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                                  THE

                            GOOD GRAY POET.

                             A VINDICATION.

                 *        *        *        *        *

                               NEW YORK:
                BUNCE & HUNTINGTON, 459, BROOME STREET.
                                 1866.




                          THE GOOD GRAY POET.

                             A VINDICATION.

                 *        *        *        *        *

                                 WASHINGTON, D. C., _September 2, 1865_.

Nine weeks have elapsed since the commission of an outrage, to which I
have not till now been able to give my attention, but which, in the
interest of the sacred cause of free letters, and in that alone, I never
meant should pass without its proper and enduring brand.

For years past, thousands of people in New York, in Brooklyn, in Boston,
in New Orleans, and latterly in Washington, have seen, even as I saw two
hours ago, tallying, one might say, the streets of our American cities,
and fit to have for his background and accessories, their streaming
populations and ample and rich façades, a man of striking masculine
beauty—a poet—powerful and venerable in appearance; large, calm,
superbly formed; oftenest clad in the careless, rough, and always
picturesque costume of the common people; resembling, and generally
taken by strangers for, some great mechanic, or stevedore, or seaman, or
grand laborer of one kind or another; and passing slowly in this guise,
with nonchalant and haughty step along the pavement, with the sunlight
and shadows falling around him. The dark sombrero he usually wears was,
when I saw him just now, the day being warm, held for the moment in his
hand; rich light an artist would have chosen, lay upon his uncovered
head, majestic, large, Homeric, and set upon his strong shoulders with
the grandeur of ancient sculpture; I marked the countenance, serene,
proud, cheerful, florid, grave; the brow seamed with noble wrinkles; the
features, massive and handsome, with firm blue eyes; the eyebrows and
eyelids especially showing that fullness of arch seldom seen save in the
antique busts; the flowing hair and fleecy beard, both very gray, and
tempering with a look of age the youthful aspect of one who is but
forty-five; the simplicity and purity of his dress, cheap and plain, but
spotless, from snowy falling collar to burnished boot, and exhaling
faint fragrance; the whole form surrounded with manliness, as with a
nimbus, and breathing, in its perfect health and vigor, the august charm
of the strong. We who have looked upon this figure, or listened to that
clear, cheerful, vibrating voice, might thrill to think, could we but
transcend our age, that we had been thus near to one of the greatest of
the sons of men. But Dante stirs no deep pulse, unless it be of hate, as
he walks the streets of Florence; that shabby, one-armed soldier, just
out of jail and hardly noticed, though he has amused Europe, is Michael
Cervantes; that son of a vine-dresser, whom Athens laughs at as an
eccentric genius, before it is thought worth while to roar him into
exile, is the century-shaking Æschylus; that phantom whom the wits of
the seventeenth century think not worth extraordinary notice, and the
wits of the eighteenth century, spluttering with laughter, call a
barbarian, is Shakespeare; that earth-soiled, vice-stained ploughman,
with the noble heart and sweet, bright eyes, whom the good abominate and
the gentry patronize—subject now of anniversary banquets by gentlemen
who, could they wander backward from those annual hiccups into Time,
would never help his life or keep his company—is Robert Burns; and this
man, whose grave, perhaps, the next century will cover with passionate
and splendid honors, goes regarded with careless curiosity or phlegmatic
composure by his own age. Yet, perhaps, in a few hearts he has waked
that deep thrill due to the passage of the sublime. I heard lately, with
sad pleasure, of the letter introducing a friend, filled with noble
courtesy, and dictated by the reverence for genius, which a
distinguished English nobleman, a stranger, sent to this American bard.
Nothing deepens my respect for the beautiful intellect of the scholar
Alcott, like the bold sentence, “Greater than Plato,” which he once
uttered upon him. I hold it the surest proof of Thoreau’s insight, that
after a conversation, seeing how he incarnated the immense and new
spirit of the age, and was the compend of America, he came away to speak
the electric sentence, “He is Democracy!” I treasure to my latest hour,
with swelling heart and springing tears, the remembrance that Abraham
Lincoln, seeing him for the first time from the window of the East Room
of the White House as he passed slowly by, and gazing at him long with
that deep eye which read men, said, in the quaint, sweet tone which
those who have spoken with him will remember, and with a significant
emphasis which the type can hardly convey—“Well, _he_ looks like A
MAN!” Sublime tributes, great words; but none too high for their object,
the author of _Leaves of Grass_, Walt Whitman, of Brooklyn.

On the 30th of June last, this true American man and author was
dismissed, under circumstances of peculiar wrong, from a clerkship he
had held for six months in the Department of the Interior. His dismissal
was the act of the Hon. James Harlan, the Secretary of the Department,
formerly a Methodist clergyman, and President of a Western college.

Upon the interrogation of an eminent officer of the Government, at whose
instance the appointment had, under a former Secretary, been made, Mr.
Harlan averred that Walt Whitman had been in no way remiss in the
discharge of his duties, but that, on the contrary, so far as he could
learn, his conduct had been most exemplary. Indeed, during the few
months of his tenure of office, he had been promoted. The sole and only
cause of his dismissal, Mr. Harlan said, was that he had written the
book of poetry entitled _Leaves of Grass_. This book Mr. Harlan
characterized as “full of indecent passages.” The author, he said, was
“a very bad man,” a “Free-Lover.” Argument being had upon these
propositions, Mr. Harlan was, as regards the book, utterly unable to
maintain his assertions; and, as regards the author, was forced to own
that his opinion of him had been changed. Nevertheless, after this
substantial admission of his injustice, he absolutely refused to revoke
his action. Of course, under no circumstances would Walt Whitman, the
proudest man that lives, have consented to again enter into office under
Mr. Harlan: but the demand for his reinstatement was as honorable to the
gentleman who made it, as the refusal to accede to it was discreditable
to the Secretary.

The closing feature of this transaction, and one which was a direct
consequence of Mr. Harlan’s course, was its remission to the scurrilous,
and in some instances libellous, comment of a portion of the press. To
sum up, an author, solely and only for the publication, ten years ago,
of an honest book, which no intelligent and candid person can regard as
hurtful to morality, was expelled from office by the Secretary, and held
up to public contumely by the newspapers. It remains only to be added
here, that the Hon. James Harlan is the gentleman who, upon assuming the
control of the Department, published a manifesto, announcing that it was
thenceforth to be governed upon the principles of Christian
civilization.

This act of expulsion, and all that it encloses, is the outrage to which
I referred in the opening sentence of this letter.

I have had the honor, which I esteem a very high one, to know Walt
Whitman intimately for several years, and am perfectly conversant with
the details of his life and history. Scores and scores of persons, who
know him well, can confirm my own report of him, and I have therefore no
hesitation in saying that the scandalous assertions of Mr. Harlan,
derived from whom I know not, as to his being a bad man, a Free-Lover,
&c., belong to the category of those calumnies at which, as Napoleon
said, innocence itself is confounded. A better man in all respects, or
one more irreproachable in his relations to the other sex, lives not
upon this earth. His is the great goodness, the great chastity of
spiritual strength and sanity. I do not believe that from the hour of
his infancy, when Lafayette held him in his arms, to the present hour,
in which he bends over the last wounded and dying of the war, that any
one can say aught of him that does not consort with the largest and
truest manliness. I am perfectly aware of the miserable lies which have
been put into circulation respecting him, of which the story of his
dishonoring an invitation to dine with Emerson, by appearing at the
table of the Astor House in a red shirt, and with the manners of a
rowdy, is a mild specimen. I know, too, the inferences drawn by wretched
fools, who, because they have seen him riding upon the top of an
omnibus; or at Pfaff’s restaurant; or dressed in rough clothes suitable
for his purposes, and only remarkable because the wearer was a man of
genius; or mixing freely and lovingly, like Lucretius, like Rabelais,
like Francis Bacon, like Rembrandt, like all great students of the
world, with low and equivocal and dissolute persons, as well as with
those of a different character, must needs set him down as a brute, a
scallawag, and a criminal. Mr. Harlan’s allegations are of a piece with
these. If I could associate the title with a really great person, or if
the name of man were not radically superior, I should say that for solid
nobleness of character, for native elegance and delicacy of soul, for a
courtesy which is the very passion of thoughtful kindness and
forbearance, for his tender and paternal respect and manly honor for
woman, for love and heroism carried into the pettiest details of life,
and for a large and homely beauty of manners, which makes the civilities
of parlors fantastic and puerile in comparison, Walt Whitman deserves to
be considered the grandest gentleman that treads this continent. I know
well the habits and tendencies of his life. They are all simple, sane,
domestic; worthy of him as one of an estimable family and a member of
society. He is a tender and faithful son, a good brother, a loyal
friend, an ardent and devoted citizen. He has been a laborer, working
successively as a farmer, a carpenter, a printer. He has been a stalwart
editor of the Republican party, and often, in that powerful and nervous
prose of which he is master, done yeoman’s service for the great cause
of human liberty and the imperial conception of the indivisible Union.
He has been a visitor of prisons; a protector of fugitive slaves; a
constant voluntary nurse, night and day, at the hospitals, from the
beginning of the war to the present time; a brother and friend through
life to the neglected and the forgotten, the poor, the degraded, the
criminal, the outcast; turning away from no man for his guilt, nor woman
for her vileness. His is the strongest and truest compassion I have ever
known. I remember here the anecdote told me by a witness, of his meeting
in a by-street in Boston a poor ruffian, one whom he had known well as
an innocent child, now a full-grown youth, vicious far beyond his years,
flying to Canada from the pursuit of the police, his sin-trampled
features bearing marks of the recent bloody brawl in New York in which,
as he supposed, he had killed some one; and having heard his hurried
story, freely confided to him, Walt Whitman, separated not from the bad
even by his own goodness, with well I know what tender and tranquil
feeling for this ruined being, and with a love which makes me think of
that love of God which deserts not any creature, quietly at parting,
after assisting him from his means, held him for a moment, with his arm
around his neck, and, bending to the face, horrible and battered and
prematurely old, kissed him on the cheek; and the poor hunted wretch,
perhaps for the first time in his low life, receiving a token of love
and compassion like a touch from beyond the sun, hastened away in deep
dejection, sobbing and in tears. It reminds me of the anecdotes Victor
Hugo, in his portraiture of Bishop Myriel, tells, under a thin veil of
fiction, of Charles Miolles, the good Bishop of Rennes.—I know not what
talisman Walt Whitman carries, unless it be an unexcluding friendliness
and goodness which is felt upon his approach like magnetism; but I know
that in the subterranean life of cities, among the worst roughs, he goes
safely; and I could recite instances where hands that, in mere
wantonness of ferocity, assault anybody, raised against him, have of
their own accord been lowered almost as quickly, or, in some cases, been
dragged promptly down by others; this, too, I mean, when he and the
assaulting gang were mutual strangers. I have seen singular evidence of
the mysterious quality which not only guards him, but draws to him with
intuition, rapid as light, simple and rude people, as to their natural
mate and friend. I remember, as I passed the White House with him one
evening, the startled feeling with which I saw the soldier on guard
there—a stranger to us both, and with something in his action that
curiously proved that he was a stranger—suddenly bring his musket to
the “present,” in military salute to him, quickly mingling with this
respect due to his colonel, a gesture of greeting with the right hand as
to a comrade; grinning, meanwhile, good fellow, with shy, spontaneous
affection and deference; his ruddy, broad face glowing in the flare of
the lampions. I remember, on another occasion, as I crossed the street
with him, the driver of a street car, a stranger, stopping the
conveyance, and inviting him to get on and ride with him. Adventures of
this kind are frequent, and, “I took a fancy to you,” or, “You look like
one of my style,” is the common explanation he gets upon their
occurrence. It would be impossible to exaggerate the personal adhesion
and strong, simple affection given him, in numerous instances on sight,
by multitudes of plain persons—sailors, mechanics, drivers, soldiers,
farmers, sempstresses, old people of the past generation, mothers of
families—those powerful, unlettered persons, among whom, as he says in
his book, he has gone freely, and who never in most cases even suspect
as an author him whom they love as a man, and who loves them in
return.—His intellectual influence upon many young men and
women—spirits of the morning sort, not willing to belong to that
intellectual colony of Great Britain which our literary classes compose,
nor helplessly tied like them to the old forms—I note as kindred to
that of Socrates upon the youth of ancient Attica, or Raleigh upon the
gallant young England of his day. It is a power at once liberating,
instructing, and inspiring.—His conversation is a university. Those who
have heard him in some roused hour, when the full afflatus of his spirit
moved him, will agree with me that the grandeur of talk was
accomplished. He is known as a passionate lover and powerful critic of
the great music and of art. He is deeply cultured by some of the best
books, especially the Bible, which he prefers above all other great
literature; but principally by contact and communion with things
themselves, which literature can only mirror and celebrate. He has
travelled through most of the United States, intent on comprehending and
absorbing the genius and meaning of his country, that he might do his
best to start a literature worthy of her, sprung from her own polity,
and tallying her own unexampled magnificence among the nations. To the
same end, he has been a long, patient, and laborious student of life,
mixing intimately with all varieties of experience and men, with
curiosity and with love. He has given his thought, his life, to this
beautiful ambition, and, still young, he has grown gray in its service.
He has never married; like Giordano Bruno, he has made Thought in the
service of his fellow-creatures his _bella donna_, his best beloved, his
bride. His patriotism is boundless. It is no intellectual sentiment; it
is a personal passion. He performs with scrupulous fidelity and zeal,
the duties of a citizen. For eighteen years, not missing once, his
ballot has dropped on every national and local election day, and his
influence has been ardently given, for the good cause. Of all men I
know, his life is most in the life of the nation. I remember, when the
first draft was ordered, at a time when he was already performing an
arduous and perilous duty as a volunteer attendant upon the wounded in
the field—a duty which cost him the only illness he ever had in his
life, and a very severe and dangerous illness it was, the result of
poison absorbed in his devotion to the worst cases of the hospital
gangrene; and when it would have been the easiest thing in the world to
evade duty, for though then only forty-two or three years old, and
subject to the draft, he looked a hale sixty, and no enrolling officer
would have paused for an instant before his gray hair—I remember, I
say, how anxious and careful he was to get his name put on the
enrollment lists, that he might stand his chance for martial service.
This, too, at a time when so many gentlemen were skulking, dodging,
agonizing for substitutes, and practising every conceivable device to
escape military duty. What music of speech, though Cicero’s own—what
scarlet and gold superlatives could adorn or dignify this simple antique
trait of private heroism?—I recall his love for little children, for
the young, and for very old persons, as if the dawn and the evening
twilight of life awakened his deepest tenderness. I recall the affection
for him of numbers of young men, and invariably of all good women. Who,
knowing him, does not regard him as a man of the highest spiritual
culture? I have never known one of greater and deeper religious feeling.
To call one like him good, seems an impertinence. In our sweet country
phrase, he is one of God’s men. And as I write these hurried and broken
memoranda—as his strength and sweetness of nature, his moral health,
his rich humor, his gentleness, his serenity, his charity, his
simple-heartedness, his courage, his deep and varied knowledge of life
and men, his calm wisdom, his singular and beautiful boy-innocence, his
personal majesty, his rough scorn of mean actions, his magnetic and
exterminating anger on due occasions—all that I have seen and heard of
him, the testimony of associates, the anecdotes of friends, the
remembrance of hours with him that should be immortal, the traits,
lineaments, incidents of his life and being—as they come crowding into
memory—his seems to me a character which only the heroic pen of
Plutarch could record, and which Socrates himself might emulate or envy.

This is the man whom Mr. Harlan charges with having written a bad book.
I might ask, How long is it since bad books have been the flower of good
lives? How long is it since grape-vines produced thorns or fig-trees
thistles? But Mr. Harlan says the book is bad because it is “full of
indecent passages.” This allegation has been brought against _Leaves of
Grass_ before. It has been sounded loud and strong by many of the
literary journals of both continents. As criticism it is legitimate. I
may contemn the mind or deplore the moral life in which such a criticism
has its source; still, as criticism it has a right to existence. But Mr.
Harlan, passing the limits of opinion, inaugurates punishment. He joins
the band of the hostile verdict; he incarnates their judgment; then,
detaching himself, he proceeds to a solitary and signal vengeance. As
far as he can have it so, this author, for having written his book shall
starve. He shall starve, and his name shall receive a brand. This is the
essence of Mr. Harlan’s action. It is a dark and serious step to take.
Upon what grounds is it taken?

I have carefully counted out from Walt Whitman’s poetry the lines,
perfectly moral to me, whether viewed in themselves or in the light of
their sublime intentions and purport, but upon which ignorant and
indecent persons of respectability base their sweeping condemnation of
the whole work. Taking _Leaves of Grass_, and the recent small volume,
_Drum-Taps_ (which was in Mr. Harlan’s possession), there are in the
whole about nine thousand lines or verses. From these, including matter
which I can hardly imagine objectionable to any one, but counting every
thing which the most malignant virtue could shrink from, I have culled
eighty lines. Eighty lines out of nine thousand! It is a less proportion
than one finds in Shakespeare. Upon this so slender basis, rests the
whole crazy fabric of American and European slander, and the brutal
lever of the Secretary.

Now, what by competent authority is the admitted character of the book
in which these lines occur? For, though it is more than probable that
Mr. Harlan never heard of the work till the hour of his explorations in
the Department, the intellectual hemispheres of Great Britain and
America have rung with it from side to side. It has received as
extensive a critical notice, I suppose, as has ever been given to a
volume. Had it been received only with indifference or derision, I
should not have been surprised. In an age in which few breathe the
atmosphere of the grand literature—which forgets the superb books and
thinks Bulwer moral, and Dickens great, and Thackeray a real
satirist—which gives to Macaulay the laurel due to Herodotus, and to
Tennyson the crown reserved for Homer, and in which the chairs of
criticism seem abandoned to squirts and pedagogues and monks—a mighty
poet has little to expect from the literary press save unconcern and
mockery. But even under these hard conditions, the tremendous force of
this poet has achieved a relative conquest, and the tone of the press
denotes his book as not merely great, but illustrious. Even the copious
torrents of abuse which have been lavished upon it, have in numerous
instances taken the form of tribute to its august and mysterious power,
being in fact identical with that still vomited upon Montaigne and
Juvenal. On the other hand, eulogy, very lofty and from the highest
sources, has spanned it with sunbows. Emerson, our noblest scholar, a
name to which Christendom does reverence, a critic of piercing insight
and full comprehension, has pronounced it “the most extraordinary piece
of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.” How that austere
and rare spirit, Thoreau, regarded it, may be partly seen by his last
posthumous volume. He thought of it, I have heard, with measureless
esteem, ranking it with the vast and gorgeous conceptions of the
Oriental bards. It has been reported to me, that unpublished letters,
received in this country from some of Europe’s greatest, announce a
similar verdict. The _North American Quarterly Review_, unquestionably
the highest organ of American letters, in the course of a eulogistic
notice of the work, remarking upon the passages which Mr. Harlan has
treated as if they were novel in literature, observes: “There is not
anything, perhaps (in the book), which modern usage would stamp as more
indelicate than are some passages in Homer. There is not a word in it
meant to attract readers by its grossness, as there is in half the
literature of the last century, which holds its place unchallenged on
the tables of our drawing-rooms.” The London _Dispatch_, in a review
written by the Rev. W. J. Fox, one of the most distinguished clergymen
in England, after commending the poems for “their strength of
expression, their fervor, their hearty wholesomeness, their originality
and freshness, their singular harmony,” &c., says that, “in the
unhesitating frankness of a man who dares to call simplest things by
their plain names, conveying also a large sense of the beautiful,” there
is involved “a clearer conception of what manly modesty really is, than
in any thing we have in all conventional forms of word, deed, or act, so
far known of;” and concludes by declaring that “the author will soon
make his way into the confidence of his readers, and his poems in time
will become a pregnant text-book, from which quotations as sterling as
the minted gold will be taken and applied to every form of the inner and
the outer life.” The London _Leader_, one of the foremost of the British
literary journals, in a review which more nearly approaches perception
of the true character and purport of the book, than any I have seen, has
the following sentences: “Mr. Emerson recognized the first issue of the
_Leaves_, and hastened to welcome the author, then totally unknown.
Among other things, said Emerson to the new avatar, ‘I greet you at the
beginning of a great career, which yet _must have had a long foreground
somewhere for such a start_.’ The last clause was, however, overlooked
entirely by the critics, who treated the new author as one
self-educated, yet in the rough, unpolished, and owing nothing to
instruction. The authority for so treating the author was derived from
himself, who thus described, in one of his poems, his person, character,
and name, having omitted the last from the title-page:—

        ‘Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,
         Disorderly, fleshly, and sensual,’—

and in various other passages, confessed to all the vices, as well as
the virtues of man. All this, with intentional wrong-headedness, was
attributed by the sapient reviewers to the individual writer, and not to
the subjective-hero supposed to be writing. Notwithstanding the word
‘kosmos,’ the writer was taken to be an ignorant man. Emerson perceived
at once that there had been a long foreground somewhere or somehow;—not
so they. Every page teems with knowledge, with information; but they saw
it not, because it did not answer their purpose to see it. . . . . . The
poem in which the word ‘kosmos’ appears explains in fact the whole
mystery—nay, the word itself explains it. The poem is nominally upon
himself, but really includes everybody. It begins:—

        ‘I celebrate myself;
        And what I assume, you shall assume;
        For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.’

In a word, WALT WHITMAN _represents the Kosmical man—he is the_ ADAMUS
_of the nineteenth century—not an individual, but_ MANKIND. As such, in
celebrating himself, he proceeds to celebrate universal humanity in its
attributes, and accordingly commences his dithyramb with the five
senses, beginning with that of smell. Afterwards, he deals with the
intellectual, rational, and moral powers, showing throughout his
treatment an intimate acquaintance with Kant’s transcendental method,
and perhaps including in his development the whole of the German school,
down to Hegel—at any rate, as interpreted by Cousin and others in
France, and Emerson in the United States. He certainly includes Fichte,
for he mentions the Egotist as the only true philosopher, and
consistently identifies himself not only with every man, but with the
universe and its Maker; and it is in doing so that the strength of his
description consists. It is from such an ideal elevation that he looks
down on Good and Evil, regards them as equal, and extends to them the
like measure of equity. . . . . Instead, therefore, of regarding these
_Leaves of Grass_ as a marvel, they seem to us as the most natural
product of the American soil. They are certainly filled with an American
spirit, breathe the American air, and assert the fullest American
freedom.” The passages characterized by the Secretary as “indecent” are,
adds the _Leader_, “only so many instances adduced in support of a
philosophical principle; not meant for obscenity, but for scientific
examples, introduced as they might be in any legal, medical, or
philosophical book, for the purpose of instruction.”

I could multiply these excerpts; but here are sufficient specimens of
the competent judgments of eminent scholars and divines, testifying to
the intellectual and moral grandeur of this work. Let it be remembered
that there is nothing in the book that in one form or another is not
contained in all great poetic or universal literature. It has nothing
either in quantity or quality so offensive as everybody knows is in
Shakespeare. All that this poet has done is to mention, without levity,
without low language, very seriously, often devoutly, always simply,
certain facts in the natural history of man and of life; and sometimes,
assuming their sanctity, to use them in illustration or imagery. Far
more questionable mention and use of these facts are common to the
greatest literature. Shall the presence in a book of eighty lines,
similar in character to what every great and noble poetic book contains,
be sufficient to shove it below even the lewd writings of Petronius
Arbiter, the dirty dramas of Shirley, or the scrofulous fiction of
Louvet de Couvray—to lump it in with the anonymous lascivious trash
spawned in holes and sold in corners, too witless and disgusting for any
notice but that of the police—and to entitle its author to treatment
such as only the nameless wretches of the very sewers of authorship
ought to receive?

If, rising to the utmost cruelty of conception, I can dare add to the
calamities of genius a misery so degrading and extreme as to imagine the
great authors of the world condemned to clerkships under Mr. Harlan, I
can at least mitigate that dream of wretchedness and insult by adding
the fancy of their fate under the action of his principles. Let me
suppose them there, and he still magnifying the calling of the Secretary
into that of the literary headsman. He opens the great book of
_Genesis_. Everywhere “indecent passages.” The mother hushes the child,
and bids him skip as he reads aloud that first great history. It cannot
be read aloud in “drawing-rooms” by “gentlemen” and “ladies.” The freest
use of language, the plainest terms, frank mention of forbidden
subjects; the story of Onan; of Hagar and Sarai; of Lot and his
daughters; of Isaac, Rebekah, and Abimelech; of Jacob and Leah; of
Reuben and Bilhah; of Potiphar’s wife and Joseph; tabooed allusion and
statement everywhere; no veils, no euphemism, no delicacy, no meal in
the mouth anywhere. Out with Moses! The cloven splendor on that awful
brow shall not save him.—Mr. Harlan takes up the _Iliad_ and the
_Odyssey_. The loves of Jupiter and Juno; the dalliance of Achilles and
Patroclus with their women; the perfectly frank, undraped reality of
Greek life and manners naïvely shown without regard to the feelings of
Christian civilizees—horrible! Out with Homer!—Here is Lucretius: Mr.
Harlan opens the _De Rerum Natura_, and reads the vast, benign, majestic
lines, sad with the shadow of the unintelligible universe upon them;
sublime with the tragic problems of the Infinite; august with their
noble love and compassion for mankind. But what is this? “_Ut quasi
transactis sœpe omnibus rebus_,” &c. And this: “_Morè ferarum,
quadrupedumque magis ritu_,” &c. And this: “_Nam mulier prohibet se
concipere atque repugnat_,” &c. And this: “_Quod petiere, premunt arcte,
faciuntque dolorem_,” &c. Enough. Fine language, fine illustrations,
fine precepts, pretty decency! Out with Lucretius! Out with the chief
poet of the Tiber side!—Here is Æschylus: a dark magnificence of cloud,
all rough with burning gold, which thunders and drips blood! The Greek
Shakespeare. The gorgeous and terrible Æschylus! What is this in the
_Prometheus_ about Jove and Iö? What sort of detail is that which, at
the distance of ten years, I remember amazed Mr. Buckley as he
translated the _Agamemnon_? What kind of talk is this in the _Chœphori_,
in _The Suppliants_, and in the fragments of the comic drama of _The
Argians_? Out with Æschylus!—Here is the sublime book of Ezekiel. All
the Hebrew grandeur at its fullest is there. But look at this blurt of
coarse words, hurled direct as the prophet-mouth can hurl them—this
familiar reference to functions and organs voted out of language—this
bread for human lips baked with ordure—these details of the scortatory
loves of Aholah and Aholibamah. Enough. Dismiss this dreadful majesty of
Hebrew poetry. He has no “taste.” He is “indecent.” Out with
Ezekiel!—Here is Dante. Open the tremendous pages of the _Inferno_.
What is this about the she-wolf Can Grande will kill? What picture is
this of strumpet Thais?—ending with the lines—

        “Taida è, la puttana che rispose
            Al drudo suo, quando disse: Ho io grazie
            Grandi appo te? Anzi meravigliose.”

What is this, also, in the eighteenth canto?—

        “Quivi venimmo, e quindi giù nel fosso
           Vidi gente attuffata in uno sterco,
           Che dagli uman privati parea mosso:
         E mentre ch’ ìo là giù con l’occhio cerco,
           Vìdi un col capo sì di merda lordo,
           Che non parea s’era laico o cherco.”

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?—

        “Ed egli avea del cul fatto trombetta.”

And look at these lines in the twenty-eighth canto:—

        “Già reggia, per mezzul perdere o lulla
         Com’ io vidi un, cosi non si pertugia,
         Rotto dal mento insin dove si trulla.”

That will do. Dante, too, has “indecent passages.” 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 overarching sky of Oriental piety, are here. But here also the
inevitable “indecency.” Instead of the virtuous fiction of the
tansy-bed, Job actually has the indelicacy to state how man is
born—even mentions the belly; talks about the gendering of bulls and
the miscarriage of cows; uses rank idioms; and in the thirty-first
chapter especially, indulges in a strain of thought and expression which
it is amazing does not bring down upon him, even at this late date, the
avalanches of our lofty and pure Reviews. Here is certainly “an immoral
poet.” 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
Tacitus. What statement of crimes that ought not to be hinted! Does the
man gloat over such things? What dreadful kisses are these of Agrippina
to Nero—the mother to the son! Out with Tacitus!—and since there are
books that ought to be publicly burned, by all means let the stern
grandeur of that rhetoric be lost in flame.—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 eternal roar of God above the guilty world,
utters coarse words. Amidst the bolted lightnings of that sublime
denunciation, coarse thoughts, indelicate figures, indecent allusion,
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 Hafiz, the Anacreon of Persia, but more: a
banquet of wine in a garden of roses, the nightingales singing, the
laughing revellers high with festal joy; but a heavenly flame burns on
every brow; a tone not of this sphere is in all the music, all the
laughter, all the songs; a light of the Infinite trembles over every
chalice and rests on every flower; and all the garden is divine. Still,
when Hafiz cries out, “Bring me wine, and bring the famed veiled beauty,
the Princess of the brothel,” &c., or issues similar orders, Mr. Harlan,
whose virtue does not understand or endure such metaphors, must deal
sternly with this kosmic man of Persia. Out with Hafiz!—Here is Virgil,
ornate and splendid poet of old Rome; a master with a greater pupil,
Alighieri! a bard above whose ashes Boccaccio kneels a trader, and
arises a soldier of mankind; but he must lose those fadeless chaplets,
the undying green of a noble fame; for here in the _Æneid_ is “_Dixerat;
et niveis hinc atque hinc Diva lacertis_,” &c., and here in the
_Georgics_ is “_Quo rapiat sitiens Venerem, interiusque recondat_,” &c.,
and there are other verses like these. Out with Virgil!—Here is
Swedenborg. Open this poem in prose, the _Conjugial 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,” &c. 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
hook, the _Elective Affinities_, still pumps up oaths from clergymen;
Walpurgis has hardly ceased its uproar over _Faust_. Out with
Goethe!—Here is Byron: grand, dark poet; a great spirit—a soul like
the ocean; generous lover of America; fiery trumpet of liberty; a sword
for the human cause in Greece; a torch for the human mind in _Cain_; a
life that redeemed its every fault by taking a side, which was the human
side; tempest of scorn in his first poem, tempest of scorn and laughter
in his last poem, only against the things that wrong man; vast bud of
the Infinite that Death alone prevented from its vaster flower; immense,
seminal, electrical, dazzling Byron.—But _Beppo_—O! But _Don Juan_—O
fie! Not to mention the Countess Guiccioli—ah, me! Prepare quickly the
yellow envelope, and out with Byron!—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!—Here is another, a sun of literature, moving in a vast orbit
with dazzling plenitudes of power and beauty; the one only modern
European poet and novelist worthy to rank with the first; permanent
among the fleeting; a demigod of letters among the pigmies; a soul of
the antique strength and sadness, worthy to stand as the representative
of the high thought and hopes of the nineteenth century—Victor Hugo!
Now open _Les Misérables_. See the great passages which the American
translator softens and the English translator tears away. Open this
other book of his, _William Shakespeare_, a book with only one grave
fault, the omission of the words “A Poem” from the title-page; a book
which is the courageous arch, the comprehending sky of criticism, but
which no American publisher will dare to issue, or, if he does, will
expurgate. Out with Hugo, of course!—Here is Juvenal, terrible and
splendid fountain of all satire; inspiration of all just censure;
exemplar of all noble rage at baseness; satirist and moralist sublimed
into the poet; the scowl of the unclouded noon above the low streets of
folly and of sin. But what he withers, he also shows. The sun-stroke of
his poetry reveals what it kills. Juvenal tells all. His fidelity of
exposure is frightful. Mr. Harlan would make short work of him. Out with
Juvenal!—Open the divine _Apocalypse_. What words are these among the
thunderings and lightnings and voices? Is this a poem to be read aloud
in parlors (for such appears to be the test of propriety and purity)? At
least, John might have been a little more choice in language. Some of
these texts are “indecent.” Yes, indeed! John must go.—Here is Spenser.
Encyclopædic poet of the visioned chivalry. It is all there. Amadis,
Esplandian, Tirante the White, Palmerin of England, all those Paladin
romances were but the leaves: this is the flower. A lost dream of valor,
chastity, courtesy, glory—a dream that marks an age of human
history—glimmers here, far in these depths, and makes this unexplored
obscurity divine. “But is the _Faëry Queen_ such a book as you would
wish to put into the hands of a lady?” What a question! Has it not been
expurgated? Out with Spenser!—Here is another, a true soldier of the
human emancipation; one who smites amidst uproars of laughter; the
master of Titanic farce; a whirlwind and earthquake of
derision—Rabelais. A nice one for Mr. Harlan! One glimpse at the
chapter which explains why the miles lengthen as you leave Paris, or at
the details of the birth and nurture of Gargantua, will suffice. Out
with Rabelais—out with the great jester of France, as Lord Bacon calls
him!—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 defence 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!—Now, except
Virgil for vassalage to literary models, and for grave and sad falsehood
to liberty; except Goethe for his lack of the final ecstasy of
self-surrender which completes a poet, and for coldness to the great
mother—one’s country; except Spenser for his remoteness, and Byron for
his immaturity, and there is not one of those I have named that does not
belong to the first order of human intellect. But no need to make
discriminations here; they are all great; they have all striven; they
have all served. Moses, Homer, Lucretius, Æschylus, Ezekiel, Dante, Job,
Plutarch, Herodotus, Tacitus, Shakespeare, Solomon, Isaiah, Montaigne,
Hafiz, Virgil, Swedenborg, Goethe, Byron, Cervantes, Hugo, Juvenal,
John, Spenser, Rabelais, Bacon, Phidias, Rembrandt, Mozart,
Angelo:—these are among the demi-gods of human thought; the souls that
have loved and suffered for the race; the light-bringers, the teachers,
the lawgivers, the consolers, the liberators, the inspired inspirers of
mankind; the noble and gracious beings who, in the service of humanity,
have borne every cross and earned every crown. There is not one of them
that is not sacred in the eyes of thoughtful men. But not one of them
does the rotten taste and morals of the nineteenth century spare! Not
one of them is qualified to render work for bread under this Secretary!
Do I err? Do I exaggerate? I write without access to the books I
mention—(it is fitting that this piece of insolent barbarism should
have been committed in almost the only important American city which is
without a public library!)—with the exception of three or four volumes
which I happen to have by me, I am obliged to rely for my statements on
the memory of youthful readings, eight or ten years ago; but name me one
book of the first order in which such passages as I refer to do not
occur! Tell me who can—what poet of the first grade escapes this brand,
“immoral,” or this spittle, “indecent”! If the great books are not, in
the point under consideration, in the same moral category as _Leaves of
Grass_, then why, either in translation or in the originals, either by a
bold softening which dissolves the author’s meaning, or by absolute
excision, are they nearly all expurgated? Answer me that. By one process
or the other, Brizeux, Cary, Wright, Cayley, Carlyle, everybody,
expurgates Dante; Langhorne and others expurgate Plutarch; Potter and
others expurgate Æschylus; Gifford, Anthon, and others expurgate
Juvenal; Creech, Watson, and others expurgate Lucretius; Bowdler and
others expurgate Shakespeare; Nott (I believe it is) expurgates Hafiz;
Wraxall and Wilbour expurgate Hugo; Kirkland, Hart, and others expurgate
Spenser; somebody expurgates Virgil; somebody expurgates Byron; the
Oxford scholars dilute Tacitus; Lord Derby expurgates Homer, besides
making him as ridiculous as the plucked cock of Diogenes in translation;
several hands expurgate Goethe; and Archbishop Tillotson in design
expurgates Moses, Ezekiel, Solomon, Isaiah, St. John, and all the
others—a job which Dr. Noah Webster executes, but, thank God, cannot
popularize. What book is spared? Nothing but a chain of circumstance,
which seems divinely ordained, saves us the unmutilated Bible. Nearly
every other great book bleeds. When one is not expurgated, the balance
is restored by its being cordially abused. Thanks to the splendid
conscience and courage of Mr. Wight, we can read Montaigne in English
without the omission of a single word! Thanks also to Motteux and
others, Cervantes has gone untouched, and we have not as yet a family
Rabelais. Neither have we as yet a family Mankind nor a family Universe;
but this is an oversight which will, doubtless, be repaired in time. God
will also, doubtless, be expurgated whenever it is possible. Why not?
One step to this end is taken in the expurgation of genius, which is His
second manifestation, as Nature is His first! Go on, gentlemen! You will
yet have things as “moral” as you desire!

I am aware that so far as his opinion, not his act, is concerned, Mr.
Harlan, however unintelligently, represents to some extent the shallow
conclusions of his age; and I know it will be said, that if the great
books contain these passages, they ought to be expurgated. It is not my
design to endeavor to put a quart into people who only hold a gill, nor
would I waste time in endeavoring to convert a large class of persons
whom I once heard Walt Whitman describe, with his usual Titanic richness
and strength of phrase, as “the immutable granitic pudding-heads of the
world.” But there is a better class than these; and I am filled with
measureless amazement, that persons of high intelligence, living to the
age of maturity, do not perceive, at least, the immense and priceless
scientific and human _uses_ of such passages, and the consequent
necessity, transcending and quashing all minor considerations, of having
them where they are. But look at these sad sentences—a complete and
felicitous statement of the whole modern doctrine—in the pages of a man
I love and revere: “The literature of three centuries ago is not decent
to be read; we expurgate it. Within a hundred years, woman has become a
reader, and for that reason, as much or more than any thing else,
literature has sprung to a higher level. No need now to expurgate all
you read.” He goes on to argue that literature in the next century will
be richer than in the classic epochs, because woman will contribute to
it as an author—her contribution, I infer, to be of the kind that will
not need expurgating. These, I repeat, are sad sentences. If they are
true, Bowdler is right to expurgate Shakespeare, and Noah Webster the
Bible. But no, they are not true! I welcome woman into art; but when she
comes there grandly, she will not come either as expurgator or creator
of emasculate or partial forms. Woman, grand in art, is Rosa Bonheur,
painting with fearless pencil the surly, sublime Jovian bull, equipped
for masculine use; painting the powerful, ramping stallion in his
amorous pride; not weakly or meanly flinching from the full celebration
of what God has made. Woman, grand in art, will come creating in forms,
however novel, the absolute, the permanent, the real, the evil and the
good, as Æschylus, as Cervantes, as Shakespeare before her; with sex,
with truth, with universality, without omissions or concealments. And
woman, as the ideal reader of literature, is not the indelicate prude,
flushing and squealing over some frank page; it is that high and
beautiful soul, Marie de Gournay, devoutly absorbing the work of her
master, Montaigne; finding it all great; greatly comprehending, greatly
accepting it all; fronting its license and grossness without any of the
livid shuddering of Puritans; and looking on the book in the same
universal and kindly spirit as its author looked upon the world. Woman
reading otherwise than thus—shrinking from Apuleius, from Rabelais,
from Aristophanes, from Shakespeare, from even Wycherley, or Petronius,
or Aretin, or Shirley—is less than man, is not ideal, not strong, not
nobly good, but petty, and effeminate, and mean. And not for her, nor by
her, nor by man, do I assent to the expurgation of the great books.
Literature cannot spring to a higher level than theirs. Alas! it has
sprung to a lower. 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.” Yes, and it is the profound of the mystery of
genius also! Evil is part of the economy of genius, as it is part of the
economy of God.—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.” “The age permitted a
degree of coarseness,” &c. “Shakespeare’s indecencies are the result of
his age.” O Ossa on Pelion, mount piled on mount, of error and folly!
What has genius, spirit of the absolute and the eternal, to do with
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 naïve 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 of 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 any thing 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
culture, 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 every thing 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 _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. Yet this vast and patriotic celebration and presentation
of all that is our own, is but a part of this tremendous volume. Here in
addition is thrown in poetic form, a philosophy of life, rich, subtle,
composite, ample, adequate to these great shores. Here are presented
superb types of models of manly and womanly character for the future of
this country, athletic, large, naïve, free, dauntless, haughty, loving,
nobly carnal, nobly spiritual, equal in body and soul, acceptive and
tolerant as Nature, generous, cosmopolitan, above all, religious. Here
are erected standards, drawn from the circumstances of our case, by
which not merely our literature, but all our performance, our politics,
art, behavior, love, conversation, dress, society, every thing belonging
to our lives and their conduct, will be shaped and recreated. A powerful
afflatus from the Infinite has given this book life. A voice which is
the manliest of human voices sounds through it all. In it is the strong
spirit which will surely mould our future. Mark my words: its sentences
will yet clinch the arguments of statesmen; its precepts will be the
laws of the people! From the beams of this seminal sun will be
generated, with tropical luxuriance, the myriad new forms of thought and
life in America. And in view of the national character and national
purpose of this work—in view of its vigorous re-enforcement and service
to all that we hold most precious—I make the claim here, that so far
from defaming and persecuting its author, the attitude of an American
statesman or public officer toward him should be to the highest degree
friendly and sustaining.

Beyond his country, too, this poet serves the world. He refutes by his
example the saying of Goethe, one of those which stain that noble fame
with baseness, that a great poet cannot be patriotic; and he dilates to
a universal use which redoubles the splendors of his volume, and makes
it dear to all that is human. I am not its authorized interpreter, and
can only state, at the risk of imperfect expression, and perhaps error,
what its meanings and purpose seem to me. But I see that, in his general
intention, the author has aimed to express that most common but wondrous
thing—that strange assemblage of soul, body, intellect—beautiful,
mystical, terrible, limited, boundless, ill-assorted, contradictory, yet
singularly harmonized—a Human Being, a single separate Identity, a
Man,—himself; but himself typically, and in his universal being. This
he has done with perfect candor, including the bodily attributes and
organs, as necessary component parts of the creation. Every thinking
person should see the value and use of such a presentation of human
nature as this. I also see—and it is from these parts of the book that
much of the misunderstanding and offence arises—that this poet seeks in
subtle ways to rescue from the keeping of blackguards and debauchees, to
which it has been abandoned, and to redeem to noble thought and use, the
great element of amativeness or sexuality, with all its acts and organs.
Sometimes by direct assertion, sometimes by implication, he rejects the
prevailing admission that this element is vile; declares its natural or
normal manifestation to be sacred and unworthy shame; awards it an equal
but not superior sanctity with the other elements that compose man; and
illustrates his doctrine and sets his example, by applying this element,
with all that appertains to it, to use as part of the imagery of poetry.
Then, besides, diffused like an atmosphere throughout the poem,
tincturing all its quality, and giving it that sacerdotal and prophetic
character which makes it a sort of American Bible, is the pronounced and
ever-recurring assertion of the divinity of all things. In a spirit like
that of the Egyptian priesthood, who wore the dung-beetle in gold on
their crests, perhaps as a symbol of the sacredness of even the lowest
forms of life, the poet celebrates all the creation as noble and
holy—the meanest and lowest parts of it, as well as the most lofty; all
equally projections of the Infinite; all emanations of the creative life
of God. Perpetual hymns break from him in praise of the divineness of
the universe: he sees a halo around every shape, however low; and life
in all its forms inspires a rapture of worship.

How some persons can think a book of this sort bad, is clearer to me
than it used to be. Swedenborg says that to the devils, perfumes are
stinks. I happen to know that some of the vilest abuse that it has
received, has come from men of the lowest possible moral life. It is not
so easy to understand how some persons of culture and judgment can fail
to perceive its literary greatness. Making fair allowance for faults,
which no great work, from _Hamlet_ to the world itself, is perhaps
without, the book, in form as in substance, seems to me a masterpiece.
Never in literature has there been more absolute conceptive or
presentative power. The forms and shows of things are bodied forth so
that one may say they become visible, and are alive. Here, in its
grandest, freest use, is the English language, from its lowest compass
to the top of the key; from the powerful, rank idiom of the streets and
fields, to the last subtlety of academic speech—ample, various,
telling, luxuriant, pictorial, final, conquering; absorbing from other
languages to its own purposes their choicest terms; its rich and daring
composite defying grammar; its most incontestable and splendid triumphs
achieved, as Jefferson notes of the superb Latin of Tacitus, in haughty
scorn of the rules of grammarians. Another singular excellence is the
metre—entirely novel, free, flexible, melodious, corresponsive to the
thought; its noble proportions and cadences reminding of winds and
waves, and the vast elemental sounds and motions of Nature, and having
an equal variety and liberty. I have heard this brought into disparaging
comparison with the metres of Tennyson; the poetry also disparaged in
the same connection. I hardly know what to think of people who can talk
in this way. To say nothing of the preference, the mere parallel is only
less ludicrous and arbitrary than would be one between Moore and Isaiah.
Tennyson is an exquisite and sumptuous poet of the third, perhaps the
fourth order; as certainly below Milton and Virgil as Milton and Virgil
are certainly below Æschylus and Homer. His full-fluted verbal music,
which is one of his chief merits, is of an extraordinary beauty. But in
this respect the comparison between him and Walt Whitman is that between
melody and harmony—between a song by Franz Abt or Schubert and a
symphony by Beethoven. Speaking generally, and not with exact justice to
either, the words of Tennyson, irrespective of their sense, make music
to the ear; while the sense of Walt Whitman’s words makes a loftier
music in the mind. For a music, perfect and vast, subtle and more than
auricular—woven not alone from the verbal sounds and rhythmic cadences,
but educed by the thought and feeling of the verse from the reader’s
soul, by the power of a spell few hold—I know of nothing superior to
“By the bivouac’s fitful flame,” the “Hymn of Dead Soldiers,” the
“Spirit whose work is done,” the “Arming of Mannahatta,” or that most
mournful and noble of all love songs, “Out of the rolling ocean, the
crowd,” in _Drum-Taps_; or the “Word out of the Sea,” the “Elemental
Drifts,” the entire section entitled “Walt Whitman,” the hymn commencing
“Splendor of falling day,” or the great salute to the French Revolution
of ’93, entitled “France,” in _Leaves of Grass_. If these are not
examples of great structural harmony as well as of the highest poetry,
there are none in literature. And if all these were wanting, there is a
single poem in the late volume, _Drum-Taps_, which, if the author had
never written another line, would be sufficient to place him among the
chief poets of the world. I do not refer to “Chanting the Square
Deific”—though that also would be sufficient, in its incomparable
breadth and grandeur of conception and execution, to establish the
highest poetic reputation—but to the strain commemorating the death of
the beloved President, commencing, “When lilacs last in the door-yard
bloomed”—a poem whose rich and sacred beauty and rapture of tender
religious passion, spreading aloft into the sublime, leave it unique and
solitary in literature, and will make it the chosen and immortal hymn of
Death forever. Emperors might well elect to die, could their memories be
surrounded with such a requiem, which, next to the grief and love of the
people, is the grandest and the only grand funeral music poured around
Lincoln’s bier. In the face of works like these, testimony of the
presence on earth of a mighty soul, I am thunderstruck at the low tone
of the current criticism. Even from eminent persons, who ought to know
how to measure literature, and who are friendly to this author, I hear,
mingled with inadequate praise, the self-same censures—the very
epithets, even, which Voltaire, not more ridiculously, passed upon
Shakespeare. Take care, gentlemen! What you, like Voltaire, take for
rudeness, chaos, barbarism, lack of form, may be the sacred and
magnificent wildness of a virgin world of poetry, all unlike these fine
and ordered Tennysonian rose-gardens which are your ideal, but excelling
these as the globe excels the parterre. I, at any rate, am not deceived.
I see how swiftly the smart, bright, conventional standards of modern
criticism would assign Isaiah or Ezekiel to the limbo of abortions. I
see of how limited worth are the wit and scholarship of these _Saturday
Reviews_ and _London Examiners_, with their _doppelgangers_ on this side
of the Atlantic, by the treatment some poetic masterpiece of China or
Hindustan receives when it falls into their hands for judgment. Any
thing not cast in modern conventional forms, any novel or amazing
beauty, strikes them as comic. Read Mr. Buckley’s notes, even at this
late day, on a poet so incredibly great as Æschylus. Read an Æschylus
illustrated by reference to Nicholas Nickleby, Mrs. Bombazine, and
Mantalini, and censured in contemptuous, jocular, or flippant
annotations—this, too, by an Oxford scholar of rank and merit! No
wonder _Leaves of Grass_ goes underrated or unperceived. Modern
criticism is Voltaire estimating the _Apocalypse_ as “dirt” and roaring
with laughter over the leaves of Ezekiel. Why? Because this poetry has
not the court tread, the perfume, the royal purple of Racine—only its
own wild and formless incomparable sublimity. Voltaire was an immense
and noble person; only it was not part of his greatness to be able to
see that other greatness which transcends common-sense as the Infinite
transcends the Finite. These children of Voltaire, also, who make the
choirs of modern criticism, have great merits. But to justly estimate
poetry of the first order, is not one of them. “Shakespeare’s _Tempest_,
or the _Midsummer Night’s Dream_, or any such damned nonsense as that,”
said one of this school to me a month ago. “Look at that perpendicular
grocery sign-board: the letters all fantastic and reading from top to
bottom: a mere oddity; that is _Leaves of Grass_,” said another, a
person of eminence. No, gentlemen! you and I differ. I see, very
clearly, the nature of a work like this, the warmest praise of which,
not to mention your blame, has been meagre and insufficient to the last
degree, and which centuries must ponder before they can sufficiently
honor. You have had your say; let me have at least the beginning of
mine: Nothing that America had before in literature, rose above
construction: this is a creation. Idle, and worse than idle, is any
attempt to place this author either among or below the poets of the day.
They are but singers; he is a bard. In him you have one of that mighty
brotherhood who, more than statesmen, mould the future: who, as Fletcher
of Saltoun said, when they make the songs of a nation, it matters not
who make the laws. I class him boldly, and the future will confirm my
judgment, among the great creative minds of the world. By a quality
almost incommunicable, which makes its possessor, no matter what his
diversity or imperfections, equal with the Supremes of art, and by the
very structure of his mind, he belongs there. His place is beside
Shakespeare, Æschylus, Cervantes, Dante, Homer, Isaiah—the bards of the
last ascent, the brothers of the radiant summit. And if any man think
this estimate extravagant, I leave him, as Lord Bacon says, to the
gravity of that judgment and pass on. Enough for me to pronounce this
book grandly good and supremely great. Clamor, on the score of its
morality, is nothing but a form of turpitude; denial of its greatness is
nothing but an insanity; and the roar of Sodom and the laughter of
Bedlam shall not, by a hair’s breadth, swerve my verdict.

As for those passages which have been so strangely interpreted, I have
to say that nothing but the horrible inanity of prudery, to which
civilization has become subject, and which affects even many good
persons, could cloud and distort their palpable innocence and nobleness.
What chance has an author to a reasonable interpretation of such
utterances in an age when squeamishness, the Siamese twin-brother of
indelicacy, is throned as the censor of all life? Look at the nearest,
the commonest and homeliest evidences of the abysm into which we have
fallen! Here in my knowledge is an estimable family which, when the baby
playing on the floor kicked up its skirts, I have repeatedly seen rush
_en masse_ to pull down the immodest petticoat. Here is a lady whose
shame of her body is such, that she will not disrobe in the presence of
one of her own sex, and thinks it horrible to sleep at night without
being swaddled in half her garments. Everywhere you see women
perpetually glancing to be sure their skirts are quite down; twisting
their heads over their shoulders, like some of the damned in Dante, to
get a rear view; drawing in their feet if so much as the toe happens to
protrude beyond the hem of the gown, and in various ways betraying a
morbid consciousness which is more offensive than positive immodesty.
When I went to the hospital, I saw one of those pretty and good girls,
who in muslin and ribbons ornament the wards, and are called nurses,
pick up her skirts and skurry away, flushing hectic, with averted face,
because as she passed a cot the poor fellow who lay there happened, in
his uneasy turnings, to thrust part of a manly leg from beneath the
coverlid. I once heard Emerson severely censured in a private company,
five or six persons present, and I the only dissenting voice, because in
one of his essays he had used the word “spermatic.” When Tennyson
published the _Idyls of the King_, some of the journals in both America
and England, and several persons in my own hearing, censured the weird
and magnificent _Vivien_, one of his finest poems, as “immoral” and
“vulgar.” When Charles Sumner, in the debate on Louisiana, characterized
the new-formed State as “a seven months’ child begotten by the bayonet,
in criminal conjunction with the spirit of caste”—a stroke of absolute
genius—he was censured by the public prints, and reminded that there
were ladies in the gallery! Lately the London _Observer_, one of the
most eminent of the British journals, in a long and labored editorial on
the bathing at Margate, denounced the British wives and matrons in the
severest terms for sitting on the beach when men were bathing in “slight
bathing-dresses” (it was not even pretended that the men were nude)—and
even went the length of demanding of the civil authorities that they
should invoke the interference of Parliament to stop this scandal! These
are fair minor specimens of the prudery, worse than vice, but also the
concomitant of the most shocking vice, which prevails everywhere. Its
travesty is the dressing in pantalettes the “limbs” of the piano; its
insolent tragi-comedy is the expulsion of Shakespeare from office
because he writes “indecent passages;” its tragedy is the myriad results
of wrong and crime and ruin, carried into all the details of every
relation of life.

A civilization in which such things as I have mentioned can be thought
or done, is guilty to the core. It is not purity, it is impurity, and of
the shallowest kind, which calls clothes more decent than the naked
body—thus inanely conferring upon the work of the tailor or milliner a
modesty denied to the work of God. It is not innocent but guilty thought
which attaches shame, secrecy, baseness, and horror to great and august
parts and functions of humanity. The tacit admission everywhere
prevalent that portions of the human physiology are base; that the
amative feelings and acts of the sexes, even when hallowed by marriage,
are connected with a low sensuality; and that these, with such subjects
or occurrences as the conception and birth of children, are to be
absconded from, blushed at, concealed, ignored, withheld from education,
and in every way treated as if they belonged to the category of sins
against Nature, is not only in itself a contemptible insanity, but a
main source of unspeakable personal and social evil. From the morbid
state of mind which such a theory and practice must induce, are spawned
a thousand guilty actions of every description and degree. There is no
occurrence in the whole vast and diversified range of sexual evil, from
the first lewd thought in the mind of the budding child, the very
suspicion of which makes the parent tremble, down to the last ghastly
and bloody spasm of lust which rends its hapless victim in some rusurban
woodland, that is not fed mainly from this mystery and mother of
abominations to whose care civilization has remitted the entire subject.
The poet who, in the spirit of that divine utility which marked the
first great bards and will mark the last, seeks to make literature
remediate to an estate like this, works in the best interests of his
country and his fellow-beings, and deserves their gratitude. This is
what Walt Whitman has done. Directly and indirectly, in forms as various
as the minds he seeks to influence; in frank opposition to the great
sexual falsehood by which we are ruled and ruined, he has thrown into
civilization a conception intended to be slowly and insensibly absorbed,
and to ultimately appear in results of good—the conception of the
individual as a divine democracy of essences, powers, attributes,
functions, organs—all equal, all sacred, all consecrate to noble use;
the sexual part, the same as the rest; no more a subject for mystery or
shame or secrecy than the intellectual or the manual or the alimentary
or the locomotive part—divinely common-place as head, or hand, or
stomach, or foot; and, though sacred, to be regarded as so ordinary that
it shall be employed, the same as any other part, for the purposes of
literature—an idea which he exemplifies in his poetry by a metaphorical
use which it is a deep disgrace to any intellect to misunderstand. This
is his lesson. This is one of the central ideas which rule the myriad
teeming play of his volume, and interpret it as a law of Nature
interprets the complex play of facts which proceeds from it. This, then,
is not license, but thought. It may be erroneous, it may be chimerical,
it may be ineffectual; but it is thought, serious and solemn thought, on
a most difficult and deeply immersed question—thought emanating from
the deep source of a great love and care for men, and seeking nothing
but a pure human welfare. When, therefore, any persons undertake to
outrage and injure its author for having given it to the world, it is
not merely as the pigmy incarnations of the depraved modesty, the
surface morality, the filthy and libidinous decency of the age, but it
is as the persecutors of thought that they stand before us. It is no
excuse for them to say, that such treatment of Walt Whitman is
justifiable, because his book appears to them bad. Waiving every other
consideration, I have to inform them that on this subject they should
not permit themselves the immodesty of a judgment. It is not for such as
they to attempt to prison in the poor cell of their opinion the vast
journey and illumination of the human mind. No matter what the book
seems to them, they should remember that an author deserves to be tried
by his peers, and that a book may easily seem to some persons quite
another thing from what it really is to others. Here is Rabelais, a
writer who wears all the crowns; but even Mr. Harlan would consider Walt
Whitman white as purity beside him. “Filth,” “zanyism,” “grossness,”
“profligacy,” “licentiousness,” “sensuality,” “beastliness”—these are
samples of the epithets which have fallen, like a rain of excrement, on
Rabelais for three hundred years. And yet it is of him that the
holy-hearted Coleridge—an authority of the first order on all purely
literary or ethical questions—it is of him that Coleridge says, and
says justly: “I could write a treatise in praise of _the moral
elevation_ of Rabelais’ work which would make the Church stare, and the
Conventicle groan, and yet would be the truth, and nothing but the
truth.” The moral elevation of Rabelais! A great criticism, a needed
word. It is just. No matter for seeming—Rabelais is good to the very
core. Rabelais’ book, viewed with reference to ensemble, viewed in
relation, viewed in its own proper quality by other than cockney
standards, is righteous to the uttermost extreme. So is the work of Walt
Whitman, far other in character, and far less obnoxious to criticism
than that of Rabelais, but which demands at least as liberal a judgment,
and which it is not for any deputy, however high in office, to assign to
shame. I know not what further vicissitude of insult and outrage is in
store for this great man. It may be that the devotees of a castrated
literature, the earthworms that call themselves authors, the
confectioners that pass for poets, the flies that are recognized as
critics, the bigots, the dilettanti, the prudes and the fools, are more
potent than I dream to mar the fortunes of his earthly hours; but above
and beyond them uprises a more majestic civilization in the immense and
sane serenities of futurity; and the man who has achieved that sublime
thing, a genuine book; who has written to make his land greater, her
citizens better, his race nobler; who has striven to serve men by
communicating to them that which they least know—their own experience;
who has thrown into living verse a philosophy designed to exalt life to
a higher level of sincerity, reality, religion; who has torn away
disguises and illusions, and restored to commonest things, and the
simplest and roughest people, their divine significance and natural,
antique dignity; and who has wrapped his country and all created things
as with splendors of sunrise, in the beams of a powerful and gorgeous
poetry—that man, whatever be the clouds that close around his fame, is
assured illustrious; and when every face lowers, when every hand is
raised against him, turning his back upon his day and generation, he may
write upon his book, with all the pride and grief of the calumniated
Æschylus, the haughty dedication that poet graved upon his hundred
dramas: TO TIME!

And Time will remember him. He holds upon the future this supreme claim
of all high poets—behind the book, a life loyal to humanity! Never, if
I can help it, shall be forgotten those immense and divine labors in the
hospitals of Washington, among the wounded of the war, to which he
voluntarily devoted himself, as the best service he could render to his
struggling country, and which illustrate that boundless love which is at
once the dominant element of his character, and the central source of
his genius. How can I tell the nature and extent of that sublime
ministration! During those years, Washington was a city in whose unbuilt
places and around whose borders were thickly planted dense white
clusters of barracks. These were the hospitals—neat, orderly,
rectangular, strange towns, whose every citizen lay drained with
sickness or wrung with pain. There, in those long wards, in rows of cots
on either side, were stretched, in all attitudes and aspects of
mutilation, of pale repose, of contorted anguish, of death, the martyrs
of the war; and among them, with a soul that tenderly remembered the
little children in many a dwelling mournful for those fathers, the worn
and anxious wives, haggard with thinking of those husbands, the girls
weeping their spirits from their eyes for those lovers, the mothers who
from afar yearned to the bedsides of those sons, walked Walt Whitman in
the spirit of Christ, soothing, healing, consoling, restoring, night and
day, for years; never failing, never tiring, constant, vigilant,
faithful; performing, without fee or reward, his self-imposed duty;
giving to the task all his time and means, and doing every thing that it
is possible for one unaided human being to do. Others fail, others flag;
good souls that came often and did their best, yield and drop away; he
remains. Winter and summer, night and day, every day in the week, every
day in the year, all the time, till the winter of ’65, when for a few
hours daily, during six months, his duties to the Government detain him;
after that, all the time he can spare, he visits the hospitals. What
does he do? See! At the red aceldama of Fredericksburg, in ’62, he is in
a hospital on the banks of the Rappahannock; it is a large brick house,
full of wounded and dying; in the yard, at the foot of a tree, is a
cart-load of amputated legs, arms, hands, feet, fingers; dead bodies
shrouded in brown woollen blankets are near; there are fresh graves in
the yard: he is at work in the house among the officers and men, lying,
unclean and bloody, in their old clothes; he is up stairs and down; he
is poor, he has nothing to give this time, but he writes letters for the
wounded; he cheers up the desponding; he gives love. Some of the men,
war-sad, passionately cling to him; they weep; he will sit for hours
with them if it will give them comfort. Here he is in Washington, after
Chancellorsville, at night, on the wharf: two boat-loads of wounded (and
oh, such wounded!) have been landed; they lie scattered about on the
landing, in the rain, drenched, livid, lying on the ground, on old
quilts, on blankets; their heads, their limbs bound in bloody rags; a
few torches light the scene; the ambulances, the callous drivers are
here; groans, sometimes a scream, resound through the flickering light
and the darkness. He is there, moving around; he soothes, he comforts,
he consoles; he assists to lift the wounded into the ambulances; he
helps to place the worst cases on the stretchers; his kiss is warm upon
the pallid lips of those who yearn to him, often mere children; his
tears drop upon the faces of the dying. Here he is in the hospitals of
Washington—the Campbell, the Patent Office, the Eighth street, the
Judiciary, the Carver, the Douglas, the Armory Square. He writes
letters; he writes to fathers, mothers, brothers, wives, sweethearts;
some of the soldiers are poor penmen; some cannot get paper and
envelopes; some fear to write lest they should worry the folks at home:
he writes for them all; he uses that genius which shall endure to the
latest generation, to say the felicitous, the consoling, the cheering,
the prudent, the best word. He goes through the wards; he talks
cheerfully, he distributes amusing reading-matter; at night or by day,
when the horrible monotony of the hospital weighs like lead on every
soul, he reads to the men; he is careful to sit away from the cot of any
poor fellow so sick or wounded as to be easily disturbed, but he gathers
into a large group as many as he can, and amuses them with some story or
enlivening game, like that of Twenty Questions, or starts some
discussion, or with some device dispels the gloom. For his daily
occupation, he goes from ward to ward, doing all he can to hearten and
revive the spirits of the sufferers, and keep the balance in favor of
their recovery. Usually, his plan is to pass, with haversack strapped
across his shoulder, from cot to cot, distributing small gifts; his
theory is that these men, far from home, lonely, sick at heart, need
more than any thing some practical token that they are not forsaken,
that some one feels a fatherly or brotherly interest in them; hence, he
gives them what he can; to particular cases, entirely penniless, he
distributes small sums of money, fifteen cents, twenty cents, thirty
cents, fifty cents, not much to each, for there are many, but under the
circumstances these little sums are and mean a great deal. He also
distributes and directs envelopes, gives letter-paper, postage-stamps,
tobacco, apples, figs, sweet biscuit, preserves, blackberries; gets
delicate food for special cases; sometimes a dish of oysters or a dainty
piece of meat, or some savory morsel for some poor creature who loathes
the hospital fare, but whose appetite may be tempted. In the hot weather
he buys boxes of oranges and distributes them, grateful to lips baked
with fever; he buys boxes of lemons, he buys sugar, to make lemonade for
those parched throats of sick soldiers; he buys canned peaches,
strawberries, pears; he buys in the market fresh fruit; he buys
ice-cream and treats the whole hospital; he buys whatever delicacies and
luxuries his limited resources will allow, and he makes them go as far
as he can. Where does he get the means for this expenditure? For Walt
Whitman is poor;—he is poor, and has a right to be proud of his
poverty, for it is the sacred, the ancient, the immemorial poverty of
goodness and genius. He gets the means by writing for newspapers; he
expends all he gets upon his boys, his darlings, the sick and maimed
soldiers—the young heroes of the land who saved their country, the
laborers of America who fought for the hopes of the world. He adds to
his own earnings the contributions of noble souls, often strangers, who,
in Boston, in New York, in Providence, in Brooklyn, in Salem, in
Washington and elsewhere, have heard that such a man walks the wards,
and who volunteer to send him this assistance; when at last, he gets a
place under Government, and till Mr. Harlan turns him out, he has a
salary which he spends in the same way; sometimes his wrung heart gets
the better of his prudence, and he spends till he himself is in
difficulties. He gives all his money, he gives all his time, he gives
all his love. To every inmate of the hospital something, if only a vital
word, a cheering touch, a caress, a trifling gift; but always in his
rounds he selects the special cases, the sorely wounded, the deeply
despondent, the homesick, the dying: to these he devotes himself; he
buoys them up with fond words, with caresses, with personal affection;
he bends over them, strong, clean, cheerful, perfumed, loving, and his
magnetic touch and love sustain them. He does not shrink from the smell
of their sickening gangrene; he does not flinch from their bloody and
rotten mutilations; he draws nigher for all that; he sticks closer; he
dresses those wounds; he fans those burning temples; he moistens those
parched lips; he washes those wasted bodies; he watches often and often
in the dim ward by the sufferer’s cot all night long; he reads, from the
New Testament, the words sweeter than music to the sinking soul; he
soothes with prayer the bedside of the dying; he sits, mournful and
loving, by the wasted dead. How can I tell the story of his labors! How
can I describe the scenes among which he moved with such endurance and
devotion, watched by me, for years! Few know the spectacle presented by
those grim wards. It was hideous. I have been there at night when it
seemed that I should die with sympathy if I stayed;—when the horrible
attitudes of anguish, the horizontal shapes of cadaver on the white
cots, the quiet sleepers, the excruciated emaciations of men, the bloody
bandages, the smell of plastered sores, the dim lamp-light, the long
white ward, the shallow girl-nurse flirting with the wardmaster or
surgeon, the tinkle of the ward piano mixed with the groans of some
grisly wretch, half hidden behind a screen, naked, shorn of both arms,
held by the assistant upon a stool, made up a scene whose
well-compounded horror is unspeakable. Now realize a man without worldly
inducement, without reward, without the mandate of official duty,
voluntarily, from love and compassion only, giving up his life to scenes
like these; foregoing pleasure and rest for vigils, as in chambers of
torture, among the despairing, the mangled, the dying, the forms upon
which shell and rifle and sabre had wrought every bizarre atrocity of
mutilation; immuring himself in the air of their sighs, their moans, the
mutter and scream of their delirium; breathing the stench of their
putrid wounds; taking up his part and lot with them, living a life of
privation and denial, and hoarding his scanty means for the relief and
mitigation of their anguish. That man is Walt Whitman! I said his labors
have been immense. The word is well chosen. I speak within bounds when I
say that, during those years, he has been in contact with, and, in one
form or another, either in hospital or on the field, personally
ministered to, upward of one hundred thousand sick and wounded men. You
mothers of America, these were your sons! Faithfully and with a mother’s
love, he tended them for you! Many and many a life has he saved—many a
time has he felt his heart grow great with that delicious triumph—many
a home owes its best beloved to him. Sick and wounded, officers and
privates, the black soldiers the same as the white, the teamsters, the
poor creatures in the contraband camps, the rebel the same as the
loyal—he did his best for them all; they were all sufferers, they were
all men.—Let him pass. I note Thoreau’s saying, that he suggests
something more than human. It is true. I see it in his book and in his
life. To that something more than human which is also in all men—to the
hour of judgment, to the hour of sanity—let me resign him. Not for such
as I to vindicate such as he. Not for him, perhaps, the recognition of
his day and generation. But a life and deeds like his, lightly esteemed
by men, sink deep into the memory of Man. Great is the stormy fight of
Zutphen; it is the young lion of English Protestantism springing in
haughty fury for the defence of the Netherlands from the bloody ravin of
Spain; but Philip Sidney passing the flask of water from his own lips to
the dying soldier looms gigantic, and makes all the foreground of its
noble purpose and martial rage; and whatever be the verdict of the
present, sure am I that hereafter and to the latest ages, when Bull Run
and Shiloh and Port Hudson, when Vicksburg and Stone River and Fort
Donelson, when Pea Ridge and Chancellorsville and Gettysburg and the
Wilderness, and the great march from Atlanta to Savannah, and Richmond
rolled in flame, and all the battles for the life of the Republic
against her last internal foe, are gathered up in accumulated terraces
of struggle upon the mountain of history, well relieved against those
bright and bloody tumultuous giant tableaux, and all the dust and
thunder of a noble war, the men and women of America will love to gaze
upon the stalwart form of the good gray poet, bending to heal the hurts
of their wounded and soothe the souls of their dying, and the deep and
simple words of the last great martyr will be theirs—“Well, he looks
like A MAN!”

So let me leave him. And if there be any who think this tribute in bad
taste, even to a poet so great, a person so unusual, a man so heroic and
loving, I answer, that when on grounds of taste foes withhold
detraction, friends may withhold eulogy; and that at any rate I
recognize no reason for keeping back just words of love and reverence
when, as in this case, they must glow upon the sullen foil of the
printed hatreds of ten years. To that long record of hostility, I am
only glad and proud to be able to oppose this record of affection.—And,
with respect to the crowning enmity of the Secretary of the Interior,
let no person misjudge the motives upon which I denounce it. Personally,
apart from this act, I have nothing against Mr. Harlan. He is of my own
party; and my politics have been from my youth essentially the same as
his own. I do not know him; I have never even seen him; I criticise no
attitude nor action of his life but this; and I criticise this with as
little personality as I can give to an action so personal. I withhold,
too, as far as I can, every expression of resentment; and no one who
knew all I know of this matter could fail to credit me with singular and
great moderation. For, behind what I have related, there is another
history, every incident of which I have recovered from the obscurity to
which it was confided; and, as I think of it, it is with difficulty that
I restrain my just indignation. Instead of my comparatively cold and
sober treatment, this transaction deserves rather the pitiless exposure
and the measureless, stern anger and red-hot steel scourge of Juvenal.
But I leave untold its darkest details; and, waiving every other
consideration, I rest solely and squarely on the general indignity and
injury this action offers to intellectual liberty. I claim that to expel
an author from a public office and subject him to public contumely,
solely because he has published a book which no one can declare immoral
without declaring all the grand books immoral, is to affix a penalty to
thought, and to obstruct the freedom of letters. I declare this act the
audacious captain of a series of acts and a style of opinions whose
tendency and effect throughout Christendom is to dwarf and degrade
literature, and to make great books impossible, except under pains of
martyrdom. As such, I arraign it before every liberal and thoughtful
mind. I denounce it as a sinister precedent; as a ban upon the free
action of genius; as a logical insult to all commanding literature; and
as in every way a most serious and heinous wrong. Difference of opinion
there may and must be upon the topics which in this letter I have
grouped around it, but upon the act itself there can be none. As I drag
it up here into the sight of the world, I call upon every scholar, every
man of letters, every editor, every good fellow everywhere who wields
the pen, to make common cause with me in rousing upon it the full
tempest of reprobation it deserves. I remember Tennyson, a spirit of
vengeance over the desecrated grave of Moore; I think of Scott rolling
back the tide of obloquy from Byron; I see Addison gilding the
blackening fame of Swift; I mark Southampton befriending Shakespeare; I
recall Du Bellay enshielding Rabelais; I behold Hutten fortressing
Luther; here is Boccaccio lifting the darkness from Dante, and
scattering flame on his foes in Florence; this is Bembo protecting
Pomponatius; that is Grostête enfolding Roger Bacon from the monkish
fury; there, covered with light, is Aristophanes defending Æschylus: and
if there lives aught of that old chivalry of letters, which in all ages
has sprung to the succor and defence of genius, I summon it to act the
part of honor and duty upon a wrong which, done to a single member of
the great confraternity of literature, is done to all, and which flings
insult and menace upon every immortal page that dares transcend the
wicked heart or the constricted brain. I send this letter to Victor
Hugo, for its passport through Europe; I send it to John Stuart Mill, to
Newman, and Matthew Arnold, for England; I send it to Emerson and
Wendell Phillips; to Charles Sumner; to every Senator and Representative
in Congress; to all our journalists; to the whole American people; to
every one who guards the freedom of letters and the liberty of thought
throughout the civilized world. God grant that not in vain upon this
outrage do I invoke the judgment of the mighty spirit of literature, and
the fires of every honest heart!

                                     WILLIAM DOUGLAS O’CONNOR,

                                                  Of Massachusetts.




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Transcriber’s Notes:

Punctuation and type-setting errors have been corrected without note.
Hyphenation and archaic spellings have been retained as in the original.





End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Good Gray Poet, A Vindication, by 
William Douglas O'Connor

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