Now, here’s what he has to say to his wife. (He’s just written White-Jacket, a bitter, blood-soaked book, a book about desperate combat, a renewed attack against the rule of law, against corporal punishment in the United States Navy.) “Well, it’s a shame, my dear, but they aren’t going to like me anymore. In everything I’ve done, I’ve been going against the interests of plenty of people who will make me pay dearly for it. The commodores guard their privileges jealously. If they could get me into their clutches, I’m sure they’d dress me down in no time. But I only write about what I know, and I know they’re plowing up the backs of mates of mine with whiplashes even as I speak.”

“They didn’t whip you, Herman, did they?”

“They did whip me, my dear, just like the others. The law of the high seas spares no one. No doubt, I’m going to have on my back everything that cries out for democracy without knowing what it means.”

“Let’s greet Miss Morrow,” says Mistress Melville. “She’s waving to us over there, from inside her carriage.”

“Good day, Miss Gwendoline,” says Herman, in a bass voice, while toward the roadway he makes the same little nonchalant gesture with his hat.

The reason he’s going to London this time is precisely because of White-Jacket. The book is written. He’s put all his manly rage into it. Now he wants to have it published with as much fanfare as possible. He wants to move, to outrage, and to heal—even if there’s a good chance it will blow up in scandal, even if he himself is likely to perish, utterly, in the uproar of that scandal.

He’s an American democrat. He’s part of that democracy whose praises Whitman will sing later on, starting with the second poem in his Leaves of Grass. Democracy is propelling the whole of the New World into its first explosion of lyricism. “Liberty Poem for Asia, Africa, Europe, and America” is already on Whitman’s lips:

Courage yet! my brother or my sister!

Keep on! Liberty is to be subserv’d whatever occurs. . . .

•

France has just been turned upside down by the events of 1848. Americans of all social classes share in the excitement of the French. It’s an all-consuming, passionate affair. Everywhere in America, people are discussing it and debating it. Everything else is set aside, everything falls under its spell. Suddenly, at a ball, dancing comes to a standstill. The musicians give up playing; the women fall silent and breathe faster than ever before; the men plant their heels firmly inside their boots. They “discuss it.” They discuss it everywhere: in workshops, on city streets, on country roads, out in the fields, in farmhouses, in stagecoaches, in the remotest forests. And all the lone rangers, when the night wind lofts their riding coats behind them, gallop in a dream, immersed in an extraordinary atmosphere of human freedom. On all sides, men rise up—teeth clenched, eyes drunk, hearts pledged—with their scythes, their tongs, their horsewhips. These are impeccable men. A moral stain would kill them more surely than a pistol shot. Freedom is a word that permeates their whole existence, their passions, their work. Its grandeur ignites a fire in their eyes and in their words. Young men give up the company of girls to talk among themselves about democracy and the rights of the individual. They’re all in love with France. At the end of the poem he’ll entitle “France,” Whitman will call her “MY WIFE” (“I will yet sing a song for you, MA FEMME”), because France was the land of liberty.