In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

C H A P T E R T H R E E AGospelofBeauty “To the artist, I say, has been given the command to go forth unto all the world and preach the gospel of beauty.” —Walt Whitman On May 16, 1888, a young labor agitator came to see Whitman at his home in Camden. He was a handsome young man, and the impact he made on the ailing poet was such that he confided to Horace Traubel that the impression would never go away. Political, literary, or other considerations were of secondary importance for Whitman before the beauty of his young visitor. Moreover, one gets the impression that no matter what the young man’s political ideas might have been, his impressive beauty would have been enough of a justification for them. This is how Traubel relates the episode: [Whitman said:] “There was a kind of labor agitator here today—a socialist or something like that: young, a rather beautiful boy [ . . . ] I was sorry to see him come: I am somehow afraid of agitators, though I believe in agitation: but I was more sorry to see him go than come. Some people are so much sunlight to the square inch. I am still bathing in the cheer he radiated. O he was a beautiful, beautiful boy!” “What was his name? Where did he come from?” “I could not catch the name—he was from the west. he said he just came to say ‘how d’ye do’ and go again: that he was sure Leaves of Grass could do more for the new dispensation than anything else he knew. I don’t see how anything could do more for the dispensation than such a boy himself. Horace—he had your blue eyes: there was a flavor of German in him: he said he was the son of an emigrant . Well—you might crowd this room with emperors and they would only be in the way—O he was a beautiful boy—a wonderful daybeam: I shall probably never see his face again—yet he left something here with me that I can never quite lose.”1 58 Walt Whitman’s Mystical Ethics of Comradeship This episode, narrated by one of Whitman’s closest disciples, is significant in that, in a candid and spontaneous way, it points to a characteristic of Whitman ’s thought: the preeminence of the aesthetic judgment over the ethical judgment. He is an aestheticist, although of a different sort than his contemporaries in Britain, who became the best known representatives of aesthetic morality as a value system. Aestheticism was not a monolithic movement, as some have attempted to characterize it.2 The aesthetic worldview gained prominence in Western thought during the later part of the nineteenth century . John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde are among the best known figures in this post-Romantic movement, which could be rather characterized as late Romanticism. The influence of aestheticism in the nineteenth century was wider than generally thought. It made an impact not only on the realm of literature and the visual arts, but also on the field of philosophy and religion. Walt Whitman , too, absorbed the aesthetic ideas of his generation, and they played a crucial role in shaping his own religious and ethical ideals. In this chapter, I will focus on the aestheticist assumptions in Whitman ’s worldview and how they inform his ethics. As part of this analysis, we will trace the roots of these assumptions in Western culture. In the second part of the chapter, I will discuss the ideologies of two aesthetes who were contemporaries of Whitman, Friedrich Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde. Both of these figures had intensely personal views on religion and ethics. Little known aspects of their personality and writings offer extraordinary similarities with the work and the personality of Walt Whitman. Viewed in this light, Whitman’s figure appears clearly connected to, if not purely representative of, the aestheticist tradition of ethical discourse during the later part of the nineteenth century. It is against the background of nineteenth century aestheticism that Whitman’s religious enterprise and the new ethics he proposes are to be understood. the Classical Roots of Aestheticism Since the early times of the Christian era, two opposite lines of thought have coexisted in Western culture, as far as the relationship between ethics and aesthetics is concerned: the Christian Neoplatonic and the Classical Greek (Platonic ). In Neoplatonism, whose influence has dominated Christian thought throughout the centuries in some...

Share