The unperform’d, more gigantic than ever, advance, advance upon me.[424]
The war poems follow.
Whitman’s attitude towards war is not obvious, but it is, I believe, logical and consistent. On one side it approximated to the Quaker position, but only on one side. Or rather, perhaps, the Quaker position approximates to one side of Whitman’s. He was devoted to a social order, or republic, which could not be realised by deeds of arms. He had no hatred for any of his fellows, and recognised in his political enemy a man divine as himself—one cannot say that he had any personal enemies, though there were men who would like to have been accounted such.
The fat years of peace had, however, awakened doubts in him of the average American’s capacity for great passions.[425] These seemed to be rare among them, and Whitman had been driven to seek them in nature and her storms. It was with exultation, then, that he felt the response of New York and of the whole of America to the call of the trumpet.[426]
Men of peace are accustomed to lament the contagion of the war-fever, and with a large measure of justice. But so long as civilisation tends to render the common lives of men cheap or calculating, there will remain a divine necessity for those hours of fierce enthusiasm which, like a forest fire or religious revival, sweep irresistibly over a nation. Whitman shared the rhythmic answer of the blood, and of the soul which is involved therewith, to the imperious throbbing of the drums.[427] He knew that it represented in some, perhaps barbaric, way the throbbing of the nation’s heart, and that the cry “To Arms!” called forth much that was best in men.
The call to arms is one thing; the actual fighting, which converts men, to use his own phrase, into “devils and butchers,” is another. The call to arms awakes something in a man more heroic than the life he ordinarily lives; he seems to hear in it the voice of the Nation calling him by name, and when he answers he feels the joy of the Nation in his heart. He becomes consciously one with a great host in the hour of peril. He hears the voice of a Cause in the bugles and the drums. He shares in a new emotion, which is his glory because it is not his alone. He finds a fuller liberty than he has ever known in the discipline of the ranks; he accepts the petty tyrannies to which he is subjected, feeling that behind the officers is the will of the Nation to which he has yielded his own.
This, for better and worse, we may call the mysticism of war, and it appealed forcibly to Whitman. For him, war was illuminated by the idea of solidarity; an idea which was constantly present to him from this time forward. He no longer saw the great personalities only, nor only their divine comradeship in the life of God; all that remained as vivid as of old; but now he was being constantly reminded of the way in which individuals share consciously in the life of the nation; and this suggested to him how, presently, they will come to be conscious of their part in the life of the Race.
He recognised how essential was the sense of citizenship to fuller soul-life. The barriers in which our individual lives are isolated must be broken, if liberty is to be brought to the soul. If we are to live fully, we must feel the tides of being sweep through our emotional natures. Hence his welcome to war, which, in spite of all the fiendish spirits which follow in its wake, does thrill a chord of national consciousness in the individual heart.