The Letters of Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman Part 3

Every spear of gra.s.s--the frames, limbs, organs, of men and women, and all that concerns them, All these to me are unspeakably perfect miracles."

The natural _is_ the supernatural, says Carlyle. It is the message that comes to our time from all quarters alike; from poetry, from science, from the deep brooding of the student of human history. Science materialistic?

Rather it is the current theology that is materialistic in comparison.

Science may truly be said to have annihilated our gross and brutish conceptions of matter, and to have revealed it to us as subtle, spiritual, energetic beyond our powers of realization. It is for the Poet to increase these powers of realization. He it is who must awaken us to the perception of a new heaven and a new earth here where we stand on this old earth. He it is who must, in Walt Whitman's words, indicate the path between reality and the soul.

Above all is every thought and feeling in these poems touched by the light of the great revolutionary truth that man, unfolded through vast stretches of time out of lowly antecedents, is a rising, not a fallen creature; emerging slowly from purely animal life; as slowly as the strata are piled and the ocean beds hollowed; whole races still barely emerged, countless individuals in the foremost races barely emerged: "the wolf, the snake, the hog" yet lingering in the best; but new ideals achieved, and others come in sight, so that what once seemed fit is fit no longer, is adhered to uneasily and with shame; the conflicts and antagonisms between what we call good and evil, at once the sign and the means of emergence, and needing to account for them no supposed primeval disaster, no outside power thwarting and marring the Divine handiwork, the perfect fitness to its time and place of all that has proceeded from the Great Source. In a word that Evil is relative; is that which the slowly developing reason and conscience bid us leave behind. The prowess of the lion, the subtlety of the fox, are cruelty and duplicity in man.

"Silent and amazed, when a little boy, I remember I heard the preacher every Sunday put G.o.d in his statements, As contending against some being or influence."

says the poet. And elsewhere, "Faith, very old now, scared away by science"--by the daylight science lets in upon our miserable, inadequate, idolatrous conceptions of G.o.d and of His works, and on the sophistications, subterfuges, moral impossibilities, by which we have endeavoured to reconcile the irreconcilable--the coexistence of omnipotent Goodness and an absolute Power of Evil--"Faith must be brought back by the same power that caused her departure: restored with new sway, deeper, wider, higher than ever." And what else, indeed, at bottom, is science so busy at? For what is Faith? "Faith," to borrow venerable and unsurpa.s.sed words, "is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." And how obtain evidence of things not seen but by a knowledge of things seen? And how know what we may hope for, but by knowing the truth of what is, here and now? For seen and unseen are parts of the Great Whole: all the parts interdependent, closely related; all alike have proceeded from and are manifestations of the Divine Source. Nature is not the barrier between us and the unseen but the link, the communication; she, too, has something behind appearances, has an unseen soul; she, too, is made of "innumerable energies." Knowledge is not faith, but it is faith's indispensable preliminary and starting ground. Faith runs ahead to fetch glad tidings for us; but if she start from a basis of ignorance and illusion, how can she but run in the wrong direction? "Suppose," said that impetuous lover and seeker of truth, Clifford, "Suppose all moving things to be suddenly stopped at some instant, and that we could be brought fresh, without any previous knowledge, to look at the petrified scene. The spectacle would be immensely absurd. Crowds of people would be senselessly standing on one leg in the street looking at one another's backs; others would be wasting their time by sitting in a train in a place difficult to get at, nearly all with their mouths open, and their bodies in some contorted, unrestful posture. Clocks would stand with their pendulums on one side. Everything would be disorderly, conflicting, in its wrong place.

But once remember that the world is in motion, is going somewhere, and everything will be accounted for and found just as it should be. Just so great a change of view, just so complete an explanation is given to us when we recognize that the nature of man and beast and of all the world is _going somewhere_. The maladaptions in organic nature are seen to be steps toward the improvement or discarding of imperfect organs. The _baneful strife which lurketh inborn in us, and goeth on the way with us to hurt us_, is found to be the relic of a time of savage or even lower condition." "Going somewhere!" That is the meaning then of all our perplexities! That changes a mystery which stultified and contradicted the best we knew into a mystery which teaches, allures, elevates; which harmonizes what we know with what we hope. By it we begin to

"... see by the glad light, And breathe the sweet air of futurity."

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

"Each of us inevitable; Each of us limitless--each of us with his or her right upon the earth; Each of us allow'd the eternal purports of the earth; Each of us here as divinely as any are here.

"You Hottentot with clicking palate! You woolly hair'd hordes!

You own'd persons, dropping sweat-drops or blood-drops!

You human forms with the fathomless ever-impressive countenances of brutes!

I dare not refuse you--the scope of the world, and of time and s.p.a.ce are upon me.

"I do not prefer others so very much before you either; I do not say one word against you, away back there, where you stand; (You will come forward in due time to my side.) My spirit has pa.s.s'd in compa.s.sion and determination around the whole earth; I have look'd for equals and lovers, and found them ready for me in all lands; I think some divine rapport has equalized me with them.

"O vapours! I think I have risen with you, and moved away to distant continents and fallen down there, for reasons; I think I have blown with you, O winds; O waters, I have finger'd every sh.o.r.e with you.

"I have run through what any river or strait of the globe has run through; I have taken my stand on the bases of peninsulas, and on the high embedded rocks, to cry thence.

"_Salut au monde!_ What cities the light or warmth penetrates, I penetrate those cities myself; All islands to which birds wing their way I wing my way myself.

"Toward all, I raise high the perpendicular hand--I make the signal, To remain after me in sight forever, For all the haunts and homes of men."

But "Hold!" says the reader, especially if he be one who loves science, who loves to feel the firm ground under his feet, "That the species has a great future before it we may well believe; already we see the indications. But that the individual has is quite another matter. We can but balance probabilities here, and the probabilities are very heavy on the wrong side; the poets must throw in weighty matter indeed to turn the scale the other way!" Be it so: but ponder a moment what science herself has to say bearing on this theme; what are the widest, deepest facts she has reached down to. INDESTRUCTIBILITY: Amidst ceaseless change and seeming decay all the elements, all the forces (if indeed they be not one and the same) which operate and substantiate those changes, imperishable; neither matter nor force capable of annihilation. Endless transformations, disappearances, new combinations, but diminution of the total amount never; missing in one place or shape to be found in another, disguised ever so long, ready always to re-emerge. "A particle of oxygen," wrote Faraday, "is ever a particle of oxygen; nothing can in the least wear it.

If it enters into combination and disappears as oxygen, if it pa.s.s through a thousand combinations, animal, vegetable, mineral--if it lie hid for a thousand years and then be evolved, it is oxygen with its first qualities neither more nor less." So then out of the universe is no door. CONTINUITY again is one of Nature's irrevocable words; everything the result and outcome of what went before; no gaps, no jumps; always a connecting principle which carries forward the great scheme of things as a related whole, which subtly links past and present, like and unlike. Nothing breaks with its past. "It is not," says Helmholtz, "the definite ma.s.s of substance which now const.i.tutes the body to which the continuance of the individual is attached. Just as the flame remains the same in appearance and continues to exist with the same form and structure although it draws every moment fresh combustible vapour and fresh oxygen from the air into the vortex of its ascending current; and just as the wave goes on in unaltered form and is yet being reconstructed every moment from fresh particles of water, so is it also in the living being. For the material of the body like that of flame is subject to continuous and comparatively rapid change--a change the more rapid the livelier the activity of the organs in question. Some const.i.tuents are renewed from day to day, some from month to month, and others only after years. That which continues to exist as a particular individual is, like the wave and the flame, only the _form of motion_ which continually attracts fresh matter into its vortex and expels the old. The observer with a deaf ear recognizes the vibration of sound as long as it is visible and can be felt, bound up with other heavy matter. Are our senses in reference to life like the deaf ear in this respect?"

"You are not thrown to the winds--you gather certainly and safely around yourself;

It is not to diffuse you that you were born of your mother and father--it is to identify you; It is not that you should be undecided, but that you should be decided; Something long preparing and formless is arrived and form'd in you, You are henceforth secure, whatever comes or goes.

"O Death! the voyage of Death!

The beautiful touch of Death, soothing and benumbing a few moments for reasons; Myself discharging my excrement.i.tious body to be burn'd or reduced to powder or buried.

My real body doubtless left me for other spheres, My voided body, nothing more to me, returning to the purifications, farther offices, eternal uses of the earth."

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

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

"... in truth Is but another name for absolute power, And clearest insight, amplitude of mind And reason in her most exalted mood."

Let Walt Whitman speak for us:

"And I know I am solid and sound; To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow: All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.

"I know I am deathless; I know this...o...b..t of mine cannot be swept by the carpenter's compa.s.s; I know I shall not pa.s.s like a child's carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night.

"I know I am august; I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood; I see that the elementary laws never apologize; (I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by, after all.)

"I exist as I am--that is enough; If no other in the world be aware I sit content; And if each one and all be aware, I sit content.

"One world is aware, and by far the largest to me, and that is myself; And whether I come to my own to-day, or in ten thousand or ten million years, I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.

"My foothold is tenon'd and mortis'd in granite; I laugh at what you call dissolution; And I know the amplitude of time."

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

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

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

"To know the Universe itself as a road--as many roads As roads for travelling souls.

For ever alive; for ever forward.

Stately, solemn, sad, withdrawn, baffled, mad, turbulent, feeble, dissatisfied; Desperate, proud, fond, sick; Accepted by men, rejected by men.

They go! they go! I know that they go, but I know not where they go.

But I know they go toward the best, toward something great; The whole Universe indicates that it is good."

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

"... Man is only weak Through his mistrust and want of hope,"

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

"I hear and behold G.o.d in every object, yet understand G.o.d not in the least."

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

In what sense may Walt Whitman be called the Poet of Democracy? It is as giving utterance to this profoundly religious faith in man. He is rather the prophet of what is to be than the celebrator of what is. "Democracy,"

he writes, "is a word the real gist of which still sleeps quite unawakened, notwithstanding the resonance and the many angry tempests out of which its syllables have come from pen or tongue. It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten because that history has yet to be enacted. It is in some sort younger brother of another great and often used word, Nature, whose history also waits unwritten." Political democracy, now taking shape, is the house to live in, and whilst what we demand of it is room for all, fair chances for all, none disregarded or left out as of no account, the main question, the kind of life that is to be led in that house is altogether beyond the ken of the statesmen as such, and is involved in those deepest facts of the nature and destiny of man which are the themes of Walt Whitman's writings. The practical outcome of that exalted and all-accepting faith in the scheme of things, and in man, toward whom all has led up and in whom all concentrates as the manifestation, the revelation of Divine Power is a changed estimate of himself; a higher reverence for, a loftier belief in the heritage of himself; a perception that pride, not humility, is the true homage to his Maker; that "n.o.blesse oblige" is for the Race, not for a handful; that it is mankind and womankind and their high destiny which constrain to greatness, which can no longer stoop to meanness and lies and base aims, but must needs clothe themselves in "the majesty of honest dealing"

(majestic because demanding courage as good as the soldier's, self-denial as good as the saint's for every-day affairs), and walk erect and fearless, a law to themselves, sternest of all lawgivers. Looking back to the palmy days of feudalism, especially as immortalized in Shakespeare's plays, what is it we find most admirable? what is it that fascinates? It is the n.o.ble pride, the lofty self-respect; the dignity, the courage and audacity of its great personages. But this pride, this dignity rested half upon a true, half upon a hollow foundation; half upon intrinsic qualities, half upon the ignorance and brutishness of the great ma.s.ses of the people, whose helpless submission and easily dazzled imaginations made stepping-stones to the elevation of the few, and "hedged round kings,"

with a specious kind of "divinity." But we have our faces turned toward a new day, and toward heights on which there is room for all.

"By G.o.d, I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms"

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