Whitman’s view gave offence; he thought of civilisation as a conventional system, cultivating a false shame and an ignoble reserve about bodily processes.  But the vital truth of his doctrine lies in the fact that many of our saddest, because most remediable, disasters are caused by a timid reticence about the strongest force that animates the world, the force of reproduction.  Whitman felt, and truly felt, that reason and sentiment have outrun discretion.  It may be asked, indeed, how this terror of all outspokenness has developed in the human race, so that parents cannot bear to speak to their children about an experience which they will be certain to make acquaintance with in some far more violent and base form.  Does this shrinking delicacy, this sacred reserve, mean nothing, it may be asked?  Well, it may be said, if this sensitiveness is so valuable that it must not be required to anticipate tenderly and faithfully what will be communicated in a grosser form, then silence is justified, and not otherwise.  But to transfer this reticence about a matter of awful concern to some other region of morals, what should we think of the parent who so feared to lessen the affection of a child by rebuking it for a lie or a theft as to let it go out into the world ignorant that either was reprobated?  Whitman’s argument would rather be that a parent should say to a child, “There is a force within you which will to a large extent determine the happiness of your life; it must be guarded and controlled.  You will probably not be able to ignore or disregard it, and you must bring it into harmonious co-operation with mind and reason and duty.  There is nothing that is shameful about its being there; indeed, it is the dominant force in the world.  The shameful thing is to use it shamelessly.”  Yet the attitude of parents too often is to treat the subject, not as if it were sacred, but as if it were unmentionable; so that the very fact of the child’s own origin would seem to be an essentially shameful thing.

The Greeks, it is true, had an instinct for the thought of the vital interdependence of body and soul; but they thought too much of the glowing manifestation of the health and beauty of youth, and viewed the decay and deformity of the human frame too much as a disgrace and an abasement.  But here again comes in the largeness of Whitman’s presentment, that whatever disasters befall the body, whether through drudgery or battle, disease or sin, they are all parts of a rich and large experience, not necessarily interrupting the co-operation of mind and matter.  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,