The New Spirit

wide significance.[5] These three belong to the same corner of the continent; they form a culminating series, and at th

arried over sea, to germinate slowly and peace[90]fully in New England, that at length it broke into flower, and that we know clearly that union of robust freedom and mystic exaltation which lies at the heart of Puritanism. In his calm and austere manner—born of the blood that had passed through the veins of six generations of Puritan ministers—Emerson overturned the whole of tradition. “A world in the hand,” he said, with cheery, genial scepticism, “is worth

ve deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner and reduce it to its lowest terms.” So he went into Walden Woods and built himself a hut, and sowed beans, and grew strangely familiar with the lives of plants and trees, of birds and beasts and fishes, and with much else besides. This period of self-dependent residence by Walden Pond has usually been regarded as the chief episode in Thoreau’s life. Doubtless it was, in the case of a man who spent his whole life in a small New England town, and made the very moderate living that he needed by intermittent work at pencil-making, teaching, land-surveying, magazin

In person he was rather undersized, with “huge Emersonian nose,” and deep-set bluish-grey eyes beneath large overhanging brows; prominent pursed-up lips, a weak receding chin, “a ruddy weather-beaten face, which reminds one of some shrewd and honest animal’s.” He was a vigorous pedestrian; he had sloping shoulders, long arms, short legs, large hands and feet—the characteristics, for the most part, of an anthropoid ape.

and for this Thoreau seems to have been peculiarly adapted; he had acquired one of the rarest of arts, that of approaching birds, beasts and fishes, and exciting no fear. There are all sorts of profoundly interesting investigations which only such a man can profitably undertake. But that right question which is at least the half of knowledge was hidden from Thoreau; he seems to have been absolutely deficient in scientific sense. His bare, impersonal records of observations are always dull and unprofitable reading; occasionally he stumbles on a good observation, but, not realizing its sig

tectonic qualities of style, there is a keen exhilarating breeze blowing about these boulders, and when we look at them they have the grace and audacity, the happy, natural extravagance of fragments of the finest Decorated Gothic on the site of a[95] fourteenth century abbey. He was in love with the things that are wildest and most untamable in Nature, and of these his sentences often seem to be a solid artistic embodiment, the mountain side, “its sublime gray mass, that antique, brownish-gray, Ararat colour,” or the “ancient, familiar, immortal cr

ial humour, flashing now and then into divine epigram. A life in harmony with Nature, the culture of joyous simplicity, the subordination of science to ethics—these were the principles of Cynicism, and to these Thoreau was always true. “Every day is a festival,” said Diogenes, and Metrocles rejoiced that he was happier than the Persian king. “I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself,” said Thoreau, “than be crowded on a velvet cushion.” “Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage.... It is life near the bone, where it is sweetest.... Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.” He had “travelled much in Concord.” “Methinks I should be content to sit at the back-door in Concord under the poplar tree for ever.” Such utterances as these strewn throughout Thoreau’s pages—and the saying in the last days of the[97] dying man to the youth who would talk to him about a future world, “One world at a time”—are full, in the uncorrupted sense, of the finest cynicism. Diogenes, seeing a boy drink out of his hand, t

had to confess that of all phenomena his own race was to him the most mysterious and undiscoverable. He writes finely: “The whole duty of man may be expressed in one line: Make to yourself a perfect body;” but this appears to be a purely intellectual intuition. He had a fine insight into the purity of sex and of all natural animal functions, from which we excuse ourselves of speaking by falsely saying they are trifles. “We are so degraded that we cannot speak simply of the necessary functions of human n

. “We need the tonic of wildness.” Thoreau has heightened for us the wildness of Nature, and his work—all written, as we need not be told, in the

I

has been placed while yet alive by the side of the wor

tter So

e core, yet

ixed to “Leaves of Grass” shows him with an expression like his father’s; in later life he bears a singular resemblance to his mother as she is represented in Bucke’s book. He himself, we are told, makes much of the women of his ancestry. “I estimate three leading sources and formative stamps of my own character,”—in his own words—“the maternal nativity-stock brought hither from far-away Netherlands, for one (doubtless the best); the su

on the omnibuses talking to the drivers, in the workshops[101] talking to the artisans. His physical health was perfect; he earned enough to live on; he felt himself the equal of highest or lowest; he drank of the great variegated stream of life before him from every cup. His culture was, in its own way, as large and as sincere as Goethe’s. Of books, indeed, he knew little; he was equally ignorant of science, of p

it becomes more predominant than even his superb egotism. It is this element in his large emotional nature, brought to full maturity by these war experiences, which so many persons have felt thrilling through the man’s whole personality, and which probably explains in some measure the devotion he has inspired. Whitman went to Washington young, in the perfection of virile physical energy (“He is a Man,” said the shrewd Lincoln, to whom Whitman was unknown, as he chanced to see him through a window once); he came away old and enfeebled, having touched the height of life, to walk henceforth a downward path. Physically impressive, however, at that time and always, he remained. He is described, after this time (chiefly by Dr. Bucke), as six feet in height, weighing nearly two hundred pounds; with eyebrows highly arched; eyes light blue, rather small, dull and heavy (this point is of some[103] interest, bearing in mind that with exceptional creative imagination large bright eyes are associated); full-sized mouth, with full lips; large handsome ears, and senses exceptionally acute. The

blood of a master-spirit, and no book throbs with a more vivid personal life than “Leaves of Grass.” It is the whole outcome of a whole man, a

rs, after chastity, friendship, p

ound and breastin

sorbing eras, temperaments, races

r clarifyings, elevations,

ssible there comes to a man, a woma

I

child of an older and colder country,[105] in love with age and suffering and toil. Yet in essentials it is identical. Even personally, it is said, Millet recalled Whitman.[6] Judging from the representations of him, Millet, in his prime, was a colossal image of manly beauty—deep-chested, muscular, erect, the quiet, penetrating blue eyes, the delicately expressive eyelids, the large nose and dilating sensitive nostrils, the fir

us believe, but that the rough linen should simplify its folds and take the form of the body, that he might give a fresher and stronger accent to those qualities he so loved, the garment becoming, as it were, a part of the body, and expressing, as he has said, even more than the nude, the larger and simpler forms of Nature.” There is the genuine Hellenic spirit, working in a different age and under a different sky. Millet felt that for him it was not true to paint the naked body, and at the same time that the body alone was the supremely interesting thing to paint. In the “Sower” we see this spirit expressed in the highest form which Millet ever reached—the grace of natural beauty and strength, in no remote discobolus or gladiator, but in the man of his own country and clime, a peasant like himself, who

g to a rough but convenient distinction, it is the poetry of energy rather than the poetry of art. When Whitman speaks prose, the language of science, he is frequently incoherent, emotional, unbalanced, with no very just and precise sense of the meaning or words or the structure of reasoned language.[7] It is clear that in this man the moral in its largest sense—that is to say, the personality and its personal relations—is more developed than the scientific; and that on the ?sthetic side the artist is merged in the mystic, wrapt in emotional contemplation of a cosmic whole. What we see, therefore, is a manifold personality seeking expression for itself in a peculiarly flexible and responsive medium. It is a deep as well as a superficial resemblance that these chants bear to the Scriptur

ligion.” If we wish to understand Walt Whitman, we must have some conception of this religion. We shall find that two great and contradictory co

complete utterance of Whitman’s

the soul is not

at the body is not

, is greater to one

1

on. “Let it stand as an indubitable truth, which no inquiries can shake, that the mind of man is so entirely alienated from the righteousness of God, that he cannot conceive, desire, or design anything but what is wicked, distorted, foul, impure and iniquitous; that his heart is so thoroughly environed by sin tha

nothing

as duties I give

he heart’s acti

of a healthy nature, not the product

en said, is the maxim on which Whitman’s morality[111] is founded, and it is the morality

ssertion of human pride and passion in “Tristan and Isolde,” the same strain changed to a stronger and nobler key. Then came the great wave of the Renaissance through Italy and France and England, filling art and philosophy with an exaltation of physical life, and again later, in the movements that centre around the French Revolution, an exaltation of arrogant and independent intellectual life. But all these manifestations were sometimes partial, sometimes extravagant; they were impulses of the natural man surging up in rebellion against the dominant Christian temper; they were, for[112] the most part consciously, of the nature of reactions. We feel that there is a

those wonderful eyes. Especially in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” in which he seems to gaze most clearly “through narrow chinks of his cavern,” he has set forth his conviction that “first the notion that man has a body d

, as Hinton pointed out, by a new form of asceticism, which lay in the denial of emotion. Whitman, one of the very greatest emotional forces of modern times, who had grown up apart from the rigid and technical methods of science, face to face with a new world and a new civilization, whi

steadily employed to c

t I stand with

philosophy of[114] Hegel—with its conception of the universe as a single process of evolution, in which vice and disease are but transient perturbations—with which he had a second-hand acquaintance, that has left dist

od of the world—saying, not: “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” but, with Clifford: “Let us take hands and help, for this day we are alive together”—is certainly Whitman’s most significa

go we know

ld obstructi

e worse

lawless and un

ne ho

c developments of the seventeenth century. Whitman’s attitude is not the less deep-rooted and original. For he is not content to argue, haughtily indifferent, with Epicurus and Epictetus, that death can be nothing to us, because it is no evil to lose what we shall never miss. Whitman will reveal the loveliness of death. We feel constantly in “Leaves of Grass” as to some extent we feel before the “Love and Death” and some other pictures of one of the greatest of Eng

1

in, look for me und

know who I am

good health to

and fibre y

ttered in “This Compost,” in which he reaches beyond the corpse that is good manure to sweet-scented roses, to the polished breasts of melons; or again, in the noble elegy, “Pensive on her dead gazing,” on those who died during the war. In his most perfectly lyrical poem, “Ou

ways gliding nea

for thee a chant o

or thee, I glorif

t when thou must indeed

1

e-tops I floa

g waves, over the myriad f

cities all and the tee

with joy, with jo

. His intense sense of individuality was marked from the

d, is Greater to one

t great thought. But even in the “Song o

ascended a hill and look

of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of eve

e but level that lift to

thought; he alludes to that body which he had called the

ntitious body to be burned, or

tless left to me

1

t is not a mere aggregate of things, it is an order, sometimes a moral order. Also he wisely refuses with unswerving consistency to admit an abstract Humanity; of “man” he has nothing to say; there is nothing anywhere in the universe for him but individuals, undying, everlastingly aggrandizing individuals. This egoism is practical, strenuous, moral; it cannot be described as religious. Whitman is lacking—and in this respect he comes nearer to Goethe than to any other great modern man—in what may be pos

t and whine about

ke in the dark and

e sick discussing

not one is demented with

, nor to his kind that li

able or unhappy ov

complexity, its passive resignation, its restless mystical ardours. That Whitman delighted in music is clear; it is equally clear, from the testimony of

is a gr

ed is music—t

iated Beethoven, or understood Wagne

tells us, to inaugurate a new religion, but he has few or no marks upon him of that mysticism—that Eastern spirit of glad renunciation of the self in a larger self

me leaves peace and

life to be lost

hard to find in “Leaves of Grass,” and the more precious when found. Whitman hardly succeeds in the expression of joy; to feel exquisitely the pulse of gladness a mor

seem to have perished by the roadside—and they radiate an infinite energy, an infinite joy. It is truly a tremendous diastole of life to which the crude and colossal extravagance of this vision bears witness; we weary soon of its strenuous vitality, and crave for the systole of life, for peace and repose. It is not strange that the immense faith o

tity beyond the grave. “He a-hold of my hand has completely satisfied me.” He discovers at last that love and comradeship—adhesiveness—is, after all, the main thing, “base and finale, too, for all met

1

lay, such a transp

d athwart my hips and ge

bosom-bone, and plunged your

lt my beard, and reache

me the peace and knowledge that p

hand of God is the

spirit of God is t

n are also my brothers, and t

son of the cre

V

ave occurred to him that so extraordinary a conception can be formulated; his relations to men generally spring out of his relations to par

d women and looking on them, and in the contac

1

e soul, but these pl

vision of Nature as a spiritual Presence; God is to him a word only, without vitality; to Art he is mostly indifferent; yet there remains this great moral kernel, spr

man of strong moral instinct it covers all human things in infinitely widening circles; his heart goes out to every creature that shares the loved one’s delicious humanity; henceforth there is nothing human that he cannot touch with reverence and love. “Leaves of Grass” is penetrated by this moral element

the average man, woman, child, around them might be, with love and absolute faithfulness, phlegmatically set forth. In their heroic earthliness they could at no point be repulsed; colour and light may aureole their work, but the most commonplace things of Nature shall have the largest nimbus. That is the temper of Dutch art throughout; no other art in the world has the same characteristics. In the art of Whitman alone do we meet with it again, impatient indeed and broken up into fragments, pierced throu

st slow sudden

aves when all th

ged the pulses

Whitman, in “I sing the body electric,”

working surely and softl

the willing an

of the clasping and

Thoreau’s, that for him to whom sex is impure there are no flowers in Nature. He cannot help speaking of man’s or woman’s life in terms of Nature’s life, of Nature’s life in terms of man’s; he mingles them together w

les and lemons, of t

oods, of the la

self in mystic obscurity; and the words in which he rec

imed; there still exist barbarous traditions which medi?val Christianity has helped to perpetuate, so that the words of Pliny[127] regarding the contaminating touch of a woman, who has always been regarded as in a peculiar manner the symbol of sex—“Nihil facile reperiabatur mulierum profluvio magis monstrificum”—are not even yet meaningless. Why should the sweetening breath of science be guarded from this spot? Why should not “freedom and faith and earnestness” be introduced here? Our attitude towards this part of life affects profoundly our attitude towards life altogether. To realize this, read Swift’s “Strephon and Chloe,” which enshrines, vividly and unshrinkingly, in a classic form, a certain emotional way of approaching the body. It narrates the very trivial experiences of a man and woman on their bridal night. The

g things is of prime importance, the new conceptions of purity are founded on a scientific basis which must be deeply understood. Swift’s morbid and exaggerated spiritualism, a legacy of medi?valism—and the ordi

ic brains. Some who have striven to find a vital natural meaning in the central sacrament of Christianity have thought that the Last Supper was an attempt to reveal the divine mystery of food, to consecrate the loveliness

s of our life. At whatever point touched, the reverberation, multiplexly charged with uses, meanings, and emotional associations of infinite charm, to the sensitive individual more or less conscious, spreads throughout the entire organism. We can no longer intrude our crude distinctions of high and low. We cannot now step in and say that this link in the chain is eternally ugly and that is eternally be

1

is an element in this record which, while perhaps very American, reminds one of the great Frenchman who shouted so lustily through his huge brass trumpet, seated on the apex of the universe in the Avenue d’Eylau. The noble lines to “You felons on trial in Courts” accompany “To him that was crucified.” Such rhetorical flourishes do not impair the value of this revel

super-refined ideal, at the same time rather hysterical and rather prim. In youth we cannot see through these Tartuffes and Précieuses; when we become grown men and women we feel a great thirst for Nature, for reality in literature, and we slake it at such fountains as this of “Leaves of Grass.” Like Ant?us of old we bow down to touch the earth, to come in contact with the great primal energies of Nature, and to grow

I pass, hear my

palm of your hand

fraid of

1

the earth, and the equilibrium also.” And in his vigorous masculine love, asserting his own personality he has asserted that of all—“By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.” Charging himself in every place with contentment and triumph,

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