No one in the last century expressed this tendency more impressively and thoroughly, with a certain insane energy, than William Blake--the great chained spirit whom we see looking out between the bars of his prison-house with those wonderful eyes. Especially in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” in which he seems to gaze most clearly “through narrow chinks of his cavern,” he has set forth his conviction that “first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged,” and that “if the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man, as it is, infinite.” This most extraordinary book is, in his own phraseology, the Bible of Hell.
Whitman appeared at a time when this stream of influence, grown mighty, had boldly emerged. At the time that “Leaves of Grass” sought the light Tourgueneff was embodying in the typical figure of Bassaroff the modern militant spirit of science, positive and audacious--a spirit marked also, as Hinton pointed out, by a new form of asceticism, which lay in the denial of emotion. Whitman, one of the very greatest emotional forces of modern times, who had grown up apart from the rigid and technical methods of science, face to face with a new world and a new civilization, which he had eagerly absorbed so far as it lay open to him, had the good inspiration to fling himself into the scientific current, and so to justify the demands of his emotional nature; to represent himself as the inhabitant of a vast and co-ordinated cosmos, tenoned and mortised in granite:
“All forces have been steadily employed to complete and delight me, Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul.”
That Whitman possessed no trained scientific instinct is unquestionably true, but it is impossible to estimate his significance without understanding what he owes to science. Something, indeed, he had gained from the philosophy of Hegel--with its conception of the universe as a single process of evolution, in which vice and disease are but transient perturbations--with which he had a second-hand acquaintance, that has left distinct, but not always well assimilated marks on his work; but, above all, he was indebted to those scientific conceptions which, like Emerson, he had absorbed or divined. It is these that lie behind “Children of Adam.”