With the completion of the main body of his work, and before we pass to the details of his last years in Camden, a brief digression into wider fields may perhaps be permissible. For Whitman’s thought, though it is very consciously his, is interestingly related to that of the preceding century and of his own, and no study of him would be at all complete which left this fact out of consideration. Readers who prefer to follow the path of events will find it again in the next chapter.
While it is difficult to imagine a greater contrast than that between the Essayist on Man and the Singer of Myself, they were at least agreed as to the proper subject for human study.
Physically they were most dissimilar—Pope, a little, deformed, ivory-faced wit, all nerves and eyes; Whitman, a huge, high-complexioned, phlegmatic peasant-artisan. Between their thought lay the century of Rousseau, Goethe and Hegel, of Washington, Robespierre and Napoleon. And their mental contrast was as marked as their physical. It is clearly indicated in the formal character of their work: Pope’s, a mosaic of brilliant couplets; Whitman’s, a choral or symphonic movement.
Wholly lacking in the intellectual dazzle of the Augustan wits, Whitman’s strength lay rather in those naturalistically romantic regions of the imaginative world which in the eighteenth century were being rediscovered by certain provincial singers, the forerunners of the Lake-poets. In the verses of Scottish poets from Ramsay to Burns; in Macpherson’s “Ossian,” and, finally, in the work of two men who were Londoners but “with a difference”—the soul-revealing cries of Cowper and the lyric abandonment of Blake—there was restored to English poetry that emotional quality which had been banned and ousted by the self-conscious club-men of the eighteenth century.
Just as the passion of high conviction returns to English politics with Burke, and to English religion with Wesley, so it finds expression once again in the rhythmical impulse of Lyrical Ballads and the Songs of Innocence. There is here a new feeling for beauty, a new sense of the emotional significance of Nature.
With the return of that enthusiasm based upon conviction, which the sceptical Deism of Pope abhorred, there came a more elastic use of metre. For the movement of poetry should vary as the pulse varies under emotion. Passion now took the place of logic in the guidance of the rhythm of thought. And as the spirit of the poet lay open to the stars, his ear caught new and ever subtler rhythms, and became aware that every impelling motive for song has its own perfect and inalienable movement. His attention passed from current standards and patterns to those windy stellar melodies unheard by the town-bred Augustan ear. All this, with much more, is revealed in the work of the new poets, from Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley to Tennyson.
When Whitman came, his spirit was aware of this newly apprehended canon of poetic form. At first, he tried the medium of rhymed verses; but his were without inspiration. When self-expression became imperative he abandoned them.
For the poet, nothing can be more important than the emotional atmosphere which his verses create, for he is conveying rather moods than fancies, inspirations of the soul rather than thoughts of the intelligence. Eventually, it is the poet’s own personality or attitude of mind that most affects the world; and it seemed to Whitman that this must communicate itself through the medium of his thoughts by their rhythm or pulse of speech and phrasing. The manner of speaking means more almost than the matter spoken, because it is by the manner, and not by the thought, that the speaker’s attitude toward life is most intimately conveyed.
It need hardly be said that there are rhythms which suggest and evoke gladness and exaltation; others which call forth melancholy; others which predispose to lascivious passions, and so forth: the thought is older than Plato. Whitman wished to convey to his readers all that I have attempted to describe in the foregoing pages; his own attitude towards life, that of a fearless, proud, abysmal, sympathetic, wholesome man. And he found no medium among those in current use which seemed to him effective for his purpose.
He had to go back to the prophets of Israel, and the rhythm into which their message was put anew by the seventeenth century translators, to find a model. It was from them, and from a study of the movements of prose, but especially of speech, that he came to his own singular, and not inappropriate style. At the last definition, the appeal of Leaves of Grass is intended to be that of an intimate kind of speech. It would be interesting, in this connection, to compare Whitman’s manner with that of the other writers of his period who have most distressed the purists—Browning, Carlyle, Emerson and Meredith—but that field is too large for us to enter now.
Addington Symonds once said that Whitman had influenced him even more deeply than Plato; and the juxtaposition of the two names is as singular as it is suggestive. For while the “arrogant Mannhattanese” is far indeed from the founder of the Academy, there is something essentially Platonic in Whitman’s attitude toward poetry. For Whitman was a moralist in the highest sense. With Plato, he dreamed always of the Republic, and that dream was the moving passion of his life.
He would—at least in his earlier years—have said with Plato, in his Laws, “The legislator and the poet are rivals, and the latter can only be tolerated if his words are in harmony with the laws of the State”. But over the last phrase he would have laughed, adding, In my Republic the citizens think lightly of the laws!
Like Plato, he accused all the poets whom he loved best of an essential hostility to the Republic. Their whole attitude implied an aristocratic spirit, which discovered itself in their rhythms, and struck at the life of America. He would only admit such poets as are in harmony with the spirit of the Republic, and interpret the genius of America.
It was for America, then, that he made his chants; chanting them, as he hoped, in such fashion that they might forever nerve new soldiers for the battle which he saw her destined to maintain through all the ages against the ancient tyrannies of the past.
If one were to seek among modern writers for those whose genius is related to Whitman’s, one would, I suppose, name first Rousseau, with his moody self-consciousness, his great social enthusiasm, his religious fervour, and his passionate perception of beauty in Nature. And then, after Goethe, to whom I have several times referred in passing, one would add Byron, that audacious egoist, who, threatening the Almighty like some Miltonic Lucifer, fascinated the gaze of Europe.
But Whitman had almost nothing either of the morbid sentiment or dramatic skill of the French reformer, nor had he Byron’s theatrical and somewhat futile rhetoric of rebellion. He was indeed very much at peace with the cosmos; his confessions are frank, but impersonal; his egoism may be Satanic in its pride, but then for him, Satan, though he remains in opposition, is really an essential factor in the government of the worlds. Temperamentally he was nearer to George Sand; and, on at least one side of his nature, to Victor Hugo.
It is rather as a prophet than as a literary figure that we must compare him with his great contemporaries. On this side, he was obviously related to Millet, to Beethoven and to Wagner—but it seems simpler roughly to set him over against several men of his own craft who hold a European reputation—to Carlyle, Mazzini, Emerson, Morris, Browning, Tolstoi and Nietzsche.
With Whitman, Carlyle recognised the underlying moral purpose of the universe, and the organic unity or solidarity of mankind; but being himself a Calvinistic Jacobin of irritable nerves, these convictions filled him, not with a joyful wonder and faith, but with contempt and despair. He never saw humanity as the body of a Divine and Godlike soul; and though he was continually calling men to duty and repentance, he did so from inward necessity rather than with any anticipation of success. For he felt himself to be a Voice crying in the wilderness. Whitman worshipped the hero as truly as did Carlyle; but then he saw the heroic in the heart of our common humanity, where Carlyle missed it; hence his appeal was one of confidence, not despair.
For Mazzini, the word “duty” was not a scourge but a magician’s wand, because he believed. The Italian was not, like Carlyle, an iconoclast, but a messenger of good tidings; and if he carried a sword, it was in the name of the Prince of Peace. Like Whitman, he was conscious of the world-life pulsing through him; in himself he found the peremptory spirit of the Republic demanding from him both blood and brain. Like Whitman also, he looked to a comradeship of young men for the regeneration of his nation; and to a poet to come for the great words which alone can unite men and nations, creating the world anew in the image of Humanity. For them both, religion was the ultimate word—a religion free from the shackles of dogma, free in the spirit of the Whole—and it was a word which the world could only receive from the poets that are to be. But while thus similar in their aspirations, they were very different in temper and circumstances. For Mazzini was a fiery, nervous martyr to his cause, a Dantesque exile from the land of his love. And yet his appeal, at least in his writings, is not so intimate as is that of the less vehement apostle of liberty.
With Emerson, whose relationship to Whitman I have already discussed, there is the great contrast of temperament. For in him, passion seems to have played but little part. He is one of the noblest of those constitutional Protestants and individualists who are incapable of feeling the fuller tides of the catholic passion of social sympathy. His earnest and profound spirit seems to dwell forever in the sunny cloisters of a thoughtful solitude, far distant from life’s rough and tumble.
Browning’s belief that the immanent Divinity finds expression through passion, and is lost in all suppression of life; and his faith in the universal plan, which includes the worst with the best, relate his thought to Whitman’s. For them both, each individual life contains a part of the divine secret. It is the concrete personality of things which they seek to express, though in very different ways.
Browning astonished Carlyle by his confident cheerfulness. And his optimism was founded upon knowledge, or at least did not depend upon ignorance. Though he believed in the triumph of the divine element in every soul—the element of love—he recognised the reality of evil, and saw life as a battle.
But not as a battle between the body and the soul, or between vice and virtue: the conflict, for Browning as for Whitman, is ultimately between love as the inmost spirit of life, and all other virtues and vices whatsoever. Love alone “leaves completion in the soul,” and solves the enigmas of doubt.
Browning’s conception of a Democracy, in which all men should “be equal in full-blown powers,” and God should cease to make great men, because the average man would have become great, was set forth in some of the earliest work of a genius as precocious in its development as that of his master Shelley.
But it would be easy to exaggerate the relationship which I have indicated. For Browning was a cosmopolitan and delightful gentleman, who in his later years cultivated music and studied yellow parchments and the freaks of human nature, in a Venetian palace; while Whitman was sauntering through old age in the suburb of an American city, appearing by comparison uneducated, uncouth and provincial. Appearance is, however, deceptive, for the earth Walt smacks of is the autochthonous red soil of the creation of all things.
Tolstoi, aristocrat as he is by birth and education, is yet a peasant in his physical and spiritual character; a Russian peasant, with the moujik’s almost Oriental stubbornness of resignation and passivity. Like Whitman, he is one of the people, and in some respects he is an incarnation of Russia, as Whitman was of America. But while there are many obvious relations between the two men, their contrast is the more striking. Tolstoi has the Oriental tendency towards pessimism and asceticism. He sees the body and spirit in irreconcilable conflict. And similarly he opposes forever pleasure and duty; so that his is a message of the endless sacrifice of self.
An abyss of terror surrounds him, from which he can only escape by a life of resolute and loving self-devotion. His gospel is one of escape, and is in many respects nearer in spirit to Carlyle’s than to Whitman’s. Tolstoi’s detestation of the State is, doubtless, largely traceable to the military despotism under which he has lived.
There is a certain element of pessimism also, in the attitude of William Morris, as of Ruskin his master. But though he flings back the Golden Age into the thirteenth century, his gospel is really one of actual joy. When the citizen finds pleasure in his daily work, the State will prosper; such is his promise for the future, and his condemnation of the present. Carlyle urged men to work, in order to kill doubt, and silence the terrible questions; but Morris finds that the questions are really answered by work, if only it is done in the spirit of the artist, and in fellowship with others.
Like Whitman, Morris was one who seemed to his friends almost terribly self-sufficing; he could stand alone, they thought. But strong as he seemed in his solitude, he was the poet of fellowship, of a fellowship which is man’s fulfilment and immortal life. Though Whitman’s view of that life was more philosophical, and his personality had a more mystical depth, the two men had much in common, especially in the aggressive and elemental masculinity of their character, and their superb joy and pride in themselves.
It would be interesting to compare Whitman’s general position with that of Nietzsche; that most perplexing figure of young Germany in revolt from Hegel and all the past, from the restraint, system and conventions which threaten the liberty of the individual spirit. But Nietzsche is difficult to summarise; and time has not yet given us the perspective in which alone the general forms of his thought will become evident.
It is clear, however, that he expresses that spirit of rebellion which was so marked a feature of the first Leaves of Grass; a rebellion against all bondage, even though it call itself virtue and morality. And this, be it remembered, was always a part of the real Whitman; it was the side of the Square Deific which he has aptly named “Satan”.
Between Nietzsche’s “overman,” jealous of every tittle of his identity, and always a law unto himself, refusing to bow his neck to the virtues and vices of the “weaker brother”; and Whitman’s self-asserting Ego, there is the same striking resemblance. One can never omit the dogma of the sacredness of self-assertion, with the criticism of Christianity which it involves, from any statement of Whitman’s position. He evidently detested that plausible levelling argument, so potent for mischief to the race-life which it professes to guard—that one must be always considering the effects of example upon the foolish and perverse, and endeavouring to live down to their folly and perversity, instead of up to the level of true comradeship. Be yourself, say Whitman and Nietzsche, and do not waste your life trying to be what you fancy for the sake of other people you ought to be.
Whitman’s doctrine of equality is again really not unlike Nietzsche’s doctrine of inequality; for it only asserts the equality of individuals because of the overman latent in each one; and is different enough from the undistinguishing equalitarianism of popular philosophy.
But Whitman had the balancing qualities which Nietzsche lacked. As he said once to Mr. Pearsall Smith: “I am physically ballasted so strong with weightiest animality and appetites, or I should go off in a balloon”. In his case, self-assertion was not associated with mania; for it never snapped those ties of comradeship and love which keep men human, but became instead a bond for fuller and nobler relations with men and women.
The comparison with Nietzsche suggests the limits of Whitman’s Hegelianism. For though he once declared that he “rated Hegel as Humanity’s chiefest teacher and the choicest loved physician of my mind and soul”; and again, that his teaching was the undercurrent which fructified his views of life, yet it may well be doubted whether he ever really mastered the full Hegelian theory, or realised the futility of many of those generalisations in which German idealism has been so prolific. It was because Hegel saw life, both the Me and the Not Me, as a single Whole, and found a place for evil in his world-purpose, that Whitman hailed him as the one truly “American” thinker of the age. But in the individualism of Nietzsche is the partial corrective of Hegel’s position; and as I have suggested, Whitman would have accepted it as such.
Perhaps the foregoing very rough and ready comparisons may have thrown some light on the outstanding features of Whitman’s personal message and influence. But there remains another, which I have already suggested, and to which for a moment we must return.
Whitman was essentially a prophet-mystic, and while he derived nothing from most of the men with whom his thought is related, the indirect influence upon him of George Fox the Quaker is certain.
Fox’s distinguishing quality was his intense personal reality; there are few more vivid figures on any page of history. This seems to be due to the fulness of life which he realised, and could focus in his actual consciousness. From this he did not derive “advanced views” but vital power. And vital power is equally, and perhaps in fuller measure, characteristic of Whitman, manifesting itself by various signs in his daily life, and in the phrases of his book.
In Whitman, as in Fox, this was an attractive power of extraordinary force. Around Fox it created a Society of Friends; and one cannot doubt that sooner or later a world-wide Fellowship of Comrades will result from the life-work of Whitman.
Fox’s “Friends”—though the meaning of the title may originally have been “Friends of the Truth”—were real friends; united in a new ideal of communion. They shared the highest experience in common; meeting for the purpose of entering together into “the power of the life”.
And Whitman also realised that life at its highest is only revealed to comrades. His view of religion was even less formal than that of the early Quakers; but he, too, preferred to sit in silence with those he loved, realising that Divine power and purpose which was one in them.
Quakerism has not unfairly been spoken of as a spiritual aristocracy; there seems to be something essentially exclusive about it. On the other hand, it is essentially democratic and would exclude none; but the methods necessary to its conception of truth do not appeal to the many.
Similarly, the Fellowship of Whitman’s Comrades must be an aristocracy of overmen—if the words can be divested of all sinister association and read in their most literal sense.
Whitman recognised that his inner teachings could only be accepted by the few, and for them he set them forth. But for the many also, he had a message. And though the actual comrades of Whitman must be able to rise to his breadth of view and depth of purpose, that purpose embraces the whole world.
For the possibility of Comradeship is implicit in every soul; and there is none—no, not the most foolish or perverted or conventionally good—who is ultimately incapable of entering into it. The fellowship must be as essentially attractive as was the personality of Whitman himself; and if few should be chosen to be its members, yet all would be called.
Once realised as the one end of all individual and social life, such a Comradeship would transform our institutions and theories whether of ethics, politics, education or religion. In a word, it would change life into a fine art. For it could be no Utopian theory, but the most practicable of gospels. The seed has been already sown, and we may now await with confidence the growth of a tree through whose branches all the stars of faith will yet shine, and in whose embracing roots all the rocks of science will be held together.
Emerson and Longfellow died within six months of Whitman’s Boston visit; the former being buried in that graveyard at Sleepy Hollow where Walt had so recently stood by the green mounds that mark the resting-places of Hawthorne and of Thoreau. Carlyle had died a year earlier; Carlyle who so deeply impressed his impetuous pathetic personality upon all that he handled, and who was one of the principal literary influences upon Whitman during his later years, as Emerson had doubtless been an inspiration in the earlier. And while Walt had been working on the Osgood proof-sheets, James Garfield, the friend who used to hail him as he passed on Pennsylvania Avenue riding with Pete Doyle, shouting out some tag from the Leaves, and who had now become President of the United States, died amid the mourning of the nation.
Whitman’s daily life had been poorer these last two or three years, since Mrs. Gilchrist’s return to England, but new friends were continually added to his circle. Among these was Mr. W. S. Kennedy, who was working for awhile on one of the Philadelphia papers, and has since published a notable collection of reminiscences and memoranda of his relations with the Camden poet.
The Christmas of 1882 brought him a delightful gift in the friendship of a Quaker family. Mr. Pearsall Smith was a wealthy Philadelphia glass merchant, who with his wife had, till recently, been a member of the Society of Friends. He had had a remarkable career as an evangelist, both in his own country and in Europe; his eloquence and magnetic personality having been instrumental in changing the course of many lives. His wife also was an active worker in the fields of religion and philanthropy; and their home in Germantown—one of the suburbs of Philadelphia most remote in every sense from plebeian Camden—became a meeting-place for men and women interested and engaged in the work of reform. By this time, however, Mr. Pearsall Smith himself, finding in human nature more forces than were accounted for in the evangelical philosophy, had withdrawn from active participation in its labours.
The elder of his daughters, Miss Mary Whitall Smith, a thoughtful and enthusiastic college girl, came back from New England, where she was studying, fired by a determination to meet Walt Whitman. Her parents discovered with dismay that she had read the Leaves, at first with the consternation proper to her Quaker training, but later with ardour. Respectable Philadelphians, and especially members of the Society of Friends, were disposed to regard the poet as an outrageous, dangerous person, who lived in a low place, among disreputable and vulgar associates. His works were classed by them with the wares of obscene book-vendors, as absolutely impossible.
The parents’ consternation at their daughter’s resolve may well be imagined. But being wise parents, they were prepared to learn; and Mr. Smith eventually drove her over in a stylish carriage behind a pair of excellent horses.
Picture of Mary Whitall Smith (Mrs. Berenson) in 1884.
MARY WHITALL SMITH (MRS. BERENSON) IN 1884
They found Whitman at home. He descended slowly, leaning on his stick, to the little stuffy parlour where they were waiting; and with a kindly, affectionate amusement received the girl’s homage. Her father immediately and impulsively asked the old man to drive back and spend the night with them. This was the spontaneous kind of hospitality which most delighted Walt, and after a moment’s hesitation, in which he weighed the matter, he decided in favour of his new friends and their excellent equipage. His sister-in-law quickly produced the boots and other necessaries, and they set forth. Whitman loved to drive and to be driven, and as he sat on the back seat by his adoring young friend, he heartily enjoyed the whole situation. It was indeed enough to warm an old man’s heart.
After listening to her avowals, he recommended Miss Smith to study Emerson and Thoreau, but was evidently well pleased with her praise. Genuine devotion he always accepted.
He stayed a couple of days on this occasion; delighting in long drives along the Wissahickon Creek, and showing himself very much at home among the young people of the household.
From this time on, and until the family left for England in 1886, he was their frequent visitor; and in later years—while reverently remembering Mrs. Gilchrist, who died in 1885—he came to speak of Mary Whitall Smith as his “staunchest living woman friend”. His letters to her father also are evidences of a close intimacy between the two men. Thus it seems permissible to speak here at greater length than usual of their relations, which serve besides to illustrate others not less affectionate.
Often during the college vacations, when the house was filled with merry young folk, Whitman would sit in the hall to catch the sounds of their laughter, enhanced by a little distance; or from his corner, leaning upon his stick, he would look on for hours together while they danced. Spirits ran high on these occasions, and all the higher for his smiling presence. He enjoyed everything, and not least the wholesome incipient love-making which he was quick to notice, and encourage.
Often he was full of fun; and still, as in the old days, he sang gaily as he splashed about in his bath, a delighted group of young people listening on the landing without to the strains of “Old Jim Crow,” some Methodist hymn, or negro melody. At night, before retiring, he would take a walk under the stars, sometimes alone, sometimes with his girl friend, who could appreciate the companionableness of silence.
He was always perfectly frank, as well as perfectly courteous; if he preferred solitude he said so; and if, when at table, his hostess proposed to read aloud some long family letter, and asked him in an aside whether he would like to hear it, he would smile and answer, No.
He came to see them usually in his familiar grey suit; but in winter he wore one of heavier make, which was, however, provided with an overcoat only; indoors, he then put on the knitted cardigan jacket seen in some of his portraits. On one occasion, when some local literary people were invited to meet him, he appeared unaccustomedly conscious of his clothes. Uncomfortable at the absence of a coat, he tried the overcoat for awhile; but becoming very hot before the dinner was done, he beat a retreat into the hall; and there divesting himself of the burden, returned in his ordinary comfortable dress. Such incidents admirably illustrate his simple and homely ways.
Henceforward, though records are multiplied, the movement of Whitman’s life is less and less affected by outer events, and becomes yearly more private and elusive.
Picture of Whitman at sixty-two.
WHITMAN AT SIXTY-TWO
There is little to record of 1883, save that shortly after his sixty-fourth birthday there appeared the biographical study of Whitman by his Canadian friend. Like the earlier and smaller sketch by John Burroughs, Dr. Bucke’s volume was revised and authenticated by the poet, and is an invaluable record. Though fragmentary and far from exhaustive, it is written by one of the very few who can be said to have caught the real significance of the life and personality of the author of Leaves of Grass. That he fully understood Whitman, neither he nor his poet friend ever suggested; but then one must add that Whitman always laughingly asserted he did not by any means understand himself.
As a result of the sales of the Philadelphia edition and the royalties which they brought him, the old man was now enabled to carry a long-cherished plan into execution.
On March the 26th, 1884, he left his brother’s house, and removed to a little two-story cottage on Mickle Street, near by. Here he installed himself, at first with an elderly workman and his wife, and afterwards under the more efficient régime of Mrs. Mary Davis, a buxom New Jersey widow of comfortable presence, who brought into the house that homely atmosphere which Whitman had so long been seeking.
Downstairs, in the little front parlour, he carried on what remained to him of his own publishing—the old autograph editions which he had not entrusted to Mr. McKay; and over it, upstairs, was his bedroom, which he liked to compare with a big ship’s cabin. In the backyard were lilacs, which he loved; and a shady tree stood in the side-walk in front.
He found his little “shack,” as he called it, pleasant and restful, and his own. He was not much worried by the rasping church choir and the bells, which jangled cruelly loud for such sensitive hearing every Sunday; nor by the neighbourhood of a guano factory, which was noticeable enough to the most ordinary nose. Here his friends from far and near were frequent visitors, Dr. Bucke, John Burroughs and Peter Doyle among them; and in June came Edward Carpenter from England on his second visit.
Carpenter had now issued his slender green Towards Democracy, that strange, prophetic, intimate book, so unlike all others, even the Leaves which it most resembles. It was seven years since the two men had met, and the older had grown thinner and more weary-looking. He had not been worsted in the long struggle with time and illness, but they had left their mark upon his body.
The visitor renewed his first impressions of that complex personality; felt again the wistful affection mingled with the contradictiousobstinacy; recognised the same watchful caution and keen perception, “a certain artfulness,” and the old “wild hawk look” of his untameable spirit; but, beneath all, the wonderful unfathomed tenderness.
Whitman manifestly had his moods, “lumpishly immovable” at times, at times deliberately inaccessible. He took a certain wilful pleasure in denial, for the quality of “cussedness” was strong in him. And his friends admired his magnificent “No,” issuing from him naked and unashamed, just as mere acquaintances dreaded it.
But in other moods he was all generosity, and you knew in him a man who had given himself body, mind and spirit to Love, never contented to give less than all.
Among the topics of their conversations was the Labour Movement, in which Carpenter was actively interested. Whitman professed his belief in co-operation, at the same time reiterating his deeply-rooted distrust of elected persons, of officials and committees. He had lived in Washington; and besides, his feeling for personal initiative, his wholesome and passionate love of individuality, and its expression in every field, set him always and everywhere against mere delegates and agents. Above all things, he abhorred regimentation, officialism and interference. “I believe, like Carlyle, in men,” he said with emphasis. He hoped for more generous, and, as he would say, more prudent, captains of industry; but he looked for America’s realisation to an ever-increasing class of independent yeomanry, who should constitute the solid and permanent bulk of the Republic.
Regarding America from the universal point of view, as the standard-bearer of Liberty among the nations, he thought of Free-trade as a moral rather than a merely economic question. Free-trade and a welcome to all foreigners were for Whitman integral parts of the American ideal. “The future of the world,” he would say, “is one of open communication and solidarity of all races”; and he added, with a dogmatism characteristic of his people, “if that problem cannot be solved in America, it cannot be solved anywhere”.
In considering Whitman’s attitude towards the Social Problem, and especially the Labour Problem, whose development in America he had been watching since the close of the war, one must consider the conditions of his time and country. The Industrial Revolution, which is still in progress—and which in its progress is changing the face of the globe, disintegrating the old society down to its very basis in family life—has revealed itself to us in the last generation, much more clearly than to Whitman, who grew up seventy years ago in a new land.
We can see now that, though it may prelude a reconstruction of human society and relations in all their different phases, it is itself destructive rather than constructive. We recognise that it does not bring equality of opportunity to all, as its earlier observers had predicted; but that, on the contrary, it destroys much of the meaning of opportunity; the control of capital which is the motive power of modern industrial life, falling more and more into the hands of a small group of legatees, on whose pleasure the rest of the community tends to become dependent for its livelihood.
And we see the results of this new economic condition in the character of the populations of those vast cities into which the Industrial Revolution is still gathering the peoples of Europe and America. Among these, the spirit of individual enterprise and initiative is continually choked by the narrow range of their opportunity. Their lives become the melancholy exponents of that theory of the specialisation of industry against which the humanitarians of the age have all inveighed.
Serious as it was becoming in the New World, the Labour Question had not yet, in Whitman’s time, assumed an aspect so menacing as in the Old. Even to-day the proportion of Americans engaged in agriculture is four times as large as that which rules in Great Britain; and except in the North Atlantic States, the rural population does not seem to be actually losing ground; though its increase is much less rapid than that of the urban districts, into which more than a third of the population is now gathered, as against a fifth at the close of the war, or an eighth in the middle of the century. At the time of Whitman’s death nearly three-quarters of the total number of American farmers were the owners of their farms; and it was in these working proprietors, with the similar body of half-independent artisans who were owners of their houses, that he placed his social faith. These were, as we have seen, the men whom he regarded as citizens in the fullest sense.
In this view he was doubtless influenced by Mill, whose Principles of Political Economy he seems to have studied soon after its appearance in 1848. Roughly speaking, Mill had supplemented the teaching of Adam Smith, that individual liberty is the one sure foundation for the wealth of nations, by describing the proper sphere of social intervention in industrial matters. His picture of the future industry—the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers selected and removable by themselves—has been quoted as the socialist ideal.
And Mill was deeply influenced by the early Socialists. Their activity in Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century was so remarkable that it must have come under the notice of Whitman. Robert Owen, intoxicated with what was perhaps a rather shallow conception of the great truth of human perfectibility, had spent his life and wealth in unsuccessful but most suggestive social experiments. No less optimistic were his French contemporaries, St. Simon and Fourier.
In striking contrast with them and their doctrinaire systems, Proudhon, the peasant, who presents not a few points of agreement with Whitman, looked forward to voluntarism as the final form of society, and detested alike the theoretic elaboration and the sexual lubricity of his amiable but, on the whole, unpractical compatriots.
The failure of the risings of 1848, and the succeeding period of reaction, checked the socialist movement, and social reform was left for awhile to middle-class Liberalism, with its philanthropic ignorance of the real needs of the workers; until, in the last generation, the demands of labour, the pressure of poverty and the aspirations of social enthusiasts, have together furnished the motive power for a further struggle for the collectivist ideal of “intelligent happiness and pleasurable energy” for all.
This recent movement was at first most unequally yoked with an unbeliever in the brilliant, fatalistic theory of Karl Marx. Marx was a year older than Whitman; his acute Hebrew intellect was trained under the Hegelian system of thought, but he was apparently destitute of the finer historic sense, as well as of Hegel’s idealism. The humanitarian character of the social movement is now once more sweeping it far beyond his formulas; but in Whitman’s time the Marxian theory dominated Socialism.
In Long Island and New York, during the period of Whitman’s youth, the social condition was, on the whole, free from serious disorders, save those incident upon growth and rapid development. The spirit of Elizabethan enterprise, the practical achievement of brave and ardently conceived ideas, ruled in that democratic society wherein his habit of mind was shaped, and of which it was in large degree a natural product. Whitman’s youth and early manhood were little touched by evidences of any social disease so deep-seated as to encourage ideas of revolution. It is true that the vested interests of the slave party made themselves felt in New York; but neither to him nor to the “Free-soil” party did the anti-slavery movement suggest that other change which the political title they adopted brings so vividly before the mind to-day. “Free-soil” had for him no definitely Socialistic significance.
And it was only, as we have seen, after the war that the accentuation of the labour problem brought it into prominence in the American cities. Whenever, thereafter, Whitman, leaving the comparative quiet of his own surroundings, revisited the metropolis, or wandered to some great western centre of industry, he realised dimly the progressive approach of the crisis.
The increase in the accumulation of wealth was far outrunning even the rapid increase in population; but a large proportion of this wealth was being concentrated in a few hands which threatened to control the national policy. Manufacture was facilitated by the immense influx of immigrants who swelled the dependent city populations, and these immigrants coming more and more from the south-east of Europe, that is to say, from the most backward, ignorant and turbulent nations, promised by their presence to create a social problem in the North and Middle West not less acute if less extensive than that of the negro in the South.
Democracy looks with suspicion on the very poor, quoth Whitman, meaning that the poverty of the poor incapacitates them for citizenship. That, I think, is one of the great and final arguments against the policy of laissez faire under existing circumstances.
Things would go very well if left to themselves, says the philosophic theorist, and so even Whitman is often inclined to declare. But just as the organised party of slavery, in the fifty years before the war, refused to leave things to right themselves, so the party of property to-day interferes, more or less unconsciously, with the principle which it so loudly proclaims. It is because of the existence of innumerable sacrosanct parchments, customs and traditions, and all the subtly clinging fingers of mortmain, that laissez faire remains an empty phrase. If we could burn the parchments and loose the fingers, men might go free. But still for the sake of the nation’s health the poor would need to be assisted to rise out of the helpless condition into which society has allowed them to be thrust and held.
We have noted Whitman’s hearty approval of Canada’s benevolent institutions for the incapable; he fully recognised the duty of society toward such as these. And however hesitating his declarations on a subject which he was willing to leave to younger men, the main principle of his social economy, the right of each individual to be well born, carries us far from the policy of any party dominant to-day in our political life.
He recognised this right as far more fundamental than any secondary privilege which has been accorded to property for social convenience. And it is because this right continues to be denied to millions of future citizens, to the most serious peril of the whole Republic, and apparently for no better reason than that its recognition must impede the present rate of increase in material development, that the Socialist party has arisen in America. It is safe to say that it is the only party which deliberately aims at social amelioration and the equal opportunity of all citizens; and in this respect it seeks to realise Whitman’s ideal. In so far, however, as it clings to European theories, and identifies itself solely with a section of the nation, proclaiming a class-war in the interests, not of America or of Humanity, but of Labour—large, and inclusive as the term may be—it seems directly to antagonise that ideal.
Whitman would certainly be belied by the label of “Socialist”; but “Individualist” would as little describe him. He was, and must always remain, outside of parties, and to some extent in actual antagonism to them; for while recognising its purpose and necessity, he was essentially jealous of government and control. He wanted to see the Americans managing their own affairs as little as possible by deputy, and, as far as possible, in their own persons. That, I take it, is the only form of collectivism or social life which is ultimately desirable; and all political reform will aim at its practical realisation. It depends most of all upon the simultaneous deepening of social consciousness and sympathy and increase of the means and spirit of individual independence. Only by these simultaneous developments can we hope to see established that Society of Comrades which was the America of Whitman’s vision.
On the practical side of the Labour Question the old man occasionally expressed his emphatic dislike of certain sides of Trade unionism, and probably misunderstood, as he clearly mistrusted the movement. “When the Labour agitation,” he would say, “is other than a kicking of somebody else out to let myself in, I shall warm up to it, maybe.” And of the workman he added: “He should make his cause the cause of the manliness of all men; that assured, every effort he may make is all right”.
But he was a poor man himself, judged by modern standards, and he had a profoundly human and practical sympathy with the lives of the poor. He knew exactly where their shoe pinched. And thus, whatever his dislike of unionism, he was an admirable administrator of charity. His delight in giving made him the willing almoner of at least one wealthy Philadelphia magnate, and during severe winters he was enabled to supply his friends, the drivers of the street cars, with warm overcoats. In his diary, alongside of the addresses of those who purchased his books, are long lists of these driver friends, dimly reminiscent of the hospital lists which he used to keep in Washington.
Walt was always an incurable giver of gifts, and these, one may be sure, never weakened the manly independence of their recipients. His admiration for generous men of wealth, like George Peabody, has found a place in Leaves of Grass. For he saw that to love is both to give and to receive, and in that holy commerce both actions alike are blessed.
His interest in social work is shown in a hitherto unpublished letter written about this time to Mary Whitall Smith, who had married and gone to England, and who sent him accounts of the work being done among the poor of the East End through the agency of Toynbee Hall. Of this he writes at noon on the 20th of July, 1885: “The account of the Toynbee Hall doings and chat deeply interesting to me. I think much of all genuine efforts of the human emotions, the soul and bodily and intellectual powers, to exploit themselves for humanity’s good: the efforts in themselves I mean (sometimes I am not sure but they are the main matter)—without stopping to calculate whether the investment is tip-top in a business or statistical point of view.
“These libations, ecstatic life-pourings as it were of precious wine or rose-water on vast desert-sands or great polluted river—taking chances for returns or no returns—what were they (or are they) but the theory and practice of the beautiful God Christ? or of all Divine personality?”
The presidential election of the autumn of 1884 brought the long Republican régime to an end. During the twenty-four years of its continuance the old party cries had become almost meaningless, and the parties themselves ineffective, while political life had grown increasingly corrupt from top to bottom. The only practical demand of the hour was for a good government, and this required a change of party. Whitman, with a number of independent Republicans known as “Mugwumps,” supported the Democrat, Mr. Grover Cleveland. With his return to the White House the South may be said to have returned to the union, after a generation of bitter estrangement.
In the following summer Whitman had a slight sun-stroke, which rendered walking much more difficult. For several months he was a good deal confined to his little house, but his friends promptly came to the rescue with a horse and light American waggon.
He was overcome with gratitude for the gift—driving, as we have seen, was one of his delights—and he promptly began to make full use of his new toy. He soon disposed of the quiet steed, thoughtfully provided, and substituted one of quicker paces, which he drove furiously along the country roads at any pace up to eighteen miles an hour. Rapid movement brought him exhilaration, and he displayed admirable nerve upon emergency.
One page of a hand written letter from Whitman to Mr. R. Pearsall Smith, Mar. 4, 1884.
FAC-SIMILE OF PORTION OF LETTER FROM WHITMAN TO THE LATE MR. R. PEARSALL SMITH, MAR. 4, 1884
Though he was getting old, his capacity for enjoyment was as great as ever. He enjoyed everything, especially now that at sixty-five he was, for the first time in his life, a householder; he enjoyed his quarters, his friends, his food, and in a grim way his very suffering. “Astonishing what one can stand when put to one’s trumps,” he wrote on a black day. While he could rattle along the roads in his waggon, he was naturally happy enough, and he encouraged all opportunities for pleasure. He enjoyed his food, and he now relaxed some of the stricter rules of temperance which hitherto he had followed.
During periods of his life, as a young man and through the years at Washington, he was practically a total abstainer, and till he was sixty he only drank an occasional toddy, punch, or glass of beer. After that he followed the doctor’s advice and his own taste, enjoying the native American wines, and at a later period, champagne.
Stories of heavy drinking were circulated by the gossips, and were tracked at last to the habits of a local artist, who imitated Whitman in his garb, and somewhat resembled him. Walt’s head was remarkably steady, and it need hardly be said that he was always most jealous of anything which could dispute with him his self-control.
In 1885 and several subsequent years a popular caterer on the river-side, a mile or two below Camden, opened the summer season, about the end of April, with a dinner to some of his patrons, and Whitman was one of those who did fullest justice to his planked shad and champagne. For the latter he would smilingly admit an “incidental weakness”.
His temperance had given him a keen relish for fine flavours, and he enjoyed all the pleasures of the senses without disguise, and with a frank, childlike response to them. This responsiveness, more almost than any other thing, kept his physical nature supple and young. His consciousness was never imprisoned in his brain, among stale memories and thoughts whose freshness had faded; it was still clean and sensitive to its surroundings, and found expression in the noticeably fresh, rich texture of his skin.
It was well that he should practise these simple pleasures, for apart from his own ailments, which increased with time, he was still troubled with financial difficulties. The purchase of the house had not been exactly prudent, as it added considerably to his expenses, and the success of the Philadelphia edition was not long continued. The royalty receipts soon dwindled to a very little stream, and his other earnings—though he was well paid for such contributions as the magazines accepted, and was retained on the regular staff of the New York Herald—were not large.
Word went round among his friends, both in America and in England, that the old man was hard up again, and a second time there was a hearty response. A fund, promoted by the Pall Mall Gazette at the end of 1886, brought him a New Year’s present of ￡80, and individual friends on both sides of the sea frequently sent thank-offerings to him.
Some Boston admirers attempted at this time to secure for him a Government pension of ￡60 a year, in recognition of his hospital work. But Whitman disliked the plan, and though it was favourably reported upon by the Pensions Committee of the House of Representatives, he wrote gratefully but peremptorily refusing to become an applicant for such a reward, saying quite simply, “I do not deserve it”. His services in the Attorney-General’s Department seem to have been adequately paid, and one is glad the matter was not pressed. The hospital ministry could not have been remunerated by an “invalid pension”; it was given as a free gift, and now it will always remain so.
Picture of Mickle Street, Camden in 1890.
MICKLE STREET, CAMDEN IN 1890: THE LITTLE HOUSE ON THE RIGHT IS WHITMAN’S
From time to time special efforts were made by his friends to remove any immediate pressure of financial anxiety. Whitman, who was on the one hand generous to a fault, and on the other not without a pride which consented with humiliation to receive some of the gifts bestowed, manifested a boyish delight in money of his own earning, and it did his friends good to see his merriment over the dollars taken—six hundred of them—at his Lincoln lecture of 1886 in the Chestnut Street Opera House. By way of profit-sharing he insisted on presenting each of the theatre attendants with two dollars.
The repetition of the lecture in New York the following spring, at the Madison Square Theatre, before a brilliant company of distinguished people, including Mr. James Russell Lowell, “Mark Twain,” Mr. Stedman, and Whitman’s staunch admirer, Mr. Andrew Carnegie, brought him a similar sum; while Colonel Ingersoll’s lecture for his benefit in 1890 was yet more productive, and the birthday dinners also contributed something to his funds. But the mention of these financial matters must not be construed into a pre-occupation with the subject in the old man’s later years; it troubled his friends far more than it troubled him.
After the gift of the horse and waggon, Mr. W. S. Kennedy and others planned to provide Whitman with a cottage at Timber Creek. The idea delighted him; he craved for the pure air and the living solitude of the woods. But his health became too uncertain for the realisation of the scheme, and the remainder of his days was spent in Camden.
The little house in quiet, grassy Mickle Street, standing modestly between its taller neighbours, with the brass plate, “W. Whitman,” on the door, and the mounting-stone opposite, was becoming a place of frequent pilgrimage, and it has often been lovingly described.
During the earlier years, Walt’s favourite seat was at the left-hand lower window, and there the children would call out to him, and he would answer brightly as they went by to school. The walls and mantel-shelf were covered with portraits, and as to the books and papers, so long as he used the room, it was beyond the wit of any woman to keep them within bounds. But it was afterwards, when he was more confined to his bedroom, that they fairly broke loose.
He seems to have enjoyed this native disorder, for in the big, square, three-windowed upper room they occupied not only the shelves and chairs and table but the floor itself. “His boots,” says a friend—who, when Mrs. Davis was out, used to effect an entrance at the window to save her host descending the stairs—“his boots would be standing on piles of manuscript on a chair, a half-empty glass of lemonade or whiskey toddy on another, his ink-bottle on still another, his hat on the floor, and the whole room filled with an indescribable confusion of scraps of paper scrawled over with his big writing, with newspapers, letters and books. He was not at all eager to have order restored, and used to grumble in a good-natured way when I insisted upon clearing things up a bit for him.”
He liked to think and speak of the room as his den or cabin; it was his own place, and bustling with his own affairs. Here were his old-time companionable books: the complete Scott of his youth, and a volume of poets which he used in the hospitals; his friend Mr. E. C. Stedman’s Library of American Literature; studies of Spanish and German poets, and Felton’s Greece; translations of Homer, Dante, Omar Khayyam, Hafiz, Saadi; Mr. Rolleston’s Epictetus—a constant friend—Marcus Aurelius and Virgil; with Ossian, Emerson, Tennyson and Carlyle, and some novels, especially a translation of George Sand’s Consuelo; and last, and best read of all, Shakespeare and the Bible. The book of Job was one of his prime favourites in the beloved volume which was always by him in later years.
Perilously mingled with the papers was wood for his stove, over whose crackling warmth he would sit in the cold weather, ensconced in his great rattan-seated, broad-armed rocker, with the wolf-skin over it; his keen scent relishing the odour of oak-wood and of the printer’s ink on the wet proofs which surrounded him.
Visitors usually waited in the room below for his slow and heavy step upon the stairs. There the canary sang its best, as though to be caged in Whitman’s house was not confinement after all; and a bunch of fragrant flowers stood on the window-sill. A kitten romped about the premises, which were inhabited besides by a parrot, a robin, and a spotted “plum-pudding” dog; not to mention Mrs. Davis, and eventually her two stepsons. One of these, Warren Fritzinger, who had been a sailor and three times round the world, afterwards became Walt’s nurse, while his brother Harry called his first child Walt Whitman, to the old man’s delight.
Among the visitors was a young Japanese journalist, who afterwards published an amusing but ill-advised record of their conversations, a document which seems to the English mind somewhat more injudicious than other Whitmanite publications, which certainly do not err on the side of reticence. After his first visit, Mr. Hartmann maintains that Walt shouted after him, “come again,” and this injunction from time to time he fulfilled, na?vely recording his own desperate attempts to cope with the long silences which threatened to overwhelm his forlorn sallies into all conceivable regions of conversation.
The older man would sit absent-mindedly, replying with an ejaculation or abruptly clipped phrase, or impossible sentence; but chiefly with his monosyllabic “Oy! oy?” which served, with a slight inflection, for almost any purpose of response. They say that Whitman grew garrulous, or at least less laconic, in his old age; but Mr. Hartmann hardly found him so.
One day, when Mrs. Davis was absent, they lunched together on “canned lobster” and Californian claret in the kitchen. The sun shone on the grass in the little back garden, on the pear-tree half-smothered in its creeper, and the high boarded fence; and on the hens, poking in and out through the open door, and recalling the old farm life at West Hills. Whitman talked of the West, and of Denver, his queen-city of the West.
Over another similar meal, he declared his love for the Heart of Midlothian, and his distaste for the gloomy poets from Byron to Poe. They discussed music among their many topics. Mr. Hartmann declared himself a Wagnerian, but Whitman confessed his ignorance of the “music of the future”; Mendelssohn, of course, he knew; and in later life he had discovered Beethoven as a new meaning in music, and had been carried out of himself, as he says, seeing, absorbing many wonders. But he was brought up on the Italians; it was from Verdi and his predecessors, interpreted by Alboni, Bettini and others, that he had learnt the primal meanings of music, and they always retained his affection.
About the middle of May, 1887, a sculptor, who had already studied Whitman in the Centennial year, came on from Washington to Mickle Street. Mrs. Davis sided some of the litter in the parlour; and the old man sat for him there as amiably as ten years before in the improvised studio on Chestnut Street.
They talked much of the President, on a portrait of whom Mr. Morse had been working. Whitman had a high opinion of Mr. Cleveland, and displayed a lively interest in all the personal details his friend could supply.
During the sittings Herbert Gilchrist arrived from England, where his mother had died of a painful disease some eighteen months earlier; and he set up his easel also. Callers came from far and near; while dozens of children entered with a word or message from the street, and older folk looked in at the window.
Whitman was not very well even for him, and he missed his solitude. But he was a delightful and courteous host. The three men often lunched together, while several English visitors—taking Whitman on their tour even though they missed Niagara—sat down to a bite of beef, a piece of apple-pie, and a cup of tea poured out by the reverend host in the hot little kitchen.
Good Mrs. Davis watched her old charge and friend with some anxiety, as this constant stream of visitors flowed in and out; but she herself rose more than equal to every emergency. She had for lieutenant a coloured char-woman, born the same day as Whitman, who felt herself for that reason responsible in no ordinary degree for the general appearance of the premises. The sculptor and she often found themselves in conflict. As for his clay, she disdained it along with the whole genus of “dirt”. She succeeded in white-washing the delightful moss-covered fence, and would, he felt sure, have liked to treat both him and his work in the same summary fashion. They debated theological problems together, to Whitman’s amusement, and he would have it that Aunt Mary came out of these encounters better than the artist.
“How does your Satan get work to do,” the latter would ask, “if God doeth all?”
“Never you fear for him,” she retorted. “He’s allers a-prowlin’ around lookin’ fer a chance when God’s back is turned. There ain’t a lazy hair on his head. I wish,” she added significantly, “I could say as much for some others.”
Beside Aunt Mary other characters appear upon the pages of his friends’ journals; notably a garrulous, broad-brimmed Georgian farmer, who had served in the Confederate army. He was the father of a large family, which he had brought up on the Leaves. As for himself, he had the book by heart, and was never so happy as when reciting his favourite passages at Sunday School treat or Church meeting. He knew Emerson’s writings with almost equal intimacy, but complained that these set his soul nagging after him, while Whitman’s were soothing to it. With Walt he declared that he loafed and invited his soul; with Waldo, his soul became importunate and invited him.
Meanwhile, he admitted, his farm ran more to weeds than it should. Doubtless, during his pilgrimage the weeds prospered exceedingly; for he stayed long, and sad to say, in the end he went away a “leetle disappointed”. “I have to sit and admire him at a distance,” he complained, “about as I did at home before I came.” Walt liked him, and was amused by his talk, but his advice, his criticism and his interpretations to boot, were overmuch for a weary man.
There came one day a “labour agitator,” who required an introduction or testimonial of some sort from Whitman; and he also went away disappointed. In answer to all his loud-flowing, self-satisfied declarations, Whitman merely ejaculated his occasional colourless monosyllable; and when at last the discomfited man took his leave, the poet’s absent-minded “Thanks!” was more ludicrously and baldly opportune than intentional.
Humorous as they appeared at the time, there was another side to interviews of this character; for it began to be noised about that Whitman was quite spoilt by his rich friends, and had lost his interest in and sympathy with the American working-man. This was due, of course, to a complete misunderstanding. The old fellow who lived in his “little shack” on Mickle Street, and dined in Germantown in his cardigan jacket, might have a world-reputation, but he was not forgetful of the people from among whom he sprang and to whom he always belonged.
At the same time it is true, as we saw, that he did not himself profess to understand or to approve the party organisation of labour. He was rather inclined to sit in his corner and have faith, and to listen to what the younger men had to say. In any case, he saw no remedy for present troubles in the exploitation of class feeling; he could see no help in urging the battle between two forms of selfishness.
Generosity and manhood were his constant watchwords, whether for labour or for the nation. No circumstances, he would say, sitting in his room broken by the suffering of years, can deprive a hero of his manhood. But he would add his conviction that the Republic must be in peril as long as any of her sons were being forced to the wall, and his wish that each “should have all that is just and best for him”.
The sculptor and his sitter had many a long evening chat together, the shadows of the passers-by cast by the street light and moving across the blind. The old man’s mellow and musical, but somewhat uncertain, voice filled at these times with a confidential charm.
One night he wrote out a tentative statement of his general views, declaring for Free-trade, and for the acknowledgment of the full human and political equality of women with men. He regarded the world as being too much governed, but he was not against institutions in the present stage of evolution, for he said that he looked on the family and upon marriage as the basis of all permanent social order. He seems to have disliked and even condemned the practices of the American Fourierist “Free-lovers,” though Love’s real freedom is always cardinal in his teachings. Anything like a laxity in fulfilling obligations, but especially the ultimate obligations of the soul, was abhorrent to him.
He was not a critic of institutions; and he accepted the work of the churches and of rationalism as alike valuable to humanity. He added to his statement various personal details; saying, half-interrogatively, that he thought if he was to be reported at all, it was right that he should be reported truthfully. This feeling was undoubtedly very strong with him from the day when he wrote anonymous appreciations of the Leaves in the New York press.
Talk turned sometimes to the Washington days, to Lincoln’s yearning passion for the South, to the affectionate admiration felt by the union veterans for the men and boys who fought under Lee, and to the terrible rigidity of the Southern pride. Such talk would often end in reminiscences of the hospitals; and Whitman told his friend that he would like him to cut a bas-relief showing Walt seated by a soldier’s cot in the wards. It had been his most characteristic pose, if one may use the word; and such a study would have shown him at his own work, the work in which he was most at home, surrounded by the boys who were his flesh and blood.
During the first years of his sojourn among them, some of the young men of Camden had founded a Walt Whitman Club; and year by year a group of intimate friends was springing up about his own door.
Chief of these was Mr. Horace Traubel, whose life became so inextricably interwoven with Whitman’s last years that he has rightly been called the old poet’s spiritual son. He was one of the first of Walt’s Camden acquaintances. How or when they met, neither could remember; looking back to the summer evenings when the lame, white-haired man and the fair lad sat together on the steps of the Stevens Street house, it seemed as though they had always been friends.
Another of the group was Mr. T. B. Harned, Traubel’s brother-in-law, an able lawyer and lover of books, whose house became a second home for Whitman after the removal from Philadelphia of his friends the Pearsall Smiths. These two gentlemen, with Dr. Bucke, eventually became Whitman’s executors; better than anything else, this shows the confidence which their old friend reposed in them.
On his sixty-ninth birthday—Friday, 31st May, 1888—his Camden friends and others met him at dinner at Mr. Harned’s. Two days later he was there again, and Dr. Bucke, arriving unexpectedly, was of the party.
Walt had come in his carriage, and afterwards drove the doctor to the ferry. Thence he made his way to a point where, urging his horse into the river, he had nothing but water and sky before him, all filled with the sunset glory. He sat for an hour absorbing it in a sort of ecstasy.
Returning home, he felt that he had been chilled, and recognised intimations of a paralytic attack—the seventh— as he went to bed. He quietly resisted this alone. In the morning he had two more slight strokes, and for the first time temporarily lost the power of speech.
This was Monday, and all through the week he lay close to death. Dr. Bucke had returned, his friends entertaining no hopes of his recovery. But the end was not yet.
Even in the midst of the uncertainty he was determined to complete the work he had in hand. Every day he contrived to get downstairs, and every evening he turned over the proof-sheets of a new volume, which Horace Traubel brought with him from the printer’s on his way back from the city. From this time on, Traubel was his daily visitor, his faithful and assiduous aid.
Slowly the old man began again to improve, but he never regained the lost ground. His friends found him paler than of old, with new lines on his face, and a heavier expression of weariness. The horse and carriage were no longer of service, and had to be sold; in the autumn a nurse and wheel-chair took their place. The increased confinement troubled him most of all, so that he became jealous of the tramp with his outdoor life.
Hand written text from two postcards which Whitman sent to Mrs. Berenson, 1887-1888.
FAC-SIMILES OF POST-CARDS FROM WHITMAN TO MRS. BERENSON, 1887-8
Altogether, as he wrote to his friends, though holding the fort—“sort o’”—he was “a pretty complete physical wreck”. O’Connor, too, was now paralysed and near his end; the two old friends, similarly stricken, were once again exchanging greetings, though separated now by a whole continent. In O’Connor’s case, however, the brain itself was also giving way. Walt followed all the illness of him who had been in some respects his best comrade with pathetic interest, until, returning from California to Washington, the broken flesh gave freedom at last to the man’s fiery spirit.
Whitman grew somewhat more querulous in these later days, with the increase of pain and discomfort; for from this time on one may almost say that he was slowly dying. Not that he complained or was inconsiderate, but little things caused him greater irritation, though only for a moment.
Nothing is more notable in Whitman’s nature than the short duration of his fits of quick-flaming wrath. They flashed out from him in a sudden word, and passed, leaving no trace of bitterness or resentment behind.
An example of this is afforded by his behaviour toward the unexpected and vehement assault upon him by a former admirer, Mr. Swinburne. Having once acclaimed Whitman as the cor cordium of the singers of freedom, he now consigned him to the category of the Tuppers; opining that, with a better education, he might perhaps have attained to a rank above Elliott the Corn-Law rhymer, but below the laureate Southey. According to Mr. Swinburne’s revised estimate, Whitman was in short no true poet; and as for his ideal of beauty, it was not only vulgar but immoral. The attack roused Whitman to snap out, “Isn’t he the damnedest simulacrum?” but that was all. The affair was dismissed, and he only regretted that, for his own sake, Swinburne had not risen higher.
The rather contemptuous reference to Whitman’s deficient education recalls the first criticism passed upon the Leaves. Their author was gravely commended to the study of Addison, and to tell the truth, this has been about the last word of a large number of academic persons from that day to this. Their advice, when acted upon, nearly ruined Robert Burns; it had little effect upon Whitman, though it was not neglected.
But Mr. Swinburne’s attack reminds one also of something more important even than “Addison”; the antithesis and opposition which exists between two great orders of poets, of which his friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Whitman himself may be taken as the types. The Blessed Damozel is in another world from any page of the Leaves; and there is almost nothing which the two poets seem to share. Mr. Swinburne did good service, in so far as he pointed the contrast; but he confused it by declaiming against the prophet, and extolling the sonneteer.
The field may not so be limited; the exile of Byron, Emerson and Carlyle from the brotherhood of poets, though proclaimed by Mr. Swinburne, can hardly be enforced. For as Whitman has suggested, there are, inevitably, two kinds of great poetry: one corresponding, as it were, to the song of the Nightingale, and another to the flight of the Eagle. He himself has nothing of the infinitely allusive grace of the former, the sonnet-twining interpreters of the romantic past, the painters of subtle dream-beauties and fair women whose faces are the faces of unearthly flowers wrought purely of the passions of dead men.
But they again have nothing of his appeal to the heroic and kingly spirit that confronts the equally romantic future, grappling with world-tragedies and creating the new beauty of passions hitherto unborn. Doubtless the greatest poets unite these two orders, reconciling them in their own persons; but such are the very greatest of all time. I do not think that Whitman himself would have admitted a claim on his behalf to be counted among them.
The sheets he had been correcting with Traubel’s aid, in the crisis of his illness, were those of November Boughs, a volume composed, like Two Rivulets, of prose and verse. It appeared in November, 1888. Among its prose papers are sympathetic studies of Burns and of Elias Hicks, with an appreciation of George Fox. There are also many reminiscences, notably of the Old Bowery Theatre, and of New Orleans; and most interesting of all, a biographical study of the origins and purpose of the Leaves themselves.
This Backward Glance o’er Travel’d Roads has far more of modesty in it than his earlier writings, which were necessarily occupied with self-assertion. In his old age he shows himself a little alarmed at his more youthful readiness to take up the challenge which he had seen Democracy and Science throwing down to Poetry. He recognises with clearer vision than many of his friends, his own weakness in poetic technique, and the experimental nature of his work in poetry. But he does not pretend to doubt its importance; for, as he avers, it is the projection of a new and American attitude of mind. He is not without confidence also, that his book will prove a comfort to others, since it has been the main comfort of his own solitary life—and he believes it will be found a stimulus to the American nation of his love.
The poems of the new collection are all brief and many of them are descriptive. For the rest, they are mainly the assertions of a jocund heart defying the ice-cold, frost-bound winter of old-age, and waiting for the sure-following spring. Meanwhile, he enjoys the inner mysteries, and the enforced quiet of these later days, these starry nights; living, as he quaintly says, in “the early candlelight of old-age”. To him they sometimes seem to be the best, the halcyon days of all.
Not from successful love alone,
Nor wealth, nor honor’d middle age, nor victories of politics or war;
But as life wanes, and all the turbulent passions calm,
As gorgeous, vapory, silent hues cover the evening sky,
As softness, fulness, rest, suffuse the frame, like freshier, balmier air,
As the days take on a mellower light, and the apple at last hangs really finish’d and indolent-ripe on the tree,
Then for the teeming quietest, happiest days of all!
The brooding and blissful halcyon days!
He often reviews his past, so seemingly purposeless and incoherent, and yet so profoundly urged from its source within toward the unseen goal. Still before him, he sees endless vistas of the eternal purpose. The secret souls of things speak to him; the restless sea betrays the unsatisfied passion of the Earth’s great heart; the rain bears love back with it to the mountains whence it came. Everything instructs him, for he remains eager to learn—criticism and rejection at least as much as acceptance.
Sometimes the long process of dying—the painfully prolonged separating of a Body and Soul which were more intimately wedded than are others—leaves its mark upon the page; as in a brief note where he states simply that his solemn experiences at this period are unlikely to occur in any other human life. He felt himself solitary even in his pain. But this was a solitude hallowed and supported by the Everlasting Arms.
Though often sleepless and suffering, he kept, upon the whole, a cheery business about him, working to the end. But silence now predominated in his days, and his craving for it increased. In the evening, Traubel would come in and sit beside him, watching his face profiled against the evening light. He had grown to feel the old man’s mood, and had learnt to say nothing. After an hour or two he had his reward; Walt would bid him good-bye with a smile, saying, “What a good talk we’ve had”. For neither of them wanted words.
Through the winter and spring of 1888 to 1889 he remained house-tied, anchored in his big chair by the fire; “every month letting the pegs lower,” he wrote to his friends. But in June he got out and about in his wheel-chair, and in August crossed the ferry to be photographed, immensely delighted at the evidences of gaiety and prosperity which met him everywhere. America, he would say, is laying great material foundations; the sky-climbing towers will arise in good time.
Picture of Whitman at seventy.
WHITMAN AT SEVENTY
The birthday dinner, which he did not altogether approve, became this year a public function, and was held in the largest of the Camden halls. He was seventy, and the day was but doubtfully propitious. However, he would not disappoint his friends, and arrived when the meal was over.
He looked weary, as well he might, but the human contact and the atmosphere of love and fellowship warmed and refreshed him. The messages of congratulation came from far and from many, from William Morris among the rest. Walt wore a black coat, which was almost unprecedented, and hid himself behind a great bowl of flowers, enjoying their colour and scent, sipping at his champagne, and tapping applause with the bottle whenever he approved a sentiment. One remembers how he used to detest and escape from all lionising, and to-night, after the praises and the enthusiasm were concluded, he said laughingly to his nurse that it was very well, but there was too much “gush and taffy”.
That spring he had been too ill to celebrate the Lincoln anniversary, but in the following, after a struggle with influenza, he delivered it for the last—the thirteenth—time.
Hoarse and half-blind, he crossed the river, assisted everywhere by willing hands, and with great difficulty climbed the long stairs to the room on South Broad Street, where Horace Traubel’s Contemporary Club held its meetings. Refusing introduction, he took his seat on the platform, put on his glasses, and got immediately to business, reading with a melodious voice and easy manner.
He was over in the city again for his next birthday celebration, and after the dinner, Colonel Ingersoll made a long, impassioned tribute to his friend. The comradeship between them was strong and satisfying to both; Whitman was always in better spirits after a call from the colonel. “He is full of faults and mistakes,” he said once to an English friend, “but he is an example in literature of natural growth as a tree”; adding, “he gives out always from himself.”
Their attitude toward questions of religion was often antagonistic, and on this occasion, after the speech, Whitman made a sort of rejoinder. While gratefully acknowledging his friend’s appreciation of Leaves of Grass, he pointed out that Ingersoll had stopped short of the main matter, for the book was crammed with allusions to immortality, and was bound together by the idea of purpose, resident in the heart of all and realising itself in the material universe. He turned to Ingersoll, demanding, “Unless there is a definite object for it all, what, in God’s name, is it all for?” And Ingersoll, shaking his head, replied, “I can’t tell. And if there is a purpose, and if there is a God, what is it all for? I can’t tell. It looks like nonsense to me, either way.”
From this intellectual agnosticism no argument could dislodge a mind like Ingersoll’s, for noble as it was, it was limited by its own logic, and to logic alone, working with the material of merely intellectual knowledge, the universe must inevitably remain a riddle. Whitman, recognising a more perfect faculty of reason, and cognisant of a field of transcendent knowledge which Ingersoll had never known, was able to realise a purpose in this, which to Ingersoll seemed only nonsense.
For the divinely creative imagination, when it is awakened, discovers in all things the meanings of creative thought. And personality, when in its supreme hours it transcends the limitations of human knowledge, and enters the consciousness of the Whole, discovers the meaning of immortality, and the indestructibility of the soul. Such flights are naturally impossible to the pedestrian faculties of the mind.
Ingersoll spoke again in Philadelphia, in the same vein and on the same subject, in October. He had a large audience of perhaps two thousand persons in the Horticultural Hall, and Whitman was present on the platform.
Taking up his subject somewhat in the manner of O’Connor in the Good Gray Poet, the orator denounced the hypocrisy and parochialism of American opinion, and proclaimed the Divine right of the liberator, genius. He justified “Children of Adam,” and gave in his adherence to the theory of free rhythm which is exemplified in the Leaves.
Alluding to the subject of their discussion after the recent dinner at Reisser’s, he declared it impossible for him to make any assertion of immortality; but admitted that Hope, replying to the question of Love over the grave, might proclaim that “before all life is death, and after death is life”.
After the fine, but, in cold type at least, the over-florid peroration descriptive of the atmosphere of Whitman’s work, the applause was dying away, and the people rising to go, when the old poet signalled for them to be detained, and saying that he was there himself to offer the final testimony to and explanation of his writings, if they would look at him and understand, he gave thanks to them and to the orator, and bade them all farewell.
Picture of Robert G. Ingersoll.
ROBERT G. INGERSOLL, FROM A PRINT
The whole scene presents a curiously suggestive picture. And Whitman’s situation was a most singular one. His friends had arranged a benefit lecture on the Leaves by the most eloquent eulogist in America. It is true the book is not identical with Whitman, but it would be difficult to separate the Leaves from the man. And here was the man, apparently of his own free will, receiving the eulogy and applause in person and the gate-money by deputy.
The pious Philadelphians had expressed their disapproval of the lecturer, his iconoclastic fervour and agnosticism, by refusing him the use of the most commodious hall, and their opposition had encouraged Walt to stand at his friend’s side. But apart from this, his presence illustrates some of the characteristics of his nature, his child-like and sometimes terrible love of directness in the relations of life, and his frank eagerness for appreciation.
We have seen already that he could learn from criticism, and there is a story of Dr. Bucke’s which is too good to omit, though it entails a slight digression. It was against the awkwardness, not the severity, of his literary surgeons that he would protest with a quiet humour. After one of their operations, more painful than usual, in his slow, slightly nasal drawl, he related how a Quaker was once set on by a robber in a wood. The fellow knocked his passive victim to the ground, rifled him thoroughly, and “pulling out a long knife proceeded to cut his throat. The knife was dull, the patience of the poor Quaker almost exhausted. ‘Friend,’ said he to the robber, ‘I do not object to thee cutting my throat, but thee haggles.’”
But while accepting blame with serenity, he yet preferred praise; understanding praise above all, though even ignorant praise was hardly unwelcome. Praise not directly of himself, be it understood—that often made him uncomfortable; but of the book, his alter ego, his child. For the book was, besides, a Cause, and that the noblest; and even vain applauding of it sounded, in the old man’s ears, like the tramp of the hosts of progress; in whose ranks there must needs follow, let us admit, a number of enthusiastic fools.
Of such, certainly, Ingersoll was not one. He saw in the book much of what Whitman had put there; and especially he understood how it had been written under the stress of an emotion which finds its symbol in that banner of the blue and stars, which he so happily described as “the flag of Nature”.
Other men have given themselves out to be a Christ, or a John the Baptist, or an Elijah; Whitman, without their fanaticism, but with a profound knowledge of himself, recognised in a peasant-born son of Mannahatta, an average American artisan, the incarnation of America herself. “He is Democracy,” quoth Thoreau; and when he sat with a pleased indifference under the eloquent stream of Ingersoll’s panegyric, he was only testifying anew to his whole-hearted, glad willingness to give himself, body and mind, for the interpretation of America to her children. But none the less, it was a singular situation; and, doubtless, Whitman, who was not by any means obtuse, felt it to be such.
His last birthday dinner was held in the lower room at Mickle Street after a winter of illness—“the main abutments and dykes shattered and threatening to give out”—broken by an occasional saunter in his wheelchair with the welcome sight of some four-masted schooner on the river, and by the visits of his friends.
He was still himself, however. An English admirer had recently been astounded to find the irrepressible attractive power of the old man. He was brought downstairs, weak, after a bad day, to meet some thirty of his friends.
Walt himself started the proceedings with a toast to the memory of Bryant, Emerson and Longfellow, and to Tennyson and Whittier, living yet; for the fact that Whittier strongly disapproved of the Leaves in no way separated him from Whitman’s affectionate esteem. Rejoicing over his big family gathering, he wistfully remembered the absent. Doyle had not been to the house for many months. Perhaps he was a little jealous of new friends, and resented even being thought of as a stranger by Mrs. Davis. O’Connor was dead, and so was Mrs. Gilchrist, and there were many others not less dear. Some who were far away sent their greetings, Tennyson and Symonds among the rest; and there were the usual warm congratulatory speeches.
The host was sometimes absent-minded, and sometimes, according to the record, oddly garrulous. But the talk about the table was often of the deepest interest. Dr. Bucke was present, and Whitman and he had a friendly bout over Leaves of Grass. The poet would not accept the doctor’s interpretation, or indeed, any other’s, saying that the book must have its own way with its readers. It was simply the revelation of the man himself, “the personal critter,” as he would phrase it.
Dr. Bucke made some interesting reference to the elements of evil passion which he detected in his old friend’s make-up; “the elements of a Cenci or an Attila”. And Whitman quite simply admitted that he was not sure that he understood himself.
A touch of humour was never long absent where Whitman was found. Some audacious devotee asked him why he had never married; and Walt rambled off into an explanation, which, after alluding to the “Nibelungen—or somebody—’s cat with an immensely long, long, long tail to it,” and again to the obscurities that confront the biographer of Burns, concluded that the matter in question was probably by no means discreditable, though inexplicable enough, except in the light of his whole life.
The questioner remained standing—he was very enthusiastic—and had more to follow. But as he began to recite “Captain! my Captain!” a stray dog which had entered at the open door provided a melancholy and irresistible accompaniment, convulsing those present in their own despite until the tears ran down their cheeks.
Finally, Whitman made an interesting political statement. He condemned as false the protectionist idea of “America for the Americans”; and asserted as the basic political principle, the interdependence of all peoples, and their openness to one another for purposes of exchange. The common people of all races are embarked together like fellows on a ship, he said; what wrecks one, wrecks all. The ultimate truth about the human race is its solidarity of interest. Then he was tired, and calling for his stick and his nurse, he blessed them all and went slowly upstairs.
It was the last of his birthday dinners. He was seventy-two, very old in body, and very weary. But he was still bright and affectionate toward the friends who continued to come great distances to greet him. A group at Bolton sent two representatives in the years 1890 and 1891, whose records of their visits are suffused with wonder at the old poet’s courtesy and loving consideration and comradely demonstrations of personal feeling. He was a little anxious lest his English friends should misapprehend his character: “Don’t let them think of me as a saint or a finished anything,” was the burden of his messages to them, always accompanied by his love.
He spoke warmly of the English, comparing them favourably at times with their cousins across the sea, and saying that they represented the deeper and more lasting qualities of the Anglo-Saxon race; they were like the artillery of its army. The welcome from English readers had astonished and delighted him. In 1887 he contemplated a visit to Great Britain; and he sometimes seems even to have toyed with the idea of an English home. One can be more Democratic there than in America, he had once declared.
Of his own later years, he said to Mr. J. W. Wallace, who called frequently during the late autumn of 1891, “I used to feel ... that I was to irradiate or emanate buoyancy and health. But it came to me in time, that I was not to attempt to live to the reputation I had, or to my own idea of what my programme should be; but to give out and express what I really was; and, if I felt like the devil, to say so; and I have become more and more confirmed in this.” Whitman has so often been accused of a self-conscious pose, that this partial acknowledgment that such a pose had existed is full of interest; an interest accentuated by the statement that he deliberately abandoned it in his later years.
Talking was at this time often an effort; the heavy feeling in his head, which had become more and more frequent since his first illness, increased till he compared his brain to “sad dough,” or “an apple dumpling”. At times, when he was really prostrated, his head was “like ten devils”.
The portrait prefixed to his last little book, is that of some patriarch, bent under a world-weight of experience. The volume, Good-bye, my Fancy, appeared in the winter—sixty pages of fragmentary notes and rhythms of pathetic interest. He called them his “last chirps”. It opens on a rather deprecatory note, but is touched here and there with wistful humour.
Picture of Whitman at seventy-two.
WHITMAN AT SEVENTY-TWO
The preface, written two summers before, describes him as moved by the sunshine to the playfulness of a kid, a kitten or a frolicsome wave. He finds a grim satisfaction even in his present state, counting it as a part of his offering to the cause of the union and America, for he has no doubt of its origin in the strain of the war-years. Of the war, and of his part in it, he now sees all his Leaves as reminiscent.
The prose memoranda are principally memorial of old friends, and familiar books and places, and are full of those generous appreciations which were a delightful feature of his later life. Among others, are tributes to Queen Victoria, to his friend Tennyson, and to the great American poets.
He returns again to his gospel of health, as the message most needed in the world to-day; a message which would contrast with the cry of Carlyle or of Heine, or of almost any of the dwellers in that Europe which he sees afar off, as a sort of vast hospital or asylum ward. It has been his own single purpose to arouse the soul, the essential giver of Divine health, in his readers. His aim has always been religious; he foresees the coming of a new religion which shall embrace both the feminine beauty of Christianity and the masculine splendour of Paganism.
The poems are still in the vein of November Boughs. They are the utterance of certain belated elements in his life-experience, without which his book would be incomplete. Some review his past; others anticipate his future.
The most important is the poem “To the Sunset Breeze,” which is perhaps the highest expression of his mystical attitude toward nature. The breeze brings to this lonely, sick man, incapable of movement, the infinite message of God and of the world; it comes to him as a loving and holy companion, the distillation and essence of all material things, the most godly of spirits:—
Thou, messenger-magical strange bringer to body and spirit of me,
(Distances balk’d—occult medicines penetrating me from head to foot),
I feel the sky, the prairies vast—I feel the mighty northern lakes,
I feel the ocean and the forest—somehow I feel the globe itself swift-swimming in space;
Thou blown from lips so loved, now gone—haply from endless store, God-sent,
(For thou art spiritual, Godly, most of all known to my sense),
Minister to speak to me, here and now, what word has never told, and cannot tell,
Art thou not universal concrete’s distillation? Law’s, all Astronomy’s last refinement?
Hast thou no soul? Can I not know, identify thee?
One cannot doubt the feeling behind these passionate lines, or question the soul-contact which the old poet felt with the things we are complacently and ignorantly contented to regard as mere automata, moved by mechanical force. For Whitman, Nature was a soul; a soul, though strange and often seeming-hostile, yet beloved and really loving; a soul, whose infinite life is, without exception, seeking and groping after its divine source. He deliberately enumerates a catalogue of things evil to make the significance of his meaning clear.
The title of the book is related, on the last page, to a curious thought which occupied his mind at this period. While the imagination which has prompted all his poems has not been exactly himself, it has become so intimately related to him that he cannot now conceive of himself existing after death unaccompanied by it; hence his Good-bye, my Fancy is but a new welcome, a vale atque ave.
There are two more poems, not included in this volume, which seem to close his work. One, the last thing that he composed, was a final greeting to Columbus, who had become in his mind a type of the poet of the future.
The other, the last that I can note of these “concluding chirps,” as he would call them, is a beautiful correction of the popular picture of death’s valley. Before Whitman—and he of all men had a right to speak upon the subject, because he knew Death, as it were, personally—there spread out a very different landscape:—
Of the broad blessed light and perfect air, with meadows, rippling tides, and trees and flowers and grass,
And the low hum of living breeze—and in the midst God’s beautiful eternal right hand,
Thee, holiest minister of Heaven—thee, envoy, usherer, guide at last of all,
Rich, florid, loosener of the stricture-knot call’d life,
Sweet, peaceful, welcome Death.
As his book-making thus drew to a finish, he occupied himself with his own tomb. This was being erected through the autumn of 1891 among the young beeches and hickories of a new cemetery, a few miles out of Camden. It was built of grey granite into the bank, and framed after a well-known design of Blake’s.
At once plain but impressive, it is strikingly different from the poor little cottage in which he died. And the fact illustrates again Whitman’s simple acceptance of realities. He knew that his grave must be a place of pilgrimage; and having brought the bones of his father and mother to lie beside his own, he gave all possible dignity, for the sake of the book and the cause, to this his last resting-place.
While he was thus spending a considerable sum upon his tomb, the extra expenses entailed by his prolonged illness were being met, unknown to him, by the generosity of his Camden friends. After his death, his executors were surprised to find that there was in the bank a considerable reserve, amounting to several hundred pounds, available for distribution between his sisters and his brother Edward, according to the terms of his will.
In mid-December, 1891, Whitman’s right lung became congested, and when Dr. Bucke arrived on the 22nd the death-rattle had already been heard, and his immediate passing was anticipated.
At Christmas, John Burroughs came over, and found such an unconquered look upon the sufferer’s face that the thought of death’s nearness seemed impossible. From St. Louis came Jessie Whitman, her father, Jefferson, having died a year earlier; and the colonel brother, who seems now to have removed from Camden, spent at least one anxious night in the little house. Mr. Johnston also came over from New York for a last sight of his old friend. But even with those nearest to him, interviews became more and more difficult. He longed for the solitude and silence which their love found it hardest to give.
The wintry days at the junction of the years went by in suffering and patience. Walt was affectionately grateful for the intimate services of his nurse and of Horace Traubel; writing of the latter as “unspeakably faithful”. Though he was generally calm he was longing for death. He had dreadful hiccoughs, and grew colder and more emaciated. The suffering had become terrible, and the anticipation of its long continuance brought fear for the first time to his strong heart.
Picture of Horace Traubel at forty-five.
HORACE TRAUBEL AT FORTY-FIVE
In mid-January, however, he rallied. The Fritzinger baby was born and called after him, and Walt had it brought in to be fondled upon his breast. Colonel Ingersoll called, and his magnetic spontaneous presence and words of profound affection comforted and sustained his friend. Then, to his great satisfaction, the tenth edition of his works appeared, and special copies were forwarded to his friends. He contrived to write brief notes to Dr. Bucke and to his favourite sister, telling them of the publication and of his condition.
On the 6th and 7th of February he wrote a last pathetic letter, which was lithographed and sent out to many correspondents. The “little spark of soul” which, according to his own quaint version of a favourite saying of Epictetus, had during all these months been “dragging a great lummux of corpse-body clumsily to and fro around,” was still glimmering. His friends were ever faithful, he says, and for his bodily state, “it is not so bad as you might suppose, only my sufferings much of the time are fearful”. And he added, as a last dictum, the substance of his latest public thoughts—for he read the newspapers constantly to the last—“more and more it comes to the fore, that the only theory worthy our modern times, for great literature, politics and sociology, must combine all the best people of all lands, the women not forgetting”.
His friend over-sea, Addington Symonds, was ill and depressed, and George Stafford passed away at Glendale. He became yet more silent; looked over his letters and the journals; took and relished his brandy-punch and slept. Almost daily his pain increased, and the choking mucus. He was often in terrible exhaustion, and the long nights were almost unbearable. “Dear Walt,” said his faithful friend, as he bent down and kissed him, “you do not realise what you have been to us”; and Walt rejoined feebly, “nor you, what you have been to me”.
All through March the restlessness and agony increased. There seemed to be no parcel of his emaciated body which was not the lurking place of pain. The stubborn determination of his nature suffered the last throes of human agony before it would surrender. Thus he learnt the lesson of death as few have ever learnt it.
Those who watched could do little but love him, and for that his dim eyes repaid them a thousandfold to the end. Without, the days were dismally bleak; snow lay heavily upon the earth, but in the big three-windowed room winter seemed still more fierce and dread.
On the night of the 24th he was moved on to a water bed, which eased him. He tried to laugh when, as he turned him upon it and the water splashed around, Warry, the sailor-nurse, said it sounded like the waves upon a ship’s flanks. The thought was full of suggestions and chimed with his own; but the mucus choked him into silence.
Next day he was terribly weak, but restful, and that night he slept and seemed easier. On the following afternoon they saw that at last he was surrendering. He smiled and felt no longer any pain. Warry moved him for the last time about six o’clock, and Walt acknowledged the change with gratitude. Half an hour later, holding Traubel’s hand in his, he lapsed silently into the Unknown.
It was growing dark, and the rain fell softly bearing its burden of love to the earth, and dripping from the eaves upon the side-walk. The noble ship had slipt its cable and gone forth upon “the never-returning tide”.
Whitman died on a Saturday night. On the Wednesday following, from eleven to two, the Mickle Street house was invaded by thousands of people of every age and class, who had come to take a last look at the familiar face. “It was the face of an aged, loving child,” said one of them.
Among the rest came an old Washington comrade, who was unrecognised by the policeman keeping order at the little door. No, said he, it is late, and the house is full already. With a bitter and broken heart, he was turning away bewildered from the place, when one of the others saw him and, heartily calling his name, led him in.
How many, many thoughts surged through his brain, as he looked on that dear face, and poignantly remembered again the old days! How he reproached himself for the long lapses that had crept of late, half-observed, into their intimacy! Why had he not been here these months past, nursing and caring for one who had been dearer to him than his father? Why had he left him in his last agonies to hired helpers, however kind, and to new friends. Surely, he thought, the old are dearer—if they be true.
He went out with the crowd to Harleigh, saw the strange ceremony, and heard, without understanding them, the fine words spoken. And then, refusing to be comforted, he escaped, walking home alone along the dusty roads—alone forever now—the tears coursing down his cheeks.
But come! he would no longer waste the hours in vain reproaches. Walt, after all, understood. He had always understood, and felt the depth of love that sometimes seeks so false an expression in jealousy. Come now, he will live henceforward by the thought and in the unclouded love of his old Walt, once his and his now forever.
Of course, he had not understood Walt, not as these scholars, these writers and poets understood him. But he had been “awful near to him, nights and days”. And those letters of his! Sometimes he thought that in the passion of his young plain manhood, he had come nearer, yes, nearer than any other, to that great loving soul. And for my part, I am not sure that he was mistaken.
Meanwhile, in the new cemetery, out along Haddon Avenue beyond the Dominican Convent where dwell the Sisters of the Perpetual Rosary, they had buried the remains of Walt Whitman’s body. The hillside above the pool had been covered with folk; and up on the beech-spray over the tomb, the first blue-bird had sung its plaintive-sweet promise of the breaking spring.
In the palm-decked white pavilion, with its open sides, the words of the old poet’s Chant of Death had mingled with those of the Christ and of the Buddha, and with the half-choked sentences of living lovers and friends. “I felt as if I had been at the entombment of Christ,” writes one; and another murmured, “We are at the summit”.
But the last words had been spoken by Ingersoll—“I loved him living, and I love him still”.
Picture of Whitman's tomb at Harleigh Cemetery, 1904.
THE TOMB AT HARLEIGH CEMETERY, 1904
“To tell you the truth,” writes one who knew him intimately, “I have never had the feeling that Walt Whitman was dead. I think of him as still there, capable of writing to me at any time, and my thoughts often turn to him for his friendly sympathy.”
It is incredible that any being who has consciously entered upon that life of love which approves itself to the soul as God’s own life, can be fundamentally affected by death. What our life is we know not, nor may we speak with any confidence of the nature of the change which we call death; but love we know, and in it, as Ingersoll rightly guessed, is the key to the riddle of mortality.
APPENDIX A NOTE ON THE WILLIAMSES
Whitman himself has described his grandmother, Naomi Williams, as belonging to the Quaker Society, but upon inquiry it does not appear that she was ever a member. She was one of seven sisters; her father, Captain John Williams, and his only son, died at sea. He had been part-owner of his vessel, a schooner in the East Indian trade, plying between New York and Florida, and in 1767 he was married at Cold Spring, where his father, Thomas Williams, also a seaman, was living at the same time.
The name of Thomas Williams occurs elsewhere in the old records of this district. In 1759 one of this name, who had a son John, was at Cove Neck, having removed there from Cold Spring. This Thomas one inclines to identify with the sea-going grandfather of Naomi, and he was the son of John Williams and Tamosin Carpenter, of Musketa Cove, whose name occurs in a document of 1727. I understand that this John and his son Thomas were Quakers.
Another Captain Thomas Williams, described as “of Oyster Bay,” was in 1758 first captain of the Queen’s County recruits. Twenty-one years later, a John Williams and a Daniel van Velsor were serving as privates in a Long Island troop of horse, but they do not concern us.
In the absence of any definite information, and in view of the frequency of the name of Williams throughout this district—owing to the fact that Robert and Richard Williams (Welshmen) settled hereabouts in the middle of the seventeenth century—one can only surmise the cause which severed the family of Naomi Williams from the Society. It is possible that her father married out, thus forfeiting his membership, according to the old laws of the Society concerning marriage with a non-member. Or the War of Independence may have claimed his active participation and thus snapped the bond. Or, again, circumstances connected with his profession, or difficulties in attending the meetings for worship, may have caused his name to be dropped from the lists of membership. There would seem to be no doubt, however, that his daughter’s sympathies remained with the Friends.
APPENDIX B WHITMAN IN NEW ORLEANS
Edward Carpenter wrote in the Reformer, February, 1902, p. 89: “In a letter to J. Addington Symonds (19th August, 1890), he mentioned that he had six children. Symonds, writing to me in 1893, quoted the passage in question from this letter of Whitman’s, and it runs as follows: ‘My life, young manhood, mid-age, times South, etc., have been jolly bodily, and doubtless open to criticism. Tho’ unmarried I have had six children—two are dead—one living, Southern grandchild, fine boy, writes to me occasionally—circumstances (connected with their fortune and benefit) have separated me from intimate relations.’”
In a letter to Carpenter, further attested in conversation with myself, Horace Traubel says: “Walt frequently in his later years made allusions to the fact of his fatherhood. That is, to me. One night, just previous to his death, I went with Harned to Walt’s room, at Walt’s request, to get a sort of deposition in the matter, its detail, etc., etc.... But he was taken sick in our presence and was unable to proceed. There the thing rested ... he ... could never resume the subject. He wished to have the recital ‘put away in Harned’s safe,’ as he said, ‘in order that some one should authoritatively have all the facts at command if by some misfortune a public discussion of the incident were ever provoked’.... He did not wish the matter broached. He felt that it would indisputably do a great injury to some one, God knows who (I do not). During Walt’s last sickness his grandson came to the house. I was not there at the time. When W. mentioned the occurrence to me I expressed my regret that I had missed him. ‘I wish I might see him.’ ‘God forbid!’ ....”
I was informed in Camden that there were two Southern (?) ladies, one of whom had died. There was an impression among my informants that Whitman was explicitly pledged, by the family of one if not both of these ladies, never to hint at his relationship to the children. He told Traubel that this enforced separation was the tragedy of his life. There is a love-letter extant, signed with a pseudonym, dated from New York in 1862, evidently written by a cultivated woman. If the grandchild who called at Mickle Street in 1891 was from the South—the correspondent of Symond’s letter, as one may suspect—it is difficult to put the birth of his father or mother much later, I think, than 1850. It is noticeable that Whitman destroyed the references among his papers to the New Orleans visit, beyond those already printed in his prose works. In a book of memoranda referring to his early years, now in the possession of Mr. Harned, I have noted the tearing out of several leaves after the entry of his starting for New Orleans. The specification of “one living Southern grandchild,” and of four children still living in 1890, suggests the probability that the second lady was not living in the South.
The End