Complete Prose Works: Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My FancyWhitman, Walt
History
Complete Prose Works: Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy
Whitman, Walt
American literature
The political history of the past may be summ'd up as having grown out
of what underlies the words, order, safety, caste, and especially out of
the need of some prompt deciding authority, and of cohesion at all cost.
Leaping time, we come to the period within the memory of people
now living, when, as from some lair where they had slumber'd long,
accumulating wrath, sprang up and are yet active, (1790, and on eyen to
the present, 1870,) those noisy eructations, destructive iconoclasms, a
fierce sense of wrongs, amid which moves the form, well known in modern
history, in the old world, stain'd with much blood, and mark'd by savage
reactionary clamors and demands. These bear, mostly, as on one inclosing
point of need.
For after the rest is said--after the many time-honor'd and really true
things for subordination, experience, rights of property, &c., have
been listen'd to and acquiesced in--after the valuable and well-settled
statement of our duties and relations in society is thoroughly conn'd
over and exhausted--it remains to bring forward and modify everything
else with the idea of that Something a man is, (last precious
consolation of the drudging poor,) standing apart from all else, divine
in his own right, and a woman in hers, sole and untouchable by any
canons of authority, or any rule derived from precedent, state-safety,
the acts of legislatures, or even from what is called religion, modesty,
or art. The radiation of this truth is the key of the most significant
doings of our immediately preceding three centuries, and has been the
political genesis and life of America. Advancing visibly, it still more
advances invisibly. Underneath the fluctuations of the expressions of
society, as well as the movements of the politics of the leading nations
of the world, we see steadily pressing ahead and strengthening itself,
even in the midst of immense tendencies toward aggregation, this image
of completeness in separatism, of individual personal dignity, of a
single person, either male or female, characterized in the main, not
from extrinsic acquirements or position, but in the pride of himself or
herself alone; and, as an eventual conclusion and summing up, (or else
the entire scheme of things is aimless, a cheat, a crash,) the simple
idea that the last, best dependence is to be upon humanity itself, and
its own inherent, normal, fullgrown qualities, without any superstitious
support whatever. This idea of perfect individualism it is indeed that
deepest tinges and gives character to the idea of the aggregate. For it
is mainly or altogether to serve independent separatism that we favor a
strong generalization, consolidation. As it is to give the best vitality
and freedom to the rights of the States, (every bit as important as the
right of nationality, the union,) that we insist on the identity of the
Union at all hazards.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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