My real body doubtless left to me for other spheres.”
The first great utterance was naturalistic; this egoism is spiritualistic. It is the sublime apotheosis of Yankee self-reliance. “I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself.” This became the dominant conception in Whitman’s later work, and fills his universe at length. Of a God, although he sometimes uses the word to obtain emphasis, he at no time had any definite idea. Nature, also, was never a living vascular personality for him; when it is not a mere aggregate of things, it is an order, sometimes a moral order. Also he wisely refuses with unswerving consistency to admit an abstract Humanity; of “man” he has nothing to say; there is nothing anywhere in the universe for him but individuals, undying, everlastingly aggrandizing individuals. This egoism is practical, strenuous, moral; it cannot be described as religious. Whitman is lacking—and in this respect he comes nearer to Goethe than to any other great modern man—in what may be possibly the disease of “soul,” the disease that was so bitterly bewailed by Heine. Whitman was congenitally deficient in “soul;” he is a kind of Titanic Undine. “I never had any particular religious experiences,” he told Bucke, “never felt the need of spiritual regeneration;” and although he describes himself as “pleased with the earnest words of the sweating Methodist preacher, impressed seriously at the camp-meeting,” we know what weight to give to this utterance when we read elsewhere, of animals:
“They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.”
We may detect this lack of “soul” in his attitude towards music; for, in its highest development, music is the special exponent of the modern soul in its complexity, its passive resignation, its restless mystical ardours. That Whitman delighted in music is clear; it is equally clear, from the testimony of his writings and of witnesses, that the music he delighted in was simple and joyous melody as in Rossini’s operas; he alludes vaguely to symphonies, but