The Letters of Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman. Whitman Walt
spear of grass – 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 God 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 God 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 unsurpassed 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 unsurpassed 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 space 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 pass’d in compassion 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 shore 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