This is the strongest proof of
Whitman's faith in the essential brotherhood of man, that such
horrors and wretchednesses do not seem to him to interrupt the
design, or to destroy the possibility of a human sympathy which is
instinctive rather than a matter of devout effort. Whitman is here
on the side of the very greatest and finest human spirits, in that
he is shocked and appalled by nothing. He does not call it the best
of worlds, but it is the only world that he knows; and the glowing
interest, the passionate emotion, the vital rush and current of it,
prove beyond all doubt that we are in touch with something very
splendid and magnificent indeed, and that no misdeed or disaster
forfeits our share in the inheritance. He is utterly at variance
with the hideous Calvinistic theory, that God sent some of His
creatures into the world for their pain and ruin. Whatever happens
to your body or your soul, says Whitman, it is worth your while to
live and to have lived. He adopts no facile system of compensations
and offsets. He rather protests with all his might that, however
broken your body or fatuous your mind, it is a good thing for you
to have taken a hand in the affair; and that the essence of the
whole situation has not been your success, your dignity, your
comfortable obliteration of half your faculties, or on the other
hand your failure, your vileness, or your despair, but that just at
the time and place at which the phenomenon called yourself took
place, that intricate creature, with its bodily needs and desires,
its joys of the senses, its outlook on the strange world, took
shape and made you exactly what you are, and nothing else.
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