ever-impressive countenances of brutes”—only second-class tickets on
the cosmic road to perfection. This is most evident in the poem’s ¤nal
version:
I do not prefer others so very much before you either,
I do not say one word against you away back there where
you stand,
You will come forward in due time to my side.
[emphasis added]For many centuries theological debates had raged in Europe about the eli-
gibility of non-European peoples to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.
Johann Kaspar Lavater, in his in®uential Essays on Physiognomy (1778), il-
lustrated the idea of racial superiority by sketching faces of non-Europeans
that showed a greater brutishness than the faces of Germanic peoples,
because, he reasoned, the latter were more closely fashioned in God’s im-
age. And although the persona of “Salut au Monde!” seems to make an
exception of the “dim-descended, black, divine-souled African... su-
perbly destined, on equal terms with me!” (the Noble Savage who was a
staple of popular culture), the poem is tainted by nineteenth-century
racial attitudes.^26 In assuming that nature advances all peoples—but at
different rates—Whitman expresses a view that was sanctioned by the
United States government and espoused by many white reformers. Bry-
ant’s New York Evening Post, nominally a liberal Free-Soil paper, argued
that before the Negro could achieve equal status with the whites in the
Western States he would have to “take those primary lessons in civiliza-
tion which his race has never yet mastered” and alleged that “the supe-
rior intelligence and advantages of the whites” would block blacks from
achieving self-reliance and independence.^27
Having explored “every shore” as he circled the earth before landing
on home territory, the persona, in keeping with the folksy tenor of the
1856 edition, embraces all his “brothers, sisters, lovers” everywhere in the
world, declaring that “I ¤nd my home wherever there are any homes of
man.”^28 In the 1860 edition, the poet added the statement, “I think some
divine rapport has equalized me with them,” thus signaling his demo-
cratic empathy with all humanity. And in a four-line stanza added in 1860
the persona sends the peoples of the world a sign that his immortal self
will be “in sight forever” to welcome all men and women. Thus the poem
“The Progress of Souls” / 115