Another of the new poems calls for a word in passing. “Chanting the Square Deific”[439] is an attempt to express his theory of ultimate reality, that is to say, of the soul. Four elements go to the making of this, and these he calls respectively, Jehovah, Christ, Satan and Santa Spirita—adopting, as he sometimes would, a formula of his own inventing, that was of no known language. In other words, he conceived of the soul’s reality,[440] as characterised by four essential qualities; first, its obedience to the remorseless general laws of being; second, its capacity for attraction to and absorption into others—its love-quality; third, its lawless defiance of everything but its own will; fourth, its sense of identity with the whole.
Condemnation, compassion, defiance, harmony, these he says are final and essential qualities of the Divine; only as they are united can our idea of God or of the Soul, which is the Son of God, be complete. In the traditional Satan of revolt and pride, he saw an element without which the harmony was immaterial and unreal. Evil and perilous in itself, in its relation to the rest it is the solid ballast of the soaring soul. In this, he suggests much of the attitude which Nietzsche was afterwards to make his own.
During the composition of some of these poems a crisis occurred in his new official career. The war was over, but the hospitals still were full, and Walt was busy there as usual in his leisure hours; and at his desk in the Indian Bureau, whenever his duties were not pressing, he was at work upon his manuscripts,[441] when some hostile fellow-clerk seems to have called the attention of the newly appointed chief of the department to the character of these private documents.
Whitman had been a favourite with the chief clerk in the bureau, and had been given a good deal of latitude; perhaps the hostile person had observed this with a jealous eye. The manuscript proved to be not the innocuous Drum-taps, but an annotated copy of Leaves of Grass preparing for a new edition. A reading of the volume decided the chief upon a prompt dismissal of its author, and this is not surprising when we remember that Mr. Harlan had been appointed through the pressure of the powerful Methodist interest which he commanded. The Methodist eye in him must have regarded many of these pages with suspicion and not a few with disgust.
The dismissal itself was perfectly colourless; it ran:—
“Department of the Interior,
“Washington, D.C., June 30th, 1865.
“The services of Walter Whitman, of New York, as a clerk in the Indian Office, will be dispensed with from and after this date.
“Jas. Harlan,
“Secretary of the Interior.”[442]
It is obvious that the chief had no right to open his clerk’s desk and examine what he knew to be private papers; but having done so, and being presumably of an unimaginative, narrowly pious and over-conscientious character, we cannot wonder at his action. From Whitman’s point of view the matter was serious; he could ill-afford a peremptory dismissal from the public service. And to his friends the dismissal appeared not so much unjust as enormous.
O’Connor, hearing the news, went straight to Hubley Ashton, in the fiery heat of that generous and righteous wrath which scintillates and flashes with perfervid splendour through the pages of his Good Grey Poet.[443] Mr. Ashton was not so fierce, but he was indignant. He was a member of the Administration, and used his power to Whitman’s advantage. Finding all remonstrance with Mr. Harlan to be vain, he yet induced him to make some sort of exchange by which Whitman was not actually dismissed from the service, but only transferred to his own department—the Attorney-General’s.
Painful at the time, the affair did Whitman little injury. When Harlan’s action became known it was far from popular in Washington, where every one knew Walt, and where next to nobody had read his Leaves. A section at least of the local press supported the claims of a fellow-pressman;[444] while in the Civil Service he was a favourite with the clerks. In literary circles, also, O’Connor’s slashing attack upon the Secretary for the Interior turned the tables in Walt’s favour.