A History of American Literature

by Percy Holmes Boynton

Finally, the egotistic “I” is often a token of the religious mysticism at the back of his faith. Without an understanding of this factor in Whitman he cannot be known. “Place yourself,” said William James in his lecture on Bergson, “at the center of a man’s philosophic vision and you understand at once all the different things it makes him write or say. But keep outside, use your post-mortem method, try to build the philosophy up out of the single phrases, taking first one and then another, and seeking to make them fit, and of course you fail. You crawl over the thing like a myopic ant over a building, tumbling into every microscopic crack or fissure, finding nothing but inconsistencies, and never suspecting that a centre exists.” It is James again who gives the exact cue to Whitman’s mysticism, this time in a chapter of “Varieties of Religious Experience.” It is the experience of the mystic, he explains, to arrive in inspired moments at a height from which all truth seems to be divinely revealed. This revelation is not a flashlight perception of some single aspect of life, but a sense of the entire scheme of creation and a conviction that the truth has been imparted direct from God. It is clear, like the view from a mountain top, but, like such a view, it is incapable of adequate expression in words,—“an intuition,” and now the words are Whitman’s, “of the absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole of this multifarious, mad chaos of fraud, frivolity, hoggishness—this revel of fools, and incredible make-believe and general unsettledness, we call the world; a soul-sight of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of things, all history and time, and all events, however trivial, however momentous, like a leashed dog in the hand of the hunter.” It was the fashion of speech of the Hebrew prophets, when thus inspired, to preface their declarations with “Thus saith the Lord”; Whitman, with his simpler, “I say” or “I tell you,” regarded himself no less as mouthpiece of the Most High. The vision made him certain of an underlying unity in all life and of the coming supremacy of a law of love; it made him equally certain of the mistakenness of human conditions and unqualifiedly direct in his uttered verdicts.

This sense of the wholeness of life—a transcendental doctrine—made all the parts deeply significant to him who could perceive their meaning. The same mystic consciousness is beneath all these passages, and all the others like them:

I celebrate myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

. . . . . . . .

The wild gander leads his flock through the cool night;

Ya-honk! he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation;

(The pert may suppose it meaningless, but I listen close;

I find its purpose and place up there toward the wintry sky.)