Drum Taps | Page 2

put in shape by
some great literatus, and projected among mankind, may duly cause changes, growths,
removals, greater than the longest and bloodiest war, or the most stupendous merely
political, dynastic, or commercial overturn.
The literatus who realized this had his own message in mind. And yet, justly. For those
who might point to the worldly prosperity and material comforts of his country, and ask,
Are not these better indeed than any utterances even of greatest rhapsodic, artist, or
literatus? he has his irrefutable answer. He surveys the New York of 1870, "its façades of
marble and iron, of original grandeur and elegance of design," etc., in his familiar
catalogical jargon, and shutting his eyes to its glow and grandeur, inquires in return, Are
there indeed men here worthy the name? Are there perfect women? Is there a pervading
atmosphere of beautiful manners? Are there arts worthy freedom and a rich people? Is
there a great moral and religious civilization--the only justification of a great material one?
We ourselves in good time shall have to face and to answer these questions. They search
our keenest hopes of the peace that is coming. And we may be fortified perhaps by the
following queer proof of history repeating itself:
Never, in the Old World, was thoroughly upholster'd exterior appearance and show,
mental and other, built entirely on the idea of caste, and on the sufficiency of mere

outside acquisition--never were glibness, verbal intellect, more the test, the
emulation--more loftily elevated as head and sample-- than they are on the surface of our
Republican States this day. The writers of a time hint the mottoes of its gods. The word
of the modern, say these voices, is the word Culture.
Whitman had no very tender regard for the Germany of his time. He fancied that the
Germans were like the Chinese, only less graceful and refined and more brutish. But
neither had he any particular affection for any relic of Europe. "Never again will we trust
the moral sense or abstract friendliness of a single Government of the Old World." He
accepted selections from its literature for the new American Adam. But even its greatest
poets were not America's, and though he might welcome even Juvenal, it was for use and
not for worship. We have to learn, he insists, that the best culture will always be that of
the manly and courageous instincts and loving perceptions, and of self-respect. In our
children rests every hope and promise, and therefore in their mothers. "Disengage
yourselves from parties.... These savage and wolfish parties alarm me.... Hold yourself
judge and master over all of them." Only faith can save us, the faith in ourselves and in
our fellow-men which is of the true faith in goodness and in God. The idea of the mass of
men, so fresh and free, so loving and so proud, filled this poet with a singular awe.
Passionately he pleads for the dignity of the common people. It is the average man of a
land that is important. To win the people back to a proud belief and confidence in life, to
rapture in this wonderful world, to love and admiration--this was his burning desire. I
demand races of orbic bards, he rhapsodizes, sweet democratic despots, to dominate and
even destroy. The Future! Vistas! The throes of birth are upon us. Allons, camarado!
He could not despair. "Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled?" he
asks himself in "Drum-Taps." But wildest shuttlecock of criticism though he is, he has
never yet been charged with looking only on the dark side of things. Once, he says,
"Once, before the war (alas! I dare not say how many times the mood has come!), I too,
was fill'd with doubt and gloom." His part in it soothed, mellowed, deepened his great
nature. He had himself witnessed such misery, cruelty, and abomination as it is best just
now, perhaps, not to read about. One fact alone is enough; that over fifty thousand
Federal soldiers perished of starvation in Southern prisons. Malarial fever contracted in
camps and hospitals had wrecked his health. During 1862-65 he visited, he says, eighty to
a hundred thousand sick and wounded soldiers, comprehending all, slighting none. Rebel
or compatriot, it made no difference. "I loved the young man," he cries again and again.
Pity and fatherliness were in his face, for his heart was full of them. Mr. Gosse has
described "the old Gray" as he saw him in 1884, in his bare, littered sun-drenched room
in Camden, shared by kitten and canary:
He sat with a very curious pose of the head thrown backward, as if resting it one vertebra
lower down the spinal column than other people do, and thus tilting his face a