the plant—should appear; nor do we understand why, often amid quite unpromising foliage of the human mind, a great work of art or prophecy arises; yet we seem to see that the processes are very similar. A centre of growth, hitherto unnoticed, long hidden, has come to light.

Prophecy at all times has this inevitable spontaneous character, as of something arising from below the ordinary consciousness, which just for the very reason that it so arises cannot be deliberately quenched or stopped—something almost inarticulate, hardly gaining the sphere of definition; irrational, and out of joint with accepted things; subversive, inconvenient, contrary; annunciative of a new order. The prophets are stoned; for they are obviously liars and iconoclasts. They are charged with inconsistency, and, poor things! they cannot deny the charge. They cannot help themselves. The flower unfolding out of its own roots cannot unfold other than it does.

By many such marks Whitman’s work shows a prophetic character. And while he does not claim to deliver a new Gospel, he seems to claim to take his place in the line of those who have handed down a world-old treasure of redemption for mankind. In his poem, “To Him that was Crucified,”[6] he says:—

It will be noticed that in this great poem he speaks not merely as a successor of him that was crucified, but as a continuer of some world-wide and agelong tradition. And in truth we cannot doubt that the root of it all has been known and realised since the farthest history; the charge and succession have certainly descended out of dim obscurity from the earliest times. How much exactly Walt Whitman may have known of the Vedic and other early writings is doubtful; but that he had read here and there among them, quite enough to gain an insight into the heart of them, and to know that his message was continuous with theirs, is quite certain. “These are really the thoughts of men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me.” In the Vedic scriptures, and, in lineal succession from these, in the Buddhist and Platonist and Christian writings, in the Taoists of China, the Mystics of Egypt, the Sufis of Persia, the root is to be found—and is clearly distinguishable—the very same from which “Leaves of Grass” has sprung. [It would be too long at present, by quotations from all these writings, to attempt to prove this; but in an Appendix to this paper I have, in very imperfect fashion, dotted in a number of parallel passages from them and from “Leaves of Grass,” and these may serve to illustrate what I mean.] A glance at these ancient and modern utterances assures us that all down history the same loving universal spirit has looked out, making its voice heard from time to time, harmonising the diverse eras, enclosing continents, castes, and theologies. The same charge and succession has passed on, and Whitman voices and transmits it in his turn.

Yet of course there are differences. We cannot say that Whitman is more subtle, more penetrating, more profound than many of those who have gone before. It would be hard to imagine anything more subtle and profound than passages in the Upanishads. But in one respect he is certainly unique among the prophets, and that is in the universality and breadth of his appeal. He seems to liberate the good tidings and give it a democratic scope and world-wide application unknown in the elder prophets, even in the sayings of Buddha.

The difficulty with the earlier prophets no doubt was that around them limitations existed on every hand. Races, peoples, religions, were sharply divided from each other. In the early world exclusiveness was indispensable. The peoples and nations could not have grown up if each had not believed that its own customs, morals, religion, race, &c., were infinitely superior to those of the others. Exclusiveness and war were the nurses of growing humanity’s powers—of comradeship, organised life, community of sentiment, courage, self-sacrifice, and all the early virtues. Problems of social life and character, which could never have been solved in a general ocean of mankind, were easy to define and determine in small communities. Ignorance and prejudice were necessary fences between one state or system of society and another. And however great certain individual teachers may have been in the past—however generous and wide their real outlook on life, they still could only act and speak subject to the very definite limitations prevailing around them.[7] The Joels, Jeremiahs, Mohammeds, Carlyles,—stung no doubt by incontrollable impulse to blaze forth that which was in them—have delivered their special messages: have called the people of their time to gather themselves round some new centre of life and inspiration, moral or religious or racial; and in doing so have anathematised every other code of morals or form of religion, called all outside people Gentiles or Barbarians, and put them to the sword. They have done work priceless in their time and locality, insisting on and compelling each some certain and necessary step in human progress; and having done so, they have gone their way and been superseded, because their message was only a part-message. Only a few have not been superseded. Teachers like the Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth, St. Francis, and the Syrian Bâb,[8] belong to no race or nationality; if they press the claims of religion or morality, it is with so little insistence on any particular scheme or code, that their net may be said to be spread to catch all humanity. They are accepters rather than deniers; they represent the prophetic gift in its deepest and most inclusive utterance; and it is difficult to think of them as becoming antiquated or out of date.

Yet—though it would not be acceptable or desirable to make comparisons of greatness—we may say that even among these Whitman was (with the exception perhaps of the Bâb) unique in the realisation of the world-wide and universal character of his message. The others had messages of world-wide import to deliver, though perhaps they hardly knew this at the time; but Whitman realised from the first that this universality was the very key and centre of his utterance, and set himself deliberately to emphasise it. Many things conspired, with him, to this result—the girdling of the earth in his time, and the extraordinary developments of locomotion and intercommunication which were bringing together East and West, and all races and classes, creeds and customs, into close touch and acknowledgment of each other. The peoples were being compelled to see that none of them has a monopoly of excellence or defect, but that all illustrate, in their various ways, forms of necessary life. The Press, the Locomotive, the Wire, were pushing more and more insistently to this conclusion. The fences were breaking down; a new Era was shaping; and Whitman himself, by a nature and temperament of extraordinary balance and fulness, physical, mental, and moral (“I can resist anything better than my own diversity”), was fitted to respond to it all—to swim in this ocean of humanity as in a sea.

[Yet even so, and allowing for the occasioning causes, it must be said that his utterance, in its dæmonic reach and sweep, is somewhat staggering! Through “Leaves of Grass” pours a torrent of trades, classes, characters, occupations, races, nations, morals, manners, incidents, opinions—things generally accounted beautiful, and things unbeautiful, things good or evil, proper or improper—in huge indifference, all apparently accepted on an equality, dismissed on an equality. It is, to certain folk, most confusing, and at times even revolting and terrifying.]

Of this new Era, with all its splendours and terrors, Walt Whitman may be said to be the prophet. Through the “barbaric yawp” and seeming-random medley of his verse—inarticulate enough at times in its very endeavour to include and accept every phase and feature of human life—break out the deep-rolling organ-tones of Creation’s primal music. We hear the same agelong theme and symphony of all historic time, gaining, through whatever imperfections, a larger freer expression by virtue of its so much more extended key-board and orchestra, by virtue of its discords and sequences more daring than ever used in literature before.

And the Theme? Whitman has defined it very directly at the first outset of his poems:—

The Self, individual and separate, yet conjoined and continuous throughout Creation’s mass—that is the theme which undoubtedly runs through the whole of his poems and prophetic utterances. And it is the theme of the eldest Upanishads of the Vedic sages. It is the theme which has come down through the ages—variously balanced, with now somewhat more insistence on one aspect, now somewhat more on another; variously expressed and illustrated, in poetical, religious, or philosophical form; variously coloured, confined, or conventionalised by race and tradition; but inevitably gaining in the long-run in freedom and fulness of utterance. In Whitman it breaks out almost unconsciously—certainly less as the result of any intellectual process or argument than by force of an irresistible impulse—into a strange torrential pæan of identity. Everything, the whole earth, all its shows, men and women, sinners and saints, the stars, insects, solar systems—all beings are envisaged in order to be identified with the One; they are accorded each their unique unapproachable character and perfection, only to be embraced:—

So in Whitman all the purblind morals and moonlight ideals of the past are, whether directly or by implication, broken up (hence storm and terror to many) and led back to their most central motive, the world-old revelation of the Self, eternal and inseparate.

Always the inward, the enduring, the central, the vital, is acknowledged and honoured; the external, the temporary, the unessential thrown off. Underneath all morals, manners, races, titles, classes, the original human soul and its affections, greater than all. Underneath clothing, costume, ranks, trades, and occupations, the bodily form, its needs and physiology. Underneath all art and social life, sex and fraternity. Greater than all houses, temples, galleries, and museums, the life of the open air and its lessons. In such simple elementary things as these—in the universal human soul, rediscovering itself in all forms, in the healthy and beautiful human body, in sex and fraternity, in the life with the earth and the open air, Whitman sees the root out of which future humanity will spring (as it has sprung in the past): out of which a society of proud, strong, free individuals, who shall also be brethren and lovers, may easily and naturally arise:—

We may indeed say that, with the signal appearance of “Leaves of Grass,” the hour has struck for mankind of liberation, of emancipation, from mere outer rules and limitations; the hour for the reference of all life, irrespective of colour, creeds, and principles, to its central essence. It may be, for reasons already hinted, an hour of danger. Not a few, accustomed only to walk by well-worn paths and formulæ, will lose their way. “Take warning! He traveling with me needs the best blood, thews, endurance.” But it is an hour which must needs come; and it opens for humanity on an era of unexampled glory.

And here a word about Individuals. It will be recognised by all readers of Whitman that his insistence on the permanence, the immortality, the supreme life of the Individual, is a most marked feature of his teaching. “The sum of all known reverence I add up in you whoever you are.” “Yourself! yourself! yourself for ever and ever!” “I sing the songs of the glory of none, not God, sooner than I sing the songs of the glory of you.” For Whitman every Self in its essence is individual, eternal, perfect, accruing to itself alone: “I swear I think now that everything without exception has an eternal soul!”

And yet (strange paradox!) all are One.

Each is a simple separate person, and yet en-masse with the rest. I think we may say that no former teacher has quite dared to give this side of the truth as Whitman has done, nor given it with so free and so splendid an expression.

Thus it may seem that if in the matter of pure philosophical statement Whitman does not stand out in the great charge and succession so strongly as some of his predecessors, yet in two respects at least his work is unique: namely, in the universality and determination of his appeal to, and brotherhood with, all creation, and in his insistence on the root-existence of every Individual from everlasting to everlasting—his protest, in fact (though quite indirect), against a mere doctrine of absorption in the Universal.

One other point I should like to note—and it goes with the preceding remarks—namely, Whitman’s extraordinary concreteness, and his consistent and set avoidance of abstract doctrine in the highest regions of thought. “I swear I see what is better than to tell the best, it is always to leave the best untold.” This avoidance is so subtle and determined that many readers are deceived by it into not perceiving “beautiful things well envelop’d,” and into thinking Whitman himself did not perceive them. The reason of it is clear. Whitman refused to address himself to the Brain alone. He saw that with regard to the highest truths it is useless to try to seize or impart them that way. They must be felt as well as thought. To try to think them alone, as one would prove a syllogism, is a kind of blasphemy. And to create the feeling, the direct awareness and consciousness of the highest facts, one must proceed in another way; one must use the method of Indirection—the method of Life and Time and the Earth, as well as of all great Art and Literature—the appeal through sense and all concrete experience, penetrating, far-reaching, cumulative in its power, till it wake the profoundest deeps of the soul. Through Whitman’s pages all the shows of the Earth, and myriads of concrete images, surge and break upon the sensitive mind-surface of the reader—who in many cases as little understands or suspects what their meaning and intention is, as every child of Man suspects the meaning of the winds and waters that play around him as he walks. Nevertheless they convince by their presence. They wake and build up new ranges of feeling in him. They filter and fibre his blood. And it is this concreteness, this power of indirect appeal, which constitute Whitman great among the Poets—even as his unrivalled knowledge of the actual world and of actual life, and his absolute acceptance of the same, give him so high a distinction among the Prophets.