Whitman’s residence in Washington and the nature of his occupation in the hospitals, through the years of the war, have rendered an outline of their history almost necessary. Of his manner of life during this period we have many notes and records, both in his own letters and memoranda and in the biographical accounts afterwards printed by his friends.
During the first five or six months after his arrival he took his meals and spent much of his spare time with Mr. and Mrs. O’Connor, who had recently settled in the city. He boarded in the same house as they, about six blocks from the Treasury building, where O’Connor worked, and a mile from the Armory Square Hospital, where lay many of his own wounded friends.
William Douglas O’Connor was a strikingly handsome man of thirty years, full of spirit and eloquence. He had previously been a Boston journalist, had married in that city a charming wife, and was the father of two children. He had lost his post there through his outspoken support of John Brown and the attack on Harper’s Ferry. While out of employment he had written his novel, Harrington, an eloquent story of the Abolitionist cause, which was published by Thayer & Eldridge. In 1861 he had obtained a comfortable clerkship in the Lighthouse Bureau under the new Lincoln administration.
Picture of William Douglas O'Connor.
WILLIAM DOUGLAS O’CONNOR
Whitman had already made his acquaintance in Boston, and their friendship now became most cordial and intimate. Generous and romantic in his view of life, O’Connor’s whole personality was very attractive to Whitman from the day of their first encounter. He had the warm Irish temperament which Walt loved; he was a natural actor, and Walt was always at home with actors. Moreover, he was an eager and intelligent admirer of Leaves of Grass; and his keen insight, wide reading and remarkable powers of elocution sometimes revealed to their author meanings and suggestions in his own familiar words of which he himself had been unconscious. O’Connor’s personal attachment to and reverence for the older man is evident upon every page of The Carpenter, a tale which he afterwards contributed to Putnam’s Magazine; while in the impassioned eulogium of The Good Gray Poet he has expressed his admiration for the Leaves.
Upon politics however the two friends never agreed, and, unfortunately, O’Connor was always eager for political argument. He was a friend of Wendell Phillips, that anti-slavery orator who once described Lincoln as “the slave-hound of Illinois,” because the latter approved the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law while it remained on the statute-book: and to O’Connor, compulsory emancipation always came before the preservation of the union. This of course was not Whitman’s view, and it was upon the negro question that their friendship finally suffered shipwreck.
O’Connor’s rooms soon became the centre of an interesting group of literary friends. Mr. Eldridge, the publisher, came to Washington after the wreck of his Boston business, and a little later Mr. John Burroughs, a student of Wordsworth, Emerson and the Leaves, being attracted to the capital, whither all eyes were turning, gave up teaching in New England, and obtained a Government clerkship. Mr. E. C. Steadman, a poet and journalist in those days, and a clerk in the Attorney-General’s department, was of the O’Connor group; and Mr. Hubley Ashton also, then a rising young lawyer, who afterwards intervened successfully on Whitman’s behalf at a critical moment.
The last-named of these gentlemen tells me that he first saw Whitman late one evening at the rooms of their mutual friend. It was indeed past midnight when Walt appeared asking for supper. He was wearing army boots, his sleeves were rolled up, and his coat was slung across his arm. He had just come in with a train-load of wounded from the front, and had been disposing of his charges in the Washington hospitals. Very picturesque he looked, as he stood there, stalwart, unconventional, majestic, an heroic American figure.
That figure rapidly became as familiar in Washington as it had been in New York. No one could miss or mistake this great jolly-looking man, with his deliberate but swinging gait, his red face with its grey beard over the open collar, and crowned by the big slouch hat; and every one wondered who and what he might be. Some Western general, or sea-captain, or perhaps a Catholic Father, they would guess; for he seemed a leader of men, and there was a freshness about his presence that surely must have come either from the prairies, the great deep, or the very heart of humanity. He had the bearing, too, of a man of action; he looked as though he could handle the ribbons, or swing an axe with the best, as indeed he could.
Whitman was more puzzled than any of the onlookers about his occupation, or rather his business. Occupation he never lacked while the hospitals were full; but for years he was very poor, and once, at least, seriously in debt. The need for money, to supply the little extras which might save the life of many a poor fellow in the wards, was constant; and now, probably for the first time, he found it difficult to earn his own livelihood. He had failed in his application for a Government clerkship. Living in Washington was in itself costly, and the paragraphs and letters which he contributed to the local and metropolitan press, with his two or three hours a day of copying in the paymaster’s office—a pleasant top-room overlooking the city and the river—brought him but a meagre income.
Moreover the need for money began to press in a new direction; for first, the family breadwinner at Brooklyn was threatened, and then, though he was not drawn for the army, his salary was cut in two. Whereupon brother Andrew, always one suspects rather a poor tool, fell ill; and died after a lingering malady, leaving a widow and several little children in poverty.
Walt himself lived in the strictest simplicity. For awhile, as we have seen, he boarded with the O’Connors; then he took a little room on a top-floor; breakfasted on tea and bread, toasted before an oil-stove, and had for his one solid meal a shilling dinner at a cheap restaurant. To all appearance he was in magnificent health. At the beginning of the first summer he is so large and well, as he playfully tells his mother, that he looks “like a great wild buffalo, with much hair”. Simplicity of life was never a hardship to him. There was something wild and elemental in his nature that chose a den rather than a parlour or a club-room for its shelter.
The money difficulty renewed his thoughts of lecturing, and after the first summer in Washington his home—letters often refer to it. But the plan now appears less as an apostolate than as a means of raising funds for his hospital service. The change may, of course, be due in part to the fact that he was writing of his plans to his old mother, who would be most likely to appreciate this motive; but it was chiefly the result of his present complete absorption in those immediate tasks of comradeship for which he seemed to be born.
He was, however, well advised not to actually attempt the enterprise. Even a famous orator could hardly have found a hearing during the crisis of the war, when the newspaper with its casualty lists was almost the sole centre of interest. And even had he been sure of success, his hospital service would not have let him go.
During this first summer Whitman hurt his hand, and had to avoid some of the worst cases in order to escape blood-poisoning; but in September he wrote home: “I am first-rate in health, so much better than a month or two ago: my hand has entirely healed. I go to hospital every day or night. I believe no men ever loved each other as I and some of these poor wounded sick and dying men love each other.” Such words are a fitting commentary upon the pages of Calamus. Here, among the perishing, the genius of this great comrade of young men found its proper work of redemption.
Great, indeed, was his opportunity. The federal city was full of troops and of wounded soldiers. The whole of the district a few blocks north of Pennsylvania Avenue, and of that lying east of the Capitol, were alike occupied by parade grounds, camps and hospitals. The latter even invaded the Capitol itself; and for a time the present Hall of Statuary was used as a ward. Midway between the Capitol and the present Washington Monument, and close to the Baltimore and Potomac railway station, is the site of the Armory Square Hospital; four blocks to the north again is the Patent Office, for a long time filled with beds. And hard by, in Judiciary Square, where the hideous Pension Office now stands, was another great camp of the “boys in white”. Whitman was a frequent visitor at all of these.
There were fourteen large hospitals in the city by the summer of 1863; and the total number in and about it rose to fifty. They spread away over the surrounding fields and hill-sides, as far as the Fairfax Seminary on the ridge above the quaint Washingtonian town of Alexandria. This was almost in the enemy’s country. And even the melancholy strains of the Dead March were welcomed with covert rejoicings by its citizens when the funeral of some union soldier passed their doors. All through the war Washington itself was full of disaffected persons; and for a while, looking out from the height of the Capitol, one could see the Confederate flag flying on the Virginian hills opposite.
The greater part of the hospital nursing was done, of course, by orderlies; and a more or less severe and mechanical officialism prevailed in most of the wards. But this frigid atmosphere was warmed by the presence of a number of women; emissaries of Relief Associations supported by individual States, or of the Sanitary and Christian Commissions. It is difficult to overestimate the good that was done by Dorothea Dix and her helpers, among whom were not a few Quakeresses; and by all the devoted Sisters of Mercy and Sisters of Charity whose goodwill never failed.
But even then the field for service was so vast that much remained undone. Many of the doctors and surgeons were able and kindly, some of them were absolutely devoted to their painful labours; and many of the nurses were more than patient and faithful; but the lads who were carried in wounded and sick from the cold and ghastly fields, wanted the strong support of manly understanding and prodigal affection in fuller measure than mere humanity seemed able to give. Human as he was, Walt came to hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, like a Saviour. In after years they remembered “a man with the face of an angel” who had devoted himself to their individual needs.
The mere presence of a perfectly sane and radiant personality raised the tone of a whole ward. The dead-weight of cloudy depression brooding upon it would melt in the ineffable sunshine that streamed from him. And then he always seemed to know exactly what was wanted, and he was never in a hurry. When anything was to be done or altered, he spoke with the authority of the man who alone, among overpressed and busy people, has the leisure for personal investigation; and therefore in most cases he had his way.
Absolutely unsparing of himself, he knew too well wherein his strength lay to be careless of his health. If his food was sometimes insufficient, he would yet take his one square meal, after refreshing himself with a bath, before starting upon his rounds. And when they were over, he cleared his brain under the stars before he turned in to sleep. Thus he kept his power at the full, and his presence was like that of the open air. He would often come into the wards carrying wild flowers newly picked, and strewing them over the beds, like a herald of the summer. Well did he know that they were messengers of life to the sick, words to them from the Earth-mother of men.
Whatever he might be in the literary world of Washington or New York, here Whitman was nothing but Walt the comrade of soldiers. And for himself, he said in later years, that the supreme loves of his life had been for his mother and for the wounded. It is a saying worthy of remembrance, for it indicates the man.
Of the efficiency of his service there can be no question. He worked his own miracles. He knew it positively himself, and besides, both the lads and the doctors assured him, time and again, that he was saving lives by refusing to give them over to despair. “I can testify,” he writes to The Brooklyn Eagle, his old paper, “that friendship has literally cured a fever, and the medicine of daily affection a bad wound.” In his own words, he distributed himself, as well as the contents of his pockets and haversack, in infinitesimal quantities, certain that but little of his giving would be wasted. And yet he never gave indiscriminately; he knew always what he was doing, and did it with deliberation.
The feeling that the lads wanted him had detained him at the first; the superabundance of his life, and the fulness of his health and spirits, carrying with them a conviction of duty when he entered these vestibules of death. Here was something that he, and he only, could adequately accomplish; here was a cry he was bound by the law of his being to answer; and the cry of the hospitals continued to hold him till the war was done. As he left of a night, after going his last round and kissing many a young, pale, bearded face, in fulfilment of his own written injunctions, he would hear the boys calling, “Walt, Walt, Walt! come again, come again!” And it would have required a harder heart than his to refuse them, even had the answer within been less loud and insistent.
They kept him busy, too. He provided them with pens, stamps, envelopes and paper, and wrote their letters for them; letters to mothers, wives and sweethearts; and the last news of all, when the sad procession had carried son, husband or lover to his soldier’s grave, and had fired over him the last salute. He would enter, armed with newspapers and magazines which he distributed; and often he would read to the men, or recite some suitable verses, never, I think, his own. He played games with them, too; and though he was one of the few men in Washington who never smoked, he was the only one of all the visitors who brought them tobacco; and the ward-surgeons, though at first they protested, could not refuse him; it really seemed as though Walt knew best. On the glorious Fourth, he would provide a feast of ice-cream for some ward; and on other hot days—and there were too many in the capital—would distribute the contents of crates full of oranges, or lemons and sugar for the making of lemonade.
It was for such gifts as these, and many others of a similar kind, that he needed money; and through the influence of Emerson, James Redpath and other friends in New York and Boston, he was able to distribute perhaps ￡1,200 among the soldiers in these infinitesimal quantities. Thus he became the almoner of many in the North.
Much of the service, however, was entirely his own—if one can ever call love one’s own, which all things seem to offer to the soul that has learnt to receive from all. In cases of heart sickness, and the despondency and despair that come to the lonely man lying helpless among callous or unimaginative and therefore indifferent persons, Walt’s quick divination of the real trouble made him the best of nurses; and he took care to remember all the cases that came under his notice, innumerable as they must have seemed.
He kept a strict record of his patients and their individual needs in little blood and tear-stained notebooks, many of which are still extant. This is an additional proof of that concrete definiteness of observation which distinguishes his habit of mind from the love of merely nebulous generalisation of which he is sometimes accused. One is bound to respect the intuitions of a mind which has so large a grasp of detail.
Beginning characteristically with the Brooklyn lads whom he found scattered about the several hospitals, and who claimed his attention by the natural right of old acquaintanceship, his work grew like a rolling snowball, as he made his way from bed to bed; for he was always quick to feel the needs of a stranger. Before long he realised that there was not one among the thousand tents and wards in which he might not profitably have expended his whole vital energy. As it was, however, he tramped from hospital to hospital, faithfully going his rounds as far afield as the Fairfax Seminary. And in those days the Washington streets were heavy walking in the wet weather; for Pennsylvania Avenue was the only one that was yet paved, and then boasted nothing but the cobble-stones, which still serve in the quaint streets across the Potomac.
He walked a great deal. The open air relieved the tension of the wards, which at times was almost unbearable. Though his presence and affection saved many a lad’s life, there must have been many more that died; and the tragedy of these deaths, and the terrible suffering that often preceded them, bit into his soul.
Fascinated though he was by his employment, and delighting in it while he was strong and well, the strength of his great heart was often as helpless as a little child’s; and his whole nature staggered under the blows, which he felt even in his physical frame. He was literally an “amateur”; he could never take a detached or “professional” attitude towards his patients, for he knew that what they needed from him was love; their suffering became his suffering, and something died in him when they died.
The following passage, written when the war itself was drawing to a close, indicates the character of much of his work, and the spirit in which it was done:—
“The large ward I am in is used for secession soldiers exclusively. One man, about forty years of age, emaciated with diarrh?a, I was attracted to, as he lay with his eyes turned up, looking like death. His weakness was so extreme that it took a minute or so every time for him to talk with anything like consecutive meaning; yet he was evidently a man of good intelligence and education. As I said anything, he would lie a moment perfectly still, then, with closed eyes, answer in a low, very slow voice, quite correct and sensible, but in a way and tone that wrung my heart. He had a mother, wife and child, living (or probably living) in his home in Mississippi. It was long, long since he had seen them. Had he caused a letter to be sent them since he got here in Washington? No answer. I repeated the question very slowly and soothingly. He could not tell whether he had or not—things of late seemed to him like a dream. After waiting a moment, I said: ‘Well, I am going to walk down the ward a moment, and when I come back you can tell me. If you have not written, I will sit down and write.’ A few minutes after I returned; he said he remembered now that some one had written for him two or three days before. The presence of this man impressed me profoundly. The flesh was all sunken on face and arms; the eyes low in their sockets and glassy, and with purple rings around them. Two or three great tears silently flowed out from the eyes, and rolled down his temples (he was doubtless unused to be spoken to as I was speaking to him). Sickness, imprisonment, exhaustion, etc., had conquered the body, yet the mind held mastery still, and called even wandering remembrance back.”
At times the tragedy unnerved him, so that even his native optimism was clouded. “I believe there is not much but trouble in this world,” we find him writing to his mother, and the page hardly reads like one of his; “if one hasn’t any for himself, he has it made up by having it brought close to him through others, and that is sometimes worse than to have it touch oneself.” He had already learnt the primer of sorrow; now he was studying the lore in which he was to become so deeply read.
Even that first summer the malarial climate and excessive heat of Washington, with the close watching in the wards, and the continual draught upon his vital forces, affected him perceptibly. In his letters home he mentions heavy colds, with deafness and trouble in his head caused by the awful heat, as giving him some anxiety. He seems to have had a slight sun-stroke in earlier years, which made him more susceptible to this kind of weakness; and on hot days he went armed with a big umbrella and a fan. But through all this time he seemed to his friends the very incarnation of his “robust soul”.
Picture of John Burroughs at sixty-three.
JOHN BURROUGHS AT SIXTY-THREE
Though he shuddered sometimes as he recalled the sights of the wards, the life outside was a pleasant one. He loved to take long midnight rambles about the city and over the surrounding hills, with his friends. In spring, he delighted in the bird-song, the colour and fragrance of the flowers which lined the banks of Rock Creek, a stream which, entering the broad Potomac a mile above the Treasury building, separated Washington from the narrow ivy-clad streets of suburban Georgetown.
And the stir and life of the capital always interested him. He loved to watch the marching of the troops; and the martial music and flying colours always delighted him as though he were a boy. He frequently met the President, blanched and worn with anxiety and sorrow, riding in from his breezier lodging at the Soldiers’ Home on the north side of the city, to his official residence. They would exchange the salutations of street acquaintances, each man admiring the patent manliness of the other.
In Washington, as in New York, Whitman was speedily making himself at home with everybody; eating melons in the street with a countryman, or chatting at the Capitol with a member of Congress; for men or women, black or white, he always had his own friendly word. He had besides, as we have seen, his inner circle at O’Connor’s.
He was often at the Capitol, that noble, but somewhat uninteresting building which overlooks the city; and if he deplored the low level of the Congressional debates, he found some compensation among the trees without; for fine trees were already a feature of Washington, which now appears, as one looks down upon it, like a city builded in a wood. About sundown, too, he liked to stand where he could see the level light blazing like a star upon the bronze figure of Liberty, newly mounted above the dome.
It was in the summer of 1864, when Whitman was forty-five years of age, that he had his first serious illness. He had never been really out of health before. The preceding autumn he had paid a short visit to his home, and in February had gone down to the front at Culpepper, thinking that his services might be needed nearer to the actual scene of battle. But he found that he could do better work in Washington. The cases there seemed to grow more desperate as the long strain of the war made itself felt upon the men in the ranks.
It was immediately after this that Grant was given the supreme command; and at the close of March, Whitman, who foresaw the real meaning of the task of crushing Lee, wrote of it thus: “O mother, to think that we are to have here soon what I have seen so many times; the awful loads and trains and boat-loads of poor, bloody and pale, and wounded young men again.... I see all the little signs—getting ready in the hospitals, etc. It is dreadful when one thinks about it. I sometimes think over the sights I have myself seen: the arrival of the wounded after a battle; and the scenes on the field too; and I can hardly believe my own recollections. What an awful thing war is! Mother, it seems not men, but a lot of devils and butchers, butchering one another.”
A week later, describing the frightful sufferings of the soldiers, and the callous selfishness of their attendants, he says: “I get almost frightened at the world”. Again, two days after: “I have been in the midst of suffering and death for two months, worse than ever. The only comfort is that I have been the cause of some beams of sunshine upon their suffering and gloomy souls and bodies too.” And he adds: “Oh, it is terrible, and getting worse, worse, worse”.
Rumours spread in the city of the probable character of Grant’s campaign; and as he realised more and more fully what would be its inevitable cost, a sort of terror took hold of him. Yet he believed in Grant, as well as in Lincoln. And hating war as he did, he could not see any other course possible now than to complete its work. He was solemnly ready to take his part in those ranks of men converted, as it were, into “devils and butchers,” if need be, if he could feel assured that he was more use to America upon the field than in the wards among the sick and dying.
Meanwhile, he shared the old mother’s anxiety about George, who was always in the thick of the fighting. News, both true and false, was arriving; and his letters are always seeking to support the old woman’s faith, and to give her the plain truth with all the hope that might be.
He was kept very closely occupied now in the hospitals; and especially at Armory Square, where some 200 desperate cases were collected; men who had lain on the field, or otherwise unattended, until their wounds and amputations had mortified. He had always made a rule of going where he was most needed. But now he began to suffer severely from what he describes as fulness in the head, to have fits of faintness, and to be troubled with sore throat.
To add to the horrors of those days, a number of the wounded lads went crazy; and at last the strain became so manifestly too much for his failing vitality, that his friends and the doctors bade him go North for a time. But he hung on still; hoping, like Grant, for the war to end with the summer, and writing to his mother that he cannot bear to leave and be absent if George should be hit and brought into Washington. However, with midsummer upon him and its deadly heat, he became really ill, and had to relinquish his post. For nearly six months he remained restlessly at home.
Whitman never fully recovered. We may perhaps be surprised at this, and wonder that he should have broken down, even under the circumstances. Was he not in such relations with the Universal Life that he should daily have been able to replenish the storehouse of his physical and emotional forces?
He was no spendthrift, and husbanded them as well as he might, knowing their value; and doubtless he asked himself this very question many a time. Doubtless, too, he was confident, at least during the earlier months, that after the strain was over his resilient nature would regain its normal tone. But on the other hand, he had volunteered for a service to whose claims he was ready to respond to the uttermost farthing. Where others gave their lives, who was he to hold back anything of his?
The soul, one may say, never gives more than it can afford; for the soul is divinely prudent, and knows the worthlessness of such a gift. And giving with that prudence, it never seeks repayment; what it gives, it gives. But the body, even at its best, is not as the soul. And when the soul gives the vital and emotional forces of its body to invigorate other bodies, it may give more of these, and more continuously, than the body can replace. And so it was with Whitman. He gave, and I think he gave deliberately, for he was an extraordinarily deliberate man, that for which he cared far more than life; he gave his health to the friends, the strangers, whom he loved; and thus his “spiritualised body” found its use.
While Whitman was at home, during the latter part of 1864, he doubtless put the finishing touches to Drum-taps, which was printed at New York early in the following summer. Several of the poems in this collection had been written in that city during the two years which had elapsed since the last publication of Leaves of Grass, before he set out for Washington. The manuscript had remained at home, tied up in its square, spotted, stone-colour covers, but was sent on to him, to be discussed in the Washington circle. Early in 1864 a friend seems to have taken it the round of the Boston publishers, but without success.
If we are to understand Whitman’s attitude towards the war, we must glance at the little brown volume of seventy-two pages, Walt Whitman’s Drum-taps. Among the poems which preceded his visit to the capital were probably the song of “Pioneers,” with its cry of the West, and the poem of the “Broadway Pageant,” of 1860, celebrating the Japanese Embassy, and forming a complementary tribute to the maternal East. To these one may add the lines to “Old Ireland” and the noble “Years of the Modern”.
In this last he proclaims the growing consciousness of solidarity among the peoples of the world. Artificial boundaries seem to be breaking down in Europe, and the people are making their own landmarks—witness the rise of a new Italy. Everywhere men among the people are awaking to ask pregnant questions, and to link all lands together with steam and electricity.
Are all nations communing? Is there going to be but one heart to the globe?
Is humanity forming en-masse? for lo, tyrants tremble, crowns grow dim,
The earth, restive, confronts a new era, perhaps a general divine war,
No one knows what will happen next, such portents fill the days and nights;
Years prophetical! the space ahead as I walk, as I vainly try to pierce it, is full of phantoms,
Unborn deeds, things soon to be, project their shapes around me,
This incredible rush and heat, this strange ecstatic fever of dreams, O years!
Your dreams, O years, how they penetrate through me! (I know not whether I sleep or wake);
The perform’d America and Europe grow dim, retiring in shadow behind me,
The unperform’d, more gigantic than ever, advance, advance upon me.
The war poems follow.
Whitman’s attitude towards war is not obvious, but it is, I believe, logical and consistent. On one side it approximated to the Quaker position, but only on one side. Or rather, perhaps, the Quaker position approximates to one side of Whitman’s. He was devoted to a social order, or republic, which could not be realised by deeds of arms. He had no hatred for any of his fellows, and recognised in his political enemy a man divine as himself—one cannot say that he had any personal enemies, though there were men who would like to have been accounted such.
The fat years of peace had, however, awakened doubts in him of the average American’s capacity for great passions. These seemed to be rare among them, and Whitman had been driven to seek them in nature and her storms. It was with exultation, then, that he felt the response of New York and of the whole of America to the call of the trumpet.
Men of peace are accustomed to lament the contagion of the war-fever, and with a large measure of justice. But so long as civilisation tends to render the common lives of men cheap or calculating, there will remain a divine necessity for those hours of fierce enthusiasm which, like a forest fire or religious revival, sweep irresistibly over a nation. Whitman shared the rhythmic answer of the blood, and of the soul which is involved therewith, to the imperious throbbing of the drums. He knew that it represented in some, perhaps barbaric, way the throbbing of the nation’s heart, and that the cry “To Arms!” called forth much that was best in men.
The call to arms is one thing; the actual fighting, which converts men, to use his own phrase, into “devils and butchers,” is another. The call to arms awakes something in a man more heroic than the life he ordinarily lives; he seems to hear in it the voice of the Nation calling him by name, and when he answers he feels the joy of the Nation in his heart. He becomes consciously one with a great host in the hour of peril. He hears the voice of a Cause in the bugles and the drums. He shares in a new emotion, which is his glory because it is not his alone. He finds a fuller liberty than he has ever known in the discipline of the ranks; he accepts the petty tyrannies to which he is subjected, feeling that behind the officers is the will of the Nation to which he has yielded his own.
This, for better and worse, we may call the mysticism of war, and it appealed forcibly to Whitman. For him, war was illuminated by the idea of solidarity; an idea which was constantly present to him from this time forward. He no longer saw the great personalities only, nor only their divine comradeship in the life of God; all that remained as vivid as of old; but now he was being constantly reminded of the way in which individuals share consciously in the life of the nation; and this suggested to him how, presently, they will come to be conscious of their part in the life of the Race.
He recognised how essential was the sense of citizenship to fuller soul-life. The barriers in which our individual lives are isolated must be broken, if liberty is to be brought to the soul. If we are to live fully, we must feel the tides of being sweep through our emotional natures. Hence his welcome to war, which, in spite of all the fiendish spirits which follow in its wake, does thrill a chord of national consciousness in the individual heart.
We may well ask whether there is no errand worthier of this sense of solidarity than that of slaughter. Surely the affirmation of such an errand underlies the whole thought of Drum-taps, with its call to a “divine war”.
The hour has come when the Social Passion is about to rouse the peoples to a nobler crusade against oppression than any yet; when the nations shall be purged by revolutions wholesomer than those of 1789 or 1861. Whitman’s whole life, throbbing in every page he wrote, proclaims it.
He regarded the Civil War as a sort of fever in the body politic, caused by anterior conditions of congestion. War had become necessary for the life of that body, and only after a war could health re-assert itself. To compromise continually, as we boast in England that we do, may sustain a sort of social peace, but it is almost certain to drive the disease deeper into the very heart of our national life, and there to sap the sheer ability for any kind of noble enthusiasm. You may purchase a sort of peace with the price of a life more sacred than even that of individual citizens. Whitman demanded national health, without which he could see no real peace.
He did not suppose, indeed, that war could of itself effect a cure. Health could only return in so far as the aroused conscience of the nation—which had lived in its soldiers and in the wives and families who had shared in their devotion—was carried forward into the civil life. Peace itself must be rendered sentient of that heroic national purpose which had for a moment flashed across the fields of battle. Peace, indeed, is only priceless when it has become more truly and wisely heroical than war; when it has become affirmative where war is cruelly negative; when it creates where war destroys, quickening the heart of each citizen to fulfil a sacred duty.
Whitman well knew that in order to have such a peace we must set before the peoples a mission, a sublime national task. What party is there to-day, either in England or America, which dares to hold up for achievement any programme of heroism?
Read in this light, and only so, I believe, will Drum-taps yield up its essential meaning. It is a Song of the Broad-axe, not a scream of the war-eagle.
In alluding to Drum-taps, I have somewhat anticipated the natural course of the story, to which we must now return. Even at home on furlough, Whitman could not wholly relinquish the occupation which he had assumed, and became a frequent visitor at the hospitals of Brooklyn and New York.
Early in December, 1864, he was back again at his post, suffering from the added anxiety for his brother’s welfare; for George was a prisoner in the hands of the Confederates, enduring the almost inconceivable horrors of a winter imprisonment at Dannville. At the beginning of February Walt made an application to General Grant, through a friend in the office of the New York Times, for the release of his brother, together with another officer of the 51st New York Volunteers; alleging, as an urgent reason, the deep distress of his aged mother whose health was breaking. The application appears to have been successful, and George, who had been captured early in the preceding summer, and upon whom fever, starvation, exposure and cold had wreaked their worst for many months, returned alive to Brooklyn, his excellent constitution triumphant over all hardships.
In the same month Whitman obtained a clerkship in the Indian Bureau of the Department of the Interior, and thoroughly enjoyed the contact into which he was thus brought with the aboriginal Americans. They on their side appear to have distinguished him as a real man among the host of colourless officials, and to have responded to his advances.
This was the early spring of Lincoln’s death; and Walt was at the President’s last levee. He looked in also at the Inauguration Ball held in the Patent Office—strangely converted from its recent uses as a hospital. There he remarked the worn and weary expression of the beloved brown face; for still the great tragedy dragged on.
Five or six weeks later, a young Irish-Virginian, one of Walt’s Washington friends, was up in the second gallery of the crowded theatre upon the tragic night of the assassination, and saw the whole action passing before his bewildered eyes. Whitman was at home again in Brooklyn: seeing George, we may presume, and making final arrangements for his Drum-taps; on his return he seems to have heard the whole graphic story from his friend.
It is doubtful whether Whitman and the dead President had ever spoken to one another, beyond the ordinary greeting of street acquaintances. They had met perhaps a score of times, and it is recorded that once, when Walt passed the President’s window, Lincoln had remarked significantly—“Well, he looks like a man”. It seems possible that at first Whitman may have felt something of the public uncertainty about the character of the new President.
How deep-rooted in the average American mind was the distrust or dislike of his policy is seen in the fact that, only six months before the death that was mourned by the whole nation, the opposition to his re-election was represented by a formidable popular vote. The South was in revolt, and therefore of course disfranchised; but even so, McClellan polled as large a total as had the President at the previous election; though Lincoln himself increased his former vote by a little more than one-fifth. So strong ran popular feeling against the whole policy of interference with the seceding States even in the fourth year of the war.
But Lincoln’s death revealed his true worth to America. And the sense of the almost sacramental nature of that death, as sealing for ever the million others of the war, and finally consecrating the re-established union of North and South, grew upon Whitman, who long before had realised that Lincoln was the father of his country and the captain of her course.
A sense of some impending tragedy seems to have accompanied Whitman upon his walks at the time of the assassination. It was early spring and the lilac was in blossom; a strange association, deeper than mere fancy, seemed to the poet to establish itself between the scent of the lilac, the solitary night-song of the hermit-thrush, the fulness of the evening star at this time, and the passing of “the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands”. It was out of this deeply realised association that he built up the mystical symphony which he afterwards called “President Lincoln’s Burial Hymn,” a poem in many respects similar to his other great chant of death, “Out of the Cradle”.
Mystical and symbolic, it is charged with a vast national emotion; and this gives a certain vagueness to its solemnity, better befitting its theme than a more concrete treatment. The poet was not writing of “him I love,” but rather attempting to express the feeling of lonely loss which thousands experienced on that dark April day. Hence his poem is the hymn of a nation’s bereavement rather than the elegy of a great man dead. Whitman, in his attitude toward Lincoln, had come to regard him as an incarnation of America. He thought of him as he thought of the Flag; and his personal reverence for the man took almost the form of devotion to an ideal.
The President’s death had been already noted in Drum-taps, but when he conceived the longer poem, Whitman seems to have recalled the edition, in order to add this and certain other verses as a sequel, thus delaying its publication till about the end of the year.
Another of the new poems calls for a word in passing. “Chanting the Square Deific” is an attempt to express his theory of ultimate reality, that is to say, of the soul. Four elements go to the making of this, and these he calls respectively, Jehovah, Christ, Satan and Santa Spirita—adopting, as he sometimes would, a formula of his own inventing, that was of no known language. In other words, he conceived of the soul’s reality, as characterised by four essential qualities; first, its obedience to the remorseless general laws of being; second, its capacity for attraction to and absorption into others—its love-quality; third, its lawless defiance of everything but its own will; fourth, its sense of identity with the whole.
Condemnation, compassion, defiance, harmony, these he says are final and essential qualities of the Divine; only as they are united can our idea of God or of the Soul, which is the Son of God, be complete. In the traditional Satan of revolt and pride, he saw an element without which the harmony was immaterial and unreal. Evil and perilous in itself, in its relation to the rest it is the solid ballast of the soaring soul. In this, he suggests much of the attitude which Nietzsche was afterwards to make his own.
During the composition of some of these poems a crisis occurred in his new official career. The war was over, but the hospitals still were full, and Walt was busy there as usual in his leisure hours; and at his desk in the Indian Bureau, whenever his duties were not pressing, he was at work upon his manuscripts, when some hostile fellow-clerk seems to have called the attention of the newly appointed chief of the department to the character of these private documents.
Whitman had been a favourite with the chief clerk in the bureau, and had been given a good deal of latitude; perhaps the hostile person had observed this with a jealous eye. The manuscript proved to be not the innocuous Drum-taps, but an annotated copy of Leaves of Grass preparing for a new edition. A reading of the volume decided the chief upon a prompt dismissal of its author, and this is not surprising when we remember that Mr. Harlan had been appointed through the pressure of the powerful Methodist interest which he commanded. The Methodist eye in him must have regarded many of these pages with suspicion and not a few with disgust.
The dismissal itself was perfectly colourless; it ran:—
“Department of the Interior,
“Washington, D.C., June 30th, 1865.
“The services of Walter Whitman, of New York, as a clerk in the Indian Office, will be dispensed with from and after this date.
“Jas. Harlan,
“Secretary of the Interior.”
It is obvious that the chief had no right to open his clerk’s desk and examine what he knew to be private papers; but having done so, and being presumably of an unimaginative, narrowly pious and over-conscientious character, we cannot wonder at his action. From Whitman’s point of view the matter was serious; he could ill-afford a peremptory dismissal from the public service. And to his friends the dismissal appeared not so much unjust as enormous.
O’Connor, hearing the news, went straight to Hubley Ashton, in the fiery heat of that generous and righteous wrath which scintillates and flashes with perfervid splendour through the pages of his Good Grey Poet. Mr. Ashton was not so fierce, but he was indignant. He was a member of the Administration, and used his power to Whitman’s advantage. Finding all remonstrance with Mr. Harlan to be vain, he yet induced him to make some sort of exchange by which Whitman was not actually dismissed from the service, but only transferred to his own department—the Attorney-General’s.
Painful at the time, the affair did Whitman little injury. When Harlan’s action became known it was far from popular in Washington, where every one knew Walt, and where next to nobody had read his Leaves. A section at least of the local press supported the claims of a fellow-pressman; while in the Civil Service he was a favourite with the clerks. In literary circles, also, O’Connor’s slashing attack upon the Secretary for the Interior turned the tables in Walt’s favour.
In later years assaults of the same character were not infrequent, both upon Leaves of Grass and its author; but, however annoying, they always resulted in arousing curiosity, and thus in extending the circle of readers. Probably the fear of this consequence prevented their further multiplication, for average American opinion was then undisguisedly hostile, as, of course, it still remains.
On the whole, Whitman seems to have been happy in his new office. He never tired of the view from his window in the second storey of the Treasury Building, overlooking miles of river reaches with white sails upon them, and the range of wooded Virginian hills. He liked his companions, and he relished the green tea which came in every afternoon from a girl in an adjacent office; not, indeed, intended for him, but resigned to him by its recipient, who was scornful of the cup.
He went on great walks, especially by night, and enjoyed his jaunts on the cars. One Thanksgiving Day we find him picnicing by the falls of the Potomac, and on another occasion he is visiting Washington’s old mansion at Mount Vernon. Every Sunday till the close of 1866 he was in the hospitals, and frequently called at one or other during the week. He was a regular visitor at the homes of several friends, and his acquaintance with Mr. Peter Doyle, which seems to have begun during the last winter of the war, had ripened into a close comradeship.
Mr. and Mrs. Burroughs had always to keep Sunday breakfast waiting for him; there was a regularity in his lateness. After a chat with them, and a glance through the Sunday papers, he would stroll over to the office for his letters on his way to some hospital, and during the course of the afternoon he dropped in at the O’Connors’ for tea. In the winter he spent much of his leisure by the fire in the comfortable Library of the Treasury Building reading novels, philosophy and what he would.
He boarded at a pleasant house on M Street, near Twelfth. It stood back from the road, with a long sweep of sward in front of it, and an arbour under a great cherry tree, which became in spring a hill of snowy blossom. As the evenings grew warmer, Whitman and his fellow-boarders would draw their chairs out on to the grass and sit under the trees talking or silently watching the passers-by, or listening to occasional strolling players.
To his companions and to casual visitors he seemed as strong as ever. He ate well, avoiding excess, and, still adhering to his resolution, partaking but sparingly of meat. He went to bed and rose early. Always affable and courteous, he contrived to take his part in the general conversation without saying much.
Such a life was easy, and passably comfortable; he was earning a fair salary, and making new friends constantly. But he was without a home; and Washington, after all, as the seat of officialism, shows the seamy side of democracy. The cynic declares that its population consists exclusively of negroes, mean whites and officials; thus presenting a melancholy contrast to the metropolis of the fifties with its large class of vigorous-minded, independent artisans, the backbone of a city democracy as the yeoman-farmers are of a nation.
The routine also of the work he was doing must often have been irksome to him. It is one of the enigmas of Whitman’s life that he should have been content to continue in Washington six years at least after the hospitals had ceased to claim him; sitting before a Government desk as third clerk and earning his regular pay of rather more than three hundred pounds a year. How great the change from his old Bohemian days! The question obtrudes, was Walt becoming “respectable”?
Whether he were or no, at least he had become noticeably better clad and less aggressive, a gentler seeming man than of old. And yet there was always something illusive about this apparent change. He could still turn the face of a rock to impertinent intruders; he could still blaze out in sudden anger upon a rare occasion.
But he was near fifty now, and for several years the strong sympathies of his nature had been fully and continually exercised in the wards. His individuality was as marked as ever; but with the war he had experienced a deeper sense of his membership in the life of the Race. The word “en-masse,” now so often on his lips, expresses this constant consciousness. It was not new to him, but its dominance was new.
Again, while he had seen before that, in general, every soul is divine, it was the days and nights which he spent in the wards which made him understand how divine it actually is. The meaning of love grows richer in its exercise, and this was doubtless true in the case of Walt Whitman.
The experience of recent years had cleansed his self-assertion of qualities which were merely fortuitous. Never intentionally eccentric, he had previously perhaps exaggerated the traits which were peculiar to a stage in the development of his own personality. But the crucible heat of the wards rid him of that, while integrating his nature more perfectly. Living more intensely than ever, he was living more than ever in the lives of others; and this inevitably made him more catholic.
Other circumstances aided in the same direction. His manner of daily life had altered. He lived no longer among his own folk at home, but instead among professional men and clerks, at a middle-class Washington boarding-house. He worked now with a pen, not a hammer; and his book, written for the young American artisan, was being read and appreciated, not at all by him, but instead by students in Old and New England. He lost nothing of himself by becoming one of this other class in which for the time he lived with his book. A smaller man might have been seriously affected by such a change in environment; but while it could not be without effect upon Whitman, it never made him less true to his essential self.
In considering this period, I think we may say that the Whitman of the later sixties was still the large masculine man who wrote the first Leaves of Grass; but having in 1860 completed the first plan of the book, his task of self-assertion now became as it were a secondary matter. The suffering and sympathy of the war had developed the saviour in him; so that some of his portraits, taken at the time, have almost the air of a “gentle shepherd”. His message became increasingly one of helpful love, newly adjusted to the individuals among whom he was thrown.
And with the rise of a group of able young champions and admirers, it became more necessary that he should guard his message and himself from anything that could encourage that habit of personal imitation which would have created a group of little Whitmanites, whose very ability must have limited the original inspiration which had bound them to him.
Thus it was in a sense true that, after the publication of the volume of 1860, the first Whitman was, as he prophesied he would be, “disembodied, triumphant, dead”.
So much on the matter of Whitman’s increased respectability: as to his prolonged stay in Washington, something further must be said.
It is evident that he was no longer the Titan of old days. In the spring of 1867 he writes home that he is well, but “getting old”; and every year he seemed to feel the extremes of the Washington climate more and more. This is further evidence of decreasing vitality.
Had he returned to New York, it must probably have been to write for the press; and however physically robust he might suppose himself to be, something at least of the old force of initiative had left him. There was no longer any immediate need for his presence at home; for when Jeff went West to St. Louis, as engineer to the city waterworks, his brother George was there to take his place as the mother’s main support.
Walt was, moreover, earning a sufficient income in an easy fashion. The work itself was light; he was trusted, and little supervised. His chief seems to have recognised that he had spent himself unsparingly for America in the hospitals, without immediate reward; and now, in consequence, allowed him to arrange his duties as suited him best. He spent but little of his income upon himself; though the penurious simplicity and discomfort of the early days was no longer desirable. He always sent something to his mother, and seems to have divided the remainder between any of his hospital boys who still lingered; the beggars whom he never refused; his friends, and the Savings Bank.
But one suspects that Whitman really stayed on in Washington for the same reason that he had previously remained in New York. He took root wherever he stood; and it required the tug of duty to remove him. Wherever he was, his life was full of incident and material for thought. Outward occupation or adventure counted for comparatively little in his experience. His present circumstances favoured the steady progress of his own writing and the prosecution of his friendships.
Not that he ever forgot his friends in the metropolis, or grew indifferent to the claims of his family. He contrived to spend at least a month every summer in his old haunts, living at home and making daily expeditions on the bay, bathing from the Coney Island beach, and sauntering along Broadway. He often had business at the printers’, for he was now again his own publisher.
The Leaves had been out of print since the failure of his Boston friends, and in 1867 he was working on a new edition, completing the very copy which had roused the wrath of Mr. Harlan. He seems to have spent a few days with his friend Mrs. Price; and coming down late to tea one evening, after working on his manuscripts, one of the daughters has recorded the extraordinary brightness and elation of his mien. “An almost irrepressible joyousness,” she says, “shone from his face and seemed to pervade his whole body. It was the more noticeable as his ordinary mood was one of quiet yet cheerful serenity. I knew he had been working at a new edition of his book, and I hoped if he had an opportunity he would say something to let us into the secret of his mysterious joy. Unfortunately, most of those at the table were occupied with some subject of conversation; at every pause I waited eagerly for him to speak; but no, some one else would begin again, until I grew almost wild with impatience and vexation. He appeared to listen, and would even laugh at some of the remarks that were made, yet he did not utter a single word during the meal; and his face still wore that singular brightness and delight, as though he had partaken of some divine elixir.”
But it was not always in joy that he wrote. Other friends have told how they have noted him turning aside from the street into some door or alleyway to take out a slip of paper and write, with the tears running fast across his face. Whether in tears or in ecstasy, it is certain that he composed his poems under the stress of actual feeling; and of emotions which shook his whole being and thrilled its heavy, slow-vibrating chords to music.
In October, 1867, the new volume appeared; it was intended to replace the former final edition of 1860, and in itself was now regarded as final. Whitman wrote home to his mother that at last he had finished his re-arrangings and corrections, for good. But he was mistaken; for because the book was a whole, every page which he added to it in succeeding years entailed a new revision of the rest. Each new note affects the old sequence, which thus requires to be ordered anew.
The book might be handsomer, he says; but he notes that he has omitted some excessive phrases, and even dropped a passage or two which had not stood the test of time; and now he feels that the volume proves itself to any fair-minded person. Beyond these alterations, the book contains little that is new.
That public interest in Whitman was increasing is shown by the appearance this year of the first of those brief biographical studies which have since become so numerous. It was from the pen of his intimate friend, Mr. John Burroughs, than whom none knew him better during the Washington days; and having besides the full advantage of Whitman’s supervision, remains a principal authority to this day.
Equally important was the preparation in England this autumn of a volume of selections by Mr. W. M. Rossetti. The editor of the Germ, that most interesting expression of a new and pregnant spirit in art whose brief but brilliant course had ended a few years before the first appearance of the Leaves, was the right man to introduce Walt Whitman to the English reader. Both he and his brother, the poet, had for several years been admirers of Whitman’s work; and before the publication of the new edition he had written an able notice of the book in The Chronicle, a short-lived organ of advanced Catholic views.
This was widely copied by the American press. It preserves a judicial tone, which while fully appreciating the literary value of the new work, is far from indiscriminate praise. Mr. Rossetti frankly protested against what he regarded as the gross treatment of gross things, not so much on ethical as on ?sthetic grounds; against jarring words and faulty constructions. He noted the obscurity and fragmentary character of many passages, commented on the agglomerative or cataloguial habit, and upon the author’s justifiable, but at first sight exasperating, self-assertion.
Much of this was, at least from its writer’s literary point of view, just and valuable criticism. Mr. Rossetti was less fortunate when he asserted that if only he were brought down by sickness many things would appear very different to Whitman; for while the remark contains an incontestable element of axiomatic truth, its particular application was based upon a misapprehension of the poet’s character. He conceived that Whitman’s faith depended upon physical well-being—just as Walt once declared that Goethe’s religion was founded simply upon good digestion and appetite—thus missing the spiritual basis of his personality.
But if Rossetti’s literary criticisms are searching and upon the whole just, his praises are not less notable. Leaves of Grass he describes as by far the largest poetical performance of our period; and while acclaiming him the founder of American poetry, he foresees that its author’s voice will one day be potential and magisterial wherever the English language is spoken.
The criticism was followed by the compilation of a volume of selections containing nearly one half of the current Leaves of Grass, and a large part of the original Preface of 1855. The enterprise brought the compiler into cordial personal relations with the poet. There had at first been a slight misunderstanding as to the scope of the English version, and an expurgated but otherwise complete edition had been suggested. Whitman could not be a party to such a volume, and would naturally have preferred his own complete book to any selections. But in Mr. Rossetti he recognised an understanding friend. While frankly expressing his own views, he was most cordial and generous in the declaration of his faith in his correspondent’s wisdom, and of his desire to leave him unshackled.
The selections contained none of the poems which had aroused the indignation of Mr. Harlan and his friends, and would probably have more than satisfied the very different criticisms of Emerson. Their publication established the foundation of Whitman’s English fame, which now rapidly outstripped his American. Already known to the few—to such men for instance as Tennyson, Dante G. Rossetti, Swinburne, W. Bell Scott, J. A. Symonds and Thomas Dixon—Leaves of Grass was from this time eagerly sought after by a considerable number of the younger and more vigorous thinkers.
Although they never met, Whitman’s friendship with Symonds is so important that I cannot pass it by without some reference to the younger man’s character. He had been, as is well known, an exceptionally brilliant Oxford scholar; who had shown so little trace of the disqualifying elements of genius that his painfully accurate poetic form carried off the Newdigate prize. After his studies at Balliol, he entered early manhood with impaired sight, an irritable brain and incipient consumption. His temper was naturally strenuous, but this quality was accompanied by introspective morbidity.
In the autumn of 1865, at the age of five and twenty, the late Mr. Frederick Myers introduced him to Leaves of Grass; his reading of one of the Calamus poems—“Long I thought that knowledge alone would suffice me”—from the edition of 1860, sending, as Symonds says, electric thrills through the very marrow of his bones. Whitman of course rode rough-shod over all the scholar’s academic and aristocratic prejudices, and required slow assimilation. This process continued during the next four years; but he says that the book became eventually a more powerful formative influence in his life than Plato’s works, or indeed any other volume, save the Bible.
Married already, and already largely an invalid, life was full of difficulties for so keen and eager a mind; and the Leaves became his anchor, especially the poems of Calamus. It was in 1869 and 1870 that he realised their full value.
Already his mind had responded to the idea of the cosmos and of cosmic enthusiasm, suggested to it in the Hymn of Cleanthes, in certain pages of Marcus Aurelius, Giordano Bruno, Goethe, and the Evolutionists of his own time. To these ideas Whitman brought conviction and reality. It was through his study of the Leaves that Symonds came to understand for himself the infinite value and possibility of human comradeship, and became a glad participant in the Universal Life.
For twenty years the two men corresponded as close friends; and there were few in whose admiration for his work Whitman found such keen satisfaction. But Addington Symonds was always a conscientious as well as an affectionate and reverent friend; and while at a later date he publicly protested against Mr. Swinburne’s assault, and in his posthumous study of Whitman, proved himself second to none in his admiration of him whom he called Master, yet he himself made some of the frankest and most trenchant criticisms of his friend’s work. He thus preserved his independence, and, unlike that of the mere disciple, his praise of Whitman is rendered really valuable by this quality.
Picture of Anne Gilchrist.
ANNE GILCHRIST
In the summer of 1869, Mr. Madox Brown lent a copy of the Selections to his friend Mrs. Alexander Gilchrist, the widow of Blake’s biographer. She responded to the book’s appeal, and immediately borrowed Mr. Rossetti’s copy of the complete volume. While wholly approving the omission from his Selections of such poems as the “Children of Adam,” and herself making some partial reservation with regard to these as perhaps infringing in certain passages the natural law of concealment and modesty, she expressed to Mr. Rossetti, in fervid and impassioned phrases, the joy that came to her in this new gospel, worthy at last as she thought of America. Her friend obtained her permission to allow her letters to him to be published; and they appeared in the Boston Radical for May, 1870.
Her words of womanly understanding stirred Whitman too deeply for much outward expression. He hardly regarded them as a declaration of individual friendship, showing himself at the time even a little indifferent to the personality of their writer. They were, he knew, a testimony not so much to him as to his Leaves of Grass, which were a half-impersonal utterance, and as such he received them with gratitude. Nothing, not even O’Connor’s brilliant vindication, had so justified the poems to their maker.
Whitman has been roundly abused by Mr. Swinburne and others, because, as they say, he lacks the romantic attitude toward woman. Mr. Meredith has shown in his own inimitable way the fiends that mask themselves too often under this romantic mien; and one is not always sure whether Whitman’s honesty is not in itself a little distasteful to some of his critics.
It is true that he has addressed woman as the mother or the equal mate of man, rather than as the maid unwed, as though his thought of sex transcended the limits usually assigned to it. I am persuaded that the explanation of this is to be found in the fact that Whitman’s mystic consciousness had broken many of the barriers which have constricted the passion of sex too narrowly during past centuries. He heard all the deeps of life calling to one another and responding with passionate avowals of life’s unity. The soul of the lover—as all the poets have been telling us since Dante’s day—discovers its true self in the beloved person: but the soul of Whitman discovered itself as surely and as passionately in the Beloved World. The expression is so novel that it sounds well-nigh absurd to ears that do not “hear”. But for those who can hear, Whitman’s voice is all surcharged with the lover’s passion; not less intense but larger in its sanity than the voices of other poets.
Again we may justly urge that, in general, it was Woman as Madonna, rather than as Venus, whom he contemplated. Or shall we say he saw the Madonna in Venus, as Botticelli did? His love, when he wrote, was that of a man of middle life, in whom the yearning tenderness of fatherhood mingled with the other currents of passion. His vision beheld the Divine Child, without whom love itself is incomplete. For fatherhood and motherhood are seen by the insight of the poet to be implicit in the passion of sex, and it was impossible for Whitman, the seer, to think of one apart from the other.
As a wife and a mother, Anne Gilchrist recognised the beauty and purity of Whitman’s conception of love; and his book was to her like the presence of a great and wise comrade. She was the first woman who had publicly recognised his purpose in these poems, and it was an act of no small heroism. Whitman might well be moved by it.
Picture of Walt at about fifty.
WHITMAN AT ABOUT FIFTY
The Selections had appeared in 1868, a year which also saw the publication of O’Connor’s tale, The Carpenter, in whose pages commences that legendary element in Whitman’s story, which follows the advent of the more striking personalities. Here Whitman is confused with Christ, somewhat as was Francis by his followers, more than six centuries before.
That such a thing should have been possible in the Whitman circle requires a few words of explanation. I have already described the poem in which he himself claims comradeship with “the Crucified”. The further assertion of such a claim inevitably fell to O’Connor, whose work was always marked by an element of vehemence and even of excess. Brilliant, generous, eloquent, he was oftener a fervid partisan than a safe critic.
Having already coupled Whitman’s name with the greatest in literature—an act of audacity, even if we accept the conjunction—it was but natural that, finding the man himself nobler even than his works, he should compare him with the greatest masters of human life. He was not satisfied even with the praises he had piled upon his hero in his indignant rejoinder to the Hon. James Harlan.
O’Connor’s tale is of no great value; but it reminds us that there was in Walt something which bewildered those who knew him best: something Jove-like says one; something that, judged by ordinary standards, was superhuman, alike in its calm breadth of view and its capacity for love. They observed that what others might do under the constraint of exceptional influences, of intellectual conviction, moral ideal or religious enthusiasm, he did naturally. He did not rise to an occasion, but always embraced opportunity as though from a higher level. He was not shocked or alienated by things which shocked other men; and personal slights and injuries hardly touched him, dropping from him at once. He was the best of comrades, and yet he was a man of deep reserve. And he was so many-sided that his friends were hardly aware that he concealed something of himself from them. Always when you met him again you found him bigger than you had remembered him; and the better you knew him, the less certain you would be of accurately forecasting his actions or understanding his thoughts.
If, however, we call him superhuman, it must be by an unusual manner of speech; for he was, as we know, the most human of men, seeming to be personally familiar and at home with every fragment of humanity. He comprehended the springs of action in individuals, as the soul comprehends the purpose of each limb and article of the body. He had the understanding which comes through a subtle sympathy with the whole of things.
Explain or ignore it as we will, there is in every man that which is Divine; but usually this side of his nature is, as it were, turned away from view. Our personality has deeps which even our own consciousness has not plumbed, though at times it catches a glimpse of them. And we know that there are men whose consciousness is as much deeper than ours as ours is deeper than that of a babe. Whitman was one of these; and the fact that he was such a one must always render the writing of his biography a tentative task. It seems as though O’Connor, feeling this, had thrown his own attempt at portraiture into the form of a sort of parable. For his friends, while they saw possibilities in him which they also recognised in themselves, saw also others which bewildered them by their suggestions of the old hero-stories; and it cannot therefore be wondered, if sometimes they found in his life a similitude to that of the Nazarene.
The world is ever telling over the old legends, and wondering in spite of itself if, after all, they might be true. In our nobler moments we find ourselves rebelling against the traditional limitations of our manhood; something within our own hearts assures us that humanity is destined to attain a nobler stature. Every new revelation of the possibilities of life, every new incarnation of humanity in some great soul, brings to our lips the name of Jesus. For in it the aspirations of the world’s childhood have been made our own.
We can never believe that the story of the Christ closed with the earthly career of Jesus. We know that He will come again; that humanity will renew its promise; that the old stock will break once more into prophetic blossom. And waiting and watching, at the advent of every great one, our hearts cry out the ineffable name of our hope, at whose very hearing the soul of faith is refreshed. Every great soul assures us that the old, old stories are more than true; they are prophetic for our very selves; speaking to us of a Divine destiny and purpose to which we, too, may—nay, must—eventually arise. To Whitman’s closest friends such was his gospel.
But it was not every one who could read him so significantly. Merely intellectual people, trying him by their own standards, often found him stupid. A young doctor, for instance, who had known him in New York, and was now a fellow-boarder with him upon M Street, records his own impression formed at this time, that Walt was physically lazy and intellectually hazy; that his conversation was disappointingly enigmatic and obscure, and his words were misty, shadowy, elusive adumbrations. His vocabulary, says this gentleman, even when he was deeply affected by natural scenes, was almost grotesquely inadequate; they were “tip-top,” he would declare; and you could only gather from his manner and the tone of his voice that he meant more than a shabby commonplace.
The doctor, who was doubtless an encyclop?dia of accurate knowledge, found his companion sadly ignorant of the common names of the trees and birds they noticed on their rambles. A few years later, however, Whitman displayed so considerable a knowledge in these directions that one may at least suppose he profited considerably from his companion’s information. And even if he did not know their names, he came near to knowing their actual personality; which is probably more than even the worthy doctor attempted.
It is very certain that Whitman was no dreamer of vague dreams. His face at this time was equally expressive of alertness and of calm. His small eyes, grey-blue under their heavy-drooping passionate lids, were of an extraordinarily penetrating vision. They were the eyes of a spirit which looked out through them ceaselessly as from behind a shelter. Circled by a definite line, they had the perceptive draining quality of a child’s when it is first awake to all the world’s storehouse of strange things. Never a merely passive onlooker, he was always a dynamic force, challenging and evoking the manhood of his friends.
This is notably the case in his relations with Peter Doyle, of whom I have already spoken as one of Walt’s closest companions during the greater part of the Washington period. Doyle was a young Catholic, born in Ireland but raised in the Virginian Alexandria. His father, a blacksmith and machinist, eventually went to work in a Richmond foundry; and when the war broke out, Pete, who was a mere lad, entered the Confederate army. Soon after, he was wounded and made a prisoner, and being carried to Washington, he obtained during his convalescence the post of conductor on one of the tram-cars running upon Pennsylvania Avenue. It was a course of some four miles, from Georgetown, by the White House and Treasury and near to Armory Square, up the hill by the Capitol and down again to near the Navy Yard on the Anacostia River. And in such a course he was bound sooner or later to make the acquaintance of Whitman.
Drawing of Doyle at twenty-two and Walt at fifty.
DOYLE AT TWENTY-TWO AND WHITMAN AT FIFTY
Their meeting occurred one wild stormy night, perhaps in the winter of 1864-65, when Pete was about eighteen. Walt had been out to see John Burroughs, and was returning wrapt around in his great blanket-rug, the only passenger in the car. Pete was cold and lonely: something about the big red-faced man within promised fellowship and warmth. So he entered the car and put his hand impulsively on Walt’s knee. Walt was pleased; they seemed to understand one another at once; and instead of descending at his destination, the older man rode an extra four miles that night for friendship’s sake.
Pete was a fair well-built lad, with a warm Irish heart; and in Walt, who was old enough to have been his father, the fraternal and paternal qualities alike were very strong. Separated from his own children, and his own younger brothers whom he had dearly loved, his heart’s tenderness expended itself upon other lads, and upon none more than upon Pete. There are few ties stronger than those which bind together the man or woman of middle life whose sympathies are still natural and warm, and the adolescent lad or maiden upon life’s threshold.
Whitman did not appear merely as a good fellow to his young comrade: his affection ran too deep for that. This is well illustrated by an incident in their relationship. In a passing fit of despondency Pete declared that life was no longer worth living, and that he had more than half a mind to end it. Walt answered him sharply; he was very angry and not a little shocked. This occurred upon the evening of his departure for Brooklyn for one of his visits home, and the two separated somewhat coldly.
Walt arrived really ill, suffering from a sort of partial and temporary paralysis, which seems to have attacked him at times during the latter part of his residence in Washington. As soon as he was sufficiently recovered, he wrote his friend a letter full of loving reproaches, of affectionate calls to duty, and promises of assistance. The unmanly folly of Pete’s words had, he says, repelled him; but afterwards the sense of his indestructible love for the lad had returned again in fuller measure than ever, and he became certain that it was not the real Pete, “my darling boy, my young and loving brother,” who had spoken those wicked words. He adjures him, by his love for his widowed mother and for Walt his comrade, to be a man.
Many of the letters to Pete, during the vacations in Brooklyn from 1868 to 1872, are marked by a sort of paternal anxiety for the young man’s welfare. Pete was impulsive and emotional; he was not one to whom study or thrift was naturally easy. Walt aided him all he could in both directions. He was always encouraging his “boys” to read good books, combining still, as in earlier years, the r?les of teacher and comrade; but he never checked in any degree his friend’s boyish, generous and pleasure-loving nature. And his love was returned with the whole-hearted loyal devotion of the true Celt.
Picture of Peter Doyle at fifty-seven.
PETER G. DOYLE AT FIFTY-SEVEN
This friendship with Doyle was only one among many, and the fact that Pete was a Catholic and had been a Confederate soldier, shows how far such relations transcended any mere similarity of opinion. Indeed, there is nothing more notable in the circle of Whitman’s friends than their extraordinary dissimilarity one from another.
Day after day, Pete would come to the Treasury building after his work was done, and wait sleepily there till Walt was free; when they would start off upon a stroll, which often extended itself for many miles into the country. Walt frequently had other companions upon these rambles. Sometimes it would be John Burroughs, and sometimes quite a party of men, laughing, singing and talking gaily together as they went.
Whitman was the heart of good-fellowship; he was the oldest of them in years, but in years only. One wonders sometimes whether he himself realised that all these men were so much his juniors. There was no comrade, either man or woman, who had grown up beside him, learning with him the lessons of life. His mother was the great link with his own boyhood, and the letters which he wrote to her from Washington show how strong was his attachment to her, and how great his capacity for home-love.
It is, then, not a little tragic that he had no home to call his own. In a sense he was a solitary man; in the midst of his all-embracing love and his self-revealing poems, Walt Whitman lived his life apart and kept many secrets. In spirit he was as solitary as Thoreau, nay, even more than he, for, though his fellowship was with the life Universal, his consciousness of it seemed unique.
His self-reliant, masculine nature was attractive to women, with whom he had, as one of his friends phrased it, “a good way”. With them and with children he was natural and happy.
Vague and anonymous figures of women move from time to time across his story. In 1863 it is with “a lady” that he first remarks the President’s sadness. In 1868 he has great talks and jolly times with the girls he meets on a trip in New England, and he writes of his “particular women friends in New York”. In 1869 he declares laughingly, he is quite a lady’s man again as in the old days.
Women trusted him instinctively, and he repayed their trust by a remarkable silence as to his relations with them. He understood the hearts of women, for there was in him much of the maternal. This quality often finds quaint expression in his letters to Pete, who is “dear baby” sometimes, and who found more than one kiss sent him upon the paper.
As he became famous, Whitman had his queue of visitors. Now it is a spiritualistic woman, who breaks off her interview in order to converse with the spirit of Abraham Lincoln; and now a Mrs. McKnight, who would paint his portrait. Later, when he fell ill, “Mary Cole” came and ministered to him. Mrs. O’Connor, with Mrs. Burroughs and Mrs. Ashton, belonged to the circle of his friends. With women, as with men, he had his own frank way of expressing affection, and many a time he greeted them with a kiss, knowing it would not be misinterpreted.
From 1868 to 1870 he was engaged upon a brief political treatise, apparently suggested to him by Carlyle’s vehement assault upon Democracy and all its ways, in Shooting Niagara.
Life in Washington during and after the war had made the short-comings of Democracy very evident to Whitman. The failure of President Johnson and his attempted impeachment, had been followed by drastic measures for enforcing Republican ideas in the South by all the abominable methods known to corruption and carpet-bag politicians. The year 1868 saw the election of Grant to the Presidency, and under him corruption extended in every direction. Grant’s real work was finished at Appomattox, and his eight years of official life added nothing to his fame. But Whitman, sharing the national regard for a simple-minded, downright soldier, heartily approved his nomination, and urged his brothers to support him.
For the carpet-bag reconstruction of the South he had, of course, no sympathy. He longed for a union of hearts, and looked ardently forward to the day when the South, whom he loved so passionately, would realise again her inalienable part in the union. Without her America was incomplete. And in the “magnet South” was much that was personally dearest to Whitman’s heart.
The more extreme Abolitionist sentiment had combined with the exigency of party to create a position in the Southern States which was intolerable to all right feeling. The suffrage had been taken away from the rebellious whites and given instead to the negroes. It was as though the management of the household affairs should be entrusted to wholly irresponsible children. One need hardly add that it was not the negro who ruled, but the political agent who bought his vote and made a tool of him. Such a policy only exasperated the antagonism between North and South.
And Whitman, though he hated slavery, saw that the negro was not ready to exercise the full rights of citizenship. When the negro vote in the capital became dominant in political elections, and the black population paraded the city in their thousands, armed and insolent, they seemed to him “like so many wild brutes let loose”.
It was upon this question of negro-citizenship that he quarrelled with O’Connor. They had been arguing the subject, as O’Connor would insist on doing, and Walt, for the nonce, had the better of the bout. Thoughtlessly, and in the heat of the moment, he pressed his advantage too far; O’Connor lost his temper—perhaps Walt did the same—but when a moment later the older man returned to his usual good humour and held out his hand warmly to his friend, O’Connor’s wrath was still hot; he was offended and refused the reconciliation. In spite of their friends the sad estrangement continued for years.
The political treatise appeared at last under the title of Democratic Vistas. It is the outcome of Whitman’s experiences and meditations upon the purpose of social and national life, especially during the last decade in Washington. In many respects it is an enlargement of portions of the first Preface.
In these fragmentary political memoranda Whitman is seen as the antagonist of what is often supposed to be the American character. The book is a scathing attack upon American complacency, which is even more detestable to Whitman than it was to Carlyle. He recognises the vulgarity and corruption that everywhere abound; the superficial smartness and alert commercial cunning which have taken the place of virtues in the current code of transatlantic morals. Flippant, infidel, unwholesome, mean-mannered; so he characterises New York, his beloved city. As fiercely as Carlyle he detests all the shams and hypocrises of democratic government, and he is as keen to discover the perils of universal suffrage.
But withal he holds fast to faith, and offers a constructive ideal. The jottings are threaded together by the reiterated declaration that national life will never become illustrious without a national literature. It is precisely here, says he, that America is fatally deficient. Except upon the field of politics, what single thing of moral value has she originated? And what possible value has all her material development unless it be accompanied by a corresponding development of soul?
There is something like an inconsistency of attitude in this book; for here, on the one hand, we have Whitman assuming the r?le of the moralist, denouncing, menacing, upbraiding, and generally allowing himself to employ the moralist’s exaggerated, because partial, manner of speech. On the other hand, we find, interspersed among these passages of condemnation, others which assert his unwavering faith in the issue, his constant sense of the heroic character of the people.
Whitman never professed consistency, but his inconsistency is generally explicable enough. In this case he is of course denouncing the America of his day, only because he is regarding her from the popular point of view as something perfect and complete. He has faith in America when he views her as a promise of what she shall be; but even then only because he sees far into her essential character. The shallow, popular optimism is, he knows, wholly false; for if America is to triumph, as he believes she will, it can only be by the profound moral forces which are silently at work beneath the trivial shows of her prosperity.
The last enemy of the Republic was not slain when the slave party of secession, with its feudal spirit, was overcome. The victory of the North has for the present secured American unity, and with it the broad types both of Northern and of Southern character essential to the creation of a generous and profound national spirit. But America has set forth upon the most tremendous task ever conceived by man; a task indeed beyond the scope of any man’s thought. Urged on by the inner destiny-forces of the race, she is attempting to realise the race-ideal of a true democracy. To accomplish her errand she must be nerved and vitalised by the highest and deepest of ideals; for hers is a world-battle with all the relentless foes of progress.
Whitman, seeing clearly the dark aspect of the future, the wars and revolutions yet in store, and having counted the cost of them, though he had faith that America would eventually achieve her purpose, yet might well be foremost in scourging her light moods of optimism with bitter words. And though he had not despaired of America—and even if he had, would have been the last man to suggest despair to others—though, also, he knew and loved the real soul of the nation; he was not so blind to possibilities of disaster, possibilities which he had faced more than once in recent years, as to suppose that she was of necessity chosen to be the elder sister of the Republics of the coming centuries.
On the contrary, while he had no doubt of the growth and progress of humanity, he knew that a branch of the race might wither away prematurely; and he saw in the current culture and social beliefs of the city populations a wholly false and mischievous conception of American destiny. If the people of America were to perceive nothing but a field for money-making wherever the Stars and Stripes might float, then their patriotism would be worthless, and the Republic must fall.
He loved America too passionately to be cynically indifferent as to her fate. In spite of unworthy qualities, she yet might realise the world’s hope. But seeking ardently for a way, there was only one that Whitman could see; it was the way of religion. The old priestcraft was effete, but religion had not died with it. In a new fellowship of prophet-poets, who should awaken the Soul of the Nation in the hearts of their hearers, as did the prophet-poets of Israel, in these and in these alone he had assurance—for already he seemed to behold them afar off—assurance of the future of his land.
Whitman agreed with Carlyle as to the infinite value to the race of great men. He continually asserts their necessity to Democracy; not, indeed, as masters and captains so much as interpreters and as prophets. The truly great man includes more of the meaning of Democracy than the little man, and is therefore the better fitted to explain the purpose of the whole. Moreover, according to Whitman, it is for the creation of great personalities that Democracy exists; for he differs widely from the Platonic mysticism with its Ideal State as the goal of personal achievement.
He includes in his philosophy of society what is best both in the individualistic and the socialistic theories. He sees progress depending upon the interplay of two forces, which he calls the two sexes of Democracy—Solidarity and Personality. It is for great souls to declare in the name of Personality the fundamental truth of Democracy, that every man is destined to become a god. They must realise for themselves, and assert for the world, that a man well-born, well-bred and well-trained, may and must become a law unto himself.
According to Whitman, the one purpose of all government in a democracy is to encourage by all possible means the development of Soul-consciousness in every man and woman without any exception. For, speaking generally, one may affirm that every fragment of humanity is ultimately capable of the heroism which is the force at humanity’s heart; but each fragment can only realise its possibilities as a part of the whole, and as sharing in the life of Solidarity.
To accomplish this destiny, and not for reasons of merit, Democracy encourages and requires of every one a participation in the duties and privileges of citizenship. And similarly, it requires that every one should be an owner of property in order that each may have his own material cell in the body politic.
All persons are not yet prepared for citizenship; but such as are minors must be wisely and strenuously prepared, for Democracy suffers until all become true citizens.
The idle and the very poor are always a menace to Democracy.
Even a greater menace, if that be possible, is to be found in the low standard of womanhood which still prevails in America. Woman, if only she would leave her silliness and her millinery, and enter the life of reality and enterprise, would, by the majesty of maternity, be more than the equal of man. I think, though approving of women’s suffrage, he doubted whether it could effect the change he desired to see.
It cannot be doubted that, like Plato, he saw in the triviality of the women of the upper classes especially, one of the gravest dangers which beset the Republic. For the aim of Democracy is great free personalities, and these can only be produced from a noble maternity. Unless motherhood and fatherhood in all their aspects become a living science, and the practice of personal health is recognised as the finest of the arts, any achievement of the purpose of Democracy must be slow indeed.
Of other and very secondary kinds of culture, desirable enough in their place, America, he continues, has no lack. In some respects she is more European than Europe. But to personality, and the moral force which is personality, she is alarmingly indifferent. We have fussed about the world, cries this stern speaker of truth to his age and nation; we have gathered together its art and its sciences, but we have not grown great in our own souls. Our mean manners result precisely from that.
Thus he returns to reiterate the cry that can always be heard whenever we open any book of his, the cry of the quintessential importance of religion in every field of human life. For religion is the life of the soul; that is to say, it is the heart of life.
Whitman’s religion, however, is not that which is taught by churches and churchmen. It is a religion extricated from the churches. In a notable passage he declares: “Bibles may convey, and priests expound, but it is exclusively for the noiseless operation of one’s isolated self to enter the pure ether of veneration, reach the Divine levels, and commune with the unutterable”. In short, religion is moral or spiritual force: it is that which forms and maintains existence: without it, the continued life of nation or individual is inconceivable.
For a nation, too, has its soul-identity; and must become conscious of that if it is to live, much more if it is to lead. The awakening of America to this consciousness of its spiritual purpose Whitman awaits, as the prophets of Israel awaited the Messiah. And we may add that with its realisation of nationhood, there comes to a people the sense of its membership in the solidarity of the race.
Now this soul-consciousness, he proceeds, comes to a nation through its literature. In its songs and in its great epics, a people tells and reads the secrets of its life; it sees there, as in a glass, the Divine purpose which tabernacles in its own heart.
A literature which can do this for America will not be made by merely correct and clever college men, or by fanciful adepts in the arts of verse. Those who make it must breathe the open air of Nature; they must, in the largest sense, be men of science. But in Whitman’s language nature and science include more than the material and the seen. They are the world of reality and its knowledge; and the soul is the essence of reality: wherefore its experience is the sum of knowledge.
Thus made, literature will for the first time be worthy to quicken and immortalise the life of America. It will feed the infant life of the real nation. Reading it, Americans will become aware at last of their world-destiny; and they will face the whole of life and death with a new faith and joy. America will become not merely a new world, but the mother of new worlds: and lowering as the skies must often be, and tragic though the day’s end, she will behold the stars beyond.
Such, in crudest outline, is the gist of Whitman’s tractate; which, with the fifth edition of the Leaves, appeared early in 1871. Leaves of Grass now included Drum-taps; but the poems of President Lincoln’s death, with other matter suggested by the close of the war, were separately published in a little volume of 120 pages, which, while containing poems upon the lines suggested in Democratic Vistas, and reverting again to old themes, was more especially marked by those in which the idea of death as a voyage upon an unknown sea is dominant.
A page of Walt's handwritten manuscript, circa 1875.
FAC-SIMILE OF MS. BY WHITMAN, BELONGING PROBABLY TO 1875
The little book was called Passage to India, after the opening poem; and it has a completeness of its own, closing with a “Now Finalé to the Shore”. In its preface, he alludes to a plan which he had entertained—his active imagination entertained so many plans which he never realised!—the scheme of a new volume to companion and complement the Leaves, suggestive of death and the disembodied soul, as the Leaves were of the life in the body. He found, however, that the body was not so soon to be put aside; to the end, its hold upon him was extraordinarily tenacious. Doubting his ability for the task, he became content to offer a fragment and hint of what he had intended.
Passage to India is among his finest efforts. Some of its single lines ring like clear bells, while the movement of the whole is varied, solemn and majestic. He shows his reader how the enterprise and invention of the world is binding all lands together to complete the “rondure” of the earth. The opening of the Suez Canal and of the Pacific Railroad are fulfilling the dream of the Genoese, who sought a passage to India in the circumnavigation of the world.
But, says Whitman, with that characteristic mystical touch which is never absent in his poems, it is only the poet who conceives of the world as really one and round. For none but he understands that the universe is essentially one, Soul and Matter, Nature and Man. To the mystic sense, India becomes symbolic of all the first elemental intuitions of the human race. Thither now again the poet leads his nation, back to its first visions and back to God.
Returning almost to the phrases of his first great poem, Whitman declares his sureness of God, and his resolve not to dally with the Divine mystery. For him, God is the heart of all life, but especially the heart of all life that is true, good and loving: He is the reservoir of the spiritual, and He is the soul’s perfect and immortal comrade. Thus Whitman’s idea of God embraces the “personal” element, so-called, which has been predicated by Christian experience and dogma.
When the soul has accomplished its “Passage to India”—has realised the unity of all—then, says he, it will melt into the arms of its Elder Brother, the Divine Love. He does not mean that it will lose its slowly gained consciousness of selfhood; but that, to employ a formula of the Christian faith, it will enter the Godhead as a distinct Person. For the Godhead of Whitman’s theology is the ultimate unity of ultimate personalities—Many-in-one, the God of Love, the Heart of Communion or Fellowship.
It is with a splendid cry of adventurous delight and heroic ardour that Whitman sets out upon his perilous voyage, seeking the meaning of everything and of the whole, all hazards and dangers before him, upon all the seas of the Unknown: but not foolhardily—“Are they not all the seas of God?”
In passing, we may note that in these Washington poems the feeling for formal perfection is often clearly manifested. Many of the shorter lyrics repeat the opening line at their close. And careful reading, or better, recitation, will show that some at least of the longer poems are constructed with a broad, architectonic plan.
It is indeed a great mistake to suppose that Whitman was careless of form. Paradoxical though it sound, it was nothing but his overwhelming sense of the necessity for a living incarnation of his motive-emotions which led him to abandon the accepted media of written expression. He probably laboured as closely, deliberately and long upon his loose-rhythmed verses as a more precious stylist upon his. Whether successful or no, he was most conscientious and self-exacting in his obedience to the creative impulse, and in his selection of such cadences and words as seemed to his ear the best to render its precise import.
Probably the quiet life at Washington, and the intercourse there with studious and thoughtful men and women, helped his artistic sense. With a few exceptions, however, the Washington poems are somewhat less inevitable and procreative in their quality than those of an earlier period. They are not less interesting, but they are less elemental.
“The older he gets,” wrote a correspondent of the New York Evening Mail, “the more cheerful and gay-hearted he grows.” Though he was now beginning to wear glasses, his jolly voice as he sang blithely over his bath, and his thrush-like whistle, his hearty appetite and love of exercise, bore witness to vigour and good spirits.
The circle of his friends grew daily wider, and a measure of international fame began to come to him. Both in Germany and in France his book was being read, criticised and admired. Rossetti’s selections had given him an English public, which was eager now for new editions of his complete poems; he had cordial letters from Tennyson and Addington Symonds; Swinburne addressed him in one of his “Songs before Sunrise,” and there were many others.
From time to time he would receive an invitation from some academic or other body to recite a poem at a public function. Thus, in the autumn of 1871, he gave his “Song of the Exposition” at the opening of the annual exhibition of the American Institute; it is a half-humorous poem, which follows some of the political themes suggested in Democratic Vistas. Again, at midsummer, 1872, he recited “As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free” on the invitation of the United Literary Societies of Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire; making at this time a further tour as far as Lake Champlain, to visit his sister Hannah, who was married unhappily and far from all her people.
Later the same autumn, old Mrs. Whitman left Brooklyn to live with her son, the colonel, in Camden; a quiet unattractive artisan suburb of Philadelphia. The old lady, now nearly eighty, partially crippled by rheumatism, and a widow for some eighteen years, did not long survive this transplanting. But sorrows came thick upon the Whitmans at this time. And first of all, it was Walt himself who broke down and was house-tied.
At the opening of 1873 Whitman had been just ten years in Washington, and was in the fifty-fourth of his age. Recent letters to his friends had told of more frequent spells of partially disabling sickness and lassitude. On the evening of Thursday, January 23rd, he sat late over the fire in the Library of the Treasury Building, reading Lord Lytton’s What will he do with it? As he left, the guard at the door remarked him looking ill.
His room was close by, just across the street; and he went to bed as usual. Between three and four in the morning, he awoke to find that he could move neither arm nor leg on the left side. Presently he fell asleep again; and later, as he could not rise, lay on quietly, till some friends coming in raised the alarm and fetched a doctor. After some six or seven years of preliminary symptoms, Walt had now had a slight stroke of paralysis.
His first thought was of his mother, to whom he wrote as soon as he was able, reassuring her; for the newspapers had exaggerated his condition. Once before, he reminds her with grim humour, they had killed him off; but he is on the road to recovery; in a few days he will be back at his desk on the other side of the street.
Pete Doyle, Charles Eldridge and John Burroughs came in to nurse and companion him: Mrs. Ashton would have carried him to her house; Mrs. O’Connor, who did not share in the estrangement of her husband, was often at his bedside. And at the bed-foot, his mother’s picture was always before him.
He had scarcely begun to move about a little in his room before a letter from St. Louis told of the death of Martha, Jefferson Whitman’s wife, to whom the whole family was much attached, and Walt especially. The blow fell heavily on him.
On the last day of March, he crossed the street again to his work; and by the end of April he was having regular electrical treatment, and working for a couple of hours daily, with an occasional lapse. His leg was very clumsy, and he complained of frequent sensations of distress and weakness in his head, but he seemed to be progressing as well as was possible.
Early in May, however, the old mother in Camden fell ill. Walt was very anxious about her; at her age she could hardly recover from a serious illness, and his letters to her are pathetically full of loving solicitude. She grew rapidly worse, and although he was still but feeble, he could not remain away from her. On the 20th he hurried home, and on the 23rd, while he was with her, she died.
The shock to Walt was terrible; and when, dreading the heat, he attempted to reach the coast, he had a serious relapse at the outset, and was brought back to Colonel Whitman’s, to the melancholy little house. And here he too, so it would seem, was to end his life.
Only a year before, in the preface to the reprint of his Dartmouth College poem, he had declared that now—the Four Years’ War being over, and he himself having rounded out the poem of the “Democratic Man or Woman”—he was prepared for a new enterprise. He would now set to work upon fulfilling the programme of his Democratic Vistas; and put the States of America hand-in-hand “in one unbroken circle in a chant”. He would sing the song for which America waited, the song of the Republic that is yet to be.
Again, a year earlier, he had told in his Passage to India how he was ready to set forth upon the Unknown Sea.
And now, with his labours unaccomplished, his heart stricken and heavy with bereavement, joylessly he seemed to hear the weighing of the anchor and to feel his ship already setting forth. Where now was the old exaltation of spirit; where the eager longing for Divine adventure with which hitherto he had always contemplated death?
Now sorrow claimed him, and for a season he lost hold of joy and faith. He was as one abandoned by the Giver of Life, and isolated from Love. Thus deserted, he became utterly exhausted of vitality. It is as though for a time his soul had parted from his bodily life, and yet the life in the body must go on. If death had come now he would not have refused it; but his hour was not yet. Neither living nor dying, through the sad, dark days of long protracted illness and solitude, of physical debility and mental bewilderment—as it were, through year-long dream-gropings—he waited.
The light of his life seemed suddenly to have gone out. Near as he had dwelt to death, in the tragedy of the war-hospitals and in the habit of his thought, he was wholly unprepared for the death of his mother.
He was a man upon whose large harmonious and resonant nature every tragic experience struck out its fullest note. Philosophy and religion were his, if they were any man’s; but he was not one of those who escape experience in the byways of abstraction. He took each blow full in his breast.
His mother was dead; that was the physical wrench which crippled him body and soul. He could not accustom himself to her death and departure. He could not understand it, nor why he was so stricken by it. It seemed as though in her life his mother had given to her son something that was essential to that soul-consciousness in which he had lived, and that her death had broken his own life asunder, so that it was no longer harmonious and triumphant.
His mother was dead, and he was alone in Camden. Not perhaps actually alone, for his new sister, George’s wife, was always kindly; and so, indeed, was George himself. But spiritually he was alone. He had lost something, it seems, of the spiritual companionship which had made the world a home to him wherever he went. And now the human comrades who had come so close were far away. Washington and New York were equally out of reach; and he had lost O’Connor. Letters, indeed, he had; but they did not make up to him for the daily magnetic contact with the men and women whom he loved. Touch and presence meant more to him than to others, and these he had lost.
He was, then, very much alone; bereft at once, so it would seem, of the material and the spiritual consciousness of fellowship; standing wholly by himself, in the attitude of that live-oak he had once wondered at in Louisiana, because it uttered joyous leaves of dark green though it stood solitary. He was like a tree blasted by lightning; yet he too continued to put forth his leaves one and one, letters of cheery brief words to his old comrades, and especially to Pete. He was an old campaigner worsted at last, standing silently at bay; only determined, come what might, that he would not grumble or complain.
His circumstances were not all gloomy. Through the summer of 1873, Whitman remained with his brother, at number 322, Stevens Street, in the pleasant room his mother had occupied upon the first floor. Around him were the old familiar objects dear to him from childhood.
He was not wholly house-tied: two lines of street-cars ran near by, and by means of one or other he contrived to reach the ferry, which he loved to cross and cross again, revelling in the swing of the tawny Delaware, and all the comings and goings of the river and ocean craft. Hale old captains still remember him well as he was in those days. Sometimes also he would extend his jaunt, taking the Market Street cars on the Philadelphia side of the river, and going as far as the reading-room of the Mercantile Library upon Tenth Street.
But often he was too weak to go abroad for days together. His brain refused to undertake the task of leadership or co-ordination, and there was no friend to assist him. With his lame leg and his giddiness, he had at the best of times hard work to move about; but as he wrote to Pete, “I put a bold face on, and my best foot foremost”.
During bad days he sat solitary at home, trying to maintain a good heart, his whole vitality too depressed to do more. “If I only felt just a little better,” he would say, “I should get acquainted with many of the men,” a class who affected this particular locality. But feeble as he was, it was long before he made any friends to replace the lost circle at Washington. Now and again some kindly soul, hearing that he was ill, would call upon him: or Jeff would look in on his way to New York, or Eldridge or Burroughs, coming and going between Washington and New England.
Walt could not readily adjust himself to his new circumstances. His was not an elastic, pliable temper; but on the contrary, very stubborn, and apt to become set in ways; the qualities of adhesion and inertia increasing in prominence as his strong will and initiative ebbed. He kept telling himself between the blurs that disabled his brain, that he might be in a much more deplorable fix; that his folks were good to him; that his post was kept open for his return, and that his friends were only waiting to welcome him back to Washington.
But he could not pass by or elude the ever-present consciousness and problem of his mother’s death. At the end of August he wrote to Pete: “I have the feeling of getting more strength and easier in the head—something like what I was before mother’s death. (I cannot be reconciled to that yet: it is the great cloud of my life—nothing that ever happened before has had such an effect on me.)” When we remember his separation from the woman and the children of his love, and all the experiences of the war, we may a little understand the meaning of these soberly written words, and the strength of the tie which bound together mother and son. Who knows or can estimate the full meaning of that relationship which begins before birth, and which all the changes and separations of life and death only deepen?
It is difficult to look calmly at this period of Whitman’s life. One resents, perhaps childishly, the fate which overtook this sane and noble soul. Surely he, of all men, had been faithful to the inner vision, and generous to all. He had fulfilled the Divine precept; he had loved the Lord his God with all the might of soul and body, and his neighbour as himself. From childhood up he had been clean and affectionate, independent and loyal, whole-heartedly obedient to the law as it was written in his heart, undaunted by any fear or convention.
He had prized health, and held it sacred, as the essential basis of freedom and sanity of spirit. And he had hazarded it without reserve and without fear, in the infectious and malarial wards of the hospitals.
He had opened his heart to learn the full chords and meanings of all the emotions that came to him; and when he had become a scholar in these, he became an interpreter of the soul unto itself, both in the printed page and in the relations of his life. In Leaves of Grass he gave, to whosoever would accept the gift, his own attitude towards life, and the results of his study of living. In the wards he gave himself in whatever ways he could contrive to the needy.
And he gave all. Twenty years at least of his own health he sacrificed, and gave freely, out of the overflow of his love, to the wounded in their cots. As I have before suggested, he gave more than, physically speaking, he could afford. But he gave with joy, knowing that he was born to give, and that in giving himself irretrievably, he was fulfilling the highest law of his being, and fully and finally realising himself. It was the crowning proof not only of “Calamus,” but of his gospel of self-realisation.
Deliberate though his service was, not even Whitman himself could fully estimate the cost of his charity. But he accepted the consequences of all his acts as proper and due, being, indeed, implicit in the acts themselves. And now, when his very joy in life was called in to meet the mortgage he had given; when he was, as it were, stripped naked and left in the dark; he accepted his condition without declaiming against the Divine justice, or calling insanely upon God.
Year after year, he was patient, expecting the light to break again, the daylight beyond death. He had never professed to understand the ways of God, but he had always trusted Him. And when faith itself seemed for awhile to forsake him, his blind soul did but sit silently awaiting its return.
It was out of such a mood, lighted at times by moments of vision, that during 1874 and 1875 he wrote some of the noblest of his verses, notably the “Prayer of Columbus,” the “Song of the Universal,” and the “Song of the Redwood Tree”.
There are those who have suggested that Whitman’s illness was brought on by a life of dissipation; one supposes that such persons find in these poems the death-bed repentance of a maudlin old roué. But to the unprejudiced reader such a view must appear worse than absurd. Whitman never claimed to have lived a blameless life, but he did claim to have lived a sane and loving one; the evidence of all his writings, and of these poems especially, supports that claim.
Simple and direct, the “Prayer of Columbus” breathes the religious spirit in which it was conceived. Lonely, poor and paralysed, battered and old, upon the margin of the great ocean of Death, he pours out his heart and tells the secret of his life; for, as Whitman himself confessed, it is he who speaks under a thin historical disguise.
I am too full of woe!
Haply I may not live another day;
I cannot rest, O God, I cannot eat or drink or sleep,
Till I put forth myself, my prayer, once more to Thee,
Breathe, bathe myself once more in Thee, commune with Thee,
Report myself once more to Thee.
Thou knowest my years entire, my life,
My long and crowded life of active work, not adoration merely;
Thou knowest the prayers and vigils of my youth,
Thou knowest my manhood’s solemn and visionary meditations,
Thou knowest how before I commenced I devoted all to come to Thee,
Thou knowest I have in age ratified all those vows and strictly kept them,
Thou knowest I have not once lost nor faith nor ecstasy in Thee....
All my emprises have been fill’d with Thee,
My speculations, plans, begun and carried on in thoughts of Thee,
Sailing the deep or journeying the land for Thee;
Intentions, purports, aspirations mine, leaving results to Thee.
O I am sure they really came from Thee,
The urge, the ardour, the unconquerable will,
The potent, felt, interior command, stronger than words,
A message from the Heavens whispering to me even in sleep,
These sped me on....
What the end and result of all, he cannot tell—that is God’s business; but he has felt the promise of freedom, religious joy and peace. The way itself has always been plain to him, lit by an ineffable, steady illumination, “lighting the very light”. And now, lost in the unknown seas, he will again set forth, relinquishing the helm of choice; and though the vessel break asunder and his mind itself should fail, yet will his soul cling fast to the one sure thing; for though the waves of the unknown buffet his soul, “Thee, Thee, at least I know”.
In the “Song of the Universal”—apparently delivered by proxy at the Commencement Exercises of Tuft’s College, Massachusetts, midsummer, 1874—Whitman reiterates his conviction that the Divine is at the heart of all and every life. The soul will at last emerge from evil and disease to justify its own history, to bring health out of disease, and joy out of sorrow and sin. Blessed are they who perceive and pursue this truth! It is to forward this wondrous discovery of the soul that America has, in the ripeness of time, arrived.
The measured faiths of other lands, the grandeurs of the past,
Are not for thee, but grandeurs of thine own,
Deific faiths and amplitudes, absorbing, comprehending all,
All eligible to all.
All, all for immortality,
Love like the light silently wrapping all,
Nature’s amelioration blessing all,
The blossoms, fruits of ages, orchards divine and certain,
Forms, objects, growths, humanities, to spiritual images ripening.
Give me, O God, to sing that thought,
Give me, give him or her I love this quenchless faith,
In Thy ensemble, whatever else withheld withhold not from us,
Belief in plan of Thee enclosed in Time and Space,
Health, peace, salvation universal.
Without this faith the world and life are but a dream.
The “Song of the Californian Redwood” still harps upon American destiny and upon the mystery of death. The giant of the dense forest, falling before the axes of the pioneers, declares the conscious soul that lives in all natural things. He complains not at death, but rejoices that his huge, calm joy will hereafter be incarnate in more kingly beings—the men that are yet to dwell in this new land of the West—and, above all, in the Godlike genius of America. The “Song of the Redwood Tree” is the voice of a great past, prophetic of a greater, all-continuing, all-embracing future, and, therefore, undismayed at its own passing.
Such were the weapons with which Whitman fought against despair; such the heroic heart which, amid confusion, restlessness and perplexity, still held its own.
Picture of Col. Whitman's corner house at 431 Stevens Street, Camden, 1904.
COL. WHITMAN’S CORNER HOUSE, No. 431, STEVENS STREET, CAMDEN, 1904
At the end of September, 1873, the Whitmans had moved into a fine new brick house which George, who was now a prosperous inspector of pipes, had built upon a corner lot on Stevens Street. It faced south and west, and Walt chose a sunny room on the second floor, as we should say, or, according to the American and more accurate enumeration, on the third. Here he remained for ten years.
The house still stands, well-built and comfortable; and though the neighbourhood is shabby and the district does not improve with time, the trees that stand before it give it a pleasant air upon a summer’s day. Walt was to have had a commodious room upon the floor below, specially designed for his comfort and convenience, but he preferred the other as sunnier and more quiet.
The family now consisted of three only, for Edward, the imbecile brother, was boarding somewhere near by in the country. Jeff was in St. Louis, the two sisters were married, Andrew had died. About Jesse we have no information; he may still have been living in Long Island or New York.
More than once Whitman wrote very seriously to Pete, gently preparing him for the worst; but though confinement, loneliness and debility of brain and body made the days and nights dreary, there continued to be gleams of comfort. John Burroughs had begun to build his delightful home upon the Hudson, and called at Camden on his way north, after winding up his affairs in the capital. Among occasional callers was Mr. W. J. Linton, who afterwards drew the portrait for the Centennial edition of the Leaves. And Walt made the acquaintance of a jovial Colonel Johnston, at whose house he would often drink a cup of tea on Sunday afternoons.
Then, too, the young men at the ferry, and the drivers and conductors on the cars, came to know and like him, helping him as he hobbled to and fro. He was often refreshed by the sunsets on the river, and by the winter crossings through the floating ice; while the sound and sight of the railroad cars crossing West Street, less than a quarter of a mile away, reminded him constantly of Pete Doyle, now a baggage-master on the “Baltimore and Potomac”.
He had a companion, too, in his little dog, which came and went with him, and all these pleasant, homely little matters go to make his letters as cheerful as may be. If only he could be in his own quarters, and among his friends, he would be comparatively happy. It is the home-feeling and affection that he craves all the time; even a wood-fire would help towards that, but alas, brother George has installed an improved heater!
About midsummer, 1874, a new Solicitor-General discharged Whitman from his post at Washington. Hitherto Walt had employed a substitute to carry on his work. But he had now been ill some eighteen months, and the prospect of his return was becoming so remote that he could not feel he had been treated unjustly.
From this time forward his financial position became precarious. The amount of his savings grew less and less, and his earnings were not large. Besides beginning to edit his hospital memoranda for publication, he wrote for the papers and magazines whenever his head allowed him to do so; and in England, as well as at home, there was still some demand for his book. But even the scanty sales-money did not always reach him, being retained by more than one agent who regarded the author’s life as practically at an end.
All through 1875 the weakness continued; but in November he was well enough to pay a visit to Washington, accompanied by John Burroughs; and, the public re-burial of Poe taking place about that time in Baltimore, Doyle appears to have convoyed him thither. There, sitting silently on the platform at the public function, he seems once again to have been cordially greeted by Emerson, but O’Connor, who was also present, made no sign.
It was not till the following summer that Whitman’s old spirits began to return. Since his mother died he had passed three years in the valley of the shadow, and he was still lonely, sick and poor when his English friends came to his rescue.
He and his writings had been pulverised between the heavy millstones of Mr. Peter Bayne’s adjectives in the Contemporary Review for the month of December. In England, as well as in America, he had literary enemies in high places. But on the 13th of March the Daily News published a long and characteristically fervid letter, full of generous feeling, from Mr. Robert Buchanan, who dilated upon the old poet’s isolation, neglect and poverty. It aroused wide comment, and some indignation on both sides of the Atlantic, among Whitman’s friends as well as among his enemies.
That he was never deserted by his faithful American friends a series of articles upon his condition, published in the Springfield (Mass.) Republican, bears witness. But Buchanan’s letter evoked new and widespread sympathy, which was the means of saving Whitman from his melancholy plight. A fortnight later the Athen?um printed his short sonnet-like poem, “The Man-o’-War Bird”.
In the meantime, Mr. Rossetti, always faithful to his friend, had learned of his condition, and had written asking how best his English admirers might offer him assistance. Walt wrote in reply, stating that his savings were exhausted, that he had been cheated by his New York agents, and that in consequence he was now, for the new Centennial edition, which had just appeared, his own sole publisher. If any of his English friends desired to help him, they could best do so by the purchase of the book. He wrote with affectionate gratitude, and quiet dignity. He was poor, but he was not in want.
There came, through Mr. Rossetti, an immediate, generous and most cordial response, and in the list of English and Irish subscribers appear many illustrious names. The invalid revived; “both the cash and the emotional cheer,” he wrote at a later time, “were deep medicine”. He could now afford to overlook the bitter and contemptuous attacks which were being made upon him by an old acquaintance in the editorials of the New York Tribune. And, which was at least equally important, he could contrive to take a country holiday.
Picture of the Timber Creek pool in 1904.
TIMBER CREEK: THE POOL, 1904
About the end of April, or early in May, he drove out through the gently undulating dairy lands and the fields of young corn to the New Jersey hamlet of Whitehorse, some ten miles down the turnpike which leads to Atlantic City and Cape May. A little beyond the village, and close to the Reading Railroad, there still stands an old farmhouse, then tenanted by Mr. George Stafford, and to-day the centre of a group of pleasant villas known as Laurel Springs.
It was here that Whitman lodged, establishing cordial relations with the whole Stafford family, relations which added greatly to the happiness of his remaining years. He became especially attached to Mrs. Stafford, who intuitively read his moods, and to her son Harry.
A short stroll down the green lane, which is now being rapidly civilised out of that delightful category, brings one to a wide woody hollow, where amid the trees a long creek or stream winds down to a large mill-pool with boats and lily leaves floating upon it. Save for the boats and the people from the villas, the place has been but little changed by the quarter of a century which has elapsed since Whitman first visited it. The walnut and the oak under which he used to sit among the meadow-grass are older trees, of course, and the former is now circled with a wooden seat; but the kecks and crickets, the shady nooks by the pool, the jewel-weed and the great-winged tawny butterflies are there as of old. And with them much of the old, sweet, communicative quiet.
At the creek-head, among the willows, is a swampy tangle of mint and calamus, reeds and cresses, white boneset and orange fragile jewel-weed, and above, from its mouth in the steep bank, gushes the “crystal spring” whose soft, clinking murmur soothed the old man many a summer’s day.
Here, early and late, he would sit or saunter through the glinting glimmering lights, and here Mother-Nature took him, an orphan, to her breast. The baby and boyhood days in the lanes and fields at West Hills, and among the woods and orchards came back to him and blessed him with significant memories. To outward seeming an old man, and near sixty as years go, in heart he was still and always a child. And for the last three years a broken-hearted, motherless child. He had been starving to death for lack of the daily ministry of Love.
Picture of the Timber Creek 'Crystal Spring' and the old marl-pit, 1904.
TIMBER CREEK: “CRYSTAL SPRING” AND THE OLD MARL-PIT, 1904
At Timber Creek, by the pool and in the lanes, the touch of that all-embracing Love which pervades the universe was upon him. Without any effort on his part the caressing air and sunshine re-established the ancient relationship of love, in which of old he had been united to Nature. He would sit silent for hours, wrapt in a sort of trance, realising the mystery of the Whole, through which, as through a body, the currents of life flow and pulse. Woe to any one, however dear, who broke suddenly in upon his solitude!
His heart went out to the tall poplars and the upright cedars with their tasselled fruit, and he felt virtue flow from them to him in return. He believed the old dryad stories, and became himself truly nympholeptic, and aware of presences in the woods. In August, 1877, he writes: “I have been almost two years, off and on, without drugs and medicines, and daily in the open air. Last summer I found a particularly secluded little dell off one side by my creek, originally a large dug-out marl-pit, now abandoned, filled with bushes, trees, grass, a group of willows, a straggling bank and a spring of delicious water running right through the middle of it, with two or three little cascades. Here I retreated every hot day, and follow it up this summer. Here I realise the meaning of that old fellow who said he was seldom less alone than when alone. Never before did I come so close to Nature, never before did she come so close to me. By old habit I pencilled down from time to time almost automatically, moods, sights, hours, tints and outlines on the spot.”
Unlike the ordinary naturalist he regarded the birds and trees, the dragon-flies and grey squirrels, the oak-trees and the breeze that sang among their leaves, as spirits; strange, but kindred with his own, members together with his of a transcendental life; and he communed with them. Something, he felt sure, they interchanged; something passed between them.
Their mystical fellowship had its ritual, as have all religions. The place was sacred, and he did off, not only his shoes, but all his raiment, giving back himself to naked Mother-Nature, naked as he was born of her. In the solitude, among the bare-limbed gracious trees and the clear-flowing water, he enjoyed many a sun-bath, and on hot summer days, in his bird-haunted nook, many a bathing in the spring; many a wrestle, too, with strong young hickory sapling or beech bough, conscious, as they wrestled together, of new life flowing into his veins.
Whatever ignorance of names his Washington acquaintance may have discovered, his diary at this time is full of nature-lore. It enumerates some forty kinds of birds, and he was evidently familiar with nearly as many sorts of trees and shrubs; while differentiating accurately enough between the sundry trilling insects, locusts, grasshoppers, crickets and katydids which populate the district, vibrant by day and night. Doubtless he had learnt much from the companionship of John Burroughs, but he was himself an accurate observer.
The story of his visits to Timber Creek and its vicinity from 1876 to 1882 is told in Specimen Days, with much else beside—a book to carry with one on any holiday, or to make a holiday in the midst of city work. It is, for the rest, an admirable illustration of the saying of the philosopher-emperor, that virtue is a living and enthusiastic sympathy with Nature.
Three years of gradual convalescence were divided not only between the Stafford’s farm and the house on Stevens Street, but also with the homes of other friends whose love now began to enrich his life. Of three of the most notable among his new comrades we must speak in passing. In the autumn of 1876 Anne Gilchrist took a house in Philadelphia, while in the following summer Dr. Bucke and Mr. Edward Carpenter came to Camden on pilgrimage.
Whitman often said in his later years that his best friends had been women, and that of his women friends Mrs. Gilchrist was the nearest. She was an Essex girl of good family, nine years younger than Whitman. At school she had loved Emerson, Rousseau, Comte and Ruskin, and a little later she added to them the writings of Carlyle, Guyot and Herbert Spencer. Music and science, with the philosophical suggestions which spring from the discoveries of science, were her chief interests.
At twenty-three she married Alexander Gilchrist, an art-critic and interpreter. It was a wholly happy marriage; Anne became the mother of four children, and, beside being deeply interested in her husband’s work, contrived to contribute scientific articles to the magazines.
While compiling his well-known Life of Blake, Mr. Gilchrist fell a victim to scarlet fever. His widow, with her four young children and the uncompleted book, removed to a cottage in the country, and there, with the encouragement and help of the Rossetti brothers, she finished her husband’s task. Her life was now, as she said, “up hill all the way,” but the book helped her. And her close study of Blake, added to her scientific interests and her love of music, formed the finest possible introduction to her subsequent reading of Whitman.
Her task was concluded in 1863; it had tided her over the first two years of her bereavement; but her letters of sympathy to Dante Rossetti, heart-broken at the loss of his young wife, discover her gnawing sorrow yet undulled by time. Like Whitman, she had the capacity for great suffering. And like Whitman, too, she was helped in her sorrow by the companionship of Nature. And, again, she was a good comrade.
Unlike her grandmother, who was one of Romney’s beauties, Anne Gilchrist was not a handsome woman; but her personality was both vivid and profound, and increasingly attractive as the years passed. She was so serious and eager in temperament that, even in London, she lived in comparative retirement.
The letters which she exchanged with the Rossettis during a long period are evidence both of her common-sense and her capacity for passionate sympathy. They are often as frank as they are noble; revealing a nature too profound to be continually considerate of criticism. This gives to some of her utterances a half na?ve and wholly charming quality, which cannot have been absent from her personality, and must have endeared her to the comrades whom she honoured with her confidence.
This high seriousness of hers made her the readier to appreciate a poet who, almost alone among Americans, has bared his man’s heart to his readers, careless of the cheap ridicule of those smart-witted cynics whom modern education and modern morality have multiplied till they are almost as numerous as the sands of the sea. She was a little more than forty when she first read Leaves of Grass and wrote those letters to W. M. Rossetti in which she attested her appreciation of their purpose and power.
It was no light thing for a woman to publish such a declaration of faith; and in her own phrase, she felt herself a second Lady Godiva, going in the daylight down the public way, naked, not in body but in soul, for the good cause. She was convinced that her ride was necessary; for men would remain blind to the glory of Whitman’s message until a woman dared the shame and held its glory up to them. And what she did, she did less for men than for their wives and mothers, upon whom the shadow of their shame-in-themselves had fallen.
Mr. Rossetti has described her as a woman of good port, in fullest possession of herself, never fidgetty, and never taken unawares; warm-hearted and courageous, with full, dark, liquid eyes, which were at the same time alive with humour and vivacity, quick to detect every kind of humbug, but wholly free from cynicism. Her face was not only expressive of her character, but “full charged with some message” which her lips seemed ever about to utter. Her considerable intellectual force was in happy harmony with her domestic qualities, and filled her home-life with interest.
Such was the woman who, in November, 1876, at the age of forty-eight, brought her family to Philadelphia, in order that one of the daughters might study medicine at Girard College; and in whose home, near the college grounds, Whitman henceforward, for two or three years, spent a considerable part of his time. The relationship of these two noble souls seems to have been comparable with that which united Michael Angelo and Vittoria Colonna, and they were at a similar time of life.
This, the Centennial year, was filled with thoughts and celebrations of American independence; among which we may recall the Exposition in Philadelphia—where throughout the summer, Whitman had been a frequent visitor—and the Centennial edition of his works. He had also celebrated the occasion by sitting for his bust to a young sculptor, in an improvised studio on Chestnut Street. The weather was too hot for a coat; and in his white shirt sleeves he would, at the artist’s request, read his poems aloud with na?ve delight, which rose to a climax when the sound of applause from a group of young fellows on the stairs without, crowned his efforts. “So you like it, do you?” he cried to them; “well, I rather enjoyed that myself.”
The old sad and solitary inertia was broken. Ill though he often was, the lonely little upper room held him no longer; nor was he any more shut up within the sense of bereavement. Jeff had come over from St. Louis, and his two daughters spent the autumn with their aunt and uncles in Stevens Street. All through the winter Walt was moving back and forward between George’s house, the Staffords farm, and Mrs. Gilchrist’s. He was cheerfully busy with the orders for his pair of handsome books, which were selling briskly at a guinea a volume.
Leaves of Grass had been reprinted from the plates of the fifth edition. Its companion, Two Rivulets, was a “mélange” compounded of additional poems, including “Passage to India,” and the prose writings of which we have already spoken, printed at various times during the last five years. “Specimen Days” was not among them, and did not appear till 1882. The title Two Rivulets suggests the double thread of its theme, the destiny of the nation and of the individual, American politics and that mystery of immortal life which we call death. They were not far asunder in Whitman’s thought.
At the end of February, Mr. Burroughs met Walt at Mrs. Gilchrist’s, and thence they set out together for New York. Here, Whitman stayed with his new and dear friends, Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Johnston; and presented himself in his own becoming garb at the grand full-dress receptions which were held in his honour; the applause which greeted him, and the atmosphere of real affection by which he was surrounded, compensating him for the always distasteful attentions of a lionising public, eager for any sensation.
He renewed also, and with perhaps more unmitigated satisfaction, his acquaintance with the men on the East River ferries, and the Broadway stages; and, finally, he ascended the Hudson to stay awhile with John Burroughs. This pleasant holiday jaunt was not without its tragic element; his friend, Mrs. Johnston, dying suddenly on his last evening in New York.
It was in May that Mr. Edward Carpenter visited him in Camden. After a brilliant Cambridge career, he was now a pioneer University Extension lecturer in natural sciences. But besides, or rather beyond this, a poet, in whom the sense of fellowship and unity was already becoming dominant.
Picture of Edward Carpenter at forty-three.
EDWARD CARPENTER AT FORTY-THREE
In a note to his just-published preface, Whitman had spoken of the “terrible, irrepressible yearning” for sympathy which underlay his work, and by which he claimed the personal affection of such readers as he could truly call his own. This also was the aim which underlay Mr. Carpenter’s first book of verses, Narcissus and Other Poems, published in 1873.
Their author was already familiar with Leaves of Grass, which he had first read at about the age of twenty-five, and which he had since been absorbing, much as he absorbed the sonatas of Beethoven. They fed within him the life of something which was still but dimly conscious; something dumb, blind and irrational, but of titanic power to disturb the even tenor of an academic life. One remarks that both Mrs. Gilchrist and he shared to the full the modern feeling for science and its philosophy, and for music.
When he visited Whitman, Edward Carpenter was thirty-three; it was not till four years after this that he gave himself up to the writing of his own “Leaves,” coming into his spiritual kingdom a little later in life than did Walt. In many respects his nature, and consequently his work which is the outcome and true expression of his personality, was in striking contrast with that of his great old friend. Lithe and slender in figure, he was subtle also and fine in the whole temper of his mind; sharing with Addington Symonds that tendency to over-fineness, that touch of morbid subtilty which demands for its balance a very sweet and strenuous soul, such indeed, as is revealed in the pages of Towards Democracy.
He found Whitman’s mind clear and unclouded after the suffering of the last four years, his perception keen as ever. Courteous, and possessed of great personal charm, he was yet elemental and “Adamic” in character. He impressed his visitor with a threefold personality: first, the magnetic, effluent, radiant spirit of the man going out to greet and embrace all; then, the spacious breadth of his soul, and the remoteness of those further portions in which his consciousness seemed often to be dwelling; and afterwards, the terrible majesty, as of judgment unveiled in him, a Jove-like presence full of thunder.
This last element in his nature was naked, ominous, immovable as a granite rock. When once you perceived it, there was, as Miss Gilchrist has remarked, no shelter from the terrible blaze of his personality. But this rocky masculine Ego was wedded in him with a gentle almost motherly affection, which found expression in certain caressing tones of his widely modulated voice. While, to complete alike the masculine and feminine, was the child—the attitude of reverent wonder toward the world.
By turns then, a wistful child, a charming loving woman, an untamed terrible truth-compelling man, Whitman seems to have both bewitched and baffled his young English visitor.
Mr. Carpenter saw him at Stevens Street and Timber Creek, and again under Mrs. Gilchrist’s hospitable roof. They sat out together in the pleasant Philadelphia fashion through the warm June evenings upon the porch steps; and Walt would talk in his deliberate way of Japan and China, or of the Eastern literatures. He liked to join hands while he talked, communicating more, perhaps, of himself, and understanding his companion better, by touch than by words. His mere presence was sufficient to redeem the commonplace.
His visitor had also an opportunity of noting the efficiency of Whitman’s defences against the globe-trotting interview-hunting type of American woman. His silence became aggressive, and her words rebounded from it; he had disappeared into his rock-faced solitude where nothing could reach him. And a very few moments of this treatment sufficed, even for the brazen-armoured amazon.
During Mr. Carpenter’s visit, Mrs. George Whitman, whom Dr. Bucke has described as an attractive, sweet woman, was out of health, and her brother-in-law made a daily excursion down town and across the ferry to see her, and to transact his own affairs. In the heat of the following July she first opened the door to Dr. Bucke.
He, too, had long been a student of Leaves of Grass, a student at first against his own judgment, and with little result beyond an annoying bewilderment to his sense of fitness, and of exasperation to his intelligence. But from the first, he felt a singular interior compulsion to read the book, which he could not at all understand. Its lack of all definite statement was the head and front of its offending to a keen scientific mind. But now after many years, he had come to recognise the extraordinary power of suggestion which was embodied in every page.
Dr. R. Maurice Bucke’s personality was strongly marked and striking; he had as much determination as had Whitman himself, and his whole face is full of resolute purpose.
Born in Norfolk, in 1837, but immediately transplanted to Canada, he was thoroughly educated by his father, who was a man of considerable scholarship and a minister in the Church of England.
In 1857, he crowned an adventurous youth passed in the mining regions of the Western States, by a daring winter expedition over the Sierras, in which he was so badly frozen that he afterwards lost both feet, but his tall and vigorous figure showed hardly a trace of this misfortune.
Returning to Canada, he studied medicine; and eventually, in 1877, became the head of a large insane asylum at London, Ontario. Here he introduced several notable reforms in the treatment of the patients, which were widely imitated throughout America.
He was a keen student of mental pathology, and for some time before his death was reckoned among the leading alienists of the continent. Certain interesting and suggestive studies of the relation which appears to exist between the so-called sympathetic nervous system and the moral and emotional nature, but especially his magnum opus, Cosmic Consciousness, published the year before his death (1901), reveal the direction of his dominant interest. From 1877, he was one of Whitman’s closest friends, and became subsequently his principal biographer.
In the printed recollections of his first interview with Whitman, Dr. Bucke recalls the exaltation of his mind produced by it; describing it as a “sort of spiritual intoxication,” which remained with him for months, transfiguring his new friend into more than mortal stature. It is another instance of the almost incredible power of the invalid’s personality.
Picture of Richard Maurice Bucke.
RICHARD MAURICE BUCKE
Whitman’s own jottings and records of the period testify to his increasing physical vigour. He goes, for instance, to the Walnut Street Theatre, to a performance of Joaquin Miller’s The Danites, accompanied by his friend the author. In the summer of 1878, and in the succeeding year, he is again a guest both of John Burroughs and of J. H. Johnston. On the second occasion, he had delivered his lecture on the “Death of Lincoln” in the Steck Hall, New York; promising himself anew, that if health permitted, he would even now set forth on the lecture tour which he had so long contemplated. But though, in the autumn, he made, with several friends, an extended tour of some sixteen weeks beyond the Mississippi, he did not accomplish this cherished scheme.
At night on the 10th of September, Whitman and his party left Philadelphia, westward bound. Walt delighted in the magic speed and comfort of the Pullman; in which, lying awake among the sleepers, he was whirled all through the first night up the broad pastoral valley of the Susquehanna, curving with its thousand reedy aits about thick-wooded steeps; and on, over ridge and ridge of the Alleghanies, till morning found them at smoking Pittsburg.
Crossing the Ohio, almost at the point whence he had descended it thirty years before on that fateful southern journey, the good engine, the Baldwin, hurried them all that day through rich and populous Ohio and Indiana. Whitman was not disinclined to acknowledge a personality in the fierce and beautiful locomotive which he had already celebrated in a poem full of fire and of the modern spirit.
They were due next morning at St. Louis, but about nightfall their headlong flight through the broad lands was arrested. The Baldwin ran foul of some obstacle, and suffered serious damage and consequent delay. Spending the third night in the city, they continued through a beautiful autumn day, across the rolling prairies of Missouri, feasting their eyes upon the wide farmlands full of the promise of bread for millions of men.
Nor material bread only. There is something in the vast aerial spaces of these prairie states, their great skies and lonely stretches, which exalts and feeds the soul; something oceanic, Whitman thought, “and beautiful as dreams”. Central in the continent, this country had always seemed to him to correspond with certain central qualities in his ideal America, and to supply the background for the two men whose figures stood out supremely above the struggle for the union, Lincoln and Grant—men of unplumbed and inarticulate depths of character, and of native freedom of spirit and elemental originality of thought.
Whitman stayed for a while with friends upon the road, at Lawrence and Topeka. Many of the boys he had tended in the wards were now hale men out West, and they were always eager for sight of him; so that there were few places in America where he would not have found a hearty welcome.
He proceeded along the yellow Kansas River, through the Golden Belt, and over the Colorado table-lands, bare and vast as some immense Salisbury Plain, to Denver. In that young city he spent several days, dreaming his great dreams of a Western town that should be full of friends and strong for and against the whole world, breathing her fine air, sparkling as champagne and clear as cold spring water; falling in love with her people and her horses, and the little mountain streams which ran along the channel ways of her broad streets.
Thence, he made short trips into the Rockies; where the railroad winds among fantastic yellow buttes with steep sloping screes, and towering battlements; and the trains swing eagerly round a thousand curves to follow the bronze and amber path-finder, brawling in its sinuous ravine between the pinnacled, red, cloud-topped crags which it has carved and sundered.
Every break in the walls disclosed Olympian companies of august peaks against the high blue. Gradually the way would climb to the summit, its straightness widening, here and there, into sedgy mountain meadows closed about by keen-cut granite heights, the perfect record of laborious ages; and as the day advanced, the broad and restful light broadened and grew more serene as it shone afar on chains of snowy peaks.
Here in this tremendous mountain fellowship, with its shapes at once fantastic and sublime, its solemn joy and wild imagination, its infinite complex of form and colour suggesting vast emotions to the soul, Walt breathed his proper air and recognised the landscape of his deepest life. “I have found the law of my own poems,” he kept saying to himself with increasing conviction, hour after hour. Like the lonely mountain eagle which he watched wheeling leisurely among the peaks, he was at home in this sternly beautiful, untamed, unmeasured land.
Towards the end of September, he turned East again from the mining town of Pueblo; leaving the Far West unseen—Utah with its Canaanitish glories of intense lake and naked, ruddy, wrinkled mountains; the great grey desert of Nevada; and the forest-clad Sierras looking out across their Californian garden towards the Pacific. Stopping here and there with his former friends, he found his way to Jefferson Whitman’s home in St. Louis, and there remained over the year’s end.
This cosmopolitan Western city, planted in the centre of that vast valley which the Mississippi drains and waters, and at the heart of the American continent, was intensely interesting to Whitman. He had an almost superstitious love for “the Father of Waters”; and many a moonlit autumn night he haunted its banks, its wharves and bridges, fascinated by the sound of the moving water as the river flowed through the luminous silence under the eternal stars.
Physically, St. Louis did not suit him: he was ill there for weeks together; but even so, he was happy in his own simple, human way. He went twice a week to the kindergartens, and there, for an hour together, he entertained the younger pupils with his funny children’s tales. After the first moments of strangeness, and alarm at his size and the whiteness of his hair, nearly all the children quickly came to love old “Kris Kringle” or “Father Christmas” as they would call him; and for his part, he was as happy among little children as a young mother.
Early in January, 1880, he returned home. All his delight in the West, gathered on his first journey up the Mississippi thirty years before, and since accumulating from many sources, notably from the young Western soldiers he had nursed, had been confirmed by this visit.
In only one thing was he disappointed. The men had seemed, to his searching gaze, fit sons of that new land of possibility; but in the women he had failed to find the qualifications he was seeking. Physically and mentally, he saw them still in bondage to old-world traditions; instead of originating nobler and more generous manners, they were imitating the foolish gentility of the East. Whitman was very exacting in his ideal of womanhood; and perhaps it was mainly upon the ladies of the shops and streets that his strictures were passed; for there are others in that Western world, who are not far from her whom he has described in the “Song of the Broad-axe”—the best-beloved, possessed of herself, who is strong in her beauty as are the laws of nature.
After six months at home among his books and his friends—to whom at this time he added, at least by correspondence, Colonel Robert Ingersoll, afterwards a member of the inner circle—Whitman set out upon another journey, in length almost equal to that of the preceding autumn. Early in June, he crossed the bridge over Niagara on his way to London, Ontario; and now at his second sight, the significance of that majestic scene, which thirty years before he would seem to have missed, was discovered to him.
Staying with Dr. Bucke, he made frequent visits to the great asylum, with its thousand patients, under the wise doctor’s care. Walt’s own family life, with the tragedy of his youngest brother’s incapacity, had made the melancholy brotherhood of those whom he has beautifully described as the “sacred idiots” especially interesting to him. He attended the religious services held in the asylum; joining with those wrecked minds in a common worship, and seeing the storms of their lives strangely quieted, as though a Divine love, brooding over all, had hushed them. With many of the patients he became personally acquainted, and years afterwards recalled them by name, inquiring affectionately after their welfare.
Whitman was in better health than usual, and in excellent spirits. He loved the doctor, was happy and at home in his household, and on the best of terms with its younger members. Among the latter, his presence never checked the natural flow of high spirits, as does the presence of most grown-up persons: he was always one of themselves.
This, indeed, was a characteristic of Whitman in whatever company he was found, from a kindergarten to a company of “publicans and sinners”. The spirit of comradeship identified him with the others, and he was so profoundly himself that such identification took nothing away from his own identity. Among the young people of Dr. Bucke’s household his fun and humour had free and natural expression; as when, for example, one moonlit evening, he undertook the burial of an empty wine-bottle, addressing a magniloquent oration over its last resting-place to the goddess Semele.
He loved to linger at the table, telling stories after tea; and to recite or read aloud, when the family sat together in the dusk on the verandah; and sometimes, too, he would take his turn in singing some well-known song. For reading aloud, he would often choose some poem of Tennyson’s—“Ulysses” seems to have been his favourite.
At this time also, in a secluded nook in the grounds, he read leisurely over to himself, with the satisfaction which Tennyson’s work nearly always gave him, the newly published De Profundis. His diary of these pleasant, refreshing weeks contains many notes of the thick-starred heavens and the merry birds, and the multitudinous swallows, which would recall to his well-stored mind the story of Athene and Ulysses’ return.
His vital force seemed to be almost unimpaired. The noble calm of his presence, indeed, made him appear even older than he was; his fine hair was snowy white, and the high-domed crown which rose through it and grew higher and nobler with every year, gave him all claims to reverence.
But, though at first sight he seemed to be nearer eighty than sixty years old, and though he was lame from paralysis, a second glance showed him erect and without a line of care or of senility upon his face. His complexion was rosy as a winter pippin, and his cheeks were full and smooth, for his heart was always young.
His host wished to show him Canada; in which country he was the more deeply interested through his settled conviction that it would presently become a part of the United States. The St. Lawrence and the Lakes, he always said, cannot remain a frontier-line; they are and should be recognised as a magnificent inland water-way, comparable with the Mississippi.
Towards the end of July he set out upon this great road with his friend. Taking boat at Toronto, they descended by easy stages, stopping a night or two at Kingston, Montreal and Quebec, Whitman thoroughly enjoying all the new scenes and making friends everywhere on the way. He sat on the fore-deck in the August sunshine, wrapped in his grey overcoat, wondering at the grim pagan wildness of the lower St. Lawrence, nightly watching the Northern Lights, and appearing on deck before sunrise.
Picture of Walt Whitman at sixty-one, July 1880.
WHITMAN AT SIXTY-ONE, JULY, 1880
As they turned up the deep dark Saguenay and reached the mountain pillars of Eternity and Trinity, the mystery of northern river and height, with all they hold of stillness and of storm, communed with him. He saw infinite power wedded with an ageless peace; and all, however awful in its sublimity, yet far from inhospitable to an heroic race of men; nay, by its very awfulness, inviting and proclaiming the men who shall dare to dwell therein.
With the people of Canada, as a whole, he was well pleased. He liked their benevolent care for the weak and infirm in body and mind; and thought them in every respect worthy of the destiny which he believed that he foresaw—the destiny of citizenship in the Republic.
After a winter in Camden, Philadelphia and the country, among friends old and new, Whitman paid his second visit to Boston. The house-tied stationary years of 1873 to 1876 had been succeeded by a period of considerable activity, both mental and physical.
On the 14th of April, he gave his lecture on the “Death of Abraham Lincoln,” at the Hawthorn Rooms. It was the third year of its delivery; on the two previous occasions it had been read in New York and Philadelphia; and he purposed thus annually to commemorate an event which appeared to him as perhaps the most significant of his time, an event which the American people could ill afford to forget.
In Whitman’s view, as we have noted, the assassination of the great President had sealed the million deaths of the war, and cemented, as could nothing else, the union for whose sake they had been given. He believed that future ages would see in it the most dramatic moment of the victorious struggle of the nation against slavery. Rarely hereafter, in spite of increasing feebleness, did he miss the occasion as the season came round; though it was often with difficulty that even a small audience could be gathered for the anniversary.
Among the friends and notables whom he met in Boston was Longfellow, who had already called on him in Camden; and Whitman was warm in eulogies of the old poet’s courteous manner and personality. Something of the burden of his first prophetic message had lifted from Walt’s shoulders, and with it some of his wrath against the popular poets of America. He had consequently become better able to express his sense of the real value of work like theirs when its secondary place was recognised.
There were others in Boston whom he also now discovered for the first time; notably the women of middle and later life, among whom he rejoiced to find some of those large, vigorous personalities whose absence he had lamented in the West.
In earlier days he had been alienated by the academic and Puritan qualities which still gave its principal colour, especially when seen from New York, to intellectual Boston. But both Boston and Whitman had changed—alike with the war and with the advance of time; the provincialism of the former had given place to broader views, and the nobler identification of New England with the whole interests of the nation; while the latter was now able more generously to estimate even New England’s shortcomings, and to recognise among its people that ardour and yearning for the ideal which had always been theirs, but warmed now and humanised, as he thought, by a new joyousness and breadth of tolerance. He felt a sunshine in the streets, which radiated from the men and women who traversed them. This effusive ardour of public spirit set him thinking of Athens in her golden days; and for the first time he, who had so much of the Greek in his nature, felt himself at home in Boston.
The visit was also memorable to him because it introduced him to the works of Millet, and, one may add, to the emotional significance of painting as an art. As I have before noted, New York only became a centre of art collections in comparatively recent years; and it was probably not till Whitman had sat for two hours before some of the Breton artist’s finest studies in the house of a Bostonian, that he recognised Painting as the true sister of music and of poetry.
It was fitting that this revelation should have come to the poet of Democracy from such canvasses as that of the first “Sower” and the “Watering the Cow”. Surcharged as they are with a primitive emotion new to modern art, the works of Millet reveal the inner nature of that great Republican peasant people whom Whitman always loved.
Much of the early summer, after his return, was spent at Glendale, whither the family from Whitehorse had now removed, Mr. Stafford having taken the store on the cross-roads, some three or four miles from his old home. Directly opposite to it there stands a Methodist chapel, and often on a Sunday morning the young people would laugh as they heard Walt, in the room above, angrily banging down his window sash at the first clanging of the bell. But behind the chapel is a dense wood, and here he spent many a long, happy day.
The heat of July was, as usual, very trying to him; and at the end of the month he accompanied Dr. Bucke on a visit to his old breezy haunts in Long Island. The farm at West Hills had passed out of the family; Iredwell Whitman, the last of Walt’s uncles to hold it, seems to have sold out about 1835. In the little burying ground there is a stone erected to his daughter Mahala, who died eight years later.
While in Boston he seems to have received propositions from the firm of Osgood and Company for the publication of a definitive edition of the Leaves, and about the beginning of September, after completing his manuscript at the home of his friends, Mr. and (the second) Mrs. Johnston, at Mott Haven, New York, he settled down in the New England capital to read proofs and to enjoy himself.
He stayed at the Bullfinch, close to Bowdoin Square, and frequented the water-side. Often he would take the cars which run through South Boston to City Point, whose pebbly, crescent beach is lapped forever by the Atlantic ripple. And to this place the lover of Whitman may well follow, for it holds memories of him.
On a summer’s evening, after dark, thousands of young Bostonians gather under the lamps, laughing and talking and listening to the band; but, beyond the zone of lights and mirth and music, one finds oneself at once in a mystical solitude. A long bridge or pier stretches out into the bay, terminating in Castle Island and grim Fort Independence; and wandering out along it, surrounded in every direction by distant lights, the illuminated dome of the State House rising afar in the west, and lights moving to and fro mysteriously upon the water, you feel the night wind blowing cool across the black gulf of sea as it carries to you distant sounds of merry-making. Very far away they seem, thus encircled in mysterious spaces which are peopled by sea voices and the stars. The light surf makes upon the shore its constant and delicious murmur—“death, death, death, death, death”—and the lights and the noises of life, with all its passing show, are mysteriously related in that murmur to the sane, star-lighted silence of eternity.
Whitman walked daily on the Common, watching the friendly grey squirrels, and becoming acquainted with each one in turn of the American elms under which he sat. Timber Creek had deepened his knowledge of the life of trees and little creatures since last he walked here with Emerson.
Emerson, too, he saw once again. Mr. Sanborn, the friend at whose trial he had been present on that former visit, took him out through the suburbs and the wooded country to Concord. It was Indian-summer weather, and the meadows, that late Saturday afternoon, were busy and odorous with haymaking; all things spoke of peace. Emerson came over for the evening to Mr. Sanborn’s house, and the two old friends sat silent in the midst of the talk.
Bronson Alcott, who had brought Thoreau to Brooklyn and had once compared Whitman with Plato, was of the company of illustrious and charming neighbours. The others talked, but Emerson leaned back in his chair under the light, a good colour in his old face, and the familiar keenness; and near by sat Walt, satisfied to watch him without words.
On Sunday the Sanborns and he went over to dinner. His place was by Mrs. Emerson, who entertained him with talk of Thoreau, but though he listened with interest, most of his attention belonged to his beloved host. More than ever, if that were possible, did Whitman lovingly recognise the character of his friend. He had not always been just to Emerson, nor had Emerson always maintained his first generosity; each had said of the other words one cannot but regret, but deeper than such words of partial criticism was the comrade-love which united them.
In a letter, written immediately after this visit to his friend Alma Calder, who had recently become the second Mrs. J. H. Johnston, Whitman wrote: “I think Emerson more significant and glorified in his present condition than in any of his former days”.
The whole family was present, and sitting quietly among them Whitman could understand the natural limitations which his household entailed upon the philosopher, and acknowledging these, felt the personal bond stronger than ever. The relation of the two men had been singular as well as noble, for it was the elder who had sought the younger out and affectionately acknowledged him, and through the years that followed the advances had been made by him.
Whitman’s attachment to Emerson had been one of love and reverence for his person, much more than of intellectual affinity. “I think,” he wrote a few years later to his Boston friend, Mr. W. S. Kennedy, “I think I know B. W. E better than anybody else knows him—and love him in proportion.” The evidence does not indicate a similar understanding on Emerson’s part, though the love between them was not unequal. To Emerson, as to Tennyson, Whitman remained “a great big something” of undetermined character.
Whitman met many friends, new and old, upon this visit, but of the old, Thoreau had long been dead; and the strong, homely sailor’s face of Father Taylor drew Boston no longer to the Seamen’s Bethel. Whitman himself attracted much attention as he sauntered along among the fashionable shoppers on Washington Street; tall, erect and noble, one could not pass him without notice. I have heard a lady tell how, being familiar with his portraits, she recognised him at once. Seeing him mount a car she followed, taking a seat where for several miles she could, without rudeness, study and enjoy that splendid ruddy face, through which, lamp-like, there shone and glowed an inner light of spiritual ecstasy.
And for Whitman himself, those were happy days. The paralysis and the other ailments, more or less serious and painful, by which it had been enforced, troubled him less than usual. In his little room at Messrs. Rand & Avery’s printing house, or out-of-doors in the woods with a fallen tree for his table, he was revising the proofs of his Leaves with a deliberation and particularity worthy of their final form.
For now this singular book, slowly built up through the continual inspiration, thought and labour of a quarter of a century, had come to its completion, and the final plates were to be cast. Or better, we may say that for the first time it was to be really published, all other efforts in that direction having been but tentative, and more or less unsuccessful. Hitherto, despised and rejected of publishers, it had issued with an innocent air from strange places, unvouched by any name which was recognised by the bookselling world. The edition of 1860 is the only exception; and almost immediately after its publication, the enterprising house which guaranteed it sank into ruins.
Now at last, the plan of the book had been, as far as health and strength permitted, brought to completion—a plan amended since the previous Boston visit, and qualified to admit those poems which had since been written, and at first designed for a supplementary book. The cargo was filled, and the good ship ready to sail.
After a visit to the Globe Theatre to see Rossi in “Romeo and Juliet,” and a supper with his co-operators, the printers and proof-readers, whose aid he was always eager to acknowledge, Whitman set out again for New York, returning home about the beginning of November. Late in the same month, the book, his vessel as he loved to think of it, set out upon its voyage; but in spite of favourable presages and a happy commencement, it was soon shrouded about in fog, which only yielded to a storm.
Some 2,000 copies were sold during the winter, but early in the New Year (1882) the trouble, which seemed to have passed over when the Postmaster-General decided that the book was not so obscene as to be “unmailable,” began to threaten anew. The Boston District Attorney, urged by certain agents of the Society for the Suppression of Vice—as though, forsooth, vice could be “suppressed”!—objected to the publication, and demanded the withdrawal of certain passages.
Whitman was hardly surprised. He had discussed these passages, or a certain number of them, with his own judgment; and it is possible that Mrs. Gilchrist’s view of them had also appealed to him. In his own judgment they were right, but he seems to have been willing to omit five brief items, amounting in all to nearly a page, from the incriminated “Children of Adam” section, if it would save the edition from further molestation. These he suggested might be cut out of the plates, and replaced by other cancelling lines which he would substitute. This was early in March.
But the Attorney was not to be so easily satisfied. He demanded the omission of lines in all parts of the volume, amounting to a total of eight or ten pages. This, Whitman emphatically refused; and as neither party would give way, Messrs. Osgood, without testing the case further, threw up their publication on the 9th of April. Their action was scathingly contrasted with that of Woodfall, the publisher of the letters of Junius, and of Mr. Murray, Lord Byron’s publisher, by W. D. O’Connor, in a letter to the New York Tribune. His indignant sense of literary justice had brought him once more to the side of his old friend, and although the former cordial relations seem hardly to have been re-established, the phantasmal but rigid barrier between them was crumbling away.
That Whitman was sorely disappointed by the issue of the affair, goes without saying, for he had counted much upon this edition. But District Attorneys and Societies for the Suppression of Vice were not likely to daunt him.
Binding a number of copies in green cloth, he issued them himself; for Messrs. Osgood had made over to him the printed sheets and plates. At midsummer, he transferred the latter to a Philadelphia firm—afterwards Mr. David McKay—who immediately brought out an edition which sold in a single day. Persecution had, as usual, assisted the cause, and for some months the sale continued brisk, bringing Whitman at the year’s end royalties to the amount of nearly ￡300.
The Osgood disaster was not the only menace to Whitman’s slender income during these years. The plates of the original Boston edition of 1860 were still extant, having been bought at auction by a somewhat unscrupulous person, who, in spite of Whitman’s protest, succeeded in putting a number of copies upon the market.
This affair was already worrying Whitman when he lay ill at St. Louis, and it was not till just before the publication of Messrs. Osgood’s edition that some sort of settlement with this Mr. Worthington was effected. The author seems to have accepted a nominal sum by way of royalty, and was dissuaded from seeking the legal redress for which at first he had hoped. The surreptitious sale of this spurious edition was, however, continued till his death.
Picture of Glendale Store, 1904.
GLENDALE STORE, 1904: WHITMAN OCCUPIED ONE OF THE ROOMS LOOKING OUT OVER THE VERANDAH
Much of the winter of 1881 to 1882 had been spent at Glendale; and during the following autumn he was busy with the proofs of Specimen Days and Collect, a volume of about the same size as the Leaves, and similar in appearance, which embraced the bulk of his prose writings up to that time, including a selection from the early tales and sketches. The plan of separation adopted in the Centennial edition, in which the supplementary volume consisted of both prose and verse, was now abandoned, and the whole of Whitman’s verse—with the exception of rejected passages which are numerous—was re-arranged and fitted together into the enlarged scheme of the Leaves.
This new arrangement is not without interest. First comes the prefatory section intended to prepare the reader, and to indicate the character of the book—it belongs largely, in order of time, to the later, more explanatory period. There follows the original poem, now known as “The Song of Myself,” with its assertion of the Divine and final Me—the inherent purpose and personality of the All—and its gospel of Self-Realisation. After this we have the poems of Sex—life’s reproductive energy—by which self-assertion is carried out towards society; and then of comradeship and the social passion. These complete the first section of the book, and, as it were, bring the individual to his or her majority. Henceforward he is a man and citizen.
There ensues a group of a dozen powerful poems—“The Open Road,” “The Broad-axe” and others—in which the life of ideal American manhood is celebrated, and the conception of America and her needs becomes more and more complete. In “Birds of Passage,” the loins are girded for noble perils, and here the middle of the volume is reached. There follows, “Sea-Drift” and “By the Road-side”; the former, a group of poems contemplative, in middle life, of the mysteries of bereavement and of death; the latter, full of questions, doubts and warnings, leading up to the “Drum-taps,” poems of war, of national consciousness and of political destiny.
“Autumn Rivulets” are discursive and peaceful after the storm; they introduce a group, including “The Passage to India,” in which the unity of the world is emphasised, a unity which is declared simultaneously by Whitman with the utterance of his thoughts of death. In “Whispers of Heavenly Death,” he gives expression to many moods, to insurgent doubts and to triumphant faith. They are followed by an Indian-summer of miscellaneous poems, “From Noon to Starry Night,” and the volume closes with the “Songs of Parting,” and the identical words which in 1860 he had set at the end.
There is little new in the book beyond the arrangement, and careful and final revision and readjustment of all the items to the unity of the whole. The main lines of the edition of 1860 are still followed; but since that version, most of the political poems have been added, and many of those which sing of battle and of death, with a considerable mass of the explanatory and philosophical material natural to later life.
All this has necessarily qualified the earlier work, and has made the task of revision and adjustment necessary. For Whitman had a profound sense of congruity and character, and his alterations were dictated by his original purpose of creating a book which his own soul might forever joyfully acknowledge and attest, and even perhaps in future ages continue. The book was his body, projected, out of his deepest realisation of himself, into type and paper, and it changed somewhat in all its parts as it grew to completion and became more perfect.