The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William Jamesreligious consciousness. In neither of these senses does it fitly definethis poet. He is more than your mere animal man who has nottasted of the tree of good and evil. He is aware enough of sin for aswagger to be present in his indifference towards it, a consciouspride in his freedom from flexions and contractions, which yourgenuine pagan in the first sense of the word would never show.“I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and selfcontained,I stand and look at them long and long;They do not sweat and whine about their condition.They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania ofowning things,Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands ofyears ago,Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.”40No natural pagan could have written these well-known lines. Buton the other hand Whitman is less than a Greek or Roman; fortheir consciousness, even in Homeric times, was full to the brim ofthe sad mortality of this sunlit world, and such a consciousness WaltWhitman resolutely refuses to adopt. When, for example, Achilles,about to slay Lycaon, Priam’s young son, hears him sue for mercy,he stops to say:—“Ah, friend, thou too must die: why thus lamentest thou? Patroclostoo is dead, who was better far than thou… . Over me too hangdeath and forceful fate. There cometh morn or eve or some noondaywhen my life too some man shall take in battle, whether withspear he smite, or arrow from the string.”41Then Achilles savagely severs the poor boy’s neck with hissword, heaves him by the foot into the Scamander, and calls tothe fishes of the river to eat the white fat of Lycaon. Just as here40 Song of Myself, 32.41 Iliad, XXI., E. Myers’s translation.83