The great philosophical poets, like Lucretius, try to solve the riddles. Whitman's aim is only to thrust the riddles before you, to give you a new sense of them, and start the game afresh. He knows what a complex, contradictory thing the universe is, and that the most any poet can do is to break the old firmament up into new forms. To put his arms around it? No. Put your arms around your fellow-man, and then you have encompassed it as nearly as mortal can do.
VI
Whitman's attraction toward the common people was real. There is one thing that makes every-day humanity, the great, toiling, unlettered masses, forever welcome to men who unite great imagination with broad sympathies,—they give a sense of reality; they refresh, as nature always refreshes. There is a tang and a sting to the native, the spontaneous, that the cultivated rarely has. The farmer, the mechanic, the sailor, the soldier, savor of the primal and the hardy. In painting his own portrait, Whitman makes prominent the coarser, unrefined traits, because here the colors are fast,—here is the basis of all. The careful student of Whitman will surely come to see how all the elements of his picture—his pride, his candor, his democracy, his sensuality, his coarseness,—finally fit together, and correct and offset each other and make a perfect unity.
No poet is so easily caricatured and turned into ridicule as Whitman. He is deficient in humor, and hence, like the Biblical writers, is sometimes on the verge of the grotesque without knowing it. The sense of the ridiculous has been enormously stimulated and developed in the modern mind, and—what is to be regretted—it has been mostly at the expense of the sense of awe and reverence. We "poke fun" at everything in this country; to whatever approaches the verge of the ridiculous we give a push and topple it over. The fear which all Americans have before their eyes, and which is much stronger than the fear of purgatory, is the fear of appearing ridiculous. We curb and check any eccentricity or marked individuality of manners or dress, lest we expose ourselves to the shafts of ridicule. Emerson said he had heard with admiring submission the remark of a lady who declared that the sense of being perfectly well dressed gave a feeling of inward tranquillity which religion was powerless to bestow; and what ranks before religion with us as a people is being in the mode, and writing our verse and cutting our coats in the approved style. Pride of the eye, a keen sense of the proprieties and the conventionalities, and a morbid feeling for the ridiculous, would have been death to Whitman's undertaking. He would have faltered, or betrayed self-consciousness. He certainly never could have spoken with that elemental aplomb and indifference which is so marked a feature of his work. Any hesitation, any knuckling, would have been his ruin. We should have seen he was not entirely serious, and should have laughed at him. We laugh now only for a moment; the spell of his earnestness and power is soon upon us.
VII
Thoreau considered Whitman's "Leaves" worth all the sermons in the country for preaching; and yet few poets have assumed so little the function of the preacher. His great cure-all is love; he gives himself instead of a sermon. His faith in the remedial power of affection, comradeship, is truly Christ-like. Lover of sinners is also his designation. The reproof is always indirect or implied. He brings to bear character rather than precept. He helps you as health, as nature, as fresh air, pure water help. He says to you:—
"The mockeries are not you;
Underneath them, and within them, I see you lurk;
I pursue you where none else has pursued you:
Silence, the desk, the flippant expression, the night, the accustomed routine,—if these conceal you from others,
or from yourself, they do not conceal you from me.
The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion,—if these balk others, they do not balk me.
The pert apparel, the deformed attitude, drunkenness, greed, premature death,—all these I part aside.
I track through your windings and turnings,—I come upon you where you thought eye should never come upon you."
Whitman said, in the now famous preface of 1855, that "the greatest poet does not moralize, or make applications of morals,—he knows the soul." There is no preaching or reproof in the "Leaves."
"I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame;
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done;
I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate;
I see the wife misused by her husband; I see the treacherous seducer of the young woman;
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be hid,—I see these sights on the earth,
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny; I see martyrs and prisoners,
I observe a famine at sea,—I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be killed, to preserve the lives of the rest,
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes,
and the like;
All these—all the meanness and agony without end I sitting look out upon,
See, hear, and am silent."