Chapter III

With the war-time period came the turning point in the popular estimate of Walt Whitman. No doubt, too, his experiences during this time of stress and storm influenced the rest of his career as a man and as a writer. His service as a volunteer nurse in camp and in hospital gave him a sympathetic insight and a patriotic outlook tempered with gentleness which are reflected in his poetry of this period, published under the title Drum-Taps. His well-known song of sorrow, O Captain, My Captain, is a threnody poignant with genuine feeling. It has, more than any others of his verses, lyric rather than plangent quality. When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed, and The Sobbing of the Bells are other poems belonging to this distinctive group. It is notable that in his lament over the death of Lincoln, Whitman gives rhyme as well as rhythm to the verses.

This was a time of triumph for Whitman in a literary sense. In Germany, the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath contributed to the Allgemeine Zeitung, Augsburg, May 10, 1868, a long article in praise of his work. In England, his poetry attracted the attention of the Rossettis, Tennyson, John Addington Symonds. Mrs. Anne Gilchrist defended him from the aspersions cast upon his references to womanhood. A sympathetic and friendly tone began to displace the collection of distasteful adjectives which had been his meed heretofore.

Then, in the latter part of 1865, occurred an episode which drew around Whitman a circle of friends keen to resent, and active to condemn, an act of injustice from one high in authority. Among the influential friends who rushed to his defense were John Burroughs and William Douglas O'Connor, and the events which drew their fire were these:

Whitman, whose health was shattered by his untiring devotion and ministrations to ill and wounded soldiers, had been given a minor clerkship in the Department of the Interior. James Harlan was Secretary of the Department. He had been a Methodist clergyman and president of a western college. When his attention was called to Whitman's authorship of Leaves of Grass, the Secretary characterized the book as "full of indecent passages," the author was termed "a very bad man," and was abruptly dismissed from the position he had held for six months.

Whitman meekly accepted the curt dismissal, but William Douglas O'Connor in a white heat of indignation issued a pamphlet which flayed the astonished Secretary of the Interior as a narrow-minded calumniator. The pamphlet, now a very rare document, was headed:

THE GOOD GRAY POET
A VINDICATION

With Celtic fervor and eloquence, William Douglas O'Connor made his plea an intercession in the cause of free letters. He examined the entire range of literature, ancient and modern, in quest of parallels that would prove Whitman's book by comparison to be a masterpiece of literature, and would demonstrate Mr. Secretary Harlan to be merely a literary headsman. Out of many pages of allusion to the literary productions of the great writers of all time and for all time, some characteristic passages may be chosen:

"Here is Dante. Open the tremendous pages of the Inferno. What
is this line at the end of the twenty-first canto, which even
John Carlyle flinches from translating, but which Dante did
not flinch from writing? Out with Dante!

"Here is the book of Job: the vast Arabian landscape, the
picturesque pastoral details of Arabian life, the last tragic
immensity of Oriental sorrow, the whole over-arching sky of
Oriental piety, are here. But here also the inevitable
'indecency.' Out with Job!

"Here is Plutarch, prince of biographers, and Herodotus,
flower of historians. What have we now? Traits of character
not to be mentioned, incidents of conduct, accounts of
manners, minute details of customs, which our modern
historical dandies would never venture upon recording. Out
with Plutarch and Herodotus!

"Here is Shakespeare: 'indecent passages' everywhere; every
drama, every poem thickly inlaid with them; all that men do
displayed, sexual acts treated lightly, jested about,
mentioned obscenely; the language never bolted; slang, gross
puns, lewd words, in profusion. Out with Shakespeare!

"Here is the Canticle of Canticles: beautiful, voluptuous poem
of love literally, whatever be its mystic significance;
glowing with the color, odorous with the spices, melodious
with the voices of the East; sacred and exquisite and pure
with the burning chastity of passion, which completes and
exceeds the snowy chastity of virgins. This to me, but what to
the Secretary? Can he endure that the female form should stand
thus in a poem, disrobed, unveiled, bathed in erotic splendor?
Look at these voluptuous details, this expression of desire,
this amorous tone and glow, this consecration and perfume
lavished upon the sensual. No! Out with Solomon!

"Here is Isaiah. The grand thunder-roll of that righteousness,
like the lion-roar of Jehovah above the guilty world, utters
coarse words. Amidst the bolted lightnings of that sublime
denunciation, coarse thoughts, indelicate figures, indecent
allusions, flash upon the sight, like gross imagery in a
midnight landscape. Out with Isaiah!

"Here is Montaigne. Open those great, those virtuous pages of
the unflinching reporter of man; the soul all truth and
daylight, all candor, probity, sincerity, reality, eyesight.
A few glances will suffice. Cant and vice and sniffle have
groaned over these pages before. Out with Montaigne!

"Here is Swedenborg. Open this poem of prose, the Conjugal
Love, to me, a temple, though in ruins; the sacred fane,
clothed in mist, filled with moonlight, of a great though
broken mind. What spittle of critic epithets stains all here?
'Lewd,' 'sensual,' 'lecherous,' 'coarse,' 'licentious,' etc.
Of course these judgments are final. There is no appeal from
the tobacco-juice of an expectorating and disdainful virtue.
Out with Swedenborg!

"Here is Goethe: the horrified squealing of prudes is not yet
silent over pages of Wilhelm Meister: that high and chaste
book, the Elective Affinities, still pumps up oaths from
clergymen. Walpurgis has hardly ceased its uproar over Faust.
Out with Goethe!

"Here is Cervantes: open Don Quixote, paragon of romances,
highest result of Spain, best and sufficient reason for her
life among the nations, a laughing novel which is a weeping
poem. But talk such as this of Sancho Panza and Tummas Cecial
under the cork trees, and these coarse stories and bawdy
words, and this free and gross comedy--is it to be endured?
Out with Cervantes!

"And here is Lord Bacon himself, in one of whose pages you may
read, done from the Latin by Spedding into a magnificent
golden thunder of English, the absolute defense of the free
spirit of the great authors, coupled with stern rebuke to the
spirit that would pick and choose, as dastard and effeminate.
Out with Lord Bacon!

"Not him only, not these only, not only the writers are under
the ban. Here is Phidias, gorgeous sculptor in gold and ivory,
giant dreamer of the Infinite in marble; but he will not use
the fig-leaf. Here is Rembrandt, who paints the Holland
landscape, the Jew, the beggar, the burgher, in lights and
glooms of Eternity; and his pictures have been called
'indecent,' Here is Mozart, his music rich with the sumptuous
color of all sunsets; and it has been called 'sensual.' Here
is Michael Angelo, who makes art tremble with a new and
strange afflatus, and gives Europe novel and sublime forms
that tower above the centuries, and accost the Greek; and his
works have been called 'bestial.' Out with them all!"

In his summing up, stirred to wrath by the low tone of contemporary comment, O'Connor proceeded to expound the philosophy of literary ideals:

"The level of the great books is the Infinite, the Absolute.
To contain all, by containing the premise, the truth, the idea
and feeling of all, to tally the universe by profusion,
variety, reality, mystery, enclosure, power, terror, beauty,
service; to be great to the utmost conceivability of
greatness--what higher level than this can literature spring
to? Up on the highest summit stand such works, never to be
surpassed, never to be supplanted. Their indecency is not that
of the vulgar; their vulgarity is not that of the low. Their
evil, if it be evil, is not there for nothing--it serves; at
the base of it is Love. Every poet of the highest quality is,
in the masterly coinage of the author of Leaves of Grass, a
kosmos. His work, like himself, is a second world, full of
contrarieties, strangely harmonized, and moral indeed, but
only as the world is moral. Shakespeare is all good, Rabelais
is all good, Montaigne is all good, not because all the
thoughts, the words, the manifestations are so, but because at
the core, and permeating all, is an ethic intention--a love
which, through mysterious, indirect, subtle, seemingly absurd,
often terrible and repulsive, means, seeks to uplift, and
never to degrade. It is the spirit in which authorship is
pursued, as Augustus Schlegel has said, that makes it either
an infamy or a virtue; and the spirit of the great authors, no
matter what their letter, is one with that which pervades the
Creation. In mighty love, with implements of pain and
pleasure, of good and evil, Nature develops man; genius also,
in mighty love, with implements of pain and pleasure, of good
and evil, develops man; no matter what the means, that is the
end.

"Tell me not, then, of the indecent passages of the great
poets. The world, which is the poem of God, is full of
indecent passages! 'Shall there be evil in a city and the Lord
hath not done it?' shouts Amos. 'I form the light, and create
darkness; I make peace, and create evil; I, the Lord, do all
these things,' thunders Isaiah. 'This,' says Coleridge, 'is
the deep abyss of the mystery of God.' Ay, and the profound of
the mystery of genius also! Evil is part of the economy of
genius, as it is part of the economy of Deity. Gentle
reviewers endeavor to find excuses for the freedoms of
geniuses. 'It is to prove that they were above
conventionalities.' 'It is referable to the age.' Oh, Ossa on
Pelion, mount piled on mount, of error and folly! What has
genius, spirit of the absolute and the eternal, to do with
the definitions of position, or conventionalities, or the age?
Genius puts indecencies into its works, because God puts them
into His world. Whatever the special reason in each case, this
is the general reason in all cases. They are here, because
they are there. That is the eternal why. No; Alphonso of
Castile thought that, if he had been consulted at the
Creation, he could have given a few hints to the Almighty. Not
I. I play Alphonso neither to genius nor to God.

"What is this poem, for the giving of which to America and the
world, and for that alone, its author has been dismissed with
ignominy from a Government office? It is a poem which Schiller
might have hailed as the noblest specimen of native
literature, worthy of a place beside Homer. It is, in the
first place, a work purely and entirely American,
autochthonic, sprung from our own soil; no savor of Europe nor
the past, nor of any other literature in it; a vast carol of
our own land, and of its Present and Future; the strong and
haughty psalm of the Republic. There is not one other book, I
care not whose, of which this can be said. I weigh my words
and have considered well. Every other book by an American
author implies, both in form and substance, I cannot even say
the European, but the British mind. The shadow of Temple Bar
and Arthur's Seat lies dark on all our letters. Intellectually
we are still a dependency of Great Britain, and one
word--colonial--comprehends and stamps our literature. In no
literary form, except our newspapers, has there been anything
distinctively American. I note our best books--the works of
Jefferson, the romances of Brockden Brown, the speeches of
Webster, Everett's rhetoric, the divinity of Channing, some of
Cooper's novels, the writings of Theodore Parker, the poetry
of Bryant, the masterly law arguments of Lysander Spooner, the
miscellanies of Margaret Fuller, the histories of Hildreth,
Bancroft and Motley, Ticknor's History of Spanish Literature,
Judd's Margaret, the political treatises of Calhoun, the rich,
benignant poems of Longfellow, the ballads of Whittier, the
delicate songs of Philip Pendleton Cooke, the weird poetry of
Edgar Poe, the wizard tales of Hawthorne, Irving's
Knickerbocker, Delia Bacon's splendid sibyllic book on
Shakespeare, the political economy of Carey, the prison
letters and immortal speech of John Brown, the lofty patrician
eloquence of Wendell Phillips, and those diamonds of the first
water, the great clear essays and greater poems of Emerson.
This literature has often commanding merits, and much of it is
very precious to me; but in respect to its national character,
all that can be said is that it is tinged, more or less
deeply, with America; and the foreign model, the foreign
standards, the foreign ideas, dominate over it all.

"At most, our best books were but struggling beams; behold in
Leaves of Grass the immense and absolute sunrise! It is all
our own! The nation is in it! In form a series of chants, in
substance it is an epic of America. It is distinctively and
utterly American. Without model, without imitation, without
reminiscence, it is evolved entirely from our own polity and
popular life. Look at what it celebrates and contains! hardly
to be enumerated without sometimes using the powerful,
wondrous phrases of its author, so indissoluble are they with
the things described. The essences, the events, the objects of
America; the myriad, varied landscapes; the teeming and giant
cities; the generous and turbulent populations; the prairie
solitudes, the vast pastoral plateaus; the Mississippi; the
land dense with villages and farms; the habits, manners,
customs; the enormous diversity of temperatures; the immense
geography; the red aborigines passing away, 'charging the
water and the land with names'; the early settlements; the
sudden uprising and defiance of the Revolution; the august
figure of Washington; the formation and sacredness of the
Constitution; the pouring in of the emigrants; the
million-masted harbors; the general opulence and comfort; the
fisheries, and whaling, and gold-digging, and manufactures,
and agriculture; the dazzling movement of new States, rushing
to be great; Nevada rising, Dakota rising, Colorado rising;
the tumultuous civilization around and beyond the Rocky
Mountains, thundering and spreading; the Union impregnable;
feudalism in all its forms forever tracked and assaulted;
liberty deathless on these shores; the noble and free
character of the people; the equality of male and female; the
ardor, the fierceness, the friendship, the dignity, the
enterprise, the affection, the courage, the love of music, the
passion for personal freedom; the mercy and justice and
compassion of the people; the popular faults and vices and
crimes; the deference of the President to the private citizen;
the image of Christ forever deepening in the public mind as
the brother of despised and rejected persons; the promise and
wild song of the future; the vision of the Federal Mother,
seated with more than antique majesty in the midst of her many
children; the pouring glories of the hereafter; the vistas of
splendor, incessant and branching, the tremendous elements,
breeds, adjustments of America--with all these, with more,
with everything transcendent, amazing and new, undimmed by the
pale cast of thought, and with the very color and brawn of
actual life, the whole gigantic epic of our continental being
unwinds in all its magnificent reality in these pages. To
understand Greece, study the Iliad and the Odyssey; study
Leaves of Grass to understand America. Her democracy is there.
Would you have a text-book of democracy? The writings of
Jefferson are good; De Tocqueville is better; but the great
poet always contains historian and philosopher--and to know
the comprehending spirit of this country, you shall question
these insulted pages."