Burroughs's nature essays, charming as they are and full as they are of a delightful personality, will be superseded by others as careful and as charming; Burroughs's criticism was the voice of an era, and it will stand with the era. It was in his later years that he put forth his real message.
John Burroughs is the historian of a small area; he has the home instinct, the hereditary farmer's love for his own fields and woods, and the haunts of his childhood. He is contemplative, tranquil, unassertive. John Muir was restless, fervid, Scotch by temperament as by birth, the very opposite of Burroughs. He was telescopic, not microscopic; his units were glaciers and Yosemites, Sierras and Gardens of the Gods.
The childhood of Muir was broken at eleven by the migration of his family from their native Scotland to the wilderness of Wisconsin, near the Fox River. After a boyhood in what literally was a new world to him, he started on his wanderings. By accident he found himself in the University of Wisconsin, where he studied for four years, the first author of note to be connected with the new state college movement, the democratizing of education. He pursued no regular course, but devoted himself to chemistry, botany, and other natural sciences that interested him, and then, to quote his own words, "wandered away on a glorious botanical and geological excursion, which has lasted nearly fifty years and is not yet completed, always happy and free, poor and rich, without thought of a diploma, of making a name, urged on and on through endless, inspiring, Godful beauty."
First he went to Florida, walking all the way, and sleeping on the ground wherever night overtook him; then he crossed to Cuba, with visions of South America and the Amazon beyond; but malarial fever, caused by sleeping on swampy ground, turned him away from the tropics toward California, where he arrived in 1868. The tremendous scenery of this west coast, those American Alps edging a continent from the Sierras to the Alaskan glaciers, so gripped his imagination and held him that he forgot everything save to look and wonder and worship. For years he explored the region, living months at a time in the forests of the Yosemite, in the wild Alpine gardens and glacial meadows of the Sierra, in passes and cañons, moving as far north as Alaska, where he was the first to see the great glacier now called by his name, sleeping where night overtook him, disdaining blanket or shelter, and returning to civilization only when driven by necessity. After years of such wandering he became as familiar with the mighty region, the tremendous western wall of a continent, as Thoreau was with Concord or Burroughs was with the banks of the Pepacton.
Unlike Burroughs, Muir sent down no roots during his earlier formative period; he was a man without a country, anchored to no past, a soul unsatisfied, restless, bursting eagerly into untrodden areas, as hungry of heart as Thoreau, but with none of Thoreau's provincialism and transcendental theories. In 1869 in the Big Tuolumne Meadows he was told of a marvelous, but dangerous, region beyond, and his account of the episode illumines him as with a flash-light:
Recognizing the unsatisfiable longings of my Scotch Highland instincts, he threw out some hints concerning Bloody Cañon, and advised me to explore it. "I have never seen it myself," he said, "for I never was so unfortunate as to pass that way. But I have heard many a strange story about it, and I warrant you will at least find it wild enough." Next day I made up a bundle of bread, tied my note-book to my belt, and strode away in the bracing air, full of eager, indefinite hope.
His first out-of-doors article, a paper on the Yosemite glaciers, was published in the New York Tribune in 1871. Later he contributed to the Overland Monthly, to Harper's, and Scribner's Monthly articles that have in them an atmosphere unique in literature. What sweep and freedom, what vastness of scale, what abysses and gulfs, what wildernesses of peaks. It is like sweeping over a continent in a balloon. One is ever in the vast places: one thrills with the author's own excitement:
How boundless the day seems as we revel in these storm-beaten sky-gardens amidst so vast a congregation of onlooking mountains.... From garden to garden, ridge to ridge, I drifted enchanted, now on my knees gazing into the face of a daisy, now climbing again and again among the purple and azure flowers of the hemlocks, now down among the treasuries of the snow, or gazing afar over domes and peaks, lakes and woods, and the billowy glaciated fields of the upper Tuolumne, and trying to sketch them. In the midst of such beauty, pierced with its rays, one's body is all a tingling palate. Who wouldn't be a mountaineer! Up here all the world's prizes seem nothing.—July 26, 1869.
I chose a camping ground on the brink of one of the lakes, where a thicket of hemlock spruce sheltered me from the night wind. Then after making a tin cupful of tea, I sat by my campfire reflecting on the grandeur and significance of the glacial records I had seen. As the night advanced, the mighty rock-walls of my mountain mansion seemed to come nearer, while the starry sky in glorious brightness stretched across like a ceiling from wall to wall, and fitted closely down into all the spiky irregularities of the summits. Then, after a long fireside rest, and a glance at my note-book, I cut a few leafy branches for a bed, and fell into the clear, death-like sleep of the mountaineer.
No pain here, no dull empty hours, no fear of the past, no fear of the future. These blessed mountains are so compactly filled with God's beauty, no petty personal hope or experience has room to be.... Perched like a fly on this Yosemite dome, I gaze and sketch and bask, oftentimes settling down into dumb admiration without definite hope of ever learning much, yet with the longing, unresisting effort that lies at the door of hope, humbly prostrate before the vast display of God's power, and eager to offer self-denial and renunciation with eternal toil to learn any lesson in the divine manuscript.—July 20, 1869.
To read Muir is to be in the presence not of a tranquil, chatty companion like Burroughs, who saunters leisurely along the spring meadows listening for the birds just arrived the night before and comparing the dates of the hyla's first cry; it is rather to be with a tempestuous soul whose units are storms and mountain ranges and mighty glacial moraines, who strides excitedly along the bare tops of ragged peaks and rejoices in their vastness and awfulness, who cries, "Come with me along the glaciers and see God making landscapes!" One gets at the heart of Muir in an episode like this, the description of a terrific storm in the Yuba region in December, 1874:
The force of the gale was such that the most steadfast monarch of them all rocked down to its roots with a motion plainly perceptible when one leaned against it. Nature was holding high festival, and every fiber of the most rigid giants thrilled with glad excitement. I drifted on through the midst of this passionate music and motion across many a glen, from ridge to ridge; often falling in the lee of a rock for shelter, or to gaze and listen. Even when the glad anthem had swelled to its highest pitch, I could distinctly hear the varying tones of individual trees—spruce, and fir, and pine, and leafless oak. ... Toward midday, after a long, tingling scramble through copses of hazel and ceanothus, I gained the summit of the highest ridge in the neighborhood; and then it occurred to me that it would be a fine thing to climb one of the trees to obtain a wider outlook and get my ear close to the Æolian music of its topmost needles.... Being accustomed to climb trees in making botanical studies, I experienced no difficulty in reaching the top of this one, and never before did I enjoy so noble an exhilaration of motion. The slender tops fairly flapped and swished in the passionate torrent, bending and swirling backward and forward, round and round, tracing indescribable combinations of vertical and horizontal curves, while I clung with muscles firm braced, like a bobolink on a reed.
He had more humor than Burroughs, more even than Thoreau, a sly Scotch drollery that was never boisterous, never cynical. In the Bloody Cañon he meets the Mono Indians and finds little in them that is romantic:
The dirt on their faces was fairly stratified and seemed so ancient in some places and so undisturbed as almost to possess a geological significance. The older faces were, moreover, strangely blurred and divided into sections by furrows that looked like cleavage joints, suggesting exposure in a castaway condition on the mountains for ages. Viewed at a little distance they appeared as mere dirt specks on the landscape.
Like Thoreau, he was a mystic and a poet. He inherited mysticism with his Scotch blood as he inherited wildness and the love of freedom. He was not a mere naturalist, a mere scientist bent only on facts and laws: he was a searcher after God, even as Thoreau. As one reads him, one feels one's soul expanding, one's horizons widening, one's hands reaching out for the infinite. The message of Muir is compelling and eager:
Next to the light of the dawn on high mountain-tops, the alpenglow is the most impressive of all the terrestrial manifestations of God;... stay on this good fire mountain and spend the night among the stars. Watch their glorious bloom until dawn, and get one more baptism of light. Then, with fresh heart, go down to your work, and whatever your fate, under whatever ignorance or knowledge you may afterwards chance to suffer, you will remember these fine, wild views, and look back with joy.
And again after his joyous study of the water ouzel, a prose lyric, rapturous and infectious, he cries:
And so I might go on, writing words, words, words; but to what purpose? Go see him and love him, and through him as through a window look into Nature's warm heart.
The output of Muir, especially of books, has been small. To one who cares nothing for money and who is indifferent to fame, it is hard to offer inducements. He wrote only to please himself; he would not be commanded or bribed or begged, for why should one write words when the Sierras are in bloom and the winds are calling in the upper peaks? The public at large knows little of him, compared with what it knows of Burroughs or even of Thoreau. His influence, therefore, has been small. Though he had published many magazine articles, it was not until 1894 that he published The Mountains of California, his first book. Our National Parks came in 1901, and My First Summer in the Sierra in 1911. The last is Muir's journal, kept on the spot, full of the thrill and the freshness of the original day. If it be a sample of the journal which we have reason to believe that he kept with Thoreau-like thoroughness almost to the time of his death—he died in December, 1914—the best work of John Muir may even yet be in store.
Muir was more gentle than Thoreau or Burroughs, and more sympathetic with everything alive in the wild places which he loved. Unlike Burroughs, he has named the birds without a gun, and, unlike Thoreau, he has refused to kill even fish or rattlesnakes. He could look on even the repulsive lizards of his region, some of them veritable monsters in size and hideousness, with real affection:
Small fellow-mortals, gentle and guileless, they are easily tamed, and have beautiful eyes, expressing the clearest innocence, so that, in spite of prejudices brought from cool, lizardless countries, one must soon learn to like them. Even the horned toad of the plains and foothills, called horrid, is mild and gentle, with charming eyes, and so are the snake-like species found in the underbrush of the lower forests.... You will surely learn to like them, not only the bright ones, gorgeous as the rainbow, but the little ones, gray as lichened granite, and scarcely bigger than grasshoppers; and they will teach you that scales may cover as fine a nature as hair or feather or anything tailored.
And there is no more sympathetic, interpretative study among all the work of the nature-writers than his characterization of the Douglas squirrel of the Western mountains:
One never tires of this bright chip of Nature, this brave little voice crying in the wilderness, observing his many works and ways, and listening to his curious language. His musical, piney gossip is savory to the ear as balsam to the palate; and though he has not exactly the gift of song, some of his notes are sweet as those of a linnet—almost flute-like in softness; while others prick and tingle like thistles. He is the mocking-bird of squirrels, pouring forth mixed chatter and song like a perennial fountain, barking like a dog, screaming like a hawk, whistling like blackbirds and sparrows; while in bluff, audacious noisiness he is a jay.
Emerson visited Muir during his trip to the West Coast, climbed the precarious ladder that led to his room in the Yosemite sawmill, and passed a memorable afternoon. "He is more wonderful than Thoreau," he said, and he tried long to induce him to leave the mountains for the East, and to live in the midst of men. But to Muir the leaving of the Yosemite and the Sierra was like leaving God Himself. To him the city was the place of unnatural burdens, of money that dulls and kills the finest things of the soul, of separation from all that is really vital in the life of man.
His style is marked by vividness and fervid power. He makes a scene stand out with sharpness. He is original; there are in his work no traces of other writings save those of the Bible, with which he was saturated, and at rare intervals of Thoreau. Often there is a rhetorical ring to his page, a resonant fullness of tone that can be described only by the word eloquent. In passages describing storm or mountain majesty there is a thrill, an excitement, that are infectious. The prose of John Muir may be summed up as sincere and vigorous, without trace of self-consciousness or of straining for effect. Few writers of any period of American literature have within their work more elements of promise as they go down to the generations to come.
Beginning with the late sixties, out-of-door themes more and more took possession of American literature. Burroughs was only one in an increasing throng of writers; he was the best known and most stimulating, and soon, therefore, the leader and inspirer. The mid-nineteenth century had been effeminate in the bulk of its literary product; it had been a thing of indoors and of books: the new after-the-war spirit was masculine even at times to coarseness and brutality. Maurice Thompson (1844–1901), one of the earliest of the new period, perceived the bent of the age with clearness. "We are nothing better than refined and enlightened savages," he wrote in 1878. "The wild side of the prism of humanity still offers its pleasures to us.... Sport, by which is meant pleasant physical and mental exercise combined—play in the best sense—is a requirement of this wild element, this glossed over heathen side of our being, and the bow is its natural implement."[84] It was the apology of the old school for the new era of sport. Thompson would direct these heathen energies toward archery, since it was a sport that appealed to the imagination and that took its devotees into the forests and the swamps, but there was no directing of the resurging forces. Baseball and football sprang up in the seventies and grew swiftly into hitherto unheard-of proportions. Yachting, camping, mountaineering, summer tramping in the woods and the borders of civilization swiftly became popular. The Adirondacks and the Maine forests and the White Mountains sprang into new prominence. As early as 1869 Stedman had complained that The Blameless Prince lay almost dead on the shelves while such books as Murray's Adventures in the Wilderness sold enormously. For a time indeed W. H. H. Murray—"Adirondack Murray"—did vie even with Bonner's Ledger in popularity. He threw about the wilderness an alluring, half romantic atmosphere that appealed to the popular imagination and sent forth, eager and compelling, what in later days came to be known as "the call of the wild." His books have not lasted. There is about them a declamatory, artificial element that sprang too often from the intellect rather than the heart. Charles Dudley Warner in his In the Wilderness, 1878, and William H. Gibson in such books as Camp Life in the Woods, sympathetically illustrated by their author, were far more sincere and wholesome. Everywhere for a decade or more there was appeal for a return to the natural and the free, to the open-air games of the old English days, to hunting and trapping and camping—a masculine, red-blooded resurgence of the savage, a return to the wild. The earlier phase of the period may be said to have culminated in 1882 with the founding of Outing, a magazine devoted wholly to activities in the open air.
The later eighties and the nineties are the period of the bird books. C. C. Abbott's A Naturalist's Rambles About Home, 1884; Olive Thorne Miller's Bird Ways, 1885; Bradford Torrey's Birds in the Bush, 1885; and Florence Merriam Bailey's Birds Through an Opera Glass, 1889, may be taken as representative. Bird life and bird ways for a period became a fad; enthusiastic observers sprang up everywhere; scientific treatises and check lists and identification guides like Chapman's Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America, began to appear in numbers. What the novelists of locality were doing for the unusual human types in isolated corners of the land, the nature writers were doing for the birds.
Of all the later mass of Nature writings, however, very little is possessed of literary distinction. Very largely it is journalistic in style and scientific in spirit. Only one out of the later group, Bradford Torrey, compels attention. Beyond a doubt it is already safe to place him next in order after Burroughs and Muir. He is more of an artist than Burroughs, and he is more literary and finished than Muir. In his attitude toward Nature he is like Thoreau—sensitive, sympathetic, reverent. It was he who edited the journals of Thoreau in their final form, and it was he also who after that experience wrote what is undoubtedly the most discriminating study that has yet been made of the great mystic naturalist.
John Burroughs. (1837——.) Notes on Walt Whitman, as Poet and Person, New York, 1867; Wake-Robin, 1871; Winter Sunshine, 1875; Birds and Poets, 1877; Locusts and Wild Honey, 1879; Pepacton, 1881; Fresh Fields, 1884; Signs and Seasons, 1886; Indoor Studies, 1889; Riverby, 1894; Whitman, a Study, 1896; The Light of Day, 1900; Literary Values, 1904; Far and Near, 1904; Ways of Nature, 1905; Leaf and Tendril, 1908; Time and Change, 1912; The Summit of the Years, 1913; Our Friend John Burroughs. By Clara Barrus. 1914.
John Muir. (1838–1914.) "Studies in the Sierras," a series of papers in Scribner's Monthly, 1878; The Mountains of California, 1894; Our National Parks, 1901; Stickeen, the Story of a Dog, 1909; My First Summer in the Sierra, 1911; The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, 1913; Letters to a Friend, 1915.
William Hamilton Gibson. (1850–1896.) Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap-Making, 1876; Pastoral Days, or Memories of a New England Year, 1882; Highways and Byways, or Saunterings in New England, 1883; Happy Hunting Grounds, a Tribute to the Woods and Fields, 1886; Strolls by Starlight and Sunshine, 1890; Sharp Eyes, 1891; Our Edible Toadstools and Mushrooms, 1895.
Charles Conrad Abbott. (1843——.) The Stone Age in New Jersey, 1876; Primitive Industry, 1881; A Naturalist's Rambles About Home, 1884; Upland and Meadow, 1886; Wasteland Wanderings, 1887; Days out of Doors, 1889; Outings at Odd Times, 1890; Recent Rambles, 1892; Outings in a Tree-Top, 1894; The Birds About Us, 1894; Notes of the Night, 1895; Birdland Echoes, 1896; The Freedom of the Fields, 1898; Clear Skies and Cloudy, 1899; In Nature's Realm, 1900.
"Olive Thorne Miller"—Harriet Mann Miller. (1831——.) Little Folks in Feathers and Fur, 1879; Queer Pets at Marcy's, 1880; Bird Ways, 1885; In Nesting Time, 1888; Four Handed Folk, 1890; Little Brothers of the Air, 1890; Bird-Lover in the West, 1894; Upon the Tree Tops, 1896; The First Book of Birds, 1899; True Bird Stories, 1903; With the Birds in Maine, 1904; and others.
Bradford Torrey. (1843–1912.) Birds in the Bush, 1885; A Rambler's Lease, 1889; The Foot-Path Way, 1892; A Florida Sketch-Book, 1894; Spring Notes from Tennessee, 1896; A World of Green Hills, 1898; Every-Day Birds, 1900; Footing It in Franconia, 1900; The Clerk of the Woods, 1903; Nature's Invitation, 1904; Friends on the Shelf, 1906.
Florence Merriam Bailey. (1863——.) Birds Through an Opera Glass, 1889; My Summer in a Mormon Village, 1895; A Birding on a Bronco, 1896; Birds of Village and Field, 1898; Handbook of Birds of Western United States, 1902.
Frank Bolles. (1856–1894.) Land of the Lingering Snow, 1891; At the North of Bearcamp Water: Chronicles of a Stroller in New England from July to December, 1893; From Blomidon to Smoky, 1895.
Whitman and Thoreau stand as the two prophets of the mid century, both of them offspring of the Transcendental movement, pushing its theories to their logical end, both of them voices in the wilderness crying to deaf or angry ears, both of them unheeded until a new generation had arisen to whom they had become but names and books. Thoreau was born in 1817; Whitman in 1819, the year of Lowell, Story, Parsons, Herman Melville, J. G. Holland, Julia Ward Howe, and E. P. Whipple, and of the Victorians, Kingsley, Ruskin, George Eliot, and Arthur Hugh Clough. Whitman published Leaves of Grass, his first significant volume, in 1855, the year of Hiawatha, of Maud, and of Arnold's Poems. He issued it again in 1856 and again in 1860—a strange nondescript book rendered all the more strange by the fact, thoroughly advertised in the second edition, that it had won from Emerson the words: "I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.... I greet you at the beginning of a great career." But even the compelling name of Emerson could not sell the book; little notice, in fact, was taken of it save as a few voices expressed horror and anger; and when in 1862 Whitman became lost in the confusion of the war, he had made not so much impression upon America as had Thoreau at the time of his death that same year. Until well into the seventies Walt Whitman seemed only a curious phenomenon in an age grown accustomed to curious phenomena.
The antecedents and the early training of Whitman were far from literary. He came from a race of Long Island farmers who had adhered to one spot for generations. No American was ever more completely a product of our own soil.
They were crude, vigorous plowmen, unbookish and elemental. The father was the first to break from the soil and the ancestral environment, but he left it only to become a laborer on buildings in the neighboring city of Brooklyn.
The boyhood of Whitman was passed in the city, though with long vacations in the home of his grandparents on Long Island. His schooling was brief and desultory. He left the schools at twelve to become office boy for a lawyer and from that time on he drifted aimlessly from one thing to another, serving for brief periods as doctor's clerk, compositor in a country printing office, school teacher in various localities, editor and proprietor of a rural weekly, stump speaker in the campaign of 1840, editor of various small journals, contributor of Hawthornesque stories and sketches to papers and magazines, writer of a melodramatic novel, and in 1846 editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. But he could hold to nothing long. In 1848 he was induced by a stranger who had taken a fancy to him to go to New Orleans as editor of the Crescent newspaper, but within a year he was back again in New York, where for the next few years he maintained a half-loafing, half-working connection with several papers and periodicals.
It was during this period that he made himself so thoroughly familiar with the middle and lower strata of New York City life. He spent hours of every day riding on Broadway vehicles and on Fulton ferry boats and making himself boon companion of all he met. He knew the city as Muir knew the peaks and mountain gardens of the Sierra, and he took the same delight in discovering a new specimen of humanity on a boat or an omnibus that Muir might take in finding a new plant on an Alaska glacier.
I knew all the drivers then, Broadway Jack, Dressmaker, Balky Bill, George Storms, Old Eliphant, his brother, Young Eliphant (who came afterward), Tippy, Pop Rice, Big Frank, Yellow Joe, Pete Callahan, Patsey Dee, and dozens more; for there were hundreds. They had immense qualities, largely animal—eating, drinking, women—great personal pride, in their way—perhaps a few slouches here and there, but I should have trusted the general run of them, in their simple good will and honor, under all circumstances.[85]
Almost daily, later ('50 to '60), I cross'd on the boats, often up in the pilot-houses where I could get a full sweep, absorbing shows, accompaniments, surroundings. What oceanic currents, eddies, underneath—the great tides of humanity also, with ever-shifting movements. Indeed, I have always had a passion for ferries; to me they afford inimitable, streaming, never-failing, living poems. The river and bay scenery, all about New York island, any time of a fine day—hurrying, splashing sea-tides—the changing panorama of steamers, all sizes.... My old pilot friends, the Balsirs, Johnny Cole, Ira Smith, William White, and my young ferry friend, Tom Gere—how well I remember them all.[86]
* * * * *I find in this visit to New York, and the daily contact and rapport with its myriad people, on the scale of the oceans and tides the best, most effective medicine my soul has yet partaken—the grandest physical habitat and surroundings of land and water the globe affords.[86]
The earlier Whitman is a man par excellence of the city as Muir is of the mountains and Thoreau of the woods.
A jungle of writings has sprung up about Whitman; as many as four biographies of him have appeared in a single year, yet aside from two or three careful studies, like those of Perry and Carpenter, no really scholarly or unbiased work has been issued. Before the last word can be spoken of the poet there must be an adequate text with variorum readings and chronological arrangement. The present definitive edition is a chaos, almost useless for purposes of study. New and old are mixed indiscriminatingly. The "Chants Democratic," for instance, of the earlier editions have been dismembered and scattered from end to end of the book. All of the older poems were in constant state of revision from edition to edition, until now patches from every period of the poet's life may be found on many of them. Large sections of the earlier editions were omitted, enough indeed at one time and another to make up a volume. The fact is important, since the material rejected by a poet at different stages in his evolution often tells much concerning his art.
There is, moreover, a strange dearth of biographical material at critical points in Whitman's life, notably during that formative period preceding the first issue of Leaves of Grass. In his later years he talked of his own experiences and aims and ideals with the utmost freedom; through Traubel, his Boswell, he put himself on record with minuteness; his poetic work is all autobiographical; and almost all of his editions are prefaced by long explanations and defenses, yet of the really significant periods of his life we know little. A crude man of the people, a Broadway rough, as he described himself, who has been writing very ordinary poems and stories and editorials—how ordinary we can easily judge, for very many of them have been preserved—suddenly brings out a book of poems as unlike any earlier work of his or any previous work of his nation or language as an issue of the Amaranth or the Gem would be unlike the book of Amos. What brought about this remarkable climax? Was it the result of an evolution within the poet's soul, an evolution extending over a period of years? Did it come as a sudden inspiration or as a deliberate consummation after a study of models? We do not know. There are no contemporary letters, no transition poems, no testimony of any friend to whom the poet laid bare his soul. At one period we have verses like these:
Then suddenly without warning we have this:
That is the problem of Walt Whitman, a problem the most baffling and the most fascinating in the later range of American literature.
There can be little doubt that the primal impulse in the creation of Leaves of Grass came from the intellectual and moral unrest of the thirties and the forties. Whitman caught late, perhaps latest of all the writers of the period, the Transcendental spirit that had so unsettled America and the rest of the world as well. "What a fertility of projects for the salvation of the world!" Emerson had cried in 1844. Who "will ever forget what was somewhat vaguely called the 'Transcendental Movement' of thirty years ago"? Lowell had asked in 1865. "Apparently set astir by Carlyle's essays on the 'Signs of the Times,' and on 'History,' the final and more immediate impulse seemed to be given by 'Sartor Resartus.' At least the republication in Boston of that wonderful Abraham à Sancta Clara sermon on Falstaff's text of the miserable forked radish gave the signal for a sudden mental and moral mutiny.... The nameless eagle of the tree Ygdrasil was about to set at last, and wild-eyed enthusiasts rushed from all sides, eager to thrust under the mystic bird that chalk egg from which the newer and fairer creation was to be hatched in due time."[87] Whitman was a product of this ferment. He took its exaggerations and its wild dreams as solemn fact. He read Emerson and adopted his philosophy literally and completely: "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist." "He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness." "Insist on yourself; never imitate." "Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide; him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him." "Trust thyself; every heart vibrates to that iron string." "With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do," and so on and on.
All criticism of Whitman must begin with the fact that he was uneducated even to ignorance. He felt rather than thought. Of the intellectual life in the broader sense—science, analysis, patient investigation—he knew nothing. When he read he read tumultuously, without horizon, using his emotions and his half conceptions as interpreters. A parallel may be drawn between him and that other typical product of the era, Mrs. Eddy, the founder of the Christian Science cult. Both were mystics, almost pathologically so; both were electric with the urge of physical health; both were acted upon by the transcendental spirit of the era; both were utterly without humor; and both in all seriousness set about to establish a new conception of religion.
To Whitman the religious leader of an era was its poet. He would broaden the conception of the Poet until he made of him the leader and the savior of his age.
With assurance really sublime he announced himself as this poet of the new era, this new prophet of the ages:
He hails as comrade and fellow savior even Him who was crucified:
He too would give his life to the lowly and the oppressed; he too would eat with publicans and sinners; he too would raise the sick and the dying:
The poetic message of Whitman, the new message that was, as he believed, "to drop in the earth the germs of a greater religion," he summed up himself in the phrase "The greatness of Love and Democracy"—Love meaning comradeship, hearty "hail, fellow, well met" to all men alike; Democracy meaning the equality of all things and all men—en masse. He is to be the poet of the East and the West, the North and the South alike; he is to be the poet of all occupations, and of all sorts and conditions of men. He salutes the whole world in toto and in detail. A great part of Leaves of Grass is taken up with enumerations of the universality and the detail of his poetic sympathy. He covers the nation with the accuracy of a gazetteer, and he enumerates its industries and its population, simply that he may announce, "I am the poet of these also."
The appearance of Whitman marks the first positive resurgence of masculinity in mid-century America. He came as the first loud protest against sentimentalism, against Longfellowism, against a prudish drawing-room literature from which all life and masculine coarseness had been refined. Whitman broke into the American drawing-room as a hairy barbarian, uncouth and unsqueamish, a Goth let loose among ladies, a Vandal smashing the bric-à-brac of an over-refined generation. He came in with a sudden leap, unlooked-for, unannounced, in all his nakedness and vulgarity like a primitive man, and proceeded to sound his barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. He mixed high and low, blab and divinity, because he knew no better. Like the savage that he was he adorned himself with scraps of feathers from his reading—fine words: libertad, camerado, ma femme, ambulanza, enfans d'Adam; half understood fragments of modern science; wild figures of speech from the Transcendental dreamers which he took literally and pushed to their logical limit. And he poured it all out in a mélange without coherence or logical sequence: poetry and slang, bravado and egotism, trash and divinity and dirt. At one moment he sings:
And the next moment be bursts out:
And he does it all honestly, unsmilingly, and ignorantly. It is because he had so small a horizon that he seems so to project beyond the horizon. To understand him one must understand first his ignorance.
But if he is a savage, he has also the vigor and dash and abounding health of the savage. He enters upon his work with unction and perfect abandonment; his lines shout and rush and set the blood of his reader thrilling like a series of war whoops. His first poem, the "Proto-Leaf," is, to say the least, exhilarating. Read straight through aloud with resonant voice, it arouses in the reader a strange kind of excitement. The author of it was young, in the very tempest of perfect physical health, and he had all of the youth's eagerness to change the course of things. His work is as much a gospel of physical perfection as is Science and Health. It is full of the impetuous passions of youth. It is not the philosophizing of an old savant, or of an observer experienced in life, it is the compelling arrogance of a young man in full blood, sure of himself, eager to reform the universe. The poems indeed are
The physical as yet is supreme. Of the higher laws of sacrifice, of self-effacement, of character that builds its own aristocracy and draws lines through even the most democratic mass, the poet knows really nothing. He may talk, but as yet it is talk without basis of experience.
The poems are youthful in still another way: they are of the young soil of America; they are American absolutely, in spirit, in color, in outlook. Like Thoreau, Whitman never had all his life long any desire to visit any other land than his own. He was obsessed, intoxicated, with America. He began his reckoning of time with the year 1775 and dated his first book "the year 80 of the States." A large section of his poems is taken up with loving particularization of the land—not of New England and New York alone, but of the whole of it, every nook and corner of it. For the first time America had a poet who was as broad as her whole extent and who could dwell lovingly on every river and mountain and village from Atlantic to Pacific.
He glories in the heroic deeds of America, the sea fight of John Paul Jones, the defense of the Alamo, and his characterization of the various sections of the land thrills one and exhilarates one like a glimpse of the flag. What a spread, continent-wide, free-aired and vast—"Far breath'd land, Arctic braced! Mexican breezed!"—one gets in the crescendo beginning:
It is the first all American thrill in our literature.
The new literary form adopted by Whitman was not a deliberate and studied revolt from the conventional forms of the times: it was rather a discovery of Walt Whitman by himself. Style is the man: the "easily written, loose-fingered chords" of his chant, unrimed, lawless; this was Whitman himself. How he found it or when he found it, matters not greatly. It is possible that he got a hint from his reading of Ossian or of the Bible or of Eastern literature, but we know that at the end it came spontaneously. He was too indolent to elaborate for himself a deliberate metrical system, he was too lawless of soul to be bound by the old prosody. Whatever he wrote must loaf along with perfect freedom, unpolished, haphazard, incoherent. The adjective that best describes his style is loose—not logical, rambling, suggestive. His mind saunters everywhither and does not concentrate. In other words, it is an uneducated mind, an unfocused mind, a primitive mind.
The result was that, despite Whitman's freshness and force and stirring Americanism, he made little impression in the decade following the first Leaves of Grass. Emerson's commendation of him had been caused by his originality and his uncouth power, but none of the others of the mid-century school could see anything in the poems save vulgarity and egotistic posing. Lowell from first to last viewed him with aversion; Whittier burned the book at once as a nasty thing that had soiled him. The school of Keats and Tennyson, of Longfellow and Willis, ruled American literature with tyrannic power, and it was too early for successful revolution.
The Civil War found Whitman young; it left him an old man. There seems to have been no middle-age period in his life. He had matured with slowness; at forty, when he issued the 1860 Leaves of Grass, he was in the very prime of youth, the physical still central. There had been no suffering in his life, no grip of experience; he spoke much of the soul, but the soul was still of secondary importance. He wrote to his mother in 1862:
I believe I weigh about two hundred, and as to my face (so scarlet) and my beard and neck, they are terrible to behold. I fancy the reason I am able to do some good in the hospitals among the poor languishing and wounded boys, is that I am so large and well—indeed like a great wild buffalo, with much hair. Many of the soldiers are from the West, and far North, and they take to a man that has not the bleached, shiny and shaven cut of the cities and the East.[88]
The world of the 1860 Leaves of Grass is a world as viewed by a perfectly healthy young man, who has had his way to the full. The appeal of it is physiological rather than spiritual. It ends the first period of Whitman's poetical life.
His next book, Drum-Taps, came in 1866. Between the two had come the hospital experience of 1862–1865, from which had emerged the Whitman of the later period.
He had been drawn into this hospital experience, as into everything else in his life, almost by accident. It had come to him after no hard-fought battle with himself; it was the result of no compelling convictions. The war had progressed for a year before it assumed concrete proportions for him. It required the news that his brother was lying desperately wounded at Fredericksburg to move his imagination. When he had arrived at the front and had found his brother in no serious condition after all, he had drifted almost by accident into the misery of the ambulance trains and the hospitals, and before he had realized it, he was in the midst of the army nurses, working as if he had volunteered for the service. And thus he had drifted on to the end of the war, a self-appointed hospital worker, touching and helping thousands of sinking lives.
And he gave during those three years not only his youth but also his health of body. He was weakened at length with malaria and infected with blood poisoning from a wound that he had dressed. Moreover, the experience drained him on the side of his emotions and his nervous vitality until he went home to become at last paralytic and neurotic. The strain upon him he has described with a realism that unnerves one: