A History of the American People

All the same, Whitman demonstrated (as Papa' Hemingway was to do in the 20th century) that literary salesmanship and self-promotion, if pursued relentlessly and skillfully enough, can be as effective as any other kind. The first edition of Leaves of Grass sold only ten copies and Whitman had to give the rest away. But by the end of his life he was already a cult figure on both sides of the Atlantic, and his fame, and the interest in his work and personality, have continued to increase. He was, in short, despite his social and sexual heterodoxy, an all-American American, much more so, perhaps, than Longfellow, though unlike Longfellow's his verse has never been learned by heart and quoted-the one exception being his uncharacteristicO Captain! My
Captain!' Of course Whitman's ascent to fame has been accelerated by the well organized support
of the homosexual community, who have presented him as the literary talisman of inversion, just
as Oscar Wilde is in England. But the essence of Whitman's more general appeal is something
quite different: he can plausibly be presented as the first apostle of poetic modernity.
A country works hard and long, silently and obscurely, to achieve cultural maturity. But, when
at last it comes, it comes suddenly, in a blinding flash, and thereafter all is changed for ever.
Curiously enough, Emerson, who was very much part of this maturing process, summed it up
brilliantly, in his volume of essays on genius, from Plato to Goethe, Representative Men: There is a moment in the history of every nation when, proceeding out of this brute youth, the perceptive powers reach their ripeness and have not yet become microscopic, so that man, at that instant, extends across the entire scale and, with his feet still planted on the immense forces of night, converses with his eyes and brain with solar and stellar creation. That is the moment of adult health, the culmination of power.’ American literature's moment of adult health came, with great and unexpected force, in the first half of the 1850s. The key year was 1850, the Year of Debate, when not only Representative Men itself but Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter were published, followed that autumn by White- Jacket, a novel by a self-made writer just coming into prominence: Herman Melville (1819-91), a New Yorker from an old but impoverished Anglo-Dutch family, who had been in turns bank clerk, store clerk, farmer, teacher, cabin-boy, whaler, naval seaman, and adventurer in the South Seas. White-jacket is the story of his life aboard a man-of-war. The next year, 1851, the summation of all his experiences, imagination, and energy, Moby Dick, telling the tale of the New England whalers, made its appearance, the first American fictional epic. The same year Hawthorne published his sinister The House o f the Seven Gables. In 1852 Hawthorne followed it with his Brook Farm tale, The Blithedale Romance, and Melville with Pierre, both concerned with the American dilemma of combining idealism and practicality, and telling how, often enough, utopia is crushed by materialism. It is the mark of a mature literature to produce unexpected works which are sui generis. This happened to America in 1854, when Henry Thoreau (1817-62), a Concord man of Puritan, Quaker, and Scotch stock, with a dash of Gallic blood, published his masterpiece, Walden, or Life in the Woods. Thoreau, a Harvard man, had been a teacher and assistant disciple to Emerson, describing himself asa mystic, a transcendentalist and a natural philosopher to boot.' From July
1845 to September 1847 he had lived in a hut he built near Walden Pond in the Concord woods,
observing what transpired in nature and `in the mind and heart of me.' His return to the simplicity
of nature was interrupted (as he describes) by a day's imprisonment for refusing to pay a poll-tax
to a government that was waging war against Mexico, a war he denounced as a mere scheme by
slave-holders to extend slavery and enhance its political power. Walden is another book which
could have come only from America, a work celebrating pioneering and closeness to nature in
wild spaces, written by a tender and sophisticated scholar of Puritan descent. To complete this