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

VENTURES, ON AN OLD THEME

A DIALOGUE--

_One party says_--We arrange our lives--even the best and boldest men
and women that exist, just as much as the most limited--with reference
to what society conventionally rules and makes right. We retire to our
rooms for freedom; to undress, bathe, unloose everything in freedom.
These, and much else, would not be proper in society.

_Other party answers_--Such is the rule of society. Not always so, and
considerable exceptions still exist. However, it must be called the
general rule, sanction'd by immemorial usage, and will probably always
remain so.

_First party_--Why not, then, respect it in your poems?

_Answer_--One reason, and to me a profound one, is that the soul of a
man or woman demands, enjoys compensation in the highest directions
for this very restraint of himself or herself, level'd to the average,
or rather mean, low, however eternally practical, requirements of
society's intercourse. To balance this indispensable abnegation, the
free minds of poets relieve themselves, and strengthen and enrich
mankind with free flights in all the directions not tolerated by
ordinary society.

_First party_--But must not outrage or give offence to it.

_Answer_--No, not in the deepest sense--and do not, and cannot. The
vast averages of time and the race _en masse_ settle these things.
Only understand that the conventional standards and laws proper enough
for ordinary society apply neither to the action of the soul, nor its
poets. In fact the latter know no laws but the laws of themselves,
planted in them by God, and are themselves the last standards of the
law, and its final exponents--responsible to Him directly, and not at
all to mere etiquette. Often the best service that can be done to the
race, is to lift the veil, at least for a time, from these rules and
fossil-etiquettes.

NEW POETRY--_California, Canada, Texas_.--In my opinion the time has
arrived to essentially break down the barriers of form between prose
and poetry. I say the latter is henceforth to win and maintain its
character regardless of rhyme, and the measurement-rules of iambic,
spondee, dactyl, &c., and that even if rhyme and those measurements
continue to furnish the medium for inferior writers and themes,
(especially for persiflage and the comic, as there seems henceforward,
to the perfect taste, something inevitably comic in rhyme, merely in
itself, and anyhow,) the truest and greatest _Poetry_, (while subtly
and necessarily always rhythmic, and distinguishable easily enough,)
can never again, in the English language, be express'd in arbitrary
and rhyming metre, any more than the greatest eloquence, or the truest
power and passion. While admitting that the venerable and heavenly
forms of chiming versification have in their time play'd great and
fitting parts--that the pensive complaint, the ballads, wars, amours,
legends of Europe, &c., have, many of them, been inimitably render'd
in rhyming verse--that there have been very illustrious poets whose
shapes the mantle of such verse has beautifully and appropriately
envelopt--and though the mantle has fallen, with perhaps added beauty,
on some of our own age--it is, not-withstanding, certain to me, that
the day of such conventional rhyme is ended. In America, at any rate,
and as a medium of highest esthetic practical or spiritual expression,
present or future, it palpably fails, and must fail, to serve. The
Muse of the Prairies, of California, Canada, Texas, and of the peaks
of Colorado, dismissing the literary, as well as social etiquette of
over-sea feudalism and caste, joyfully enlarging, adapting itself to
comprehend the size of the whole people, with the free play, emotions,
pride, passions, experiences, that belong to them, body and soul--to
the general globe, and all its relations in astronomy, as the savans
portray them to us--to the modern, the busy Nineteenth century, (as
grandly poetic as any, only different,) with steamships, railroads,
factories, electric telegraphs, cylinder presses--to the thought of
the solidarity of nations, the brotherhood and sisterhood of the
entire earth--to the dignity and heroism of the practical labor of
farms, factories, foundries, workshops, mines, or on shipboard, or
on lakes and rivers--resumes that other medium of expression, more
flexible, more eligible--soars to the freer, vast, diviner heaven of
prose.

Of poems of the third or fourth class, (perhaps even some of the
second,) it makes little or no difference who writes them--they are
good enough for what they are; nor is it necessary that they should be
actual emanations from the personality and life of the writers. The
very reverse sometimes gives piquancy. But poems of the first class,
(poems of the depth, as distinguished from those of the surface,) are
to be sternly tallied with the poets themselves, and tried by them and
their lives. Who wants a glorification of courage and manly defiance
from a coward or a sneak?--a ballad of benevolence or chastity from
some rhyming hunks, or lascivious, glib _roue_?

In these States, beyond all precedent, poetry will have to do with
actual facts, with the concrete States, and--for we have not much
more than begun--with the definitive getting into shape of the Union.
Indeed I sometimes think _it_ alone is to define the Union, (namely,
to give it artistic character, spirituality, dignity.) What American
humanity is most in danger of is an overwhelming prosperity,
"business" worldliness, materialism: what is most lacking, east, west,
north, south, is a fervid and glowing Nationality and patriotism,
cohering all the parts into one. Who may fend that danger, and fill
that lack in the future, but a class of loftiest poets?

If the United States haven't grown poets, on any scale of grandeur,
it is certain they import, print, and read more poetry than any equal
number of people elsewhere--probably more than all the rest of the
world combined.

Poetry (like a grand personality) is a growth of many
generations--many rare combinations.

To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too.

BRITISH LITERATURE

To avoid mistake, I would say that I not only commend the study of
this literature, but wish our sources of supply and comparison
vastly enlarged. American students may well derive from all former
lands--from forenoon Greece and Rome, down to the perturb'd mediaeval
times, the Crusades, and so to Italy, the German intellect--all the
older literatures, and all the newer ones--from witty and warlike
France, and markedly, and in many ways, and at many different periods,
from the enterprise and soul of the great Spanish race--bearing
ourselves always courteous, always deferential, indebted beyond
measure to the mother-world, to all its nations dead, as all its
nations living--the offspring, this America of ours, the daughter, not
by any means of the British isles exclusively, but of the continent,
and all continents. Indeed, it is time we should realize and fully
fructify those germs we also hold from Italy, France, Spain,
especially in the best imaginative productions of those lands, which
are, in many ways, loftier and subtler than the English, or British,
and indispensable to complete our service, proportions, education,
reminiscences, &c.... The British element these States hold, and have
always held, enormously beyond its fit proportions. I have already
spoken of Shakspere. He seems to me of astral genius, first class,
entirely fit for feudalism. His contributions, especially to the
literature of the passions, are immense, forever dear to humanity--and
his name is always to be reverenced in America. But there is much
in him ever offensive to democracy. He is not only the tally of
feudalism, but I should say Shakspere is incarnated, uncompromising
feudalism, in literature. Then one seems to detect something in him--I
hardly know how to describe it--even amid the dazzle of his genius;
and, in inferior manifestations, it is found in nearly all leading
British authors. (Perhaps we will have to import the words Snob,
Snobbish, &c., after all.) While of the great poems of Asian
antiquity, the Indian epics, the book of Job, the Ionian Iliad, the
unsurpassedly simple, loving, perfect idyls of the life and death
of Christ, in the New Testament, (indeed Homer and the Biblical
utterances intertwine familiarly with us, in the main,) and along
down, of most of the characteristic, imaginative or romantic relics of
the continent, as the Cid, Cervantes' Don Quixote, &c., I should say
they substantially adjust themselves to us, and, far off as they are,
accord curiously with our bed and board to-day, in New York,

Washington, Canada, Ohio, Texas, California--and with our notions,
both of seriousness and of fun, and our standards of heroism,
manliness, and even the democratic requirements--those requirements
are not only not fulfill'd in the Shaksperean productions, but are
insulted on every page.

I add that--while England is among the greatest of lands in political
freedom, or the idea of it, and in stalwart personal character,
&c.--the spirit of English literature is not great, at least is not
greatest--and its products are no models for us. With the exception of
Shakspere, there is no first-class genius in that literature--which,
with a truly vast amount of value, and of artificial beauty,
(largely from the classics,) is almost always material, sensual,
not spiritual--almost always congests, makes plethoric, not frees,
expands, dilates--is cold, anti-democratic, loves to be sluggish and
stately, and shows much of that characteristic of vulgar persons, the
dread of saying or doing something not at all improper in itself, but
unconventional, and that may be laugh'd at. In its best, the sombre
pervades it; it is moody, melancholy, and, to give it its due,
expresses, in characters and plots, those qualities, in an unrival'd
manner. Yet not as the black thunder-storms, and in great normal,
crashing passions, of the Greek dramatists--clearing the air,
refreshing afterward, bracing with power; but as in Hamlet, moping,
sick, uncertain, and leaving ever after a secret taste for the blues,
the morbid fascination, the luxury of wo....

I strongly recommend all the young men and young women of the United
States to whom it may be eligible, to overhaul the well-freighted
fleets, the literatures of Italy, Spain, France, Germany, so full of
those elements of freedom, self-possession, gay-heartedness, subtlety,
dilation, needed in preparations for the future of the States. I only
wish we could have really good translations. I rejoice at the feeling
for Oriental researches and poetry, and hope it will go on.

DARWINISM--(THEN FURTHERMORE)

Running through prehistoric ages--coming down from them into the
daybreak of our records, founding theology, suffusing literature, and
so brought onward--(a sort of verteber and marrow to all the antique
races and lands, Egypt, India, Greece, Rome, the Chinese, the Jews,
&c., and giving cast and complexion to their art, poems, and their
politics as well as ecclesiasticism, all of which we more or less
inherit,) appear those venerable claims to origin from God himself, or
from gods and goddesses--ancestry from divine beings of vaster beauty,
size, and power than ours. But in current and latest times, the theory
of human origin that seems to have most made its mark, (curiously
reversing the antique,) is that we have come on, originated, developt,
from monkeys, baboons--a theory more significant perhaps in its
indirections, or what it necessitates, than it is even in itself. (Of
the twain, far apart as they seem, and angrily as their conflicting
advocates to-day oppose each other, are not both theories to be
possibly reconcil'd, and even blended? Can we, indeed, spare either of
them? Better still, out of them is not a third theory, the real one,
or suggesting the real one, to arise?)

Of this old theory, evolution, as broach'd anew, trebled, with indeed
all-devouring claims, by Darwin, it has so much in it, and is so
needed as a counterpoise to yet widely prevailing and unspeakably
tenacious, enfeebling superstitions--is fused, by the new man, into
such grand, modest, truly scientific accompaniments--that the world of
erudition, both moral and physical, cannot but be eventually better'd
and broaden'd in its speculations, from the advent of Darwinism.
Nevertheless, the problem of origins, human and other, is not the
least whit nearer its solution. In due time the Evolution theory will
have to abate its vehemence, cannot be allow'd to dominate every thing
else, and will have to take its place as a segment of the circle, the
cluster--as but one of many theories, many thoughts, of profoundest
value--and re-adjusting and differentiating much, yet leaving the
divine secrets just as inexplicable and unreachable as before--maybe
more so.

_Then furthermore_--What is finally to be done by priest or poet--and
by priest or poet only--amid all the stupendous and dazzling novelties
of our century, with the advent of America, and of science and
democracy--remains just as indispensable, after all the work of the
grand astronomers, chemists, linguists, historians, and explorers
of the last hundred years--and the wondrous German and other
metaphysicians of that time--and will continue to remain, needed,
America and here, just the same as in the world of Europe, or Asia,
of a hundred, or a thousand, or several thousand years ago. I think
indeed _more_ needed, to furnish statements from the present points,
the added arriere, and the unspeakably immenser vistas of to-day.
Only, the priests and poets of the modern, at least as exalted as any
in the past, fully absorbing and appreciating the results of the
past, in the commonalty of all humanity, all time, (the main results
already, for there is perhaps nothing more, or at any rate not much,
strictly new, only more important modern combinations, and new
relative adjustments,) must indeed recast the old metal, the already
achiev'd material, into and through new moulds, current forms.

Meantime, the highest and subtlest and broadest truths of modern
science wait for their true assignment and last vivid flashes of
light--as Democracy waits for it's--through first-class metaphysicians
and speculative philosophs--laying the basements and foundations for
those new, more expanded, more harmonious, more melodious, freer
American poems.

"SOCIETY"

I have myself little or no hope from what is technically called
"Society" in our American cities. New York, of which place I have
spoken so sharply, still promises something, in time, out of its
tremendous and varied materials, with a certain superiority of
intuitions, and the advantage of constant agitation, and ever new and
rapid dealings of the cards. Of Boston, with its circles of social
mummies, swathed in cerements harder than brass--its bloodless
religion, (Unitarianism,) its complacent vanity of scientism and
literature, lots of grammatical correctness, mere knowledge, (always
wearisome, in itself)--its zealous abstractions, ghosts of reforms--I
should say, (ever admitting its business powers, its sharp, almost
demoniac, intellect, and no lack, in its own way, of courage and
generosity)--there is, at present, little of cheering, satisfying
sign. In the West, California, &c., "society" is yet unform'd,
puerile, seemingly unconscious of anything above a driving business,
or to liberally spend the money made by it, in the usual rounds and
shows.

Then there is, to the humorous observer of American attempts at
fashion, according to the models of foreign courts and saloons, quite
a comic side--particularly visible at Washington city--a sort of
high-life-below-stairs business. As if any farce could be funnier,
for instance, than the scenes of the crowds, winter nights, meandering
around our Presidents and their wives, cabinet officers, western or
other Senators, Representatives, &c.; born of good laboring mechanic
or farmer stock and antecedents, attempting those full-dress
receptions, finesse of parlors, foreign ceremonies, etiquettes, &c.

Indeed, consider'd with any sense of propriety, or any sense at all,
the whole of this illy-play'd fashionable play and display, with their
absorption of the best part of our wealthier citizens' time, money,
energies, &c., is ridiculously out of place in the United States.
As if our proper man and woman, (far, far greater words than
"gentleman" and "lady,") could still fail to see, and presently
achieve, not this spectral business, but something truly noble,
active, sane, American--by modes, perfections of character, manners,
costumes, social relations, &c., adjusted to standards, far, far
different from those.

Eminent and liberal foreigners, British or continental, must at times
have their faith fearfully tried by what they see of our New World
personalities. The shallowest and least American persons seem surest
to push abroad, and call without fail on well-known foreigners, who
are doubtless affected with indescribable qualms by these queer ones.
Then, more than half of our authors and writers evidently think it a
great thing to be "aristocratic," and sneer at progress, democracy,
revolution, etc. If some international literary snobs' gallery were
establish'd, it is certain that America could contribute at least her
full share of the portraits, and some very distinguish'd ones. Observe
that the most impudent slanders, low insults, &c., on the great
revolutionary authors, leaders, poets, &c., of Europe, have their
origin and main circulation in certain circles here. The treatment of
Victor Hugo living, and Byron dead, are samples. Both deserving so
well of America, and both persistently attempted to be soil'd here by
unclean birds, male and female.

Meanwhile I must still offset the like of the foregoing, and all it
infers, by the recognition of the fact, that while the surfaces of
current society here show so much that is dismal, noisome, and vapory,
there are, beyond question, inexhaustible supplies, as of true gold
ore, in the mines of America's general humanity. Let us, not ignoring
the dross, give fit stress to these precious immortal values also.
Let it be distinctly admitted, that--whatever may be said of our
fashionable society, and of any foul fractions and episodes--only here
in America, out of the long history and manifold presentations of
the ages, has at last arisen, and now stands, what never before took
positive form and sway, _the People_--and that view'd en masse, and
while fully acknowledging deficiencies, dangers, faults, this people,
inchoate, latent, not yet come to majority, nor to its own religious,
literary, or esthetic expression, yet affords, to-day, an exultant
justification of all the faith, all the hopes and prayers and
prophecies of good men through the past--the stablest, solidest-based
government of the world--the most assured in a future--the beaming
Pharos to whose perennial light all earnest eyes, the world over, are
tending--and that already, in and from it, the democratic principle,
having been mortally tried by severest tests, fatalities of war and
peace, now issues from the trial, unharm'd, trebly-invigorated,
perhaps to commence forthwith its finally triumphant march around the
globe.

THE TRAMP AND STRIKE QUESTIONS: _Part of a Lecture proposed, (never
deliver'd)_

Two grim and spectral dangers--dangerous to peace, to health,
to social security, to progress--long known in concrete to the
governments of the Old World, and there eventuating, more than once or
twice, in dynastic overturns, bloodshed, days, months, of terror--seem
of late years to be nearing the New World, nay, to be gradually
establishing themselves among us. What mean these phantoms here? (I
personify them in fictitious shapes, but they are very real.) Is the
fresh and broad demesne of America destined also to give them foothold
and lodgment, permanent domicile?

Beneath the whole political world, what most presses and perplexes
to-day, sending vastest results affecting the future, is not
the abstract question of democracy, but of social and economic
organization, the treatment of working-people by employers, and all
that goes along with it--not only the wages-payment part, but a
certain spirit and principle, to vivify anew these relations; all
the questions of progress, strength, tariffs, finance, &c., really
evolving themselves more or less directly out of the Poverty Question,
("the Science of Wealth," and a dozen other names are given it, but I
prefer the severe one just used.) I will begin by calling the reader's
attention to a thought upon the matter which may not have struck you
before--the wealth of the civilized world, as contrasted with its
poverty--what does it derivatively stand for, and represent? A rich
person ought to have a strong stomach. As in Europe the wealth of
to-day mainly results from, and represents, the rapine, murder,
outrages, treachery, hoggishness, of hundreds of years ago, and
onward, later, so in America, after the same token--(not yet so bad,
perhaps, or at any rate not so palpable--we have not existed long
enough--but we seem to be doing our best to make it up.)

Curious as it may seem, it is in what are call'd the poorest, lowest
characters you will sometimes, nay generally, find glints of the most
sublime virtues, eligibilities, heroisms. Then it is doubtful whether
the State is to be saved, either in the monotonous long run, or in
tremendous special crises, by its good people only. When the storm
is deadliest, and the disease most imminent, help often comes from
strange quarters--(the homoeopathic motto, you remember, _cure the
bite with a hair of the same dog.)_

The American Revolution of 1776 was simply a great strike, successful
for its immediate object--but whether a real success judged by the
scale of the centuries, and the long-striking balance of Time, yet
remains to be settled. The French Revolution was absolutely a strike,
and a very terrible and relentless one, against ages of bad pay,
unjust division of wealth-products, and the hoggish monopoly of a few,
rolling in superfluity, against the vast bulk of the work-people,
living in squalor.

If the United States, like the countries of the Old World, are also
to grow vast crops of poor, desperate, dissatisfied, nomadic,
miserably-waged populations, such as we see looming upon us of late
years--steadily, even if slowly, eating into them like a cancer of
lungs or stomach--then our republican experiment, notwithstanding all
its surface-successes, is at heart an unhealthy failure.

_Feb. '79._--I saw to-day a sight I had never seen before--and it
amazed, and made me serious; three quite good-looking American men,
of respectable personal presence, two of them young, carrying
chiffonier-bags on their shoulders, and the usual long iron hooks in
their hands, plodding along, their eyes cast down, spying for scraps,
rags, bones, &c.

DEMOCRACY IN THE NEW WORLD

estimated and summ'd-up to-day, having thoroughly justified itself
the past hundred years, (as far as growth, vitality and power are
concern'd,) by severest and most varied trials of peace and war, and
having establish'd itself for good, with all its necessities and
benefits, for time to come, is now to be seriously consider'd also
in its pronounc'd and already developt dangers. While the battle was
raging, and the result suspended, all defections and criticisms were
to be hush'd, and everything bent with vehemence unmitigated toward
the urge of victory. But that victory settled, new responsibilities
advance. I can conceive of no better service in the United States,
henceforth, by democrats of thorough and heart-felt faith, than
boldly exposing the weakness, liabilities and infinite corruptions of
democracy. By the unprecedented opening-up of humanity en-masse in the
United States, the last hundred years, under our institutions, not
only the good qualities of the race, but just as much the bad ones,
are prominently brought forward. Man is about the same, in the main,
whether with despotism, or whether with freedom.

"The ideal form of human society," Canon Kingsley declares, "is
democracy. A nation--and were it even possible, a whole world--of free
men, lifting free foreheads to God and Nature; calling no man master,
for One is their master, even God; knowing and doing their duties
toward the Maker of the universe, and therefore to each other; not
from fear, nor calculation of profit or loss, but because they have
seen the beauty of righteousness, and trust, and peace; because the
law of God is in their hearts. Such a nation--such a society--what
nobler conception of moral existence can we form? Would not that,
indeed, be the kingdom of God come on earth?"

To this faith, founded in the ideal, let us hold--and never abandon
or lose it. Then what a spectacle is _practically_ exhibited by our
American democracy to-day!

FOUNDATION STAGES--THEN OTHERS

Though I think I fully comprehend the absence of moral tone in our
current politics and business, and the almost entire futility of
absolute and simple honor as a counterpoise against the enormous greed
for worldly wealth, with the trickeries of gaining it, all through
society our day, I still do not share the depression and despair on
the subject which I find possessing many good people. The advent of
America, the history of the past century, has been the first general
aperture and opening-up to the average human commonalty, on the
broadest scale, of the eligibilities to wealth and worldly success and
eminence, and has been fully taken advantage of; and the example has
spread hence, in ripples, to all nations. To these eligibilities--to
this limitless aperture, the race has tended, en-masse, roaring and
rushing and crude, and fiercely, turbidly hastening--and we have seen
the first stages, and are now in the midst of the result of it all,
so far. But there will certainly ensue other stages, and entirely
different ones. In nothing is there more evolution than the American
mind. Soon, it will be fully realized that ostensible wealth and
money-making, show, luxury, &c., imperatively necessitate something
beyond--namely, the sane, eternal moral and spiritual-esthetic
attributes, elements. (We cannot have even that realization on any
less terms than the price we are now paying for it.) Soon, it will
be understood clearly, that the State cannot flourish, (nay, cannot
exist,) without those elements. They will gradually enter into the
chyle of sociology and literature. They will finally make the blood
and brawn of the best American individualities of both sexes--and
thus, with them, to a certainty, (through these very processes of
to-day,) dominate the New World.