The Letters of Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman

“… see by the glad light,And breathe the sweet air of futurity.”

The scornful laughter of Carlyle as he points with one hand to the baseness, ignorance, folly, cruelty around us, and with the other to the still unsurpassed poets, sages, heroes, saints of antiquity, whilst he utters the words “progress of the species!” touches us no longer when we have begun to realize “the amplitude of time”; when we know something of the scale by which Nature measures out the years to accomplish her smallest essential modification or development; know that to call a few thousands or tens of thousands of years antiquity, is to speak as a child, and that in her chronology the great days of Egypt and Syria, of Greece and Rome are affairs of yesterday.

“Each of us inevitable;Each of us limitless – each of us with his or her right upon the earth;Each of us allow’d the eternal purports of the earth;Each of us here as divinely as any are here.“You Hottentot with clicking palate! You woolly hair’d hordes!You own’d persons, dropping sweat-drops or blood-drops!You human forms with the fathomless ever-impressive countenances of brutes!I dare not refuse you – the scope of the world, and of time and space are upon me.········“I do not prefer others so very much before you either;I do not say one word against you, away back there, where you stand;(You will come forward in due time to my side.)My spirit has pass’d in compassion and determination around the whole earth;I have look’d for equals and lovers, and found them ready for me in all lands;I think some divine rapport has equalized me with them.“O vapours! I think I have risen with you, and moved away to distant continents and fallen down there, for reasons;I think I have blown with you, O winds;O waters, I have finger’d every shore with you.“I have run through what any river or strait of the globe has run through;I have taken my stand on the bases of peninsulas, and on the high embedded rocks, to cry thence.“Salut au monde!What cities the light or warmth penetrates, I penetrate those cities myself;All islands to which birds wing their way I wing my way myself.“Toward all,I raise high the perpendicular hand – I make the signal,To remain after me in sight forever,For all the haunts and homes of men.”

But “Hold!” says the reader, especially if he be one who loves science, who loves to feel the firm ground under his feet, “That the species has a great future before it we may well believe; already we see the indications. But that the individual has is quite another matter. We can but balance probabilities here, and the probabilities are very heavy on the wrong side; the poets must throw in weighty matter indeed to turn the scale the other way!” Be it so: but ponder a moment what science herself has to say bearing on this theme; what are the widest, deepest facts she has reached down to. Indestructibility: Amidst ceaseless change and seeming decay all the elements, all the forces (if indeed they be not one and the same) which operate and substantiate those changes, imperishable; neither matter nor force capable of annihilation. Endless transformations, disappearances, new combinations, but diminution of the total amount never; missing in one place or shape to be found in another, disguised ever so long, ready always to re-emerge. “A particle of oxygen,” wrote Faraday, “is ever a particle of oxygen; nothing can in the least wear it. If it enters into combination and disappears as oxygen, if it pass through a thousand combinations, animal, vegetable, mineral – if it lie hid for a thousand years and then be evolved, it is oxygen with its first qualities neither more nor less.” So then out of the universe is no door. Continuity again is one of Nature’s irrevocable words; everything the result and outcome of what went before; no gaps, no jumps; always a connecting principle which carries forward the great scheme of things as a related whole, which subtly links past and present, like and unlike. Nothing breaks with its past. “It is not,” says Helmholtz, “the definite mass of substance which now constitutes the body to which the continuance of the individual is attached. Just as the flame remains the same in appearance and continues to exist with the same form and structure although it draws every moment fresh combustible vapour and fresh oxygen from the air into the vortex of its ascending current; and just as the wave goes on in unaltered form and is yet being reconstructed every moment from fresh particles of water, so is it also in the living being. For the material of the body like that of flame is subject to continuous and comparatively rapid change – a change the more rapid the livelier the activity of the organs in question. Some constituents are renewed from day to day, some from month to month, and others only after years. That which continues to exist as a particular individual is, like the wave and the flame, only the form of motion which continually attracts fresh matter into its vortex and expels the old. The observer with a deaf ear recognizes the vibration of sound as long as it is visible and can be felt, bound up with other heavy matter. Are our senses in reference to life like the deaf ear in this respect?”

“You are not thrown to the winds – you gather certainly and safely around yourself;········It is not to diffuse you that you were born of your mother and father – it is to identify you;It is not that you should be undecided, but that you should be decided;Something long preparing and formless is arrived and form’d in you,You are henceforth secure, whatever comes or goes.“O Death! the voyage of Death!The beautiful touch of Death, soothing and benumbing a few moments for reasons;Myself discharging my excrementitious body to be burn’d or reduced to powder or buried.My real body doubtless left me for other spheres,My voided body, nothing more to me, returning to the purifications, farther offices, eternal uses of the earth.”

Yes, they go their way, those dismissed atoms with all their energies and affinities unimpaired. But they are not all; the will, the affections, the intellect are just as real as those affinities and energies, and there is strict account of all; nothing slips through; there is no door out of the universe. But they are qualities of a personality, of a self, not of an atom but of what uses and dismisses those atoms. If the qualities are indestructible so must the self be. The little heap of ashes, the puff of gas, do you pretend that is all that was Shakespeare? The rest of him lives in his works, you say? But he lived and was just the same man after those works were produced. The world gained, but he lost nothing of himself, rather grew and strengthened in the production of them.

Still farther, those faculties with which we seek for knowledge are only a part of us, there is something behind which wields them, something that those faculties cannot turn themselves in upon and comprehend; for the part cannot compass the whole. Yet there it is with the irrefragable proof of consciousness. Who should be the mouthpiece of this whole? Who but the poet, the man most fully “possessed of his own soul,” the man of the largest consciousness; fullest of love and sympathy which gather into his own life the experiences of others, fullest of imagination; that quality whereof Wordsworth says that it

“… in truthIs but another name for absolute power,And clearest insight, amplitude of mindAnd reason in her most exalted mood.”

Let Walt Whitman speak for us:

“And I know I am solid and sound;To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow:All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.“I know I am deathless;I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by the carpenter’s compass;I know I shall not pass like a child’s carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night.“I know I am august;I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood;I see that the elementary laws never apologize;(I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by, after all.)“I exist as I am – that is enough;If no other in the world be aware I sit content;And if each one and all be aware, I sit content.“One world is aware, and by far the largest to me, and that is myself;And whether I come to my own to-day, or in ten thousand or ten million years,I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.“My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite;I laugh at what you call dissolution;And I know the amplitude of time.”

What lies through the portal of death is hidden from us; but the laws that govern that unknown land are not all hidden from us, for they govern here and now; they are immutable, eternal.

“Of and in all these thingsI have dream’d that we are not to be changed so much, nor the law of us changed,I have dream’d that heroes and good doers shall be under the present and past law,And that murderers, drunkards, liars, shall be under the present and past law,For I have dream’d that the law they are under now is enough.”

And the law not to be eluded is the law of consequences, the law of silent teaching. That is the meaning of disease, pain, remorse. Slow to learn are we; but success is assured with limitless Beneficence as our teacher, with limitless time as our opportunity. Already we begin —

“To know the Universe itself as a road – as many roadsAs roads for travelling souls.For ever alive; for ever forward.Stately, solemn, sad, withdrawn, baffled, mad, turbulent, feeble, dissatisfied;Desperate, proud, fond, sick;Accepted by men, rejected by men.They go! they go! I know that they go, but I know not where they go.But I know they go toward the best, toward something great;The whole Universe indicates that it is good.”

Going somewhere! And if it is impossible for us to see whither, as in the nature of things it must be, how can we be adequate judges of the way? how can we but often grope and be full of perplexity? But we know that a smooth path, a paradise of a world, could only nurture fools, cowards, sluggards. “Joy is the great unfolder,” but pain is the great enlightener, the great stimulus in certain directions, alike of man and beast. How else could the self-preserving instincts, and all that grows out of them, have been evoked? How else those wonders of the moral world, fortitude, patience, sympathy? And if the lesson be too hard comes Death, come “the sure-enwinding arms of Death” to end it, and speed us to the unknown land.

“… Man is only weak

Through his mistrust and want of hope,”

wrote Wordsworth. But man’s mistrust of himself is, at bottom, mistrust of the central Fount of power and goodness whence he has issued. Here comes one who plucks out of religion its heart of fear, and puts into it a heart of boundless faith and joy; a faith that beggars previous faiths because it sees that All is good, not part bad and part good; that there is no flaw in the scheme of things, no primeval disaster, no counteracting power; but orderly and sure growth and development, and that infinite Goodness and Wisdom embrace and ever lead forward all that exists. Are you troubled that He is an unknown God; that we cannot by searching find Him out? Why, it would be a poor prospect for the Universe if otherwise; if, embryos that we are, we could compass Him in our thoughts:

“I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least.”

It is the double misfortune of the churches that they do not study God in His works – man and Nature and their relations to each other; and that they do profess to set Him forth; that they worship therefore a God of man’s devising, an idol made by men’s minds it is true, not by their hands, but none the less an idol. “Leaves are not more shed out of trees than Bibles are shed out of you,” says the poet. They were the best of their time, but not of all time; they need renewing as surely as there is such a thing as growth, as surely as knowledge nourishes and sustains to further development; as surely as time unrolls new pages of the mighty scheme of existence. Nobly has George Sand, too, written: “Everything is divine, even matter; everything is superhuman, even man. God is everywhere. He is in me in a measure proportioned to the little that I am. My present life separates me from Him just in the degree determined by the actual state of childhood of our race. Let me content myself in all my seeking to feel after Him, and to possess of Him as much as this imperfect soul can take in with the intellectual sense I have. The day will come when we shall no longer talk about God idly; nay, when we shall talk about Him as little as possible. We shall cease to set Him forth dogmatically, to dispute about His nature. We shall put compulsion on no one to pray to Him, we shall leave the whole business of worship within the sanctuary of each man’s conscience. And this will happen when we are really religious.”

In what sense may Walt Whitman be called the Poet of Democracy? It is as giving utterance to this profoundly religious faith in man. He is rather the prophet of what is to be than the celebrator of what is. “Democracy,” he writes, “is a word the real gist of which still sleeps quite unawakened, notwithstanding the resonance and the many angry tempests out of which its syllables have come from pen or tongue. It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten because that history has yet to be enacted. It is in some sort younger brother of another great and often used word, Nature, whose history also waits unwritten.” Political democracy, now taking shape, is the house to live in, and whilst what we demand of it is room for all, fair chances for all, none disregarded or left out as of no account, the main question, the kind of life that is to be led in that house is altogether beyond the ken of the statesmen as such, and is involved in those deepest facts of the nature and destiny of man which are the themes of Walt Whitman’s writings. The practical outcome of that exalted and all-accepting faith in the scheme of things, and in man, toward whom all has led up and in whom all concentrates as the manifestation, the revelation of Divine Power is a changed estimate of himself; a higher reverence for, a loftier belief in the heritage of himself; a perception that pride, not humility, is the true homage to his Maker; that “noblesse oblige” is for the Race, not for a handful; that it is mankind and womankind and their high destiny which constrain to greatness, which can no longer stoop to meanness and lies and base aims, but must needs clothe themselves in “the majesty of honest dealing” (majestic because demanding courage as good as the soldier’s, self-denial as good as the saint’s for every-day affairs), and walk erect and fearless, a law to themselves, sternest of all lawgivers. Looking back to the palmy days of feudalism, especially as immortalized in Shakespeare’s plays, what is it we find most admirable? what is it that fascinates? It is the noble pride, the lofty self-respect; the dignity, the courage and audacity of its great personages. But this pride, this dignity rested half upon a true, half upon a hollow foundation; half upon intrinsic qualities, half upon the ignorance and brutishness of the great masses of the people, whose helpless submission and easily dazzled imaginations made stepping-stones to the elevation of the few, and “hedged round kings,” with a specious kind of “divinity.” But we have our faces turned toward a new day, and toward heights on which there is room for all.

“By God, I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms”

is the motto of the great personages, the great souls of to-day. On the same terms, for that is Nature’s law and cannot be abrogated, the reaping as you sow. But all shall have the chance to sow well. This is pride indeed! Not a pride that isolates, but that can take no rest till our common humanity is lifted out of the mire everywhere, “a pride that cannot stretch too far because sympathy stretches with it”:

“Whoever you are! claim your own at any hazard!These shows of the east and west are tame, compared to you;These immense meadows – these interminable rivers —You are immense and interminable as they;These furies, elements, storms, motions of Nature, throes of apparent dissolution – you are he or she who is master or mistress over them,Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements, pain, passion, dissolution.“The hopples fall from your ankles – you find an unfailing sufficiency;Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest, whatever you are promulges itself;Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided, nothing is scanted;Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance and ennui, what you are picks its way.”

This is indeed a pride that is “calming and excellent to the soul”; that “dissolves poverty from its need and riches from its conceit.”

And humility? Is there, then, no place for that virtue so much praised by the haughty? Humility is the sweet spontaneous grace of an aspiring, finely developed nature which sees always heights ahead still unclimbed, which outstrips itself in eager longing for excellence still unattained. Genuine humility takes good care of itself as men rise in the scale of being; for every height climbed discloses still new heights beyond. Or it is a wise caution in fortune’s favourites lest they themselves should mistake, as the unthinking crowd around do, the glitter reflected back upon them by their surroundings for some superiority inherent in themselves. It befits them well if there be also due pride, pride of humanity behind. But to say to a man, ‘Be humble’ is like saying to one who has a battle to fight, a race to run, ‘You are a poor, feeble creature; you are not likely to win and you do not deserve to.’ Say rather to him, ‘Hold up your head! You were not made for failure, you were made for victory: go forward with a joyful confidence in that result sooner or later, and the sooner or the later depends mainly on yourself.’

“What Christ appeared for in the moral-spiritual field for humankind, namely, that in respect to the absolute soul there is in the possession of such by each single individual something so transcendent, so incapable of gradations (like life) that to that extent it places all being on a common level, utterly regardless of the distinctions of intellect, virtue, station, or any height or lowliness whatever” is the secret source of that deathless sentiment of Equality which how many able heads imagine themselves to have slain with ridicule and contempt as Johnson, kicking a stone, imagined he had demolished Idealism when he had simply attributed to the word an impossible meaning. True, Inequality is one of Nature’s words: she moves forward always by means of the exceptional. But the moment the move is accomplished, then all her efforts are toward equality, toward bringing up the rear to that standpoint. But social inequalities, class distinctions, do not stand for or represent Nature’s inequalities. Precisely the contrary in the long run. They are devices for holding up many that would else gravitate down and keeping down many who would else rise up; for providing that some should reap who have not sown, and many sow without reaping. But literature tallies the ways of Nature; for though itself the product of the exceptional, its aim is to draw all men up to its own level. The great writer is “hungry for equals day and night,” for so only can he be fully understood. “The meal is equally set”; all are invited. Therefore is literature, whether consciously or not, the greatest of all forces on the side of Democracy.

Carlyle has said there is no grand poem in the world but is at bottom a biography – the life of a man. Walt Whitman’s poems are not the biography of a man, but they are his actual presence. It is no vain boast when he exclaims,

“Camerado! this is no book;Who touches this touches a man.”

He has infused himself into words in a way that had not before seemed possible; and he causes each reader to feel that he himself or herself has an actual relationship to him, is a reality full of inexhaustible significance and interest to the poet. The power of his book, beyond even its great intellectual force, is the power with which he makes this felt; his words lay more hold than the grasp of a hand, strike deeper than the gaze or the flash of an eye; to those who comprehend him he stands “nigher than the nighest.”

America has had the shaping of Walt Whitman, and he repays the filial debt with a love that knows no stint. Her vast lands with their varied, brilliant climes and rich products, her political scheme, her achievements and her failures, all have contributed to make these poems what they are both directly and indirectly. Above all has that great conflict, the Secession War, found voice in him. And if the reader would understand the true causes and nature of that war, ostensibly waged between North and South, but underneath a tussle for supremacy between the good and the evil genius of America (for there were just as many secret sympathizers with the secession-slave-power in the North as in the South) he will find the clue in the pages of Walt Whitman. Rarely has he risen to a loftier height than in the poem which heralds that volcanic upheaval: —

“Rise, O days, from your fathomless deeps, till you loftier and fiercer sweep!Long for my soul, hungering gymnastic, I devour’d what the earth gave me;Long I roam’d the woods of the north – long I watch’d Niagara pouring;I travel’d the prairies over, and slept on their breast —I cross’d the Nevadas, I cross’d the plateaus;I ascended the towering rocks along the Pacific, I sail’d out to sea;I sail’d through the storm, I was refresh’d by the storm;I watch’d with joy the threatening maws of the waves;I mark’d the white combs where they career’d so high, curling over;I heard the wind piping, I saw the black clouds;Saw from below what arose and mounted (O superb! O wild as my heart, and powerful!)Heard the continuous thunder, as it bellow’d after the lightning;Noted the slender and jagged threads of lightning, as sudden and fast amid the din they chased each other across the sky;– These, and such as these, I, elate, saw – saw with wonder, yet pensive and masterful;All the menacing might of the globe uprisen around me;Yet there with my soul I fed – I fed content, supercilious.“’Twas well, O soul! ’twas a good preparation you gave me!Now we advance our latent and ampler hunger to fill;Now we go forth to receive what the earth and the sea never gave us;Not through the mighty woods we go, but through the mightier cities;Something for us is pouring now, more than Niagara pouring;Torrents of men (sources and rills of the Northwest, are you indeed inexhaustible?)What, to pavements and homesteads here – what were those storms of the mountains and sea?What, to passions I witness around me to-day? Was the sea risen?Was the wind piping the pipe of death under the black clouds?Lo! from deeps more unfathomable, something more deadly and savage;Manhattan, rising, advancing with menacing front – Cincinnati, Chicago, unchain’d;– What was that swell I saw on the ocean? behold what comes here!How it climbs with daring feet and hands! how it dashes!How the true thunder bellows after the lightning! how bright the flashes of lightning!How Democracy, with desperate, vengeful port strides on, shown through the dark by those flashes of lightning!(Yet a mournful wail and low sob I fancied I heard through the dark,In a lull of the deafening confusion.)“Thunder on! stride on, Democracy! stride with vengeful stroke!And do you rise higher than ever yet, O days, O cities!Crash heavier, heavier yet, O storms! you have done me good;My soul, prepared in the mountains, absorbs your immortal strong nutriment,– Long had I walk’d my cities, my country roads, through farms, only half satisfied;One doubt, nauseous, undulating like a snake, crawl’d on the ground before me,Continually preceding my steps, turning upon me oft, ironically hissing low;– The cities I loved so well, I abandon’d and left – I sped to the certainties suitable to me;Hungering, hungering, hungering for primal energies, and nature’s dauntlessness;I refresh’d myself with it only, I could relish it only;I waited the bursting forth of the pent fire – on the water and air I waited long;– But now I no longer wait – I am fully satisfied – I am glutted;I have witness’d the true lightning – I have witness’d my cities electric;I have lived to behold man burst forth, and warlike America rise;Hence I will seek no more the food of the northern solitary wilds,No more on the mountain roam, or sail the stormy sea.”

But not for the poet a soldier’s career. “To sit by the wounded and soothe them, or silently watch the dead” was the part he chose. During the whole war he remained with the army, but only to spend the days and nights, saddest, happiest of his life, in the hospital tents. It was a beautiful destiny for this lover of men, and a proud triumph for this believer in the People; for it was the People that he beheld, tried by severest tests. He saw them “of their own choice, fighting, dying for their own idea, insolently attacked by the secession-slave-power.” From the workshop, the farm, the store, the desk, they poured forth, officered by men who had to blunder into knowledge at the cost of the wholesale slaughter of their troops. He saw them “tried long and long by hopelessness, mismanagement, defeat; advancing unhesitatingly through incredible slaughter; sinewy with unconquerable resolution. He saw them by tens of thousands in the hospitals tried by yet drearier, more fearful tests – the wound, the amputation, the shattered face, the slow hot fever, the long impatient anchorage in bed; he marked their fortitude, decorum, their religious nature and sweet affection.” Finally, newest, most significant sight of all, victory achieved, the cause, the Union safe, he saw them return back to the workshop, the farm, the desk, the store, instantly reabsorbed into the peaceful industries of the land: —