This is the man whom Mr. Harlan charges with having written a bad book. I might ask, How long is it since bad books have been the flower of good lives? How long is it since grape-vines produced thorns or fig-trees thistles? But Mr. Harlan says the book is bad because it is “full of indecent passages.” This allegation has been brought against Leaves of Grass before. It has been sounded loud and strong by many of the literary journals of both continents. As criticism it is legitimate. I may contemn the mind or deplore the moral life in which such a criticism has its source; still, as criticism it has a right to existence. But Mr. Harlan, passing the limits of opinion, inaugurates punishment. He joins the band of the hostile verdict; he incarnates their judgment; then, detaching himself, he proceeds to a solitary and signal vengeance. As far as he can have it so, this author, for having written his book shall starve. He shall starve, and his name shall receive a brand. This is the essence of Mr. Harlan’s action. It is a dark and serious step to take. Upon what grounds is it taken?
I have carefully counted out from Walt Whitman’s poetry the lines, perfectly moral to me, whether viewed in themselves or in the light of their sublime intentions and purport, but upon which ignorant and indecent persons of respectability base their sweeping condemnation of the whole work. Taking Leaves of Grass, and the recent small volume, Drum-Taps (which was in Mr. Harlan’s possession), there are in the whole about nine thousand lines or verses. From these, including matter which I can hardly imagine objectionable to any one, but counting every thing which the most malignant virtue could shrink from, I have culled eighty lines. Eighty lines out of nine thousand! It is a less proportion than one finds in Shakespeare. Upon this so slender basis, rests the whole crazy fabric of American and European slander, and the brutal lever of the Secretary.
Now, what by competent authority is the admitted character of the book in which these lines occur? For, though it is more than probable that Mr. Harlan never heard of the work till the hour of his explorations in the Department, the intellectual hemispheres of Great Britain and America have rung with it from side to side. It has received as extensive a critical notice, I suppose, as has ever been given to a volume. Had it been received only with indifference or derision, I should not have been surprised. In an age in which few breathe the atmosphere of the grand literature—which forgets the superb books and thinks Bulwer moral, and Dickens great, and Thackeray a real satirist—which gives to Macaulay the laurel due to Herodotus, and to Tennyson the crown reserved for Homer, and in which the chairs of criticism seem abandoned to squirts and pedagogues and monks—a mighty poet has little to expect from the literary press save unconcern and mockery. But even under these hard conditions, the tremendous force of this poet has achieved a relative conquest, and the tone of the press denotes his book as not merely great, but illustrious. Even the copious torrents of abuse which have been lavished upon it, have in numerous instances taken the form of tribute to its august and mysterious power, being in fact identical with that still vomited upon Montaigne and Juvenal. On the other hand, eulogy, very lofty and from the highest sources, has spanned it with sunbows. Emerson, our noblest scholar, a name to which Christendom does reverence, a critic of piercing insight and full comprehension, has pronounced it “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.” How that austere and rare spirit, Thoreau, regarded it, may be partly seen by his last posthumous volume. He thought of it, I have heard, with measureless esteem, ranking it with the vast and gorgeous conceptions of the Oriental bards. It has been reported to me, that unpublished letters, received in this country from some of Europe’s greatest, announce a similar verdict. The North American Quarterly Review, unquestionably the highest organ of American letters, in the course of a eulogistic notice of the work, remarking upon the passages which Mr. Harlan has treated as if they were novel in literature, observes: “There is not anything, perhaps (in the book), which modern usage would stamp as more indelicate than are some passages in Homer. There is not a word in it meant to attract readers by its grossness, as there is in half the literature of the last century, which holds its place unchallenged on the tables of our drawing-rooms.” The London Dispatch, in a review written by the Rev. W. J. Fox, one of the most distinguished clergymen in England, after commending the poems for “their strength of expression, their fervor, their hearty wholesomeness, their originality and freshness, their singular harmony,” &c., says that, “in the unhesitating frankness of a man who dares to call simplest things by their plain names, conveying also a large sense of the beautiful,” there is involved “a clearer conception of what manly modesty really is, than in any thing we have in all conventional forms of word, deed, or act, so far known of;” and concludes by declaring that “the author will soon make his way into the confidence of his readers, and his poems in time will become a pregnant text-book, from which quotations as sterling as the minted gold will be taken and applied to every form of the inner and the outer life.” The London Leader, one of the foremost of the British literary journals, in a review which more nearly approaches perception of the true character and purport of the book, than any I have seen, has the following sentences: “Mr. Emerson recognized the first issue of the Leaves, and hastened to welcome the author, then totally unknown. Among other things, said Emerson to the new avatar, ‘I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start.’ The last clause was, however, overlooked entirely by the critics, who treated the new author as one self-educated, yet in the rough, unpolished, and owing nothing to instruction. The authority for so treating the author was derived from himself, who thus described, in one of his poems, his person, character, and name, having omitted the last from the title-page:—
‘Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,
Disorderly, fleshly, and sensual,’—
and in various other passages, confessed to all the vices, as well as the virtues of man. All this, with intentional wrong-headedness, was attributed by the sapient reviewers to the individual writer, and not to the subjective-hero supposed to be writing. Notwithstanding the word ‘kosmos,’ the writer was taken to be an ignorant man. Emerson perceived at once that there had been a long foreground somewhere or somehow;—not so they. Every page teems with knowledge, with information; but they saw it not, because it did not answer their purpose to see it. . . . . . The poem in which the word ‘kosmos’ appears explains in fact the whole mystery—nay, the word itself explains it. The poem is nominally upon himself, but really includes everybody. It begins:—
‘I celebrate myself;
And what I assume, you shall assume;
For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.’
In a word, Walt Whitman represents the Kosmical man—he is the Adamus of the nineteenth century—not an individual, but Mankind. As such, in celebrating himself, he proceeds to celebrate universal humanity in its attributes, and accordingly commences his dithyramb with the five senses, beginning with that of smell. Afterwards, he deals with the intellectual, rational, and moral powers, showing throughout his treatment an intimate acquaintance with Kant’s transcendental method, and perhaps including in his development the whole of the German school, down to Hegel—at any rate, as interpreted by Cousin and others in France, and Emerson in the United States. He certainly includes Fichte, for he mentions the Egotist as the only true philosopher, and consistently identifies himself not only with every man, but with the universe and its Maker; and it is in doing so that the strength of his description consists. It is from such an ideal elevation that he looks down on Good and Evil, regards them as equal, and extends to them the like measure of equity. . . . . Instead, therefore, of regarding these Leaves of Grass as a marvel, they seem to us as the most natural product of the American soil. They are certainly filled with an American spirit, breathe the American air, and assert the fullest American freedom.” The passages characterized by the Secretary as “indecent” are, adds the Leader, “only so many instances adduced in support of a philosophical principle; not meant for obscenity, but for scientific examples, introduced as they might be in any legal, medical, or philosophical book, for the purpose of instruction.”