IV
In June, 1865, after he had served for a short time as a clerk in the Interior Department at Washington, Whitman had been discharged on the ground that he kept in his desk an indecent book of which he was the author. As a result of the episode, W. D. O'Connor, an impetuous young journalist, published in September the same year a pamphlet entitled The Good Gray Poet, defending Whitman as a man incapable of grossness and hailing him as a new force in American literature. Despite its extravagance and its manifest special pleading, the little book is a notable one, a document indeed in the history of the new literary period. It recognized that a new era was opening, one that was to be original and intensely American.
It [Leaves of Grass] is, in the first place, a work purely and entirely American, autochthonic, sprung from our own soil; no savor of Europe nor of the past, nor of any other literature in it; a vast carol of our own land, and of its Present and Future; the strong and haughty psalm of the Republic. There is not one other book, I care not whose, of which this can be said. I weigh my words and have considered well. Every other book by an American author implies, both in form and substance, I cannot even say the European, but the British mind. The shadow of Temple Bar and Arthur's Seat lies dark on all our letters. Intellectually, we are still a dependency of Great Britain, and one word—colonial—comprehends and stamps our literature.... At most, our best books were but struggling beams; behold in Leaves of Grass the immense and absolute sunrise! It is all our own! The nation is in it! In form a series of chants, in substance it is an epic of America. It is distinctly and utterly American. Without model, without imitation, without reminiscence, it is evolved entirely from our own polity and popular life.
The defense fell for the most part on deaf ears. It had been Whitman's dream that the great poet of democracy was to be the idol of the common people, the poet loved and read even by the illiterate.
The woodman that takes his ax and jug with him shall take me with him all day,
The farm-boy, plowing in the field, feels good at the sound of my voice.
But the common people heard him not gladly: they preferred Longfellow. The American average man—"en masse"—sees no poetry in him. Moreover, he has been rejected very largely by the more educated. It has been his curious experience to be repudiated by democratic America and to be accepted and hailed as a prophet by the aristocratic intellectual classes of England and of Europe generally. Swinburne, W. M. Rossetti, Symonds, Dowden, Saintsbury, Tennyson, and very many others accepted him early and at full value, as did also Freiligrath, Schmidt, and Björnson. A cult early sprang up about him, one composed largely of mystics, and revolutionists, and reformers in all fields.
In 1871, Whitman issued what unquestionably is his most notable prose work, Democratic Vistas. It is pitched in major key: it swells O'Connor's piping note into a trumpet blast. Boldly and radically it called for a new school of literature. The old is outgrown, it cried; the new is upon us; make ready for the great tide of Democratic poetry and prose that even now is sweeping away the old landmarks.
To the new era it was what Emerson's American Scholar was to the period that had opened in the thirties. It was our last great declaration of literary independence. Emerson, the Harvard scholar, last of a long line of intellectual clergymen, had pleaded for the aristocracy of literature, the American scholar, the man thinking his own thoughts, alone, the set-apart man of his generation; Whitman pleaded for the democracy of literature, for an American literature that was the product of the mass, a literature of the people, for the people, and by the people. Emerson had spoken as an oracle: "What crowded and breathless aisles! What windows clustering with eager heads!" Whitman was as one crying in the wilderness, uncouth, unheeded save by the few. Emerson was the clarion voice of Harvard; Whitman was the voice of the great movement that so soon was to take away the scepter from Harvard and transfer it upon the strong new learning of the West. His message was clear and it came with Carlyle-like directness:
Literature, strictly considered, has never recognized the People, and, whatever may be said, does not to-day.
Our fundamental want to-day in the United States, with closest, amplest reference to present conditions, and to the future, is of a class, and the clear idea of a class, of native authors, literati, far different, far higher in grade than any yet known, sacerdotal, modern, fit to cope with our occasions, lands, permeating the whole mass of American mentality, taste, belief, breathing into it a new breath of life.
He has this to say of the poets who thus far had voiced America:
Touch'd by the national test, or tried by the standards of democratic personality, they wither to ashes. I say I have not seen a single writer, artist, lecturer, or what-not, that has confronted the voiceless but ever erect and active, pervading, underlying will and typic aspiration of the land, in a spirit kindred to itself. Do you call these genteel little creatures American poets? Do you term that perpetual, pistareen, paste-pot work, American art, American drama, taste, verse? I think I hear, echoed as from some mountaintop afar in the west, the scornful laugh of the Genius of these States.
America has not been free. She has echoed books; she has looked too earnestly to the East.
America has yet morally and artistically originated nothing. She seems singularly unaware that the models of persons, books, manners, &c., appropriate for former conditions and for European lands, are but exiles and exotics here.
Our literature must be American in spirit and in background, and only American.
What is the reason our time, our lands, that we see no fresh local courage, sanity, of our own—the Mississippi, stalwart Western men, real mental and physical facts, Southerners, &c., in the body of our literature? especially the poetic part of it. But always instead, a parcel of dandies and ennuyés, dapper little gentlemen from abroad, who flood us with their thin sentiment of parlors, parasols, piano-songs, tinkling rimes, the five-hundredth importation—or whimpering and crying about something, chasing one aborted conceit after another, and forever occupied in dyspeptic amours with dyspeptic women. While, current and novel, the grandest events and revolutions, and stormiest passions of history, are crossing to-day with unparallel'd rapidity and magnificence over the stages of our own and all the continents, offering new materials, opening new vistas, with largest needs, inviting the daring launching forth of conceptions in literature, inspired by them, soaring in highest regions, serving art in its highest.
America demands a poetry that is bold, modern, and all-surrounding and kosmical, as she is herself. It must in no respect ignore science or the modern, but inspire itself with science and the modern. It must bend its vision toward the future, more than the past. Like America, it must extricate itself from even the greatest models of the past, and, while courteous to them, must have entire faith in itself, and the products of its own democratic spirit only.
Faith, very old, now scared away by science, must be restored, brought back by the same power that caused her departure—restored with new sway, deeper, wider, higher than ever. Surely, this universal ennui, this coward fear, this shuddering at death, these low, degrading views, are not always to rule the spirit pervading future society, as it has in the past, and does the present.
The book came winged with a double message: it was a defense and an explanation of Walt Whitman, the poet of democracy, and it was the call for a new era in American literature. In both aspects it was notable, notable as Wordsworth's early prefaces were notable. It was both an effect and a cause. The same impulse that launched it launched also Thoreau and the nature school, Bret Harte and the Pike County balladists, Mark Twain and the vulgarians, Howells and realism, and all the great wave of literature of locality. Its effect and the effect of Leaves of Grass that went with it has been a marked one. After these two books there could be no more dilettanteism in art, no more art for mere art's sake, no more imitation and subservience to foreign masters; the time had come for a literature that was genuine and compelling, one that was American both in message and in spirit.