Carpenter had now issued his slender green Towards Democracy, that strange, prophetic, intimate book, so unlike all others, even the Leaves which it most resembles. It was seven years since the two men had met, and the older had grown thinner and more weary-looking. He had not been worsted in the long struggle with time and illness, but they had left their mark upon his body.
The visitor renewed his first impressions of that complex personality; felt again the wistful affection mingled with the contradictiousobstinacy; recognised the same watchful caution and keen perception, “a certain artfulness,” and the old “wild hawk look” of his untameable spirit; but, beneath all, the wonderful unfathomed tenderness.
Whitman manifestly had his moods, “lumpishly immovable” at times, at times deliberately inaccessible. He took a certain wilful pleasure in denial, for the quality of “cussedness” was strong in him. And his friends admired his magnificent “No,” issuing from him naked and unashamed, just as mere acquaintances dreaded it.
But in other moods he was all generosity, and you knew in him a man who had given himself body, mind and spirit to Love, never contented to give less than all.
Among the topics of their conversations was the Labour Movement, in which Carpenter was actively interested. Whitman professed his belief in co-operation, at the same time reiterating his deeply-rooted distrust of elected persons, of officials and committees. He had lived in Washington; and besides, his feeling for personal initiative, his wholesome and passionate love of individuality, and its expression in every field, set him always and everywhere against mere delegates and agents. Above all things, he abhorred regimentation, officialism and interference. “I believe, like Carlyle, in men,” he said with emphasis. He hoped for more generous, and, as he would say, more prudent, captains of industry; but he looked for America’s realisation to an ever-increasing class of independent yeomanry, who should constitute the solid and permanent bulk of the Republic.
Regarding America from the universal point of view, as the standard-bearer of Liberty among the nations, he thought of Free-trade as a moral rather than a merely economic question. Free-trade and a welcome to all foreigners were for Whitman integral parts of the American ideal. “The future of the world,” he would say, “is one of open communication and solidarity of all races”; and he added, with a dogmatism characteristic of his people, “if that problem [of free interchange] cannot be solved in America, it cannot be solved anywhere”.
In considering Whitman’s attitude towards the Social Problem, and especially the Labour Problem, whose development in America he had been watching since the close of the war, one must consider the conditions of his time and country.[660] The Industrial Revolution, which is still in progress—and which in its progress is changing the face of the globe, disintegrating the old society down to its very basis in family life—has revealed itself to us in the last generation, much more clearly than to Whitman, who grew up seventy years ago in a new land.