Solitary, singing in the West, says the introductory Leaf,[266] the poet is striking up for a New World; and lo, he beholds all the peoples of all time as his interminable audience. For through him, Nature herself speaks without restraint; and through him, the Soul, the ultimate Reality.
He sings for America; for there at last the Soul is acknowledged; and his song will bind her together. The Body, Sex, Comradeship, these he sings: but above all, Faith, for he is proclaiming a new religion which includes all others and is worthy of America.[267] Of whatever he may seem to write, he is always writing of Religion; for indeed she is supreme. Love, Democracy, Religion—these three—and the greatest of these is Religion.
The world is unseen as much as seen. The air is full of invisible presences as real as the seen. And his songs also are for those as yet unseen, his children by Democracy, the woman of his love. For them he will reveal the soul, glorious in the body.
Ah, what a glory is this our life, and this our country! Death itself will not carry him away from it. In these fields, men and women in the years to come will ever be discovering him, and he will render them worthy of America as none other can. For he has “arrived,” he is no longer mortal.
If you would behold America, seek her in these pages. And if you would triumph and make her triumphant, you must become his comrade. The final note is one of passionate love-longing for comradeship.[268]
Such is the summary of the book; but it cannot be so briefly dismissed by us, for it is full of suggestions of the inner workings of Whitman’s mind at this period, for us, in some respects, the most characteristic and important of all. For after it there comes the war, the watershed of his life; there he employed and in a sense expended all the resources of his manhood, to issue from it upon the slopes of ill-health which lead down into the valley of the shadow. But here he is in his prime, and on the heights.
Here also, his individuality shows most definitely, even in its secondary qualities. The association with men of a somewhat less Bohemian type than were many of his literary friends in New York, and the more cosmopolitan atmosphere of the national capital, together with the close intimacy with death which the war-hospitals afforded, somewhat quieted the tone of later editions. Here there is more of the naïve colloquialism and mannerism, the slang and the ejaculations of “the arrogant Mannhattanese” which he loves to proclaim himself.[269] It is the edition which is most dear to many an enthusiast, and most exasperating to many a critic.
After the first-written and longest of all the poems, “The Song of Myself,” here called “Walt Whitman,” there follow two large bundles, tied together and labelled respectively “Chants Democratic” and “Leaves of Grass”. The bulk of these consists of material already familiar.
But number four of the Chants,[270] celebrating the organic unity of America, is new, and may be quoted as a curious example of Whitman’s style. Here are seven pages of soliloquy practically innocent of a period, flowing along together in a hardly vertebrate sentence, which enumerates the different elements included in the Union. Strange as it certainly looks, this creation must have been so constructed of set purpose, for Whitman could not be ignorant of the oddity of its appearance, when viewed by the ever-alert humour of the already hostile American critic. Can there possibly be any connection between this style of composition and the larger consciousness of which he had experience? The question may appear absurd, but I ask it in all seriousness, and would propose an affirmative answer.
Whitman regarded his whole book as a unit, not as a collection. Like the composer who elaborates a single theme into a long-sustained symphony, or the psychological novelist who requires three volumes for the portrayal of a personality, he held his meaning suspended in order that it might be more fully grasped; and this is true also of his individual poems. The thought he had to convey was not epigrammatic, but a complex of suggestions which merge into one as they are read together. I would even venture to suggest that some of these exercises in sustained meaning were also designed to train the faculty of apprehending the Many-in-One, the Unity, which, as he believed, lies behind all variety. In considering this suggestion one may contrast the emotional results produced by epigrams and long sentences. May not the former be the natural rhythm for wit and the latter for imagination?