“I am enamoured of growth out of doors,
Of men that live among cattle, or taste of the ocean or woods,
Of the builder and steerers of ships, and the wielders of axes, and
The drivers of horses.
I can eat and sleep with them week in week out.”
Such are his comrades. And well he knows them. For many years of his life he was roving through country and city, coming into daily contact with the men and women about whom he has sung. Walt Whitman—farm boy, school teacher, printer, editor, traveller, mechanic, nurse in the army hospital, Government clerk. Truly our poet has graduated as few have done in the school of Life. No writer of our age has better claims to be considered the Poet of Democracy.
But he was no sentimentalist. More tolerant and passive in disposition than Victor Hugo, he had the same far-seeing vision when dealing with the people. He recognized their capacity for good, their unconquerable faith, their aspirations, their fine instincts; but he recognized also their brutality and fierceness. He would have agreed with Spencer’s significant words: “There is no alchemy by which you can get golden conduct out of leaden instincts”; but he would have denied Spencer’s implication that leaden instincts ruled the Democracy. And he was right. There is more real knowledge of men and women in Leaves of Grass and Les Miserables than in all the volumes of the Synthetic Philosophy. Thus Whitman announces his theme:—
“Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power,
Cheerful, for freest action formed under the laws divine.
The modern man I sing.”
“Whitman,” wrote the late Mr. William Clarke, in his stimulating study of the Poet, [188] “sings of the Modern Man as workman, friend, citizen, brother, comrade, as pioneer of a new social order, as both material and
spiritual, final and most subtle, compound of spirit and nature, firmly planted on this rolling earth, and yet ‘moving about in worlds not realized.’ As representative democratic bard Whitman exhibits complete freedom from unconventionality, a very deep human love for all, faith in the rationality of the world, courage, energy, and the instincts of solidarity.”
In the introductory essay to this volume some remarks were made about the affections of the literary Vagabond in general and of Whitman in particular, which call now for an ampler treatment, especially as on this point I find myself, apparently, at issue with so many able and discerning critics of Whitman. I say apparently because a consideration of the subject may show that the difference, though real, is not so fundamental as it appears to be.
That Whitman entertained a genuine affection for men and women is, of course, too obvious to be gainsaid. His noble work in the hospitals, his tenderness towards criminals and outcasts—made known to us through the testimony of friends—show him to be a man of comprehensive sympathies. No man of a chill and calculating nature could have written as he did, and, although his writings are not free of affectation, the strenuous, fundamental sincerity of the man impresses every line.
But was it, to quote William Clarke, “a very deep human love”? This seems to me a point of psychological interest. A man may exhibit kindliness and tenderness towards his fellow-creatures without showing any deep personal attachment. In fact, the wider a
man’s sympathies are the less room is there for any strong individual feeling. His friend, Mr. Donaldson, has told us that he never remembers Whitman shedding a tear of grief over the death of any friend. Tears of joy he shed often; but no tear of sorrow, of personal regret. It is true that Mr. Donaldson draws no particular inference from this fact. It seems to me highly significant. The absence of intense emotion is no argument truly for insensibility; but to a man of large, sweeping sympathies such as Whitman the loss of a particular friend did not strike home as it would do in men of subtler temperaments.