thanks BF for pointing me to an online version of Walt Whitman disciple Horace Traubel's massive conversations-with-Goethe like "With Walt Whitman in Camden"--
from Sept 14th, 1889
"Harned mischievously questioned W.: "Are you not the friend of Unitarians, Walt?" For the instant W. misunderstood him--supposed he asked, "Are you Unitarian?""No--Tom--I don't know why I should ask or accept the name." But when T. explained, added: "O yes, that--why not? I am the friend of all. It was the Hegelian idea, principle, that all are needed--that all are part of the whole--and so I should insist, all belong in their places--none can be dismissed--Catholic, Quaker, Mormon, Freethinker--even the Unitarian! I cannot be this or that, but I can recognize this or that. I know of no school in this, our day,--not Gladstone's, Henry George's, any other--who offers anything adequate--anything that would land us at the goal, any more than the present system. We old fogies, in the absence of fire, health, solace ourselves with clinging to what is--with not making ventures any longer. Yet I like the sects--I feel of them as a doctor [does] of pimples on the face--it is better for them to come out than to be hidden underneath the exterior--a hundred percent better. Pimples are a thing we can fight, but insidious hidden processes defy battle." And again: "A great city--London, for instance--would typify our present condition--the prevailing tone, what-not--of our civilization--the religious aspect: London is not made up of one man but of several millions of men--so our universe--so religions. Some people see a decadence in the present troubles--what I call our intestinal troubles but then we do not--do not believe in decadence. It was Mrs. Gilchrist's favorite expression--when she looked out on this surging seething man--that we were all going somewhere--not only that, but somewhere good. And I believe it.""It is true there is plenty of bad in the human critter--we all agree to it--he is a bad lot, as Tennyson's farmer puts it--but that is not the whole of him: he is not all or only what Carlyle paints of him." Harned quoted Emerson, to the effect that to find a man trustworthy, you must trust him. W. said fervently: "That's it--that's the whole story. It's the story over again of my woman friend in Washington who complained that whereas her sister, who distrusted nobody, had no locks and keys for drawers, no mysteries, no securities, was never robbed, she, who was so careful, padlocked and keyed everything, was careful of all her goings and comings, was continually losing,--being robbed, taken advantage of." Again: "After all, I wish well to all reformers. And besides, there's no danger of a dearth of them in our age--our age, on the contrary is full of Henry Georges, temperance, other reformers--all with panaceas. And for an old fogy like me to doubt a little can do no harm. There is an embarrassment of riches in reform..."
