Complete Prose Works

W >> Walt Whitman >> Complete Prose Works

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55

Our lands, embracing so much, (embracing indeed the whole, rejecting
none,) hold in their breast that flame also, capable of consuming
themselves, consuming us all. Short as the span of our national life
has been, already have death and downfall crowded close upon us--and
will again crowd close, no doubt, even if warded off. Ages to come
may never know, but I know, how narrowly during the late secession
war--and more than once, and more than twice or thrice--our
Nationality, (wherein bound up, as in a ship in a storm, depended, and
yet depend, all our best life, all hope, all value,) just grazed, just
by a hair escaped destruction. Alas! to think of them! the agony and
bloody sweat of certain of those hours! those cruel, sharp, suspended
crises!

Even to-day, amid these whirls, incredible flippancy, and blind fury
of parties, infidelity, entire lack of first-class captains and
leaders, added to the plentiful meanness and vulgarity of the
ostensible masses--that problem, the labor question, beginning to open
like a yawning gulf, rapidly widening every year--what prospect
have we? We sail a dangerous sea of seething currents, cross and
under-currents, vortices--all so dark, untried--and whither shall we
turn? It seems as if the Almighty had spread before this nation charts
of imperial destinies, dazzling as the sun, yet with many a
deep intestine difficulty, and human aggregate of cankerous
imperfection-saying, lo! the roads, the only plans of development,
long and varied with all terrible balks and ebullitions. You said in
your soul, I will be empire of empires, overshadowing all else, past
and present, putting the history of Old-World dynasties, conquests
behind me, as of no account--making a new history, a history of
democracy, making old history a dwarf--I alone inaugurating largeness,
culminating time. If these, O lands of America, are indeed the prizes,
the determinations of your soul, be it so. But behold the cost, and
already specimens of the cost. Thought you greatness was to ripen
for you like a pear? If you would have greatness, know that you
must conquer it through ages, centuries--must pay for it with a
proportionate price. For you too, as for all lands, the struggle, the
traitor, the wily person in office, scrofulous wealth, the surfeit of
prosperity, the demonism of greed, the hell of passion, the decay of
faith, the long postponement, the fossil-like lethargy, the ceaseless
need of revolutions, prophets, thunder-storms, deaths, births, new
projections and invigorations of ideas and men.

Yet I have dream'd, merged in that hidden-tangled problem of our fate,
whose long unraveling stretches mysteriously through time--dream'd
out, portray'd, hinted already--a little or a larger band--a band
of brave and true, unprecedented yet--arm'd and equipt at every
point--the members separated, it may be, by different dates and
States, or south, or north, or east, or west--Pacific, Atlantic,
Southern, Canadian--a year, a century here, and other centuries
there--but always one, compact in soul, conscience-conserving,
God-inculcating, inspirid achievers, not only in literature, the
greatest art, but achievers in all art--a new, undying order,
dynasty, from age to age transmitted--a band, a class, at least as
fit to cope with current years, our dangers, needs, as those who, for
their times, so long, so well, in armor or in cowl, upheld and made
illustrious, that far-back feudal, priestly world. To offset chivalry,
indeed, those vanish'd countless knights, old altars, abbeys, priests,
ages and strings of ages, a knightlier and more sacred cause to-day
demands, and shall supply, in a New World, to larger, grander work,
more than the counterpart and tally of them.

Arrived now, definitely, at an apex for these Vistas, I confess that
the promulgation and belief in such a class or institution--a new and
greater literatus order--its possibility, (nay certainty,) underlies
these entire speculations--and that the rest, the other parts, as
superstructures, are all founded upon it. It really seems to me the
condition, not only of our future national and democratic development,
but of our perpetuation. In the highly artificial and materialistic
bases of modern civilization, with the corresponding arrangements
and methods of living, the force-infusion of intellect alone, the
depraving influences of riches just as much as poverty, the absence
of all high ideals in character--with the long series of tendencies,
shapings, which few are strong enough to resist, and which now seem,
with steam-engine speed, to be everywhere turning out the generations
of humanity like uniform iron castings--all of which, as compared with
the feudal ages, we can yet do nothing better than accept, make the
best of, and even welcome, upon the whole, for their oceanic practical
grandeur, and their restless wholesale kneading of the masses--I say
of all this tremendous and dominant play of solely materialistic
bearings upon current life in the United States, with the results as
already seen, accumulating, and reaching far into the future, that
they must either be confronted and met by at least an equally subtle
and tremendous force-infusion for purposes of spiritualization, for
the pure conscience, for genuine esthetics, and for absolute and
primal manliness and womanliness--or else our modern civilization,
with all its improvements, is in vain, and we are on the road to a
destiny, a status, equivalent, in its real world, to that of the
fabled damned.

Prospecting thus the coming unsped days, and that new order in
them--marking the endless train of exercise, development, unwind, in
nation as in man, which life is for--we see, fore-indicated, amid
these prospects and hopes, new law-forces of spoken and written
language--not merely the pedagogue-forms, correct, regular, familiar
with precedents, made for matters of outside propriety, fine words,
thoughts definitely told out--but a language fann'd by the breath of
Nature, which leaps overhead, cares mostly for impetus and effects,
and for what it plants and invigorates to grow--tallies life and
character, and seldomer tells a thing than suggests or necessitates
it. In fact, a new theory of literary composition for imaginative
works of the very first class, and especially for highest poems, is
the sole course open to these States. Books are to be call'd for,
and supplied, on the assumption that the process of reading is not a
half-sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast's struggle;
that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert,
must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history,
metaphysical essay--the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start
or frame-work. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing,
but the reader of the book does. That were to make a nation of supple
and athletic minds, well-train'd, intuitive, used to depend on
themselves, and not on a few coteries of writers.

Investigating here, we see, not that it is a little thing we have,
in having the bequeath'd libraries, countless shelves of volumes,
records, etc.; yet how serious the danger, depending entirely on them,
of the bloodless vein, the nerveless arm, the false application, at
second or third hand. We see that the real interest of this people of
ours in the theology, history, poetry, politics, and personal models
of the past, (the British islands, for instance, and indeed all the
past,) is not necessarily to mould ourselves or our literature upon
them, but to attain fuller, more definite comparisons, warnings, and
the insight to ourselves, our own present, and our own far grander,
different, future history, religion, social customs, &c. We see that
almost everything that has been written, sung, or stated, of old,
with reference to humanity under the feudal and oriental institutes,
religions, and for other lands, needs to be re-written, re-sung,
re-stated, in terms consistent with the institution of these States,
and to come in range and obedient uniformity with them.

We see, as in the universes of the material kosmos, after
meteorological, vegetable, and animal cycles, man at last arises, born
through them, to prove them, concentrate them, to turn upon them with
wonder and love--to command them, adorn them, and carry them upward
into superior realms--so, out of the series of the preceding social
and political universes, now arise these States. We see that while
many were supposing things establish'd and completed, really the
grandest things always remain; and discover that the work of the New
World is not ended, but only fairly begun.

We see our land, America, her literature, esthetics, &c., as,
substantially, the getting in form, or effusement and statement, of
deepest basic elements and loftiest final meanings, of history and
man--and the portrayal, (under the eternal laws and conditions of
beauty,) of our own physiognomy, the subjective tie and expression of
the objective, as from our own combination, continuation, and points
of view--and the deposit and record of the national mentality,
character, appeals, heroism, wars, and even liberties--where these,
and all, culminate in native literary and artistic formulation, to be
perpetuated; and not having which native, first-class formulation,
she will flounder about, and her other, however imposing, eminent
greatness, prove merely a passing gleam; but truly having which, she
will understand herself, live nobly, nobly contribute, emanate, and,
swinging, poised safely on herself, illumin'd and illuming, become
a full-form'd world, and divine Mother not only of material but
spiritual worlds, in ceaseless succession through time--the main thing
being the average, the bodily, the concrete, the democratic, the
popular, on which all the superstructures of the future are to
permanently rest.

Notes:

[20] "From a territorial area of less than nine hundred thousand
square miles, the Union has expanded into over four millions and a
half--fifteen times larger than that of Great Britain and France
combined--with a shore-line, including Alaska, equal to the entire
circumference of the earth, and with a domain within these lines far
wider than that of the Romans in their proudest days of conquest and
renown. With a river, lake, and coastwise commerce estimated at over
two thousand millions of dollars per year; with a railway traffic
of four to six thousand millions per year, and the annual domestic
exchanges of the country running up to nearly ten thousand millions
per year; with over two thousand millions of dollars invested in
manufacturing, mechanical, and mining industry; with over five hundred
millions of acres of land in actual occupancy, valued, with their
appurtenances, at over seven thousand millions of dollars, and
producing annually crops valued at over three thousand millions of
dollars; with a realm which, if the density of Belgium's population
were possible, would be vast enough to include all the present
inhabitants of the world; and with equal rights guaranteed to even the
poorest and humblest of our forty millions of people--we can, with
a manly pride akin to that which distinguish'd the palmiest days of
Rome, claim," &c., &c., &c.--_Vice-President Colfax's Speech, July 4,
1870_.

LATER--_London "Times," (Weekly,) June 23, '82_.

"The wonderful wealth-producing power of the United States defies and
sets at naught the grave drawbacks of a mischievous protective tariff,
and has already obliterated, almost wholly, the traces of the greatest
of modern civil wars. What is especially remarkable in the present
development of American energy and success is its wide and equable
distribution. North and south, east and west, on the shores of the
Atlantic and the Pacific, along the chain of the great lakes, in the
valley of the Mississippi, and on the coasts of the gulf of Mexico,
the creation of wealth and the increase of population are signally
exhibited. It is quite true, as has been shown by the recent
apportionment of population in the House of Representatives, that some
sections of the Union have advanced, relatively to the rest, in an
extraordinary and unexpected degree. But this does not imply that
the States which have gain'd no additional representatives or have
actually lost some have been stationary or have receded. The fact is
that the present tide of prosperity has risen so high that it has
overflow' d all barriers, and has fill'd up the back-waters, and
establish'd something like an approach to uniform success."

[21] See, for hereditaments, specimens, Walter Scott's Border
Minstrelsy, Percy's collection, Ellis's early English Metrical
Romances, the European continental poems of Walter of Aquitania, and
the Nibelungen, of pagan stock, but monkish-feudal redaction; the
history of the Troubadours, by Fauriel; even the far-back cumbrous
old Hindu epics, as indicating the Asian eggs out of which European
chivalry was hatch'd; Ticknor's chapters on the Cid, and on the
Spanish poems and poets of Calderon's time. Then always, and, of
course, as the superbest poetic culmination-expression of feudalism,
the Shaksperean dramas, in the attitudes, dialogue, characters, &c.,
of the princes, lords and gentlemen, the pervading atmosphere, the
implied and express'd standard of manners, the high port and proud
stomach, the regal embroidery of style, &c.

[22] Of these rapidly-sketch'd hiatuses, the two which seem to me most
serious are, for one, the condition, absence, or perhaps the singular
abeyance, of moral conscientious fibre all through American society;
and, for another, the appaling depletion of women in their powers of
sane athletic maternity, their crowning attribute, and ever making the
woman, in loftiest spheres, superior to the man.

I have sometimes thought, indeed, that the sole avenue and means of
a reconstructed sociology depended, primarily, on a new birth,
elevation, expansion, invigoration of woman, affording, for races to
come, (as the conditions that antedate birth are indispensable,) a
perfect motherhood. Great, great, indeed, far greater than they
know, is the sphere of women. But doubtless the question of such
new sociology all goes together, includes many varied and complex
influences and premises, and the man as well as the woman, and the
woman as well as the man.

[23] The question hinted here is one which time only can answer.
Must not the virtue of modern Individualism, continually enlarging,
usurping all, seriously affect, perhaps keep down entirely, in
America, the like of the ancient virtue of Patriotism, the fervid and
absorbing love of general country? I have no doubt myself that the two
will merge, and will mutually profit and brace each other, and that
from them a greater product, a third, will arise. But I feel that at
present they and their oppositions form a serious problem and paradox
in the United States.

[24] "SHOOTING NIAGARA."--I was at first roused to much anger and
abuse by this essay from Mr. Carlyle, so insulting to the theory of
America--but happening to think afterwards how I had more than once
been in the like mood, during which his essay was evidently cast, and
seen persons and things in the same light, (indeed some might say
there are signs of the same feeling in these Vistas)--I have since
read it again, not only as a study, expressing as it does certain
judgments from the highest feudal point of view, but have read it with
respect as coming from an earnest soul, and as contributing certain
sharp-cutting metallic grains, which, if not gold or silver, may be
good, hard, honest iron.

[25] For fear of mistake, I may as well distinctly specify, as
cheerfully included in the model and standard of these Vistas, a
practical, stirring, worldly, money-making, even materialistic
character. It is undeniable that our farms, stores, offices,
dry-goods, coal and groceries, enginery, cash-accounts, trades,
earnings, markets, &c., should be attended to in earnest, and actively
pursued, just as if they had a real and permanent existence. I
perceive clearly that the extreme business energy, and this almost
maniacal appetite for wealth prevalent in the United States, are parts
of amelioration and progress, indispensably needed to prepare the
very results I demand. My theory includes riches, and the getting
of riches, and the amplest products, power, activity, inventions,
movements, &c. Upon them, as upon substrata, I raise the edifice
design'd in these Vistas.

[26] The whole present system of the officering and personnel of the
army and navy of these States, and the spirit and letter of their
trebly-aristocratic rules and regulations, is a monstrous exotic,
a nuisance and revolt, and belong here just as much as orders of
nobility, or the Pope's council of cardinals. I say if the present
theory of our army and navy is sensible and true, then the rest of
America is an unmitigated fraud.

[27] A: After the rest is satiated, all interest culminates in the
field of persons, and never flags there. Accordingly in this field
have the great poets and literatuses signally toil'd. They too, in all
ages, all lands, have been creators, fashioning, making types of men
and women, as Adam and Eve are made in the divine fable. Behold,
shaped, bred by orientalism, feudalism, through their long growth and
culmination, and breeding back in return--(when shall we have an
equal series, typical of democracy?)--behold, commencing in primal
Asia, (apparently formulated, in what beginning we know, in the gods
of the mythologies, and coming down thence,) a few samples out of the
countless product, bequeath'd to the moderns, bequeath'd to America as
studies. For the men, Yudishtura, Rama, Arjuna, Solomon, most of
the Old and New Testament characters; Achilles, Ulysses, Theseus,
Prometheus, Hercules, Aeneas, Plutarch's heroes; the Merlin of Celtic
bards; the Cid, Arthur and his knights, Siegfried and Hagen in the
Nibelungen; Roland and Oliver; Roustam in the Shah-Nemah; and so on to
Milton's Satan, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Shakspere's Hamlet, Richard
II., Lear, Marc Antony, &c., and the modern Faust. These, I say, are
models, combined, adjusted to other standards than America's, but of
priceless value to her and hers.

Among women, the goddesses of the Egyptian, Indian and Greek
mythologies, certain Bible characters, especially the Holy Mother;
Cleopatra, Penelope; the portraits of Brunhelde and Chriemhilde in
the Nibelungen; Oriana, Una, &c.; the modern Consuelo, Walter Scott's
Jeanie and Effie Deans, &c., &c. (Yet woman portray'd or outlin'd at
her best, or as perfect human mother, does not hitherto, it seems to
me, fully appear in literature.)

[28] Note, to-day, an instructive, curious spectacle and conflict.
Science, (twin in its fields, of Democracy in its)--Science, testing
absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the
world--a sun, mounting, most illuminating, most glorious--surely never
again to set. But against it, deeply entrench'd, holding possession,
yet remains, (not only through the churches and schools, but by
imaginative literature, and unregenerate poetry,) the fossil theology
of the mythic-materialistic, superstitious, untaught and credulous,
fable-loving, primitive ages of humanity.

[29] It is to the development, identification, and general prevalence
of that fervid comradeship, (the adhesive love, at least rivaling the
amative love hitherto possessing imaginative literature, if not going
beyond it,) that I look for the counterbalance and offset of
our materialistic and vulgar American democracy, and for the
spiritualization thereof. Many will say it is a dream, and will not
follow my inferences: but I confidently expect a time when there will
be seen, running like a half-hid warp through all the myriad audible
and visible worldly interests of America, threads of manly friendship,
fond and loving, pure and sweet, strong and life-long, carried
to degrees hitherto unknown--not only giving tone to individual
character, and making it unprecedently emotional, muscular, heroic,
and refined, but having the deepest relations to general politics. I
say democracy infers such loving comradeship, as its most inevitable
twin or counterpart, without which it will be incomplete, in vain, and
incapable of perpetuating itself.

[30] I am reminded as I write that out of this very conscience, or
idea of conscience, of intense moral right, and in its name and
strain'd construction, the worst fanaticisms, wars, persecutions,
murders, &c., have yet, in all lands, in the past, been broach'd, and
have come to their devilish fruition. Much is to be said--but I may
say here, and in response, that side by side with the unflagging
stimulation of the elements of religion and conscience must henceforth
move with equal sway, science, absolute reason, and the general
proportionate development of the whole man. These scientific
facts, deductions, are divine too--precious counted parts of moral
civilization, and, with physical health, indispensable to it, to
prevent fanaticism. For abstract religion, I perceive, is easily led
astray, ever credulous, and is capable of devouring, remorseless, like
fire and flame. Conscience, too, isolated from all else, and from the
emotional nature, may but attain the beauty and purity of glacial,
snowy ice. We want, for these States, for the general character,
a cheerful, religious fervor, endued with the ever-present
modifications of the human emotions, friendship, benevolence, with a
fair field for scientific inquiry, the right of individual judgment,
and always the cooling influences of material Nature.

[31] The culmination and fruit of literary artistic expression, and
its final fields of pleasure for the human soul, are in metaphysics,
including the mysteries of the spiritual world, the soul itself, and
the question of the immortal continuation of our identity. In all
ages, the mind of man has brought up here--and always will. Here, at
least, of whatever race or era, we stand on common ground. Applause,
too, is unanimous, antique or modern. Those authors who work well in
this field--though their reward, instead of a handsome percentage,
or royalty, may be but simply the laurel-crown of the victors in the
great Olympic games--will be dearest to humanity, and their works,
however esthetically defective, will be treasur'd forever. The
altitude of literature and poetry has always been religion--and
always will be. The Indian Vedas, the Nackas of Zoroaster, the Tal
mud of the Jews, the Old Testament, the Gospel of Christ and his
disciples, Plato's works, the Koran of Mohammed, the Edda of Snorro,
and so on toward our own day, to Swedenborg, and to the invaluable
contributions of Leibnitz, Kant and Hegel--these, with such poems only
in which, (while singing well of persons and events, of the passions
of man, and the shows of the material universe,) the religious tone,
the consciousness of mystery, the recognition of the future, of the
unknown, of Deity over and under all, and of the divine purpose, are
never absent, but indirectly give tone to all--exhibit literature's
real heights and elevations, towering up like the great mountains of
the earth.

Standing on this ground--the last, the highest, only permanent
ground--and sternly criticising, from it, all works, either of the
literary, or any art, we have peremptorily to dismiss every pretensive
production, however fine its esthetic or intellectual points, which
violates or ignores, or even does not celebrate, the central divine
idea of All, suffusing universe, of eternal trains of purpose, in the
development, by however slow degrees, of the physical, moral, and
spiritual kosmos. I say he has studied, meditated to no profit,
whatever may be his mere erudition, who has not absorbed this simple
consciousness and faith. It is not entirely new--but it is for
Democracy to elaborate it, and look to build upon and expand from
it, with uncompromising reliance. Above the doors of teaching the
inscription is to appear, Though little or nothing can be absolutely
known, perceiv'd, except from a point of view which is evanescent, yet
we know at least one permanency, that Time and Space, in the will of
God, furnish successive chains, completions of material births and
beginnings, solve all discrepancies, fears and doubts, and eventually
fulfil happiness--and that the prophecy of those births, namely
spiritual results, throws the true arch over all teaching, all
science. The local considerations of sin, disease, deformity,
ignorance, death, &c., and their measurement by the superficial mind,
and ordinary legislation and theology, are to be met by science,
boldly accepting, promulging this faith, and planting the seeds of
superber laws--of the explication of the physical universe through the
spiritual--and clearing the way for a religion, sweet and unimpugnable
alike to little child or great savan.

ORIGINS OF ATTEMPTED SECESSION

_Not the whole matter, but some side facts worth conning to-day and
any day_.