In the fifties a change came over America, a change preluding the great struggle which ensued. The population grew rapidly with its former mathematical regularity; but the settlement and development of the country went forward even more rapidly. During the decade, the area of improved land increased by one-half, and the value of farm property was doubled. The west bank of the Mississippi being already settled, the future of the lands still further west between the Missouri and the Rockies, became of paramount interest to the nation. It was this problem of the West which strained until it broke that policy of compromise which for a generation had bound American politics.
The year 1850 itself is memorable for Clay’s opportunist resolutions in Congress, which were intended to settle nothing; and for the fierce debates upon them and upon the Fugitive Slave Bill, in which Webster and Seward, Calhoun and Jefferson Davis participated. Clay and Webster died soon after, and their party being utterly routed at the polls in 1852, finally went to pieces. The vote of the liberty party had declined, and compromise still held up its foolish head. But the victorious Democrats brought all hope of its continuance to an end by reviving the principle of “squatter sovereignty,” and proceeding to apply it in the newly settled lands. It was their policy to snatch the question of slavery out of the hands of Congress; for which, as the organ of the Federal power, they nursed an increasing enmity. The bloody scenes which drew all eyes to Kansas made it plain that compromise was done; the South had thrown it over, and was now half-consciously driving the country into war.
When the leaders of 1850 died there was no one to take their places, though the crisis called for men of counsel and of spirit. President Pierce, of New Hampshire, the tool of the party machine, merely represented the political weakness of the nation. It was not till after the next elections that their new leaders were discovered by the American people. Judge Douglas, the champion of “squatter sovereignty,” rose indeed into prominence in 1854, but his greater antagonist still remained comparatively unknown in the country, though famous in his State and among his neighbours for keen logic and humorous common-sense.
There was no leadership. Compromise was yielding not to principle but to the spirit of the mob. Immigration and the increase of the towns favoured organised political corruption; and the tyranny of interests and privileges was beginning to make itself felt on every hand. When parties are separated by motives of personal gain rather than by principle, party-feeling finds expression not in devotion and enthusiasm, but in violence. It was not only in such newly settled lands as Kansas, nor alone in such chaotic aggregations of humanity as were being piled together in New York, that constitutional methods were abandoned and private violence was condoned. The spirit of anarchy was abroad, and members of Congress went armed to the Capitol itself.
The violence was a natural reaction from the compromise, and like the compromise was a birth of the materialistic spirit. America’s idealism, so triumphant at the close of the eighteenth century, had fallen upon too confident a slumber, and heavily must the Republic pay for that sleep. A young nation of idealists is doubtless more subject than any other to these outbreaks of materialism and its offspring. It is optimistic, and when it sleeps it leaves no dogs on guard. The nation becomes engrossed in material tasks, and is presently surprised by the enemy. But being so surprised, and fighting thus at disadvantage, it accomplishes more than the wary old pessimists whose energy is absorbed in prudence.
American idealism was asleep, but its slumbers were by no means sound. The voices of Garrison, Emerson and others mingled troublously with its dreams. And the pursuit and capture of fugitive slaves like Anthony Burns, in Boston itself; and the extraordinary sale, both in America and Europe, of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, did much to quicken that Abolitionist sentiment which in the end won the day. For the present, however, and until the third year of the war, abolition remained outside the region of practical politics. The question which was dividing the nation was whether slavery should become a national institution—whether it should take its place, as the South intended, as one of the essential postulates in the theory of American liberty—or should be restrained within its old limits as a State institution, an evil which the Federal Government would never recognise as necessary to the welfare of America, but which it was too proud and too generous to compel its constituent States to abolish. The situation was one of unstable equilibrium, and the illogical position could not much longer be maintained. It was the logic of ideas that first drove the South into secession, and afterwards the nation into abolition.
Immigration was now beginning to create a difficult problem in the metropolis, and was in part accountable for the corruption which from this time forward disfigured its politics. By 1855 New York counted more than six hundred thousand inhabitants; a number which in itself must inevitably have created many a delicate situation in a new country, but which was rendered tenfold more difficult to manage by its rapid growth and heterogeneous character. It had doubled in fifteen years, and a continuously increasing stream of immigration had poured through it.
The first great wave had brought nearly two millions of Europeans, principally Germans and Irish, across the Atlantic during the later forties. The failure of the Irish potato crop in 1846, the crisis of 1848, when Europe was swept by revolution and afterwards by reaction, sent hundreds of thousands of homeless men across the sea. Many of the Germans afterwards took their share in another struggle for freedom in their new home; but on the other hand, the more helpless of the immigrants, and a large proportion of the Irish, swelled the population of New York; and proved themselves quicker to learn the advantages of party subserviency than the ethics of citizenship. Many of them had been trained in the school of tyranny at home. Thus the city government became almost hopelessly corrupt, falling into the hands of the genteel and unprincipled Mayor Fernando Wood, and Isaiah Rynders, captain of his bodyguard of blackguards. Men of this stamp began to control not only the government of New York city, but the national party which had its headquarters at Tammany Hall. Whitman was intimate with the condition of things there, and knew the men who manipulated the machine, and pulled the strings at the nominating conventions. He has described those of this period in the most scathing words, and has made it clear that they were among the worst of a bad class. They did not favour slavery so much as inaction; they longed only for a continuance of their own good fortune, desiring to fatten peacefully at the troughs of corruption. To men like these, ideals seem to constitute a public danger. And the war which broke over America in 1861 was due as much to the northern menials of Mammon as to the real followers of Calhoun. It was not only against the South that America fought—or rather it was not against the South itself at all—but against the hosts of those who used her freedom for the accomplishment of an end antagonistic to hers.
Evidences of the demoralising influence always present in the life of a great city were thus painfully patent in New York, especially in the lowest strata, becoming hourly more debased and numerous. The plutocracy also began to imitate the showy splendours of Paris under the second Empire. But it would be wrong to assume that corruption and display characterised the metropolis of the fifties. For in spite of the foreign influx, and the venality of a considerable class both of native and of foreign birth, and in spite too of the snobs, in spite that is to say of the appearance of two dangerous elements, the very poor and the very rich, there was still predominant in New York a frank and hearty democratic feeling. The mass of the people still embodied much of the true American genius; they were marked by the friendly, independent and unconventional carriage which is still upon the whole typical of the West.
New York was full of large democratic types of manhood. Notable, even among these, was Walt Whitman. Even here, he was unlike other men: the fulness of his spirits, his robust individuality, the generosity of his whole nature, was so exceptional as to make itself felt. His figure began to grow familiar to all kinds of New Yorkers during these years. He was frequently to be seen on Broadway, in his favourite coign of vantage, on the stage-top by the driver’s side, a great, red-faced fellow, in a soft beaver, with clothes of his own choosing, an open collar like that of Byron or Jean Paul, and a grey beard. The dress suited him, he was plainly at home in it, and in those days it was not specially remarkable or odd; it was the man himself who compelled attention.
On many a holiday through 1853 he might also have been seen at the International Exhibition or World’s Fair, which was held in the Crystal Palace on Sixth Avenue and Fortieth Street, and offered a remarkable object lesson to the people of New York on the development of American resources and the value of that national unity which railroads and machinery were yearly making more actual. Here America was seen in all her own natural promise, and also in her relation to the Transatlantic world.
It was one of those sights which Whitman dearly loved. The Exhibition taught him far more than books about the country in which he lived; for his mind was like a child’s in its responsiveness to concrete illustrations—a quality which may explain the long strings of nouns which figure so oddly on many a page which he afterwards wrote. He loved a medley of things, each one significant and delightful in itself. A catalogue was for him a sort of elemental poem; and being elemental, he sought to introduce the catalogue into literature. We who live in another and more ordered world, rarely respond to this kind of emotional stimulus, which was doubtless very powerful for Whitman, and cannot but laugh at his attempts to move us by a chatter of names. It may be we are wrong, and that another age will smile at us in our turn, though at present we remain incredulous.
Here, too, he studied such examples as he found of statuary and painting, arts of which he must hitherto have been largely ignorant. It is only very old or very wealthy cities that become treasuries of the plastic arts, and at this time New York was not yet sufficiently rich, or perhaps sufficiently travelled, to have accumulated this kind of wealth. Whitman was not blind to painting, like Carlyle, for in later years he so appreciated the genius of J. F. Millet that he used to say, “the man that knows his Millet needs no creed”.
After a varied experience as teacher, printer, journalist and editor, Whitman had settled into the life of an American artisan. He had inherited much of the Dutch realism, the love of things and of the making of things, from his mother’s side; while on his father’s, the associations with mallet and chisel had been strong from his childhood; and thus his trade helped him to gather together the fragments of his identity and weld them into one. As he was never in any sense its slave, it also provided him with the means for that constant leisurely study of life which was now his real occupation. When a house was off his hands and the money for it assured, he would take a holiday, extending sometimes over weeks together, in the remote parts of Long Island. The open spaces helped his mood, and the quietness furthered the slow processes of self-realisation.
While at Brooklyn, he was every day on the ferry, and almost every evening he was in New York. He read during his dinner hour, and thought and meditated while he worked. The physical exercise quieted his brain. Taken earlier, it might have deadened it; but he was now a mature man full of thoughts, and well furnished with experience. What he needed was to assimilate all this material and make it his own. And while he built houses, the co-ordinating principle of his personality was building up for him a harmonious self-consciousness, which gradually filled out the large and wholesome body of the man. This gestating process required precisely the deliberation and open-air accompaniments which were afforded by his present life—a life so different from the confinement and incessant strain and stress which check all processes of conscious development in most men and women before they reach maturity. His nature was emotional, and music played a considerable part in its development. Always an assiduous opera-goer, Whitman took full advantage of the musical opportunities which New York offered him at this time. In 1850, Barnum had brought Jenny Lind to the Castle Gardens—now the Aquarium—a fashionable resort on the Battery, and Maretzek of the Astor Opera House, had replied with Parodi, and Bettini the great tenor.
Best of all, in 1853, Marietta Alboni visited the city, and Whitman heard her every night of her engagement. This great singer, whose voice was then in the plenitude of its power, had been some twelve years before the public and was already beginning to attain those physical proportions suggested in the cruel but witty saying that she resembled an elephant which had swallowed a nightingale. She was low-browed and of a somewhat heavy face, though Whitman thought her handsome; but it was by her voice, not her face, that she triumphed. Critics found her talent exceptionally impersonal and even cold, though they confessed that never voice was more enchanting. This coldness is rather difficult to understand, for Whitman, who was a judge in such matters, felt it to be full of passion, and a passion which swept him away in the Titanic whirlwind of its power. He had found Jenny Lind somewhat immature and her voice unrewarding, but Alboni awakened and illumined his very soul, and became, as it were, the incarnation of music.
The same summer Walt took his father, whose health was failing, on a visit to Huntington, to see the old home for a last time. Two years later, Walter Whitman died and was buried in Brooklyn.
The family seems to have been living in Ryerton Street, in a house which was the last building on that side of the town. Beside Walt, there were three unmarried brothers at home, George and Jeff as well as Edward; and Hannah, Walt’s favourite sister. We hear little of Jesse, the oldest brother, who appears to have been a labourer, of Andrew, or of the remaining sister Mary. Probably they were all married by this time and living away.
The three at home were the ablest of the brothers, and doubtless they shared the financial responsibility between them. The Portland Avenue house, into which they presently moved, bears witness to their comfortable circumstances. Walt contributed his share with his brothers; beyond that he seemed indifferent about money; he hardly ever spoke of it, and perhaps by way of contrast with the others, evidently regarded the subject as of minor importance. Indeed, just as his own work had really grown profitable and he was on the way to become rich, he gave up carpentering for good. This was early in 1855.
Of late he had been more and more absorbed and pre-occupied; his days off had been more frequent and numerous, and whatever his immediate occupation he was continually stopping to write. He seemed to grow daily more indifferent to opinion, daily more markedly himself.
The fragments which he wrote in out-of-the-way places or at work he would read aloud or recite when by himself, to the waves or to the trees; trying them over at the opera, on the ferry, or on Broadway, where in the midst of the city one can be so unobserved and so unheard in the heart of its hubbub. He must assure himself that they were without a hint of unreality or of books.
For he was now deliberately at work upon his great task, his child’s fancy. He was come up into his manhood. He had, it seemed to him, thoroughly perceived and absorbed the spirit of America and of his time. His message had come to him, and he was writing his prophetic book, his Song of Walt Whitman.
At last, the manuscript was done, and in the early summer he went to work in a little printing shop on Cranberry Street, and set up much, perhaps the whole, of the type jealously with his own hands. About the beginning of July, and a few days only before his father’s death, it was completed. In the New York Tribune for the sixth of the month, it was advertised as being on sale at Fowler & Wells’s Phrenological Dep?t and Bookstore on Broadway, and at Swayne’s in Fulton Street, Brooklyn. The price was at first two dollars, which seems a little exorbitant for so slender and unpretending a volume, in shape and thickness a mere single copy of one of the smaller periodicals, bound in sea-green cloth, with the odd name, Leaves of Grass, in fanciful gilt lettering across its face. It was presently reduced to a dollar.
The other members of the household took the new venture very quietly. They had never been consulted in the matter—it had been Walt’s affair, and only his; and the father’s death must speedily have obliterated the little mark it made upon their minds. “Hiawatha” was published about the same time, and a copy found its way into the house. The mother, turning the pages of both, considered that if Longfellow’s were acknowledged as poetry, Walt’s queer lines might pass muster too. Brother George fingered the book a little, and concluded it was not worth reading—that it was not in his line anyhow.
Doubtless they were relieved when the writing and printing were done, thinking that now surely Walt would return to the ways of mortals. For he had certainly fallen into the most irregular habits. He lay late abed, and came down still later to breakfast; wrote for a few hours, and when the table was being laid for dinner, took down his big hat and sauntered out, to return presently after the meal was over and the dishes cold. He was not intentionally inconsiderate, but he was wholly engrossed in his work, and so pre-occupied that he must often have been tiresome enough.
After dinner he disappeared altogether, spending the afternoon and evening in his own leisurely way; setting type, perhaps, on his book at Andrew Rome’s little office, and then going off to the opera or to some friend’s; and, as he came back, staying far into the night in talk with the young fellows on the ferry, or on one of the East River steamers. Sometimes Hannah or Jeff might accompany him, but as a rule he went alone.
If his family anticipated any change in his ways when the book was out, they were doomed to disappointment. The new task was but begun; the methods approved themselves to his mind and were pursued. He had weighed everything over again that summer, as soon as the book was out, going away to the eastern shore of Long Island for months of thought and solitude.
As one turns the ninety broad pages of the volume, with their large type, their long flowing lines, their odd punctuation and occasional slips in orthography, every detail telling of the individuality behind it, one feels a little of what it must have meant to its maker. Five times, they say, he wrote and re-wrote, made and un-made it, and looking back it seemed as though for seven years it had been struggling with him for utterance.
He had written tales and verses with the others, but this book he knew was different from them all. It was not so much his writing as himself. It was a man, and, withal, a new sort of man. For better or worse it was Walt Whitman, a figure familiar enough to the common people of Brooklyn and New York, familiar and beloved—he was not unconscious of his exceptional power of attraction—but a Walt Whitman whom, as yet, they understood very little, who had, indeed, but recently come to an understanding of himself, and who was now approaching to speak with them. Here is the frank declaration of himself, which he proffers to all. Now, at last, we shall understand one another, he seems to say.
It was the old, old need for expression, the ultimate and deepest necessity of man, which urged him to his task and made its publication possible. Self-revelation is, of course, continuous and inevitable upon its unconscious side. It is only when it becomes a deliberate act that it astonishes the beholder to outcries of admiration or indignant horror.
Now the passion that overwhelms the poet is near akin to the lover’s, for he is a lover whose heart is transfigured by the presence of Beauty, the Beloved, immanent in his world. And only by a naked avowal can such passion be satisfied.
There are those, of course, who regard every self-revelation as an immodesty, and who will and do avert their eyes from all passion, crying shame. But some at least of the others, who are well aware of the weakness of words, and know how few can use them perfectly, will reverently approach such a confession as Whitman’s; not, indeed, as if it were that of a young girl, but as that of a man, na?ve, yet virile, and of heroic sanity. And if they feel any shame they will frankly acknowledge it to be their own.
There is a kind of egoism which all self-revelation pre-supposes—the consciousness of possessing something supremely worthy of giving. This glorious pride is not incompatible with the profoundest humility, for it is divine, like the “I am” of Jehovah, the egoism of God.
If self-expression is the outcome of passion, its new incarnation has some of the wonder which attends a birth. The most virile of poets must here become as a woman; and the mystery which, for any mother, enwraps her first-born, clings for his Muse about her slender child by the great god of song. And when, as in the instance of this book of Whitman’s, the children of the Muse betray in every feature the abandonment of the remote passion in which they were conceived, one cannot oneself handle them without emotion.
Walt regarded the book with undisguised pride and satisfaction. Mother-like, he eyed it as the future saviour of men. He saw it prophetic and large with destiny for America. He was confident that the public would be quick to recognise that quality in it for which they had been so long half-consciously waiting. The people would read it with a new delight, for surely it must be dynamic with the joy in which it was written.
He often said in later years that Leaves of Grass was an attempt to put a happy man into literature. Others may discuss the optimism and the egoism of his pages, for of both qualities there is plenty in them, but, after all, they are but secondary there. As to the qualities themselves, we may hold contrary and even disparaging opinions of their value, they will certainly at times repel us. But primarily these pages portray the happy man, and a strong and happy personality has the divine gift of attraction. Byron may dominate the whole of Europe for a generation by the dark Satanic splendour of his pride; Carlyle may hold us still by his fierce, lean passion for sincerity; but Whitman draws us by the outshining of his joy.
Happiness is not less infectious than melancholy or zeal; and if it is genuine it is at least equally beyond price. As far as it goes, it seems to indicate that a man may be perfectly adjusted to this world of circumstances, which to us appears so often contrary. A happy and intelligent man of thirty-six, who has looked at life open-eyed, and is neither handsome, rich nor famous is worthy of attention. There is something half-divine about him; and we cannot but hope he may prove to be prophetic of the race.
Some such thought must have been in Emerson’s mind, when a few days after the perusal of Leaves of Grass, he wrote his acknowledgment to its unknown author. The letter has been often quoted, but it is so significant that I must quote it again. For no other literary acknowledgment ever accorded to Whitman possesses anything like equal interest or importance.
Emerson was certainly the most notable force among American writers at that time; and one might add, the only figure of anything like the first magnitude. In Great Britain, the century had already produced the literature which we associate with the names of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats and Carlyle, not to mention the earlier work of Tennyson, Browning and others. Emerson was the only American who could venture to claim rank with these, and then hardly equal literary rank. But in some respects his influence was greater, for his was certainly the clearest and fullest expression of the American spirit in letters. His words are therefore of importance to us:—
“Concord, Mass’tts, 21st July, 1855.
“Dear Sir,—I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of Leaves of Grass. I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seems the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our Western wits fat and mean. I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment that so delights us and which large perception only can inspire.
“I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging.
“I did not know until I last night saw the book advertised in a newspaper that I could trust the name as real and available for a post office. I wish to see my benefactor, and have felt much like striking my tasks and visiting New York to pay you my respects.
R. W. Emerson.
“Mr. Walter Whitman.”
Picture of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
R. W. EMERSON
The epigrammatic style of the sentences, together with a strong flavour of sentiment, may set the reader in his turn rubbing his eyes, and wondering whether Emerson were consciously inditing a mere complimentary letter. But a second perusal renders such an idea untenable. The epigram and the sentiment were parts of the Emersonian mannerism. The letter was not penned in hot haste, after a first glance at the pages; a delay had taken place between reading and writing. Moreover, when about this time a visitor called at Concord, he was sent on his way to Brooklyn as upon a pilgrimage, with the significant words, “Americans abroad may now come home: unto us a man is born”. Another epigram, uttered perhaps with a gentle smile, but without a flavour of irony.
Emerson was then a man of fifty-two. The first and second series of his lecture-essays had been published more than ten years, and the first volume of his poems in 1847; he was already famous in England as well as in America. But though he was in certain quarters the cynosure of admiration, in others he was the butt of ridicule. This same year the London Athen?um praised Irving because, as it said, his fancies were ideal, and not like Emerson’s merely typographical—because they did not consist, like the latter’s, in the use of verbs for nouns, in erratic punctuation, tumid epithets, which were startling rather than apposite, or in foreign forms and idioms.
This though milder, is not unlike what many of the critics were soon to be saying with better reason of Whitman; and it is interesting to recall that in 1839, when he was Whitman’s age, Emerson was struggling to escape from the limits of metre into a rhythm that should suggest the wildest freedom; that should be “firm as the tread of a horse,” vindicate itself like the stroke of a bell, and knock at prose and dulness like a cannon ball; a rhythm which should be in itself a renewing of creation, because it was the form of a living spirit. In later years, Emerson seems to have harked back again to the more regular forms, believing them to correspond to essential pulse-beats, or organic rhythm. But his journal contains several little prose poems of the date of 1855 or 1856, notably the sketch of the “Two Rivers,” outlined partly in loose irregular metres.
This search of the Concord prophet after a new free rhythmical form, must have predisposed him to interest in such a book as Leaves of Grass, where the laws of metre are in force no longer. But beyond this, the older man felt a close kinship with the younger. Whitman had declared himself unequivocally for the faith in life which was Emerson’s gospel; and he smacked of the soil and air of America in a way that Emerson could not but love. Here at last was an actual incarnation of the ideas he had so long been hurling at the heads of the American people.
A beautiful and characteristic modesty is evident in the tone of the letter. Emerson might well have acknowledged the younger man as a pupil rather than as a benefactor; it was the same quality as had appeared in his reply to Frederika Bremer, when, five years earlier, she had been praising his own verses: “The Poet of America,” he answered gravely, “is not yet come. When he comes he will sing quite differently.”
The idea of an American poet was “in the air”. Intellectual America was in revolt; she would remain no longer a mere province of Britain; her writers should shape themselves no more upon merely English models. Lowell in his “Biglow Papers” and Longfellow in “Hiawatha” were among many who sought to exploit the literary soil of the New World. Whatever their success in this, they can hardly be said to have inaugurated a new literature. No American Muse had yet appeared upon the Heights of Helicon to spread a new hush over the world, and by her singing raise the place of song perilously near to the stars. But though she had not appeared she was eagerly expected; and Emerson’s letter is like nothing so much as the heralding cry that he had at last caught a glimpse of her across Whitman’s pages. It was but a glimpse, and he was yet in doubt; he must come to Brooklyn himself, must meet this fellow face to face, and see.
It is time that we ourselves took a view of the book, for we must see what Whitman had actually done during these last months, and gather what further indications we may as to his general notions of himself and of the world.
The volume consists of a long preface or manifesto of the New Poetry, and of twelve poems by way of example. The preface commences with a description of America, the greatest of poems, the largest and most stirring of all the doings of men. “Here is action untied from strings, necessarily blind to particulars and details, magnificently moving in masses!” Here is a nation, hospitable, spacious, prolific; a nation whose common people is a larger race than hitherto, demanding a larger poetry.
He describes the American poet, who is coming to awaken men from their nightmare of shame to his own faith and joy. That poet is the lover of the universe, who beholds with sure and mystic sight the perfection that underlies all imperfection, for he sees the Whole of things. Past and future are present to him; and with them is the eternal soul. “The greatest poet does not moralise or make applications of morals—he knows the soul.” His readers become loving, generous, democratic, proud, sociable, healthy, by beholding in his poems the beauty of these qualities.
“Seer as he is, the poet,” continues Whitman, “is no dreamer. He sees and creates actual forms.... To speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of animals, and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside is the flawless triumph of art. If you have looked on him who has achieved it, you have looked on one of the masters of the artists of all nations and times. You shall not contemplate the flight of the grey gull over the bay, or the mettlesome action of the blood horse, or the tall leaning of sunflowers on their stalk, or the appearance of the sun journeying through heaven, or the appearance of the moon afterward, with any more satisfaction than you shall contemplate him. The great poet has less a marked style, and is more the channel of thoughts and things without increase or diminution, and is the free channel of himself. He swears to his art, I will not be meddlesome, I will not have in my writing any elegance or effect, or originality, to hang in the way between me and the rest like curtains.... I will have purposes as health or heat or snow has, and be as regardless of observation.... You shall stand by my side and look in the mirror with me.”
His words never pose before the reader for ornament, they are living things. And for this very reason, he follows no models; his thought is living and original; it must find a new form for its perfect expression, as a new seed would find new growth and leafage.
The poet appeals to every reader as to an equal, because in every reader he appeals to the Supreme Soul. Many may not hear him, but he appeals to all, and not to a coterie.
Whitman then proceeds to the praise of science. Knowledge, bringing back the mind from the supernatural to the actual, brings faith with it; and the soul is the divinest thing that science discovers in the universe. He turns to philosophy, and bids her deal candidly with whatsoever is real, recognise the eternal tendency of all things toward happiness, and cease to describe God as contending against some other principle.
The poet deals with truth and with the actual. All else is but a sham and impotent. For everywhere and always, the soul which is the one permanent reality, loves truth and responds to it.
The poet is by nature prudent, as one who knows the real purpose of the soul and of the universe, and would act in accordance with that knowledge. He accepts the impulses of the soul as the only final arguments; and only the deeds which it dictates appear to him to be profitable. Living in his age, and becoming its embodiment, he is therewithal a citizen of eternity. The future shall be his proof: will his song remain at her heart? Will it awaken, century after century, the divine unrest, and as it were, create new souls forever?
As for the priests and their work, they are done. The American poets shall fill their place, and the whole world shall answer to their message. Their words shall be in the English tongue—the language of “all who aspire”—but they shall be the very words of the people of America; they shall be native to the soil, and redolent of the air of the Republic. Such poets shall be America’s own, and in them she will welcome her most illustrious visitors. They are her equals; for the soul of a man is as supreme as the soul of a nation. And America shall absorb them as affectionately as they have absorbed her.
Such is the gist of Whitman’s manifesto. Nature the Soul and Freedom; Simplicity and Originality of Expression—these, its dominant notes, recall at once Rousseau, Wordsworth and Shelley, with many another; while certain passages remind the reader that The Germ was but recently published across the sea, the manifesto of another movement associated with the names of the Rossetti family and with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. But whatever the reminiscences it awakens, Whitman’s preface is his own. The thoughts were not all originally his. But they had shaped themselves newly in his brain and under his pen, and every line bears the stamp of originality.
Without staying to discuss the preface let us proceed to a rapid survey of the remaining pages. They are written, it would seem, for measured declamation, in a sort of free chant, which is neither prose nor verse, but whose lines coincide in length with natural pauses in the thought. Whitman himself spoke very deliberately, in a half drawl; he had a melodious baritone voice of considerable range and power, and one can well imagine how he would recite, when alone or with some intimate friend, the first lines, beginning:—
I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.
The lines are quite simple and direct; they are intended to place the reader at once in relation with the actual idler who recites them in the summer fields. He is an out-of-doors fellow, who lives whole-heartedly in the present, rejoicing in the world and observing it. He and his soul—he distinguishes decisively between the temporal and the eternal elements in himself whose equal balance, neither abdicating its place nor contesting that of the other, makes the harmony of his life—he and his soul commune together, and discover that the world means Love, and that the very grass is full of suggestions of immortality.
Everything indeed has its word for Walt Whitman; he understands what the streets are unconsciously saying; the animals of the country-side, the working men, the youths and the women, each and all are teaching him something of himself. All life appeals to him; he recognises himself in each of its myriad forms. And his thoughts are the half-conscious thoughts which lie in the minds of all. It is not only the happy and prosperous whom he represents, but the defeated also, and the outcast.
All things have their mystical meanings; but especially are manhood and womanhood divine. There is nothing more divine than they. As for him, he is proud, satisfied, august. He has no sympathy with whimperings, or conformity to the ideas of others. Is not he himself the fellow and equal of the supreme Beings, of the Night, the Earth, and the Sea?
He has faith in the issue of time; he fully accepts all reality as a part of the whole purpose. He at least will be fearless and frank, and conceal nothing; all desires shall be expressed by him.
And to him all the bodily functions are wonderful. His whole life is a wonder and delight, beyond the power of words to utter. Sounds especially he enjoys; alluding to the passionate emotions aroused in him by the opera, and adding an obscure, erotic dithyramb on the ecstasy of touch, the proof of reality, for we understand everything through touch.
Everything is seen by him to be full of meaning, because he himself is a microcosm and summary of the universe “stuccoed with quadrupeds and birds all over”. He feels so vividly his personal kinship with the animals which are never pre-occupied about religion or property, that he thinks he must have passed through their present experience “huge times ago,” to include it now in his own. Forthwith, he strings together in a rapid succession of dazzling miniatures, some of the contents of his personal memory; pictures out of his experience or his imagination, that remain vivid and significant to him. His sympathy makes them actually real to him; the figures in them are each a part of himself. “I am the man,” he cries, “I suffered, I was there.”
But he has his own distinct personality. He is the friendly and flowing savage, full of magnetism, health and power—
Wherever he goes men and women accept and desire him,
They desire he should like them, and touch them, and speak to them, and stay with them.
Behaviour lawless as snow-flakes, words simple as grass, uncombed head, and laughter, and na?veté,
Slow-stepping feet, and the common features, and the common modes and emanations....
He sees the divine that is in men, and how all the gods are latent in the race, and with them ever more besides. Even in the midst of their absurd littleness, which he fully recognises, he calls men to the reality of themselves, away from the religions of the priests to their own souls. He understands doubt very well, but he has faith, faith in an ultimate happiness for each and all.
He endeavours to express his sense of eternity, and of the friendliness of the world to him:—
Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me,
Afar down I see the huge first Nothing—the vapour from the Nostrils of Death—I know I was even there,
I waited unseen and always, and slept while God carried me through the lethargic mist,
And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon.
Long I was hugged close—long and long.
Immense have been the preparations for me,
Faithful and friendly the arms that have helped me.
Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen,
For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings,
They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.
Before I was born out of my mother, generations guided me,
My embryo has never been torpid—nothing could overlay it.
For it the nebula cohered to an orb,
The long slow strata piled to rest it on,
Vast vegetables gave it sustenance,
Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths, and deposited it with care.
All forces have been steadily employed to complete and delight me,
Now I stand on this spot with my Soul.
Thus it seems to him that he has existed potentially from the beginning; that all the ages in succession have cared for him, and that now the whole world is full of his kin and lovers. He beholds the universe as gloriously infinite in its assured purpose: God has appointed a meeting-place where He waits for every soul. The way of the soul is eternal progress, and each one must follow that road. My pupils, he exclaims, shall become masters and excel me! They shall be wholesome, hearty, natural fellows, attracted to me because I neither write for money nor indoors.
My religion is the worship of the soul. I am calm and composed, and satisfied about God, whom I do not in the least understand. Death and decay seem wholesome to him; they are the way of life by which he himself came to the present hour, wherein he realises the mystic reality, the life eternal, and the ineffable idea of happiness as the central purpose of the Universe:—
Do you see, O my brothers and sisters?
It is not chaos or death—it is form, union, plan—it is eternal life, it is happiness.
With an enigmatical farewell, he resumes his place in the life of the world, awaiting such of his readers as belong to him:—
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you, nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged,
Missing me one place, search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
The other poems are pendants to the first, offering further exemplifications of the precepts of the preface. He appeals, for example, to his fellow workmen and workwomen, that they realise their own greatness and immortality, their own individual destiny; for nothing can ever be so worthy of their reverence as their own soul.
He bids them employ and enjoy this hour to the full, for death comes, and it will not be the same as life. Yet death also will be good to the soul—all the signs assure the soul that it will be satisfied; and there is nothing which does not share in the soul-life.
In dreams he recognises some free utterances of the soul, and in sleep, the great equaliser of men. As he watches them asleep all become beautiful to him with the beauty of the soul, which men also call Heaven. Diseased or vile they may be, but their souls forever urge them along the appointed way towards the goal. He seems to see all souls meeting together in sleep, mysteriously to circle the earth, hand in hand. He entrusts himself to sleep with the same security as to Death and Birth.
At the sight and touch of the human body, he kindles with the delight of a Renaissance painter, a Botticelli or a Michael Angelo. The very soul loves the flesh, and the contact of flesh with flesh rejoices it. He writes of the magic force of attraction embodied in a woman; nor of attraction only, but of emancipation. He extols the strength and joy which is embodied in a man. The body of every man and woman, says he, should be as sacred to you as your own, for the body is almost the soul, and to desecrate the bodies of the dead is a little thing beside the shame that we put upon the bodies of the living.
If life and the soul are sacred, the human body is sacred,
And the glory and sweet of a man, is the token of manhood untainted,
And in man or woman, a clean, strong, firm-fibred body,
Is beautiful as the most beautiful face.
He fills a page with quick Hogarthian sketches of the lower types of faces, and then, turning about, acclaims the souls behind them as his equals. They too will duly come to themselves, following towards the light, after the Lord.
He loves thus to enlarge upon the poet’s office as the Answerer or sympathiser with all men, and how he should be welcome and familiar to each. In the poet’s company, the soul of each one quickens. And yet the poet is no greater than the least; his verses are not nobler than the kindly deed of any poor old woman.
He writes of 1848, the year of Revolutions, somewhat in the style of “Blood Money,” and probably this page is one of the earliest of the fragments, and may date back to the year which it celebrates. In spite of the successes of tyranny, and the failures of the young men of Europe, he sees that Liberty herself is never foiled.
By way of sharp contrast he directs a mocking and colloquial page of satire against the ’cute Bostonians of 1854. Whitman’s dislike of Boston is never for a moment concealed; Jonathan the Yankee he detests. And now he brings home to him the profits of his bargaining; he has dethroned King George only to set up in his place this Republican President, Pierce of New Hampshire, who in these loud-echoing streets employs the strength of America upon the capture of a fugitive slave.
Sometimes he is autobiographical. “There was a child went forth,”—he recites—a country boy who, at West Hills and in Brooklyn, absorbed all the sights and sounds of his world into himself; till the early lilacs, the morning-glories, and the orchard blossom, the quarrelsome and the friendly boys and the bare-footed negro-children all became a part of him. His parents, too, in the daily life of the home as well as by heredity, entered into his make-up; the mother, wholesome, quiet and gentle, the father, virile and hot-tempered, with a streak of craft and astuteness running through him. And as they became a part of me, he says, so now they shall become a part of you that read this page.
Or at his na?vest, we see him standing open-mouthed and amazed, like a very child, before the sheer naked facts of his own story from the date of his birth to the present hour; and endeavouring to evoke a similar na?ve attitude in the reader, not indeed towards the date of Whitman’s birth, but towards that of his own.
Upon a kindred note we turn the last page also—for it is a proclamation of reverence, reverence for all the old myths; reverence for the high ideals; reverence too for Youth and for Age, for Speech and Silence, for true Wealth and true Poverty, always with stress upon the last member of each pair; for America, too, and for the Earth with its ineffable future; for Truth, for Justice, for Goodness—ay, and, he adds with conscious paradox, for Wickedness as well; above all for Life, but not less for Death. Great is Life, he concludes:—
Great is Life, real and mystical wherever and whoever:
Great is Death:—sure as Life holds all parts together, Death holds all parts together:
Sure as the stars return again after they merge in the light, Death is great as Life.
How are we to sum up these pages, and figure out what it is they come to? No summary is likely to do justice to a book of poetry, which demonstrates itself by wholly other methods than argument, and it would be foolish for me to attempt it. But there is one point with which I must make shift to deal.
Beginning with a forecast of the New Poetry, as of something which should be in its essence indigenous to America, the natural expression of a new spirit and race and of its attitude towards the Self and the Universe, Whitman has boldly given examples to show what it was he meant. What are we to say of these? Do they give us a new art-form? or, if you will, a new kind of poetry? Do they bring us material for some new law of rhythm or metre?
These are deep questions, and dangerous to answer. For myself, I can but give an affirmative to them, accepting the smiles of the incredulous. And I must do so without a discussion which would here be tedious, even if I were able to make it profitable.
There is a simple test of the whole matter which one may oneself apply: Does Whitman’s method of writing arouse, in those who can read it with enjoyment, an emotion distinct in character from that aroused by the methods of all other poets? Does Leaves of Grass awake some quality of the Soul which answers neither to the words of Tennyson nor Browning, Emerson nor Carlyle? The proof by emotional reaction requires some skill in self-observation and more impartiality; but, on the whole, I think those who have tried it fairly seem to take my part, and to answer emphatically in the affirmative.
What then is this emotion which Whitman alone, or in special measure, evokes? It is a further hard but fair question, for it involves Whitman’s personality, and this book is an attempt to answer it. Briefly, it is the complex but harmonious emotion which possesses a sane full-blooded man of fully awakened soul, when he realises the presence of the Eternal and Universal incarnate in some “spear of summer grass”. One may call it the religious emotion; but it is not the emotion of any other religious poetry, saving perhaps some of the Hebrew prophets: and every prophet has his own cry. It is the emotion of a religion which is as large as the largest conceptions which man has yet formed of life; for Whitman, apart from any limitations in his thought, appears to have lived more fully and with fuller conscious purpose than did other men.
In order to make oneself understood at all one speaks in hyperbole, and doubtless I exaggerate. Whitman was, of course, no God among men, nor was he greater than other poets; in a sense he was even less than the least of them, so subjective was his genius; but since he consciously evokes a new emotion, he has his place among true artists, for Art is the power of evoking the emotion in others which one intends. And since the new emotion seems to be altogether ennobling when it is fully realised, being at once enlarging and integrating to the soul, we ought the more gladly to hail and acknowledge him.
I say a new emotion, not meaning, of course, that he is alone in calling up the soul, for no great poetry can leave the soul unstirred; but that no poetry of modern times stirs the soul in the same manner as does that of this full-natured man. So far, I think, we may acknowledge Whitman’s success as a poet, and I am not concerned to urge it further. There are many who do not respond to his writings in the way I have indicated, and they naturally refuse him the title. There are others who do, and who accord it to him; and I confess I am of the latter.
The only American poet who approaches him in sentiment is Emerson. Poems like “Each and All,” with its motive of the cosmic unity, “The perfect Whole,” or “Brahma,” with its reconciling all-inclusiveness, are very near in thought to Whitman; so again is “Merlin” with its
Great is the art,
Great be the manners of the bard;
He shall not his brain encumber
With the coil of rhyme and number,—
or “Woodnotes”—“God hid the whole world in thy heart”—or the exclamation “When worlds of lovers hem thee in” of the “Threnody”; or his “Test,” when he hangs his verses in the wind. The inspiration of the two men made them akin; but it was far from identical. There are sides of Leaves of Grass which are absent from Emerson’s writings, just as there are phases of Emerson’s thought which are never really touched by Whitman. But above all, while the works of both are exhilarating to the soul, the emotional reactions from them are quite distinct.
Considering Emerson’s influence at the time upon all that was most virile in American thought, we might feel certain that some part at least of his teaching had illuminated Whitman’s mind, and there is sufficient evidence in his own writings to prove it. He said indeed, that it was Emerson who led him to a spiritual understanding of America, and who finally brought his simmering ideas to the boil. But he also vehemently asserted the independence of Leaves of Grass from any direct Emersonian or other literary influence; and in this the internal evidence of his book supports him. It is really impossible to confuse the flavours of Whitman and of Emerson.
One more comparison, and I will pursue the story. There is much which Whitman obviously shares with Shelley. Their kinship of inspiration is too significant for a passing note, and might well be followed over many pages. The writer of Leaves of Grass, and the youthful author of Queen Mab, had drunk at the same fountain of love and wonder.
Shelley’s Defence of Poetry should be read alongside of the Preface of 1855. In it also you will find it stated that the poet lives in the consciousness of the whole; that he is not to be bound by metrical custom, the distinction between poets and prose-writers being but a vulgar error; it is sufficient if his periods are harmonious and rhythmical. Poetry is therein discovered as the great instrument of morality, for it exercises and therefore strengthens the imagination, which is the organ of love—that going-out of a man from himself to others, in which morality finds the final expression.
Here, as in Whitman’s pages, the permanence of poetry is asserted; its significance is not to be exhausted by the generation in which it found expression. Poetry is the motive power of action and creates utilities. It is the root and blossom of science and philosophy. Poetry is the interpenetration of a diviner nature with our own; it turns all things to loveliness, and strips off that film of use and wont which holds our eyes from the vision of wonder. The great poets are men of supreme virtue and consummate prudence. They are the world’s law-givers.
It must be enough for us to have noted the parallel, which might easily be pressed too far. There are regions of thought and expression in which their opposition would, of course, appear even more striking; we need not pursue the subject, remembering that much of what they share derives from the influence which we associate with the works of Rousseau.
Whatever our opinion of Whitman’s astonishing “piece of wit and wisdom,” we cannot be surprised that in some quarters it was received with contemptuous silence, and in others with prompt and frank abuse. The Boston Intelligencer, for instance, credited it to some escaped lunatic; the Criterion to a man possessed of the soul of a sentimental donkey that had died of disappointed love; while the London Critic, comparing him to Caliban, declared he should be whipped by the public executioner.
It is, perhaps, more astonishing that some of the leading journals and reviews of America—the North American Review, Putnam’s Monthly, and the New York Tribune—for example, noticed the book at some length and with friendly forbearance, if not with actual acclamation. The first of these gave the book, in its January issue (1856), three pages of discriminating welcome from the pen of Edward E. Hale, a religious minister of liberal mind and warm heart, whose own inner experience was not without resemblance to Whitman’s in its harmonious development and absence of spiritual conflict.
Whitman was probably prepared for the abuse; it was the indifference of the public which astonished him. At first, it would seem, there was no sale whatever for the book; and Emerson was the only one of its readers who found it specially significant.
Having spent the summer months in solitude in the country, Whitman decided upon a somewhat questionable method of advertisement: he contributed unsigned notices of his book to the Brooklyn Times, with which he appears to have been connected, and to a phrenological sheet issued by Fowler and Wells, his agents on Broadway. He fortified himself for his task by observing that Leigh Hunt had written for the Press upon his own work, and even claimed the high example of Dante.
These articles, whose anonymity seems to infringe on the impartiality of the Press, and to be in some sense a breach of journalistic honour, are not a little astonishing. That in the phrenological journal may, perhaps, be dismissed as a mere publishers’ circular or puff, contributed, as such things frequently are, by the writer. As to the other, Whitman was for a while the editor of the Brooklyn Times, and may have written on himself while serving in this capacity, or perhaps at the request of the actual editor, doubtless his personal friend. Or, again, if we would excuse, or rather explain, his action, we may regard the reviews as his own attempt to look impersonally at his work.
Whatever we may think of the moral aspect of the notices, or however we may account for them, they have considerable interest as further expositions of his purpose, re-inforcing the Preface after an interval of meditation. As such, and as a corrective of popular misapprehensions, he doubtless intended them. In these pages he lays special emphasis on the American character of his work. He notes his studied avoidance of all foreign similes and classical allusions. He compares himself with Tennyson and other poets, only to declare that he is alone in understanding the new poetry, which will not aim at external completeness and finish, but at infinite suggestion; which will be an infallible and unforgettable hint—a living seed, not merely of thought, but of that emotional force which is of the Soul and alone can mould personality.
In September, 1855, Mr. Moncure Conway, having heard of Whitman during a visit to Concord, called upon him in Brooklyn, with an introduction from Emerson. Walt was then living with his family in one of a row of small artisans’ houses, in Ryerton Street, out of Myrtle Avenue. At the moment, however, he was correcting proofs in the little office where his book had been printed, and wore a workman’s striped blue shirt, open at the throat. A few days later, he called upon Mr. Conway, his sister and another lady, at the Metropolitan Hotel, where his manners and conversation were enjoyed and approved. He was then garbed in “the baize coat and chequered shirt” in which he appears in the Leaves of Grass portrait.
Mr. Conway in his story has somewhat confused the details of these visits with those of another paid by him upon a Sunday morning some two years later, when the Whitmans seem to have moved to a more commodious house on North Portland Avenue. The matter is not important, and we may follow the main lines of the picturesque account which he contributed in October, 1866, to the Fortnightly Review.
According to this narrative, Whitman was discovered basking in the hot sunshine on some waste land outside Brooklyn. He was wearing the rough workman’s clothes of his choice, was as brown as the soil and as grey as the grass bents. His visitor was at once impressed by the exceptional largeness and reality of the man, and by a subtle delicacy of feeling for which Leaves of Grass does not appear to have prepared him. Whitman was slow, serene, gracious; in spite of the grey in his hair and beard, and the deep furrows across his brow, his full red face and quiet blue-grey eyes were almost those of a child.
Returning to the house, the visitor noticed a quality about him which belonged by rights to the line-engraving of Bacchus which hung in the bare room he occupied. Like a Greek hero-god, he made one ask oneself whether he was merely human. And after crossing the bay with him, and bathing and sauntering along the beach of Staten Island, the visitor seems to have left in a condition of almost painful excitement, unable to give his thought to anything but Whitman.
A few days later, according to this account, Conway found him setting type for the next edition of his book. Although he was still writing occasionally for the press, Leaves of Grass continued to provide his principal occupation. They crossed the ferry together and rambled about New York. Nearly every artisan they met greeted Walt affectionately as an old friend, and not one of them knew him as a poet.
Together they went to the Tombs prison, Whitman always having acquaintances among the outcasts of society, and often visiting them in detention, both here and at Sing-Sing. Here, Conway had an opportunity of estimating the power over others which was wielded by this personality, whose latent force had so much moved himself. The prisoners confided in him, and on behalf of one he interviewed the governor of the prison. The victim had been detained for trial on some petty charge in an unhealthy cell. Whitman repeated the man’s story, and characterised it, with a sort of religious emphasis and deliberation, as a “damned shame”. It was manifestly upon the tip of the official tongue to rebuke Walt for impertinence; but though he was dressed as an artisan, his quiet determined gaze was too much for the autocrat, who gave way before it and ordered the prisoner to be transferred to better quarters.
Other distinguished visitors called on him from time to time. Of Emerson’s own visits we know next to nothing, but they were frequent and very welcome, sometimes ending with a dinner at Astor House. We have a glimpse of Lord Houghton, sharing a dish of roast apples with his friendly host. Ward Beecher, the famous Brooklyn preacher, was among the callers; and it was on their way from his church that, on Sunday, 9th November, 1856, Mrs. Whitman, in her son’s absence, received Bronson Alcott and Thoreau.
Both men belonged to the circle of Emerson’s Concord intimates, and both have left a record of the successful renewal of their visit upon the following day. The lovable, mystical, oracular Alcott, the delight of his friends, seems to have been greatly attracted by Whitman, whom he knew already, and of whom he has spoken in terms of the highest praise. The mother, he found on that first visit, stately and sensible, full of faith in her son “Walter”; full, too, in his absence, of his praises, as being from his childhood up both good and wise, the faithful and beloved counsellor of brothers and sisters.
They spent two delightful hours with Walt next day, a Philadelphia lady accompanying them and sharing their intercourse with “the very god Pan,” as Alcott styles him. The conversation was to have been renewed on the morrow, but Walt failed to put in an appearance. He was apt to be vague about such appointments, and one could never be sure that he felt himself bound by them. Like a Quaker of the old school, he followed the direction of the hour, and his promises were tentative and well guarded.
Thoreau, too, the naturalist philosopher of Walden, wrote down his impressions of the interview. He was puzzled by Whitman, finding him in many ways a strange and surprising being, outside the range of his experience. Rough, large and masculine but sweet—essentially a gentleman, he says; but the title is paradoxical and inappropriate, and he qualifies it immediately by adding that he was coarse not fine. As to the last point, after vigorously debating it, Whitman and he appear to have retained contrary convictions. But Whitman himself would have been the first to disclaim refinement, a quality which he associated with sterility. If Thoreau had said he was elemental, we would not now dissent.
They were not likely to understand one another. The two men present a remarkable contrast, though on certain sides they have much in common. Thoreau was about two years the older; his principal book of essays, called Walden after the site of his hermitage, had been published when he was about Whitman’s age. Physically he was most unlike the genial red-faced giant opposite to him. Slight and rather short, with long arms and sloping shoulders; mouth, eyes and nose seemed to tell of solitary concentrated thought. There was something in his face of the frontiersman, that woodland look one sees also in Lincoln’s portraits; something, too, of the shyness wood creatures have.
He disliked and avoided the generality of men. In this he would compare himself with Emerson, who found society a refuge from the shabbiness of life’s commonplace, while Thoreau’s own resource was always solitude. He was continually being surprised by the vulgarity of himself and of his fellows, continually flushing with shame, personal or vicarious; and he sought and found a refuge in the pure and lonely spirit that haunted Walden Pool.
Whitman, on the other hand, though he loved solitude, seems, even in solitude, to have craved for movement. In this he was very far from the orientalism of Thoreau and its strenuous seeking after peace. He loved progress. His genius belonged not to the forest pool, whose reflections were unrippled by a breeze—the mirror of the abstract mind—but to the surging passion of the ocean beach.
Similarly, in his attitude towards men, he was far removed from both Thoreau and Emerson. Emerson confessed he could not quite understand what Whitman so enjoyed in the society of the common people; and many a Democrat, if he were only as honest, would make the same confession. It was not that Emerson was in any sense of the word a snob; but the emotional side of his nature responded but feebly to certain of the elemental notes whose vibration is felt perhaps more frequently among the common people than elsewhere. Emerson’s fellowship was largely upon intellectual fields: Whitman’s almost wholly upon the more emotional.
Thoreau found society in disembodied thought, and emotional fellowship in the woods. But to Whitman the sheer contact with people, and especially the unsophisticated natural folk of the class into which he was born and among whom he was bred, was not only a pleasure but a tonic which he could barely exist without. In solitude, he became after a time, heavy, inert, lethargic. His mind itself seemed to grow stale. He was a mere pool of water left upon the beach, which loses virtue in its stagnant isolation.
Whitman seems to have been exceptionally conscious of the stream of electric life which is the great attractive power of a city, and which in itself tends to draw all young men and women into its current. It buoyed him up and carried him, giving him a sense of exaltation only to be compared with that which other poets have derived from the mountains, or the wind out of the West. His large body and intuitive mind craved for the magnetic stimulus and suggestion of people moving about him; he did not look to them to save him from the commonplace, nor did he shrink from them as bringing him new burdens of a common shame.
Coarse, actual, living humanity was his supreme interest and passion. And the delicacy and refinement of the scholar was dreadful to him, because it separated him instantly from the vulgar and common folk. He was one of the roughs, he used to say; and so he was, but with a difference. It was this that puzzled his Concord friends who were quick to feel but slow to understand it. Their perplexity did not, however, turn into mistrust; for their appreciation of all that they understood was full and generous.
Thoreau hardly knew whether he was more repelled or attracted by this “great fellow” who seemed to be the personification of Democracy. Like Tennyson at a later date, he was unable to define him, but stood convinced that he was “a great big something”. A little more than human, Thoreau added; meaning a little larger than normal human development.
In any case, the man was an enigma. He wrote of those relations between men and women for which the poets choose the subtlest and most delicate words in their treasury, in syllables which seemed to Thoreau like those of animals which had not attained to speech. Yet even so, he spoke more truth, beast-like as his voice sounded, than the others. And Thoreau frankly reminded himself, if Whitman made him blush the fault might not be Whitman’s after all.
They did not talk very much or very deeply, as there were four to share the conversation. Thoreau, too, was in a rather cynical mood, and spoke slightingly of Brooklyn and America and her politics, which in itself was enough to chill the stream of intercourse. But they found a common interest in the Oriental writers with whom Whitman was but vaguely acquainted, the scholar advising upon translations. Thoreau and Emerson had both noted the resemblance between Leaves of Grass and some of the sacred writings of India; and the latter once humorously described the Leaves as a mixture of the Bhagavad-Gitá and the New York Herald. Thoreau died in 1862, and this was probably their only meeting.
Thoreau carried off with him a copy of the new edition of Whitman’s poems, fresh from the press, and some of the remarks I have alluded to refer especially to its contents, and to several of the new poems which we must now briefly consider, for it is obviously impossible to give any worthy account of Whitman without attempting at least to outline the successive expressions of his own views about himself, as they are set forth in his book.
None of the twenty new Leaves appears so important as the “Song of Myself,” but among them are some of the finest and most suggestive pages he ever wrote, notably the “Poem of Salutation,” and the “Poem of the Road”. The book is now shorn of its prose preface, which would be a serious loss if large portions of it were not to be found broken into lines, and otherwise slightly altered, upon the later pages. It had been used as a quarry for poems, and some of the blocks underwent but little trimming.
In the “Salutation,” he identifies himself elaborately and in much detail, with all peoples of the globe, finding equals and lovers in every land. The universal survey is faithfully made; the poem is like a rapid passage through a gallery of pictures, and regarded as a whole, suggests the outlines of the world-wide field which its author desires the reader to view. Whitman asserts his comprehensive sympathy; like America he includes all men. He is one with them in their common humanity, and sympathises with them individually in the main purposes and desires of their lives.
The poem opens in the form of question and answer. Looking into Whitman’s face, the questioner sees as it were a whole world lying latent within his gaze and becoming actual as he looks. Taking the poet’s hand, he begs him to explain: Walt accedes with readiness, and immediately forgets the questioner.
The subject of the poem—man as the microcosm not only of the universe but of the Race—is not perhaps novel; but its meaning is none the less difficult to expound. For it bears directly upon the cosmic consciousness, in which, as I have said, many of us are wanting. There are some, however, who are at times aware of moods in which they realise the symbolic character of all objects; they see them, that is to say, as forms through which vivid emotions are conveyed to the soul. At such moments, the whole world becomes for them a complex of these symbols, whose authenticity they can no more doubt than the meaning of daily speech, and whose ultimate significance is of an infinite content, which forever unfolds before them.
Such moods were evidently frequent with Whitman, and perhaps became the norm of his consciousness. In them his eyes read the world, as though it were the writing of that infinite and supreme Soul which was himself, and yet not himself; that Soul of All, with which his consciousness was become mystically one. He felt the actual thrill and meaning of the World’s Words; words which he more fully describes or rather tries to suggest, in another poem, afterwards known as the “Song of the Rolling Earth”. In order to explain Whitman’s meaning one would need to make a study of the roots of this kind of symbolism, a task which is here impracticable. We must be content instead with a glance at the poem itself.
“Earth, round, rolling, compact—suns, moons, animals—all these are words to be said,”
he asserts; vast words, not indeed of dots and strokes, nor of sounds, but of real things which exist and are uttered. I myself, and not my name, he says suggestively, is the real word which the Soul understands. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear, not my words but Me, The Word. The words of great poets are different from those of mere singers and minor poets, because they suggest these ultimate words, these presences and symbols. A symbol, be it remembered, always using the word in the sense indicated, is no arbitrary sign, it is a form or appearance, which seen through the eye—to use Blake’s happy formula—presents to the imagination an unimpeachable, distinct emotional concept.
To Whitman, everything became thus symbolic. He saw the Earth itself—the whole world about him—as a symbol, infallibly presenting to him a distinguishable idea or meaning; not indeed a thought, for the word fails to express something which must clearly be supra-intellectual—the perception of a conscious state of emotion.
Of what then was the Earth a symbol to Whitman’s sight? He says, frankly enough, that he cannot convey the idea in print; but that as far as he can suggest it, it is one of progress, or amelioration; it is generous, calm, subtle; it includes the idea of expression, or the bearing of fruit; it is the acceptance of all things, and it is the general purpose which underlies them all.
I fear that those who seek for simple explanations in plain words will scarcely be satisfied with this. Perhaps Whitman is only reasserting in his own manner the familiar adage that God is the prince of poets, and that the universe is His Chapbook which He offers to all. If so, he either gives a new meaning to the words, or he has rediscovered their old vital sense and redeemed them from the stigma of rhetoric. I do not know whether after all the simple-sounding words are not the more elusive.
The Words of the Earth-Mother spoken to her children are, he would have us believe, ultimate and infallible; all things may be tried by them. That is what he means when he says he has read his poems over in the open air. He has proved them thus to see if their suggestion is that of the Earth. She sits, as it were, with her back turned toward her children, but in her hand she holds a mirror, the clear mirror of appearances which are true, and in that mirror we may see ourselves and her.
With her ample back toward every beholder,
With the fascinations of youth, and equal fascinations of age,
Sits she whom I too love like the rest—sits undisturb’d,
Holding up in her hand what has the character of a mirror, while her eyes glance back from it,
Glance as she sits, inviting none, denying none,
Holding a mirror day and night tirelessly before her own face.
How much we can see, depends upon our own character. To the perfect man, the Face of the Mother is perfect: to the man ashamed, disfigured, broken, it appears to be such as he. Only the pure behold the Truth. There is no merely intellectual test of truth, for truth is known only by the Soul. As one looks into the mirror, and reads the thought behind appearances, not with the intellect but with the sight of the awakened soul, one grows to understand what Progress means, one sees a little further into the secrets of Love; one learns that the divine Love neither invites nor refuses.
The Sayers of Words are those who with pure insight—or as Coleridge would say, Imagination—behold things as they are apprehended by the cosmic consciousness; and thus beholding them as they truly are, find words which hint to the soul of that Reality which speaks through all appearance. After the sayers come the singers, the Poets who, building words together, create new worlds.
In another poem, the Open Road becomes the symbol of Freedom, Acceptance, Sanity, Comradeship, Immortality and Eternal Battles.
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune—I am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Strong and content, I travel the open road.
-1860
Among the best known and most popular of the Leaves of Grass, it is also among those which are most filled with recondite and mystic meanings. Over these we must not linger, save to note the indication of the mystic sense by phrases like “the float of the sight of things” and “the efflux of the Soul”. The poem as a whole is marked by musical cadences, and is vivid from end to end with courage and the open air.
After the “Song of Myself,” Thoreau preferred the “Sun-down Poem,” which describes the crossing of Brooklyn Ferry. It is filled with the thought that, even after half a century and in our own day, when others than he will be crossing, still he will be with them there unseen. The thoughts that come to him show him the Soul wrapt around in unconsciousness, and the things which, by contact with the clean senses, are presently realised as meanings by the Soul. The poem is a fine example of Whitman’s delight in movement, in masses of people, and in the surroundings of his city.
In the “Clef-poem,” intended to strike the key-note, not only for his poems, but as it were for the universe itself with its innumerable meanings, he tells how, standing on the beach at night alone, he realised that all things—soul and body, past and future, here and there—are interlocked and spanned by a vast homogeneity of essence. The knowledge sweeps away all possibilities of anxiety about the future after death; experience can never fail to feed the soul. It contents him also with the present: no experience can ever be more wonderful to him than this of to-night, when he lies upon the breast of the Mother of his being. The future can be nothing but an eternal unfolding of this that he beholds already present in his body and Soul.
While dwelling upon the symbolical mysticism which cannot be ignored in Whitman’s whole habit of thought, I may add a further word upon its character. Mysticism appears under several forms. The Indian guru, winning the eternal consciousness by long practices in the gymnasium of the mind; the lover discovering it through the fiery gateways, and tear-washed windows of passion; the poet seeking it in the eyes of the Beauty that was before the beginning of the world; the Quaker awaiting its coming in silence and simplicity; the Catholic preparing for it by prayer and fasting, by ritual and ceremony; the lover of nature discovering it among her solitudes; the lover of man entering into it only by faith, in the strenuous service of his kind: all these bear witness to the many ways of experience along which the deep waters flow.
Belonging to no school, Whitman had relations with several of the mystical groups; he had least, I suppose, with that which seeks the occult by traditional crystal-gazing and the media of hypnotic trances or the dreams produced by an?sthetic drugs. He was a mystic because wonders beset him all about on the open road of his soul. In him mysticism was never associated with pathological symptoms; it was, as he himself suggests, the flower and proof of his sanity, soundness and health.
He had not learnt his lore from books. Plato and Plotinus, Buddha and Boehme, were alike but half-familiar to him; he never studied them closely as a disciple should. His thought may have been quickened by old Elias Hicks, and strengthened occasionally by contact with the Friends. It often recalls the more leonine, less catholic spirit of George Fox; and the vision of the Soul, standing like an unseen companion by the side of every man, woman, and child, ready to appear at the first clear call of deep to human deep, was ever present to them both, and in itself explains much that must otherwise remain incomprehensible in their attitude. But the world of Whitman was that of the nineteenth century, not of the seventeenth: Carlyle, Goethe and Lincoln, had taken the places of Calvin, Milton and Cromwell. In many aspects the mysticism of Leaves of Grass is nearer to that of The Republic and The Symposium, than to that of Fox’s Epistles and Journal; nearer, that is, to the Greek synthesis, than to the evangelical ardour of the Puritan. Temperance he loved, but he hated the narrowness of negations.
To return to the book: the thought of the sanity of the Earth is brought to bear upon the problem of evil in a poem which describes how, in spite of the mass of corruption returned to it by disease and death, the earth neutralises all by the chemistry of its laws and life. With calm and patient acceptance of evil, nature refuses nothing, but ever provides man anew with innocent and divine materials. And such, it would seem, is the inherent character of the Universe, and therefore of the Soul.
A poem, whose opening cadences were suggested by the drip, drip, drip, of the rain from the eaves, presents the Broad-axe as the true emblem of America, Whitman’s substitute for the Eagle whose wings are always spread.
Broad-axe, shapely, naked, wan!
Head from the mother’s bowels drawn!
Wooded flesh and metal bone! limb only one and lip only one!
Gray-blue leaf by red-heat grown! helve produced from a little seed sown!
Resting the grass amid and upon,
To be leaned, and to lean on.
Here we enter the picturesque, muscular world of wood-cutters and carpenters so familiar to the author, and we are reminded of the older and more sinister uses and products of the axe. Seen by Whitman, the Broad-axe itself is a poem that tells of strenuous America, with her free heroic life and the comradeship of her Western cities, great with the greatness of their common folk. It tells him of the woman of America, self-possessed and strong; and of large, natural, na?ve types of manhood. It even prophecies to him of Walt Whitman, and sings the “Song of Myself,” the message of the noble fierce undying Self. As a Cuvier can reconstruct an undiscovered creature from a single fossil bone, so might the poet seer have foretold America by this symbol of an axe.
The idea of America is further expounded in several other poems, especially in the longest of the additions, which was afterwards expanded into “By Blue Ontario’s Shore”. Much of its essential thought, however, and some of its actual phrasing belongs to the old Preface, and has therefore been already noted. It dwells on the potential equality of every citizen in the sight of America herself, an equality based upon the divine Soul which is in each; and also, upon Liberty, which is the ultimate and essential element of all individual life.
The thought of America calls up in Whitman’s mind the picture of that poet, that “Soul of Love and tongue of fire,” who will utter the idea which is America, and which alone can integrate her diverse peoples into one. And here Whitman flings off his cloak which concealed him in the Preface, and openly announces that it is he himself who incarnates the spirit of the land.
Fall behind me, States!
A man, before all—myself, typical, before all.
Give me the pay I have served for!
Give me to speak beautiful words! take all the rest;
I have loved the earth, sun, animals—I have despised riches,
I have given alms to every one that asked, stood up for the stupid and crazy, devoted my income and labour to others,
I have hated tyrants, argued not concerning God, had patience and indulgence toward the people, taken off my hat to nothing known or unknown,
I have gone freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and with the mothers of families,
I have read these leaves to myself in the open air—I have tried them by trees, stars, rivers,
I have dismissed whatever insulted my own Soul or defiled my body,
I have claimed nothing to myself which I have not carefully claimed for others on the same terms,
I have studied my land, its idioms and men,
I am willing to wait to be understood by the growth of the taste of myself,
I reject none, I permit all,
Whom I have staid with once I have found longing for me ever afterward.
The poet is that equable sane man, in whose vision alone all things find and are seen in their proper place, for he sees each sub specie ?ternitatis—in its eternal aspect.
But while thus boldly declaring himself as the man that should come, he has of course no desire to stand alone, and attempts to outline the equipment necessary for future American poets. They must not only identify themselves in every possible way with America, they must be themselves creative and virile. Those who criticise, explain and adjudge, can only create a literary soil; they cannot produce the flower and fruit of poetry.
Returning to his favourite adage that a man is as great as a nation, he asserts that the true poet is America; frankly reading himself as a whole, he will see the meanings of America. Is then America also a symbol? Assuredly. She is the Republic; she is the Kingdom of God; she is Blake’s Jerusalem; but behold, she is already founded and four-square upon the solid earth.
That he was open-eyed to the materialistic spirit rampant throughout the continent while he was writing, is clearly shown in the bitter mockery of “Respondez,” a poem afterwards suppressed. It is a challenge to thought; an ironic assertion of things that are false and futile, and which yet parade as realities. Though suggestive it is obscure, and its subsequent omission was wise.
Thoughts of the destiny of America, and of the evil and imperfection which he saw about him, hindering, as it seemed, the realisation of that destiny, and of the destiny of individual souls, must often have moved him to passionate longing. He was not one of those who confuse good with evil; he always recognised the difference between right and wrong as among the eternal distinctions which could never cease to hold true. He hated sin as he hated disease, and recognised both as threatening and actual.
If he rarely denounces, it is because he has seen that the way of the soul is along the path of love and not of fear or of hate; and because he recognises the office of sin in the story of the soul. He is not anxious about vice or virtue, but only about life and love. Love, at its fullest, is something different from virtue; it contains elements which virtue can never possess, and which most ethical codes consign to the category of vice. Such love alone is the expression of the soul; and every student of love discovers sooner or later that the soul has its own intimate standard for judging what is wrong and what is right, and when that which was wrong has now become right for it to do.
Love, then, is Whitman’s code. And when he seeks to call the youth of America away from selfishness and sin, he issues no new table of Thou-Shalt-Nots, but fills their ears with the words of their destiny, and of the meaning of America. For he knows that to sin is to choose a narrow and despicable delight, and that one must needs choose the nobler, larger joy when it becomes present and real. Hence he recalls all the aspirations that went to the birth of America, and describes the parts that women and men must fill if they are to be realised. He reminds his young readers of all the divine possibilities of manhood and of womanhood, and of how those possibilities are for them; and warns them that the body must necessarily affect the soul, for it is the medium through which the soul comes into consciousness.
Anticipate your own life—retract with merciless power,
Shirk nothing—retract in time—Do you see those errors, diseases, weaknesses, lies, thefts?
Do you see that lost character?—Do you see decay, consumption, rum-drinking, dropsy, fever, mortal cancer or inflammation?
Do you see death, and the approach of death?
Think of the Soul;
I swear to you that body of yours gives proportions to your Soul somehow to live in other spheres,
I do not know how, but I know it is so.
Finally, in the new poems, Whitman makes more plain his attitude toward the woman question, as it is called. An American National Women’s Rights Association had been founded in 1850, and although its agitation for the suffrage proved unsuccessful, the more general movement which it represented, especially the higher education of women, was gaining ground throughout America. The movement may be said to have been born in New York State, where Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Miss Susan B. Anthony were its most active leaders; but it owed much to Boston also, and notably to Margaret Fuller (Ossoli), whose tragic death had been an irreparable loss to the cause.
Whitman was in cordial sympathy with everything that could forward the independence of women. But he disliked some outstanding characteristics of the movement. It was in part a violent reaction against the unwholesome sentimentalism of the past; a reaction which took the form of sexless intellectualism with a strong bent towards argumentation, perhaps the most abhorrent of all qualities to Whitman.
This movement for women’s rights seemed to him too academic and too superficial; college education and the suffrage did not appeal to him. But he was not the less an enthusiast for the cause itself, as he understood it. His views are simple and clear. A soul is a soul, whether it be man’s or woman’s; and as such, it is of necessity free, and the equal of others. A woman is every way as good as a man. This truth must be made effective in all departments of life.
Then, taking up the thought which underlies the teaching of Plato, a woman is a citizen; and an American woman must be as independent, as dauntless, as greatly daring as a man. Such as the woman essentially is, such will be the man, her son, and her mate. But—and it is here he differs from the leaders of the movement—sex is basic not only in society but in personal life; and the woman unsexed is but half a woman.
Two poems in the new edition, the nucleus of the subsequent Children of Adam, are devoted to these ideas. In the first, he describes the women of his ideal:—
They are not one jot less than I am,
They are tanned in the face by shining suns and blowing winds,
Their flesh has the old divine suppleness and strength,
They know how to swim, row, ride, wrestle, shoot, run, strike, retreat, advance, resist, defend themselves,
They are ultimate in their own right—they are calm, clear, well-possessed of themselves.
In the second, he declares that life is only life after love—he means the passionate fulness of love—and indicates that womanhood is to be glorified not through a sexless revolt, but through the redemption of paternity. When the begetting of children is recognised to be as holy and as noble as the bearing of them, then the rights of women will be on the way to recognition.
If motherhood is the glory of the race, then a movement towards perpetual virginity brings no solution of our problem. The only solution lies in the independence of women, and in the evolution of a higher masculine ideal of the sex relation. The whole thing must be naturally and honestly faced. Until we so face it, we cannot understand a world in which it is so implicated, that sex is, as it were, a summing up of all things.
This last thought grew upon him, becoming more prominent in the next edition. In the present one it recurs in the open letter to Emerson printed in its appendix, and gave a peculiar colour to the volume in the public eye. So much was this the case, that a prosecution seemed at one time imminent, many persons regarding the book as obscene. Among timid and conventional people, it seems to be established as a canon of criticism that it is always immoral to discuss immorality. They go but little farther who denounce the purity which is not defiled by pitch; or tear out by the roots all flowers that grow upon dung-heaps.
Such then, added to the old, formed the contents of the new edition of 1856. The appendix included Emerson’s letter, which Whitman had been urged to publish, by Mr. C. A. Dana, editor of the New York Sun, and a personal friend of Emerson. He succeeded in convincing Whitman, who appears at first to have doubted the propriety of such an action. There is no evidence that Emerson resented the use thus made of his glowing testimony, although he would probably have modified his words had he written in acknowledgment of the enlarged volume. A sentence from the letter appeared also upon the back of the book: “I greet you at the commencement of a great career.—R. W. Emerson.” This, together with the storm of indignation aroused by the absolutely frank language of the poems dealing with sex, gave the book notoriety and a rapid sale.
It is the least pleasing of the editions of Leaves of Grass, insignificant in appearance, and yet aggressive, by reason of that Emersonian testimonial. The open letter at the end, of which I have already spoken, is far from agreeable to read. It is careless, egotistical, na?ve to a degree, and crowded with exaggerations. Addressing Emerson as master, it proceeds to denounce the churches as one vast lie, and the actual president as a rascal and a thief. It is so egregiously self-conscious that it makes the reader question for a moment whether all the egoism and na?veté of the preceding pages may not have been worn as a pose; but a moment’s further consideration gives the question a final negative. Few men are without their hours of weakness; and that Whitman was not among those few, the letter is proof if such were needed.
The letter is not void of interest, since it records the rapid sale of the previous edition of a thousand copies, and anticipates that in a few more years the annual issue will be counted by thousands. This sanguine forecast explains the permanent and otherwise unreasonable disappointment of Whitman at the reception of his book.
It still made its appearance devoid of the usual adornment of a publisher’s name upon the title-page. Messrs. Fowler & Wells were again the principal agents, others being arranged with in the chief American cities, in London also, and Paris and Brussels. Plates were cast from the type, and a large sale was prepared for. But the New York agents soon withdrew, unwilling to face the storm of public opinion, and perhaps the dangers of prosecution, and the book fell out of print when only a thousand copies had been issued.
The two ventures of 1855 and 1856 had brought Whitman little money, a mere handful of serious readers, and some notoriety. Though he did not give in, he began to look about him for some supplementary means of delivering his soul of its burden. His youthful success on the political platform, his love of crowds and of personal contact, his extraordinary popularity among the younger people, and his own keen sense of the power of oratory, turned his thoughts to lecturing. He would follow the road which Emerson and Thoreau had taken. He would evangelise America with his gospel. Henceforward, as his mother said, he wrote barrels of lectures, and at the same time he studied his new art more or less systematically. After his death a package of notes on Oratory, and the rough draft of a prospectus were found among his papers; the latter was headed, “15 cents. Walt Whitman’s Lectures.” It belongs to the year 1858.
By this time he had planned to write, print, distribute and recite throughout the United States and Canada a number of lectures—partly philosophical, partly socio-political, partly religious—with the object of creating what he conceived to be a new, and for the first time truly American attitude of mind. The lectures were ultimately to form a second volume of explanation and argument which would sustain the Leaves. He had now omitted any preface to the poems, the creative work standing alone. But having printed the second edition and thus relieved his mind of its most pressing burden, he recognised that the work of explanation and of criticism remained.
Moreover, he conceived that his lectures would quicken public interest in his book; while, by showing himself, he hoped to dispel some of the misapprehensions which concealed his real meaning from the popular mind. He alludes whimsically in this memorandum to the offensive practice of self-advertisement, of which he was not unconscious, remarking that “it cannot be helped,” for it is the only way by which he can gain the ear of America, and bid her “Know thyself”.
Finally, he proposed to earn his living in this manner. He would have preferred to give his services without fee, in the Quaker fashion; but for the time being at least, he must make a charge of ten dollars (two guineas) a lecture, and expenses, or an admission fee of one dime (about sixpence) a head.
The idea of lecturing was probably as old as the idea of the Leaves of Grass; he seems to have been considering it ever since he returned from the South. But now he formulated his ideas, which were of course those underlying the Leaves, and thought much and cogently on the style and manner of public speaking. His conclusions betray an ideal for oratory as individual and as mystical as that for the poet’s art.
Whitman, the lecturer, is conceived as a prophet possessed by the tempestuous passion of inspiration. The orator is to combine the gifts of the great actor with the inspiration of the Pythoness and the spontaneity of the Quaker prophet. His gestures should be large, but reserved; the delivery deliberate, thought-awakening, elliptical, prophetic, wholly unlike that of the glib platform speakers of his day and our own. At first, erect and motionless, the speaker would impress his mere personality upon the assembly; then his eyes would kindle, like the eyes in that strange marble Balzac of Rodin’s, and from the eyes outward the whole body would take fire and speak.
He conceived of oratory not as the delivery of some well-prepared address, but as the focussing of all the powers of thought and experience in an hour of inspiration and supreme mastery. He saw how much it entailed—what breadth of knowledge, what depth of thought, what perfect flexibility of voice and gesture trained to clear suggestion, what absolute purity of body, what perfect self-control. For, he would say to himself, the great orator is an artist as supreme as Alboni herself; his voice is to be as potent as hers, and his life must show an equal devotion to its purpose.
In this conception of the orator we have then a most interesting parallel with that of the poet. And just as Whitman the poet stands part way between the writer of prose and the singer in verse, including in himself some of the qualities of each, and adding an inspiration wholly his own, so Whitman the orator appears in this vision standing between the actor-singer and the lecturer or preacher, improvising great words.
The political aspect of his enterprise is suggested by a brief memorandum, dated in April, 1857, wherein he notes that the “Champion of America” must keep himself clear of all official entanglements, devoting himself solely to the maintenance of a living interest in public questions throughout the length and breadth of the land. Standing aside from the parties with their clamorous cries, he must hold the public ear by nobler tones.
In another place he writes that as Washington had freed the body politic of America from its dependence upon the English crown, so Whitman will free the American people from their dependence upon European ideals. The mere publication of such frank, but private assertions of Whitman’s own faith in himself, will doubtless arouse a ready incredulity in the reader’s mind. It might, perhaps, seem kinder to his memory to suppress them altogether; but upon second thought it will, I think, appear possible that he was a better judge than others of his own ability. His personality was one of extraordinary power, and his outlook of a breadth which was almost unique. And, as I have said, he felt himself to be an incarnation of the American spirit.
At the time, America was without leadership. Lincoln was still unseen; and Whitman was fully as capable of filling the highest office in the United States as several who have held it; while nothing in the circumstances or traditions of the White House made it absurd for any able citizen, of whatever rank, to entertain the thought of its tenancy. This would be especially true of a popular New Yorker, who made perhaps the best of all candidates for a Presidential campaign. The Republican party had but just been formed, and for the first time had fought an election. Thunderclouds of war were in the air, urged on by the ominous forces of slavery, and America was without a champion.
I think the idea of political leadership crossed Whitman’s mind at this time, and that he put it definitely aside. The hour cried out for the man, and the cry was not to go unanswered; but with all his power and all his goodwill and fervour, Whitman became slowly convinced that it was not to be he. He had seen too much of party man?uvres, and had too vigorous a love of personal liberty, to contend for office. But he did covet the power of a prophet to stir the heart of America, and appeal to her people everywhere in her name. He never gave up the idea of lecturing or lost his interest in oratory; but the lectures he planned, the course on Democracy and the rest, remained undelivered. It is as though he had prepared himself and stood awaiting a call which never came.
Instead, he turned once more to add new poems to his collection. A hint in explanation is to be found in a poem written about this time, in which he tells how, having first sought knowledge, he then determined to live for America and become her orator; he was afterwards possessed by the desire for a heroic life of action, but was given the commission of song. Finally, another change came over his spirit; the claims of his own life seized him; he could not escape from the passion of comradeship which overwhelmed him and wholly absorbed his thought. We shall consider this phase in the next chapter, but before doing so, it will be well to recall the political events of the hour and the circumstances surrounding the advent of a new power and personality into American life.
Abraham Lincoln, the man for whom the hour cried out, was not quite unknown to fame. Ten years older than Whitman, and like Whitman owning to a strain of Quaker blood in his veins, he belonged by origin to the South and by adoption to the West. After six years’ service in the Illinois Legislature, and a term in the Lower House at Washington, he settled down at the age of forty to his profession as a country lawyer.
In 1854 the repeal of the Missouri compromise in favour of “squatter sovereignty” recalled him to political life, and he became the champion of Free-soil principles in his State, against the chief sponsor of the opposing doctrine, the “little giant of Illinois,” Judge Stephen Douglas. His reply to Douglas in October of that year was read and applauded by his party throughout America.
Hitherto he had been a Whig, and during Clay’s lifetime, his devoted follower, but the repeal of the compromise was followed in 1856 by the formation of a new party, and Lincoln and Whitman both became “black republicans”. “Barnburners,” Abolitionists and “Anti-Nebraska” men—those that is to say who opposed the application of the doctrine of “squatter sovereignty” to Nebraska and Kansas—had united to form a new Free-soil party. They nominated J. C. Frémont, the gallant Californian “Path-finder” for the Presidency; but, owing to the presence of a third candidate put forward by the Know-nothing Whigs—whose only policy seems to have been a “patriotic” hatred of all Catholics and foreigners—the Democratic nominee was elected for the last time in a generation. After his four years were out, a succession of Republican Presidents occupied the White House for twenty-four years.
James Buchanan, who defeated Frémont—becoming like Lincoln, his successor, a minority President—seems to have been an honourable and well-intentioned Pennsylvanian, but he was a man whose character was quite insufficient for his new office. As an injudicious, short-sighted diplomatist, he had already, when minister at St. James’s in the days of President Pierce, commended his intrigues for the annexation of Cuba.
Earlier in 1856 Chief Justice Taney, of the Supreme Court, had delivered his notorious decision in the Dred Scott case; laying it down that Congress could not forbid a citizen to carry his property into the public domain—that is to say, it could not prohibit slavery in the territories—and that, in the political sense of the word, a negro was not a “man,” but only property. This decision and the bloody scenes enacted in Kansas, where settlers from the North and South were met to struggle for the constitution which should make the new State either slave or free, greatly exasperated public opinion, and called forth, among others, the protests of Abraham Lincoln.
In 1858, while Whitman was studying oratory, Lincoln was stumping Illinois, in those ever-memorable debates which laid bare all the plots and purposes of the Southern politicians. When the votes in that contest were counted, Lincoln held an actual majority; but Douglas was returned as Senator by a majority of the electoral votes. Though thus defeated, Lincoln was no longer hidden in a Western obscurity. He was a man with a future; and America had half-unconsciously recognised him.
Towards the close of 1859, the fire which had been kindled in Kansas flashed out suddenly in Virginia. America was startled by the news of John Brown’s raid, and the capture of the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry.
Brown was among the most remarkable personalities of the time; and while some saw in him a religious fanatic of the Roundhead type, who compelled his enemies to pray at the muzzle of his musket, and who for the Abolition cause would shatter the union; others counted him a martyr for the cause of freedom. Emerson had been one of his most earnest backers when first he went to Kansas; and now his deed fired the enthusiasm of New England. Thoreau wrote: “No man in America has ever stood up so persistently and effectively for the dignity of human nature, knowing himself for a man, and the equal of any Government”; and when he was hung, it was Thoreau who vehemently declared that John Brown seemed to him to be the only man in America who had not died. His high spirit quickened the conscience of the North, and two years later its sons marched into Virginia singing the song of his apotheosis.
Whitman was present at the trial of certain of Brown’s abettors in the State House at Boston; one of a group prepared to effect their rescue in the event of a miscarriage of justice. Lincoln, on the other hand, was of those who, in spite of their intense hatred of slavery, wholly disapproved the Raid. For him, John Brown was a maddened enthusiast, a mere assassin like Orsini. His attempt to raise the slaves of Virginia in revolt against the whites was abhorrent to the Republican statesman whose knowledge of the South showed him the horrors of a negro rising. Regarding slavery as the irreconcilable and only dangerous foe of the Republic, Lincoln held that the Federal Government must restrain it within its actual bounds; and that the sentiment in favour of gradual emancipation advocated by Jefferson, the father of the Democratic party, should be encouraged in the States of the South. But it was the States themselves that held and must hold the fatal right of choice; it was for them, not for America, to liberate their slaves.
While the figure of Lincoln was thus becoming more and more visible to the nation, Whitman was fulfilling his own destiny in New York. He was born to be a leader of men; but a poet, a path-finder, a pioneer, not a politician or president. Whatever his noble ambition might urge, or his quick imagination prompt, he kept his feet to the path of his proper destiny.
He had a prodigiously wide circle of friends, gathered from every walk of life: journalists and literary men of all kinds; actors and actresses; doctors and an occasional minister of religion; political and public characters; the stage-drivers and the hands on the river-boats; farmers from the country; pilots and captains of the port; labourers, mechanics and artisans of every trade; loungers too, and many a member of that class which society has failed to assimilate and which it hunts from prison to asylum and poor-house; and he had acquaintances among another class of outcasts whose numbers were already an open menace to the life of the Western metropolis, the girls who sell themselves upon the streets.
Many anecdotes are told of him during these years: how for instance he would steer the ferry-boats, till once he brought his vessel into imminent peril, and never thereafter would consent to handle the wheel; or how, during the illness of a comrade, he held his post, driving his stage in the winter weather while he lay in the wards of the hospital; or again, how he took Emerson to a favourite rendezvous of firemen and teamsters, his good friends, and to the astonishment of the kindly sage, proved himself manifestly one of them.
A doctor at the old New York Hospital, a dark stone building surmounted by a cupola, and looking out over a grassy square through iron gates upon Pearl Street, often met him in the wards, where he came to visit one or other of his driver friends, and enjoyed the restful influence of his presence there or in the little house-doctor’s room. In those days, when Broadway was crammed with vehicles and with stages of all colours, much as is the Strand to-day, the proverbial American daring and recklessness gave ample opportunity for accidents. As to the drivers, they were generally country-bred farmers’ sons, fine fellows, wide-awake and thoroughly conversant with all that passed in the city from the earliest grey of dawn till midnight: and Whitman found some of his closest comrades in their ranks.
Sometimes a member of the hospital staff would go over with him to Pfaff’s German restaurant or Rathskeller on Broadway; a large dingy basement to which one descended from the street. Here, half under the pavement, were the tables, bar and oyster stall, whereat the Bohemians of New York were wont to gather, and in a yellow fog of tobacco-smoke denounce all things Bostonian. John Swinton, a friend of Alcott and of Whitman, belonged to the group, and among those who drank Herr Pfaff’s lager-beer, and demolished his schwartz brod, Swiss cheese, and Frankfurter wurst, were many of the brilliant little band which at this time was making the New York Saturday Press a challenge to everything academic and respectable.
It was here that a young Bostonian, paying his first visit to the city in 1860, found Whitman installed at the head of a long table, already a hero in that revolutionary young world. The Press was his champion, and his voice was not to be silenced. Mr. Howells, for it was he, had been amused and amazed at the ferociously profane Bohemianism of the worthy editor, who had lived in Paris, and now worshipped it in the person of Victor Hugo as much as he detested Longfellow and Boston.
Mr. Howells was astonished and deeply impressed by the extraordinary charm, gentleness and benignity of the man whom the Press was extolling as arch-anarch and rebel. Whitman’s eyes and voice made a frank and irresistible proffer of friendship, and he gave you his hand as though it were yours to keep. An atmosphere of unmistakable purity emanated from him in the midst of that thickness of smoke, that reek of beer and oysters and German cooking. He was clean as the sea is clean. He passed along the ordinary levels of life as one who lives among the mountains, and finds his home on Helicon or Olympus.
Ada Clare (Mrs. Julia Macelhinney), by all accounts a charming and brilliant woman, was queen of this rebel circle, and especially a friend of Whitman’s. News of her tragic death from hydrophobia, caused by the bite of her pet dog, came as a terrible shock to all who had known her. He had other women friends, notably Mrs. “Abby” Price, of Brooklyn, and her two daughters. The mother was an incurable lover of her kind, whose hospitality to the outcast survived all the frauds practised upon it.
The haunted faces of the needy were becoming only too familiar both in New York and Brooklyn. The winter of 1857-58 had been a black one: banks had broken, and work had come to a standstill; and there had been in consequence the direst need among the ever-increasing class of men who were wholly dependent upon their weekly earnings. The rise of this class in a new country marks the advent of the social problem in its more acute form: and from this date on there was a rapid development of the usual palliative agencies, missions, rescue-homes and what-not. The permanent problem of poverty had made its appearance in America.
It need hardly be added that at the same time there were many evidences of the growing wealth of another class of the citizens, those whose profits were derived from land-values and the employment of wage-labour. The brown-stone characteristic of the modern city was now replacing the wood and brick which had hitherto lined Broadway, as private houses gave way to shops and offices, hotels and theatres. Residences were built farther and farther up-town; and the Quarantine Station on Staten Island, which stood in the way of a similar expansion in that desirable quarter, was burnt out by aspiring citizens. And meanwhile the pressure of life in the East-side rookeries was growing more and more tyrannous.
The foundering of a slave-ship off Montauk Point was one of the more striking reminders of the menace of vested interests to all that the fathers of the Republic had held dear. For even the slave trade was now being revived, and the hands of Northern merchants were anything but clean from the gold of conspiracy. Sympathy for the “institution” and its corollaries was strong in New York, and was not unrepresented at Pfaff’s. It must have been about the close of 1861, or a little later, that one of the Bohemians proposed a toast to the success of the Southern arms. Whitman retorted with indignant and passionate words: an altercation ensued across the table, with some show of ill-mannered violence by the Southern enthusiast; and Whitman left his old haunt, never to return till the great storm of the war had become a far-away echo.
Picture of Walt at forty.
WHITMAN AT FORTY
There are two portraits which belong to the Pfaffian days. In either he might be the stage-driver of Broadway, and his dress presents a striking contrast with the stiff gentility of the orthodox costume, the silk hat and broadcloth, of the correct citizen. He is a great nonchalant fellow, with rough clothes fit for manual toil; a coat whose collar, by the way, has a rebellious upward turn; a waistcoat, all unbuttoned save at a point about half-way down, exposing the loose-collared shirt surrounded by a big knotted tie. The trousers are of the same striped stuff as the vest; one hand is thrust into a pocket, the other holds his broad brim.
In the photograph, which alone is of full length, the face is strong and kindly, as Mr. Howells saw it; but in the painting, which dates from 1859, and is valuable as showing the florid colouring of the man at this time—the growth of hair and beard, though touched with grey, very vigorous and still dark, the eyebrows almost black, the face handsome, red and full as of an old-time sea-captain—the aspect is heavy and even a little sinister. Probably this is a clumsy rendering of that lethargic and brooding condition which the occupation of sitting for a portrait would be likely to induce; and in this it is curiously unlike that of the photograph.
The pose in the latter is unstudied and a little awkward; one cannot help feeling that the man ought to loaf a little less. The head is magnificent, but the knees are loose. There was something in Whitman’s character which this full-length portrait indicates better than any other; something indefinite and complacent, which matched with his deliberate and swaggery gait. It is a quality which exasperates the formalists, and all the people who feel positively indecent in anything but a starched shirt.
Whitman wore the garb and fell naturally into the attitudes of the manual worker. When he was not at work he was relaxed, and stood at ease in a way that no one could mistake. And when he went out to enjoy himself he never donned a tail-coat and patent shoes. Something in this very capacity for relaxation and looseness at the knees made him more companionable to the average man, as it made him more exasperating to the superior person. The gentility of the clerical mannikin of the office was utterly abominable to him; so much one can read in the portrait, and in the fact that he persisted in calling himself Walt, the name which was familiar to the men on the ferry and the road.
Early in 1860 Whitman made arrangements with a firm of young and enterprising Boston publishers for the issue of a third edition of his book. It had now been out of print for nearly three years, and new material had all that time been accumulating, amounting to about two-thirds of what had already been published.
He went over to Boston and installed himself in a little room at the printing office, where he spent his days carefully correcting and revising the proofs. A friend who found him there speaks of his very quiet manners. He rarely laughed, and never loudly. He seemed to be provokingly indifferent to the impression he was creating, and made no effort to talk brilliantly. He was indeed quite bare of the small change of conversation, and gave no impression of self-consciousness. At the time of this interview he was accompanied by a sickly listless lad whom he had found at the boarding-house where he stayed. Whitman had compassion on him and carried him along, in order that he might communicate something of his own superabundant vitality to him.
During his stay in Boston, Walt frequently attended the services then conducted at the Seamen’s Bethel by Father Taylor. As a rule, he avoided churches of every sort, feeling acutely the ineffectiveness of what is grimly called “Divine Service,” feeling also that worship was for the soul in its solitude. Not that he was ignorant of that social passion which finds its altar in communion of spirit, or was blind to the deepest mysteries of fellowship. To these, as we shall see, he was particularly sensitive. But the formalities of a church must have seemed foolish and irksome to one for whom all fellowship was a kind of worship, and all desire was a prayer. In the preaching of Father Taylor there was nothing formal or ineffective. In it Walt felt anew the passionate sense of reality which had thrilled him as a child in the preaching of old Elias Hicks.
Father Taylor was now nearly seventy; a southerner by birth, he had been a sailor, and became upon conversion a “shouting Methodist”. The earnestness of his first devotion remained with him to the last; and his prayers were especially marked by the power which flowed from him continually. Behind the high pulpit in the quaint heavily-timbered, wood-scented chapel was painted a ship in distress, in vivid illustration of his words which were ever returning to the sea. All his ways were eloquent, unconventional, picturesque and homely like his face, so that he won the hearts of all conditions of men, and became one of the idols of Boston.
The old man’s power of fascination seemed almost terrible to his hearers; one young sailor opined that he must be the actual Holy Ghost. Walt himself was always moved to tears by the marvellous intimacy of his passionate pleading in prayer. He spoke straight to the Soul, and not at all, as do common preachers, to the intelligence or the superficial emotions; and the Soul of his hearers answered, with the awful promptitude of an unknown living presence within. His passion of love was at once tender and remorseless; Whitman compares him with a surgeon operating upon a beloved patient.
In this man, before whom all the elocution of the platform was mere trickery, Walt recognised the one “essentially perfect orator” whom he had ever heard, the only one who fulfilled the demands of his own ideal. And be it remembered, Theodore Parker was in his power in those days, while Father Taylor was an evangelical of the old school. It is, after all, not mysticism but orthodoxy which is exclusive; and though he was wholly a heretic, Whitman was able fully to love and appreciate those who were farthest removed from his own point of view.
Upon this visit Emerson and Whitman saw much of one another. They were both men in middle life—Emerson had passed his fiftieth year—and each entertained for the other a feeling of warm and affectionate regard. Whitman felt toward the older man almost as to an elder brother, and the sweet and wise and kindly spirit of Emerson frequently sought out the younger in brotherly solicitude for his welfare.
Their intimacy had sprung from Emerson’s letter, and it was always Emerson who pressed it. Something in the mental atmosphere in which the Concord philosopher moved was very repellant to Whitman: he positively disliked “a literary circle,” and blamed it for all the real or imagined shortcomings of his friend. He himself would not go to Concord from his horror of any sort of lionizing.
So when Emerson wanted to talk, they would walk together on the Common; as on one memorable, bright, keen February day, when under the bare branches of the American elms, they paced to and fro discoursing earnestly.
Emerson’s name had been somewhat too conspicuously displayed on the back of the second edition, of which he had been caused to appear almost as a sponsor; and some of the lines thus introduced had put his Puritan friends completely out of countenance, while giving his many enemies an admirable opportunity to blaspheme. The frank celebration of acts to which modern society only alludes by indirection, revealed to the observant eye of orthodoxy that cloven hoof of immorality which it always suspects concealed about the person of the philosophic heretic. And we can well imagine the consternation of the blameless householder of Boston as, in the bosom of his astonished family, he read aloud the pages commended to him by the words of the master.
It was thus upon Emerson, who did not quite approve the offending poems, that much of the storm of indignation wreaked itself; and whatever Emerson himself might think of the situation, his family was indignant. One can almost hear them arguing that a man has heresies enough of his own to close the ears of men to his message, without gratuitous implication in heresies which are not his; if he value his charge, let him keep clear of other men’s eccentricities; he really has no right to allow himself to be represented as the sponsor for such sentiments as Whitman printed in the Body Electric.
But whatever his friends might counsel, Emerson spoke from his own heart and wisdom that February day. He was pleading not for himself, but for the truth as he saw it, and for his offending friend. It was not because the book was being published as it were in his own diocese, his own beloved Boston; but because the new edition would be the first to be issued by a responsible house, and destined, probably, to enjoy a wide and permanent circulation, remaining for years the final utterance of Whitman upon these matters, that Emerson was so urgent and so eloquent.
His position was a strong one; his arguments, and the spirit which prompted them, were, as Whitman admitted, overwhelming, and his companion was in a sense convinced. It is much to be regretted that neither of the friends kept any detailed record of this discussion, but I think we can guess what the older man’s position would be.
Your message of the soul, we can imagine Emerson saying, is of the utmost importance to America: it is what America needs, and it is what you, and you alone, can make her hear. But you can only make her hear it, if you state it in the most convincing and simple way.
Now these poems of yours upon sex complicate and confuse the real message, not because they are necessarily wrong in themselves—I do not say they are—but because they do and must give rise to misunderstanding, and in consequence, obscure or even cancel the rest. They give the book an evil notoriety, and will create for it a succès de scandale. It will be bought and read by the prurient, to whom its worth will be wholly sealed.
And not only do you destroy the value of the book by printing such poems as these, you render it actually dangerous. Personally you and I are agreed—he would say—with Boehme where he writes that “the new spirit cometh to Divine vision in himself, and heareth God’s word, and hath Divine understanding and inclination ... and ... the earthly flesh ... hurteth him not at all”. We know the flesh to be beautiful and sacred; we turn with loathing from the blasphemies of Saint Bernard and of Luther, who saw in it nothing but a maggot-sack, a sack of dung. On these things we are at one; but how are we most wisely and surely to direct others on the road to self-realisation?
To feed the monster of a crude passion is surely not the way to bring the individual toward the Divine vision. To be frank about these matters is necessary; but in order to be honest is it necessary to fling abroad this wildfire, against which we are all contending, lest it destroy the labours of ages? Must we nourish this giant, whose unruly strength is for ever threatening to tear in pieces the unity of the self?
By these poems you are deliberately consigning your book to the class which every wise parent must label “dangerous to young people,” and which the very spirits you most desire to kindle for America will be compelled, by the law of their being, to handle at their peril, and to turn from with distress.
Arguments not unlike these were doubtless used by Emerson, for we know that he discussed this problem; and Whitman listened attentively to them, explaining himself at times, but generally weighing them in silence. Perhaps they were not new to him, but they were rendered the more powerful and well-nigh irresistible by the persuasive and beautiful spirit, the whole magnetic personality of his friend.
Walt was deeply moved, and when, after a couple of hours, Emerson concluded the statement of his case with the challenge, “What have you to say to such things?” could but reply, “Only that while I can’t answer them at all, I feel more settled than ever to adhere to my own theory and exemplify it”. “Very well,” responded Emerson cheerfully, “then let us go to dinner.”
They had been pacing up and down the Long Walk by Beacon Street, from which one looks across the broad, park-like stretch of the Common—that Common whose grey, bright-eyed squirrels are so confiding, and whose air is so good from the sea. To-day the oldest of the elms, that kept record of the past as wisely as any archives, have yielded to the winds and to the tooth of time. The growth of these trees is very different from that of our English species, and their long, curving branches rib the vault of sky overhead. The two men went over the historic hill—where now the gilded dome of the State House glows richly against the sky—descending through picturesquely narrow streets, full of memories and echoes of old days, to their destination at the American House.
What the theory was from which even Emerson’s eloquence could not persuade Whitman, we may understand better if we take up the new volume, turning the pages which were now being added to it, till toward the end we come upon the matter of debate.
Though handsomer and pleasanter to handle than its predecessor, this Boston edition still wears a countryman’s dress; a heavily stamped orange cover which threatens the symmetry of any library shelf. Evidently, Whitman did not intend it to lie there in peace. It was to be different from the rest, and bad company for them.
It opens on a reproduction of the 1859 painting, which faces an odd-looking lithographed and beflourished title-page. The old Preface has gone for good, and now its place is taken by a Proto-Leaf or Summary, by way of introduction.
The first edition had been a manifesto of the American idea in literature and ethics, and a declaration of the gospel of Self-realisation. The second expanded the mystical meanings involved in this; “think of the soul” running through all, and breaking out continually as a refrain, and it made clearer the message to women already more than hinted in the first. Now in the third edition, emphasis falls upon the personal note, which becomes strangely haunting. The book is not only for the first time a complete and living whole; it is a presence, a lover, a comrade, and its close is like a death.
Solitary, singing in the West, says the introductory Leaf, the poet is striking up for a New World; and lo, he beholds all the peoples of all time as his interminable audience. For through him, Nature herself speaks without restraint; and through him, the Soul, the ultimate Reality.
He sings for America; for there at last the Soul is acknowledged; and his song will bind her together. The Body, Sex, Comradeship, these he sings: but above all, Faith, for he is proclaiming a new religion which includes all others and is worthy of America. Of whatever he may seem to write, he is always writing of Religion; for indeed she is supreme. Love, Democracy, Religion—these three—and the greatest of these is Religion.
The world is unseen as much as seen. The air is full of invisible presences as real as the seen. And his songs also are for those as yet unseen, his children by Democracy, the woman of his love. For them he will reveal the soul, glorious in the body.
Ah, what a glory is this our life, and this our country! Death itself will not carry him away from it. In these fields, men and women in the years to come will ever be discovering him, and he will render them worthy of America as none other can. For he has “arrived,” he is no longer mortal.
If you would behold America, seek her in these pages. And if you would triumph and make her triumphant, you must become his comrade. The final note is one of passionate love-longing for comradeship.
Such is the summary of the book; but it cannot be so briefly dismissed by us, for it is full of suggestions of the inner workings of Whitman’s mind at this period, for us, in some respects, the most characteristic and important of all. For after it there comes the war, the watershed of his life; there he employed and in a sense expended all the resources of his manhood, to issue from it upon the slopes of ill-health which lead down into the valley of the shadow. But here he is in his prime, and on the heights.
Here also, his individuality shows most definitely, even in its secondary qualities. The association with men of a somewhat less Bohemian type than were many of his literary friends in New York, and the more cosmopolitan atmosphere of the national capital, together with the close intimacy with death which the war-hospitals afforded, somewhat quieted the tone of later editions. Here there is more of the na?ve colloquialism and mannerism, the slang and the ejaculations of “the arrogant Mannhattanese” which he loves to proclaim himself. It is the edition which is most dear to many an enthusiast, and most exasperating to many a critic.
After the first-written and longest of all the poems, “The Song of Myself,” here called “Walt Whitman,” there follow two large bundles, tied together and labelled respectively “Chants Democratic” and “Leaves of Grass”. The bulk of these consists of material already familiar.
But number four of the Chants, celebrating the organic unity of America, is new, and may be quoted as a curious example of Whitman’s style. Here are seven pages of soliloquy practically innocent of a period, flowing along together in a hardly vertebrate sentence, which enumerates the different elements included in the union. Strange as it certainly looks, this creation must have been so constructed of set purpose, for Whitman could not be ignorant of the oddity of its appearance, when viewed by the ever-alert humour of the already hostile American critic. Can there possibly be any connection between this style of composition and the larger consciousness of which he had experience? The question may appear absurd, but I ask it in all seriousness, and would propose an affirmative answer.
Whitman regarded his whole book as a unit, not as a collection. Like the composer who elaborates a single theme into a long-sustained symphony, or the psychological novelist who requires three volumes for the portrayal of a personality, he held his meaning suspended in order that it might be more fully grasped; and this is true also of his individual poems. The thought he had to convey was not epigrammatic, but a complex of suggestions which merge into one as they are read together. I would even venture to suggest that some of these exercises in sustained meaning were also designed to train the faculty of apprehending the Many-in-One, the Unity, which, as he believed, lies behind all variety. In considering this suggestion one may contrast the emotional results produced by epigrams and long sentences. May not the former be the natural rhythm for wit and the latter for imagination?
The contrast between the essayist on “Man” and the singer of “Myself” is obvious; but the optimism of the eighteenth century epigrammatist seems to be echoed in Whitman’s pages. On the verge of war, and in the midst of all the corruption of American politics, he has the audacity to declare and reiterate, “Whatever is, is best”. Are we to dismiss it as the shallow utterance of a callous-hearted, healthy-bodied, complacent American, deliberately blind to the world’s tragedy? A thousand times, no. The pages before and after such declarations are filled with knowledge of suffering and death, of the bereavement of love, of the shame that follows sin, and of the desire for a better day. But here and elsewhere, he sees the perfect plan of the ages being fulfilled. From his Pisgah-height, he beholds the stretch of time; and looking out over creation as did the Divine Eye, he, Walt Whitman, beholds that it is all good.
Emerson has written of “the Perfect Whole”; but in the pages before us Whitman specifies the parts, seeing them all illumined by the mystic light of the soul. This lays him open to attack; it is even dangerous from the point of view of morality. Whitman acknowledges as much, but he still has faith in his vision; he is still obedient to the inner impulse which for him at least, is indubitably divine. There must always be a point at which the moralist would fain part company from the mystic: one is occupied in the fields of eternity, while the other is pre-occupied upon the battlefield of time. There is room for both in a world where time and eternity alike are real, but the toil of the seer must not be made subservient to that of the warrior.
Some of the lines of Whitman’s “Hymn to the Setting Sun” recall the canticle which Brother Francis used to sing among the olives:
Open mouth of my Soul, uttering gladness,
Eyes of my Soul, seeing perfection,
Natural life of me, faithfully praising things,
Corroborating for ever the triumph of things—
and it is all pregnant with the wonder of being. In this it is like his earlier work, but it has added deeper notes to its melody, and has won therewith a finer rhythm. A mellow glory of the setting sun irradiates it. All space, the poet reminds us, is filled with soul-life, and the strong chords of that life awake the rhythms of his praise for the joy of the Universal Being.
He greets death with equanimity, and it is this bell-note of welcome to death which gives the full bass to the first Boston edition. America, these poems and their writer, and all the struggling creatures of life, are to find their meaning in death, in transition; they are to slough off what is no longer theirs and pass forward into life. Are they then to lose individual identity? No, the soul is identity, and they are of the soul; but that in them which is not the soul will find its meaning in death. There is a spiritual body, which the soul has gathered about itself through the agency of the senses, and that body the soul retains; but the body of the senses dissolves and finds new uses and new meanings, through death.
We may illustrate this thought from the life of the whole tree, which is enriched by the life of every leaf. When the sap withdraws from the leaf, and the leaf shrivels and dies, and the frost and wind carry its corpse away and mix it with the mire, the soul of the leaf still lives in the tree. But the mere outer body, which did but temporarily belong to the life of the leaf, finds new value by its destruction and death. Who has not felt the liberating joy of the autumn gales? Who has not rejoiced among the trees, feeling with them the sense of rest and quiescence in which the force of life accumulates anew for expression and growth? But for the fallen leaves also we may rejoice, since their atoms have won something by contact with the life of the tree which now they can communicate to the humble mire.
In another of these poems, Whitman compares himself with the historian. The latter studies the surface of humanity, while in the former the inner self of the race finds expression. Such is the difference between an historian and a prophet. In another, carrying forward a kindred thought, he declares that he has discovered the story of the past, not in books but in the actual present. To the seer, as to God, the past is not gone by, but is clearly legible in the pages of our current life, if only we would learn to read them. It is hidden from our normal consciousness; but in certain phases of consciousness to which, it would appear, Whitman attained, it is revealed.
To this deeper consciousness Whitman looked for the fulfilling of his own work and the integration of all knowledge in the future. As men shall enter into it, he believed, their work will show the clear evidence of an underlying unity; it will cease to be fragmentary, and our libraries, instead of being mere museums filled with specimens, will become organic like a tree. Then the sense of the cosmos will superintend all things that man makes, as it superintends all the works of nature. A unity already exists, but an unconscious unity, like that of chaos. His own work is, of course, only a part; a prelude to the universal hymn which later poets will raise together. But it is a prelude, and this distinguishes it from other contemporary verse.
America, the land of the Many-in-One, he had discovered as the field for the new poetry. For the divine unity is a living complex of variety. Every heart has its own song, and yet the heart of all song is one. Henceforward, he will go up and down America like the sun, awakening the new seasons of the soul. Some of his songs are especially for New York, others for the West, the Centre or the South. But everywhere and to all alike, they cry the messages of Reality, Equality, Immortality. Neither do they cry only, but they actually create. For song, he says, is no mere sound upon the wind, born but to die; these songs of his are the most real of realities; they will outlast centuries, supporting the Democracy of the world.
The section which is specifically entitled Leaves of Grass opens upon a note of that humility in which Whitman is supposed to have failed. Throwing wholly aside his egoism and pride, he identifies himself with tiny and ephemeral things—the scum and weed which the sea flings upon Paumanok’s coast.
“As I Ebbed with the Ocean of Life” is a most significant poem, which it is impossible to summarise briefly. It appears to have been suggested by the experiences of an autumn evening on the Long Island beach, perhaps upon the then lonely sands of Coney Island; an evening in which the divine pride of conscious power and manhood, from which as a rule he wrote in the exaltation of inspiration, ebbed away, and left him struggling with the power of what he calls the electric or eternal self, striving as it were against it to retain his own individual consciousness.
Although it is not easy to explain what he means, the passage admirably suggests the complex inner experience of his life at this period. It was filled with battles and adventures of the spirit, and it kept his mind always supplied with ample material for thought. It is no wonder that the endeavour to explain himself, and to keep some kind of record of these explorations and discoveries in the Unknown occupied much of his time, and that these years are somewhat barren of outward incident. The inner experiences of so sane and stalwart a man are of the utmost psychological interest, and we cannot lay too much stress upon their importance in Whitman’s story, proving as they do the delicate nervous organisation of the man.
As the struggle proceeds, Walt seems to be seized by a strange new feeling. He is fascinated by the tiny wind-rows left by the tide upon the sand, and the sense of a likeness between himself and them arises in him, taking the form not so much of a thought as of a consciousness of kinship. The ocean scum and débris reminds him how near to him is the infinite ocean of life and death, and how he himself is but a little washed-up drift, soon to be swallowed in the approaching waters. Doubt overwhelms him; he seems to know nothing of all that he thought he knew; his Soul and Nature make mock at him. He admits that he is but as this tiny nothing.
This mood is a real one in Whitman. It is wrong to think of him as a man who was always complacent and cock-sure; all heroic faith must have its moments of doubt, its crisis of despair, its cry of abandonment upon the cross.
But they are moments only. If he is but this sea-drift, yet he claims the shore as his father: “I take what is underfoot: what is yours, is mine, my father”. So he takes hold upon the Eternal Reality and communes with it, praying that his lips may be touched and utter the great mysteries; for otherwise, these will overwhelm his being. Pride, the full tide of life, will soon flow again in our veins; but after all, what are we but a strange complex of sea-drift and changing moods strewed here at your feet? It is not pessimism but humility which asks that question, the humility which is part of a divine pride.
That pride refuses to blink anything; let us face it all, even to the utmost, he keeps saying. He feels that the soul can and must face all. He has not to make a theory or to justify himself, to uphold institutions, or inculcate moralities; he has to open the doors of life in faith. He has to let light in at all the windows. And if it illumines ugliness as well as beauty, sin and shame as well as virtue and pride—still it is his part to let in the ever-glorious light. The more the light shines in, the more the Soul is satisfied. In himself he recognises sin and baseness and gives it expression, bringing it to the light.
(O admirers! praise not me! compliment not me! you make me wince,
I see what you do not—I know what you do not;)
Inside these breast-bones I lie smutch’d and choked,
Beneath this face that appears so impassive, hell’s tides continually run,
Lusts and wickedness are acceptable to me,
I walk with delinquents with passionate love,
I feel I am of them—I belong to those convicts and prostitutes myself,
And henceforth I will not deny them—for how can I deny myself?
But it is a mistake to think of the mystic, and especially of Whitman, as the mere onlooker at life, and the moralist as the practical person. There is ultimately of course no distinction between mystic and moralist, the mystic is the moralist become seer. And he is, perhaps, even more strenuous in his life than is the moralist; but life has now assumed for him a different aspect. He is no longer pre-occupied by the hunger and thirst after righteousness—for he feeds satisfied upon the divine bread. He is not worried about sin, because he is conscious of the antiseptic power of the Soul-life which heals the sores of sin, and sloughs off the body of corruption. What is evil passes away when life is earnestly pursued. He sees that everything which exists at all, however evil it may be, exists by reason of some virtue or excellence which it possesses, and which fits it to its environment. The wise soul uses the excellence of things, and so things hurt it not at all. The things that are not for it are evil to it; but in the sight of God they are not evil, for all things have their value to Him.
Live your life, then, in faith, not in fear; such is the word of the mystic. Condemn nothing; but learn what is proper for your own need; and by sympathy, learn to read the hearts about you, and help them also to live according to the wisdom of the soul. Feed the soul, think of the soul, exercise the soul—and the things, the instincts, the thoughts that are evil to you now, will presently cease to trouble you. For in Whitman’s universe the devil is dead.
It is this point of view, reached in his illumination, which enabled him to look out upon all the shame and evil of the world, and yet to rejoice. I doubt if he had as yet justified this attitude to himself by any process of reasoning; and it would be presumptuous in me to attempt the task; he simply accepted it as the only possible, or rather the ultimate and highest attitude of the enlightened soul. When one discovers the soul, that is the attitude in which she stands. The joy of the soul fills the universe. Nothing any longer seems unworthy of song. Not for its own sake, perhaps, but for that which it reveals to the soul. And in the exaltation of this soul-sight he sings.
Towards the end of this section, there is a little group of poems which deal with the voice. Whitman recognised that the human voice is capable of expressing more than mere thoughts. For the whole man speaks in the voice; and as the soul becomes conscious, the voice gains in actual timbre, and wins besides a mystical authority over the heart of the hearer. Each word spoken by the awakened soul is freighted with fuller meaning than it carried before, and every word so spoken has a beauty which the soul gives it. He illustrates a kindred thought by dwelling upon the different meanings which his own name assumes in different mouths. It would seem as though he realised that power of the name which is familiar to some uncivilised peoples and has been largely forgotten by us.
The section closes with a poignant little verse which declares with all the passion of conviction, that this paper is not paper, nor these words mere words; but that this is the Man Walt Whitman, who hails you here and cries farewell. The book is a sacrament; it is the wafer and wine of a Real Presence; it is a symbol pregnant with personality; it is no book, it is a man.
Lift me close to your face till I whisper,
What you are holding is in reality no book, nor part of a book,
It is a man, flushed and full-blooded—it is I—So long!
We must separate—Here! take from my lips this kiss,
Whoever you are, I give it especially to you;
So long—and I hope we shall meet again.
The Salut au Monde carries this Ave atque Vale to each and all.
I have already spoken of “A Word out of The Sea” in which Whitman relates an incident of his childhood on the Long Island coast. This is among the most melodious of his chants; and though Death and Love are the themes of all great poets it would be difficult to quote any passage more suggestive of the pathetic mystery of bereavement, than the song which he puts to the notes of the widowed mocking-bird. The bird’s song has purposes unknown to its singer, meanings which are caught by the boy’s heart, and awaken there a strange passion and wild chaos, that Death, whose voice is as the accompaniment of the sea to the cry of the bird, can alone soothe and order. It is impossible to read this poem and think of its author as ignorant of personal love and personal loss. The notes of despair and triumph blend together here and elsewhere in this edition.
We turn now to the Enfans d’Adam, poems of sex, whose name is suggested by Whitman’s outlook on life as on a garden of Eden, and by his conception of himself as it were a reincarnate Adam, begetter of a new race of happier men.
These are the poems which formed the storm-centre of Emerson’s discussion. They celebrate the love of the body for its correlative body, the bridegroom’s for the bride’s; and they celebrate the concern of the soul in reproduction. The proof and law of all life is that it go forth from itself in fertilising power, that it beget or conceive; and without this, life and love would be bereft of glory. And more: for Whitman broke wholly with that mysticism which once saw in the organs of sex a deformity consequent upon man’s fall; he beheld them rather as the vessels of a divine communion.
From this mystical view of Whitman’s, Emerson would conceivably have found no reason for dissent, but the new mysticism was full-blooded and masculine. It sprang out of experience, and was in no respect a substitute for it. When he wrote of the body, Walt used the word mystically it is true, but he meant the body nevertheless, using the word to the full of its meaning. He was very far from the abstract philosophic idealism which we usually and often unfairly associate with the transcendentalism of Concord. Thoreau, for example, the Oriental dreamer, had been thrilled through by the bloody and even brutal fanaticism of John Brown.
Yet Whitman’s virility was different from theirs. His celebration of passion was as honest and frank as Omar’s praise of the vine. To him, the begetting of children seemed in itself more satisfying to the soul than any words could express. It needed no apologist; but rose out of the region of cold ethics in the divine glow of its ecstatic reality.
Such an attitude, it seems to me, is only possible to a man who has known true love, and has lived a chaste and temperate life. And these poems, far from representing Whitman as a man of dissolute habits, indubitably afford the clearest proof, if it were needed, of his temperance and self-control; but that is, happily, a matter which is beyond dispute. He was not a man to seek unlawful pleasures, or to approach life’s mysteries irreverently, neither was he a man to treat womanhood, even when it had covered itself with shame, with anything but the utmost gentleness and chivalry. It was in the cause of womanhood, if we can say that it was in any cause, that he wrote his poems of sex, seeking, for woman’s sake, to wipe away the shame that still clings about paternity. The physical rites of love were beautiful to his sight; and he sought to tear away the obscene draperies and skulking thoughts by which they have been hidden.
With this in view, he added an inventory of all the items of the flesh to his poem of “The Body Electric,” intended as are all his lists to make the subsequent generalisation more actual. These, he said, are the parts of the soul. For matter and mind are twin aspects of the one reality, which is the soul. All knowledge comes to the soul through the senses, and if we put shame upon any function of the body we cripple something in the soul.
In a singular phrase, he declares that he will be the robust husband of the true women of America, the women who await him; meaning, I suppose, that through the medium of his book, he will quicken in those who are fearless and receptive, the conception of the new Humanity. He is Adam, destined to be the father of a new race, by the women who are able to receive him. Sexual imagery is rightly used in this connection, not only because it is according to mystical precedent, but because sex is the profoundest of the passions, as much spiritual as physical, and all reproductive energy is sexual. Whitman believed that until this was recognised, religion and art must remain comparatively sterile.
The question which these poems raise is far too large and too delicate for full discussion in this place. And its discussion is rendered more difficult because, present as it is in most of our minds, it is in many still unripe for words. The soul knows its own needs and its own hours, and pages like these of Whitman’s are not for every reader. Whitman knew it, and many a time in this volume he asks whether it were not better for you to put the book aside. As for himself, the time had come when these things must be uttered.
The soul must take experience in its own time; but Whitman was convinced that without initiation into the mysteries of love, much of life must remain an enigma to the individual. It was, it would appear, after initiation that he himself had realised his identity with all things. We speak sometimes of the bestial side of our nature, forgetting that when love illuminates it, it is this side in particular which redeems all that before seemed gross among the creatures.
True to his determination to include all, even the outcast, in his synthesis, Whitman, in another poem, companions publicly with sinners and with harlots. He shares their nature also; they, too, have their place. But if he says they are just as good as the best, it is only when seen by the eyes of a Divine Love. He, as much as any man, realises the handicap of sin; in the end the soul must conquer; but think how sin—the sin of the Pharisee and of the callous heart as much as that of the prostitute—disfigures the temple of the soul, and mars the spiritual with the outward body.
Temperate himself, Whitman’s sympathy for those who sin in the flesh was very real. And indeed for all sins of passion he felt, perhaps, a special understanding. The story runs that while he was still in Boston, he met a lad he had known in New York, who was now, after a drunken brawl, in which he believed he had killed a companion, escaping from the American police to Canada. The young fellow told Walt his story, and was sent upon his way with that comrade’s kiss of affection which meant so much more than good advice or charity.
Before closing this section, Whitman returns to the Adamic idea, as though to make his meaning unmistakable. In him, Adam has nearly circled the world, and now looks out across the Pacific to his first birth-place in the East; and still his work is unaccomplished. Still must he go on seeking for his bride, the Future. The passion of creation is upon him, he is strained with yearning for that towards which his soul gravitates.
As we finish these poems, we remember how at this time their author impressed those who approached him with two equal qualities, his force and his purity: for great passion is a clear wine in a chaste vessel. He had a right to say as his last word on this subject, “be not afraid of my body”; for, indeed, it was his soul, enamoured of all things, wholesome and pure.
After these poems, comes the “Song of the Road,” and other familiar pieces, and then another group wholly new. These appear to have been written in the autumn of 1859, and are called Calamus; a name either for a reed or for the sweet-flag, which occurs in the Bible and in the pages of Greek and Latin writers, but is here used of a common American pond-reed, a sort of tall sedge or great spear of grass, a yard or so in height, emitting a pungent watery smell, whose root is used for chewing. In these poems he asserts the soul’s need of society, for life and growth. The gospel of self-realisation thus becomes a social gospel, and the thought gives a political significance to these, the most esoteric of all Whitman’s poems.
He seems more than usually sensitive about them, and dreads to have them misunderstood. Proud and jealous, he would drive all but a few away from his confidences. They are only intended, he says, for his comrades; for it is only they who will understand them.
But in the more obvious sense the poems are for all. It is to comradeship and not to institutions that Whitman looks for a political redemption. He will bind America indissolubly together into the fellowship of his friends. Their friendship shall be called after him, and in his name they shall solve all the problems of Freedom, and bring America to victory. Lovers are the strength of Liberty, comrades perpetuate Equality; America will be established above disaster by the love of her poet’s lovers.
Then he turns to himself and his own friends, or rather, perhaps, to his own conscious need for friends. It is curious when one thinks of it, that we have no record of any close friendship, save that of Emerson, dating from these days. And he who knew and loved so many men and women, seems to have carried forward with him no equal friendship from the years of his youth. In this respect, he was solitary as a pioneer. He longed for Great Companions, but he did not meet them at this time upon the open road of daily intercourse.
Yet was he not alone. Some say he wrote of comradeship because he never found such a comrade as him of whom he wrote; but in one at least of these poems he declares that his life, or at the least his singing, depends upon such comradeship. And the absence of any record merely reminds us that Whitman was chary of committing such personal matters to the keeping of a note-book. What record has he left of those women and their children, whose relation to himself must have bulked so largely in the world of his soul? The poems seem to indicate at least one very intimate friendship, more passionately given than returned.
Sometimes, as on the beach of Paumanok, doubt oversets him. Perhaps after all, appearances do not mean what he sees in them. Perhaps the reality, the purpose, lies still undiscovered in them. Perhaps the identity of the human self after death is but a beautiful fable. There is a perfect answer—shall we say an evasion?—of these questionings and of all doubts, which fellowship provides.
To me, these, and the like of these, are curiously answered by my lovers, my dear friends;
When he whom I love travels with me, or sits a long while holding me by the hand,
When the subtle air, the impalpable, the sense that words and reason hold not, surround us and pervade us,
Then I am charged with untold and untellable wisdom—I am silent—I require nothing further,
I cannot answer the question of appearances, or that of identity beyond the grave,
But I walk or sit indifferent—I am satisfied,
He ahold of my hand has completely satisfied me.
Then he praises Love; all other joys and enterprises of the heroic soul become but little things when weighed against the life of fellowship, the joy of the presence of the beloved. Is this another of those places where the moralist begs to take his leave of the mystic? Let us beseech him to stay, for it is out of the strenuous passions of the soul that all good and lasting works for humanity have sprung. It was the face of Beatrice—and for the Italian, it could only have been her face—which drew Dante down through the circles of horror and up the steep slopes of Purgatory to Paradise. It was the beauty of the lady Poverty, that enabled her lover to kiss the sores of the lepers in the lazar house below Assisi. What would the Apostles have done in the name of their Lord had they not, like Mary the mystic, chosen the better part of communion with Him instead of fidgetting forever, with Martha, upon the errands of duty?
He writes of Love’s tragedy, and refusal; of the measured love returned for the infinite love accorded. But oftener he dwells upon its joy. The air becomes alive with music he had never heard before. The passion in his heart responds to a passion of which hitherto he had not dreamed, hidden in the heart of the world, awaiting its hour to break forth. And as these poems have come slowly up from out of the inner purpose of things, to find utterance upon Whitman’s pages, so slowly will their meaning arise in the hearts of those that read them. It is not to be guessed in a moment. For they are freighted with the mystery which unfolds in the patience of the soul.
Although he warns his reader from time to time to beware of him, for he is not at all the man he seems, a note of yearning for confidence cannot be suppressed. He confesses that his very life-blood speaks in these pages, and that his soul is heavy with infinite passion for the love of its Comrades that shall be. Sometimes, as he passes a stranger in the streets, he knows in himself that once they were each other’s; some deep chord of life thrilling, as though with memory, to promise that they will yet come together again. Ah, how many and many an one of these his mystic kin must the lands of the earth contain! It is not America only, but the whole human race that he will bind at last into his fellowship, laughing at institutions and at laws, persuading all men by the power of the Soul which is in all. One institution there is which he confesses that he would inaugurate. Let men who love one another kiss when they meet, and walk hand in hand. It is no mere sentiment; he sees that love must have its witness. In warm manly love is the mightiest power in the universe, a power that laughs at oppressors and at death.
I dreamed in a dream, I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth,
I dreamed that was the new City of Friends,
Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love—it led the rest,
It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city,
And in all their looks and words.
Calamus, like the bundle labelled Leaves of Grass, closes on the note of personal presence.
I trust it has already been sufficiently suggested that Whitman’s mysticism is not to be confused with much that hitherto has passed under that name. Mysticism it is, for it is the expression of mystical experience; but it is clearly not the mysticism which is completed in a circle of devotion, religious exercises, meditation and ecstasy. It is the mysticism which recreates the world in a new image. Professor Royce, in his most interesting lectures on “The World and the Individual,” has described it, or something very similar to it, under the title of Idealism; and his careful and suggestive elaboration of his theme is the best indirect commentary upon what I have called the mysticism of Whitman with which I am acquainted. It includes an admirable exposition of the meaning of the Soul or Self.
Your whole world, he declares, is your whole Self—Whitman would perhaps have said, it is the mirror which reveals yourself. The Infinite Universe, whereof yours is but a part, is the Self of God. We live, but are not lost in Him, for we are as it were His members. There are two aspects of the human self: the temporal, in which it appears as a mere momentary consciousness, and the eternal, which reveals it as an indestructible purpose, the essence of reality. For reality, the professor argues, is the visible expression of purpose or meaning.
To proceed to the social aspect of this teaching: the individual, when he becomes conscious of his world—his Self—becomes conscious, too, that his world is only one aspect of the Universe, that there are a myriad others, and that the Universal Life consists of a Fellowship of such Selves as his. Thus, God is the Many-in-One; in Him the Many are one Self and complete. And the Many do not only seek completion in the Divine Unity; they also seek fellowship with one another. The Divine life, which is the basis of Human life, is thus a life of Fellowship—as the Apostle says, it is Love. It is not merely a trinity, it is a City of Friends; or rather of Lovers, as Edward Carpenter suggested in his recent essays.
Now I am convinced that this thought underlies Calamus; not, indeed, as a metaphysical theory, but as one of those overwhelming realisations of the ultimate significance of things which I have described inadequately as Whitman’s symbolism. Seeking to plumb the depths of passion, he found God. Sex became for him, in its essence, the potency of that Life wherein we are One. And comradeship, a passion as intense as that of sex, he beheld as the same relation between spiritual or ?therial bodies. He was aware that the noblest of passions is the most liable to base misunderstandings. But in it alone the soul finds full freedom. Sex passion finds its proper expression in physical rites, it is the passion of the life in Time; on the contrary, the passion of comrades is of eternity and only finds expression in Death. This appears to have been Whitman’s conviction.
Yet another bundle follows Calamus; a packet of more or less personal letters or messages called Messenger Leaves. In subsequent editions they were sorted out into other sections. They are not all new; but among those that now appear for the first time are the daring and noble lines to Jesus.
My spirit to yours, dear brother,
Do not mind because many, sounding your name, do not understand you,
I do not sound your name, but I understand you, (there are others also;)
I specify you with joy, O my comrade, to salute you, and to salute those who are with you, before and since—and those to come also,
That we all labour together, transmitting the same charge and succession;
We few, equals, indifferent of lands, indifferent of times,
We, enclosers of all continents, all castes—allowers of all theologies,
Compassionaters, perceivers, rapport of men,
We walk silent among disputes and assertions, but reject not the disputers, nor anything that is asserted, ...
Till we saturate time and eras, that the men and women of races, ages to come, may prove brethren and lovers, as we are.
Scattered through the generations—so we may read his thought—are those who have come into the cosmic consciousness or larger life, who have passed beyond the reach of time and of mere argument, and who therefore understand one another as others cannot understand them. The love and communion which exists between such Great Companions, is a pledge and earnest of the Society of the Future, when all men shall be one, even as these are one.
The thought may shock those to whom it comes suddenly, if they see in Whitman the “mere man” of their own narrow conception of humanity. But in judging him we must remember that he openly claims for himself and for other men all the Divine attributes which Christians are in the habit of ascribing to their Lord. Whitman believed that Jesus identified himself with Humanity; and that all who enter, as he entered, into the cosmic life share in the fellowship of God, even as did he.
More fully than many Christians, Whitman recognised Jesus as literally his elder brother; he joined with him in the words “Our Father,” feeling them to be true. And as one reads the gospel narratives one ventures to believe that the Master who called the disciples his friends, would himself have been eager to welcome the assertion of such a relationship.
Another letter is to one about to die; it is filled not with melancholy but with congratulation. The body that dies is but an excrement, the Self is eternal and goes on into ever fuller sunlight.
Another, which has aroused perhaps more misunderstanding than anything which Whitman wrote, is addressed to a prostitute. It hardly seems to call for explanation; for it is like the simple offering of the hand of friendship to an outcast; the assertion that for her, too, Whitman’s living eternal comradeship is real and close, accompanied by the injunction that she be worthy of such friendship.
He writes to rich givers in the Franciscan spirit; for he that is willing to give all, is able to accept.
To a pupil he suggests that personality is the tool of all good work and usefulness. To be magnetic is to be great. Come then and first become yourself.
But it is impossible even to refer in passing to all the separate poems, each one with its living suggestion. Some of the briefest are not the least pregnant.
The book closes with poems of departure. A dread falls upon him; perhaps after all he may not linger, to go to and fro through the lands he loves, awakening comrades; presently his voice also will cease. But here and now at least his soul has appeared and been realised; and that in itself should be enough.
Then he says his farewell. His words have been for his own era; and in every age, the race must find anew its own poets for its own words. But till America shall have absorbed his message, he must stand, and his influence, his spirit, must endure. After all, he does but seek, with passionate longing, one worthier than himself, who yet shall take his place. For him, he has prepared.
Now is he come to die. Without comprehending or questioning, he has obeyed his mystical commission; he has sown the Divine seed with which he was entrusted; he has given the message with which he was burdened, to women and to young men; now he passes on into the state for which all experience and service has been preparing him. He ceases to sing. His work is accomplished. Now disembodied and free, he can respond to all that love him, and enter upon the intenser Reality of the Unknown.
Dear friend, whoever you are, here, take this kiss,
I give it especially to you—Do not forget me,
I feel like one who has done his work—I progress on,
The unknown sphere, more real than I dreamed, more direct, darts awakening rays about me—So long!
Remember my words—I love you—I depart from materials,
I am as one disembodied, triumphant, dead.
The new edition of Leaves of Grass pleased the critics as little as its predecessors, but had a wider circulation. Some four or five thousand copies had been sold before the house of Thayer and Eldridge went down in the financial crash which followed on the outbreak of the war. Emerson came in again for some share of the critical assault, though his name was in no way connected with the new issue. Of Whitman himself a London journalist declared that he was the most silly, the most blasphemous, and the most disgusting writer that he had ever perused.
But if it found fresh enemies, the new edition found also new friends; and notably in England, whither a few adventurous copies of the earlier versions had already penetrated. Both Emerson and Thoreau had sent them to their English friends—among whom was Carlyle—but apparently with scant acknowledgment. Ruskin’s correspondent, Mr. Thomas Dixon of Sunderland, had purchased a few examples of the first edition at Dutch auction; and some of these he forwarded to Mr. William Bell Scott, who again handed on one of them to Mr. W. M. Rossetti; an act which, as the story will show, proved to be of great importance to Walt Whitman. It was the book of 1860, however, which first aroused the younger generation of Englishmen, among whom was the late Mr. Addington Symonds. “Within the space of a few years,” says he, “we were all reading and discussing Walt.”
The book appeared under the shadow of impending war. With the Presidential election of 1860, America came to the edge of the abyss; and the return of Abraham Lincoln was promptly followed by the organisation of secession. Whitman was still in Boston when, early in the spring, Lincoln first made his appearance in New York, W. C. Bryant introducing him to a great meeting at the Cooper Institute.
The famous speech which he then delivered lived long in its hearers’ memory; but even the personal impression which he made, remarkable as it was, hardly prepared New York to learn in the following May that it was Abraham Lincoln, and not W. H. Seward, the nominal leader of the Republican party, who had received the Presidential nomination at the great Chicago Convention.
Had the Democratic party been able to hold together, Lincoln could not have carried the election; but it was now split, and further weakened by the appearance of a Constitutional union Party. The most dangerous of the opposing candidates seemed to be Lincoln’s old antagonist and subsequent loyal supporter, Judge Douglas, who represented his well-worn policy of local option, or “squatter sovereignty”. Breckinridge of Kentucky openly advocated the extension of slave territory; while Bell, the unionist, kept his own counsel.
Early in the summer of that great struggle, Whitman returned to New York. In June he was among the immense crowd of interested spectators who filled Broadway from side to side, on the arrival of the first Japanese embassy to America; and he was of the thousands who welcomed the succession of distinguished visitors who came, that ominous summer, to the capital of the West. There was the Great Eastern, that leviathan of the modern world, whose advent was so long and so eagerly anticipated; there was Garibaldi, fresh from the fields whereon Italy had become a kingdom—not indeed the sister republic of Mazzini’s ardent dream, who should have given the new law of Liberty to Europe, but at least something more than a memory and a geographical term.
Another, in whom Whitman felt an even warmer interest, was “Baron Renfrew,” otherwise the Prince of Wales. The fair royal stripling of those days attracted the stalwart Democrat, who like old George Fox, could recognise a man under a crown as readily as a man in rags. Whitman’s eyes were keen to read personality; perhaps we should rather say that the sense by which personality is distinguished was highly developed in him. And he to whom the attributes of rank were non-existent, fell in love with this young man whose warm heart was to make him perhaps the best beloved of monarchs, as he afterwards fell in love with many a private soldier carried in wounded from the field. Albert Edward was one of those strangers in whom Whitman recognised a born comrade; and this fact at once raises his democratic sentiment out of the region of class feeling.
He was a witness, too, of the advent of other visitors even more brilliant, and burdened even more to the popular fancy, and perhaps to his own, with significance. He saw the extraordinary display of the heavens—the huge meteor, luminous almost as the moon, which fell in Long Island Sound, and the unannounced comet flaring in the north.
The autumn was loud with the electoral struggle. The presence of three opposing candidates was not enough to assure Lincoln’s success. The general expectation seems to have leaned towards an electoral tie, none of the candidates polling a majority of the votes; and this would have resulted, as on the similar occasion of 1824, in the choice between them being left to the House of Representatives. Upon the result of such choice the slave party was willing to stake its hopes of success; anticipating that even though he were the popular candidate, Congress would not select Lincoln, but would put him aside, as it had passed by Jackson in its previous opportunity.
But to the consternation of the South, the “black Republican” rail-splitter polled a clear majority over all three antagonists combined. A majority, that is to say, of electoral votes, for the American President is not chosen directly by the people, but by the people’s delegates. Each State elects its quota of Presidential electors, chosen not in proportion to the strength of parties in the State, but all of them representing the dominant party. Thus it may happen that a candidate, like Judge Douglas, who polls a large minority of the total popular vote, will receive a mere handful of electoral suffrages, having failed to carry more than one or two States. Lincoln was chosen by 180 votes to 123; and though Douglas’s popular poll was two-thirds of Lincoln’s, and nearly as large as that of the two other candidates combined, his electoral support was only one-tenth of the voices against Lincoln. The Republican vote in the country fell short of the combined opposition poll by a million out of a total of less than five million votes. From the popular point of view, Lincoln was, therefore, in the difficult position of a minority President.
The result of the November elections was scarcely made public before a committee of Southern Congressmen issued a manifesto, proclaiming the immediate need for a separate Confederacy of slave-holding States, if the institution upon which their prosperity depended was to be saved from the machinations of Northern politicians. They audaciously identified both Lincoln and the Republican party with the policy of Abolition; whereas the choice of Lincoln instead of Seward, the Abolitionist, might in itself have been accepted as sufficient evidence that the North, while determined to preserve the union, was resolute against interference with the internal policy of the South.
The Manifesto was followed, on the 20th of December, by the secession of South Carolina, ever since Calhoun’s day the leader of revolt against Federal power. Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida and Louisiana promptly joined her.
Although Lincoln’s election was assured in November, the executive power remained till the beginning of March in the feeble hands of Buchanan, who was the creature of advisers themselves divided in counsel, to the signal advantage of that section which supported the revolt. When, at last, the outgoing President made up his mind to dismiss his secessionist secretary of war, the Cotton-State Caucus called a Convention at Montgomery, the picturesque and sleepy old capital of Alabama; and this finally formulated a permanent constitution for the Confederacy precisely a week after the inauguration of the new President.
In the meantime Lincoln could only stand a spectator of the wholly ineffective measures which were being taken to frustrate the active aggression of the slave power. But towards the end of February he set out for Washington. Passing on his way through Indiana and Ohio, he was received by an enormous crowd in New York; and here Whitman first saw him, not from his favourite seat upon a stage-coach, for the streets were too densely packed for traffic, but as one of the thirty or forty thousand silent pedestrian onlookers collected in the city’s heart, where now the post-office stands.
Whitman well knew what the ominous silence, which greeted that loosely-made gaunt figure, concealed; and how different was the mood of New York that day from the holiday-making good-humour with which it was wont to greet the arrival of other illustrious guests. Under the speechlessness lurked a black moody wrath ready to break forth.
It was a pleasant afternoon, just twelve months after that other February day when Whitman and Emerson had paced up and down the slope of Boston Common in earnest colloquy. Lincoln went silently into the Astor House without any demonstration either of welcome or of open hostility; thereafter proceeding to his inauguration. He was compelled to pass secretly through Baltimore, where violence was only too ready to manifest itself on the slightest encouragement. The fact that the President-elect, in order to reach the capital, had thus to travel through a State which was only with difficulty retained for the union cause, shows how close that cause was to disaster. And though, as Lincoln stated in his inaugural address, the bulk of the American people opposed secession, and the party which favoured it was but a comparatively small minority; yet it could only be either an ignorant optimism, or on the contrary a firmly founded and earnest faith in the devotion of the great mass of the citizens to the ideals of their fathers, which could face such a situation without dismay.
The weight of numbers, however, favoured the North. A review of the census returns show that at their first compilation in 1790 the population of the Southern and the Northern divisions of the country was almost absolutely equal; but that from the beginning of the century the increase in the latter was the more rapid; so that in 1860 the free population of the North was more than double that of the South.
But in spite of this great numerical preponderance, the North itself was not united on the question at issue, as is clearly shown by the returns of the Presidential election, when Douglas polled a million Free-state votes. For though Douglas opposed secession, he did not oppose the extension of slavery. It is shown clearly, too, in the attitude of New York; of which more, later.
And beyond this the Southerner was in some respects better fitted, as well by his virtues as by his faults, for a military life. The qualities of leadership and of obedience are cultivated under an aristocratic ideal, as they are not under a democratic. And the South, which had practically controlled the executive under Buchanan, and especially the department of war, was better prepared to take the field than was the North. On the other hand, the strength of the union lay in its cause, and in the latent idealism of the American people, which woke into activity at the first menace to the Stars and Stripes.
Whether the war really settled anything, whether it might possibly have been avoided, whether secession left to itself would not literally have cut its own throat, these are interesting philosophic speculations into which we need not enter. For already the spectre of war had long been abroad, stalking through the unharvested fields of Kansas and Nebraska, and gesticulating with horrid signs and mocking whispers in every corner of America. When the slave party had first raised its fatal cry of “our institution in danger,” it had raised the cry of war. And when at last men like Lincoln retorted with the declaration that the union was irrefragable—that secession could only be justified after some criminal use of the Federal power to override the rights of the minority—the battle was manifestly joined.
It is but fair to add that although the party of Lincoln had now truly become the party of the union, the first line of cleavage between North and South was marked out by a schismatic spirit in the North itself, by its support of its own sectional interests, when enforcing a policy of protection upon the whole country. There can be little doubt that the mistrust felt in the South, while largely due to anterior causes, was born under this evil star. So true does it seem that when a nation’s policy is being shaped according to merely material interests, the seeds are being sown of future revolution.
The fatal movement of American destiny towards its crisis must have dominated much of Whitman’s thought at this time. Secession was in the very air he breathed; for at its first proclamation an echoing voice was heard in New York itself.
Here Mayor Wood, after a short period of deserved seclusion, had returned to power. Unsatisfied with his patronage he dreamed of wider fields. Was it not the splendid vision of a Presidency which encouraged this fatuous person to declare for a second secession, the creation of a new island republic of New York? “Tri-Insula” was to have been its title, and its territories would have comprised Mannahatta, Staten, and Long Islands. The proposal was enthusiastically received by the absurd creatures of Tammany, who then sat upon the City Council. But their complacent folly was of brief duration. It was dispersed by the first rebel gun-shot.
Whitman had been at the opera on Fourteenth Street, and was strolling homeward down Broadway about midnight, on the 13th of April, when he was met by the newspaper boys crying the last extras with more than ordinary vehemence. Buying a copy and stopping to read it under the lamps of the Metropolitan Hotel, he was startled by the news that war had actually broken out. The day before, Confederate troops had fired upon the flag at Charleston Harbour and Fort Sumter. South Carolina had flung her challenge down.
The President immediately called for troops, and the response of the North was instantaneous. New York herself did not hesitate, but voted at once a million dollars and sent forward her quota of men. Mayor Wood was among the many thousands of Democrats who became patriots that day—in so far as one can suddenly become patriotic.
Whitman was not among the volunteers, but his brother George, who was ten years his junior, was one of the first to offer. He had been following the family trade as a Brooklyn carpenter, and henceforward proved himself a brave and able soldier. He was neither braver nor abler than Walt, but the latter stayed at home, and there are those who have blamed him for it.
Picture of Walt at forty-four.
WHITMAN AT FORTY-FOUR
Putting on one side, as they have done, his subsequent service to the army, such blame springs from a misunderstanding of the man’s nature. There are some men wholly above the reproach of cowardice or indifference, whom it is impossible for us to conceive as shouldering a gun. And for those who knew him most intimately, Whitman was such a man. Many men who loved peace heard the call to arms and obeyed. Abraham Lincoln himself—to whom America was entrusting the conduct of the war—had but now proclaimed its futility, while his whole nature revolted from its cruel folly. And had his destiny bidden him to join the colours one cannot doubt that Walt Whitman would have done so. But that inner voice, which he obeyed, rather forbade than encouraged him.
And even in years of war there is service one can do for one’s country out of the ranks. No war can wholly absorb the energies of a civilised people, for the daily life of the nation must be continued. There are, besides, tasks that have a prior claim upon the loyalty of the individual, even to the defence of the flag. And Whitman had such a task, for he bore, as it were, within his soul the infant of an ideal America, like a young mother whose life is the consecrated guardian of her unborn babe. His book was now, in a sense, complete; but none could feel more strongly than he that even his book was only an inadequate expression of his purpose; while life lasted his days were to be devoted to the creation of an immortal comradeship, and a spiritual atmosphere in which the seeds concealed in his writings might germinate.
It must also be noted that, though in his open letter to Emerson he had written of war almost as a soldier whose blood kindles at the sound of the trumpets, and though the spirit of his book is one which “blows battles into men,” yet the last edition had been marked by a curious and significant approximation to Quakerism. It was in 1860, when war was so near at hand, that he substituted the Friendly numeral equivalents for the usual names of the months and days of the week; not, assuredly, because he objected to the recognition of heathen deities, like the early Friends, but in order to avow some relationship between himself and Quakerism. The increase of mystical consciousness may have made him more aware at this time of his real identity with this society of mystics to which he never nominally belonged.
We have had repeated occasion to note the Quaker traits in Whitman’s character, and here, at the opening of the war, it is well to emphasise them anew. His love of silence, his spiritual caution, his veracity and simplicity of speech, his soul-sight, and the practical balance of his mysticism—that temperance of character upon which his inspirational faculties were founded—and, finally, the equal democratic goodwill he showed to all men; these qualities speak the original Quaker type. And the world may well extend to Whitman the respect it acknowledges for the Quaker’s refusal to bear arms.
It was, indeed, because he loved America so well that he did not fight with the common weapons. We have seen that he associated himself intimately with the American genius, a genius which necessarily includes the qualities of the South at least equally with those of the North; he himself inclining to lay the emphasis upon the Southern attributes, as though their wealth in the emotional and passionate elements were more essential than any other. America robbed of the South would, indeed, have been America divided against herself. Hence he shared to the full in the desire and struggle for unity against the sordid party which instigated secession. But he knew that a victory of arms was not necessarily a victory of principles, and it was for the principle that he strove.
May we not assert the possibility of a highly developed and powerful personality exerting itself upon the side of Justice and Liberty in moments of national crisis, in some manner more potent than that of merely physical service? Would not Whitman have been wasting his forces if he had surrendered himself to the spirit of the hour, and gone forth with the volunteers to stop or to forward a bullet or a bayonet? These are questions we well may ponder, and without attempting to give reasons for so doing, we may answer in the affirmative.
Certain it is that two or three days after he first read the news of South Carolina’s challenge, and the day following the President’s appeal, he recorded this singular vow in one of his notebooks as though it were the seal upon a struggle of his spirit: “April 16th, 1861. I have this day, this hour, resolved to inaugurate for myself a pure, perfect, sweet, clean-blooded, robust body, by ignoring all drinks but water and pure milk, and all fat meats, late suppers—a great body, a purged, cleansed, spiritualised, invigorated body.”
Read with its context of the events which were occupying his mind, may we not surmise that this was a new girding of the loins for some service of the great cause, more strenuous than ever, though perhaps yet undefined; that this vow of abstinence for the establishment of a spiritualised body, made thus at the opening of the war, and at the time of George’s enrolment, when Lincoln’s call for volunteers was ringing in the heart of every loyal citizen—that this vow was that of an athlete going into training for a supreme effort; and an athlete whose labours are upon that unseen field, whereon it may be the battles of the visible world are really won. It was thus that Whitman obeyed the calls of duty both within him and without.
Lincoln’s first tasks were to create an army and to confine the area of insurrection. He proclaimed the blockade of the Southern ports; called out more regulars and volunteers, and succeeded in preventing West Virginia and Missouri from joining the Confederacy. Had he been able to retain for the service of the union a certain brilliant young officer, the war might have opened and closed upon a very different story; but Robert Lee had already joined the Southern army, though not without an inward conflict.
No leader of equal genius appeared upon the other side until Grant came out of the West. The weakness of Northern generalship was only too clearly evidenced in the defeat at Bull Run, midway between the two capitals, which were now little more than a hundred miles apart, the Confederate Government having removed to Richmond. As a result of the defeat Washington itself lay in imminent peril; and if General Johnston had followed up his advantage, it would have fallen into his hands. But he missed his hour, and the consternation of the North was followed by a mood of stubborn resolution.
Slowly but surely Lincoln built up his military organisation. In the whirlpool of currents he remained steadfast to his single policy of maintaining the union. He succeeded in evading the occasions of war which threatened abroad; he conciliated all in the South which was at that time amenable to conciliation; and, eager as he was for emancipation, he refused to be driven before the storm of Abolitionist sentiment which had risen in the North.
During 1862, while Grant and Farragut were gradually clearing the Mississippi, the great natural thoroughfare of America, Lee was more than holding his own among the hills and rivers of Virginia. The opposing army of the Potomac remained ineffective under the brilliant but dilatory McClellan, and his more active successors, Burnside and Hooker. Lee assumed the aggressive, and invaded Maryland; but was turned back from a projected raid into Pennsylvania by the drawn battle of Antietam; in which, as in many of the previous engagements of this army, George Whitman fought.
Antietam was immediately followed by the preliminary proclamation of emancipation, to take effect in all States which should still continue in rebellion at the commencement of the new year. Lincoln’s mind had long been exercised upon the best means of compassing the liberation of the slaves; and until the close of the war, he himself looked for the ultimate solution of the problem to the method of compensation adopted by Great Britain in the West Indies. This was successfully applied to the district of Columbia, but the offer of it received no response either from the other States to which it was magnanimously made, or from Lincoln’s own Cabinet. The present proclamation was intended as a blow at the industrial resources of the rebellion.
In mid-December General Burnside lost nearly 13,000 men at Fredericksburg, Virginia, and reading the long lists of wounded, the Whitmans came upon George’s name among the more serious casualties. Great was the distress in the home on Portland Avenue, and Walt set off at once to seek him at the front. His pocket was picked in a crush at Philadelphia Station, and he arrived penniless in Washington. There, searching the hospitals for three days and nights, he could get no news of his brother’s whereabouts, but managed somehow to make his way to the army’s headquarters at Falmouth. It had been a long, melancholy journey; but arrived at the camp, he found his brother already well again, his wound having healed rapidly.
This sudden journey had momentous consequences for Whitman. His stay in New York was, perhaps naturally, drawing to a close. There are indications in the last poems that he was contemplating a westward journey, and possibly a settlement beyond the Rockies. Although he paid it frequent visits, he never lived again in Brooklyn.
At Falmouth he found among the wounded a number of young fellows whom he had known in New York. He took a natural interest in their welfare, and even though he felt he could do little for them, lingered till a party going up to Washington offered him an opportunity for usefulness in their escort. Arriving at the capital, he found innumerable similar occasions in the many hospitals which had been established in and about the city. These he began to visit daily, supporting himself by writing letters to the New York and Brooklyn press—to the New York Times in particular—and by copying work in the paymaster’s office. It was not till two years later that he obtained regular employment in the Civil Service; but during the whole of that time he was paying almost daily visits to the wards, in his honorary and voluntary capacity, as friend of the wounded.
The number of these was periodically swollen by great battles. On the 4th of May, 1863, General Hooker lost the day at Chancellorsville, and was replaced by Meade. Early in July, Lee made a second alarming dash into the North, but was turned back by General Meade from the bloody field of Gettysburg, where the total losses reached the appalling figure of 60,000.
By this time, more than two years after the fall of Fort Sumter, the first easy boasting of a short campaign and an overwhelming triumph, indulged by both sides, had long died; and the solemn sense of the great tragedy being enacted before its eyes possessed the nation. This sentiment could not have been more nobly expressed than in the words used by the President, when, speaking at the dedication of a portion of the Gettysburg battlefield as a national cemetery, he said: “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom: and that government of the people by the people for the people shall not perish from the earth”.
Meade’s victory, and the news following fast upon it of Grant’s capture of Vicksburg, with the consequent reopening of the Mississippi, reassured the wavering faith of many patriots. But the situation was still full of peril. In this same month—July, 1863—there were serious riots in New York, instigated by the “Copperheads,” as the Northern sympathisers with the Confederacy were dubbed, in opposition to the first draft for the army under the general conscription law of March. In these, more than a thousand persons were killed or wounded.
The riots were the more difficult to quell because all available troops and volunteers had been sent to the front; and these of course included a great proportion of the stabler citizens. At the same time the disaffected elements remained in their full strength. The political character of the disturbance was plain enough; for the rioters set upon any negroes they met, slinging them to the lamp-posts, and would have burned down the hospital, full of wounded union soldiers, had they not been prevented.
It is some satisfaction to know that we cannot couple the name of Fernando Wood with these outrages. There was something genuine in his patriotism. He was now in Congress, and had recently been vainly attempting, in his usual futile fashion, to negotiate a peace.
Both the draft and the riots caused the Whitman family no little anxiety. George, who had entered the army as a private and was promoted stage by stage till he became a lieutenant-colonel, was of course already at the front; and Jeff, who had married four years earlier, was keeping the home together for the old mother and helpless youngest son, as well as for his own wife and their young children. Anything that happened to him would involve the happiness of the whole family. They feared especially that he might be drawn for service; and Walt wrote from Washington that in that event, he would do all in his power to raise the necessary money to provide a substitute.
Walt himself never closed his ears against the call to serve in the ranks, if it should come to him. Had he himself been drawn, he might have regarded the circumstance as the intimation of duty; but he was not. Instead he took the risks of small-pox in the infectious wards, as well as that which is incurred by the frequent dressing of gangrened wounds; and he bore the spiritual burden of all the pathetic war-wreckage which drifted into Washington month after weary month.
The tension of those days was terrible to him. Devoted to the “Mother of All,” the American nation, he loved her sons both North and South with an equal affection, their suffering and destruction wringing his heart. For, mystic as he was, he had all the strong passions of humanity, and felt to the full the agonies of the flesh. On the one side also, his own brother was in the hottest of the fighting throughout these years; while on the other, it is just possible that some young son of his own, known or unknown to him, may have served among the boys in the opposite ranks before the war was over. His Abolitionist friends would sigh, and say the struggle must go on till every slave should be free; but he who valued freedom not less than they, and understood perhaps better what it really means, dissented from them.
The first sight of a battlefield made him cry out for peace; and if in the following months he felt the exhilaration which breathed from the simple heroism displayed by the soldiers, he still saw that war is not all heroic, but in time must darken the fairest cause. The terrible burden of its inconceivable extravagance began to weigh upon him like a nightmare. Each new season, with its prospective train of ambulances, its legion of tragedies, bewildered him with its horror; till he angrily denied that the whole population of negroes could be worth so terrific a purchase. It may have been the exaggerated retort to an extremist argument; but indeed it was not for the negroes that the war was being fought; it was not for the powerful but highly coloured manifesto of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but for the “Declaration of Independence,” and for the Constitution of America. And this both Whitman and Lincoln realised: they knew the negro of the South as the New Englander never knew him, and were firm in demanding for him the rights of a human being; but they knew also that mere abolition would not give him these, nor could it render him capable of the right exercise of American citizenship.
Though Lee had been thrown back from Gettysburg, his army had never recognised a defeat; and the chief danger to the cause of American unity lay in the conviction of the South that its general and his men were really invincible. For two more years they kept the field, with a heroic determination that appears at the same time little short of criminal when we consider the conditions involved upon all the parties to resistance. And when we add to these the story of the Southern military prisons, even the chivalrous fame of Lee becomes stained with an ineffaceable shame. Better a thousand times to have acknowledged defeat than to have been guilty of enforcing such things. But the pride of the South had become rigid, and would only admit defeat after it was broken. Its political leaders had staked everything upon victory; and it would seem that they preferred to sacrifice a whole generation of their supporters and victims rather than bear the penalty of their failure.
When Grant, or rather the reckless courage of his American volunteers, had crushed General Bragg at Chattanooga, and his friend Sherman had completed the work of clearing Tennessee, Lee’s army remained the sole hope of the desperately impoverished South. But still in itself and in its leader it was absolutely confident.
A similar confidence inspired the hearts of the union soldiers, when in March, 1864, the downright laconic general from the West was given supreme command, and went into Virginia to crush his antagonist by mere force of numbers and determination.
In Grant at last both Lincoln and the army had found the man they were waiting for. But still a year went by before the task was accomplished—a year whose memory is the most terrible of the war—upon whose page are inscribed such names as, The Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Bloody Angle, North Anna, Cold Harbour, recalling those awful fields whereon more than a hundred thousand soldiers fell. While Grant was stubbornly pushing Lee back upon Richmond, and finally holding him there, Sherman was cutting him off from further support by that extraordinary march south-eastwards from Chattanooga through Atlanta to the sea. He captured Savannah just before Christmas; and afterwards turning north, and wading through all the morasses and crossing all the innumerable streams and rivers of the Carolinas, he completed his errand a few days before his chief entered the Southern capital.
Several futile attempts had been made to bring about a reconciliation between North and South before the bitter end; but Lincoln, eager as he was for peace, stood out irrevocably for the acknowledgment of the union, and now added to it the emancipation of the slaves. It was clear that nothing short of Lee’s capitulation could satisfy the country or end the war. On the 3rd April, Richmond surrendered to Grant; and on the day after, the President, who was then with the army, entered the city which the evacuating forces had fired. Five more days and Lee gave himself up: by the end of the month the surrender of the Confederate troops had been effected, while Jefferson Davis was captured in Georgia on the 10th of May. A fortnight later the combined hosts of Grant and Sherman passed before the President in a last grand review along Pennsylvania Avenue and before the White House, to be thereafter disbanded.
But the President was no longer Abraham Lincoln. Re-elected in the preceding autumn, in spite of Republican intrigues and the dangerous opposition of General McClellan, who was put forward by the Democrats, Lincoln had been assassinated during a performance at Ford’s Theatre, on the evening of the 14th of April, the fourth anniversary of the fall of Fort Sumter.
The loss to his country was irreparable. More than any other of its Presidents, either before or since, Abraham Lincoln embodied the real genius of the American nation, and in the hour of their agony he was the father of his people. Slowly they had learnt his strength and his wisdom; but they had hardly begun to understand the greatness of a heart which was able to love the South with a mother’s tenderness even while it was in arms against him.
The Vice-President, who stepped into his place, was a union Democrat; he also loved the South, but less wisely than well. His rash haste in the reconstruction of the governments of the defeated States threw the nation into the hands of the group of narrowly partisan Republicans which continued to rule America with unscrupulous ability and ill-concealed self-interest for sixteen years, threatening by its attitude towards the Southern people to alienate their sympathies forever from the union.