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“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: —

 
“A pause – the armies wait.
A million flush’d embattled conquerors wait.
The world, too, waits, then soft as breaking night and sure as dawn
They melt, they disappear.”
 

“Plentifully supplied, last-needed proof of Democracy in its personalities!” ratifying on the broadest scale Wordsworth’s haughty claim for average man – “Such is the inherent dignity of human nature that there belong to it sublimities of virtue which all men may attain, and which no man can transcend.”

But, aware that peace and prosperity may be even still severer tests of national as of individual virtue and greatness of mind, Walt Whitman scans with anxious, questioning eye the America of to-day. He is no smooth-tongued prophet of easy greatness.

 
“I am he who walks the States with a barb’d tongue questioning every one I meet;
Who are you, that wanted only to be told what you knew before?
Who are you, that wanted only a book to join you in your nonsense?”
 

He sees clearly as any the incredible flippancy, the blind fury of parties, the lack of great leaders, the plentiful meanness and vulgarity; the labour question beginning to open like a yawning gulf… “We sail a dangerous sea of seething currents, all so dark and untried… 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, putting the history of old-world dynasties, conquests, behind me as of no account – making a new history, a history of democracy … 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 … must pay for it with 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, thunderstorms, deaths, new projections and invigorations of ideas and men.”

“Yet I have dreamed, merged in that hidden-tangled problem of our fate, whose long unravelling stretches mysteriously through time – dreamed, portrayed, 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, a year, a century here, and other centuries there, but always one, compact in soul, conscience-conserving, God-inculcating, inspired 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 time, so long, so well, in armour or in cowl, upheld and made illustrious that far-back-feudal, priestly world.”

Of that band, is not Walt Whitman the pioneer? Of that New World literature, say, are not his poems the beginning? A rude beginning if you will. He claims no more and no less. But whatever else they may lack they do not lack vitality, initiative, sublimity. They do not lack that which makes life great and death, with its “transfers and promotions, its superb vistas,” exhilarating – a resplendent faith in God and man which will kindle anew the faith of the world: —

 
“Poets to come! Orators, singers, musicians to come!
Not to-day is to justify me, and answer what I am for;
But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than before known,
 
 
“Arouse! Arouse – for you must justify me – you must answer.
 
 
“I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future,
I but advance a moment, only to wheel and hurry back in the darkness.
 
 
“I am a man who, sauntering along, without fully stopping, turns a casual look upon you, and then averts his face,
Leaving it to you to prove and define it,
Expecting the main things from you.”
 

Anne Gilchrist.

LETTER I ³
WALT WHITMAN TO W. M. ROSSETTI AND ANNE GILCHRIST

Washington,

December 9, 1869.

Dear Mr. Rossetti:

Your letter of last summer to William O’Connor with the passages transcribed from a lady’s correspondence, had been shown me by him, and copy lately furnished me, which I have just been rereading. I am deeply touched by these sympathies and convictions, coming from a woman and from England, and am sure that if the lady knew how much comfort it has been to me to get them, she would not only pardon you for transmitting them to Mr. O’Connor but approve that action. I realize indeed of this emphatic and smiling well done from the heart and conscience of a true wife and mother, and one too whose sense of the poetic, as I glean from your letter, after flowing through the heart and conscience, must also move through and satisfy science as much as the esthetic, that I had hitherto received no eulogium so magnificent.

I send by same mail with this, same address as this letter, two photographs, taken within a few months. One is intended for the lady (if I may be permitted to send it her) – and will you please accept the other, with my respects and love? The picture is by some criticised very severely indeed, but I hope you will not dislike it, for I confess to myself a perhaps capricious fondness for it, as my own portrait, over some scores that have been made or taken at one time or another.

I am still employed in the Attorney General’s office. My p. o. address remains the same. I am quite well and hearty. My new editions, considerably expanded, with what suggestions &c. I have to offer, presented I hope in more definite form, will probably get printed the coming spring. I shall forward you early copies. I send my love to Moncuré Conway, if you see him. I wish he would write to me. If the pictures don’t come, or get injured on the way, I will try again by express. I want you to loan this letter to the lady, or if she wishes it, give it to her to keep.

Walt Whitman.

LETTER II
ANNE GILCHRIST TO WALT WHITMAN

September 3, 1871.

Dear Friend:

At last the beloved books have reached my hand – but now I have them, my heart is so rent with anguish, my eyes so blinded, I cannot read in them. I try again and again, but too great waves come swaying up & suffocate me. I will struggle to tell you my story. It seems to me a death struggle. When I was eighteen I met a lad of nineteen⁴ who loved me then, and always for the remainder of his life. After we had known each other about a year he asked me to be his wife. But I said that I liked him well as my friend, but could not love him as a wife should love & felt deeply convinced I never should. He was not turned aside, but went on just the same as if that conversation had never passed. After a year he asked me again, and I, deeply moved by and grateful for his steady love, and so sorry for him, said yes. But next day, terrified at what I had done and painfully conscious of the dreary absence from my heart of any faintest gleam of true, tender, wifely love,⁵ said no again. This too he bore without desisting & at the end of some months once more asked me with passionate entreaties. Then, dear friend, I prayed very earnestly, and it seemed to me (that) that I should continue to mar & thwart his life so was not right, if he was content to accept what I could give. I knew I could lead a good and wholesome life beside him – his aims were noble – his heart a deep, beautiful, true Poet’s heart; but he had not the Poet’s great brain. His path was a very arduous one, and I knew I could smooth it for him – cheer him along it. It seemed to me God’s will that I should marry him. So I told him the whole truth, and he said he would rather have me on those terms than not have me at all. He said to me many times, “Ah, Annie, it is not you who are so loved that is rich; it is I who so love.” And I knew this was true, felt as if my nature were poor & barren beside his. But it was not so, it was only slumbering – undeveloped. For, dear Friend, my soul was so passionately aspiring – it so thirsted & pined for light, it had not power to reach alone and he could not help me on my way. And a woman is so made that she cannot give the tender passionate devotion of her whole nature save to the great conquering soul, stronger in its powers, though not in its aspirations, than her own, that can lead her forever & forever up and on. It is for her soul exactly as it is for her body. The strong divine soul of the man embracing hers with passionate love – so alone the precious germs within her soul can be quickened into life. And the time will come when man will understand that a woman’s soul is as dear and needful to his and as different from his as her body to his body. This was what happened to me when I had read for a few days, nay, hours, in your books. It was the divine soul embracing mine. I never before dreamed what love meant: not what life meant. Never was alive before – no words but those of “new birth” can hint the meaning of what then happened to me.

The first few months of my marriage were dark and gloomy to me within, and sometimes I had misgivings whether I had judged aright, but when I knew there was a dear baby coming my heart grew light, and when it was born, such a superb child – all gloom & fear forever vanished. I knew it was God’s seal to the marriage, and my heart was full of gratitude and joy. It was a happy and a good life we led together for ten short years, he ever tender and affectionate to me – loving his children so, working earnestly in the wholesome, bracing atmosphere of poverty – for it was but just possible with the most strenuous frugality and industry to pay our way. I learned to cook & to turn my hand to all household occupation – found it bracing, healthful, cheerful. Now I think it more even now that I understand the divineness & sacredness of the Body. I think there is no more beautiful task for a woman than ministering all ways to the health & comfort & enjoyment of the dear bodies of those she loves: no material that will work sweeter, more beautifully into that making of a perfect poem of a man’s life which is her true vocation.

In 1861 my children took scarlet fever badly: I thought I should have lost my dear oldest girl. Then my husband took it – and in five days it carried him from me. I think, dear friend, my sorrow was far more bitter, though not so deep, as that of a loving tender wife. As I stood by him in the coffin I felt such remorse I had not, could not have, been more tender to him – such a conviction that if I had loved him as he deserved to be loved he would not have been taken from us. To the last my soul dwelt apart & unmated & his soul dwelt apart unmated. I do not fear the look of his dear silent eyes. I do not think he would even be grieved with me now. My youngest was then a baby. I have had much sweet tranquil happiness, much strenuous work and endeavour raising my darlings.

In May, 1869, came the voice over the Atlantic to me – O, the voice of my Mate: it must be so – my love rises up out of the very depths of the grief & tramples upon despair. I can wait – any time, a lifetime, many lifetimes – I can suffer, I can dare, I can learn, grow, toil, but nothing in life or death can tear out of my heart the passionate belief that one day I shall hear that voice say to me, “My Mate. The one I so much want. Bride, Wife, indissoluble eternal!” It is not happiness I plead with God for – it is the very life of my Soul, my love is its life. Dear Walt. It is a sweet & precious thing, this love; it clings so close, so close to the Soul and Body, all so tenderly dear, so beautiful, so sacred; it yearns with such passion to soothe and comfort & fill thee with sweet tender joy; it aspires as grandly as gloriously as thy own soul. Strong to soar – soft & tender to nestle and caress. If God were to say to me, “See – he that you love you shall not be given to in this life – he is going to set sail on the unknown sea – will you go with him?” never yet has bride sprung into her husband’s arms with the joy with which I would take thy hand & spring from the shore.

Understand aright, dear love, the reason of my silence. I was obeying the voice of conscience. I thought I was to wait. For it is the instinct of a woman’s nature to wait to be sought – not to seek. And when that May & June I was longing so irrepressibly to write I resolutely restrained myself, believing if I were only patient the right opening would occur. And so it did through Rossetti. And when he, liking what I said, suggested my printing something, it met and enabled me to carry into execution what I was brooding over. For I had, and still have, a strong conviction that it was necessary for a woman to speak – that finally and decisively only a woman can judge a man, only a man a woman, on the subject of their relations. What is blameless, what is good in its effect on her, is good – however it may have seemed to men. She is the test. And I never for a moment feared any hard words against myself because I know these things are not judged by the intellect but by the unerring instincts of the soul. I knew any man could not but feel that it would be a happy and ennobling thing for him that his wife should think & feel as I do on that subject – knew that what had filled me with such great and beautiful thoughts towards men in that writing could not fail to give them good & happy thoughts towards women in the reading. The cause of my consenting to Rossetti’s⁶ urgent advice that I should not put my name, he so kindly solicitous, yet not altogether understanding me & it aright, was that I did not rightly understand how it might be with my dear Boy if it came before him. I thought perhaps he was not old enough to judge and understand me aright; nor young enough to let it altogether alone. But it has been very bitter & hateful to me this not standing to what I have said as it were, with my own personality, better because of my utter love and faithfulness to the cause & longing to stand openly and proudly in the ranks of its friends; & for the lower reason that my nature is proud and as defiant as thine own and immeasurably disdains any faintest appearance of being afraid of what I had done.

And, my darling, above all because I love thee so tenderly that if hateful words had been spoken against me I could have taken joy in it for thy dear sake. There never yet was the woman who loved that would not joyfully bare her breast to wrest the blows aimed at her beloved.

I know not what fiend made me write those meaningless words in my letter, “it is pleasantest to me” &c., but it was not fear or faithlessness – & it is not pleasantest but hateful to me. Now let me come to beautiful joyous things again. O dear Walt, did you not feel in every word the breath of a woman’s love? did you not see as through a transparent veil a soul all radiant and trembling with love stretching out its arms towards you? I was so sure you would speak, would send me some sign: that I was to wait – wait. So I fed my heart with sweet hopes: strengthened it with looking into the eyes of thy picture. O surely in the ineffable tenderness of thy look speaks the yearning of thy man-soul towards my woman-soul? But now I will wait no longer. A higher instinct dominates that other, the instinct for perfect truth. I would if I could lay every thought and action and feeling of my whole life open to thee as it lies to the eye of God. But that cannot be all at once. O come. Come, my darling: look into these eyes and see the loving ardent aspiring soul in them. Easily, easily will you learn to love all the rest of me for the sake of that and take me to your breasts for ever and ever. Out of its great anguish my love has risen stronger, more triumphant than ever: it cannot doubt, cannot fear, is strong, divine, immortal, sure of its fruition this side the grave or the other. “O agonistic throes,” tender, passionate yearnings, pinings, triumphant joys, sweet dreams – I took from you all. But, dear love, the sinews of a woman’s outer heart are not twisted so strong as a man’s: but the heart within is strong & great & loving. So the strain is very terrible. O heart of flesh, hold on yet a few years to the great heart within thee, if it may be. But if not all is assured, all is safe.

This time last year when I seemed dying I could have no secrets between me & my dear children. I told them of my love: told them all they could rightly understand, and laid upon them my earnest injunction that as soon as my mother’s life no longer held them here, they should go fearlessly to America, as I should have planted them down there – Land of Promise, my Canaan, to which my soul sings, “Arise, shine, for thy light is come & the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.” After the 29th of this month I shall be in my own home; dear friend – it is at Brookebank, Haslemere, Surrey. Haslemere is on the main line between Portsmouth & London.

Good-bye, dear Walt,

Anne Gilchrist.

Sept. 6.

The new portrait also is a sweet joy & comfort to my longing, pining heart & eyes. How have I brooded & brooded with thankfulness on that one word in thy letter⁷ “the comfort it has been to me to get her words,” for always day & night these two years has hovered on my lips & in my heart the one prayer: “Dear God, let me comfort him!” Let me comfort thee with my whole being, dear love. I feel much better & stronger now.