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336
HITMAN,
THE POET OF MODERN DEMOCRACY.
By the Hon. Roden Noel.
PART II.
We will now consider briefly Walt Whitman’s position as prophet and
teacher.
From the very extraordinary and powerful poem called ‘ Walt
Whitman’ (not reprinted by Mr. Rossetti, but a part of which is
quoted by Mr. Buchanan, and is therefore accessible to the general
reader) we may get a fair notion of its general character. Mr.
Buchanan gives an excellent description of it : ‘ Whitman is here for
the time being, and for poetical purposes, the cosmical man, an entity,
a representation of the great forces. And here he expresses with
immense power the infinite culminating worth of personality—how all
natural influences have been and are ever working up to constitute
and develop a man, a woman, a person. It is the broad dignity of a
man, as a man, he preaches : very little the special privileges of dis
tinguished men, or favoured classes of men. This is the very spirit and
truth of democracy :
Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me ;
A far down I see the first huge nothing—I know I was even then ;
I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist,
And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon.
Immense have been the preparations for me,
Faithful and friendly the arms that have helped me ;
Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen ;
For room to me, stars kept aside in their own rings,
They sent influences to look after what was to hold me;
Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me ;
My embryo has never been torpid—nothing could overlay it;
�A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN.
337
For it the nebula cohered to an orb,
The long slow strata piled to rest it on,
Vast vegetable gave it sustenance,
Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths and deposited it with care ;
All forces have been steadily employed to complete and delight me ;
Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul.
In a poem of extraordinary vigour, though, one of those where he
puts down innumerable items—yet here for a great and distinct per
vading purpose—‘ Salut au Monde,’ after passing in rapid review, and
addressing with graphic characteristic epithet or two almost all con
ceivable inhabitants of the globe—great, refined, small, vulgar, bad,
good—he says :
Each of us inevitable,
Each of us limitless, each of us with his or her right upon the earth;
Each of us allowed the eternal purports of the earth,
Each of us here as divinely as any is here.
My spirit has passed in compassion and determination around the whole earth ;
I have looked for equals and lovers, and found them ready for me in all lands,
,
And, in ‘ Starting from Paumanok,’ he says :
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
I harbour for good or bad—I permit to speak at every hazard—
Nature now without check, with primal energy . . .
. . And sexual organs and acts ! do you concentrate in me.;
For I am determined to tell you with courageous clear voice, to prove you
illustrious ...
This last determination he carries out in a series of poems (not re
printed by Mr. Rossetti) called 1 Children of Adam.’ Again he re
solves :
I will sing the song of companionship,
I will write the evangel poem of comrades and love,
For who but I should understand love, with all its sorrow and joy,.
And who but I should be the poet of comrades ?
And this he does (as I think most nobly, and with real originality)
in a series called ‘ Calamus.’ Some of these, under a different heading,
Mr. Rossetti reproduces. Thus we have ‘ The Friend,’ ‘ Meeting Again,’
4 Parting Friends,’ ‘ Envy,’ 1 The City of Friends,’ ‘ The Love of Com
rades ’:
Come, I will make the continent indissoluble ;
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever yet shone upon!
I will make divine magnetic lands
With the love of comrades,
With the life-long love of comrades.
VOL II.—NO. IX.
S
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A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN,
I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America, and along
the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies ;
I will make inseparable cities, with their arms about each other’s necks,
By the love of comrades,
By the manly love of comrades.
‘ Fit Audience’ is another of these, and the charming £ Singing in Spring. ’
One is called ‘ Out of the Crowd’:
Out of the rolling ocean, the crowd, came a drop gently to me,
Whispering I love, you ; before, long I die !
I hare travelled a long way merely to look on you, to touch you,
For I could not die till I once looked on you,
For I feared I might afterward lose you.
Now we have met, we have looked, we are safe,
Return in peace to the ocean, my love ;
I too am part of the ocean, my love ;
Behold the great rondure—the cohesion of all, how perfect!
But it is, perhaps, too much to expect that this series of poems will
ever.be liked here. With us, men friends must like each other from a
very long distance, with many a formal grating between—may, indeed,
without gross impropriety, touch the tips of each other’s fingers ; any
warmer sentiment or demonstration of such—any love, for instance, into
which a sense of beauty and grace should enter, would be greeted among
us with a storm of most virtuous execration and horror. This, of course,
is a matter of idiosyncrasy—a question of national temperament : moral
axioms, indeed, are mostly founded on men’s temperaments; their
reasons (or no reasons) being invented as an after-thought. But those
who cannot quite go the whole length of the British Philistine in this
respect will admire Whitman’s ideal of manly friendship—warm, faith
ful, founded in mutual love as well as mutual esteem—and will believe
with him, that if there were more of it, States and peoples would be
nobler and stronger.
Atomism; solitary, self-supporting, self-seeking, competing, contend
ing isolation—each for himself—is our ideal; our ideal in private life,
our ideal in political economy. It is not the ideal of Christianity, as
understood by Christ and His disciples, and the early Church. But—
John P.
Robinson, he
Sez they didn’t know everything down in Judee.
And the most orthodox Christians now, though ready to roast any honest
person who says it, seem practically very much to agree with him.
One’s wife and children indeed, as part of one’s family, as belonging to
oneself; and sometimes even a poor relation, as coming within the
�THE POET OF MODERN DEMOCRACY.
339
«nchanted circle—these may be regarded (in a married man’s case) as
one or two satellites revolving round that great centre of an English
man’s solar system—himself.
‘ To Working Men’ is a very characteristic poem. The great catholic,
all-yearning heart of the man who shrinks from no one, however de
ceived and degraded ; who longs to take each and all into his brother
man’s heart, solace and succour, and bring him nearer, not to his (the
lover’s) individual standard, but to his, the beloved man’s, own ideal
manhood—comes out finely here. Docs it not breathe the very spirit
-of Christ 1—
If you become degraded, criminal, ill, then I become so for your sake ;
If you remember your foolish and outlawed deeds, do you think I
'Cannot remember my own foolish and outlawed deeds?
If you carouse at the table, I carouse at the opposite side of the table.
Then he continues to expound his central conviction of the supreme
■worth of manhood—personality :
We consider Bibles and religions divine—I do not say they are not divine ;
I say that they have all grown out of you, and may grow out of you still;
It is not they who give the life, it is you who give the life.
Heaves are not more shed from the trees, or trees from the earth, than they are shed
out of you.
... The sum of all known reverence I add up in,you, whoever you are,
■The President is there in the White House for you ; it is not you who are here for
him.
.All doctrines, all politics, and civilisations exsurge from you ;
If you were not breathing and walking here, where would they all be ?
The most renowned poems would be ashes, oration, and plays would be vacuums.
All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it;
All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments.
If we look for some one to lament over his age, how base, how lethargic,
how vulgar and prosaic it is, and how no one can possibly get the mate
rials of poetry out of it; evidently we must not go to Walt Whitman.
■If we have not great poetry, he would probably ascribe it, not to the
fault of the age, but to that of the poets who despise and despair of it.
There are low and grovelling and unbeautiful tendencies enough, God
knows ; but we need men to see what is good and great in us, and to
-.urge us on to nobler and richer life—hardly to stand by and curse us
unhelpfully, as Shimci did David. And though it is quite true that
Whitman is not an artist primarily—he is too indifferent in shaping
beautiful works of ark out of his rich materials : he does not care for
.art at all for art’s sake—yet he does abundantly prove the spirit in
s 2
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A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN,
-which a poet may look even at this present age, and lift it np into the
regions of art, if he only will, faith, Hope, need not be extinct amongns ; there is a Future; let us help to shape it. Whitman intimates that
he looks to a wider, fuller life for all men, for average men and average
women; when love shall prevail, and individualities shall be allowed
fuller play; when each shall be reverenced and respected for what he is>
his place in the harmonious community admitted ; a richer community,,
made up from many types of person; when the dignity of flesh and its
impulses shall be acknowledged, under due restraint from those princi
ples which are yet higher in our nature—as, for instance, the sympa
thetic principle; when men shall reverence one another foi* what they
are—-not on delusive artificial grounds that afford no true reason for
Teverence, but serve only to confuse our truer instincts of veneration, to
render us superstitious and idolatrous.
Robert Buchanan among Englishmen has produced some noble poetry
out of these same unpromising materials, though shabby gentility and’
dainty academics may shuddei- at it as vulgar. And since Pope pro
duced poems unsurpassable of their kind out of the analytic critical
tendencies of his time, more unpromising than any, who shall pro
nounce, a priori, that Clough and Arnold must fail because they try to*
draw music from the mingled forebodings, foreshadowings, hopes,,
despairs, and speculations of oui- own? Surely this wondrous myste
rious twilight over a world that has fissures opening into Hell and vistas
that invite to Heaven, surely this twilight may have music of its own
•—music that shall be no frigid imitation of one that is no more.
Nothing, of course, can be easier, than to say, certain subjects are
Tinpoetical, unfit for art. Railroads are, manufactures are, mysticism
of any kind and philosophy—anxious questionings, wonderings, tremulous
fears and hopes—these are. For they are not in Homer, or Pope, or
some one else. I say it depends entirely on how they are touched, in
what spirit they are taken up and treated, whether they are poetical or
not; that we must judge honestly by poetical results, not judge the
works given forth by preconceived theories, and utterly baseless,
idiosyncrasies ; not even by the ipse dixits of a fraternity of critics : all
that passes—good work remains, and another generation acknowledges
it to be good. There is a mZei way of looking at every present epoch ;
only the old poets and prophets had a way of their own. Men and
women still live and love, and toil and suffer. Explorers and pioneers
open up new continents, bring the people of to-day face to face with
wonderful races of the past, isolated yet alive, or mummied in their
tombs; vast human problems press for solution : science enlarges heikingdom, and opens out new worlds to the imagination: Nature is.,
eternal around us : and while we wait expectant, as yet uncertain by
�THE POET OF MODERN DEMOCRACY.
341
what Word the eruptive forces we hear rumbling, as they gather anew
deep down in the very depths of our humanity, shall become articulate
in human language, we can turn to Her, ever undisturbed, ever young,
■ever calm, and read in her countenance inexhaustible meanings by the
glimmers of light shed ever freshly upon her out of restless, ever-compli•cating labyrinths of our own human spirits. Enough if there be among
us an undercurrent of sterling life—a thankfulness for victories acheived,
.a looking for victories to come, a keen relish for life as it is, or a strong
■desire to make it nobler.
Now look a moment at the poem ‘Whosoever.’ Perhaps none serves
to bring out Whitman’s central doctrine of all personal worth so
thoroughly as this :
None but would subordinate you—I only am he who will never consent to subordi
nate you ;
I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, god, beyond what waits
intrinsically in yourself.
Painters have painted their swarming groups, and the centre figure of all;
From the head of the centre figure spreading a nimbus of gold-coloured light.
IBut I paint myriads of heads ; but paint no head without its nimbus of gold-coloured,
light.
_ . . The mockeries are not you.
Underneath them and within them I see you lurk ;
I pursue you where none else has pursued you.
.. . . The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion, if these baulk others
they do not baulk me.
, . .. There is no virtue, no beauty, in man or woman, but as good is in you ;
No pleasure waiting for others, but an equal pleasure waits for you.
... I sing the songs of the glory of none—not God—sooner than I sing the songs
of the glory of you.
Whoever you are, claim your own at any hazard !
All this is very striking, and is a vigorous proclamation of a great truth,
of the greath truth which the time is beginning to see more and more
clearly. Yet in this, as in the preceding passages quoted to illustrate
Whitman’s teaching on this score, there is (as is wont to be the case in
the proclamations of most prophets), a certain one-sidedness, exaggera
tion, looseness of thought. When he says above that all doctrines, poli
tics, civilisation, sculpture, poems, histories, 1 exsurge from you] (the
;average man, any man), the truth underlying this is that all these come
-out of human nature—out of individuals, indeed, but out of individuals
who could not have existed, as they were without the help of all pre
vious human and other history, without the moulding of their age, and
■of the average men and women from whom they spring, and who take
.their part in educating these more distinguished spirits. These last are
the mouthpieces of their time, and help to mould the future man, even
the present average man. But his nature, too, has a root identity with.
�342
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN,
theirs, has germs and rudiments of the same faculties ; and the life of
all great works derives continuous vitality from kindred spirits which
comprehend them, and kindred creations are roused through the con
templation of them. Now Whitman thus proclaims that men are ‘of
one blood,’ are kindred amid all their differences ; so that a man, any
man, may claim fellowship with the best and mightiest of his race, may
therefore enfold within himself the principles of sublimest heroic and
intellectual manhood; is anyhow and at worst a person, a self, in a
higher sense than any other creatures are, and may claim from all hisfellows to be acknowledged and reverenced as such ! from his society,
and all functionaries of his society (however powerful and dignified) may
claim such possible facilities as shall enable him to make the best of
himself and his special capabilities. Though, indeed, one would have
fancied that something of this kind was precisely what our Lord Jesus
Christ had proclaimed with some force more than one thousand eight
hundred years ago. Only such truths take a good deal of proclaiming..
His followers did not quite like them, and thought it, on the whole, for'
the advantage of the brute mass (and of themselves), if they could make
out that He had in fact proclaimed precisely the opposite of such truths.
They need, therefore, reasserting, and in a modern fashion. But the big.
people and the good people will not like them any better. What a
chorus of pious horror, when some one said that Christ was the first
Socialist ! Yet for all that magna est veritas et y/rcevalelnt.
Notwithstanding, I do think, when we are making a study of thesedoctrines, we ought to point out where they seem to need considerable
guarding and qualification.
Men are not individual only, but members of a community, of a body
politic. And Whitman accordingly would supplement this bold uncom
promising assertion of individual dignity by the inculcation of love,
of the most ardent and self-sacrificing spirit of fraternity. ‘ Liberty,
equality, fraternity.’ Here again he is Christian enough. But is equality
a truth in the manner in which he asserts it 1 I believe not; and if not,
it must be so far mischievous to assort it. That common manhood is a
greater, more cardinal fact than any distinctions among men which raiseone above another I most firmly believe. Still these distinctions do*
exist, and so palpable a fact cannot be ignored without very serious in
jury. If great men could not have been without average men, and owemost to the grand aggregate soul of the ideal unit, humanity—which is-;
a pregnant truth—yet, on the other hand, this grand aggregate soul
could never have been what it is, could never have been enriched with
the treasures it now enjoys, without those most personal of all personali
ties—-prophets, heroes, men of genius. If these men need to be re
minded, as they do, of the rock whence they are hewn, there is yet a.
�THE POET OF MODERN DEMOCRACY.
343
danger of average men mistaking such a message as that of modern de
mocracy through so powerful a spokesman as Whitman, and insisting
upon paring down the ideal superiority of their great ones too much to
the level of their own chaotic uniformity, rather than acknowledging and
venerating what is verily superior in these; taking them for leaders in
regions where they are appointed by nature to lead, and generally aim
ing to raise themselves so far as possible to the standard of a higher ex
cellence thus set before them.
In order to satisfy this law of inequality among men, I do not believe
that the mere proclamation of friendly love as between comrades (any
more than of sexual love and equal union between man and woman) is
at all sufficient. Veneration, reverence, also must be proclaimed, as
equally necessary; and the great point we ought to aim at, in helping to
solve the momentous question of the social future, seems in that respect
to be this—that mankind be taught, and gradually accustomed, to place
their reverence where reverence is indeed due, and not upon mere idols
of popular superstition. It is said (and, alas! with some truth) that if
you tear people from before one false shrine, they may only grovel before
a baser one. Bnt I say this should be the end kept steadily in view—to
stir up that which is noblest in ourselves, in order that we may be able
to venerate that which is most venerable in others, and may ourselves
be raised more near to their standard. That every man, whatever he
now, is to be supremely satisfied with himself as he is now, is of course
not in the least what Whitman means; but there is a danger of his
sometimes vague and unguarded language being so .understood by the
natural average man, who is already well disposed to be satisfied with
his lower habitual self, and make himself the measure of the standard
to which the Universe on the whole will do well to conform. This may
too readily result in the tyranny of a blind and prejudiced and ignorant
majority; by no means selecting men in any department of the State or
of private occupations for their special fitness to guide and manage in
such particular positions, and to introduce a higher ideal of life or of
work, but rather jealous, hostile, or indifferent to these, and basely sus
picious of their higher manly worth, their larger knowledge, and their
vaster power. We must worship something; and what we most tend to
worship is any larger and more successful incarnation of our meaner, less
noble selves. The average Briton, for instance, has a sort of complacent
air about him as if he was quite sure, not only that the.Deity is like an
average Briton, but even that the Deity ought to be very thankful for
being so. Utter individual freedom and self-assertion, unbalanced by
any counterbalancing principle of deference, humility, and reverence, has
far too much tendency to resolve itself into this, which just makes real
progress impossible, and might throw humanity far back awhile, even in
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A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN,
the very midst of democracy and perfect political freedom. But what
Whitman does see so clearly is that, even when men have themselves
elected a ruler, or been concerned in the choice of a form of government,
there is a sort of glamour of the imagination which immediately invests
any actual depositary of power, and bows them in a kind of unreasonable
stupor before it. He therefore reminds them—you, the people, are the
source of such power, and government exists for you, not you for govern
ment. Obey it intelligently; modify it when reason requires.
Wealth, honour, and rank have the same way of casting a glamour
over the imagination, so that men do not concern themselves with en
quiring what the source of such wealth may be, or how far wealth and
rank may involve personal qualities which are indeed worthy of some
reverence. But these are accomplished facts on the surface, vague
powers; and we are apt to be enslaved by them, because we have not
been educated to enshrine a true God in the place of these usurpers—
usurpers, that is, if they assume the highest place, as they so gene
rally do.
It behoves, therefore, to look a little closer at such broad statements
as those we have quoted from Whitman. Architecture, sculpture,
religions, &c., are a great deal more than what the average man does to
them when he thinks about them. They were much more in the
creative genius of those who invented them, or at least gave the final
and complete form they took. And as to their being ashes and vacuums
now but for the average man, this is far more than anyone may presume
to say. There may be some persons who do comprehend them nearly
as they were—one or two even may cause them to take on now a pro
founder and more general significance than they wore of old, though
they are never again precisely the living foremost products of the
moving world-spirit which they were then. But, at any rate, their
significance must be quite infinite, and in proportion, moreover, to the
place that they then filled in the history of the world. The pulsations
that they caused may no longer be visible in the shape of circling
waves, but their effect can never cease. That is a law in physics, and
shall it be less a law in the higher spiritual sphere ? Assuredly not.
It is well to remind men that they may enter into all these things if
they will claim their privileges ; still it will be well to remember that
every man does not, will not, and this verily because he cannot, enter
into them. It is after all, and ever will be, the privilege of some.
Each has hisfunction, each is excellent, viewed from a higher standpoint;
even the cruel and the base are. But certainly we must not suppose
that we can all have the same place, and fill equally well the functions
. of everybody else. Such a principle can only lead to endless confusion
and mistake. Rather does the true principle of human dignity consist
�THE POET OF MODERN DEMOCRACY.
345
in learning and acknowledging the worth and necessity of every func
tion, so that no one shall henceforth be ashamed of his post, however
humble, and that no one shall foolishly look down upon him for filling
it—look down on him only if he refuse to fill it, or fill it unworthily
and carelessly. Society must see to it, indeed, that each man at his post
be regarded as man, his other human claims not being disregarded. But
his position as worker in any capacity is to be esteemed honourable;
nor need everybody be in such a desperate hurry to become something
which he is not, and which all assuredly cannot be, to the detriment
and ill-being of those who do not succeed in this general scramble for
pelf and consideration, but remain, as they must, a vast majority of
condemned pariahs on the lower rungs of the social ladder. To wear a
black coat, and win the estimable privilege of making one’s workmen
fight as fiercely with oneself for bread as one fought with one’s own
master before !—-that is what political economy says we must all make
haste and do. In this light, this unguarded proclamation of the abso
lute equality of man appears to be somewhat confounding and dangerous.
An ideal social scheme would rather consist in every man claiming his
own, and acknowledging the special aptitudes of his neighbour. And as
to religions, poems, architecture, and civilisations, even supposing they
did not live in their infinite proportional effects, they have lived, they
have been, whether the average man knows to-day anything about them
or not.
But it is fair to admit that Whitman does now and then distinctly
acknowledge the claims of greatness to lead mankind, and insists on
the supreme worth of ideal manhood—strong mastering personality; and
these passages are to be set against the others. In the ‘Song of the
Broad Axe ’ he does this finely. And nothing can be nobler and more
complete than his description of an ideal great city or state. In it he
goes dead against the too prevalent worship of material resources and
material power. It is where the most virtuous, most loving, most
independent citizens are; where the fullest life of intellect, heart and
.soul is; where the happiness and good of each one stands sacred and
.■secure, so far as the community can secure it.
That each person to himself is a centre of the whole as no other
creature can be, that to that person the whole universe centres in
himself, and that all really has worked up to me, and for me, with my
marvellous consciousness, which creates not only a Me, but at the same
.moment creates over again in me the whole world so far as I know it—
this most strikingly our author asserts. Only there is peril of our not
.remembering that there are other selves, and some selves much greater
dhan ourselves, especially when we are assured that there is 1 no better,
no master, no god over us beyond what exists intrinsically in ourselves.’
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A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN,
From a poem called ‘Greatnesses,’ however, we may set the following
against that :
Great is Justice !
Jiistice is not settled by legislators and laws—it is in the soul;
It cannot be varied by statutes, any more than love, pride, gravity;
It is immutable—it does not depend on majorities—majorities or
What not come at last before the same passionless and exact tribunal.
So that we see the truth to he, Whitman believes the ideal manhood
to be whole in each man, only waiting, hidden in some; and he calls meh
up to this, out of their basei- everyday selves. In this again, he does not
surely differ much from the teaching of the most illustrious Christian
teachers. This is precisely what William Law and Mr. Maurice pro
claim; only it is true their doctrine is otherwise put. Whitman says ’
that the ideal man is in every man. Christian teachers more platonically assert that every man rather is in the ideal Man. Readers
may think that makes not so very much difference. Still, there is a
radical difference in the way of looking at the question; for it makes
a great difference whether we are to look into ourselves, and ourselves only,
for spiritual elevation above our ordinary selves, or whether we are to
look out of ourselves to a possible source of higher self-hood, which yet
at present is by no means present in ourselves. But to understand
Whitman better when he says that he ‘sets no god over anyone,’ let us
look for a moment at the most metaphysical or quasi-theological piece he
has written, called ‘The Square Deific.’ If I rightly apprehend him,
though the piece is none of the plainest, he makes the Divine All to«
consist, as it were, of a square, a four-sided figure. The first mani
festation, which he calls ‘ God] appears to be in the character of natural
laws as they incessantly, inexorably manifest themselves in time, in all
phenomena. ‘Relentless I forgive no man; whosoever sins, dies. I will
have that man’s life. Have the seasons, gravitation, the appointed days;.
mercy? No more have I.’ Secondly comes 1 the Saviour] of whom
Christ is the most prominent embodiment. It is the spirit of love and
self-sacrifice and mercy, as it exists among men. Thirdly comes Satan,.
‘Aloof, dissatisfied, plotting revolt. Crafty, despised, a drudge, ignorantr
with sullen face and worn brow;’ in short, the principle of ignorance,
suffering, hatred, selfishness, baseness, as it appears among men. Finally
comes the Spirit, ‘including Life, God, Saviour, Satan, Essence of Forms,
Life of the Real Identities, Life of the Sun and Stars, the general soul.’
Well, here all appears to me to be what we call phenomenal, with
nothing positively transcendental in it. I mean that this simply enumerates as divine and constituting God—(1) The natural external laws of
nature (whether of spirit or matter), (2) Love as it is in men, (3) Hate,
and suffering, and ignorance, as they are in men, (4) The one essence.
�THE POET OF MODERN DEMOCRACY.
347
inclusive of all these, founding and giving them existence. Now I think
with Whitman this latter principle is merely an abstraction; it is simply
all the others, with the special characteristics of each left out. I
doubt from the language if Whitman means here to assert a iranscmdented ground, cause, principle of cdl that is in time, itself away from time,
not to be prisoned in the forms of intelligence, but by the very structureof intelligence demanding to be believed in and worshipped; worshipped
as source of all life and power, as well as worshipped in phenomenal
effects, personalities, and things. It may be otherwise; but he seems
to me not distinctly to conceive and believe in such a divine principle;
simply to deify men and nature as we see them—now regarding them as
separate entities, now viewing them as partakers of one identical yet
divinely manifested life. That is true, but to me it is not all—only
half. And if he held the other half truth, why should he distinctly say
that he places no god over any of us ? Whereas the fact is, that the
development of any personality (as of any other thing that begins to be
and changes, while retaining a certain mysterious identity from moment
to moment) were absolutely inconceivable, without admitting a principle
of such successive existence entirely out of the sphere of antecedent or
present phenomena. For when anything begins to be seen for the first
time, it is evident that nothing whatsoever which was before (being by
the very conditions of the case different and other) can possibly be
accepted as its efficient, but only as its condition, or occasional cause.
Yet the common sense of mankind and the consciousness of every man
insist that there must be an efficient cause for all that begins. Invaria
ble succession and order of phenomena have nothing whatever to dowith this, though the common fallacy is to suppose that the antecedents
are in an efficient sense causative of the consequents. Since, however,
all phenomena in their actual order are necessary to any special effect,,
the special causes of all these must be co-operative with its special causeto produce it : but these causes are alike transcendental. While, on theother hand, if intelligence and will in a divine person were taken as the
cause of phenomena, they would explain nothing, and fulfil the condi
tions of the problem no better, because phenomena as they are in time,
are not identical with them, as they would be in the divine ideas ; for
else they would have existed before, whereas they now begin to exist;
but it is this very beginning to exist which demands explanation, demands
an adequate cause. It remains, therefore, only to admit that such ulti
mate cause cannot be prisoned in forms of understanding; yet since it is,
it is the very source and essence of our, as of every other, life and
power ; and before this principle of special life and power comes forth to
constitute ourselves (as it does every successive moment we exist, chang
ing and modifying us) our special life and personality are to be regarded,.
�•348
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN.
■as folded up in God ; yet this is to be viewed only as a flexible adaptation
to our varying intelligence.
One more word. Whitman, I think, not obscurely intimates more
than once that he believes in personal immortality, but I do not think
the doctrine plays any important part in his system. And what he says
of death seems to me often very fine, quite independently of any such
doctrine of immortality. His notion of what the future life of a person
is to be, liow that person can strictly be said to live again beyond
death, is evidently of the vaguest; and so vague is it that nearly
all he says on this subject can be adopted thankfully and admiringly
oven by those who do not see their way to holding a strictly personal
immortality.
Thus, in 1 Nearing Departure,’ he says :
A dread beyond, of I know not what, darkens me. .
0 book and chant ! must all then amount to but this ?
And yet it is enough, 0 Soul ?
0 soul! we have positively' appeared—that is enough.
In 1 Wherefore,’ too, he says, yielding for awhile to sadness, doubt,
■despondency, about the poor results achieved through incessant
.apparently useless struggle :—
What good amid these, 0 me, 0 life ?
'Then he ansivers:
That you are here, that life exists and identity,
That the poicerful play goes on and you will contribute a verse.
Such, indeed, is that of which at least we are certain. The least may
know that the eternities centre in him. Now, he is—they could not
possibly be without him, even as he is—and they diverge from him
•again; a seed he is of all Divine futurity. Surely, if we cease personally
to exist after this—this is something to know ; and we may make our
lives a conscious contribution, after our measure, to the sacred cause of
humanity, we may live out of the bounds of our own little selves, and so
inherit the ages. But in truth no one can cease to be ; for the essence
of each is eternal in God.
Again, in a wonderful little bit, ‘ To one shortly to Die,’ he says :—■
The suu bursts through in unlooked-for directions ;
-Strong thoughts fill you, and confidence—you smile !
You forget you are sick, as I forget you are sick ;
You do not see the medicines—you do not mind the weeping friends—I am with you,
I exclude others from you—there is nothing to be commiserated ;
I do not commiserate—I congratulate you.
Again, elsewhere, he says :
You are henceforth secure whatever comes and goes.
And why ?
Surely any one may say it.
�THE POET OF MODERN DEMOCRACY.
349
We are, we have been, what can change that? And, moreover, theefforts of us must continue, infinite, immense, in precise proportion to
what we are and have been. We cannot, even to-day, identify our
selves with the human creature that is popularly called ourselves in the
cradle. No self-consciousness now can unite the selves we are conscious
of with that life. Scarcely can we identify ourselves with the intelligent
children that we dimly remember ourselves to have been; we may com
pletely have shifted personality; and we may regard what others call
ourselves as more strange to us now than those persons of a bygone age,
who are dead indeed, but in whose souls and spirits we find to-day more
communion, more sympathy, than in any with whom, though living, wo
are in contact of mere proximity. There shall be a continuous con
sciousness not unlike ours; and other persons in the future may obscurely,,
yet rejoicingly, identify themselves with us.
In Mr. Lincoln’s Funeral Hymn, Whitman sings :
Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring,
For fresh as the morning—thus would I chant a song for you,
0 SANE AND SACRED DEATH.
I suppose what will shock the majority most is Whitman’s admitting
evil and misfortune as part of the necessary order, entering as integral
elements into the Square Deific. Wherein he follows the small shoe
maker, and great philosopher, Jacob Behmen. Yet, after all that has
been said about it, thus it is. It affords, as imperfection, the necessary
stepping-stone to spiritual and moral progress; it affords the opposition
necessary to call out goodness, and kindness, love, virtuous strife, and
victory. All goes in this universe by a play of contraries, or where
would be the life, the advance, the infinite and harmonious variety ?
Without Satan, where would be the Saviour ?
�
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A study of Walt Whitman, the poet of modern democracy. Part 2
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Noel, Roden
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Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 336-349 p. ; 23 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. From The Dark Blue 2 (November, 1871). Attribution of journal title and date: Virginia Clark catalogue. The Dark Blue was a London-based literary magazine published monthly from 1871 to 1873.
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Poetry
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American Poetry
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Poetry in English
Walt Whitman
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241
TUDY
OF
jVALT
J/VHIT/VlANj
THE POET OF MODERN DEMOCRACY.
By the Hon. Roden Hoel.
PART I.
I had just been reading Whitman for the first time, when I took up a
weekly review, which always speaks, if not as one having, yet as one
assuming to have, authority; and there I found it stated that Walt
Whitman was an obscure impostor, and that his poetry was no better
than Miss Codger’s prose. I had thought otherwise; but upon a
diffident person this unhesitating deliverance from our weekly oracle
of critical revelation might well have a staggering effect. Kot very
long after, however, I read in the same literary arbiter, which so
thoroughly fills among us the functions of any possible Academy (what
could Mr. Arnold and Mr. Proude have been thinking about when they
sighed for one ?), that Charles Dickens was a rather inferior writer, a
sort of Bavius or Msevius of his day, at least if compared with Mr.
Tennyson. Upon this, I felt that the critic was speaking out of a
sphere so entirely away from and elevated above mine, that, until he
should have communicated his own superior nature to me, I must
remain totally incapable of profiting by his revelations. Kot without
many a qualm, therefore, I betook myself again to my own feeble lights,
having really for the nonce nothing better that I could look to.
To me, then, I will begin by owning at the outset, Walt Whitman
appears as one of the largest and most important figures of the time,
Of those who have publicly expressed a somewhat similar conviction,
may be mentioned Mr. Rossetti, Mr. Conway, Mr. Robert Buchanan,
and (I believe) Mr. Swinburne.
I think that what delights and arrests one most is the general im
pression he gives of nature, strength, health, individuality—his relish
of all life is so keen, intense, catholic—the grasp of his faith is so
nervous and tremendous—as he says, ‘ My feet are tenon’d and mortis’d
in granite.’ One of the notes of a man of genius is, that through life
he remains a child; and there is something eminently childlike in
Whitman. He is full of naif wonder and delight—each thing, every
�242
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN,
time lie looks upon it, flashes upon him with a sense of eternal freshness
and surprise ; nor is anything to him common or unclean ; but an aerial
glory, as of morning, utterly insensible to vulgar eyes, bathes and
suffuses all. He is tall, colossal, luxuriant, unpruned, like some
giant tree in a primeval forest, whose feet root profoundly in a virgin
soil. He springs out of that vast American continent full-charged
with all that is special and national in it, in a supercmincnt degrees
representative of all that is richest and most fresh in that American
life which, more fully than any other, embodies the present age’s own
individual life. He is very far from being hopeless and disdainful of
his time ; he does not, as many really great writers of his country have
done, prefer distant lands, enriched with long and eventful histories, for
his theme ; he takes his own country and his own time, however ignoble
they may seem to some fastidious tastes ; he is by no means himself
uninfluenced by the special errors and special weaknesses of these;
but he is withal magnificently pregnant with all a seer’s half-articulate
previsions, with all a prophet’s triumphant anticipations of that larger
and more generous human future which is surely about to issue out
of these travailing loins and from these most ominous birthpangs of
the present. He is American democracy incarnate ; and however much
that leaves to be desired, yet it is great. As Mr. Buchanan has already
remarked, he is more prophet than artist. He very seldom retires to
create deliberate imaginative wholes, in whose many diverse forms may
be deposited the truths he sees and must utter, the mastering emotions
which dominate his soul. You never cease to see this man Walt
Whitman. But then it is a very noble, and I contend a very poetic,
personality you see—one in which, as in a magic crystal, all these men
and women of the wrorld, all the sights of city and of landscape, find
themselves mirrored with most astonishing distinctness. He is too
eager, too excited, to linger and to weave artistic poems out of his
materials ; yet in the flash of the dark-lantern he turns upon them for
a moment as he passes, though they too often appear isolated and
disjunct, they dart out upon you with all the marvellous solidity and
reality which their images have in nature. It is certainly a poet’s
glance which has been poured upon them—piercing, remaking them;
not the glance of an analyst, a practical man, or one apathetic and
indifferent. It is always one of intense enjoyment, from complete vision
of the essence and heart of a thing. And this atmosphere of keen
buoyant personal sympathy and pleasure is more marked in Whitman
than in anyone else, and is wonderfully bracing and refreshing to
breathe. All the stale heaps of common, familiar things seem to leap
up into their proper vitality as he passes : they glow like dingy metal
filings in some electric light. And if he were otherwise, more of an
ordinary artist, we should lose this refreshing novel sense of intense
yet catholic and impersonal personality which is so eminently charac
teristic of Walt Whitman. He seems to revel in his own life, and
�THE POET OF MODERN DEMOCRACY.
243
equally in that of every man, woman, and child he meets or can
imagine. And now that so many people say and sing that they are
weary and tired and despairing, that the world is worn out, and that
yon must go back to the classics or mediaeval themes for any objects
of warm poetic interest, that life now is ‘ a suck and a sell, and its end
a bit of threadbare crape,’ this spectacle of a poet and a man like a
very child rejoicing in all the teeming forces and energies of this vulgar
world of ours—this surely is something at least novel and ‘ sensational.’
True it is,- however, that Whitman comes of the people; his past
life has been active, adventurous, healthy, varied, and broadly human
in experience. Tic dare nob set himself above them, above the meanest
of them, and look down from a height serenely benevolent upon them ;
he claims to be one with them; and what he sees more vividly than
they, glories in more supremely, is—that he is, not an elect, a very
intellectual or refined man, but a man, and has men and women
for brothers and sisters. This honest and unfeigned use of great
ness in rendering service rather than in exacting it—in pouring self
out for the enrichment of mankind rather than jn cunningly playing
upon the weaknesses of mankind for one’s own glory—this is after the
ancient type of heroism, after Christ, ‘ friend of publicans and sinners,’
the Divinest Son of Man, who ‘ drew all men to Himself; ’ and one can
well understand the personal fascination and influence which we are
informed Whitman is exercising upon so many of the youth of
America. The life familiar to him is the picturesque, free, unconven
tional life of the people—not the pale monotonous artificial life of literary
student, aristocrat, or plutocrat. He enters profoundly into all their
difficulties, enjoyments, sorrows, and eager aspirations. Then, too, he
has been in the great civil war, and been keenly penetrated with
the noblest (as well as the less noble, but still powerfully human) of
its principles and ideas. And in that war he was present personally
in the sublimes! and most heroic of capacities—he ministered constantly
to the wounded on both sides, on the field and in the hospital. Such
a man, therefore, has had exceptional advantages as man—and the
raw material being heroic, such is the result. We who stay at home in
the old country, with old traditions and prejudices rank in our blood,
nurtured under the grand yet somewhat chilling shadow of ‘ timehonoured institutions ’—we cannot pretend to call ourselves men of
the age as that man can call himself man of the age. But of book
learning, of refined inherited culture-inculcated accents, words, and
ways, this man has probably little—so far, he has not, perhaps, had all
advantages, though, whether they would not have cramped and injured
him, is to me very questionable.
There are those, I know, who affirm that a poet can never (except
quite indirectly) be a teacher or a prophet. This is again a critical
dictum so removed from me that I do not pretend to understand it. I
should have thought it depended on how he taught and prophesied—
�244
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN,
whether in doing so his whole nature was a-fire or not, his imagination
and his heart all a-glow about the chariot way of his reason ; for other
wise Isaiah and Jeremiah, Lucretius and Shelley, would be no poets,
which on the whole I rather take leave to doubt. But it resolves itself
of course into a dispute about words.
If, again, a poet must necessarily mean a metrist after our established
English models, certainly Whitman is none. His expression indeed
must be admitted to be often slovenly, inadequate, clumsy, and harsh ;
sometimes even stilted, bombastic, and inflated. But it is very far
from uniformly or generally this. I read indeed in the same review of
which I have before so reverently spoken, how it was now an axiom
unquestioned by any judicious person that subject-matter in poetry was
nothing, and style, expression, was everything. I felt terribly discon
certed at always having to believe exactly the opposite of all that is so
categorically and without argument laid down by this our supreme
authority in matters critical; hut really that did seem startling to the
uninitiated mind. Whether a poet has anything to say, to bring out,
to express, is of no consequence whatsoever. Whether it be nothing or
something, whether it be nonsense or wisdom, whether it be empty
wind or inspired revelations, gibberings of an idiot, pulings of a senti
mentalist, or utterances of sublime imagination and divine passion—all
this is of absolutely no account; if only there be sibilants and labials
and rotundities of sound in the slipping of any or of either of these
things off the tongue, he who gives vent to them is a poet, in either
case equally a poet; but if there be not quite enough of these sounds,
whatever else there be, by no means and on no account a poet. Well,
then, must not musical glasses be a poet ? And since it would certainly
be possible to weave intricacies of sound more exquisite and more varied
by discarding altogether that old-fashioned hampering obligation of
conceiving, imagining, and feeling with strength sustained enough to
keep coherence, harmony, and distinctness among the ideal links we
weave, would it not on these principles be well to lay down ex cathedra
the grand, if novel axiom, that true poetry can only and shall only
consist of nonsense verses ? On the contrary, I venture to believe that
expression implies meanings to be expressed, and that the most perfect
expression is that which most transparently and impressively fits and
shows off the meaning.
The charm of ‘ Don Juan ’ is surely in that wonderful adaptation of
the metre to all clear, luscious beauty of the pictures, all free, in
commoded movements of the story, all sparkling turns of the satire,
the humour, and the wit; there is here no deliberate concoction of
‘ blessed words like Mesopotamia,’ no triumphant exultation in the
invention of novel tricks for saying ordinary things that must be said
in a roundabout, coxcombical, and unintelligible manner, which now
(as in the days of Euphues and Darwin) appears to be considered the
one essential of great poetry. Wordsworth hoped vainly that he had
�THS POET 0> MODERN DEMOCRACY.
245
refuted that. I refuse to call him a great master of expression with
whom words, whether in prose or verse, are not before all a medium of
meaning ; if they are employed with all manner of tricks and artifice,
primarily for their own sakes, and the meaning has very much to take
its chance of sanity and wholeness among them (the effect being that
of a kaleidoscope, where bright broken fragments of ideas keep shifting
their combinations in an endless and bewildering fashion), whatever the
music of the sound be, it is not good expression, but the very worst.
Poetry in this case usurps the place of music, for words can never bo
mere sound, but always must remain symbolic sound with a determined
meaning. Just so precisely the latest fashion in music usurps the place
of language and stultifies the very idea and specific difference of music,
which implies sound for its own sake, spiritual suggestion only indirect
and indefinite : a similar remark applies to the last fashion in painting.
Shelley himself, for example, wonderful poet as he is, was often carried
into totally inadequate expression by his exquisite ear for melodious
sound. His melody and harmony are glorious when they rise spon
taneously into heaven, immediately responsive to the soaring and ex
panding impulse within, wholly obedient to the burst of impetuous ima
gination., to the divine stress and swell of immense human sympathies.
But of a poet—a maker, a seer, a singer—must first of all be demanded
if he can make and feel and see ; then afterwards, if he can sing. Yet
the chances are that if he answer ‘ yes ’ to the first question, you are
almost safe in leaving the other unasked. It is the very meaning and
essence of poetry that a man who can make in the region of the ideal,
who can feel and imagine (unless he be by nature impelled to some
other than verbal form of plastic expression), will necessarily be driven
to
form of rhythmical utterance. I do not depreciate the most
gifted in the region of melodious metrical expression. I glorify them.
If they have other things yet more essential, they are by far the most
perfect of our poets ; only Byron and Wordsworth, whose melody was
less perfect than that of Shelley or Coleridge, cannot on that account be
placed below the latter as poets; for they have abundantly filled for us
vast spaces in the area of poetry which could not have been filled without
them. They have ideal treasures not to be found in their contemporaries.
What were the early rhapsodists, the story-tellers, ballad-intoners,
bards, of an infant people ? It is generally conceded that poetry
among these is of the purest and freshest. Yet what do they know of
our elaborate involutions of phrase-mongering ? Therefore, especially
do I welcome Whitman. In spite of all his faults, he brings us back
to the matrix, to common sense and common nature, and makes us feel
what poetry originally, what at the root of the matter poetry even now,
really means and ought to mean. He is not himself indeed always an
artist a poet; but he is often a very great poet; and when he is,
he shows himself to be one, because he must be, not because he would
like to be, and can mimic those who are. He chants, declaims; when
�245
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN,
his soul and subject hid him, he sings, quite in his own fashion, as the
poets of a primitive people do.
After all, it is rarely that you find all poetic gifts perfectly balancing
one another in any poet whatever. Nor can I concede for a moment
that deficiency in the region of large vivid insight, affluent imagination,
broad human sympathy, or rush and fire of passion, can be more
perfectly atoned for by verbal daintiness and skill, or by a fine ear for
verbal music, than some defect in these last gifts can be by possession
on the part of a poet of those ideal gifts in ampler measure. Indeed, I
distinctly believe that the contrary rather is true. There is more hope
that a poet may be cured of hesitating utterance than that a mere
voluble versifier may sober and strengthen into a poet.
We did want some infusion of robuster and healthier blood among
the pallid civilised brotherhood of our poets. If admirers arise who
strive to imitate Whitman’s gait and form, they will probably make
themselves ridiculous, puff themselves out and collapse ; yet will he
certainly give our jaded literature the prick and fillip that it needed.
He at any rate is no closet-warbler, trilling delicately after the music
of other singers, having merely a few thin thoughts and emotions only
a quarter his own and a clever aptitude for catching the tricks of
another man’s manner.
He bears, however, a marvellous resemblance (I often think) to
Oriental prophets. He is in manner of life, as well as manner of
thought, feeling, temperament, marvellously like a reincarnation over
there in the West of that special principle of personality which has
been so much more frequently manifested in the East—in Derwishes,
for instance, and Sufis. He has so thoroughly assimilated Bible
poetry on account of his profound personal identity with the writers
of it. Yet is he very un-Hebrew after all. He is more Egyptian,
Persian, Indian. Pantheist is he to the back bone; a nature worshipper,
seeing God everywhere—God in all, even the meanest thing ; bowing
before good and evil as integral and correlative elements in the universal
scheme of things, all going (as Hegel demonstrates) by the principle
of identity in contraries. He is a desperate and shameless assertor of
the sacredness of the flesh, the body, beauty of form and colour, and
the fleshly instincts. This he is (let us freely admit and regret)
wantonly, inartistically coarse in asserting; unutterably shocking
of course to those who are unutterably shocked with nature for
making us of flesh at all, and who hold that the only way to remedy
her immodest mistake is to hush the fact up altogether.
The passages most capable of giving deep and permanent delight to
lovers of poetry in all ages are certainly those in which a profound
soul-moving spiritual signification rises without let or hindrance into
that perfect rhythmic cadence which is propel’ to it. Here doubtless a
careful training of the organ of expression has its place, as well as a
fine original instinct for expression, and a genius for grandeur and
�THE POET OF MODERN DEMOCRACY.
247
melody of sound. In proportion to the completeness, magic sug
gestiveness, and special beauty of sound concordant with idea and
feeling, will be the penetration and lingeringly-inherent power of the
poem. But the condition implied is that the sound be verily an echo,
a reduplication of the sense. In that wonderful music of Coleridge’s
1 Ode to France ’ there is all the still floating of cloud, the long
roll of wave, the solemn music of wind and swinging pine by
night. In ‘Lewti,’ the delicious, how the mellow ripple of verse in
its own ‘meandering mazes’ reflects and multiplies for ever that
gleam of river-swans and the river 1 A marvellous and mysterious
fellowship among sights and sounds makes such a marrying of them
attainable. Not only is the word thunder next of kin to the very roll
of sound in heaven, but very twins also are blitz and the flash that
blinds. The name gleaming gently soothes the ear, even as soft tender
light does the eye. And when the whole subject has a pervading tone,
a characteristic movement, be it rapid tumultuous rush, solemn im
perial march, pathetic pause, or tripping buoyancy of the dance, then
must the true poet’s measure breathe antiphonal response in the
music. Take Shelley’s marvellously lovely prophetic chorus in
‘ Hellas,’ or the splendid music of his eagle-chorus in the same ; out of
Byron take the stern, sad warrior-lilt of his ‘ Isles of Greece ;’ out of
Burns the abrupt exulting tramp, the clarion and the battle-shout of
‘ Scots, wha hae.’
But in no case can I find that any great poets made poetry to con
sist in mere ingenious allurements for the ear, busied themselves first
of all about this, and let the spiritual fire fall into the midst of their
word-altar if it would, or if it could. Alas ! how often it will not, though
the priests of Ashtaroth cry aloud, and leap, and cut themselves with
knives! '
Coleridge’s 1 Kubla Khan,’ exquisite for music, even in spite of the
line which brings in that ‘ blessed word ’ Mount Abora, is far too shadowy
a vision from opium-land to be permanently remembered, as 1 Christabel ’
or the 1 Mariner ’ may be. To my mind, that sweetest little bit, called
the ‘ Knight’s Grave,’ is, for atmosphere of tender sentiment, undefined
yet far-reaching and profound, suffusing picture, thought, and melody
alike (surely the melody is magical to a degree), worth many ‘Kubla
Khans ’ and similar pieces, arresting only or almost only from the music
of the syllables.
So much I thought it well to premise, because in a day which
has seen really beautiful artificial melodies in poetry brought to a
pitch of rare perfection, the rough untutored guise of Walt Whit
man’s muse is likely to prove the most serious obstacle of all to
toy cardinal justice being done to his high poetic genius.
Yet in Whitman we shall often recognise that nobler kind of music
which is bound up with a poet’s language as a more thorough and
effectual expression of thought, image, and feeling.
�248
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN,
Turn, first, to his beautiful lament for the death of Lincoln, 1 When
lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed ’ :
Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness,
To the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so still.
And the singer so shy to the rest received me,
The gray-browll bird I know received us comrades three,
And he sang what seemed the song of Death, and a verse for him I love
Come, lovely and soothing Death !
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day in the night, to all to each,
Sooner or later, delicate Death!
Praised be the fathomless universe
Por life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,
And for love, sweet love. But praise ' 0 praise and praise
Por the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding Death !
Yet each I keep and all,
The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird,
And the tallying chant, the echo aroused in my soul,
With the lustrous and drooping star, with the countenance full of woo,
With the lilac tall, and its blossoms of mastering odour.
For the dead I loved so well,
For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands . . .
And this for his dear sake.
Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,
With the holders holding my hand nearing the call of the bird,
There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.
Note here, too, the creation of a simple beautiful whole—a few
ordinary sights, scents, and sounds, flowing quietly as by accident
into his soul, and there taking a solemn tinge from the sublime
atmosphere of a manly grief ready to kindle into the gladness of a
triumphant faith—but nothing forced, nothing strained, nothing made
up; these messengers from without just taking on an aspect of
hallowed sympathy with the tone and temper of the soul they visit.
I note this particularly as one instance out of many in Whitman,
because what is most noticeable on the surface of him is a certain
fragmentariness, a certain tendency to rush rapidly through a whole
world of isolated details with an intensity of exhilaration, indeed,
which is itself poetic, but which yet fails of creating high art, because
there is no obvious wholeness, no sufficiently pervading idea or
purpose to impart unity. It is not with him a question of painting a
particular scene or even object with extraordinary lovingness and
minuteness of touch, the whole being poetical because every touch
helps to create, or indeed more strictly develop, a spiritual ideal of
scene or thing by flashing upon the bare matter, as it appears to the
cold unloving sense, a thousand tints and tones from kindred things
�The
poet
Of
modern democracy.
249
With which it has latent fellowship and sympathy. With Whitman
rather, in snch passages as offend many readers, it is a kind of rapid
excited stride through brilliant but heterogeneous stalls of a great
exhibition or bazaar, cataloguing objects with bare names as he goes.
And this is the notion he gives you always and everywhere. How
ever barren, or even stammering and inadequate his naming and
picturing, still he contrives to flash upon all a wonderful light of
freshness, and glory, and triumph in the bare existence of all things, as
he shoulders along, the great sane man, enjoying, praising, filled to
the very brim, in an age of nervous hesitation, and question, and
lamentation, with a faith as tremendous and unquenchable in the
ultimate excellence and right of things as ever burned in prophet or
saint of old. A faith not received by inheritance as an heirloom, and
conventionally valued as a property, a propriety, a matter of course—■
but a faith grown out of the very roots and breadths of his own per
sonality, and that the personality of a man who, with all reverence for
the past, yet lives in, and assimilates the fresh results yielded by the
present, sharing, according to the fuller measure of genius and un
wonted human sympathy, the hopes and aspirations of his fellows for
the future. His bright and large views of life may indeed be fairly
attributed in some measure to his splendid health and physique, as Mr.
Rosset ti remarks. And I think this rapid, often unsatisfactory, nakedly
prosaic cataloguing of innumerable isolated details, may be attributed
largely also to the poet’s exhilaration in the open air; he can hardly
stop to meditate and get the precise character of the object opened out
to him, he enjoys it so, and then so many other things everywhere
press themselves on him to be noticed and enjoyed. In this respect,
Ms fellowship with ordinary out-door, healthy men, his habit of loafing
»bout and basking, does a serious injury to his artistic expression.
For it should be well understood that accuracy of detail may be either
naked, cold, and mechanical, or intensely poetic because thoroughly
spiritualised. It is unjust to apply the phrase ‘ photographic ’ to this
Zasi kind of work. Coleridge and Keats always saw nature thus;
Wordsworth’s harder nature not perhaps always, though usually: and
what I mean by the poetic vision is a more real and intense, by no
means a less true, sight.
But generally Whitman’s description appears to me thoroughly
masterful. His epithets are few, yet precise and characteristic of the
broad general image which a thing, a scene, casts upon a quick,
passing, but piercing and sympathetic, observer. Thus :
In lower latitudes, in warmer air in the Carolinas, the large black buzzard floating
slowly, high beyond the tree-tops ;
°
below the red cedar festooned with tylandia j the pines ajid cypresses
Growing out of the white sand, that spreads far and flat ;
Ihe waving drapery on the live oak, trailing long and low, noiselessly waved by the
wind.’
VOL. II.—NO. VIII.
N
�250
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN,
But if Whitman be sometimes remarkable for incisive luminous
distinctness of vision and keenness of all sensation, at other times he
is no less remarkable for a certain magical, mysterious, half-Oriental,
half-German mood that anon possesses him, vague and dim, tender,
mournful, mystical.
‘ The Song of the Broad-axe ’ and ‘ Drum-taps ’ are poems that
are almost all wholes—exquisite pictures drawn writh a few broad
telling touches, and exhaling the profoundest pathos, yet seldom
morbid—a wind, as of bracing faith, blowing through all the sorrow
and the horror; a bracing atmosphere of personal unselfish heroic
endeavours, and most sterling human sympathy pervades them.
On the ‘ Drum-taps ’ Whitman might be content to rest his fame
with future generations. There is little philosophy or mysticism ;
there are few of those peculiarities in form or boldnesses of speech
which shock people most—the art is certainly more perfect. There
is here a definite theme through all the poems—the subject is large,
grand, full of energy and strife, one for which Whitman’s genius as
well as personal experience eminently fits him. Have there ever
been such a series of war poems written ? I do not know of any.
Here, however, not only the tender, loving, pathetic, as well as real
istic and idyllic power of Whitman appears, but also his own ardent
personal convictions, tastes, and aspirations, so that ever and anon
he breaks into passages of tremendous lyric fire. And, except in that
other great poetic figure of the day, Victor Hugo, I hardly know
where we shall look in Europe for the like ; for our verse does not excel
row-a-days in verve, and fire, and rapid rush.1 In that line is not the
following magnificent ?—
Beat! beat! drums. Blow ! bugles ! blow !
Make no parley—stop for no expostulation,
Mind not the timid, mind not the weeper or prayer,
Mind not the old man beseeching the young man,
Let not the child’s voice be heard nor the mother’s entreaties,
Make even the trestles to shake the dead, where they lie awaiting the hearses,
So strong you thump, 0 terrible drums ; so loud you bugles blow!
And in ‘ The Uprising,’ you can hear the surge, and whirl, and
shriek of the wind; the tremendous upheaval and welter of the
sea; the deep gathering overwhelming roar of a roused and mad
dening multitude. Then ‘ The Song of the Banner ’ is all alive with
spirit of battle. In the few lines 1 The Flag ’ there is a wild fierce
delight, electrically communicated, from the mere upheaval of a people
en masse to fight, it scarcely matters why or for what.
‘What we believe in invites no man, promises nothing, sits in
1 I wish to state that this essay was written more than a year and a half ago, and
has been lying by. I have since seen Mr. Swinburne’s ‘ Songs before Sunrise,’ many
of which are all alive with resonant lyric fervour inspired by great human emotions.
�THE POET OF MODERN DEMOCRACY.
251
Calmness and light, is positive and composed, knows no discourage
ment, waiting patiently, waiting its time ! ’ That to me is grand ;
he cannot define, will not pretend to explain precisely, the in
evitable and Divine issue of all our strife, and hallowed endeavour
and success, and failure—but It is there, in the Future, in the For
ever ; patient, silent, grand, adorable, inevitably To be.
The short, "so perfect, pathetic pictures I spoke of in ‘ Drum-taps ’
are well worthy of study. ‘ A Letter from Camp,’ is the simple relation
of an affecting incident, without over-elaborate phrase, or prim
precision of ornament, after the manner of idyls which become a
little wearisome, but has the rare merit, for all its plain speech, of
dropping directly into our hearts and remaining there.
‘Vigil on the Field’ is exquisite for tenderness, sadness, and
large clear delineation of incident and scene. There is a rare fresh
ness of personal feeling about that: the charm of it seems to me un
utterable. He watches by a dying comrade whom he loved—a boy
-—on the field of battle, returns to find him dead, buries him in a
blanket in a rude dug grave there. ‘ The Wounded ’ is another graphic
picture. ‘ 0 tan-faced prairie-boy ’ and ‘ A Grave ’ are exquisite little
sketches. ‘ Camps of Green,’ too, is beautiful—the camps of the dead.
So is the ‘ Dirge for Two Veterans ’ and the ‘ Hymn of Dead Soldiers : ’
Sweet, are the blooming cheeks of the living, sweet ere the musical voices sounding;
But sweet, ah ! sweet are the dead, with their silent eyes.
And what shall we say of this, called ‘ Reconciliation ’ ?—
Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war ancl all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again and ever
again this soiled world ;
For my enemy is dead—a man divine as myself is dead.
I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin ; I draw near,
I bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.
Or of this ?—He walks out in the dim gray daybreak, and sees three
forms on stretchers, covered with’ gray heavy blankets. ‘ Curious I
halt, and silent stand ’—then he lifts one blanket:
Who are you, elderly man, so gaunt and grim, with well-grayed hair, and flesh all
sunken about the eyes? Who are you, my dear comrade ?
Then to the second I step—and who are you, my child and darling ? Who are you,
sweet boy with cheeks yet blooming ?
Then to the third—a face nor child nor old, very calm, as of beautiful yellow-white
ivory,
Young man, I think I know you. I think this face of yours is the face of the Christ
himself;
Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.
I
We would now, before passing to consider shortly the general
character of Whitman’s philosophy and teaching, draw closer attentio n
N2
�252
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN,
to the nature of his music. We take another instance from the poem,
1 When lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed ’:
0 how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved ?
And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone ?
And what shall my perfume be for the grave of him I love ?
Seawinds blown from east and west,
Blown from the eastern sea, and blown from the western sea, till tlierff on the prail'iea
meeting:
These, and with these and the breath of my chant,
I perfume the grave of him I love.
0 what shall I hang on the chamber Walls ?
And what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls,
To adorn the burial-house of him I love ?
But of all our author’s poems, surely the loveliest is ‘ A Song
out of the Sea.’ I only wish I could quote it whole, but it is too
long. I hesitate not to say that to me there is no lyric in the language
like it—out of Shelley.
There is a wonderful natural music running through this and
similar poems of Whitman’s : an outbreathing as in primitive times,
and among a primitive people, that can come from nowhere but from
the very depths of a poet’s, a singer’s soul. It is all his own—creation
of spirit, body, vesture. He is intensely original; has not been imbued
with the world’s rich inheritance of treasured poetry: works under no
strong (however flexible) traditions of art, speaks because he must, sings
because he must; yet, with all his rare personal mass and intensity, sings
only sometimes—would certainly sing more constantly did he condescend
to condense and concentrate more; in which some respect for established
forms would largely assist him. And yet in the links of poems where
there is confessedly no intensity of fire possible, if at least we require
that it shall be germane to the subjects, it is more than doubtful
whether the poetic barrenness should be scattered over with sham
flowers instead of real ones ; as the established forms, or at least the
standard poetry by which this English generation judges, appears to
require. So you get either fine sound with no meaning whatever, or
epithets ingeniously constructed in cold blood, which in either case
seriously interferes with the natural and lifelike development of the
poem. Pure honest prose, where prose is really proper, would be
infinitely better.
However all this be, here, in the ‘ Song of the Sea,’ and in similar
passages from Whitman, you do assuredly find, if you are sensitive
and competent, a certain artless harmony of sound that flows like a
spell upon jaded ears, somewhat sated with cloying artificial harmonies
from the study. One is reminded of some dreary nocturne, some
slumbrous mystic voluntary breathed in twilight within a vast
cathedral, or weird natural sounds we know not whence, wandering
phantasmal over lowland wildernesses by night.
�THE POET OF MODERN DEMOCRACY.
253
It is like the very voice of the sea himself, entangled in strings of
the harper ; into the strain has passed the very plaint and murmur of
winds over barren sand and briny briar; rising alternately and fall
ing ; harsh, interrupted, disturbed ; caught up unaware smooth and
soothing; stealing upon us forlorn and melodious, from unfooted
wastes, and shadowy realms of some spirit land that is very far.
Just two personification-pictures, eminently rich in colour, firm
in outline, distinct and pregnant with symbol, yet small in compass
and condensed. One is from ‘ Old Ireland ’ :
Far hence amid an isle of wondrous beauty,
Crouching over a grave, an ancient sorrowful mother,
Once a queen, now lean and tattered, seated on the ground ;
Her old white hair drooping dishevelled round her shoulders;
At her feet an unused royal harp,
Long silent—she too long silent—mourning her shrouded hope and heir :
Of all the earth her heart most full of sorrow, because most full of love.
The other is from ‘A Broadway Pageant,’ written on occasion of
the reception of a Japanese embassy:
The Originatress comes,
The. land of Paradise—land of the Caucasus—the nest of birth,
The nest of languages, the bequeather of poems, the race of Eld,
Florid with blood, pensive, rapt with musings, hot with passion,
Sultry with perfume, with ample and flowing garments,
With sunburnt visage, with intense soul and glittering eyes,
The race of Brahma comes !
[To &e continued.']
’
�
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A study of Walt Whitman, the poet of modern democracy. Part 1
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Noel, Roden
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Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 241-253 p. ; 23 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. From The Dark Blue 2 (October 1871). Attribution of journal title and date: Virginia Clark catalogue. The Dark Blue was a London-based literary magazine published monthly from 1871 to 1873.
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American Poetry
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Walt Whitman
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Text
NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY
“_________________ -^££0
I
WREATHE THE LIVING BROWS.
I
ORATION
ON
BY
COL. ROBERT G. INGERSOLL.
Price Threepence.
■
*
^onbon:
i
PROGRESSIVE PUBLISHING COMPANY,!
28 Stonecutter Street, E.C.
OL
1890.
2
��# i2 I
Hi'S 8*2
WREATHE
THE
LIVING-
BROWS.
AN ORATION
ON
WALT
WHITMAN
BY
COL. ROBERT G. INGERSOLL.
LONDON:
PROGRESSIVE PUBLISHING COMPANY,
28 Stonecutter Street, E.O.
1890.
�INTRODUCTION.
The following oration by Colonel Ingersoll was
delivered in the Horticultural Hall, New York, on
October 21, 1890. Although the object of the meeting
was to raise a testimonial for Walt Whitman in his old
age, several halls had been refused, the proprietors and
lessees being too bigoted to allow the greatest orator in
the United States to enter their doors.
Walt Whatman sat in an easy wheeled chair on the
platform. Before the crowded assembly broke up he
spoke the following characteristic words :—
“ Only a word, my friends, only a word. After all,
the main factor, my friends, is in meeting, being face
to face and meeting like this. I thought I would like
to come forward with my living voice and thank you
for coming and thank Robert Ingersoll for speaking,
and that is about all. With such brief thanks to you
and him and showing myself to bear testimony—I
think that is the Quaker term—face to face, I bid you
all hail and farewell.”
�AN ORATION ON WALT WHITMAN.
I.
In the year 1855 the American people knew but little
of books. Their ideals, their models, were English.
Young and Pollok, Addison and Watts were regarded
as great poets. Some of the more reckless read Thom
son’ s Seasons and the poems and novels of Sir Walter
Scott. A few, not quite orthodox, delighted in the
mechanical monotony of Pope, and the really wicked
__those lost to all religious shame—were worshippers
of Shakespeare. The really orthodox Protestant, un
troubled by doubts, considered Milton the greatest poet
of them all. Byron and Shelley were hardly respect
able—not to be read by young persons. It was admitted
on all hands that Burns was a child of nature of whom
his mother was ashamed and proud.
In the blessed year aforesaid, candor, free and sincere
speech, were under the ban. Creeds at that time were
entrenched behind statutes, prejudice, custom, ignor
ance, stupidity, Puritanism and slavery ; that is to say,
slavery of mind and body.
Of course it always has been, and for ever, will be,
impossible for slavery, or any kind or form of injustice,
to produce a great poet. There are hundreds of verse
makers and writers on the side of wrong—enemies of
progress—-but they are not poets, they are not men of
genius.
,.
At this time a young man—he to whom tins testi
monial is given—he upon whose head have fallen the
snows of more than seventy winters—this man, born
within the sound of the sea, gave to the world a book,
Leaves of Grass. This book was, and is, the true
transcript of a soul. The man is unmasked. No
drapery of hypocrisy, no pretence, no fear. The book
was as original in form as in thought. All customs
�4
ORATION ON WALT WHITMAN.
were forgotten or disregarded, all rules broken—nothing
mechanical—no imitation—spontaneous, running and
winding like a river, multitudinous in its thoughts as
the waves of the sea—nothing mathematical or
measured. In everything a touch of chaos—lacking
what is called form as clouds lack form, but not lacking
the splendor of sunrise or the glory of sunset. It was
a marvellous collection and aggregation of fragments,
hints, suggestions, memories and prophecies, weeds and
flowers, clouds and clods, sights and sounds, emotions
and passions, waves, shadows and constellations.
His book was received by many with disdain, with
horror, with indignation and protest—by the few as a
marvellous, almost miraculous, message to the world—
full of thought, philosophy, poetry and music.
In the republic of mediocrity genius is dangerous.
A great soul appears and fills the world with new and
marvellous harmonies. In his words is the old Pro
methean flame. The heart of nature beats and throbs
in his line. The respectable prudes and pedagogues
sound the alarm, and cry, or rather screech : “ Is this a
book for a young person ?”
A poem true to life as a Greek statue—candid as
nature—fills these barren souls with fear.
Drapery about the perfect was suggested by im
modesty.
The provincial prudes, and others of like mould,
pretend that love is a duty rather than a passion—a
kind of self-denial—not an overmastering joy. They
preach the gospel of pretence and pantalettes. In the
presence of sincerity, of truth, they cast down their
eyes and endeavor to feel immodest. To them the most
beautiful thing is hypocrisy adorned with a blush. .
They have no idea of an honest, pure passion,
glorying in its strength—intense, intoxicated with the
beautiful—giving even to inanimate things pulse and
motion, and that transfigures, ennobles and idealises
the object of its adoration.
They do not walk the streets of the city of life—
they explore the sewers ; they stand in the gutters and
cry “ Unclean !” They pretend that beauty is a snare ;
that love is a Delilah ; that the highway of joy is the
�ORATION ON WALT WHITMAN.
5
broad road, lined with flowers and filled with perfume,
leading to the city of eternal sorrow.
Since the year 1855 the American people have de
veloped ; they are somewhat acquainted with the litera
ture of the world. They have witnessed the most
tremendous of revolutions, not only upon the fields of
battle, but in the world of thought. The American
citizen has concluded that it is hardly worth while
being a sovereign unless he has the right to think for
himself.
And now, from this height, with the vantage-ground
of to-day, I propose to examine this book and to state,
in a general way, what Walt Whitman has done, what
he has accomplished, and the place he has won in the
world of thought.
II.
THE RELIGION OF THE BODY.
Walt Whitman stood, when he published his book,
where all stand to-night—on the perpetually moving
line where history ends and prophecy begins. He was
full of life to the very tips of his fingers—brave, eager,
candid, joyous with health. He was acquainted with
the past. He knew something of song and story, of
philosophy and art—much of the heroic dead, of brave
suffering, of the thoughts of men, the habits of the
peOple_rich as well as poor—familiar with labor, a
friend of wind and wave, touched by love and friend
ship—liking the open road, enjoying the fields and
paths, the crags—friend of the forest—feeling that he
was free—neither master nor slave—willing that all
should know his thoughts—open as the sky, candid as
nature—and he gave his thoughts, his dreams, his con
clusions, his hopes, and his mental portrait to his
fellow-men.
Walt Whitman announced the gospel of the body.
He confronted the people. He denied the depravity of
man. He insisted that love is not a crime ; that men
and women should be proudly natural; that they need
not grovel on the earth and cover their faces for shame.
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ORATION ON WALT WHITMAN.
He taught the dignity and glory of the father and
mother ; the sacredness of maternity.
Maternity, tender and pure as the tear of pity, holy
as suffering—the crown, the flower, the ecstasy of love.
People had been taught from Bibles and from creeds
that maternity was a kind of crime ; that the woman
should be purified by some ceremony in some temple
built in honor of some god. This barbarism was
attacked in Leaves of Grass.
The glory of simple life was sung ; a declaration of
independence was made for each and all.
And yet this appeal to manhood and to womanhood
was misunderstood. It was denounced simply because
it was in harmony with the great trend of nature. To
me, the most obscene word in our language is celibacy.
It was not the fashion for people to speak or write
their thoughts. We were flooded with the literature
of hypocrisy. The writers did not faithfully describe
the worlds in which they lived. They endeavored to
make a fashionable world. They pretended that the
cottage or the hut in which they dwelt was a palace,
and they called the little area in which they threw
their slops their domain, their realm, their empire.
They were ashamed of the real, of what their world
actually was. They imitated ; that is to say, they
told lies, and these lies filled the literature of most
lands.
Walt Whitman defended the sacredness of love, the
purity of passion—the passion that builds every home
and fills the world with art and song.
They cried out: “ He is a defender of passion—
he is a libertine ! He lives in the mire. He lacks
spirituality !”
Whoever differs with the multitude, especially with
a led multitude—that is to say, with a multitude of
taggers—will find out from their leaders that he has
committed an unpardonable sin. It is a crime to
travel a road of your own, especially if you put up
guide-boards for the information of others.
Many centuries ago Epicurus, the greatest man of
his century, and of many centuries before and after,
said : “ Happiness is the only good : happiness is the
�ORATION ON WALT WHITMAN.
7
supreme end.” This man was temperate, frugal,
generous, noble—and yet through all these years he
has been denounced by the hypocrites of the world as
a mere eater and drinker.
It was said that Whitman had exaggerated the
importance of love—that he had made too much of
this passion. Let me say that no poet—not excepting
Shakespeare—has had imagination enough to exagge
rate the importance of human love—a passion that
contains all heights and all depths—ample as space,
with a sky in which glitter all constellations, and that
has within it all storms, all lightnings, all wrecks and
ruins, all griefs, all sorrows, all shadows, and all the
joy and sunshine of which the heart and brain are
capable.
No writer must be measured by a word or line or
paragraph. He is to be measured by his work—by
the tendency, not of one line, but by the tendency
of all.
Which way does the great stream tend ? Is it for
good or evil ? Are the motives high and noble, or low
and infamous ?
We cannot measure Shakespeare by a few lines,
neither can we measure the Bible by a few chapters,
nor Leaves of Grass by a few paragraphs. In each
there are many things that I neither approve nor
believe—but in all books you will find a mingling of
wisdom and foolishness, of prophecies and mistakes—
in other words, among the excellencies there will be
defects. The mine is not all gold, or all silver, or all
diamonds—there are baser metals. The trees of the
forest are not all of one size. On some of the highest
there are dead and useless limbs, and and there may
be growing beneath the bushes, weeds, and now and
then a poisonous vine.
If I were to edit the great books of the world, I
might leave out some lines and I might leave out the
best. I have no right to make of my brain a sieve and
say that only that which passes through belongs
to the rest of the human race. I claim the right to
choose. I give that right to all.
Walt Whitman had the courage to express his
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OKATION ON WALT WHITMAN.
thought—the candor to tell the truth. And here let
me say it gives me joy—a kind of perfect satisfaction
—to look above the bigoted bats, the satisfied owls and
wrens and chickadees, and see the great eagle poised,
circling higher and higher, unconscious of their exist
ence. And it gives me joy, a kind of perfect satisfaction,
to look above the petty passions and jealousies of small
and respectable people—above the considerations of
place and power and reputation, and see a brave,
intrepid man.
It must be remembered that the American people
had separated from the Old World—that we had
declared not only the independence of colonies, but
the independence of the individual. We had done
more—we had declared that the State could no longer
be ruled by the Church, and that the Church could not
be ruled by the State, and that the individual could
not be ruled by the Church. These declarations were
in danger of being forgotten. We needed a new voice,
sonorous, loud, and clear, a new poet for America for
the new epoch, somebody to chant the morning song
of the new day.
The great man who gives a true transcript of his
mind, fascinates and instructs. Most writers suppress
individuality. They wish to please the public. They
flatter the stupid and pander to the prejudice of their
readers. They write for the market—making books
as other mechanics make shoes. They have no
message—they bear no torch—they are simply the
slaves of customers. The books they manufacture are
handled by “ the trade ” ; they are regarded as harmless.
The pulpit does not object ; the young person can read
the monotonous pages without a blush—or a thought.
On the title-pages of these books you will find the im
print of the great publishers—on the rest of the pages,
nothing. These books might be prescribed for insomnia.
III.
Men of talent, men of business, touch life upon few
sides. They travel but the beaten path. The creative
spirit is not in them. They regard with suspicion a
poet who touches life on every side. They have little
�ORATION ON WALT WHITMAN.
9
confidence in that divine thing called sympathy, and
they do not and cannot understand the man who enters
into the hopes, the aims, and the feelings of all others.
In all genius there is the touch of chaos—a little of
the vagabond ; and the successful tradesman, the man
who buys and sells, or manages a bank, does not care
to deal with a person who has only poems for collaterals
—they have a little fear of such people, and _ regard
them as the awkward country man does a sleight-ofhand performer.
In every age in which books have been produced the
governing class, the respectable, have been opposed to
the works of real genius. If what are known as. the
best people could have their way, if the pulpit had been
consulted—the provincial moralists — the works . of
Shakespeare would have been suppressed. Not a line
would have reached our time. And the same may be
said of every dramatist of his age.
If the Scotch Kirk could have decided, nothing
would have been known of Robert Burns. If the good
people, the orthodox, could have had their say, not one
line of Voltaire would now be known. All the plates
of the French Encyclopedia would have been destroyed
with the thousands that were destroyed. Nothing
would have been known of D’Alembert, Grimm,
Diderot, or any of the Titans who warred against the
thrones and altars and laid the foundation of modern
literature not only, but what is of far greater moment,
universal education.
It is not too much to say that every book now held
in high esteem would have been destroyed, if those in
authority could have had their will. Every book of
modern times, that has a real value, that has enlarged
the intellectual horizon of mankind, that has de
veloped the brain, that has furnished real food for
thought, can be found in the Index Expurgatorius of
the Papacy, and nearly every one has been commended
to the free minds of men by the denunciations of
Protestants.
If the guardians of society, the protectors of “ young
persons,” could have had their way, we should have
known nothing of Byron or Shelley. The voices that
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ORATION ON WALT WHITMAN.
thrill the world would now be silent. If authority
could have had its way, the world would have been as
ignorant now as it was when our ancestors lived in
holes or hung from dead limbs by their prehensile
tails.
But we are not forced to go very far back. If Shake
speare had been published for the first time now, those
divine plays, greater than continents and seas, greater
even than the constellations of the midnight sky—
would be excluded from the mails by the decision of
the present enlightened postmaster-general.
The poets have always lived in an ideal world, and
that ideal world has always been far better than the
real world. As a consequence, they have forever
roused, not simply the imagination, but the energies—
the enthusiasm of the human race.
The great poets have been on the side of the oppressed
—of the downtrodden. They have suffered with the
imprisoned and the enslaved, and whenever and
wherever man has suffered for the right, wherever the
hero has been stricken down—whether on field or
scaffold—some man of genius has walked by his side,
and some poet has given form and expression, not
simply to his deeds, but to his aspirations.
From the Greek and Roman world we still hear the
voices of a few. The poets, the philosophers, the artists,
and the orators still speak. Countless millions have
been covered by the waves of oblivion, but the few
who uttered the elemental truths, who had sympathy
for the whole human race, and who were great enough
to prophesy a grander day, are as alive to-night as
when they roused, by their bodily presence, by their
living voices, by their works of art, the enthusiasm of
their fellow men.
Think of the respectable people, of the men of wealth
and position, those who dwelt in mansions, children of
success, who went down to the grave voiceless, and
whose names we do not know. Think of the vast
multitudes, the endless processions, that entered the
caverns of eternal light—leaving no thought—no truth
as a legacy to mankind !
The great poets have| sympathised; with the people.
�ORATION ON WALT WHITMAN,
11
They have uttered in all ages the human cry. Un
bought by gold, unawed by power, they have lifted
high the torch that illuminates the world'.
IV.
Walt Whitman is in the highest sense a believer in
democracy. He knows that there is but one excuse
for government—the preservation of liberty ; to the
end that man may be happy. He knows that there is
but one excuse for any institution, secular and religious
—the preservation of liberty ; and there is but one ex
cuse for schools, for universal education, for the ascer
tainment of facts, namely, the preservation of liberty.
He resents the arrogance and cruelty of power. He
has sworn never to be tyrant or slave. He has solemnly
declared :
I speak the password primeval—I give the’sign of democracy.
By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their
counterpart of on the same terms.
This one declaration covers the entire ground. It is
a declaration of independence, and it is also a declara
tion of justice, that is to say, a declaration of the
independence of the individual, and a declaration that
all shall be free. The man who has this spirit can
truthfully say :
I have taken off my hat to nothing known or unknown,
I swear I am for those that have never been mastered.
There is in Whitman what he calls “ The boundless
impatience of restraint ”—together with that sense of
justice which compelled him to say “Neithera servant
nor a master, am I.”
He was wise enough to know that giving others the
same rights that he claims for himself could not harm
him, and he was great enough to say: “ As if it were
not indispensable to my own rights that others possess
the same.”
He felt as all should feel, that the liberty of no man
is safe unless the liberty of each is safe.
There is in our country a little of the old servile spirit
a little of the bowing and cringing to others. Many
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ORATION ON WALT WHITMAN.
Americans do not understand that the officers of the
government are simply the servants of the people.
Nothing is so demoralising as the worship of place.
Whitman has reminded the people of this countay that
they are supreme, and he has said to them :
The President is there in the White House for you—it is not
you who are here for him.
The Secretaries act in their bureaus for you—not you here for
them.
All doctrines, all politics and civilisation exurge from you.
All sculpture and monuments and anything inscribed any
where are tallied in you.
He describes the ideal American citizen—the one
Who says, indifferently and alike, “ How are you friend?” to
the President at his levee.
And he says, “ Good day, my brother,” to the slave that hoes
in the sugar field.
Long ago, when the politicians were wrong, when the
judges were subservient, when the pulpit was coward,
Walt Whitman shouted:
Man shall not hold property in man.
The least developed person on earth is just as important and
to himself or herself as the most developed person is to
himself or herself.
•
This is the very soul of true democracy.
Beauty is not all there is of poetry. It must contain
the truth. It is not simply an oak, rude and grand,
neither is it simply a vine. It is both. Around the oak
of truth runs the vine of beauty.
Walt Whitman utters the elemental truths and is the
poet of democracy. He is also the poet of individuality.
V.
INDIVIDUALITY.
In order to protect the liberties of a nation, we must
protect the individual. A democracy is a nation of
free individuals. The individuals are not to be sacri
ficed to the nation. The nation exists only for the pur
�ORATION ON WALT WHITMAN.
13
pose of guarding and protecting the individuality of
men and women. Walt Whitman has told us that :
» The whole theory of the universe is directed to one
single individual—namely to you.”
And he has also told us that the greatest city—the
greatest nation—is “ where the citizen is the head and
the ideal.”
And that
The greatest city is that which has the greatest man. or
woman.
...
. .
If it be but a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city m
the whole world.
By this test, maybe the greatest city on the continent
to-night is Camden.
This poet has asked of us this question :
What do you suppose will satisfy the soul, except to walk free
and own no superior ?
The man who asks this question has leftyio impress
of his lips in the dust, and has no dirt upon his knees.
He carries the idea of individuality to its utmost
height:
What do you suppose I have intimated to you in a hundred
ways
But that man or woman is as good as God ?
And that there is no God any more divine than yourself ?
Glorying in individuality, in the freedom of the
soul, he cries out:
Oh, the joy of suffering !
To struggle against great odds ;
To meet enemies undaunted ;
To be entirely alone with them—to find out how much I can
stand;
To look strife, torture, prison, popular odium, death, face to
face;
£
•,,
To mount the scaffold—to advance to the muzzle of guns with
perfect nonchalance—
To be indeed a god.
Walt Whitman is willing to stand alone.
sufficient unto himself, and he says :
He is
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ORATION ON WALT WHITMAN.
Henceforth I ask not good fortune—I am good fortune.
Strong and content I travel the open road.
I am one of those who look carelessly into faces of
Presidents and Governors as to say, “ Who are you P”
And not only this, but he has the courage to say,
“ Nothing—not God—is greater to one than oneself.’’’
Walt Whitman is the poet of Individuality, the defender
of the rights of each for the sake of all—and his
sympathies are as wide as the world. He is the
defender of the whole race.
VI.
HUMANITY.
The great poet is intensely human—infinitely sym
pathetic-entering into the joys and griefs of others,
bearing their burdens, knowing their sorrows. Brain
without heart is not much; they must act together.
When the respectable people of the North, the rich, the
successful, were willing to carry out the Fugitive
Slave Law, Walt Whitman said :
I am the wounded slave—I wince at the bite of the dogs.
Hell and despair are upon me—“ Crack,” and again “ crack ”
the marksmen;
’
I clutch the rails of the fence—my blood drips, thinned with
the ooze of my skin ;
I fall on the weeds and stones;
The riders spur their unwilling horses—haul close ;
Taunt my dizzy ears and beat me with the butts of their
whips.
Agonies are one of my changes of garment.
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels. I, myself,
become the wounded person.
’
I see myself in prison shaped like another man ;
And feel the dull unintermitted pain.
For me the keepers of convicts shoulder their carbines and
keep watch.
It is I, let out in the morning and barred at night
Not a prisoner walks handcuffed to the jail but I am hand
cuffed to him and walk by his side.
Judge not as the judge judges, but as the sun falling upon
a helpless thing.
�ORATION ON WALT WHITMAN.
15
Of the very worst he had the infinite tenderness to
say : “ Not until the sun excludes you will I exclude
In this age of greed, when houses and lands, and
stocks and bonds, outrank human life ; when gold is
more of value than blood, these words should be read
by all :
When, the psalm sings, instead of the singer;
When the script preaches, instead of the preacher;
When the pulpit descends and goes, instead of the carver
that carved the supporting desk;
When I can touch the body of books, by night or by day, and
when they touch my body back again;
When the holy vessels, or the bits of Eucharist, or lath and
plast procreate as effectually as the young silversmiths
or bakers or the masons in their overalls;
When the university convinces like a slumbering woman and
child convince;
When the minted gold in the vault smiles like the night
watchman’s daughter;
When warranty deeds loaf in chairs opposite, and are my
friendly companions;
I intend to reach them my hand and make as much of them
as I do of men and women like you!
VII.
The poet is also a painter, a sculptor—he, too, deals
in form and color. The great poet is of necessity a
great artist. With a few words he creates pictures,
filling his canvas with living men and women—with
those who feel and speak. Have you ever read the
account of the stage driver’s funeral ? Let me. read it:
Cold dash of waves at the ferry wharf—posh of ice in the
river—half-frozen mud in the street—a gray discouraged sky
overhead—short-lasting daylight of twelfth month.
A hearse and stages—other vehicles give place—the funeral
of an old Broadway stage-driver—the cortege mostly drivers.
Steady the trot to the cemetery—duly rattles the deathbell—the gate is passed—the new-dug grave is hollowed out
—the living alight—the hearse uncloses.
The coffin is passed out—lowered and settled—the whip is
laid on the coffin—the earth is softly shoveled in.
The mound above is flattened with the spades.
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ORATION ON WALT WHITMAN.
Silence : and among them no one moves or speaks.
It is done. He is decently laid away.
Is there anything more ?
He was a good fellow—free mouthed—quick tempered—
not bad looking—able to take his own part—witty—sensitive
to a slight—ready with life or death foi’ a friend—fond of
women—gambled—ate hearty—drank hearty—had known
what it was to be flush—grew low spirited toward the lastsickened—was helped by a contribution—died aged forty-one
years—and that was his funeral.
Let me read you another description—one of a
woman:
Behold a woman !
She looks out from her Quaker cap, her face is clear and.
more beautiful than the sky.
She sits in an arm-chair under the shaded porch of the
farm-house.
The sun just shines on her old, white head.
Her ample gown is of cream-hued linen.
Her grandsons raised the flax and her granddaughters spun,
it with the distaff and the wheel.
The melodious charactei’ of the earth.
The finished—beyond which philosophy cannot go and does
not wish to go.
The justified mother of men.
Would you hear of an old-time sea fight ?
Would you learn who won by the light of the moon and stars ?
List to the yarn as my grandmother’s father, the sailor, told
it to me :
Our foe was no skulk in his ship, I tell you, said he.
His was the surly English pluck, and there is no tougher or
truer, and never was and never will be.
Long the lower eve he came, horribly raking us.
We closed with him; the yards entangled, the cannon
touched.
My captain lashed fast with his own hands.
We had received some eighteen pound shots under the water,
and on our lower gun deck two large pieces had burst at
the first fire, killing all around and blowing up overhead.
Fighting at sundown; fighting at dark.
Ten o’clock at night; the full moon well up; our leaks on the
gain; five feet of water reported.
The master-at-arms loosing the prisoners confined in the hold
to give them a chance for themselves.
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ORATION WALT WHITMAN.
The transit to and from the magazine is now stopped by the
sentinels.
They see so many strange faces they do not know whom to trust.
Our frigate takes fire.
The other asks if we demand quarter,
If our colors are struck and the fighting done.
Now I laugh content, for I hear the voice of my little Captain,
“ We have not struck,” he composedly cries, “ we have just
begun our part of the fighting.”
Only three guns in use.
One is directed by the Captain himself against the enemy’s
mainmast.
Two, well served with grape and canister, silences his mus
ketry and clears his decks.
The taps alone second the fire of his little battery, especially
the maintop.
They hold out bravely during the whole of the action,
Not a moment’s cease.
The leaks gain fast on the pumps, the fire eats toward the
powder magazine; one of the pumps has been shot
away; it is thought we are sinking.
Serene stands the little Captain,
He is not hurried; his voice neither high nor low.
His eyes give more light to us than our battle lanterns.
Toward twelve, there in the beams of the moon, they sur
render to us.
Stretched and still lies the midnight,
Two great hulks motionless on the breast of the darkness,
Our vessel riddled and slowly sinking, preparations to pass
to the one we have conquered.
The captain on the quarter-deck coolly giving his orders
through a countenance white as a sheet;
Near by, the corpse of the child that served in the cabin;
The dead face of an old salt, with long white hair and care
fully curled whiskers.
The flames, spite of all that can be done, flecked aloft and below,
The husky voices of the two officers yet fit for duty.
Formless stacks of bodies and bodies by themselves, dabs of
flesh upon the masts and spars;
Cut of cordage, tangle of rigging, slight shock of the sooth
of waves;
Black and impassive guns, litter of powder parcels, strong
scent.
A few large stars overhead, silent and mournful, shining;
delicate sniffs of sea breeze, smells of sedge grass and
fields by the shore; death messages given in charge to
survivors.
B
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ORATION ON WALT WHITMAN.
The hiss of the surgeon’s knife, the gnawing teeth of his saw,
Wheeze, cluck, swash of falling blood, short, wild scream,
long, dull, tapering groan.
Some people say that this is not poetry—that it lacks
measure and rhyme.
VIII.
WHAT IS POETRY ?
The whole world is engaged in the invisible com
merce of thought. That is to say, in the exchange of
thoughts by words, symbols, sounds, colors and forms.
The motions of the silent, invisible world, where
feeling glows and thought flames—that contains all
seeds of action—are made known only by sounds and
colors, forms, objects, relations, uses and qualities—so
that the visible universe is a dictionary, an aggregation
of symbols, by which and through which is carried on
the invisible commerce of thought. Each object is
capable of many meanings, or of being used in many
ways to convey ideas or states of feeling or of facts
that take place in the world of the brain.
The greatest poet is the one who selects the best, the
most appropriate symbols to convey the best, the
highest, the sublimest thoughts. Each man occupies a
world of his own. He is the only citizen of his world.
He is subject and sovereign, and the best he can do is
to give the facts concerning the world in which he lives
to the citizens of other worlds. No two of these
worlds are alike. They are of all kinds, from the flat,
barren and uninteresting—from the small and shrivelled
and worthless—to those whose rivers and mountains
and seas and constellations belittle and cheapen the
visible world. The inhabitants of these marvellous
worlds have been the singers of songs, utterers of great
speech—the creators of art.
And here lies the difference between creators and
imitators : the creator tells what passes in his own
world—thé imitator does not. The imitator abdicates,
and by the fact of imitation falls upon his knees. He
is like one who, hearing a traveller talk, pretends to
others that he has travelled.
�ORATION ON WALT WHITMAN.
19
In nearly all lands, the poet has been privileged—for the sake of beanty, they have allowed him to speak,
and for that reason he has told the story of the
oppressed, and has excited the indignation of honest
men and even the pity of tyrants. He, above all others,
has added to the intellectual beauty of the world. He
has been the true creator of language, and has left his
impress on mankind.
What I have said is not only true of poetry—it is
true of all speech. All are compelled to use the visible
world as a dictionary. Words have been invented and
are being invented—for the reason that new powers
are found in the old symbols, new qualities, relations,
uses, and meanings.
The growth of language is
necessary on account of the development of the human
mind. The savage needs but few symbols—the civil
ised many—the poet most of all.
The old idea was, however, that the poet must be a
rhymer. Before printing was known, it was said : the
rhyme assists the memory. That excuse no longer exists.
Is rhyme a necessary part of poetry ? In my judgment,
rhyme is a hindrance to expression. The rhymer is
compelled to wander from his subject—to say more or
less than hemeans—to introduce irrelevant matter that
interferes continually with the dramatic action and is a
perpetual obstruction to sincere utterance.
All poems, of necessity, must be short. The highly
and purely poetic is the sudden bursting into blossom
of a great and tender thought. The planting of the
seed, the growth, the bud and flower must be rapid.
The spring must be quick and warm—the soil perfect,
the sunshine and rain enough—everything should tend
to hasten, nothing to delay. In poetry, as in wit, the
crystallisation must be sudden.
,
The greatest poems are rhythmical. While rhyme is
a hindrance, rhythm seems to be the comrade of
the poetic. Rhythm has a natural foundation. Under
emotion, the blood rises and falls, the muscles contract
and relax, and this action of the blood is as rhythmical
as the rise and fall of the sea. In the highest form of
expression, the thought should be in harmony with
this natural ebb and flow.
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ORATION ON WALT WHITMAN.
The highest poetic truth is expressed in rhythmical
form. I have sometimes thought that an idea selects
its own words, chooses its own garments, and that
when the thought has possession, absolutely, of the
speaker or writer, he unconsciously allows the thought
to clothe itself.
The great poetry of the world keeps time with the
winds and the waves.
I do not mean by rhythm a recurring accent at
accurately measured intervals. Perfect time is the
death of music. There should always be room for
eager haste and delicious delay, and whatever change
there may be in the rhythm or time, the action itself
should suggest perfect freedom.
A word more about rhythm. I believe that certain
feelings and passions—joy, grief, emulation, revenge,
produce certain molecular movements in the brain—•
that every thought is accompanied by certain physical
phenomena. Now it may be that certain sounds, colors,
and forms produce the same molecular action in the
brain that accompanies certain feelings, and that these
sounds, colors, and forms produce first, the molecular
movements, and these in their turn reproduce the feel
ings in motions and states of mind capable of
producing the same or like molecular movements.
So that what we call heroic music, produces the
same molecular action in the brain — the same
physical changes — that are produced by the real
feeling of heroism ; that the sounds we call plaintive
produce the same molecular movement in the brain
that grief, or the twilight of grief, actually produces.
There may be a rhythmical molecular movement
belonging to each state of mind, that accompanies each
thought or passion, and it may be that music, or paint
ing, or sculpture, produces the same state of mind or
feeling that produces the music or painting or sculp
ture, by producing the same molecular movements.
All arts are born of the same spirit, and express like
thoughts in different ways—that is to say, they produce
like states of mind and feeling. The sculptor, the
painter, the composer, the poet, the orator, work to the
same end, with different materials. The painter
�ORATION ON WALT WHITMAN.
21
expresses through form and color and relation ; the
sculptor through form and relation. The poet also
paints and chisels—his words give form, relation, and
color. His statues and his paintings do not crumble,
neither do they fade, nor will they as long as language
endures. The composer touches the passions, produces
the very states of feeling produced by the painter and'
sculptor, and poet and orator. In all these there must
be rhythm—that is to say, proportion—that is to say,
harmony, melody.
So that the greatest poet is the one who idealizes the
common, who gives new meanings to old symbols, who
transfigures the ordinary things of life. He must deal
with the hopes and fears, and with the experiences of
the people.
The poetic is not the exceptional. A perfect poem,
is like a perfect day. It has the undefinable charm of
naturalness and ease. It must not appear to be the
result of great labor. We feel, in spite of ourselves,
that man does best that which he does easiest.
The great poet is the instrumentality, not always of
his time, but of the best of his time, and he must be in.
unison and accord with the ideals of his race. The sublimer he is the simpler he is. The thoughts of the
people must be clad in the garments of feeling—the
words must be known, apt, familiar. The height must
be in the thought, in the sympathy.
In the olden time they used to have May day parties,
and the prettiest child was crowned Queen of May.
Imagine an old blacksmith and his wife looking at
their little daughter clad in white and crowned with
roses. They would wonder while they looked at her,
how they ever came to have so beautiful a child. It is
thus that the poet clothes the intellectual children or
ideals of the people. They must not be gemmed and
garlanded beyond the recognition of their parents. Out
from all the flowers and beauty must look the eyes of
the child they know.
We have grown tired of gods and goddesses in art.
Milton’s heavenly militia excites our laughter. Light
houses have driven sirens from the dangerous coasts.
We have found that we do not depend on the imagina
�22
ORATION ON WALT WHITMAN.
tion for wonders—there are millions of miracles under
our feet.
Nothing can be more marvellous than the common
and every day facts of life. The phantoms have been
cast aside. Men and women are enough for men and
women. In their lives is all the tragedy and all the
comedy that they can comprehend.
The painter no longer crowds his canvas with the
■winged and impossible —he paints life as he sees it,
people as he knows them, and in whom he is interested.
“ The Angelus,” the perfection of pathos, is nothing
but two peasants bending their heads in thankfulness
as they hear the solemn sound of the distant* bell—two
peasants, who have nothing to be thankful for—nothing
but weariness and want, nothing but the crusts that
they soften with their tears—nothing. And yet as you
look at that picture you feel that they have something
besides to be thankful for—that they have life, love
and hope—and so th.e distant bell makes music in their
simple hearts.
IX.
The attitude of Whitman toward religion has not
been understood. Towards all forms of worship,
towards all creeds, he has maintained the attitude of
absolute fairness. He does not believe that nature has
given her last message to man. He does not believe
that all has been ascertained/ He denies that any
sect has written down the entire truth. He believes in
progress, and, so believing, he says :
We can consider bibles and religions divine. I do not say
they are not divine. I say they have all grown out of us and
may grow out of us still. It is not they who give the life.
It is you who give the life.
My thoughts are hymns of the praise of things ;
In the dispute on God and eternity I am silent.
Have you thought there could be but a single Supreme ?
There can be any number of Supremes. One does not
countervail another any more than one eyesight countervails
another.
�ORATION ON WALT WHITMAN.
23
Upon the great questions, as to the great problems,
he feels only the serenity of a great and well-poised
soul.
No array of terms can. say how much I am at peace about
God and about death.
I hear and behold God in every object, not understanding
God, not in the least.
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than
myself.
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my face in
the glass.
I find letters from God dropped in the street and every one is
signed by God’s name.
The whole visible world is regarded by him as a
revelation, and so is the invisible world, and with this
feeling he writes :
Not objecting to special revelations—considering a curl of
smoke or a hair on the back of my hand just as curious
as any revelation.
The creeds do not satisfy, the old mythologies are
not enough ; they are too narrow at best, giving only
hints and suggestions ; and feeling this lack in that
which has been written and preached, Whitman says :
Magnifying and applying come I;
Outbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters ;
Taking myself the exact dimensions of Jehovah;
Lithographing Kronos, Zeus his son and Herkules his grand
son ;
Buying drafts of Osiris, Isis, Belus, Brahm, and Buddha;
In my portfolio placing Manito alone—Alah on a leaf—the
crucifix engraved
x
With Odin and the hideous face of Mexitli and every ido 1
and image—
Taking them all for what they are worth, and not a cent more.
Whitman keeps open house. He is intellectually
hospitable. He extends his hand to a new idea. He
does not accept a creed because it is wrinkled and old
and has a long white beard. He knows that hypocrisy
has a venerable look, and that it relies on looks and
masks— on stupidity—and fear. Neither does h e rej ect
�24
ORATION ON WALT WHITMAN,
or accept the new because it is new. He wants the
truth, and so he welcomes all until he knows just who
and what they are.
PHILOSOPHY.
Walt Whitman is a philosopher.
The more a man has thought, the more he has studied,
the more he has travelled intellectually, the less certain
he is. Only the very ignorant are perfectly satisfied
that they know, To the common man the great
problems are easy, He has no trouble in accounting
for the universe. He can tell you the origin and
destiny of man and the why and the wherefore of
things. As a rule, he is a believer in special providence,
and is egoistic enough to suppose that everything that
happens in the universe happens in reference to him.
A colony of red ants lived at the foot of the Alps. It
happened one day, that an avalanche destroyed the
hill; and one of the ants was heard to remark : “ Who
could have taken so much trouble to destroy our
home ? ”
Walt Whitman walked by the side of the sea “ where
the fierce old mother endlessly cries for her castaways,”
and endeavoured to think out, to fathom the mystery
of being ? and he says :
I too, but signify, at the utmost, a little washed up drift,
A few sands and dead leaves gathered together—merging
myself as part of the sands and drift.
Aware, now, that amid all the blab whose echoes recoil upon
me, I have not once had the least idea of who or what I
am.
But that for all my insolent poems, the real me still stands
untouched, untold, altogether unreached,
Withdrawn afar, mocking me with mock congratulatory signs
and voices,
With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have
written or shall write,
Striking me with insults as I fall helpless on the sand.
I perceive I have not understood anything, not a single
object; and that no man ever can.
�ORATION ON WALT WHITMAN.
25
There is in our language no profounder poem than
the one entitled “ Elemental Drifts.'’
The effort to find the origin of things has ever been,
and will forever be, fruitless. Those who endeavour
to find the secret of life resemble a man looking in the
mirror, who thinks that if he only could be quick
enough he could grasp the image that he sees behind
the glass.
The latest word of this poet upon this subject is as
follows :
(e To me this life with all its realities and functions
is finally a mystery, the real something yet to be
evolved, and the stamp and shape and life here some
how given an important, perhaps the main, outline to
something further. Somehow this hangs over every
thing else, and stands behind it, is inside of all facts,
and the concrete and material and the worldly affairs
of life and sense. That is the purport and meaning
behind all the other meanings, of Leaves of Grass’'
As a matter of fact the questions of origin and destiny
are beyond the grasp of the human mind. We can see
a certain distance ; beyond that everything is only
indistinct; and beyond the indistinct is the unseen.
In the presence of these mysteries—and everything is
a mystery so far as origin, destiny, and nature are con
cerned—the intelligent, honest man is compelled to say,
“ I do not know.”
In the great midnight a few truths like stars shine
on forever—and from the brain of man come a few
struggling gleams of light—a few momentary sparks.
Some have contended that everything is spirit;
others that everything is matter ; and again, others
who maintained that a part is matter and 9. part is
spirit; some that spirit was first and matter after;
others that matter was first and spirit after ; and others
that matter and spirit have existed together.
But none of these people can by any possibility tell
what matter is, or what spirit is, or what the difference
is between spirit and matter.
The materialists look upon the spiritualists as sub
stantially crazy ; and the spiritualists regard the
materialists as low and groveling. These spiritualistic
�26
ORATION ON WALT WHITMAN.
people hold matter in contempt ; but, after all, matter
is quite a mystery. You take in your hand a little
earth—a little dust. Do you know what it is ? In
this dust you put a seed ; the rain falls upon it; the
light strikes it; the seed grows ; it bursts into blossom ;
it produces fruit.
What is this dust—this womb ? Do you understand
it? Is there anything in the wide universe more
wonderful than this ?
Take a grain of sand, reduce it to powder, take the
smallest possible particle, look at it with a microscope,
contemplate its every part for days, and it remains the
citadel of a secret—an impregnable fortress. Bring all
the theologians, philosophers, and scientists in serried
ranks against it; let them attack on every side with all
the arts and arms of thought and force. The citadel
does not fall. Over the battlements floats the flag and
the victorious secret smiles at the baffled hosts.
Walt Whitman did not and does not imagine that he
has reached the limit—the end of the road travelled by
the human race. He knows that every victory over
nature is but the preparation for another battle. This
truth was in his mind when he said : “ Understand me
well; it is provided in the essence of things, that from
any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come
forth something to make a greater struggle necessary.”
This is the generalisation of all history.
XI.
THE TWO POEMS.
There are two of these poems to which I have time
to call special attention. The first is entitled, “ A
Word Out of the Sea.”
The boy, coming out of the rocked cradle, wandering
over the sands and fields, up from the mystic play of
shadows, out of the patches of briers and blackberries
—from the memories of birds—from the thousand
responses of his heart—goes back to the sea and his
childhood, and sings a reminiscence.
�ORATION ON WALT WHITMAN.
27
Two guests from Alabama—two birds—build their
nest, and there were four light green eggs, spotted with
brown, and the two birds sang for joy :
Shine, shine,
Pour down your warmth together, great sun!
While we bask, we two together.
Two together—<
Windsblow south, or winds blow north,
Day come white, or night come black,
Home, or rivers and mountains from home,
Singing all time, minding no time,
If we two but keep together.
In a little while one of the birds is missed and never
appeared again, and all through the summer the mate,
the solitary guest, was singing of the lost:
Blow, blow,
Blow up, sea winds, along Paumanok’s shore;
I wait and I wait till you blow my mate to me.
And the boy that night, blending himself with the
shadows, with bare feet, went down to the sea, where
the white arms out in the breakers were tirelessly
tossing ; listening to the songs and translating the
notes.
And the singing bird called loud and high for the
mate, wondering what the dusky spot was in the
brown and yellow, seeing the mate whichever way he
looked, piercing the woods and the earth with his song,
hoping that the mate might hear his cry ; stopping
that he might not lose her answer ; waiting and then
•crying again : “Here I am!” And this gentle call is
for you. Do not be deceived by the whistle of the
wind ; those are the shadows ; and at last crying :
0 past, 0 joy !
In the air, in the woods, over fields,
Loved! loved! loved !
Loved—but no more with me—
We two togethei* no more.
And then the boy, understanding the song that had
awakened in his breast a thousand songs clearer and
louder and more sorrowful than the bird’s, knowing
�28
ORATION ON WALT WHITMAN.
that the cry of unsatisfied love would never again be
absent from him; thinking then of the destiny of all,
and asking of the sea the final word, and the sea
answering, delaying not and hurrying not, spoke the
low delicious word “ Death !” “ ever Death !”
The next poem, one that will live as long as our
language, entitled, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed,” is on the death of Lincoln.
The sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands.
. One who reads this will never forget the odor of the
lilac, “lustrous western star” and “the grey-brown
bird singing in the pines and cedars.”
In this poem the dramatic unities are perfectly pre
served, the atmosphere and climate in harmony with
every event.
Never will he forget the solemn journey of the coffin
through day and night, with the great cloud darkening
the land, nor the pomp of inlooped flags, the procession
long and winding, the flambeaus of night, the torches’
flames, the silent sea of faces, the unbared heads, the
thousand voices, rising strong and solemn, the dirges,
the shuddering organs, the tolling bells—and the sprig
of lilac.
And then for a moment they will hear the grey
brown bird singing in the cedars, bashful and tender,
while the lustrous star lingers in the West, and they
will remember the pictures hung on the chamber walls
to adorn the burial house—pictures of spring and
farms and homes and the grey smoke, lucid and
bright, and the floods of yellow gold—of the gorgeous
indolent sinking sun—the sweet herbage under foot—
the green leaves of the trees prolific—the breast of the
river with the wind-dapple here and there, and the
varied and ample land—and the most excellent sun so
calm and haughty—the violet and purple morn with
just felt breezes. The gentle, soft-born measureless
light—the miracle spreading, bathing all—the fulfilled
noon—the coming eve delicious and the welcome night
and the stars.
�ORATION ON WALT WHITMAN.
29
And then again they will hear the song of the grey
brown bird in the limitless dusk amid the cedars and
pines. Again they will remember the star and again
the odor of the lilac.
But most of all, the song of the bird translated and
becoming the chant for death:
THE CHANT FOE DEATH.
Come lovely and soothing death,
Undulate ’round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later delicate death.
Praised be the fathomless universe,
Por life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,
And for love, sweet love—but praise ! praise! praise !
For the sure enwinding arms of cool enfolding death.
Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet,
Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome p
Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all,
I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come
unfalteringly.
Approach, strong deliveress,
When it is so, when thou hast taken them I joyously sing
the dead,
Lost in the loving floating ocean of thee,
Laved in the flood of thy bliss, 0 death.
From me to thee glad serenades,
Dances for thee I propose saluting thee, adornments and
feastings for thee,
And the sights of the open landscape and the high-spread
sky are flitting.
And life and the fields, and the bright and thoughtful night.
The night in silence under many a star,
The ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice
I know,
And the soul turning to thee, O vast and well-veiled death,"
And the body gratefully nestling close to thee.
Over the tree-tops I float thee a song,
Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and
I ■«. the prairies wide,
Over the dense-packed cities all—and the teeming wharves
and waves,
I float this carol to thee, with joy to thee, 0 death.
�30
ORATION ON WALT WHITMAN,
This poem, in memory of “ the sweetest, wisest soul
of all our days and lands,” and for whose sake lilac
and star and bird were entwined, will last as long as
the memory of Lincoln.
XII.
OLD AGE.
Walt Whitman- is not only the poet of childhood, of
youth, of manhood, but, above all, of old age. He
has not been soured by slander or petrified by preju
dice ; neither calumny nor flattery has made him re
vengeful or arrogant. Now sitting by the fireside, in
the winter of life,
His jocund heart still beating in his breast,
he is just as brave and calm and kind as in his man
hood’s proudest days, when roses blossomed in his
cheeks. He has taken life’s seven steps. Now, as the
gamester might say, “ on velvet.” He is enjoying “ old
age expanded, broad, with the haughty breadth of the
universe ; old age, flowing free, with the delicious,
near-by freedom of death ; old age, superbly rising,
welcoming the ineffable aggregation of dying days.”
He is taking the “ loftiest look at last,” and before
he goes he utters thanks “ for health, the midday sun,
the impalpable air—for life, mere life ; for precious
ever lingering memories of mother, father, brothers,
sisters, friends ; for all his days, for gentle words,
carresses, gifts from foreign lands, for shelter, wine
and meat, for sweet appreciation, for beings, groups,
love, deeds, words, books ; for colors, forms ; for all
the brave, strong men who forward sprung in freedom’s
help—all years—in all lands ; the cannoneers of song
and thought—the great artillerists, the foremost leaders,
captains of the soul.”
It is a great thing to preach philosophy—far greater
to live it. The highest philosophy accepts the inevit
able with a smile, and greets it as though it were
desired.
To be satisfied : This is wealth—success.
�ORATION ON WALT WHITMAN.
31
The real philosopher knows that everything has hap
pened that could have happened—consequently he
accepts. He is glad that he has lived—glad that he has
had his moment on the stage. In this spirit Whitman
has accepted life.
I shall go forth;
I shall traverse these states, but I cannot tell whither or how
iong.
Perhaps soon, some day or night, while I am singing, my
voice will suddenly cease,
O soul!
Then all may arrive but to this :
The glances of my eyes that swept the daylight,
The unspeakable love I interchanged with women,
My joys in the open air,
My walks in the Mannahatta,
The continual good will I have met,
The curious attachments of young men to me,
My reflections alone—the absorption into me from the land
scape, stars, animals, thunder, rain, and snow in my
interviews alone;
The words of my mouth—rude, ignorant—my many faults
and derelictions;
The light touches on my lips of the lips of my comrades at
parting,
The tracks which I leave on the sidewalks and fields—
May all arrive at but this beginning of me;
This beginning of me—and yet it is enough, 0, soul!
0, soul, we have positively appeared; that is enough.
Yes, Walt Whitman has appeared. He has his place
upon the stage. The drama is not ended. His voice
is still heard. He is the Poet of Democracy—of all
people. He is the poet of the body and soul. He has
sounded the note of Individuality. He has given the
pass-word primeval. He is the Poet of Humanity—of
Intellectual Hospitality. He has voiced the aspirations
of America—and, above all, he is the poet of Love and
Death.
How grandly, how bravely he has given his thought,
and how superb is his farewell—his leave-taking :
After the supper and talk ; after the day is done.
As a friend from friends his final withdrawal prolonging.
Good-bye and good-bye with emotional lips repeating.
�32
ORATION ON WALT WHITMAN.
So hard for his hand to release those hands—no more will
they meet—
No more for.communion of sorrow and joy of old and young,
A far-stretching journey awaits him to return no more.
Shunning postponing severance, seeking to ward off the last
word ever so little,
Even at the exit dooi’ turning—charges superfluous calling
back—even as he descends the steps,
Something to eke out a minute additional—shadows of night
fall deepening,
Farewell messages lessening, dimmer the forthgoer’s visage
and form,
Soon to be lost for aye in the darkness; loth, oh, so loth to
depart!
And is this all ? Will the forthgoer be lost, and for
ever ? Is death the end ? Over the grave bends Love
sobbing, and by her side stands Hope and whispers :
We shall meet again. Before all life is death, and
after all death is life. The falling leaf, touched with
the hectic flush, that testifies of autumn’s death, is, in
a subtler sense, a prophecy of spring.
Walt Whitman has dreamed great dreams, told great
truths and uttered sublime thoughts. He has held aloft
the torch and bravely led the way.
As you read the marvellous book, or the person, called
Leaves of Grass, you feel the freedom of the antique
world ; you hear the voices of the morning, of the
first great singers—voices elemental as those of sea and
storm. The horizon enlarges, the heavens grow ample,
limitations are forgotten —the realisation of the will,
the accomplishment of the ideal, seem to be within
your power. Obstructions become petty and disappear.
The chains and bars are broken, and the distinctions
of caste are lost.
The soul is in the open air, under the blue and stars
—the flag of Nature. Creeds, theories, and philosophies
ask to be examined, contradicted, reconstructed. Pre
judices disappear, superstitions vanish, and custom
abdicates. The sacred places become highways, duties
and desires clasp hands and become comrades and
friends. Authority drops the sceptre, the priest the
mitre, and the purple falls from kings. The inanimate
�ORATION ON WALT WHITMAN.
33
becomes articulate, the meanest and humblest things
utter speech, and the dumb and voiceless burst into
song. A feeling of independence takes possession of
the soul, the body expands, the blood flows full and
free, superiors vanish, flattery is a lost art, and life
becomes rich, royal and superb. The world becomes a
personal possession, and the oceans, the continents and
constellations belong to you. You are in the centre,
everything radiates from you, and in your veins beats
and throbs the pulse of all life. You become a rover,
careless and free. You wander by the shores of all
seas and hear the eternal psalm. You feel the silence
of the wide forest, and stand beneath the intertwined
and over-arching boughs, entranced with symphonies
of winds and woods. You are borne on the tides of
eager and swift rivers, hear the rush and roar of
cataracts as they fall beneath the seven-hued arch, and
watch the eagles as they circling soar. You traverse
gorges dark and dim, and climb the scarred and threa
tening cliffs. You stand in orchards where the blossoms
fall like snow, where the birds nest and sing, and
painted moths make aimless journeys through the
happy air. You live the lives of those who till the
earth, and walk amid the perfumed fields, hear the
reapers’ song, and feel the breadth and scope of earth
and sky. You are in the great cities, in the midst of
multitudes, of the endless processions. You are on the
wide plains—the prairies—with hunter and trapper,
with savage and pioneer, and you feel the soft grass
yielding under your feet. You sail in many ships, and
breathe the free air of the sea. You travel many roads,
and countless paths. You visit palaces and prisons,
hospitals and courts ; you pity kings and convicts, and
your sympathy goes out to all the suffering and insane,
the oppressed and enslaved, and even to the infamous.
You hear the din of labor, all sounds of factory, field,
and forest, of all tools, instruments, and machines.
You become familiar with men and women of all
employments, trades, and professions—with birth and
burial, with wedding feast and funeral chant. You see
the cloud and flame of war, and you enjoy the ineffable
perfect days of peace.
�34
ORATION ON WALT WHITMAN.
In?hls°ne book’ in these wondrous Leaves of Grass
yi>n1r?.d hmts and suggestions, touches and fragments’
of all there is of life, that lies between the babe, whose
rounded cheeks dimple beneath his mother’s laughing
oving eyes, and the old man, snow-crowned, who, with
a smile, extends his hand to death. And we have met
to-night to honor ourselves by honoring the author of
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SEPTEMBER, 1890.
AVELING, DR. E. B.
Darwin. Made Easy. Cloth
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Dr. Aveling is a Fellow of the London University, and
this is the best popular exposition of Darwinism extant.
BENTHAM, JEREMY
The Church of England. Catechism Examined. A tren
chant analysis, in Bentham’s best manner, showing
how the Catechism is calculated to make children
hypocrites or fools, if not worse. Sir Samuel
Romilly was of opinion that the work would be
prosecuted for blasphemy, though it escaped that
fate in consequence of the writer’s eminence.
With a Biographical Preface by J. M. Wheeler ...
Utilitarianism...
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“A place must be assigned to Bentham among the
masters of wisdom.”—John Stuart Mill.
“ A man of first-rate genius.”—Edward Dicey.
“It is impossible to know Bentham without admiring
and revering him ”—Sir Samuel Romilly.
“ Everything that comes from the pen or from the mind
of Mr. Bentham is entitled to profound regard.”—James
Mill.
“He found jurisprudence a gibberish and left it a
science.”—Macaulay.
10
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COLLINS, ANTHONY
Free Will and Necessity. A Philosophical Inquiry
concerning Human Liberty. First published in
1715. Now reprinted with Preface and Annota
tions by G. W. Foote, and a Biographical Intro
duction by J. M. Wheeler
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Superior Edition, on superfine paper, bound in cloth
10
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“ I do not know of anything that has been advanced
by later writers in support of the scheme of Necessity,
of which the germ is not to be found in the Inquiry of
Collins.”—Prof. Dugald Stewart.
“ Collins states the arguments against human freedom
with a logical force unsurpassed by any Necessitarian.”
—Prof. A. C. Fraser.
“ Collins writes with wonderful power and closeness
of reasoning.”—Prof. Huxley.
“ Collins was one of the most terrible enemies of
the Christian religion.”—Voltaire.
FEUERBACH, LUDWIG
The Essence of Religion. God the Image of Man,
Man s Dependence upon Nature the Last and Only
Source of Religion ...
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“ No one has demonstrated and explained the purely
human origin of the idea of God better than Ludwig
Feuerbach. ’ ’—Bachner.
“ I confess that to Feuerbach I owe a debt of inesti
mable gratitude. _ Feeling about in uncertainty for the
ground, and finding everywhere shifting sands, Feuer
bach cast a sudden blaze in the darkness and disclosed
to me the way.”—Rev. S. Baring Gould.
FOOTE, G. W.
Is Socialism Sound ? Four Nights’ Public Debate
with Annie Besant ...
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Superior Edition, in cloth
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Christianity and Secularism. Four Nights’ Public
Debate with the Rev. Dr. James McGann
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Darwin on God
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Superior Edition, in cloth
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Contents :—Darwin’s Grandfather—Darwin’s Father—
Darwin’s Early Piety—Almost a Clergyman—On Board
the “ Beagle ”—Settling at Down—Death and Burial—
Purpose of Pamphlet—Some Objections—Darwin Abair-
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dons Christianity—Deism—Creation—Origin of Life—
Origin of Man— Animism—A Personal Creator Design
_ Divine Beneficence—Religion and Morality—.Agnos
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Infidel Death-Beds. Second edition, much enlarged
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List of Freethinkers dealt with :—Lord Amberley,
Baskerville, Bayle, Bentham, Bert, Lord .golingbroke,
Broussais, Bruno, Buckle, Byron, Carlile Clifiord, Clootz,
Collins, Comte, Condorcet, Cooper, D Alembert, Danton,
Charles and Erasmus Darwin, Delambre, Diderot, Bolet,
Geo. Eliot, Frederick the Great, Gambetta, Garabaldi,
Gendre, Gibbon, Godwin, Gœthe, Grote, Helvetiua,
Hetherington, Hobbes, Austin Holyoake, iHago, Hume,
Littré, Harriet Martineau, Jean Mealier, «Tames ana J onn
Stuart Mill, Mirabeau, Robt. Owen, Paine, Palmer,
Rabelais, Reade, Mdme. Roland, George Sand, Schiller,
Shelley, Spinoza, Strauss, Toland, Vanini, Voltaire,
Volney, Watson, John Watts, Woolston.
Letters to the Clergy. First Series. 128pp. ...
1, Creation, to the Bishop of Carlisle; 2, The
Believing Thief, to the Rev. C. H. Spurgeon;
3, The Atonement, to the Bishop of Peter
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Rev. R. F. Horton, M.A.; 6, Credentials of the
Gospel, to the Rev. Prof. J. A. Beet; 7, Miracles,
to the Rev. Brownlow Maitland; 8, Prayer, to
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Defence of Free Speech. Three Hours’ Address to
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Letters to Jesus Christ
Philosophy of Secularism
The Bible God...
The Folly of Prayer
The Impossible Creed. An Open Letter to the Bishop
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Christianity and Progress. Reply to Mr. Gladstone
Mrs. Besant’s Theosophy. A Candid Criticism ...
Theosophy and Secularism. A Rejoinder to Mrs.
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The New Cagliostro. An Open Letter to Madame
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What Was Christ ? A Reply to J. s. Mill
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The Shadow of the Sword. A moral and statistical
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Was Jesus Insane? A searching inquiry into the
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Bible Handbook for Freethinkers and Inquiring
Christians. Complete, paper covers ...
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Sold also in separate Parts as follows—
The Contradictions are
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2. Bible Absurdities. All the chief Absurdities
from Genesis to Revelation, conveniently and
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The Jewish Life of Christ. Being the Sepher
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With an Historical Preface and Voluminous Notes
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“Messrs. G. W. Foote and J. M. Wheeler have laid the
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National Reformer.
Crimes of Christianity. Vol. I., cloth gilt, 216 pp.
Hundreds of exact References to Standard Autho
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trustworthy, final, unanswerable Indictment of
Christianity...
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Papacy; (7) Crimes of the Popes; (8) Perse
cution of the Jews ; (9) The Crusades.
“The book is very carefully compiled, the
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work is calculated to be of the greatest use to the
opponents of Christianity.”—National Reformer.
“ The book is worth reading. It is fair, and
on the whole correct.”—Weekly Times.
“The book has a purpose, and is entitled to a
fair hearing.”—Huddersfield Examiner.
“ The work should be scattered like autumn
leaves.”—Ironclad Age (U.S.A.)
HUME, DAVID
The Mortality Of the Soul With an Introduction
by G. W. Foote. This essay was first published
after IIume’< death. It is not included in the
ordinary editions of the Essays. Prof. Huxley
calls it “ A remarkable essay ” and “ a model of
clear and vigorous statement.”
...
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Liberty and. Necessity. An argument against Free
Will and in favor of Moral Causation ...
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COL. ROBERT G. INGERSOLL.
Some Mistakes of Moses. With an Introduction by
G. W. Foote. The only complete edition in
England. Accurate as Colenso, and fascinating
as a novel. 132pp. ...
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Superior Edition, on superfinepaper, bound in cloth
Defence of Freethought. A five hours’ speech at
the Trial of C. B. Reynolds for Blasphemy
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Reply to Gladstone. With a Biography by J. M.
Wheeler ...
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Rome or Reason? A Reply to Cardinal Manning ...
Crimes against Criminals
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Why am I an Agnostic ? Parts I. and II., each ...
Faith and. Fact. Reply to Rev. Dr. Field
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God. and. Man. Second Reply to Dr. Field
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The Dying Creed.
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The Household, of Faith
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The Limits of Toleration. A Discussion with the
Hon. F. D. Oourdert and Gov. S. L. Woodford ...
Art and. Morality
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•••
Do I Blaspheme?
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The Clergy and Common Sense...
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Social Salvation
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God and the State
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Marriage and Divorce. An Agnostic’s View
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The Great Mistake
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Live Topics ...
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Myth and Miracle
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Real Blasphemy
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Repairing the Idols
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Whole of the above TPor7iS of Ingersoll bound in two
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volumes, cloth, 7s.
SHELLE?
A Refutation of Deism. In a Dialogue. With an
Introduction by G. W. Foote ...
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THOMSON JAMES (B.V)
Satires and Profanites. New Edition ...
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Contents :—The Story of a Famous Old Jewish
Firm (Jehovah, Son & Co)—The Devil in the
Church of England — Religion in the Rocky
Mountains—ChristiwrEve in the Upper Circles
—A Commission of Inquiry on Royalty—A
Bible Lesson on Monarchy—The One Thing
Needful.
1 o
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one of the most pathetic personages of our time.”—
Academy.
“As clever as they are often profane.”—Christian World.
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J. M. WHEELER
Biographical Dictionary of Freethinkers of all
Ages and Nations. Handsomely bound in cloth
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compiler deserves the thanks of the Ereethought party.”
—National Reformer.
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“The most important Freethought work published
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“ A good and useful work that was much needed.”—
Commonweal.
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Letters from Heaven
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Post free 7d. One Thousand carriage free.
Sample packet of 20 (one of each tract) post free
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gious Views; 16, Atheists and Atheism; 17.
Good Friday at Jerusalem; 18, Parsons on
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Testament Forgeries (Wheeler).
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Dublin Core
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Title
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Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
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2018
Publisher
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
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Pamphlet
Dublin Core
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Title
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An oration on Walt Whitman
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ingersoll, Robert Green [1833-1899]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 34, 8 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Printed and published by G.W. Foote. Publisher's catalogue (8 p.), dated September 1890, at end. No. 45g in Stein checklist. "The following oration by Colonel Ingersoll was delivered in the Horticultural Hall, New York, on October 21, 1890". Essays previously published in a variety of journals and books, which are listed in the Acknowledgements section. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
Publisher
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Progressive Publishing Company
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1890
Identifier
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N382
Subject
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Poetry
Rights
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (An oration on Walt Whitman), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
American Poetry
NSS
Poetry
Poetry in English
Walt Whitman