Mr. Lowes Dickinson states all the various points of view with
conspicuous eloquence and justice. If there is one point that we should
be inclined to criticise it is his stricture upon Walt Whitman, when he
quotes him as an example of the untenable optimism which equalises all
things. Walt Whitman has been singularly misunderstood on this point.
Surely no one imagines that he really thought that all distinctions were
unmeaning, that he drank coffee and arsenic in idle alternation, and
went to bed on the kitchen fire as a change from his bedstead. What he
did say and mean was that there was one plane on which all things were
equal, one point from which everything was the same, the point of view
of unfathomable wonder at the energy of Being, the power of God. There
is no inconsistency in ranking things in ascending order on the
practical plane and equalising them on the religious plane.
We may take a familiar parallel. There is nothing inconsistent in
saying, "For what we are about to receive the Lord make us truly
thankful," and then complaining that the champagne is corked or the
mutton raw. There is such a thing as a bad dinner and such a thing as a
good one, and criticism is quite justified in comparing one with the
other: but it remains true that both become good the moment we compare
them with the hypothesis of no dinner at all. So it was with Whitman,
good and bad lives became equal to him in relation to the hypothesis of
no life at all. A man, let us say a soldier of the Southern Confederacy,
was considered as a man, a miracle that swallowed up all moral
distinctions, in the realm of religion. But in the realm of criticism,
otherwise called the Battle of Gettysburg, Whitman would strain every
nerve to blow the man into a thousand pieces.
-February 16, 1901, The Speaker
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