The Commonwealth. [volume] (Everett, Wash.) 1911-1914, 1913-08-28

with adultery and the X-ray skirt
by the mechanics wife with her babe
at her nipple lntercedng for every
person born,
Three soythes at harvest whlzzing in
row from three lusty angels
with shirts bagg'd out at the
waists,
The snagtoothd hostler with red hair
redeeming sins past and to come,
! Selling all he possesses, travelling on
foot to fee lawyers for his brother
and sit by him while he is being
tried for forgery"
We get here very close to the heart
of the -Four Gospels, where the relig-
ion of Jesus Is, in spirit, preserved for
humanity.
In reading Leaves of Grass" we
soon learn to feel Whitman's joy in
religion as phase of democracy
For him democracy includes all the
essentials of all religions, of all times
and places Religion is not a set OF
statements to be believed, but kind
of life to be lived. Religion is the
sum of our human relations and social
activities under the law of love. This
is what Whitman means when he crys
exultingly:
I MY contradict
For you to share with me two great
aesses, and a third one rising in
elusive and more respondent,
The greatness of love and democracy,
and the greatness of religion"
And yet Whitman's religion is not
without its elements of faith, faith
that arises from sympathic comrade-
ship and love just as perfume is
breathed forth by the living, growing
flower. Man is not only to be COM
passionate, but he must be full of the
faith that never balks," faith in the
power of nature to turn evil into good,
because the earth has no conceivable
failures"
"All goes onward and outward, moth
ing collapses," says Whitman. Did
you see the poor wretch in the chain
gang, serving sentence for society's
derelictions? Did you see the man.
acled hands at the insane asylum?
Did you imagine that these souls were
forever crushed and ruined? Whit
IL
moments for reasons. Says he:
81 saw the face of the most smear'd
and soldering idiot that they had
at the asylum, and I knew for my
own consolation what they knew
not;
knew of the agents that emptied and
broke my brother; the same wait
to clear the rubbish from the
fallen tenement, and l shall look
again, in a score or two of ages,
and l shall meet the real landlord
perfect, and unharm'd, every inch
as good as myself"
The insane, the criminal, the fallen,
even the liar and hypocrite, are all
included in Whitman's sympathy and
love: "The weakest and shallowest is
deathless with me-" he declares.
Not till the sun excludes you do I ex
clude you;
Not till the waters refuse to glisten
for you and the leaves to rustic
for you, dc my words refuse to
glisten and rustic for you"
Because you are greasy or pimpled,
or that you were once drunk or a
thief,
Or diseased, or rheumatic, or porsti'
tute-or are so now;
Do you give in that you are any less
immortal?'
knowing how all men are what they
are by reason of circumstances mostly
fortuitous, the victims of vicious en-
vironment on the one hand or the
happy inheritors of wealth and bound
less opportunities on the other, Whit
man sees in the unfortunate merely
what he himself would have become
under the same conditions of life and
heredty. He asks;
"Who am l too that | am not on trial
or in prison?
Me ruthless and deyilish as any, that
my wrists are not chain'd with
iron, or my ankles with iron?"
IF you become degraded and Grim
inal, then | become so for your
sake;
If you remember your foolish and out
law'd deeds, do you think l cannot
remember my own foolish and
outlaW'd deeds2"
Not a mutineer walks handcuffd to
jail but / am handcuffd TO him