[7] I think this defective scientific perception is perhaps as responsible as any failure of moral insight for the vigorous manner in which an element of “manly love” flourishes in “Calamus” and elsewhere. Whitman is hardy enough to assert that he expects it will to a large extent take the place of love between the sexes. “Manly love,” even in its extreme form, is certainly Greek, as is the degradation of women with which it is always correlated; yet the much slighter degradation of women in modern times Whitman sincerely laments.
Whitman will not minimize the importance of the answerer’s mission. “I, too,” he exclaims, “following many and followed by many, inaugurate a religion.” If we wish to understand Walt Whitman, we must have some conception of this religion. We shall find that two great and contradictory conceptions dominate his work; although in his thoughts, as in his modes of expression, it is not possible to find any strongly marked progression.
The “Song of Myself” is the most complete utterance of Whitman’s first great conception of life.
“I have said that the soul is not more than the body, And I have said that the body is not more than the soul; And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is.”
The absolute unity of matter and spirit, and all which that unity involves, is the dominant conception of this first and most characteristic period. “If the body were not the soul,” he asks, “what is the soul?” This is Whitman’s naturalism; it is the re-assertion of the Greek attitude on a new and larger foundation. “Let it stand as an indubitable truth, which no inquiries can shake, that the mind of man is so entirely alienated from the righteousness of God, that he cannot conceive, desire, or design anything but what is wicked, distorted, foul, impure and iniquitous; that his heart is so thoroughly environed by sin that it can breathe out nothing but corruption and rottenness.” That is the fundamental thought of Christian tradition set down in the “Institutes,” clearly and logically, by the genius of Calvin. It is the polar opposite of Whitman’s thought, and therefore for Whitman the moral conception of duty has ceased to exist.
“I give nothing as duties, What others give as duties I give as living impulses. (Shall I give the heart’s action as a duty?)”