What others give as duties I give as living impulses.
(Shall I give the heart’s action as a duty?)”
Morality is thus the normal activity of a healthy nature, not the product either of tradition or of rationalism.
“Whatever tastes sweet to the most perfect person, that is finally right”—this, it has been said, is the maxim on which Whitman’s morality is founded, and it is the morality of Aristotle. But no Greek ever asserted and illustrated it with such emphatic iteration.
From the days when the Greek spirit found its last embodiment in the brief songs, keen or sweet, of the “Anthology,” the attitude which Whitman represents in the “Song of Myself” has never lacked representatives. Throughout the Middle Ages those strange haunting echoes to the perpetual chant of litany and psalm, the Latin student-songs, float across all Europe with their profane and gay paganism, their fresh erotic grace, their “In taberna quando sumus,” their “Ludo cum Cæcilia,” their “Gaudeamus igitur.” In the sane and lofty sensuality of Boccaccio, as it found expression in the history of Alaciel and many another wonderful story, and in Gottfried of Strasburg’s assertion of human pride and passion in “Tristan and Isolde,” the same strain changed to a stronger and nobler key. Then came the great wave of the Renaissance through Italy and France and England, filling art and philosophy with an exaltation of physical life, and again later, in the movements that centre around the French Revolution, an exaltation of arrogant and independent intellectual life. But all these manifestations were sometimes partial, sometimes extravagant; they were impulses of the natural man surging up in rebellion against the dominant Christian temper; they were, for the most part consciously, of the nature of reactions. We feel that there is a fatal lack about them which Christianity would have filled; only in Goethe is the antagonism to some extent reconciled. Beneath the vast growth of Christianity, for ever exalting the unseen by the easy method of pouring contempt on the seen, and still ever producing some strange and exquisite flower of ascêsis—some Francis or Theresa or Fénelon—a slow force was working underground. A tendency was making itself felt to find in the theoretically despised physical—in those everyday stones which the builders of the Church had rejected—the very foundation of the mysteries of life; if not the basis for a new vision of the unseen, yet for a more assured vision of the seen.
No one in the last century expressed this tendency more impressively and thoroughly, with a certain insane energy, than William Blake—the great chained spirit whom we see looking out between the bars of his prison-house with those wonderful eyes. Especially in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” in which he seems to gaze most clearly “through narrow chinks of his cavern,” he has set forth his conviction that “first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged,” and that “if the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man, as it is, infinite.” This most extraordinary book is, in his own phraseology, the Bible of Hell.
Whitman appeared at a time when this stream of influence, grown mighty, had boldly emerged. At the time that “Leaves of Grass” sought the light Tourgueneff was embodying in the typical figure of Bassaroff the modern militant spirit of science, positive and audacious—a spirit marked also, as Hinton pointed out, by a new form of asceticism, which lay in the denial of emotion. Whitman, one of the very greatest emotional forces of modern times, who had grown up apart from the rigid and technical methods of science, face to face with a new world and a new civilization, which he had eagerly absorbed so far as it lay open to him, had the good inspiration to fling himself into the scientific current, and so to justify the demands of his emotional nature; to represent himself as the inhabitant of a vast and co-ordinated cosmos, tenoned and mortised in granite:
“All forces have been steadily employed to complete and delight me,
Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul.”
That Whitman possessed no trained scientific instinct is unquestionably true, but it is impossible to estimate his significance without understanding what he owes to science. Something, indeed, he had gained from the philosophy of Hegel—with its conception of the universe as a single process of evolution, in which vice and disease are but transient perturbations—with which he had a second-hand acquaintance, that has left distinct, but not always well assimilated marks on his work; but, above all, he was indebted to those scientific conceptions which, like Emerson, he had absorbed or divined. It is these that lie behind “Children of Adam.”