A LIFE OF WALT WHITMAN

BY THE SAME WRITER
MOODS AND OUTDOOR VERSES
(“Richard Askham”)
FOR THE FELLOWSHIP

BY
HENRY BRYAN BINNS

WITH THIRTY-THREE ILLUSTRATIONS

METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON

First Published in 1905

TO
MY MOTHER
AND
HER MOTHER
THE REPUBLIC

[Pg vii]

To the reader, and especially to the critical reader, it would seem but courteous to give at the beginning of my book some indication of its purpose. It makes no attempt to fill the place either of a critical study or a definitive biography. Though Whitman died thirteen years ago, the time has not yet come for a final and complete life to be written; and when the hour shall arrive we must, I think, look to some American interpreter for the volume. For Whitman’s life is of a strongly American flavour. Instead of such a book I offer a biographical study from the point of view of an Englishman, yet of an Englishman who loves the Republic. I have not attempted, except parenthetically here and there, to make literary decisions on the value of Whitman’s work, partly because he still remains an innovator upon whose case the jury of the years must decide—a jury which is not yet complete; and partly because I am not myself a literary critic. It is as a man that I see and have sought to describe Whitman. But as a man of special and exceptional character, a new type of mystic or seer. And[Pg viii] the conviction that he belongs to the order of initiates has dragged me on to confessedly difficult ground.

Again, while seeking to avoid excursions into literary criticism, it has seemed to me to be impossible to draw a real portrait of the man without attempting some interpretation of his books and the quotation from them of characteristic passages, for they are the record of his personal attitude towards the problems most intimately affecting his life. I trust that this part of my work may at any rate offer some suggestions to the serious student of Whitman. Since he touched life at many points, it has been full of pitfalls; and if among them I should prove but a blind leader, I can only hope that those who follow will keep open eyes.

Whitman has made his biography the more difficult to write by demanding that he should be studied in relation to his time; to fulfil this requirement was beyond my scope, but I have here and there suggested the more notable outlines, within which the reader will supply details from his own memory. As I have written especially for my own countrymen, I have ventured to remind the reader of some of those elementary facts of American history of which we English are too easily forgetful.

The most important chapters of Whitman’s life have been written by himself, and will be found scattered over his complete works. To these the following pages are intended as a modest supplement and commentary. Already[Pg ix] the Whitman literature has become extensive, but, save in brief sketches, no picture of his whole life in which one may trace with any detail the process of its development seems as yet to exist. In this country the only competent studies which have appeared are that of the late Mr. Symonds, which devotes some twenty pages to biographical matters, and the admirable and suggestive little manual of the late Mr. William Clarke. Both books are some twelve years old, and in those years not a little new material has become available, notably that which is collected in the ten-volume edition of Whitman’s works, and in the book known as In re Walt Whitman. On these and on essays printed in the Conservator and in the Whitman Fellowship Papers I have freely drawn for the following pages.

Of American studies the late Dr. Bucke’s still, after twenty years, easily holds the first place. Beside it stand those of Mr. John Burroughs, and Mr. W. S. Kennedy. To these, and to the kind offices of the authors of the two last named, my book owes much of any value it may possess. I have also been assisted by the published reminiscences of Mr. J. T. Trowbridge, Mr. Moncure Conway, and Mr. Thomas Donaldson, and by the recently published Diary in Canada (edited by Mr. Kennedy), and Dr. I. H. Platt’s Beacon Biography of the poet.

Since I never met Walt Whitman I am especially indebted to his friends for the personal details with which they have so generously[Pg x] furnished me: beside those already named, to Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Johnston, Mr. J. Hubley Ashton, Mrs. W. S. Kennedy, Mrs. E. M. Calder, Mr. and Mrs. (Stafford) Browning of Haddonfield (Glendale), Mr. John Fleet of Huntington, Captain Lindell of the Camden Ferry, and to Mr. Peter G. Doyle; but especially to Whitman’s surviving executors and my kind friends, Mr. T. B. Harned and Mr. Horace Traubel. To these last, and to Mr. Laurens Maynard, of the firm of Messrs. Small, Maynard & Co., the publishers of the final edition of Whitman’s works, I am indebted for generous permission to use and reproduce photographs in their possession. I also beg to make my acknowledgments to Mr. David McKay and Mr. Gutekunst, both of Philadelphia.

Helpful suggestions and information have been most kindly given by my American friends, Mr. Edwin Markham, Professor E. H. Griggs, Mr. Ernest Crosby, Dr. George Herron, Professor Rufus M. Jones of Haverford, Mr. C. F. Jenkins of Germantown, and Mr. and Mrs. David Thompson of Washington. Mr. Benjamin D. Hicks of Long Island has repeatedly replied to my various and troublesome inquiries as to the Quaker ancestry of Walt Whitman, and Dr. E. Pardee Bucke has furnished me with an admirable sketch of his father Dr. R. M. Bucke’s life and the photograph which I have reproduced. In England also there are many to whom I would here offer my most grateful thanks. And first, to Mr. Edward Carpenter, whose own work has always been my best of[Pg xi] guides in the study of Whitman’s, and whose records of his interviews with the old poet in Camden have given me more insight into his character than any other words but Whitman’s own. He has also read the MS., and aided me by numberless suggestions. Mrs. Bernard Berenson, who for some years enjoyed the old man’s friendship, has supplied me with an invaluable picture of his relations with her father, the late Mr. Pearsall Smith, and his family, and has generously lent me various letters in her possession, and permitted me to make reproductions from them. Mr. J. W. Wallace, of the “Bolton group,” has allowed me to read and use his manuscript description of a visit to Camden in 1891; and another of the same brotherhood, Dr. J. Johnston, whose admirable account of a similar series of interviews in the preceding year is well known by Whitman students, has supplied me with a photograph of the little Mickle Street house as it then was.

To Mr. William M. Rossetti and to Mr. Ernest Rhys I am indebted for valuable suggestions; and for similar help to my friends, Professor W. H. Hudson and Messrs. Arthur Sherwell, B. Kirkman Gray and C. F. Mott. Finally, the book owes much more than I can say to my wife.

While gratefully acknowledging the assistance of all these and others unnamed, I confess that I am alone responsible for the general accuracy of my statements, and the book’s point of view, and I wish especially to relieve the personal friends of Whitman from any responsibility for[Pg xii] the hypothesis relating to his sojourn in the South, beyond what is stated in the Appendix. To all actual sins of commission and omission I plead guilty, trusting that for the sympathetic reader they may eventually be blotted out in the light which, obscured though it be, still shines upon my pages from the personality of Walt Whitman.

H. B. B.

London, January, 1905.

[Pg xiii]

[Pg xv]

[Pg xvii]

The following abbreviations are used in the Notes.

Bucke = R. M. Bucke’s Walt Whitman, 1883.

Burroughs = John Burroughs’ Note on Walt Whitman, 1867.

Burroughs (2) = John Burroughs’ Note on Walt Whitman. Second Edition.

Burroughs (a) = John Burroughs’ Whitman: A Study, 1896.

Carpenter = E. Carpenter’s “Notes of Visits to W. W.” in Progressive Review: (a) February, 1897; (b) April, 1897.

Camden’s Compliment = Camden’s Compliment to W. W., 1889.

Cam. Mod. Hist. = Cambridge Modern History: United States.

Comp. Prose = W. W.’s Complete Prose, 1898.

Calamus = Calamus, Letters of W. W. to Pete Doyle, 1897.

Camden = Camden Edition (10 vols.) of W. W.’s Works, 1902.

Donaldson = T. Donaldson’s W. W.: The Man, 1897.

En. Brit. Suppt. = Encyclopædia Britannica: Supplement, United States.

Good-bye and Hail = Good-bye and Hail, W. W., 1892.

In re = In re W. W., 1893.

Johnston = Dr. J. Johnston’s Notes of a Visit to W. W., 1890.

Kennedy = W. S. Kennedy’s Reminiscences of W. W., 1896.

L. of G. = Leaves of Grass, complete edition of 1897: followed by numerals in brackets, edition of that year.

Mem. Hist. N.Y. = J. G. Wilson’s Memorial History of New York.

Roosevelt = T. Roosevelt’s New York, 1891.

Symonds = J. A. Symonds’s W. W.: A Study, 1893.

Wound-Dresser = The W. D., Letters of W. W. to his Mother, 1898.

Whit. Fellowship = Whitman Fellowship Papers, Philadelphia, 1894.

Manuscripts.

MSS. Berenson = Letters in possession of Mrs. Bernard Berenson.

MSS. Berenson (a) = Reminiscences contributed to this volume.

MSS. Carpenter = Letters in possession of E. Carpenter.

MSS. Diary = A Diary (1876-1887) in possession of H. Traubel.

MSS. Harned = Papers in possession of T. B. Harned.

MSS. Johnston = Papers in possession of J. H. Johnston, New York.

MSS. Traubel = Papers in possession of H. Traubel.

MSS. Wallace = J. W. Wallace’s Diary of a Visit to W. W. in 1891.

[Pg xix]

WHITMAN’S AMERICA

The men of old declared that the lands of adventure lay in the West, for they were bold to follow the course of the sun; and to this day the bold do not look back to seek romance behind them in the East.

Whether this be the whole truth or no, such is the notion that comes upon the wind when, journeying westward in mid-Atlantic, you begin to know the faces on ship-board, and to understand what it is that is in their eyes. Strange eyes and foreign faces have these voyagers—dwellers upon Mediterranean shores, peasants from the borders of the Baltic, or dumb inhabitants of the vast eastern plains, huddled now together in the ship. But in them is a hope which triumphs over the misery of the present as it has survived the misery of the past, and to-day that hope has a name, and is America. For America is indeed the hope of the forlorn and disinherited in every land to whom a hope remains. From the ends of the earth they set out, and separated from one another by every barrier of race and language, meet here upon the ocean, having nothing in common but this hope, this dream which will yet weld them together into a new people. For the comfortable dreamer there is Italy and the[Pg xx] Past, but for many millions of the common people of Europe and of Italy herself—and the common people too have their dream—America, the land of the Future, is the Kingdom of Romance.

Nor to these only, but, as I think, to every traveller not unresponsive to the genius of the land. For it is the genius of youth—youth with its awkward power, its incompleteness, its promise. And the home of this genius must be the land not only of progress and material achievement, but also of those visions which haunt the heart of youth. America is more than the golden-appled earthly paradise of the poor, it is a land of spiritual promise. And more perhaps than that of any nation the American flag is to-day the symbol of a Cause, and of a Cause which claims all hearts because ultimately it is that of all Peoples.

And America has another claim to be regarded as truly romantic. Hers is the charm of novelty. It is not the glamour of the old but of the new, and the perennially new. Some four centuries have passed since the days of Columbus, centuries which have dimmed the lustre of many another adventurous voyage into dull antiquity, but America is still the New World, and the exhilarating air of discovery still breathes as fresh in the West as on the first morning.

With that discovery there dawned a new historic day whose sun is not yet set. We instinctively put back the beginning of our own era to the time of Elizabeth, that Virgin Queen in whose colony of Virginia the American people was first born, to grow up into maturity under its statesmen.

[Pg xxi]

And if we see but vaguely in the greyest hours of our dawn the figure of the Discoverer, while beyond him all seem strange as the men of yesterday—if we behold our own sun rising on the broad Elizabethan hours—how fitting it is that the New World should be peopled by those who still retain most of the temper of that generous morning! The American of to-day with his thirst for knowledge, his versatility, his quick sense of the practicable, his delight in the doing of things, his directness and frankness of purpose, his comradeship and hospitality, his lack of self-consciousness—with all the naïve inconsistencies, the amiable braggings, the mouthings of phrases, and the love of praise which belong to such unconsciousness of self—with his glowing optimism, his belief in human nature, his faith and devotion to his ideals—the American of to-day is in all these things the Elizabethan of our story. America is the supreme creation of Elizabethan genius—its New World, to which even that world which we call “Shakespeare” must give place.[1]

The Romance of America is not only new, it is like a tale that is being told for the first time into our own ears. And like some consummate story whose chapters, appearing month by month, hold us continually in expectant suspense, its plot is still evolving and its characters revealing themselves, so that as yet we can only guess at its dénouement.

I call it a Romance, for it is indeed a tale of wonder; but unlike the old romances its[Pg xxii] bold realism is not always beautiful. The style of its telling is often loud, its words blunt, its rhythm strange and full of changes. But it has a large Elizabethan movement which cannot be denied. Denounce and deprecate as we will, all that is young in us responds to it. The story carries us along, at times by violence and in our own despite, but so a story should. It may be the end will justify and explain passages that to-day are but obscure: no story is complete until the end, and America has not yet been told. It is still morning there: and the heart of it is still the heart of youth.

The unprejudiced and candid visitor will be provoked to criticism by much that he sees in the United States; but even his criticism will be prompted by the possibilities of the country. It is this sense of its possibilities which captures the imagination, and fills the mind with the desire to do—to correct, it may be—but in any case to do.

The incentive to action is felt by everyone, American or immigrant, and dominates all. Here for the first time one seems to be, as it were, in a live country, among a live people whose work is actually under its hand and must occupy it for years to come. In England things are different; the country does not so audibly challenge the labourer to till and tame it. It does not say so plainly to every man—I want you: here is range and scope for all your manhood. Only the seer can read that word written pathetically across all this English countryside whose smooth air of completion conceals so[Pg xxiii] blank a poverty. In America the very stones cry out, and all who run must read. And thus the whole American atmosphere is that of action.

The Chinese, that most practical of peoples, have an old saying that the purpose of the true worship of heaven is to spiritualise the earth. It is a reminder that materialism and mysticism should go hand in hand.

Now the American is often, and not unjustly, accused of sheer materialism. But by temper he is really an idealist. The very Constitution of the United States, not to mention the famous Declaration, is no less transcendental than the Essays of Emerson, nor less weighty with deep purpose than the speeches of Lincoln. All these are characteristic utterances of the American genius; they have been attested by events, and sealed in the blood of a million citizen soldiers.

And how, one may ask, could the citizens of a State which more than any other manifestly depends for its life upon communion in an ideal be other than idealists? Gathered from every section of the human race, this people has become a nation through its consciousness of a Cause; its members being possessed not of a common blood, tradition or literature, but of a purpose and idea sacred to all. If then the national life depends upon the living idealism of the people, the actual unquestionable vigour of this national life may be taken as evidence of the strength of that idealism. But, on the other hand, the nation’s present pre-occupation with its merely material success conceals the gravest of all its perils, because it threatens the very principle of the national life.

[Pg xxiv]

Thus held together by its future, and not as seem most others, by their past, the American nation has been slow in coming to self-consciousness, slow therefore in producing an original or national art. Hitherto it has been occupied with its own Becoming; and to-day, to virile Americans, America remains the most engrossing of occupations, the noblest of all practicable dreams.

The spirit of the Renaissance has here attempted a task far graver than in Medician Florence or Elizabethan London: to create, namely, not so much a new art as a new race. It has here to achieve its incarnation not in line and colour, not in marble nor in imperishable verse, but in the flesh and blood of a nation gathered from every family of Man. And for that, it is forever assimilating into itself scions of every European people, and transforming them out of Europeans into Americans.

Vast as such a process is, the assimilation of all their surging aspirations and ideals into one has been hardly less vast. It is little wonder then that America has been slow in coming to self-consciousness. What is wonderful is her organic power of assimilation. And now there begin to be evidences in American thought of a spiritual synthesis, the widest known. As yet they are but vague suggestions. But they seem to indicate that when an American philosophy takes the field it will be pragmatical in the best sense; too earnestly concerned with conduct and with life to be careful of symmetry or tradition; directed towards the future, not the past. It will be a philosophy of possibilities founded upon the study of an adolescent race.

[Pg xxv]

It seemed natural to preface this study of Whitman with a sketch of the American genius. Doubtless that genius has other aspects than those here presented, and to some of these, later pages will bear witness; but the impression I have attempted to reproduce is at least taken from life. It is, moreover, not unlike that of Whitman himself as presented in his first Preface, and is even more suggestive of the America of his youth than that of his old age.

Every thinker owes much to his time and race, and Whitman more than most. He always averred that the story of his life was bound up with that of his country, and took significance from it. To be understood, the man must be seen as an American. As a Modern, we might add, for the story of his land is so brief.

Dead now some thirteen years, and barely an old man when he died, his personal memory seemed to embrace nearly the whole romance. His grandfather was acquainted with old Tom Paine, whose Common Sense had popularised the Republican idea in the very hour of American Independence: he himself had talked with the soldiers of Washington, and as a lad[2] he had met Aaron Burr who killed the glorious Hamilton, sponsor for that Constitution which when Whitman died was but a century old.

In the seven decades of his life the American population had multiplied near seven-fold, and had been compacted together into an imperial nation. It seemed almost as though he could remember the thirteen poor and jealous States,[Pg xxvi] with their conflicting interests and traditions, their widely differing climates, industries and inhabitants, separated from one another by vast distances—and how they yielded themselves reluctantly under the hand of Fate to grow together in Union into the greatest of civilised peoples; while central in the story of his life was that Titanic conflict whose solemn bass accompaniment toned and deepened loose phrases and popular enthusiasms into a national hymn.

Himself something of a poet—how much we need not attempt to estimate—he did continual homage to that greater Poet, whose works were at once his education and his library—the genius of America. None other, ancient or mediæval, discoursed to his ear or penned in immortal characters for him to read, rhythms so large and pregnant. It was the prayer and purpose of his life that he might contribute his verse to that great poem; and his life is like a verse which it is impossible to separate from its context. That he understood, and even in a sense re-discovered America, can scarcely be denied by serious students of his work. I believe that the genius of America will in time discover some essential elements of herself in him, and will understand herself the better for his pages.

Belonging thus to America as a nation, the earlier scenes of Walt Whitman’s story are fitly laid in and about metropolitan New York. It was not till middle life and after the completion and publication of what may be regarded as the first version of his Leaves of Grass—the[Pg xxvii] edition that is to say of 1860—that he removed for a while to the Federal capital where, throughout the War, the interest of America was centred. Afterwards he withdrew to Camden, into a sort of hermitage, midway between New York and Washington.

Though his heart belonged to the West, the Far West never knew him. Both north and south, he wandered near as widely as the limits of his States. He knew the Mississippi, the Great Lakes, and the Rocky Mountains; but all that vast and wonderful country which reaches west from Colorado towards Balboa’s sea was untrodden by his feet. A circle broadly struck from the actual centre of population, and taking in Denver, New Orleans, Boston and Quebec, includes the whole field of his wanderings within a radius of a thousand miles. He was not a traveller according to our modern use of the word; he had never lost sight for many hours of the shores of America; even Cuba and Hawaii were beyond his range.

But he had studied nearly all the phases of life included in the Republic. His birth and breeding in the “middle States” gave him a metropolitan quality which neither New England nor the South could have contributed. Of peasant stock, himself an artizan and always and properly a man of the people, he was of the average stuff of the American nation; and his everyday life—apart from the central and exceptional fact of his individuality—was that of millions of unremembered citizens. Whitman was not only an American type, he was also a type of America.

[Pg xxviii]

The typical American is not city born. Rapidly as that sinister fate is overtaking the Englishman, the native American is still of rural birth.[3] And, as we have said, Whitman was of the average; he was born in Long Island of farming folk.

But he was a modern, and the modern movement throughout the world is citywards. Everywhere the Industrial Revolution is destroying the economy of our ancestors and creating another; diverting all the scattered energy which springs out of the countryside into the great reservoirs of city life, there to be employed upon new tasks.

Modern life is the life of the town, and for many years it was Whitman’s life. But again every town depends for its vitality and wealth upon the countryside. The city is a mere centre, factory and exchange. It cannot live upon itself. It handles everything but produces none of all that raw material from which everything that it handles is made. Especially is this true of the human stuff of civilisation. Men are only shaped and employed in cities—they are not produced there. The city uses and consumes the humanity that is made in the fields. And Whitman, who was drawn into the outskirts of the metropolis as a child, and as a young man entered into its heart, was born among wide prospects and shared the sane life of things that root in the earth. He was the better fitted to bear and to correlate all the fierce stimuli of metropolitan life.

[Pg 1]

WALT WHITMAN

THE WHITMANS OF WEST HILLS

The old writers[4] tell how Long Island was once the happy hunting ground of wolves and Indians, the playing place of deer and wild turkeys; and how the seals, the turtles, grampuses and pelicans loved its long, quiet beaches. Seals and whales are still occasional visitors, and its coasts are rich in lore of wrecks, of pirates and of buried treasure.

A hundred years ago it could boast of hamlets only less remote from civilisation than are to-day the villages of that other “Long Island”—the group of the Outer Hebrides—which, for an equal distance, extends along the Scottish coast from Butt of Lewis to Barra Head. The desultory stage then occupied a week on the double journey between Brooklyn and Sag Harbour. Beyond the latter, Montauk Point thrusts its lighthouse some fifteen miles out into the Atlantic breakers. Here the last Indians of the island lingered on their reservation, and here the whalers watched for the spouting of their prey in the offing.

A ridge of hills runs along the island near the northern shore, rising here and there into heights of three or[Pg 2] four hundred feet which command the long gradual slope of woods and meadows to the south, with the distant sea beyond them; to the north, across the narrow Sound, rises the blue coast line of Connecticut.

It is on the slopes below the highest of these points of wide vision that the Whitman homestead lies, one of the pleasant farms of a land which has always been mainly agricultural. Large areas of the island are poor and barren, covered still with scrub and “kill-calf” or picturesque pine forest, as in the Indian days. But the land here is productive.

From the wooded head of Jayne’s Hill behind the farm, the township of Huntington stretches to the coast where it possesses a harbour. It was all purchased from the Indians in 1653, for six coats, six bottles, six hatchets, six shovels, ten knives, six fathom of wampum, thirty muxes, and thirty needles.[5] The Indians themselves do not seem to have caused much anxiety to the settlers; but a generation later, it is recorded that in a single year no fewer than fifteen of the wolves, which they had formerly kept half-tamed, were killed by the citizens of Huntington.

The next troublers of the peace were the British troops. For here, a century later, during the last years of the War of Independence, Colonel Thompson of His Majesty’s forces pulled down the Presbyterian Church, and with its timbers erected a fortress in the public burying-ground, his soldiers employing the gravestones for fire-places and ovens.[6] They seem to have occupied another meeting-house as a stable. Such are the everyday incidents of a military occupation; arising out of them, claims to the amount of £7,000 were preferred against the colonel by the township; but he withdrew to England, where, as Count Rumford, he afterwards became famous upon more peaceful fields.

In Whitman’s childhood, Huntington was, as it still[Pg 3] remains, a quiet country town of one long straggling street. It counted about 5,000 inhabitants, many of them substantial folk, and in this was not far behind Brooklyn. In those days the whole island could not boast 60,000 people. But if they were few, they were stalwart. The old sea-going Paumànackers were a rough and hardy folk, and travellers remarked the frank friendliness of the island youth.[7]

Inter-racial relations seem upon the whole to have been good; the Indians being treated with comparative justice, and the negro slaves well cared for. Between the Dutch and the English there was friction in the early years. Long Island, or Paumanok—to give it the most familiar of its several Indian names[8]—had been settled by both races; the Dutch commencing on the west, opposite to their fortress and trading station of New Amsterdam (afterwards New York), and the English, at about the same time, upon the east. They met near West Hills, and Whitman had the full benefit of his birth upon this border-line, Dutch blood and English being almost equally mingled in his veins.

As to the Dutch of Long Island, they were marked here as elsewhere by sterling and stubborn qualities. There is a reserve in the Dutch nature which, while it tends to arouse suspicion in others, makes it the best of stocks upon which to graft a more emotional people. Slow, cautious, conservative, domestic, practical, they have formed a bed-rock of sound sense and phlegmatic temper, not for Long Island only, but for the whole of New York State, where, till the middle of the eighteenth century,[9] they were predominant. Perhaps no other foundation could have adequately supported the superstructure of fluctuating and emotional elements which has since been raised upon it.

The Dutch homesteads of the island were famous for their simple, severe but solid comfort, their clean white sanded floors, their pewter and their punches. From[Pg 4] such a home came Whitman’s mother. She was a van Velsor of Cold Spring, which lies only two or three miles west of the Whitman farm. Her father, Major Cornelius van Velsor, was a typical, burly, jovial, red-faced Hollander.

But Louisa, his daughter, was not wholly Dutch, for the major’s wife was Naomi Williams, of a line of sailors, one of that great Welsh clan which counted Roger Williams among its first American representatives. Naomi was of Quaker stock.[10]

The Quakers appear early in the story of the island, whose settlement was taking place during the first years of their world-wide activity. Within a quarter of a century of the first purchase of land from the Indians, an English Quaker, Robert Hodgson,[11] was arrested in a Long Island orchard for the holding of a conventicle. He was carried to New Amsterdam, cruelly handled, and imprisoned there.

In 1663, John Bowne,[12] an islander of some standing who had joined the Friends, was arrested and transported to Holland, there to undergo his trial for heresy. This was in the period when the district was under Dutch control. A year later this came to an end, and when, in 1672, George Fox preached under the oaks which stood opposite to Bowne’s house[13] at Flushing, and again from the granite rock in the Oyster Bay cemetery, he seems to have been met by no opposition more serious than that which was offered by certain members of his own Society.

We read[14] of the settlement of a group of substantial Quaker families near the village of Jericho, where they built themselves a place of worship in 1689; and here, a century later, lived Elias Hicks, perhaps the ablest character, as he was the most tragic figure, in the story of American Quakerism. He was a friend of Whitman’s paternal grandfather, and thus from both parents the[Pg 5] boy inherited something either of the blood or the tradition of that Society which, directly or indirectly, gave some of the noblest of its leaders to the nation. Such men, for instance, as William Penn, Thomas Paine, and, indirectly, Abraham Lincoln.

The earliest of the Whitmans of whom there appears to be any record is Abijah, apparently an English yeoman farmer in the days of Elizabeth.[15] His two sons sailed west in 1640 on the True-Love. One of these, Zechariah, became a minister in the town of Milford, Connecticut, and sometime before Charles II. was crowned in the old country,[16] Joseph, Zechariah’s son, had crossed the Sound and settled in the neighbourhood of Huntington. Either he or his successor seems to have purchased the farm at West Hills, where Walt Whitman was afterwards born; and in 1675 “Whitman’s hollow” is mentioned as a boundary of the township.

The garrulous histories of Long Island have little to tell us of the family. One of Joseph’s great-grandsons was killed in the battle of Brooklyn,[17] that first great fight between the forces of England and her rebellious colonies, when in 1776 Howe and his Hessians drove Putnam’s recruits back upon the little town. Lieutenant Whitman was one of those who fell on that day before Washington could carry the remnant of his troops across the East River under the friendly shelter of the fog.

Another great-grandson, Jesse, married the orphan niece of Major Brush, also a “dangerous rebel” who suffered in the British prison of “the Provost”.[18] Brushes, Williamses and Whitmans all seem to have served in the armies of Independence, and one at least of their women would have cut a figure in the field. For Jesse’s mother was large-built, dark-complexioned, and of such masculine manners and speech that she[Pg 6] seemed to have been born to horses, oaths and tobacco. As a widow she readily ruled her slaves, surviving to a great age. In contrast with her, Jesse’s wife, who also displayed remarkable ability, was a natural lady.[19] She had been a teacher, and was a woman of judgment. Perhaps Jesse himself was of gentler character than his terrible old mother; he had leanings towards Quakerism, and was a friend and admirer of Elias Hicks.[20] So too was Walter, the father of Walt, and one of Jesse’s many sons.

Born in 1789—the year in which the amended Constitution of the United States actually came into force—Walter grew up into a silent giant,[21] a serious solid man, reserved and slow of speech, kindly but shrewd and obstinate; capable too, when he was roused, of passion. He was a wood-cutter and carpenter, a builder of frame-houses and barns, solid as himself. He learnt his trade in New York, and afterwards wandered from place to place in its pursuit. For a time after his marriage in 1816, he appears to have lived at West Hills, probably farming a part, at least, of the lands of his fathers. Their old house had recently been replaced by another at a little distance. This is still standing, and here, three years later, his second son was born. The child was called after his father, but the name was promptly clipped, and to this day he remains “Walt.”

His mother,[22] Louisa van Velsor, was a well-made, handsome young woman, now in her twenty-fourth year. Fearless, practical and affectionate, hers was a strong and happy presence, magnetic with the potency of a profound nature, as large and attractive as it was without taint of selfishness. She seemed to unite in herself the gentle sweetness and restraint of her Quaker[23] mother, with the more heroic, full-blooded qualities of[Pg 7] the old jolly major. She had a natural gift of description and was a graphic story-teller, but of book-learning she had next to none, and letter-writing was always difficult to her. She lacked little, however, of that higher education which comes of life-long true and fine relations with persons and with things. She had been an excellent horsewoman, and in later years her visitors were impressed by her vitality and reserve power. Her words fell with weight; she had a grave dignity; but withal her oval face, framed in its dark hair and snowy cap, was full of kindness; and about the corners of her mouth, and under her high-set brows, there always lurked a quaint and quiet humour. Little as we know of Louisa Whitman, we know enough to regard her as in every respect the equal in character of her son, whom she endowed with a natural happiness of heart. She became the mother of eight children, and lived to be nearly eighty years old, somewhat crippled by rheumatism, but industrious, charming and beloved to the last.

The first four years of his life, little Walt spent at West Hills. He is not the only worthy of the place, for here, half a century earlier, was born the Honourable Silas Wood,[24] who now and for ten years to come, represented the district in Congress. Already, doubtless, he was collecting materials for his Sketch of the First Settlement of Long Island, soon to appear.[25] But neither he nor his history greatly concerns us.

Some two or three miles of sandy lane separate the old Whitman farm from the present railway station. On an autumn day one finds the way bordered by huckleberries and tall evening primroses, yellow toad-flax, blue chickory and corn-flowers, and sturdy forests of golden-rod among the briars and bushes. In the rough hedgerows are red sumachs, oaks, chestnuts and tall cedars, locusts and hickories; the gateways open on to broad fields full of picturesque cabbages, or the plumed regiments of the tall green Indian corn. It is a farming[Pg 8] country, and a country rich in game—foxes and quails and partridges—and populous now with all kinds of chirping insects, with frogs and with mosquitoes. The wooded hills themselves are full of birds; beyond them there are vineyards.

The road winds to the hills which give the place its name. To be precise, the Whitman farm, as my driver assured me, belongs to the hamlet of Millwell, but the title of West Hills is better known. The other name may, however, serve to recall those cold sweet springs which rise along the foot of the hills and keep the country green, and whose waters are highly esteemed in New York.

The lane passes by the end of an old grey shingled farmhouse, boasting a new brick chimney. A delicate, ash-like locust tree stands by the big gate.

Here, if you turn into the farm road under the boughs of the orchard, and then, through the wicket in the palings, cross the weedy garden square, you may enter under the timber-propped porch into the low-ceiled house where Walt was born. It is small but comfortable, of two stories and a half. The morning sun streams through the open door, blinks in at the sun-shutters, and filters through the mosquito netting. On the left of the hall[26] are a bedroom and parlour, and the dining-room is on the right, where a wing of one story has been added. Beyond this there is a lower extension; and beyond again, extend the chocolate-coloured barns and sheds and byres and stables of the farm. At one corner of the garden palings stands the little well-house with its four neat pillars, and a big bell swings in its forked post by the side gate to summon the men from the fields into which one sees the farm road wandering. The fields run up to the wood. Across the road from the garden is an apple orchard, where the pigs root, and the hens scratch and cluck and scuffle. It was planted by Walt’s uncle Jesse.

This is not the first ancestral cabin of the Whitmans;[Pg 9] that lies at a little distance, nearer to the woods. It belongs now to another farm—the former holding having been divided—and the old cabin has become a waggon-shed. Both farms have long since passed out of the family; but near the first house, on a little woody knoll,[27] you may still see the picturesque group of unlettered stones which cluster on the Whitman burying hill.

Neither Walt himself nor his father and mother are buried here among their relatives and ancestors; but the boy, so early pre-occupied with the mysteries of life, must have often stolen to this strange solitude to commune with its silence and to hear the wind among the branches, whispering of death. There is a big old oak near by, old perhaps as the first Whitman settlement, and a grove of beautiful black walnuts, and this, too, was one of the children’s haunts.

Such was the old Whitman home and country, to which the boy’s earliest memories belonged, where he spent some of the years and nearly all the holidays of his youth and early manhood, and in which his later thoughts found their natural background, his deepest consciousness its native soil. It is, as we have seen, no tame or narrow country, but wide and generous, and it is within sound of the sea. In the still night that succeeds a storm, you may hear the strange low murmur of the Atlantic surf beating upon the coast.[28] The boy was born in the hills, with that sea-murmur about him.

[Pg 10]

BOYHOOD IN BROOKLYN

The hill-range which forms the back-bone of Long Island, and upon whose slopes Walt Whitman was born, terminates on the west in Brooklyn Heights, which overlook the busy bay and crowded city of New York.

The heights recall Washington’s masterly retreat; and the hint is enough to remind the shame-faced English visitor that the American is not without cause for a certain coolness in the very genuine affection which he manifests for the mother country. ’Seventy-six and the six years that followed, with all their legacy of bitter thoughts, was succeeded by 1814 and the burning of the Capitol. In this later war it was Virginia, not New England, that took the initiative; Massachusetts and Connecticut even opposed it, and it may have been none too popular in adjacent Long Island.

It is doubtful whether Major van Velsor or his sons actually took the field against the British. But this second and last of the Anglo-American wars was still a bitter and vivid memory when in May, 1823,[29] towards Walt’s fourth birthday, his father, the old major’s son-in-law, left the farm, removing with his family to Front Street, Brooklyn, near the wharves and water-side.

Though but a country town with great elm-trees still shading its main thoroughfare,[30] Brooklyn was growing,[Pg 11] and its trade was brisk. It is likely that the carpenter, Whitman, framed more than one of the hundred and fifty houses which were added to it during the year.

In the meantime, Walt took advantage of his improved situation to study men and manners in a sea-port town. He watched the ferry-boats that for the last ninety years had plied to and fro, binding Brooklyn to its big neighbour opposite upon Manhattan Island. For another sixty years their decks provided the only roadway across the East River, and they still go back and forward loaded heavily, in spite of the two huge but graceful bridges which now span the grey waters. The boy gazed wondering at the patient horse in the round house on deck, which, turning like a mule at a wheel-pump, provided the propelling power for the ferry-boat till Fulton replaced him by steam.

The boy in frocks must have wondered, too, at the great shows and pageants of 1824 and 1825 which filled New York with holiday-making crowds. For in August of the former year, came the old hero of two Republics, General Lafayette, to be received with every demonstration of admiring gratitude by the people of America. Some scintilla of the glory of those days—pale reflection, as it was, of the far-away tragic radiance that lighted up the world at the awakening of Justice and of Liberty on both sides of the sea—fell upon the child. For when the old soldier visited Brooklyn to lay the corner-stone of a library there, he found the youngster in harm’s way and lifted him, with a hearty kiss, on to a coign of vantage.[31] Thus, at six years old, Walt felt himself already famous.

Again, a few months later, the city was all ablaze with lights and colour and congratulations on the opening of the Erie Canal, which connected New York with Ohio and promised to break the monopoly of Western commerce held hitherto by the queen city of the Mississippi.

By this time, the family counted four children; two brothers, Jesse and Walt, and two little girls, Mary and[Pg 12] Hannah, all born within six years. Of the children, Walt and Hannah appear to have been special friends, but we have little record of this period. As they grew old enough, they attended the Brooklyn public school and went duly to Sunday school as well.[32] In the summers they spent many a long holiday in the fields and lanes about West Hills.

A reminiscence of those times is enshrined in one of the best known of the Leaves of Grass,[33] written more than a quarter of a century later, a memory of the May days when the boy discovered a mocking-birds’ nest containing four pale green eggs, among the briars by the beach, and watched over them there from day to day till presently the mother-bird disappeared; and then of those September nights when, escaping from his bed, he ran barefoot down on to the shore through the windy moonlight, flung himself upon the sand, and listened to the desolate singing of the widowed he-bird close beside the surf. There, in the night, with the sea and the wind, he lay utterly absorbed in the sweet, sad singing of that passion, some mystic response awakening in his soul; till in an ecstasy of tears which flooded his young cheeks, he felt, rather than understood, the world-meaning hidden in the thought of death.[34]

This self-revealing reminiscence, even if it should prove to diverge from historic incident and to take some colour from later thought, illumines the obscurity which covers the inner life of his childhood. Elsewhere we can dimly see him as his mother’s favourite; towards her he was always affectionate. But with his father he showed himself wayward, idle, self-willed and independent, altogether a difficult lad for that kindly but taciturn[Pg 13] and determined man to manage. Walt retained these qualities, and they caused endless trouble to every ill-advised person who afterwards attempted the task in which worthy Walter Whitman failed.

Among his young companions, though he was not exactly imperious, Walt seems to have played the part of a born leader; he was a clever boy; he always had ideas, and he always had a following. And as a rule he was delightful to be with, for he had an unflagging capacity for enjoyment and adventure.

But there must have been times when he was moody and reserved. The passionate element in his nature which the song of the mocking-bird aroused belongs rather to night solitudes than to perpetual society and sunshine. As he grew older, and, perhaps, somewhat overgrew his physical strength,[35] he was often unhappy in himself. There was something tempestuous in him which no one understood, he himself least of any. Probably his wise and very human mother came nearest to understanding; and her heart was with him as he fought out his lonely battles with that strange enemy of Youth’s peace, the soul.

Little brothers were added from time to time to the family group; Andrew, George and Jeff, and last of all poor under-witted Ted, born when Walt was a lad of sixteen, to be the life-long object of his mother’s affectionate care. The names of Andrew and Jeff reflect their father’s political sentiments; the latter recalling the founder of the old Jeffersonian Republicanism; and the former being called after Andrew Jackson, the popular and successful candidate for the presidency, in the year of the boy’s birth, who afterwards reorganised his party, creating the “Democratic” machine to take the place of what had hitherto been the “Republican” caucus. Thus Republicanism changed its name, and the title did not reappear in party politics for a generation.

As Walter Whitman built, mortgaged and eventually[Pg 14] sold his frame-houses, the family would often move from one into another: we can trace at least five migrations[36] during the ten years that they remained in Brooklyn. He was a busy, but never a prosperous man; with his large family, the fluctuations of trade must have affected him seriously; and scattered through his son’s story, there are fast-days and seasons of privation. Walter Whitman was, in short, a working man upon the borders of the middle-class: thrifty, shrewd, industrious, but dependent upon his earnings; mixing at times with people of good education, but of little himself; a master-workman, the son of a well-read and thoughtful mother, living in the free and natural social order which at that time prevailed in Brooklyn and New York.

He was not outwardly religious; he was never a church-goer; even his wife, who called herself a Baptist, only went irregularly,[37] and then, with an easy tolerance, to various places of worship—the working mother of eight children has her hands full on Sundays. In the household there was no form of family prayers. But when old Elias Hicks[38] preached in the neighbourhood, they went to hear him, tending more towards a sort of liberal Quakerism than to anything else.

The Whitmans were not an irreligious family—Walt was, for instance, fairly well-grounded in the Scriptures—but they thought for themselves, they disliked anything that savoured of exclusion, and their religion consisted principally in right living and in kindliness. Their devotion to the old Quaker minister is interesting. Hicks was a remarkable man and a most powerful and moving preacher. He was large and liberal-minded; too liberal, it would seem, for some of his hearers. His utterances had however passed unchallenged till an evangelical movement, fostered by some English Friends among their American brethren, made further acquiescence seem impossible.

[Pg 15]

That which complacently calls itself orthodoxy is naturally intolerant, it can, indeed, hardly even admit tolerance to a place among the virtues; and the evangelical propaganda must be very pure if it is to be unaccompanied by the spirit of exclusion. It may seem strange that such a spirit should enter into a Society which gathers its members under the name of “Friends,” a name which seems to indicate some basis broader than the creeds, some spiritual unity which could dare to welcome the greatest diversity of view because it would cultivate mutual understanding. But the broader the basis and the more spiritual the bond of fellowship, the more disastrous is the advent of the spirit of schism masking itself under some title of expediency, and here this spirit had forced an entrance.

Between Hicks—who himself appears to have been somewhat intolerant of opposition, a strong-willed man, frankly hostile to the evangelical dogmatics—and the narrower sort of evangelicals, relations became more and more strained, until, in 1828, the octogenarian minister was disowned by the official body of Quakers, after some painful scenes. He was however followed into his exile by a multitude of his hearers and others who foresaw and dreaded the crystallisation of Quakerism under some creed.

Soon after the crisis, and only three months before his death, Elias Hicks preached in the ball-room of Morrison’s Hotel on Brooklyn Heights. Among the mixed company who listened on that November evening to the old man’s mystical and prophetic utterance, was the ten-year old boy, accompanying his parents.

Hicks sprang from the peasant-farming class to which the Whitmans belonged; and, as a lad, had been intimate with Walt’s great-grandfather, and with his son after him. It was then, with a sort of hereditary reverence, that the boy beheld that intense face, with its high-seamed forehead, the smooth hair parted in the middle and curling quaintly over the collar behind; the hawk nose, the high cheek bones, the repression of the mouth, and the curiously Indian aspect of the tall com[Pg 16]manding figure, clad in the high vest and coat of Quaker cut. The scene was one he never forgot. The finely-fitted and fashionable place of dancing, the officers and gay ladies in that mixed and crowded assembly, the lights, the colours and all the associations, both of the faces and of the place, presenting so singular a contrast with the plain, ancient Friends seated upon the platform, their broad-brims on their heads, their eyes closed; with the silence, long continued and becoming oppressive; and most of all, with the tall, prophetic figure that rose at length to break it.

With grave emphasis he pronounced his text: “What is the chief end of man?” and with fiery and eloquent eyes, in a strong, vibrating, and still musical voice, he commenced to deliver his soul-awakening message. The fire of his fervour kindled as he spoke of the purpose of human life; his broad-brim was dashed from his forehead on to one of the seats behind him. With the power of intense conviction his whole presence became an overwhelming persuasion, melting those who sat before him into tears and into one heart of wonder and humility under his high and simple words.

The sermon itself has not come down to us. In his Journal,[39] Hicks has described the meeting as a “large and very favoured season.” It seems to have been devoid of those painful incidents of opposition which saddened so many similar occasions during these last years of his ministry.

The old man had been accused of Deism, as though he were a second Tom Paine and devotee of “Reason”: in reality his message was somewhat conservative and essentially mystical. A hostile writer[40] asserts truly that the root of his heresy—if heresy we should call it—lay in his setting up of the Light Within as the primary rule of faith and practice. He always viewed the Bible writings as a secondary standard of truth or guide to action; as a book, though the best among books. And as a book, it was the “letter” only: the “spirit that[Pg 17] giveth life” even to the letter, was in the hearts of men.

In his attitude toward the idea of Christ, he distinguished, like many other mystics, between the figure of the historic Jesus of Nazareth and that indwelling Christ of universal mystical experience, wherewith according to his teaching, Jesus identified himself through the deepening of his human consciousness into that of Deity. In the mystical view, this God-consciousness is in some measure the common inheritance of all the saints, and underlies the everyday life of men. And to it, as a submerged but present element in the life of their hearers, Fox and the characteristic Quaker preachers have always directed their appeal, seeking to bring it up into consciousness. Once evoked and recognised, this divine element must direct and control all the faculties of the individual. It is the new humanity coming into the world.

Hicks recognised in Jesus the most perfect of initiates into this new life; and as such, he accorded a special authority to the Gospel teachings, but demanded that they should be construed by the reader according to the Christ-spirit in his own heart. Properly understood, the doctrine of the Inner Light is not, as many have supposed it to be, the reductio ad absurdum of individual eccentricity. On the contrary it tends to a transcendental unity; for the spirit whose irruption into the individual consciousness it seeks and supposes, is that spirit and light wherein all things are united and in harmony. In this sense, the Quaker preacher was appealing to the essence of all social consciousness—that realisation of an organic fellowship-in-communion which the sacraments of the churches are designed to cultivate.

However dark his great subject may appear to the trained gaze of philosophy, the old man’s words brought illumination to the little boy. The sense of human dignity was deepened in him; he breathed an air of solemnity and inspiration.

Hicks died early in the new year, and with him there[Pg 18] probably fell away the last strong link which held the Whitmans to Quakerism. But the seed of the ultimate Quaker faith—that faith by which alone a quaint little society rises out of a merely historic and sectarian interest to become a symbol of the eternal truths which underlie Society as a whole, a faith which declares of its own experience that Deity is immanent in the heart of Man—this seed of faith was sown in the lad’s mind to become the central principle around which all his after thought revolved.

Although, as these incidents make evident, Walt’s nature was strongly emotional, he never went through the process known as conversion. Religion came to him naturally. Responsive from his childhood to the emotional influence of that ultimate reality which we call “God” or “the spiritual,” he can never have had the overwhelming sense of inward disease and degradation which conversion seems to presuppose. Well-born and surrounded by wholesome influences, it is probable that the higher elements of his nature were always dominant. The idea of abject unworthiness would hardly be suggested to his young mind. He was not ignorant of evil, insensible to temptation, or innocent of those struggles for self-mastery which increase with the years of youth. We have reason to believe that he was wilful and passionate; though he was too affectionate and too well-balanced to be ill-natured. Harmonious natures are not insensitive to their own discordant notes, and the harmony of Whitman held many discords in solution.

He had then in his own experience, even as a child, material sufficient for a genuine sense of sin. But this sense, never, so far as we know, became acute enough to cause a crisis in his life, never created in his mind any feeling of an irreparable disaster, or any discord which he despaired of ultimately resolving. He had not been taught to regard God as a severe judge, of incredible blindness to the complexity of human nature;[41] and[Pg 19] perhaps partly in consequence of this, he was ever a rebel against the Divine Justice.

There is, it may be said, another kind of conversion, a turning of the eyes of the soul to discover the actual presence and power of God at hand: the sequel may show whether Whitman felt himself to be ignorant of this change.

Honest, upright and self-respecting, his parents never took an ascetic view of morality. They did not share in that puritanical hostility to art and to amusements which too long distorted the image of truth in the mirror of Quakerism. Even as a lad, Walt discovered those provinces of the world of romance which lie across the footlights, and in the dazzling pages of the Arabian Nights;[42] and, as a youth, he followed the wizard of Waverley through all his stories and poems, becoming, soon after Sir Walter’s death, the happy possessor of Lockhart’s complete edition, in a solid octavo volume of 1,000 pages. From this time forward he was an insatiable novel-reader, especially devoted to Fenimore Cooper, who was then delighting the younger generation with stories of pioneer life.

It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that the boy’s life at this time was all amusement. At eleven years of age he was in a lawyer’s office,[43] proud in the possession of a desk and window-corner of his own. The master found him a bright boy and was kind to him, forwarding his limited education a step further. He also subscribed on his behalf to a circulating library which supplied the lad with a continuous series of tales. But for whatever reason—one fears it was not unconnected with those stories—Walt soon found himself running errands for another master.

In his thirteenth year he was put to the printing trade, and ceased, at least for a while, to live under his father’s roof.[44] The mother was out of health for a long[Pg 20] time, during the period of the youngest son’s birth and infancy, and when in 1832 the town was visited by a severe epidemic of cholera, the Whitman family removed into the country. But Walt stayed behind, boarding with the other apprentices of the Brooklyn postmaster and printer. Mr. Clements and his family were good to the lad while he was with them, and some effusions of his—for like other clever boys he was writing verses—appear to have found their way into the Long Island Patriot.

From the Patriot he soon removed to the Star, another local weekly, whose proprietor, Mr. Alden J. Spooner, was a principal figure in the Brooklyn of those days, and who long retained a vivid memory of a certain idle lad who worked in his shop. If he had been stricken with fever and ague, he used to say laughing, the boy would have been too lazy to shake.[45] At thirteen, Walt was too much interested in watching things to take kindly to work; most of his time was spent in learning what the world had to teach him; but in the end he learnt his trade as well.

No place could have been better chosen to awake his interest in the many-sided life around him than a printing office, the centre of all the local news. Here he developed fast in every way, shot up long and stalky, scribbled for the press as well as learning his proper business, and became a very young man about town. Already, he felt the attraction of the great island city of Mannahatta, where, according to its earliest name, for ever “gaily dash the coming, going, hurrying sea-waves.”[46]

New York had for a time been crippled by the collapse of American trade which followed the close of the Napoleonic wars in Europe,[47] but had recovered again, and was now growing rapidly—a city of perhaps 200,000 inhabitants, the English element predominating[Pg 21] in its curiously mixed population. Though it was prosperous, it had its share of misfortune. Serious riots—racial, religious and political—were not infrequent. Epidemics of cholera swept through it; and in December, 1835, thirteen acres of its buildings were burnt out in a three days’ conflagration.

In spite of these disasters the town grew and extended, and means of locomotion multiplied. The stages were running on Broadway from Bowling Green to Bleecker Street, that is about half-way to Central Park, and the great thoroughfare was crowded with traffic, presenting a scene busier even and certainly more picturesque than that of to-day. Fashionable folk still lived “down town” below the present City Hall, in a district now given up as exclusively to offices and warehouses as is the City of London. Ladies took their children down to play upon the open space of the Battery, looking down the beautiful bay; and did their shopping at the various Broadway stores. Upon their door-steps, on either side of the street, citizens still sat out with their families through the summer evenings; they condescended to drink at the city pumps, and to buy hot-corn and ices from the wayside vendors, while the height of diversion was to run with the engine to some fire. In a word, New York life was still natural and democratic; palaces and slums were as unknown to the democracy of the metropolis as the sky-scrapers which render the approach to-day, in spite of its wooded hills, its ships and islands, among the least beautiful of the great sea-ports of the world.

Of diversions the citizens had no lack, for the population was now sufficient to support a good native stage and to attract foreign artists. The year 1825 saw the advent of Italian opera at the Old Park theatre, which stood not far from the present Post Office; and Garcia and Malibran appeared in the “Barber of Seville”.[48] It was here that Edwin Forrest was first seen by a New York audience; while fashionable English actors like[Pg 22] Macready and the Kembles were among its visitors. But even more interest centred in the Bowery, the great popular theatre built to seat 3,000, where the elder Booth and Forrest played night after night before enthusiastic houses of young and middle-aged artisans and mechanics capable of thunderstorms of applause.

There were other theatres, too, such as Niblo’s and Richmond Hill, and to all of these young Whitman presently found his way armed with a pressman’s pass. He must have spent many an evening in the city while he was still working for Mr. Spooner, and one unforgettable night, when he was fifteen or so, he was present at a great benefit in the Bowery when Booth played “Richard III.”[49] Fifty years later, the scene of that evening remained as clear before his eyes as when he sat in the front of the pit, hanging on every word and gesture of that consummate actor. Inflated and stagy his manner might be; but he revealed to the lad, watching his studied abandonment to passion, a new world of expression. For the first time, he understood how far gestures, and a presence more powerful than words, can express the heights and depths of emotion.

On that night in the Bowery, as upon those memorable nights on the Long Island Beach, and in Morrison’s Ballroom, Walt came face to face with one of the supreme mysteries. On these occasions it had been the mystery of Death, which alone brings peace to the heart of passionate love, and the mystery of the Immanent Deity; now it was that other equal mystery, the mystery of Expression, the utterance of the soul in living words and acts and vivid presence. Love and Religion were already significant to him; he had now been shown the meaning of Art.

In the meantime he had begun, as boys will, to take an interest in politics. And before going further, we must glance at the outstanding events and tendencies of the period.

[Pg 23]

Those two famous documents, The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, are associated respectively with Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton,[50] and represent two currents of political theory which beat against one another through subsequent years. Jefferson was saturated with the political idealism of the school of Rousseau, which sums itself up in the demand for individual liberty and rights, the declaration of individual independence, and freedom from interference.

Hamilton on the other hand—who was by temper an aristocrat, and once at a New York dinner described the people as “a great beast,”[51]—was possessed by the idea of the Nation; he dwelt upon the duty of each member to the whole, promulgating doctrines of solidarity and unity in the cause of a common freedom. The two views are, of course, complementary; their antagonism, if it gave the victory to either, would be fatal to both; and their reconciliation is essential to the life of the Republic. But between their supporters, antagonism has naturally existed.

The ideal of the Jeffersonian Republicans became associated with popular or “Democratic” sentiment,[52] standing as it did in opposition to the more conservative and constitutional position of the Hamiltonian Federalists. For a time the two parties dwelt together in such amity that the Federalists were actually merged with the Republicans; but the uncontested election of Monroe was a signal for the outbreak of the old contest. At the next election,[53] an Adams of Massachusetts was returned to the White House; and Jackson of Tennessee, one of the defeated candidates, built up a Democratic party of opposition whose organising centre was New York. On the other side, the followers of Adams and his secretary, Henry Clay, came eventually to be known as Whigs, “Republican” ceasing for a quarter of a century to be a party label.

[Pg 24]

The titles of the parties serve approximately to indicate their different tendencies; though it must be remembered that the Whiggery of Adams was coloured by New England idealism, while the material interests of the South turned their energies to capture the naturally idealistic Democracy of Jackson. Eventually the division became almost a geographical one; though certain of her interests and perhaps her jealous antipathy to New England, gave New York’s sympathies to the South.

In 1832, when Walt was studying the world through the keen eyes of thirteen, and the windows of a Brooklyn printing shop, Democratic South Carolina was offering a stubborn resistance to the Federal tariff. Theoretically, and one may add ethically, any tariff was contrary to the Jeffersonian doctrine of universal freedom; and practically, it was disastrous to the special interests of the South. Carolina, under the poetic fire and genius of Calhoun, was the Southern champion against Northern, or, let us say, Federal aggression. She stood out for the rights of a minority so far as to propose secession. The South was aggrieved by the tariff, for, roughly speaking, its States were cotton plantations, whose interests lay in easy foreign exchange; they grew no corn, they made no machinery, they neither fed nor clothed themselves. The North on the other hand was industrial, anxious to guard its infant manufactures against the competition of Great Britain. The West was agricultural, demanding roads and public works which required the funds provided by a tariff. Now even these public works, these high roads and canals, were calculated directly to benefit the Northern manufacturers rather than the planters of the South whose highway to the West was the great river which had formerly given them all the Western trade to handle, and whose cheapest market for machinery and manufactured goods lay over the high sea whither its own staple was continually going.

The tariff imposed for the benefit of the Northern section was, then, opposed by the South on grounds of industrial necessity as well as of political theory. And it may be noted the argument of the Southerner was equally[Pg 25] the argument of many an artisan in the metropolis, who saw in free trade the sole guarantee of cheap living.

Thus there was a certain antagonism between the interests of the two geographical sections of the American nation; and this was emphasised by another cause for hostility. Every statesman knew that, although unacknowledged, it was really the question of slavery which was already dividing America into “North” and “South”. And recognising it as beyond his powers of solution, he sought by maintaining a compromise to conceal it from the public mind.

The “Sovereign States,” momentarily united for defence against a domineering king, had at the same hour been swept by Tom Paine’s and Jefferson’s versions of the French Republicanism, and North and South alike adhered to a doctrinaire equality. The negro, they were willing to agree, should be voluntarily and gradually emancipated.

But the hold of this policy on the South was soon afterwards undermined by the economic development which followed the introduction of the cotton-gin. The new and rapidly growing prosperity of the planter depended on the permanence of the “institution”. And from this time forward the Southern policy becomes hard to distinguish from the vested interests of the slave-owner. The prosperity of the South seemed to depend upon the extension of the cotton industry: the cotton industry, again, upon slave-labour; thus it was argued, the institution of slavery was necessary to the prosperity of the South. The North, so the Southerner supposed, had its own interests to serve, and only regarded the South as a market. It was, he felt, jealous of the dominance of Southern statesmanship in the Union; and its desire to destroy “the institution” was denounced as the sectional jealousy of small-minded, shop-keeping bigots, of inferior antecedents. By the brute force of increasing numbers, by a vulgar love of trade, and the accidents of climate and of mineral resources, the North was beginning to establish its hold[Pg 26] upon Congress, and arrogating to itself the Federal power.

Hitherto, with the exception of the Adamses and of Jackson, every President had been of Virginian birth, bred, the Southerner declared, in the broader views of statesmanship. But the North was now predominant in the House of Representatives, and a balance could only be preserved in the Senate, where each State appoints two members, by constant watchfulness. Thus the rapid settling of the middle West by Northerners must be balanced by the annexation of new cotton-growing regions in the South-west. The famous Missouri Compromise of 1821 fixed the frontier between future free-soil and slave States at the line of the southern boundary of Missouri, while admitting that State itself into the Union as a member of the latter class. Hence it was only in the South-west that slavery could develop, and extension by conquest of cotton territory became henceforward an object of Southern politicians.

While, then, it was the aggression of the South which finally drove the nation into civil war, the South for many years had viewed itself as an aggrieved partner in the inter-State compact, victimised in the interests of the majority. It felt, perhaps not unjustly, that it was being overridden, and that the Federation was becoming what Jefferson described as “a foreign yoke”.[54] It became excessively sensitive to hostility: every rumour of the spread of Abolition sentiment in the North—a sentiment which favoured a new attitude towards the Federal power, and would give control to it over the domestic affairs of what hitherto had literally been “Sovereign States”—raised a storm of indignation and evoked new threats of secession.

But while slavery was already playing its part in American politics it had not yet become the main line of party cleavage. Although the party of free trade and of State rights was the party of the South, it was not yet[Pg 27] the party of slavery. It was still throughout America the “people’s party,” and the slave power was the last to desire that it should cease to hold that title, especially in the North. For many a year to come there would be stout Abolitionists who could call themselves Democrats; while “dough-faces,” or politicians who served the party of slavery, were always to be found amongst the Whigs.

Even while party feeling ran high, the increase of the means of communication and the introduction of steam transport, both on land and water, favoured the larger Federal sentiment and quickened the national consciousness. Talk of secession had been heard in New England as well as in South Carolina; but actual secession became more difficult as the manufacturers of the East, the cotton-growers of the South, and the farmers of the Mississippi basin had tangible evidence of the many interests and privileges which were common to them, and beheld more and more clearly the future upon which America was entering. Year by year the idea of the Union gained in vitality; and in spite of party feeling, President Jackson had a nation behind him when he refused to yield to South Carolina’s threat of secession.

A compromise was effected, and Carolina submitted to the collection of duties under a somewhat mitigated tariff: the relation of the constituent States to the Federal power remaining still undefined, waiting, for a generation to come, upon the growth of national sentiment on the one hand, and the accumulation of resentment upon the other.

[Pg 28]

TEACHER AND JOURNALIST

The spring of 1836 found Whitman in New York.[55]

He was in his seventeenth year, had now learnt his trade, and had begun to write for the weekly papers; among others, contributing occasionally to the handsome and aristocratic pages of the Mirror, perhaps the best of its class.[56] He lived in that journalistic atmosphere which encourages expression and turns many a clever lad into a prig. Walt was self-sufficient, but there was nothing of the prig[57] in him. Limited as his schooling had been, he was naturally receptive and thoughtful, and his education went steadily forward; he made friends with older men, and with men of education from whom he learnt much. And now he became a teacher.

He was a healthy boy, but had somewhat overgrown his strength, and perhaps this was among the causes of his leaving the city in May, and going up Long Island into the country. He joined his family for awhile, who were living at Norwich;[58] and subsequently settled for the winter as a country teacher at Babylon, boarding round, as was the custom, in the homes of his various pupils.

The little town of Babylon stands on the swampy inner shores of the Great South Bay, which is a spacious lagoon separated from the Atlantic by a narrow beach[Pg 29] or line of sand hills. This outer beach bears here and there a ridge of pine forest or a lighthouse; but for the rest, it is abandoned to sea-birds and grass, to the winds and a few sand-flowers scattered among the wind markings which are stencilled in purple upon the sand in some delicate aerial deposit. Outside, even upon quiet days, the surf beats ponderously with ominous sound, the will and weight of the ocean in its swing. Within, across the wide unruffled waters of the lagoon, populous with sails, is the far-away fringe of the Babylon woods, and over them, pale and blue, the hill-range above Huntington.

The bay itself is a glorious mirror for the over-glow of the sky at sunset or sunrise. Standing upon its inner rim at Babylon, as the colour begins to die into the dusk, you may see mysterious sails moving by hidden waterways among fields still merry with the chirrup of innumerable crickets; while beyond the rattle of cords and pulleys and the liquid murmur of the moving boats, beyond their lights that pierce the darkening water like jewelled spears, glimmers a star on Fire Island beach to greet the great liners as they pass by. In summer it is a field of many harvests; famous for its blue-fish, its clams and oysters; and neither the lads of Babylon nor their young master were behind-hand in spearing eels, catching crabs and gathering birds’ eggs.[59] In a hard winter it is frozen over for months together.

For the greater part of the next four or five years, Walt remained in the country, moving about from place to place, and paying occasional visits to New York. He is said to have been a good and popular teacher;[60] and if his equipment was not great, it was sufficient; he liked boys and had the gift of imparting knowledge. He took his work seriously, was always master in the schoolroom, and knew whatever passed there. He followed methods of his own; breaking loose from text-[Pg 30]books, to expound his knowledge and impart his own interests to his scholars. The element of personality told throughout his teaching; already it was notable as the power behind all that he did. An impression of himself, of his universal kindliness, of the sympathetic quality of his whole person, his voice and look and manner, and of a certain distinction and dignity inseparable from him, was retained by his pupils in after years.

His favourite method of punishment is worth recording, as characteristic of his power and of his theory of pedagogics. An admirable story-teller, he would chastise any scholar who had behaved dishonourably, by describing his conduct to the whole school, and without the mention of a name, the guilty boy or girl was sufficiently self-condemned and punished in his own shame. Graver offences were made more public.

In recess and away from school, Walt was a sheer boy, heartily joining in the most boisterous games and sharing every kind of recreation consistent with his kindly spirit. “Gunning” was never included.

Among the scholars there must often have been those of his own years, and the fact that he could preserve his status as a teacher while living on terms of frank comradeship with his scholars, declares him born to the office. They were mixed schools which he taught, and towards the girls his attitude was one of honest equanimity. He was the same with them as with the boys, betraying neither a sentimental preference nor a masculine disdain. Perhaps American girls with their friendly ways and comparative lack of self-consciousness, call for less fortitude on the young teacher’s part than some others; but Walt’s own temperament stood him in good stead. It seems improbable that he was ever subject either to green-sickness or calf-love, and he was no sentimentalist.[61]

Perhaps the idleness of which Mr. Spooner retained so lively a recollection, might have hindered his becom[Pg 31]ing an ideal dominie. His thoughts must sometimes have been far afield, his pupils and their tasks forgotten. It was not, as I have already suggested, that he was lazy; he worked hard and fast when his mind was upon his work, and best of all perhaps as a teacher in contact with human beings; but he was never so busy that he could refuse to pursue an idea, never so occupied that he could miss a new fact or emotion.

Like other young teachers, Walt probably learnt at least as much as he taught, if not from his pupils, then from their parents. Boarding with them, he came to know and to love his own people, the peasant-yeomanry of the island.[62]

He was a favourite with the friendly Long Island youths and girls of his own years, but his closer friendships seem to have been with older people: the well-balanced, but strongly marked fathers and mothers of families. He loved the country too, and all the occupations and amusements of the open-air, into which he had been initiated as a child. Thus he learned his island by heart, wandering over it on foot, by day and night; sailing its coasts and out into the waters beyond, in pilot and fishing boats, to taste for himself the brave sea life of those old salts, Williamses and Kossabones, his mother’s ancestors.

In the spring of 1838, we find him again at Huntington; and here, in June,[63] he founded a weekly journal, the Long Islander, which is still published. Full of interests, self-sufficient and ready with his pen, and in close touch with his readers, he conducted the paper for a while with success. He was nineteen and an enthusiast; and he was both printer, editor and publisher.

Like others of the time, his paper was probably a humble sheet of four small pages, and his task was not so heavy as it may sound. He thoroughly enjoyed the work, as well he might: the new responsibility and[Pg 32] independence were admirably suited to his years and temper. He purchased a press and type, and his printing house was in the upper story of what is now a stable, which stood on the main street of the town.

There he did most of the work himself, but I have talked with an old man who shared his task at times. And not his task only; for the printing room was, we may be sure, the scene of much beside labour. Walt loved companionship, and was an excellent story-teller; he loved games, especially whist, which he would play—and generally win—for a pumpkin pie. But when he worked, he “worked like the mischief,” as the saying is;[64] and when he said so his companions knew that they must go. They must have recognised, if they thought about him at all in that way, that while he made no display of his knowledge he knew far more than they, and while he was an excellent comrade, it would not do to treat Walt with too great familiarity.

As to his talk, it was clean and wholesome and self-respecting. He was too much of a man already to resort to the mannish tricks of many youths. He had, moreover, at this time, a tinge of Puritanism, which did him no harm: he neither smoked nor drank nor swore. He contemned practical jokes. Maybe there was less of Puritanism about him than of personal pride. He was himself from the beginning, belonged to no set, and went his own ways. He seemed to be everywhere and to observe everything without obtruding himself anywhere. And having purchased a horse, he carried the papers round to the doors of his readers in the surrounding townships. Often, afterwards, he recalled those long romantic drives along the glimmering roads, through the still fields and the dark oak woods under the half-luminous starry sky, broken by friendly faces and kind greetings.

But before the year was out the appearance of the Long Islander became more and more irregular, till the patience of its owner and subscribers was exhausted.[Pg 33] In the spring it ceased for a time, and when it reappeared it was numbered as a fresh venture under new management.

Walt had gone back to school teaching at Babylon.[65] He continued this work for two years more, wandering from place to place, now at the Jamaica Academy, now at Woodbury, now at Whitestone. He was, at this time, a keen debater and politician, an Abolitionist, a Washingtonian teetotaler, and ardently opposed to capital punishment. He took an active share in the stump oratory of 1840, when Van Buren of New York was for the second time the Democratic nominee for President. The fact, with the knowledge he always showed of the art of oratory, and the plans for lecturing which he afterwards drafted, seems to testify to a native capacity for public speaking, as well as a genuine and serious interest in the affairs of the nation.

Walt Whitman was becoming recognised as a young man of ability: in spite of his nonchalant and friendly unassuming ways, he had pride and ambition. He felt in himself that he was capable of great things, and that it was time to begin them. Not very clear as to what his proper work might be, he took the turning of his inclination, and early in the summer of 1841 entered the office of the New World, as a compositor,[66] to become for the next twenty years one of the fraternity of New York pressmen.

His first success was achieved in the August number of the Democratic Review, one of the first American periodicals of the day, which counted among its contributors such writers as Bryant, Whittier, Hawthorne and Longfellow. His “Death in the Schoolroom,”[67] appearing over the initials of “W. W.,” caught the public fancy, and was widely copied by the provincial press. It is the study of a gruesome incident in Long Island country life; by turns sentimental and violent in its horror, and evidently intended as an argument against school flog[Pg 34]ging. It has a sort of crude power and its subject matter would have appealed to Hawthorne. It is by no means discreditable; but to us it seems verbose, and it is clumsy in its exaggerated style. Lugare is shown to us at one moment standing as though transfixed by a basilisk—and at another, “every limb quivers like the tongue of a snake”.

Whatever its faults, they did not offend the taste of the hour: the Review welcomed his contributions, and some study from his pen appeared in its pages each alternate month throughout the next year, some being signed “Walter Whitman” in full. To the New World he had meanwhile been contributing conventional and very mediocre verses in praise of Death and of compassionate Pity.[68]

The remorse of a young murderer; an angel’s compassionate excuses for evil-doers; the headstrong revolt of youth against parental injustice, and the ensuing tragic fate; the half-insane repulsion of a father toward his son, prompting him to send the lad to a madhouse and thus wrecking his mind; the refusal of a young poet to sell his genius; the pining of a lover after the death of his beloved; the lonely misery of a deaf and dumb girl, who has been seduced and deserted; the reform of a profligate by a child; the sobering of a drunkard at his little sister’s death-bed; and an old widow’s strewing of flowers on every grave because her husband’s remains unknown: such are the subjects with which he dealt.[69] His wanderings in Long Island had supplied him with incidents upon which to exercise his imagination. Those which he selected have always some pathetic interest, while several have an obviously didactic purpose.

Whitman’s moral consciousness was still predominant: he was an advocate of “causes”. But his morality sprang out of a real passion for humanity, which took the form of sentiment; a sentiment which was[Pg 35] thoroughly genuine at bottom, but which in its expression at this time, became false and stilted enough to bear the reproach of sentimentality. In view of their author’s subsequent optimism, it is interesting to note that all these studies are of figures or incidents, more or less tragic.

Whitman was puzzling over the ultimate questions: the problem of evil, as seen in the sufferings inflicted by tyrannical power, and by callous or lustful selfishness, upon innocent victims; on the inscrutable tragedies of disease and insanity; and again, upon the power of innocence, of sorrow and of love to evoke the good which he saw everywhere latent in human nature, and which a blind and heavy-handed legalitarian justice would destroy with the evil inseparable from it. The more he thought over these problems, the more he recognised the futility of condemnation, and the effectiveness of understanding love.

The New World, upon which he was working, published the first American versions of some of the principal novels of the day; it reprinted several of the new poems of Tennyson from English sources and contained long notices of such works as Carlyle’s Heroes and Hero-worship. In November, 1842, it issued as an extra number Dickens’s American Notes, the sensation of the hour—the author having been fêted at the Park Theatre in February—and announced Lytton Bulwer’s Last of the Barons to follow. On the 23rd of the month, in the same fashion, appeared Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate, a tale of the times, by Walter Whitman. It was advertised as a thrilling romance by “one of the best novelists in this country”; and the proprietors of the magazine expressed their hope that the well-told incidents of the plot and the excellence of the moral would commend the book to general circulation. Nor were they disappointed. It is said that twenty thousand copies were sold. The book, then, achieved a tolerable success, and its author profited to the extent of some forty pounds.

Copies of Franklin Evans are now excessively rare,[Pg 36] and one may say with confidence they will remain so. For the tale will never be reprinted. It claims to be written for the people and not for the critics, and even the people are unlikely to read it a second time.

It is an ill-told rambling story of a Long Island lad who, going to the metropolis and taking to drink, falls through various stages of respectability till he becomes a bar-tender. He marries and reforms, but presently gives way again to his habit; his wife then dies, and he falls lower. Eventually he is rescued from gaol, and signs the “old” pledge against ardent spirits. Then he goes to Virginia, where he succeeds in fuddling his wits with wine, and marries a handsome Creole slave. Forthwith he becomes entangled with a white woman who drives his wife to the verge of madness, until a tragic fate releases him from them both, and the story concludes with his signature to the pledge of total abstinence. The author recommends it to his readers, and breaks out into praises of the Washingtonian crusade, foretelling its imminent and complete victory over the “armies of drink”.

The pages are diversified by Indian and other narratives impertinent to the plot, and by invectives against the scornful attitude of the pious and respectable toward those who are struggling in the nets of vice. The whole book is loosely graphic and frankly didactic, its author declaring his wish to be improving, though he will keep the amusement of his readers in view. He opines that in this temperance story he has found a novel and a noble use for fiction, and if his first venture be successful, be assured it will be followed by a second.

It is difficult to treat Franklin Evans seriously. That Whitman was at the time a sincere advocate of the more extreme doctrines of temperance reform can hardly be doubted. But in after years—the whole incident having become a matter of amusement to its author, not wholly unmingled with irritation when, as sometimes, it was thrust upon him anew by reformers as ardent as he had once been—he would laugh and say with a droll deliberation that the story was written against[Pg 37] time one hot autumn in a Broadway beer-cellar, his dull thoughts encouraged by bubbling libations. One suspects a humorous malice in the anecdote, belonging rather to his later than his earlier years. It may be noted, however, that while Whitman commended the pledge, he also commended a positive policy of “counter attraction” to all the young men who scanned his pages, to wit, an early marriage and a home, though he himself remained a bachelor.

Franklin Evans was honest enough. Young Whitman was serving the adorable Lady Temperance with fervour, if not with absolute consistency. He knew her cause to be a good one; but he found that, in this form, it was not quite his own, and he was too natural not to be inconsistent. He had not yet come to his own cause, nor for that matter to himself. And thus his essay became a tour de force; as he did not repeat it, we may suppose he was as little satisfied as those who now waste an hour upon this “thrilling romance”.

He was now in the full stream of journalistic activity. He wrote for the New York Sun, and appears for a few months to have acted as editor in succession of the Aurora and the Tattler.[70] In 1843 he filled the same post on the Statesman, and the year after upon the Democrat; while contributing also to the Columbian Magazine, the American Review, and Poe’s Broadway Journal.[71]

Probably none of these contributions are worthy of recollection. Anomalous as it may sound, from twenty-three to thirty-five Whitman was better fitted for an editor than for an essayist. He was clever without being brilliant; he had capacity but no special and definite line of his own. His strength lay in his judgment; and upon this both friends and family learnt to rely.

Several of the papers for which he wrote were party organs; it may have been that his political services in 1840 won him an introduction to the editors of the[Pg 38] Democratic Review, and helped him on his further way. In any case, it is certain that he frequented the party’s headquarters in the city. Tammany Hall was named after an Indian brave,[72] presumably to indicate the wholly indigenous character of its interests. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, it seems to have become the seat of a society of old Knickerbockers, gathered partly for mutual protection against certain groups of foreign immigrants who had shown a hostile disposition, and partly in opposition to the aristocratic Cincinnati Society presided over by Washington. During Jefferson’s Presidency it became a political centre, and was identified with the Democratic party from the time of its re-organisation under Jackson in New York State.

The Democrats failed to elect Van Buren, and were in opposition from 1840 to 1844. During the electoral struggle, a Baltimore journal had spoken slightingly of the humble character of Harrison, the Whig candidate:[73] better fitted, it pronounced, for a Western log-cabin and a small pension than for the White House. Harrison, like Andrew Jackson, was an old soldier: he had beaten the Indians long ago in a fight at Tippecanoe; and that, together with the simplicity of this Cincinnatus—the imaginary log-cabin, the coon-skins and hard cider, which made him the impersonation of the frontiersman to whom America owed so much, being all artfully exaggerated by party managers—caught the fancy of the whole country, which rang for months together with the refrain of “Tippecanoe and Tyler too”. Harrison died immediately after his inauguration and Vice-president Tyler took his place.

In Tammany’s back parlour, Walt made the acquaintance of many notables, and not least, of an old Colonel Fellowes,[74] who loved to discuss Tom Paine over a social glass, and to scatter to the four winds the legends of inebriety which had gathered about his later years of poverty and neglect. But that Whitman was a violent[Pg 39] partisan even at this time, seems to be disproved by the fact that in 1843 or 1844 he contributed political verses to Horace Greeley’s Tribune, a paper which had grown out of the Whig election sheet.[75] And though, like his father, he adhered now and always to the general political tradition of the Democrats, was a free trader, jealous of the central power, and voted with his party till it split in 1848, he was as good an Abolitionist as Greeley himself. Indeed, both the Tribune poems are inspired by the theme of slavery, and as if in witness to the reality of their inspiration, he breaks for the first time into the irregular metres he was to make his own.[76]

A religious ardour breathes from these singular Scriptural utterances. The first, “Blood-money,” is a homily on the text, “Guilty of the body and the blood of Christ”. In the slave, whom he describes as “hunted from the arrogant equality of the rest,” he sees the new incarnation of that “divine youth” whose body Iscariot sold and is still a-selling. It is an admirable piece of pathos, fresh, direct and unmannered, and by far the most individual and striking thing Whitman had done. And it was the only one which could be regarded as prophetic of the work that was to follow. Especially is this felt in such lines as

The piece was signed “Paumanok,” as also was “A Dough-face Song,” which appeared in the Evening Post.

The second of the Tribune poems, “Wounded in the House of Friends,”[77] is inferior to the first in poetic merit, though adopting a somewhat similar medium. It is a rather violent denunciation of those intimates of freedom whose allegiance to her can be bought off—“a dollar dearer to them than Christ’s blessing”—elderly “dough-faces” whose hearts are in their purses. It was upon Northern traitors to the cause rather than upon the people of the South, that Whit[Pg 40]man poured out his indignation: and this position he always maintained. The Tribune itself was at the time an ardent supporter of Clay’s candidature for the Presidency; but Clay subsequently trimmed upon this very question, and this action, by alienating the anti-slavery party in New York, resulted in his defeat at the polls.

Whitman’s political poems suggest already that loosening of ties which separated him a few years later from the main body of his party; but in 1844, following the lead of advanced Democrats like W. C. Bryant, he worked actively for Polk, the party candidate, who became President.[78] We cannot too often remind ourselves that the later Republicanism of the ’sixties was supported by men who had been Free-soil Democrats as well as by certain of their Whig opponents. Meanwhile, it was to the Radical wing of his party that young Whitman belonged.

Though engaged in the political struggle, he was by no means absorbed in it. His profession encouraged his natural interest in the affairs of his country, but not in the political affairs alone. He shared in the social functions of the city and its district. He frequented lectures and races, churches and auction rooms, weddings and clam-bakes.[79] He spent Saturday afternoons on the bare and then unfrequented sand ridge of Coney Island, bathing, reading and declaiming aloud, uninterrupted by a single one of the hundreds of thousands who now fill the island with their more artificial holiday making and their noisier laughter. In those days one did not require a costume to bathe on Coney Island beach.

Nearer than Coney Island, Brooklyn Ferry was always one of his favourite haunts.[80] Walt had always loved the boat as well as the river; as a child he had seen the horses in the round-house give place to the engine with its high “smoke-stack”; the captain and the hands were old friends, and he never tired of watching[Pg 41] the passengers. Who does not feel the delight of such a ferry, the swing of the boat, the windy gleam in the sky, the lights by day or night upon the water, the sense of weariless and unceasing movement as of life itself? New York, on its island, is richer than most cities in these river crossings, which take you at once out of the closeness and cares of the streets into the free broad roadways of wind and water, roadways which you can scarcely traverse without some enlargement and liberation of the city-pent soul in your breast.

And in the city itself he had a thousand interests;[81] he went wherever people met together for any purpose; he had a critic’s free pass to the theatres and was often at the opera and circus, he frequented the public libraries too, and the collections of antiquities; but most of all he loved to read in the open book of Broadway. Up and down that amazing torrent of humanity he would ride, breasting its flood, upon the box-seat of one of the stages, beside the driver. From time to time he would make himself useful by giving change to the fares within, when he was not already too fully occupied declaiming the great passages from his favourite poets into the ears of his friend.

The fulness of human life surging through the artery of that great city exhilarated him like the west wind or the sound and presence of the sea. The sheer contact with the crowd excited him. And though he came to know New York in all its dark and sordid corners—and even an American city before the war was not without its shame—he won an inspiration from its multitudinous humanity distinct from any that the country-side could afford. Every year he grew more conscious of his membership in the living whole of human life; and the consciousness which brought despair to Carlyle, brought faith and glory to Whitman. He did not blink the ugly and sinister aspects of things, as many an optimist has done; he saw clearly the brothel, the prison, and the mortuary; his writing at this time, as we have seen,[Pg 42] deals largely with the tragedies of life; but humanity fascinated him—not an abstract or ideal humanity, but the concrete actual humanity of New York. For its own sake he loved it, body and soul, as a man should. It was not philanthropy, it was the wholesome, native love of a man for his own flesh and blood, for the incarnation of the Other in the same substance as the Self.

Very little passed in the city without his knowledge. He was in the crowd that welcomed Dickens in 1842;[82] and was doubtless among the thousands who celebrated the introduction of the first water from the Croton supply into New York, and hailed the pioneer locomotive arriving over the new track from Buffalo. Among the public figures of the day, he became familiar with the faces of great politicians like Webster and Clay; among writers, he saw Fitz-Green Halleck and Fenimore Cooper,[83] and made the acquaintance of Poe who was struggling against poverty in New York, and who became at this time—1845—suddenly famous through the publication of “The Raven”;[84] and won the more lasting friendship of Bryant, who was at that time the preeminent American poet, and held besides the editorship of the Evening Post, to which Walt had been a contributor.[85]

In February, 1846, Whitman was appointed editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle,[86] a democratic journal of a single sheet. The office was close to the Ferry, and he seems at this time to have lived with his family on Myrtle Avenue, near Fort Greene, rather more than a mile away. His editorials boasted no literary distinction, and were even at times of doubtful grammar; but they were direct and vigorous, and discussed all the topics of the hour.[87] When a New York Episcopal Church was consecrated with much ceremony and display, he would denounce the self-complacent attitude of the Churches; every instance of lynching or of capital punishment[Pg 43] would call forth his protest; he was faithful in his support of the rights of domestic animals; he approved of dancing within reasonable hours, and he advocated art in the homes of the people. Largely owing to his persistent advocacy the old battle-ground of Fort Greene was secured to Brooklyn as a park.

In dealing with the immediately critical question of relations with Mexico, while he anticipated extension of territory without dismay, he uttered his warning against the temper which prompts a nation to aggressive acts. “We fear”, he said,[88] “our unmatched strength may make us insolent. We fear that we shall be too willing (holding the game in our own hands) to revenge our injuries by war—the greatest curse that can befall a people, and the bitterest obstacle to the progress of all those high and true reforms that make the glory of this age above the darkness of the ages past and gone.”

The admission of Texas into the Union, in 1845, was soon followed by a war with Mexico, which eventually completed the filibustering work of Houston by the annexation of New Mexico and California. This territorial expansion was pushed forward, as we noted before, by Polk and the Democrats in the interests of the South;[89] but the fact that it was Wilmot, a Free-soil Democrat, who introduced the celebrated proviso to an appropriation of money for the war, proposing to exclude slavery from all territory which might be acquired from Mexico, reminds us of the division within the party which resulted in a split two years later.

The country at this time was in a condition of feverish irritation; and the war spirit was only too easily aroused. In 1847, it threatened to burst into flame over a territorial dispute with Great Britain. America claimed the latitude of 54.40 as the northern boundary of Oregon, and for awhile, under the jingo President, the country rang with the insane alliterative cry of “fifty-four forty or fight”.[90] A spirited foreign policy[Pg 44] is the universal panacea of the charlatan; it is his receipt for every internal disorder, and it was continually being prescribed to America during the next fifteen years. This was indeed the charlatan’s hour, when the official policy of the dominant Democratic party oscillated between jingoism and what was afterwards known throughout America as “squatter sovereignty”. It was the repudiation of the Wilmot proviso, and the adoption of the new doctrine which Douglas afterwards made his own, that drove Whitman into revolt.

He was comfortably seated in his editorial chair, where he might have remained for years had his Radical convictions permitted. Though the owners of the Eagle were orthodox party men, the editor’s anti-slavery attitude was not concealed,[91] and indeed could not be. Their criticism of his editorials caused him immediately to throw up his post. He would not compromise on the question, and he would not brook interference. It was January, 1848, when he left the Eagle,[92] and a few weeks later he was making his way south to New Orleans.

Whitman had joined the “Barnburners” or Van Buren men of New York State, who now became Free-soil Democrats, making the Wilmot proviso their platform,[93] in opposition to the “Hunkers,” who denounced it. As to the Whigs, they burked the whole matter, and contrived in their nominating convention to silence the question by shouting. The Democratic party found its real platform in the nostrum of “squatter sovereignty,” the specious doctrine that in each new State the citizens should themselves decide upon their attitude towards slavery, deciding for or against it when drawing up a Constitution. To this, Lewis Cass, its candidate for the Presidency, subscribed. But the “Barnburners” put forward Van Buren, a former President, and a Democrat of the school of Jefferson[Pg 45] and Jackson, who was also supported by the “anti-slavery” party. His policy was to confine slavery within its actual limits: “no more Slave states, no more slave territory”. As a consequence of the Democratic split in the Empire State, the thirty-six electoral votes of New York were given to the Whig candidate, General Taylor, the Mexican conqueror, and he became the next President.

A whole-hearted Free-soil Democrat, Whitman’s position as editor of an orthodox party journal had naturally become untenable.

[Pg 46]

ROMANCE (1848)

Whitman was nearly twenty-nine, and had not, so far as I can discover, wandered beyond the limits of his own State,[94] nor had he experienced, to our knowledge, any serious affair of the heart. The only trace of strong personal emotion in his writing hitherto is that which we found in the Tribune poems, dictated by the passion of human solidarity. “Blood Money” is probably the only thing which he had yet produced from the deeper regions of consciousness; it is the only piece of real self-revelation which he had yet confided to the world. Now we come suddenly upon a time of wandering, over which he himself has drawn a veil—a veil which covers, we cannot for a moment doubt, one of the most important incidents of his life. But it is a veil which we are unable to raise.[95]

Walking in the lobby of the old Broadway Theatre, between the acts, one February night,[96] Whitman was introduced to a Southern gentleman. A quarter of an hour later he had engaged to go South, to assist in starting the Crescent, a daily paper in New Orleans. On the eleventh of the month he set out.[97] The South was as unknown to him as it still remains to the majority of Northerners; and the South must have been as strange and fascinating to the son of Mannahatta as are the shores of the Mediterranean to a Londoner. An[Pg 47] air of romance seems to breathe from his every reference to this period, and it may well be that the passionate attraction which afterwards drew his memory to the “magnet-south” had some personal incarnation.

Bidding a hasty good-bye to his family and friends, he left New York and made his way[98] through populous Pennsylvania, and over the Alleghanies to Wheeling on the Ohio river, where he found a small steamer, and in it descended leisurely, with many stops by the way, through the recently settled lands of Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, and Illinois, into the Mississippi, the Father of Waters, thenceforward pursuing his voyage for more than a thousand miles along that greatest of American highways, to the borders of the Mexican Gulf.

For the first time his eyes saw how vast was his country: he realised the South, and he understood the significance of the political struggle for the control of the new West. He was almost afraid as he journeyed, not so much at the immensity of the prospect, as because he felt himself upon the verge of the Unknown and its mysteries: and his feelings found utterance in some verses written on the voyage and subsequently published—surely, with a smile at the critics—in his Collected Prose. As they illustrate his mood at the time, and afford the best example of his skill as a maker of conventional verses, I may quote from them here.

After describing the fantastic forms which line the margins of the forest-bordered river, he proceeds:—

The lines are not of the best, but they are suggestive. They seem to express the lurking fear of one hardily bred in the North, when first he feels upon his face the breath of the seductive South. His strenuous self-sufficiency is imperilled. A strange world of sensations surrounds him, awakening in himself a world of emotions as strange. It is suggested to him that he is not quite the man that he supposed, that there is another side to his character, and he resents the suggestion. For who will willingly begin over again the task of self-discovery? The conservative organising active Ego fears the awakening of the adventurous, receptive Ego. I think Whitman was startled as he realised how little as yet he understood himself, or was willing to accept his whole soul if it should rise up and face him.

The New Orleans of ’48 must have been the most romantic and perhaps the most prosperous city in the Union. It was the centre of Western commerce, as well as of Mexican filibustering: its great hotels, the St. Charles and the St. Louis, were the rendezvous of planters and merchants, politicians and adventurers, and of the proudest aristocracy in the States.[100] It was a gay city, with its Creole women and Spanish men, its dancing and its play, its masks and dominoes, its duels and carnivals; gay as only an old city can be gay, with the contrast between age and youth.

About the Catholic cathedral was a mass of irregular red-tiled roofs and a net-work of shady alleys, on to which opened great galleries and courtyards full of vines. Scent of roses and the caressing sound of Creole singing stole upon the languorous breaths of the warm humid air, breaths which lazily stirred the golden-rod that overgrew the dormer windows, the old venetian[Pg 49] blinds, the geraniums and the clothes hanging in the sun. Along the alleys went the priests in their black skirts. Through the doorways one saw red floors sanded and clean, and quaint carved furniture, heirlooms of generations; or caught a glimpse of some old garden with its fountains and lilies, its violets and jonquils, myrtle and jessamine. Everywhere flowers and singing birds, and the soft quaint Creole phrases falling with the charm that only Southern lips confer.

Such was the old French quarter. Along the river-side was another; the lawless world of Mississippi flat-boatmen, a vagrant population drawn from many States, who with the soldiers discharged after the Mexican war frequented the low saloons and gaming-houses; passionate men, capable of any crime or adventure.

Again, there were the Bohemians of the city, the artists, journalists and actors of a centre of fashion. Opera had found its first American home at New Orleans, and was presented at the famous Orleans Theatre four times a week. Whitman, the opera-goer, must often have been there. Perhaps he met among the Bohemians a juvenile member of their group, Dolores Adios Fuertes, a young dancer, to be known hereafter in London and in Paris as Adah Isaacs Menken, actress, and authoress of a pathetic volume of irregular metres, who now lies buried at Mont Parnasse.

During the three months of his stay, Whitman saw New Orleans thoroughly.[101] Often on Sunday mornings he would go to the cathedral; he idled much in the old French quarters, and sauntered and loafed along the levees, making acquaintances and friends among the boatmen and stevedores. He frequented the huge bar-rooms of the two hotels, where most of the business of the city seems at that time to have been transacted; but temperate and simple himself, he preferred to their liqueurs and dainties his morning coffee and biscuit at the stall of a stout mulatto woman, who stood with her[Pg 50] shining copper kettle in the French market. There all the races of the world seemed to be gathered to idle or to bargain. He went also to the theatres, where he talked with the soldiers back from the Mexican war; among the rest, with General Taylor, soon to be President, a jovial, genial, laughter-loving old man, one of the plainest who ever went to the White House, where he died soon after his inauguration in 1849.

Whitman appears to have been thoroughly enjoying himself, when suddenly about the end of May, he made up his mind to return to the North. His brother Jeff, a lad of fifteen, who had accompanied him and was working in the printing office, was homesick and out of health; the climate with its malarial tendencies did not suit him. Walt was always devoted to this young brother, who had been his companion on many a Long Island holiday, tramping or sailing,[102] and becoming alarmed at his condition, hurried him away. There were other reasons which, he says, made him wish to leave the city, but as he does not specify[103] them himself, we can only follow the indications in guessing at their nature. We know they were not connected with his work: it is probable that they were private and personal.[104]

When asked in later years why he had never married, he would say either that it was impossible to give a satisfactory explanation,[105] although such an explanation might perhaps exist, or he would declare that, with an instinct for self-preservation, he had always avoided or escaped from entanglements which threatened his freedom.[106] These replies he made with an obvious reticence and reservation. He who professed to make so clean a breast of his own shortcomings, and who in his last years required that records of himself should err in being somewhat over personal, deliberately concealed certain important incidents in his life. There can, I[Pg 51] think, be only one interpretation of this singular state of affairs: that these incidents concerned others equally with himself, and that those others were unwilling to have them published. If they had been his, and his alone, he would have communicated them, but they were not.

Whatever Whitman’s duty in this matter, it behoves his biographer to present as full a picture as possible of his life, and to let no fact go by without notice; while the knowledge that Whitman himself could not disclose the whole truth, should only make us the more careful in our reading of the scanty facts which are known.

It seems that about this time Walt formed an intimate relationship with some woman of higher social rank than his own—a lady of the South where social rank is of the first consideration—that she became the mother of his child, perhaps, in after years, of his children; and that he was prevented by some obstacle, presumably of family prejudice, from marriage or the acknowledgment of his paternity.

The main facts can now hardly be disputed. Whitman put some of them on record in a letter to Addington Symonds during the last year of his life, designing to leave a fuller statement in the care of his executors. But this, through access of weakness, was never accomplished. Remarks which he let fall from time to time in private conversation seem to admit of no other interpretation than that I have put upon them.

In one of his poems[107] he vividly describes how once in a populous city he chanced to meet with a woman who cast her love upon him, and how they remained together till at last he tore himself away, to remember nothing of that city save her and her love. In spite of Whitman’s express desire that the poem should be regarded merely in its universal application—a desire which in itself seems to betoken a consciousness of self-betrayal—we cannot but recognise its autobiographical suggestion. And in the stress laid upon the part of the woman, we[Pg 52] may see a cause for Whitman’s reticence. If it was she who had pressed the relationship, it behoved him the more, for her sake, to keep silence, and to leave the determination of the relationship to her.

But perhaps the most important evidence upon this obscure passage of his story is to be found in the psychological development which we can, as I believe, trace in his character. It was but a short time after his Southern visit,[108] perhaps in the same year, that he began to sketch out some of the poems which afterwards took the form familiar to us in Leaves of Grass. Now these differ from his earlier writings in many ways, but fundamentally in their subjectivity. In them he sets out to put himself on record in a way he heretofore had not attempted, and this enterprise must, I take it, have had its cause in some quickening of emotional self-consciousness. That process may well have culminated a few years later in what has been described as “cosmic consciousness”; but before that culmination, Whitman’s experience must have contained elements which do not seem to have been present in the Whitman of Franklin Evans, or of the verses written upon the Mississippi. These elements, I believe, he acquired or began to acquire in the South.

Hitherto we have seen him as a young man of vigorous independence, eagerly observant of life, and delighting in his contact with it. Henceforward he enters into it in a new sense; some barrier has been broken down; he begins to identify himself with it. Strong before in his self-control, he is stronger still now that he has won the power of self-abandonment. Unconsciously he had always been holding himself back; at last he has let himself go. And to let oneself go is to discover oneself. Some men can never face that discovery; they are not ready for emancipation. Whitman was.

But who emancipated him? May we not suppose it was a passionate and noble woman who opened the[Pg 53] gates for him and showed him himself in the divine mirror of her love? Had Whitman been an egoist such a vision would have enslaved and not liberated his soul.

But if this woman loved him to the uttermost, why did he leave her? Why did he allow the foulest of reproaches to blacken that whitest of all reputations, a Southern lady’s virtue? Nowhere in the world could such a reproach have seemed more vile, more cruel. The only answer we can make is that it was, in some almost inexplicable way, her choice. And that somehow, perhaps by a fictitious marriage, this reproach was doubtless avoided; the woman’s family being readier to invent some subterfuge than to take a Northern journalist and artisan into their sacred circle. There is a poem which remained till recently in manuscript—a poem[109] of bitter sarcasm and marked power of expression—in which Whitman holds an aristocrat up to scorn. He never printed it himself, and this fact adds to the possibility that it may gain some of its force from personal suffering.

Whether Whitman met his lady again we do not know. There is no record of a second visit to the South, though there is no evidence to disprove such a visit; rather indeed, to the contrary, for Whitman speaks in one of his letters[110] of “times South” as periods in which his life lay open to criticism; and refers, elsewhere,[111] to his having lived a good deal in the Southern States. As he was in no position to reply to criticism upon this matter, he was careful not to arouse it.

Whatever lay behind his departure, Whitman left New Orleans on the 25th of May, 1848,[112] ascending the Mississippi in a river steamer between the monotonous flat banks. Jeff picked up at once.[113] They spent a few hours in St. Louis where the westward flowing streams of northern and of southern pioneers met and mingled.[114] Changing boats, and passing the mouth of the great yellow[Pg 54] Missouri, they made their way up the Illinois river for some two hundred miles, arriving after forty-eight hours at La Salle, whence a canal boat carried them to Chicago. Through the rich agricultural lands of Illinois they passed at a speed not exceeding three miles an hour.

They spent a day in the still very young metropolis of the North-west, travelling thence by way of the Great Lakes to Buffalo. The voyage occupied five glorious summer days. Whitman went on shore at every stopping place intensely interested in everything. He was so delighted with the State of Wisconsin, which was about this time admitted to the Union, that he dreamed of settling in one of its new clean townships; and he carried away with him definite impressions of the towns of Milwaukee, Mackinaw, Detroit, Windsor, Cleveland, and Buffalo.

A week from La Salle he passed under the Falls of Niagara and saw the whirlpool; but coming at the end of so much wonder, the stupendous spectacle does not seem to have greatly impressed him. Twenty-four hours of continuous travel through the thickly settled country districts of New York State brought him to the old Dutch capital of Albany, whence descending the beautiful Hudson with its wooded high-walled mountain banks, he reached New York on the evening of 15th June.

He had been away from home four months, had travelled as many thousand miles, and had made acquaintance with seventeen of the States of the Union. In New Orleans he had learnt the meaning of the South, from St. Louis he had looked into the new West, while in Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, and the coasts of Ontario, he had seen the rich corn-lands of the North-west under their first tillage. And he had felt the meaning of the Mississippi, that great river whose tributaries, from the Alleghanies to the Rockies, drain and fertilise half the arable land of America.

Besides the discovery in himself of a new world, a new hemisphere, Whitman came home filled with the sense of his American citizenship. A patriot from his childhood, from henceforward “these States,” as he[Pg 55] loved to call them, became the object of his passionate devotion. Not in their individuality alone—though this he recognised more than ever, regarding each in some degree as a nation—but above all in their Union. Thus he came back to Brooklyn to take up his old vocation and his old acquaintances with a sense of enlargement: latent powers had been awakened within him and a new ideal which may once have been a childish dream, began to dominate his manhood, hitherto lacking in a clear purpose.

In the old days,[115] when his mother read the Bible to him and taught him something of its meaning, it had seemed to the child that the highest of all the achievements of manhood must be to make such another book as that. It had been written thousands of years ago by inspired men, to be completed some day by others as truly inspired as they. For he believed in the Quaker doctrine of the continuity of revelation, which is not strange to a child.

Such fancies in a child’s mind are apt to grow into a purpose: to dream, is to dream of something one will presently do. If the dream is wholly beyond the range of possible accomplishment, a cloud of disillusionment descending on the face of youth will blot it out; but if it is not, it may become an ideal which will shape the whole of manhood as sternly as any fate.

To be an American prophet-poet, to make the American people a book which should be like the Bible in spiritual appeal and moral fervour, but a book of the New World and of the new spirit—such seems to have been the first and the last of Whitman’s day-dreams. It must have come to him as a vague longing when he was still very young, and he was never so old as to lose it. Now on his return from this long journey, his mind full of America and full of profound and mystical thoughts concerning love and the soul and the soul’s relation to the world, the dream began to struggle in him for utterance. It was seven years before it found itself a body of words, but henceforward it took possession of his life.

[Pg 56]

ILLUMINATION

Whitman returned to Brooklyn about the time that Free-soil Democrats and Liberty men were uniting at Buffalo on the ticket and platform which I have already described. He established a small book-store and printing office on Myrtle Avenue,[116] and commenced the publication of the Freeman, a weekly first, but afterwards a daily paper.

The venture continued for about a year but eventually proved unsuccessful. Its failure may have been due to the comparatively small circle of readers which the Free-soil party in Brooklyn could provide, or it may have resulted from the same lack of regularity which killed the Long Islander. It is not improbable that Whitman wearied of the continuous mechanical production demanded by the ownership and management of a daily paper. He was not methodical; and his mind was struggling with ideas which made him restless in harness, ideas so large and fundamental that much of the merely ephemeral detail of journalism must have become irritating and irksome. When the Freeman collapsed it was a bondage broken, and its owner and editor became a freeman himself.

His father was some sixty years of age and failing in health, and for lack of anything more suited to his state of mind, Walt joined him, taking up his business and becoming a master carpenter, building small frame-houses in Brooklyn and selling them upon completion as his father had been doing these thirty years.

[Pg 57]

Brooklyn was growing fast, and the Whitmans prospered. Walt lived at home and spent little; he was soon on the way to become rich. What was more important, he was now the master of his own time; and carpentering left his mind free to work entirely in its own way. He was no longer being “pushed for copy”. When the mood was urgent he could idle; that is to say, he could give himself up to his thoughts. He could dream, but the saw in his hand and the crisp timber kept him close to reality. He was out of doors, too, and among things rather than thoughts, so that his ideas were but rarely bookish.

Yet though he was the opposite of bookish he was not ill-read. He always carried a volume or part of a magazine in his knapsack with his mid-day dinner;[117] and every week for years he had visited Coney Island beach to bathe there and to read. He watched the English and American reviews, bought second-hand copies whenever they contained matter of interest to him, tore out his prize and devoured it with his sandwich. He loved especially to read a book in its native elements: the Inferno[118] in an ancient wood, Homer in a hollow of the rocks with the Atlantic surf on either hand, while he saw all the stage-plays of Shakespeare upon the boards.

He had always remained faithful to Scott, and especially to the Border ballads of his collection, with their innumerable and repaying notes. He studied the Bible systematically and deliberately, weighing it well and measuring it by the standards of outdoor America in the nineteenth century. In the same way and spirit he had read and re-read Shakespeare’s plays before seeing them, until he could recite extended passages; and he had come to very definite conclusions about their feudal and aristocratic atmosphere and influence.

He read Æschylus and Sophocles in translations, and[Pg 58] felt himself nearer to the Greeks than to Shakespeare or the Middle Ages. It is interesting to note that he barely mentions Euripides, most modern of the Hellenes, the poet of women, and was evidently little acquainted with Plato. Surely if he had read The Republic or The Symposium there could be no uncertainty upon the matter.

But about another poet, as opposed to Plato as any in the category, there is no shade of doubt. Whitman, like Goethe and Napoleon, was a lover of that shadowy being whom Macpherson exploited with such success—Ossian the Celt.[119] Ossian is dead, and for good reasons—we can do much better than read Ossian to-day; but with all his mouthings and in spite of the pother of his smoke, he is not without a flavour of those Irish epics which are among the perfect things of pure imagination. And when one thinks of the eighteenth century with its town wit, one cannot wonder at the welcome Macpherson’s Ossian won. Great billowy sea-mists engulf its reader; and through them he perceives phantom-forms, which, though they are but the shadows of men, are pointed out to him for gods. But at least the sea is there, and the wind and an outdoor world. Whitman was not blind to the indefinite and misty in Ossian.[120] He himself clung to the concrete, and though he could rant he preferred upon the whole to use familiar phrases. But he loved Ossian for better, for worse. And we may add as a corollary he disliked Milton.[121]

In the case of the foreign classics I have mentioned, and of others like Don Quixote, Rousseau, and the stories of the Nibelungen,[122] he fell back upon translations, and in works of classical verse, often upon prose. He declaimed the Iliad in Pope’s heroics, but he studied it according to Buckley.[123]

As a journalist and writer for the magazines, he had become more or less acquainted with contemporary literature, but, with few exceptions only, it seems to have[Pg 59] affected him negatively. He knew something of Wordsworth, Byron and Keats;[124] the first he said was too much of a recluse and too little of a lover of his kind; Byron was a pessimist, and in the last of the three he seemed only to find one of the over-sensitive products of civilisation and gentility. Tennyson—whose “Ulysses” (1842) was a special favourite—interested him from the beginning, though Whitman always resented what he called his “feudal” atmosphere.[125] It is doubtful whether he had yet read anything of Carlyle’s, though he would be acquainted with the ideas of Heroes and Hero-Worship.

Among Americans, he was apparently most familiar with Bryant and with Fenimore Cooper. When he first studied Emerson is uncertain; he seems to have known him as a lecturer, and could not have been ignorant of the general tendencies of his teaching.[126] Longfellow’s “Evangeline,” Lowell’s “Biglow Papers” and Whittier’s “Voices of Freedom” were the talk of the time. He had met Poe; and his tragic death at Baltimore in 1849 may have set him to re-read the brilliant but disappointing verses, and profounder criticism, of that ill-starred genius.[127]

But it was from the pages of the Bible, of Homer and of Shakespeare, of Ossian and of Scott that he derived most. Ballads he loved when they came from the folk; but Blake and Shelley, the purely lyrical writers of the new era, do not seem to have touched him; perhaps they were hardly virile enough, for when he came to know and appreciate Burns, it was as a lyrist who was at once the poet of the people and a full-blooded man. From all of which it may be deduced that it was the elemental and the virile, rather than the subtle qualities of imagination which appealed to him; he responded to breadth and strength of movement and of passion, rather than to any kind of formal or static beauty. For him, poetry was a passionate movement, the rhythm of progress, the march of humanity, the procession of[Pg 60] Freedom. It was more; it was an abandonment to world-emotions. Where he felt this abandonment to inspiration, he recognised poetry, and only there. In American literature he did not feel it at all.

When he read poetry, the sea was his favourite companion. The rhythm of the waves satisfied the rhythmical needs of his mind. Everything that belonged to the sea exercised a spell over him. The first vision that made him desire the gift of words was that of a full-rigged ship;[128] and the love of ships and shipping remained a passion with him to the end; so that when he sought to describe his own very soul it was as a ship he figured it. For the embrace of the sea itself, for the swimmer’s joy,[129] he had the lover’s passion of a Swinburne or a Meredith.

His reading was not, of course, confined to pure literature, but we have no list of the books which he read in other departments. We know that he was deeply interested in the problems of philosophy and the discoveries of science.

Though never what is called a serious student of their works, he had a good understanding of the attitude both of the metaphysicians and of the physicists of his time; and he had no quarrel with either. In his simple and direct way he came indeed very near to them both; for he loved and reverenced concrete fact as he reverenced the concept of the cosmos. Individual facts were significant to him because they were all details of a Whole, but he loved facts too for their own sake. And to the Whole, the cosmos, his soul responded as ardently as to the detailed parts. The deeper his knowledge of detail—the closer his grasp upon facts—the more intense must be his consciousness of the Whole. This consciousness of the Whole illuminated him more fully about this date, in a way I will soon recount; it must for some time previously have been exercising an influence upon his thought.

Regarding poetry as the rhythmical utterance of emo[Pg 61]tions which are produced in the soul by its relation to the world, he doubtless regarded science as the means by which that world becomes concrete, diverse and real to the soul, as it becomes one and comprehensible to it through philosophy. Science and philosophy seemed alike essential, not hostile, to poetry. Poetry is the utterance of an inspired emotion; but an emotion inspired by what? By the discovery that the Other and the Self are so akin that joy and passion arise from their contact.

In order to conceive of science or philosophy as hostile to poetry, we must think of them as building up some barrier between us and the world. But in this respect modern science does not threaten poetry, for it recognises the homogeneity of a material self with a material world; neither does idealism threaten the source of this emotion, regarding the self and the world as both essentially ideal.

The aim of modern thought has been, not to isolate the soul, but rather to give it back to the world of relations. It seems to me that, in so far as Religion has attempted to separate between the Self and things, between God and Man, between the soul and the flesh, Religion has cut at the roots of poetry; but the Religion which attempted this is not, I believe, the religion of the modern world.

Whitman then accepted modern science and philosophy with equanimity, in so far as he understood them, and in their own spheres. Apparent antagonisms between them did not trouble him. They were for him different functions of the one soul. He was too sensible of his own identity and unity in himself to share in the perplexity of those who lose this sense through the exclusive exercise of one or other of their functions. His joint exercise of these proved them to be harmonious. He was unconscious of any quarrel in himself between the scientific and the poetic, the religious and the philosophic faculties.

Definitions in such large matters must generally seem absurd and almost useless, yet here they may be sug[Pg 62]gestive. If Whitman had formulated his thought he might, perhaps, have said: “Science is the Self probing into the details of the Not-self; Philosophy is the Self describing the Not-self as a Whole; Religion is the attitude of the Self toward the Not-self; and Poetry springs from the passionate realisation of the homogeneity of the Self with the Not-self”.

In such rough and confessedly crude definitions we may suggest, at any rate, a theory for his attitude toward the thought of his day. That thought, it seems unnecessary to add, was impregnated by the positive spirit of science. Names like those of Leibnitz, Lamarck, Goethe, Hegel and Comte remind us that the idea of evolution was becoming more and more suggestive in every field—soon to be enforced anew, and more definitely, by Darwin, Wallace and Spencer. The idea of an indwelling and unfolding principle or energy is the special characteristic of nineteenth century thought; and it has been accompanied by a new reverence for all that participates in the process of becoming. Every form of life has its secret, and is worthy of study, for that secret is a part of the World’s Secret, the Eternal Purpose which affects every soul. We are each a part of that progressive purpose which we call the universe. But we are each absolutely and utterly distinct and individual. Every one has his own secret, his own purpose; in the old phrase, it is to his own master that each one standeth or falleth.

Ideas such as these, the affirmations of a new age, were driving the remnants of the old faiths and the dogmas of the school of Paley into the limbo of the incredible; but they were also casting out the futile atheisms and scepticisms of the dead century. The era of Mazzini, Browning, Ruskin, Emerson, was an era of affirmations, not an era of doubt. And Whitman caught the spirit of his age: eagerly he accepted and assimilated it.

His knowledge of modern thought came to him chiefly through the more popular channels of periodical literature, and through conversations with thoughtful[Pg 63] men. Probably the largest and most important part of his reading, then and always, was the daily press. A journalist himself, he had besides an insatiable craving for living facts, and especially for American facts. He wanted to know everything about his country. America was his passion: he understood America. Sometimes he wondered if he was alone in that.

The papers were, indeed, crowded with news of enterprise and adventure. In California, the new territory which Frémont and Stockton had taken from Mexico, gold was discovered in 1848, and in eighteen months a torrent of 50,000 argonauts had poured across the isthmus and over the plains, leaving their trail of dead through the awful grey solitude of the waterless desert. In the summer of ’49 there were five hundred vessels lying in San Francisco harbour,[130] where a few years earlier a single visitor had been comparatively rare. And at the same hour, on the eastern coast, every port was a-clamour with men frantically demanding a passage, and the refrain of the pilgrims’ song was everywhere heard,

There is no indication in Whitman’s writings that he was ever swept off his feet by this fierce tide of adventure. Anyone who has felt such a current setting in among the fluid populations of the West is not likely to underestimate its power. Even in the more staid and sober East the excitement must have been intense: and it is, at the first thought, surprising that Walt, who was still full of youth and strength and ambition, should have remained at home. On second thought, however, it is clear that gold-seeking was about the last enterprise to entice a man who was shortly to relinquish house-building because he was accumulating money.

The attraction of the new lands may have been strong when the Freeman released him, but he had had wander[Pg 64]ing enough for the present, and the attraction of New York itself was at least as strong. Unlike Joaquin Miller, who was among the first in each of the new mining camps which sprang up along the Pacific slopes during the next fifty years, Whitman remained within the circle of New York Bay. He was content to see the vessels being built for their long and hazardous voyage, strong to take all the buffeting of two oceans—those beautiful Yankee clipper ships which have never been rivalled for grace combined with speed. He was content to see all the possibilities of that bold frontier life in the friendly faces of young men leaning over the bench or driving their jolly teams.

He was not one of those who need to go afield in order that their sluggish blood may be quickened into daring, or their dull mood be thrilled with admiring wonder. Nothing was commonplace to his eyes, and he found adventures enough to occupy him in any street. Thus while others were framing new governments for new communities, he stayed at home and framed new houses for new families of workmen; and perhaps after all, in his transcendental fashion, he found his own work the more romantic. He had a deeply-rooted prejudice against the exceptional; he planned for himself the life of an average American of the middle nineteenth century, no longer geographically a frontiersman, though more than ever a pioneer in other fields. He would have taken his pan and washed for gold in the Sacramento had he wanted; but the Brooklyn streets and ferry, Broadway and the faces of New York held him. He had not exhausted them yet.

He had, moreover, a strongly conservative instinct, an inclination to “stay put,” evident in his story from this time forth. He was not a nomad, forever striking his tent and moving on; he wanted a settled home, and attached himself more than most men to the familiar. He took root, like a tree. The secure immobility of his base allowed him to stretch his branches far in every direction.

[Pg 65]

His mind, too, we may be sure, was occupied with its own problems. At first, perhaps, as an inner struggle with insurgent and rebel thoughts and desires, but now as an effort of the conscious self to include and harmonise new elements, and so to lie open to all experience with equanimity, refusing none. Such a process of integration in a mind like Whitman’s requires years of slow growth and brooding consciousness, if it is to be fully and finally achieved. And as the integration of his character became more and more complete, he won another point of view upon all things, and, as it were, saw all things new. It is little wonder that we have but scanty record of the years from 1850 to 1855.

In his home-life in Brooklyn he was happy and beloved and able to follow his own path without being questioned, or, for that matter, understood. He was probably not quite the easiest of men to live with.[131] He had his own notions, with which others were not allowed to interfere; he never took advice, and was not too considerate of domestic arrangements.

As to money, which was never too plentiful in the household, he professed and felt a royal indifference, in which, one may suspect, the others did not share. The father was somewhat penurious on occasion and capable of sharp practice; he had worked hard and incessantly, and had known poverty; the youngest son, moreover, would always be dependent upon others, and Jesse, the oldest, seems to have displayed little ability. One can understand that the father and his second son—who, with the largest share of capacity, must have seemed to the old man the most given over to profitless whims and to idle pleasures—had not always found it easy to live together, and that in the past the mother, with her good sense and understanding of them both, had often had to mediate between them. In the later years, however, Walt understood his father thoroughly and himself better, so that their relationship became as happy as it was really affectionate.

[Pg 66]

His knowledge of the world, his coolness in a crisis, his deliberate balancing of the facts, and yet more deliberate and confident pronouncing of judgment, made him an oracle to be consulted by his family and the neighbours on every occasion of difficulty. The sisters and younger brothers were all fond of him; he was more than good-natured and kind, and never presumed upon his older years to limit their freedom of action or thought.

The man’s kindliness and benignity are admirably suggested in the portraits taken in his thirty-sixth year, the earliest that we have. One in particular—that chosen for the frontispiece of this book—is almost articulate with candour and goodwill. In many respects it is the most interesting of the hundred or more portraits extant. Whitman was an excellent sitter, especially to the camera. His photographs give you a glance of recognition, and rarely wear the abstracted look, the stolidity, which is noticeable in several easel pictures.

The daguerrotype of 1854 is the most speaking of the whole series. It is an absolutely frank face, by no means the mask which, according to the sitter himself, one of the later portraits shows. It is frank, and it is kindly, but how much more! The longer one gazes at it the more complex its suggestions become. The eyes are not only kind, they are the eyes of a mystic, a seer; they are a thought wistful, but they are very clear. Like William Blake’s, they are eyes that are good for the two visions; they see and they are seen through. If, as I suppose is probable, something of the expression is due to the fact that the photograph was taken on a brilliant summer’s day, we can only congratulate ourselves that the elements co-operated with the sitter’s soul.

In striking contrast with the eyes is the good-natured but loose mouth, a faun-like expression upon its thick lips, which dismisses at once any fancy of the ascetic saint. The nose, too, is thick, strong and straight, with large nostrils. Even in the photograph you can feel that[Pg 67] rich and open texture of the skin which radiates the joy of living from every pore.

It is the face, above all, of a man, and the face of a man you would choose for a comrade; there would be no fear of his failing or misunderstanding you. But, withal, it is the face of a spirit wholly untamed, a wood-creature if you will, perhaps the face of Adam himself, looking out upon Eden with divine eyes of immortality.

Remember, as you meet his gaze, that he knows the life of cities, and that the Fall lies behind him, not before. Perhaps that is why some who have looked at it describe it as the “Christ portrait”—for Jesus was the second Adam—but this is not the ascetic Christ of the Churches, the smile about the lips is too full for that. No, it is the face of a man responsive to all the appeals of the senses, a man who drives the full team of those wild horses of passion which tear in pieces less harmonious souls.

This is a man who saw life whole, and had joy of it. He knew the life of the body on every side, save that of sickness, and of the mind on every side, save that of fear. His large, friendly, attractive personality was always feeding him with the materials of experience, and there was nothing in it all which he did not relish. The responses of his nature to each object and incident were joyous; for the responses of a harmonious nature are musical, whatever be the touch that rouses them.

A shrewd estimate of Whitman’s character had been made five years before by a New York phrenologist, and its general accuracy seems to have vanquished the incredulity of its subject.[132] Mr. Fowler described him—I will translate the jargon of his pseudo-science into plain English—as capable of deep friendship and sympathy, with tendencies to stubbornness and self-esteem, and a strong feeling for the sublime. He thought that Whitman’s danger lay in the direction of indolence and[Pg 68] sensuality, “and a certain reckless swing of animal will”. At the same time he recognised in him the quality of caution largely developed.

As this estimate was subsequently quoted by Whitman with approval, and referred to as an authority, it evidently tallied with his reading of himself, and while it is by no means remarkable or particularly significant, it bears out other testimony. That “reckless swing of animal will” always distinguished him from the colourless peripatetic brains and cold-blooded collectors of copy so numerous in the hosts of journalism. Walt came of a race of slow but passionate men, and when he was deeply moved he could be terrible. At such times his wrath blazed up and overwhelmed him in its sudden access, but it was as short-lived as it was swift.

It is related[133] that once in a Brooklyn church he failed to remove his soft broad-brimmed hat, and entered the building with his head thus covered, looking for all the world like some Quaker of the olden time. The offending article was roughly knocked off by the verger. Walt picked it up, twisted it into a sort of scourge, seized the astonished official by the collar—he always detested officials—trounced him with it, clapped it on his head again, and so, abruptly and coolly, left the church. He was a tall, muscular fellow, stood six feet two, and was broad in proportion, and could deal effectually with an offensive person when he felt that action was called for. Such actions naturally added to his popularity among the “boys”—the stage-drivers, firemen and others—with whom he was always a favourite. But, as a rule, he had no occasion to use his strength in this manner. He never gave, and rarely recognised, provocation. There are times, however, when persuasion has to give place to more summary demonstrations of purpose.

Of his strength, but especially of his health, he was not a little proud. As a lad, the praise that delighted him most was that of his well-developed body as he bathed.[134] He did not care to be thought handsome; he[Pg 69] knew that wholesomeness and health were really more attractive, and he was content with his own perfect soundness. He was never ailing, even when, in his ’teens, he outgrew for a time his natural vigour. In middle life it was his boast that he could not remember what it was to be sick. Vanity is so natural in the young that when properly based it is probably a virtue, and there can be no question that Walt’s was well-founded.

There is something more, however, in the portrait I have been describing than the perfection of physical health. It is health raised to its highest possibility, which radiates outward from the innermost seat of life, potent with the magnetism of personality, through every pore and particle of flesh. His health, hitherto unbroken, had been deepened into that sense of spiritual well-being which, in its fulness, only accompanies the realisation of harmony or wholeness.[135] He had undergone some fusing process which ended in unity and illumination.

It is difficult to say anything at all adequate about such an experience, because it appears to belong to the highest of the stages of consciousness which the race has yet attained; and because there are many men and women of the finest intellectual training and the widest culture to whom it remains foreign.

The petals of consciousness unfold as it were from within, and every stage of unfolding, being symmetrical, appears to be perfect. A further evolution is almost inconceivable, but the flower still unfolds. The healthy and vigorous personality of the man whose story we are trying to read, continued its development a stage further than the general, and at an age of from thirty to thirty-five established an exceptional relation with the universe.

That exceptional relation is best described as mystical, though the word has unhappy and unwholesome associations, which cannot attach to the character revealed in the portrait. Whitman was almost aggressively cheerful and rudely healthy. But he was not the less a mystic.[Pg 70] One of the most essentially religious of men, his religion was based upon profound personal experience.

The character of mystical experience seems to vary as widely as does that of individual mystics, but it has certain common features. It is essentially an irruption of some profounder self into the field of consciousness; an irruption which is accompanied by a mysterious but most authoritative sense of the fulness, power and permanence of this new life. Consequent upon this life-enhancement, come joy and ecstasy.

The whole story of the development of consciousness is, as I have said, a process of unfoldings; but there is one critical moment of that process which occurs sometimes after the attainment of maturity, of such infinite significance to the individual that it seems like a revolution rather than a mere development in consciousness. It is often described as conversion. Whitman’s experience was fully as significant and wonder-compelling as any; but momentous as it was, its nature compelled him to regard it as a further and crowning step in a long succession of stairs—a culmination, not a change of direction. With it he came to the top of the slope and looked over, on to the summit, and beheld the outstretched world. It was no turning round and going the other way; it was the rewarding achievement of a long and patient climb.

But the simile of the mountain-side hardly suffices, for this was a bursting of constraint—a breaking, as well as a surmounting of barriers; as though the accumulating waters in some dark and hidden reservoir should so increase in volume that they burst at last through their confining walls of rubble and of rock, forcing their way upwards in a rush of ecstasy to the universal life and the outer sunshine. This outlet of the pent-up floods of emotional experience into another and a vaster sphere of consciousness—this outpouring of the soul from its confinement in the darkness to the freedom of the light—results from the slow accumulation of the stores of life, but it has at last its supreme hour, its divine instant of liberation.

[Pg 71]

In this it has its parallel with the passion of Love. For the inner mysteries of religion and of sex are hardly to be separated. They are different phases of the one supreme passion of immanent, expanding and uniting life; mysterious breakings of barriers, and burstings forth; expressions of a power which seems to augment continually with the store of the soul’s experience in this world of sense; experience received and hidden beneath the ground of our consciousness. To feel the passion of Love is to discover something of that mystery breaking, in its orgasm, through the narrow completeness and separate finality of that complacent commonplace, which in our ignorance we build so confidently over it, and creating a new life of communion. To feel the passion of religion is to discover more.

The relation of the two passions was so evident to Whitman that we may believe it was suggested to his mind by his own experience. In some lives it would appear that the one passion takes the place of the other, so that the ascetics imagine them to be mutually exclusive; but this was certainly not Whitman’s case. Whitman’s mysticism was well-rooted in the life of the senses, and hence its indubitable reality. We have seen that he had had experience of sex-love, and we have found reasons to aver that it was of a noble and honourable order; we have seen this experience followed by an acute crisis and its determination, or at least its suspension, and change of character.

But in the meantime, the sex-experience had revealed to Whitman the dominance in his nature of those profound emotional depths of which he had always been dimly conscious since the hours on Long Island beach. The whole crisis had made him realise more fully than ever the solemnity and mysterious purpose of life. It had not satisfied him: it had roused in him many perplexities, and had entailed what was probably the first great sacrifice of his life. In a word, this obscure and mysterious page in his story prepared him who read it for a further emotional revelation, such as I have been describing.

[Pg 72]

This actually came to him one memorable midsummer morning[136] as he lay in the fields breathing the lucid air. For suddenly the meaning of his life and of his world shone clear within him, and arising, spread an ineffable peace, joy and knowledge all about him. The long process of integration was at last completed. He was at one with himself, and at peace. It was the new birth of his soul, and properly speaking, the commencement of his manhood.

Co-incident with self-realisation came the realisation of the universe. He saw and felt that it was all of the same divine stuff as the new-born soul within him; that love ran through it purposefully from end to end; that thought could not fathom the suggestions which the least of things was capable of making to its brother the soul; that the very leaves of the grass were inspired with divine spirit as truly as the leaves of any Bible. It was as though something far larger than that which he had hitherto regarded as himself had now become self-conscious in him. He was an enthusiast in the literal sense of that mystic word, possessed by a god, filled with the divine consciousness. The Spirit is One, and he was in the Spirit. It identified him with the things and objects that hitherto had appeared external to him, and infinitely increased his sense of their mysterious beauty. George Fox’s description of his own mystical experience is true, upon the whole, of Whitman’s. He writes: “Now was I come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the Paradise of God. All things were new,[Pg 73] and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter.”[137] When one considers the Quaker reputation for veracity and caution, one can hardly doubt that these wonderful words describe a condition of consciousness similar to that of Whitman on the June morning of which we speak.

Fox continues that the nature of things lay so open to him that he was at a stand “whether he should practise physic for the good of mankind”. It was by the subtle sympathy of the Spirit that the first Quaker supposed himself to be familiar with the medicinal virtues of herbs, and the same sympathy made Whitman feel that he understood the purpose of their myriad lives. The wonder of the universal life was revealed to them both. They partook of the consciousness which pervades all matter.

To both men illumination brought a double gift of vision, vision into the nature of the universal purpose—of the spiritual or deeper side of life—and insight into the condition and needs of individuals. But in Fox and Whitman this insight, which seems to predominate rather in observant than in creative types of genius such as theirs, was less prominent than the other vision. They were more largely occupied with the universal than with the individual; and while their words carry the extraordinarily intimate message of an appeal to the profoundest element in each soul, their very universality may have rendered them often indifferent to the secondary consciousness or individual self of their hearers. And it is observable that neither of them evinced anything of that dramatic gift which seems to require the predominance of this insight into the secondary self-consciousness. The impersonality with which as preacher or poet they made their public appeal, must have made them at times somewhat inaccessible in their private lives.

Consciousness, it would seem, is of a double nature, being, as it were, both personal and impersonal—if we may use these terms of something that seems after all[Pg 74] to be so wholly personal. And hence it appears contradictory to itself, and we are forever trying to harmonise it by the sacrifice of one portion to the other. But in reality it is one consciousness with two functions: the first for fellowship and communion, the second for definition and for concrete achievement.

Whitman developed these two functions harmoniously; he never sacrificed his individual self-consciousness to the cosmic. He was just as positively Walt Whitman the man, as he was Walt Whitman the organ of inspiration. I think we may say that in the midst of that mysterious wonder, that extension of himself which took place at the touch of God, Whitman’s own identity, so far from being lost, was deepened and intensified, so that he knew instinctively and beyond a doubt that it was in some sense of the word absolute and imperishable.

Earlier in this chapter we viewed philosophy as the attempt of the Self to apprehend the Not-self as a Whole; Whitman’s revelation was, it seems to me, the discovery in himself of the sense which does so apprehend the universe; not as a hypothetical Whole, but as an incarnate purpose, a life with which he was able to hold some kind of communion. It was a realisation, not a theory. Whatever this communion may have been, it related him to the universe on its spiritual side by a bond of actual experience. It related him to the ants and the weeds, and it related him more closely still to all men and women the world over. The warmth of family affection was extended to all things, as it had been in the experience of the Nazarene, and of the little poor man of Assisi.

But while his sense of relationship to individuals was thus quickened, the quickening power lay in the realisation of God’s life, and of his own share in it. His realisation of God had come to him through an ardent love of individual and concrete things; but now it was that realisation which so wonderfully deepened and impassioned his relation to individuals. What we mean[Pg 75] when we use the word God in public, is necessarily somewhat ambiguous and obscure; but when Whitman used it, as he did but rarely and always with deliberation, he seems to have meant the immanent, conscious Spirit of the Whole.

Theory came second to experience with him, and he was no adept at definition: the interest he grew to feel in the Hegelian philosophy and in metaphysics resulted from his longing, not to convince himself, but to explain himself intelligibly to his fellows, and, in so far as it was possible, make plainer to them the meaning of the world and of themselves.

It seems desirable to define his position a little further, though we find ourselves at once in a dilemma; for at this point it is evident that he was both—or neither—a Christian nor a Pagan. He is difficult to place, as indeed we must often feel our own selves to be, for whom the idea of a suffering God is no more completely satisfying than that of Unconscious Impersonal Cosmic Force. Again, while worship was a purely personal matter for him, yet the need of fellowship was so profound that he strove to create something that may not improperly be described as a Church, a world-wide fellowship of comrades, through whose devotion the salvation of the world should be accomplished.

In a profound sense, though emphatically not that of the creeds, Whitman was Christian, because he believed that the supreme Revelation of God is to be sought, not in the external world, but in the soul of man; because he held, though not in the orthodox form, the doctrine of Incarnation; because he saw in Love, the Divine Law and the Divine Liberty; and because it was his passionate desire to give his life to the world. In all these things he was Christian, though we can hardly call him “a Christian,” for in respect of all of these he might also be claimed by other world-religions.

As to the Churches, he was not only outside them, but he frankly disliked them all, with the exception of the Society of Friends; and even this he probably looked[Pg 76] upon principally as a memory of his childhood, a tradition which conventionality and the action of schismatics had gone far to render inoperative in his Nineteenth Century America. We may say that he was Unitarian in his view of Jesus; but we must add that he regarded humanity as being fully as Divine as the orthodox consider Jesus to be; while his full-blooded religion was very far from the Unitarianism with which he was acquainted;[138] and his faith in humanity exalted the passions to a place from which this least emotional of religious bodies is usually the first to exclude them. In fact, he took neither an intellectual nor an ascetic view of religion. He had the supreme sanity of holiness in its best and most wholesome sense; but whenever it seemed to be applied to him in later years he properly disclaimed the cognomen of saint, less from humility, though he also was humble, than because he knew it to be inapplicable. In conventional humility and the other negative virtues, renunciation, remorse and self-denial, he saw more evil than good. His message was one rather of self-assertion, than of self-surrender. One regretfully recognises that, for many critics, this alone will be sufficient to place him outside the pale.

Another test would be applied by some, and though it would exclude many besides Whitman, we may refer to it in passing. He was apparently without the sense of mystical relationship, save that of sympathy, with Jesus as a present Saviour-God.[139] But none the less he had communion with the Deity whose self-revealing nature is not merely Energy but Purpose. And his God was a God not only of perfect and ineffable purpose, but of all-permeating Love.[140]

Whether his relation to God can be described as prayer, it is perhaps unprofitable to ask. It is better worth while to question whether he was conscious of feeding upon “the bread of life,” for this consciousness is a test of communion. Undoubtedly he was; and the[Pg 77] nourishment which fed his being came to him as it were through all media. The sacrament of wafer and cup is the symbol of that Immanent Real Presence which is also recognised in the grace before meat. Whitman partook of the sacrament continually, converting all sensation into spiritual substance.

The final test of religions, however, is to be found in their fruits, and the boast of Christianity is its “passion for souls”. Now Whitman is among the great examples of this passion, and his book is one long “personal appeal” addressed, sometimes almost painfully, “to You”.

But, it may be asked, did he aim at “saving souls for Christ”? If I understand this very mystical and obscure question, and its ordinary use, I must answer, No,—but I am not sure of its meaning. Whitman’s own salvation urged him to save men and women by the Love of God for the glory of manhood and of womanhood and for the service of humanity.

Far as this may be from an affirmative reply to the question, the seer who has glimpses of ultimate things will yet recognise Whitman as an evangelical. For he brought good tidings in his very face. He preached Yourself, as God purposed you, and will help and have you to be. Whether this is Paganism or Christianity let us leave the others to decide; sure for ourselves, at least, that it is no cold code of ethical precepts and impersonal injunctions, but the utterance of a personality become radiant, impassioned and procreative by the potency of the divine spirit within.

In stating thus the nature of Whitman’s vision, I do not wish to place it too far out of the field of our common experience. His ordinary consciousness had been touched by it in earlier hours; and some gleam or glimmer of it enters every life as an element of romance. But for most of us, only as a light on the waters that passes and is gone, not as in Whitman’s case, and in the case of many another mystic whether Pagan or Christian—for mysticism is far older and more original than the creeds[Pg 78]—as the inward shining and immortal light which henceforward becomes for them synonymous with health and wholeness. For most men, the fairy light of childhood becomes a half-forgotten, wholly foolish memory; Romance also we outgrow, or cling only to its dead corpse as to a pretty sentiment. Thus the wonder of our childhood and our youth, so essentially real in itself, fades into the light of common day; it becomes for our unbelief a light that never was on sea or land.

But in Whitman’s story we find it living on, to become transformed in manhood into the soul of all reality. His wonder at the world grew more. And this wonder, always bringing with it, to the man as to the child, a sense of exhilaration and expansion, was at the heart of his religion, as it is doubtless at the heart of all. No one will ever understand Whitman or his influence upon those who come in contact with him, who does not grasp this fact of his unflagging and delighted wonder at life. It kept him young to the end. The high-arched brows over his eyes are its witness.

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THE CARPENTER

In the fifties a change came over America, a change preluding the great struggle which ensued. The population grew rapidly with its former mathematical regularity; but the settlement and development of the country went forward even more rapidly. During the decade, the area of improved land increased by one-half, and the value of farm property was doubled. The west bank of the Mississippi being already settled, the future of the lands still further west between the Missouri and the Rockies, became of paramount interest to the nation. It was this problem of the West which strained until it broke that policy of compromise which for a generation had bound American politics.

The year 1850 itself is memorable for Clay’s opportunist resolutions in Congress, which were intended to settle nothing; and for the fierce debates upon them and upon the Fugitive Slave Bill, in which Webster and Seward, Calhoun and Jefferson Davis participated.[141] Clay and Webster died soon after, and their party being utterly routed at the polls in 1852, finally went to pieces. The vote of the liberty party had declined, and compromise still held up its foolish head. But the victorious Democrats brought all hope of its continuance to an end by reviving the principle of “squatter sovereignty,” and proceeding to apply it in the newly settled lands. It was their policy to snatch the question of slavery out of the hands of Congress; for which, as the organ of the[Pg 80] Federal power, they nursed an increasing enmity. The bloody scenes which drew all eyes to Kansas made it plain that compromise was done; the South had thrown it over, and was now half-consciously driving the country into war.

When the leaders of 1850 died there was no one to take their places, though the crisis called for men of counsel and of spirit. President Pierce, of New Hampshire, the tool of the party machine, merely represented the political weakness of the nation. It was not till after the next elections that their new leaders were discovered by the American people. Judge Douglas, the champion of “squatter sovereignty,” rose indeed into prominence in 1854, but his greater antagonist still remained comparatively unknown in the country, though famous in his State and among his neighbours for keen logic and humorous common-sense.

There was no leadership. Compromise was yielding not to principle but to the spirit of the mob. Immigration and the increase of the towns favoured organised political corruption; and the tyranny of interests and privileges was beginning to make itself felt on every hand. When parties are separated by motives of personal gain rather than by principle, party-feeling finds expression not in devotion and enthusiasm, but in violence. It was not only in such newly settled lands as Kansas, nor alone in such chaotic aggregations of humanity as were being piled together in New York, that constitutional methods were abandoned and private violence was condoned. The spirit of anarchy was abroad, and members of Congress went armed to the Capitol itself.

The violence was a natural reaction from the compromise, and like the compromise was a birth of the materialistic spirit. America’s idealism, so triumphant at the close of the eighteenth century, had fallen upon too confident a slumber, and heavily must the Republic pay for that sleep. A young nation of idealists is doubtless more subject than any other to these outbreaks of materialism and its offspring. It is optimistic, and[Pg 81] when it sleeps it leaves no dogs on guard. The nation becomes engrossed in material tasks, and is presently surprised by the enemy. But being so surprised, and fighting thus at disadvantage, it accomplishes more than the wary old pessimists whose energy is absorbed in prudence.

American idealism was asleep, but its slumbers were by no means sound. The voices of Garrison, Emerson and others mingled troublously with its dreams. And the pursuit and capture of fugitive slaves like Anthony Burns, in Boston itself; and the extraordinary sale, both in America and Europe, of Uncle Tom’s Cabin,[142] did much to quicken that Abolitionist sentiment which in the end won the day. For the present, however, and until the third year of the war, abolition remained outside the region of practical politics. The question which was dividing the nation was whether slavery should become a national institution—whether it should take its place, as the South intended, as one of the essential postulates in the theory of American liberty—or should be restrained within its old limits as a State institution, an evil which the Federal Government would never recognise as necessary to the welfare of America, but which it was too proud and too generous to compel its constituent States to abolish. The situation was one of unstable equilibrium, and the illogical position could not much longer be maintained. It was the logic of ideas that first drove the South into secession, and afterwards the nation into abolition.

Immigration was now beginning to create a difficult problem in the metropolis,[143] and was in part accountable for the corruption which from this time forward disfigured its politics. By 1855 New York counted more than six hundred thousand inhabitants; a number which in itself must inevitably have created many a delicate situation in a new country, but which was rendered tenfold more difficult to manage by its rapid growth and[Pg 82] heterogeneous character. It had doubled in fifteen years, and a continuously increasing stream of immigration had poured through it.

The first great wave had brought nearly two millions of Europeans, principally Germans and Irish, across the Atlantic during the later forties. The failure of the Irish potato crop in 1846, the crisis of 1848, when Europe was swept by revolution and afterwards by reaction, sent hundreds of thousands of homeless men across the sea. Many of the Germans afterwards took their share in another struggle for freedom in their new home; but on the other hand, the more helpless of the immigrants, and a large proportion of the Irish, swelled the population of New York; and proved themselves quicker to learn the advantages of party subserviency than the ethics of citizenship. Many of them had been trained in the school of tyranny at home. Thus the city government became almost hopelessly corrupt, falling into the hands of the genteel and unprincipled Mayor Fernando Wood,[144] and Isaiah Rynders, captain of his bodyguard of blackguards. Men of this stamp began to control not only the government of New York city, but the national party which had its headquarters at Tammany Hall. Whitman was intimate with the condition of things there,[145] and knew the men who manipulated the machine, and pulled the strings at the nominating conventions. He has described those of this period in the most scathing words, and has made it clear that they were among the worst of a bad class. They did not favour slavery so much as inaction; they longed only for a continuance of their own good fortune, desiring to fatten peacefully at the troughs of corruption. To men like these, ideals seem to constitute a public danger. And the war which broke over America in 1861 was due as much to the northern menials of Mammon as to the real followers of Calhoun. It was not only against the South that America fought—or rather it was not against the South itself at all—but against the hosts[Pg 83] of those who used her freedom for the accomplishment of an end antagonistic to hers.

Evidences of the demoralising influence always present in the life of a great city were thus painfully patent in New York, especially in the lowest strata, becoming hourly more debased and numerous. The plutocracy also began to imitate the showy splendours of Paris under the second Empire.[146] But it would be wrong to assume that corruption and display characterised the metropolis of the fifties. For in spite of the foreign influx, and the venality of a considerable class both of native and of foreign birth, and in spite too of the snobs, in spite that is to say of the appearance of two dangerous elements, the very poor and the very rich, there was still predominant in New York a frank and hearty democratic feeling. The mass of the people still embodied much of the true American genius; they were marked by the friendly, independent and unconventional carriage which is still upon the whole typical of the West.

New York was full of large democratic types of manhood. Notable, even among these, was Walt Whitman. Even here, he was unlike other men: the fulness of his spirits, his robust individuality, the generosity of his whole nature, was so exceptional as to make itself felt. His figure began to grow familiar to all kinds of New Yorkers during these years. He was frequently to be seen on Broadway,[147] in his favourite coign of vantage, on the stage-top by the driver’s side, a great, red-faced fellow, in a soft beaver, with clothes of his own choosing, an open collar like that of Byron or Jean Paul, and a grey beard. The dress suited him, he was plainly at home in it, and in those days it was not specially remarkable or odd; it was the man himself who compelled attention.

On many a holiday through 1853 he might also have been seen at the International Exhibition or World’s Fair,[148] which was held in the Crystal Palace on Sixth[Pg 84] Avenue and Fortieth Street, and offered a remarkable object lesson to the people of New York on the development of American resources and the value of that national unity which railroads and machinery were yearly making more actual. Here America was seen in all her own natural promise, and also in her relation to the Transatlantic world.

It was one of those sights which Whitman dearly loved. The Exhibition taught him far more than books about the country in which he lived; for his mind was like a child’s in its responsiveness to concrete illustrations—a quality which may explain the long strings of nouns which figure so oddly on many a page which he afterwards wrote. He loved a medley of things, each one significant and delightful in itself. A catalogue was for him a sort of elemental poem; and being elemental, he sought to introduce the catalogue into literature. We who live in another and more ordered world, rarely respond to this kind of emotional stimulus, which was doubtless very powerful for Whitman, and cannot but laugh at his attempts to move us by a chatter of names. It may be we are wrong, and that another age will smile at us in our turn, though at present we remain incredulous.

Here, too, he studied such examples as he found of statuary and painting, arts of which he must hitherto have been largely ignorant. It is only very old or very wealthy cities that become treasuries of the plastic arts, and at this time New York was not yet sufficiently rich, or perhaps sufficiently travelled, to have accumulated this kind of wealth. Whitman was not blind to painting, like Carlyle, for in later years he so appreciated the genius of J. F. Millet that he used to say, “the man that knows his Millet needs no creed”.[149]

After a varied experience as teacher, printer, journalist and editor, Whitman had settled into the life of an American artisan. He had inherited much of the Dutch realism,[Pg 85] the love of things and of the making of things, from his mother’s side; while on his father’s, the associations with mallet and chisel had been strong from his childhood; and thus his trade helped him to gather together the fragments of his identity and weld them into one. As he was never in any sense its slave, it also provided him with the means for that constant leisurely study of life which was now his real occupation. When a house was off his hands and the money for it assured, he would take a holiday, extending sometimes over weeks together, in the remote parts of Long Island.[150] The open spaces helped his mood, and the quietness furthered the slow processes of self-realisation.

While at Brooklyn, he was every day on the ferry, and almost every evening he was in New York. He read during his dinner hour, and thought and meditated while he worked. The physical exercise quieted his brain. Taken earlier, it might have deadened it; but he was now a mature man full of thoughts, and well furnished with experience. What he needed was to assimilate all this material and make it his own. And while he built houses, the co-ordinating principle of his personality was building up for him a harmonious self-consciousness, which gradually filled out the large and wholesome body of the man. This gestating process required precisely the deliberation and open-air accompaniments which were afforded by his present life—a life so different from the confinement and incessant strain and stress which check all processes of conscious development in most men and women before they reach maturity. His nature was emotional, and music played a considerable part in its development. Always an assiduous opera-goer, Whitman took full advantage of the musical opportunities which New York offered him at this time. In 1850, Barnum had brought Jenny Lind to the Castle Gardens—now the Aquarium—a fashionable resort on the Battery, and Maretzek of the Astor Opera House, had replied with Parodi, and Bettini the great tenor.[151]

[Pg 86]

Best of all, in 1853, Marietta Alboni visited the city, and Whitman heard her every night of her engagement.[152] This great singer, whose voice was then in the plenitude of its power, had been some twelve years before the public and was already beginning to attain those physical proportions suggested in the cruel but witty saying that she resembled an elephant which had swallowed a nightingale. She was low-browed and of a somewhat heavy face, though Whitman thought her handsome; but it was by her voice, not her face, that she triumphed. Critics found her talent exceptionally impersonal and even cold, though they confessed that never voice was more enchanting.[153] This coldness is rather difficult to understand, for Whitman, who was a judge in such matters, felt it to be full of passion, and a passion which swept him away in the Titanic whirlwind of its power.[154] He had found Jenny Lind somewhat immature and her voice unrewarding, but Alboni awakened and illumined his very soul, and became, as it were, the incarnation of music.

The same summer[155] Walt took his father, whose health was failing, on a visit to Huntington, to see the old home for a last time. Two years later, Walter Whitman died and was buried in Brooklyn.

The family seems to have been living in Ryerton Street,[156] in a house which was the last building on that side of the town. Beside Walt, there were three unmarried brothers at home, George and Jeff as well as Edward; and Hannah, Walt’s favourite sister. We hear little of Jesse, the oldest brother, who appears to have been a labourer, of Andrew, or of the remaining sister Mary. Probably they were all married by this time and living away.

The three at home were the ablest of the brothers, and doubtless they shared the financial responsibility between them. The Portland Avenue house, into which they presently moved, bears witness to their comfort[Pg 87]able circumstances. Walt contributed his share with his brothers; beyond that he seemed indifferent about money; he hardly ever spoke of it, and perhaps by way of contrast with the others, evidently regarded the subject as of minor importance. Indeed, just as his own work had really grown profitable and he was on the way to become rich, he gave up carpentering for good. This was early in 1855.

Of late he had been more and more absorbed and pre-occupied; his days off had been more frequent and numerous, and whatever his immediate occupation he was continually stopping to write. He seemed to grow daily more indifferent to opinion, daily more markedly himself.

The fragments which he wrote in out-of-the-way places or at work he would read aloud or recite when by himself, to the waves or to the trees; trying them over at the opera, on the ferry, or on Broadway, where in the midst of the city one can be so unobserved and so unheard in the heart of its hubbub. He must assure himself that they were without a hint of unreality or of books.

For he was now deliberately at work upon his great task, his child’s fancy. He was come up into his manhood. He had, it seemed to him, thoroughly perceived and absorbed the spirit of America and of his time. His message had come to him, and he was writing his prophetic book, his Song of Walt Whitman.

At last, the manuscript was done, and in the early summer he went to work in a little printing shop on Cranberry Street, and set up much, perhaps the whole, of the type jealously with his own hands.[157] About the beginning of July, and a few days only before his father’s death, it was completed. In the New York Tribune for the sixth of the month, it was advertised as being on sale at Fowler & Wells’s Phrenological Depôt and Bookstore on Broadway, and at Swayne’s in Fulton Street, Brooklyn. The price was at first two dollars,[Pg 88] which seems a little exorbitant for so slender and unpretending a volume, in shape and thickness a mere single copy of one of the smaller periodicals, bound in sea-green cloth, with the odd name, Leaves of Grass, in fanciful gilt lettering across its face. It was presently reduced to a dollar.

The other members of the household took the new venture very quietly. They had never been consulted in the matter—it had been Walt’s affair, and only his; and the father’s death must speedily have obliterated the little mark it made upon their minds.[158] “Hiawatha” was published about the same time, and a copy found its way into the house. The mother, turning the pages of both, considered that if Longfellow’s were acknowledged as poetry, Walt’s queer lines might pass muster too. Brother George fingered the book a little, and concluded it was not worth reading—that it was not in his line anyhow.

Doubtless they were relieved when the writing and printing were done, thinking that now surely Walt would return to the ways of mortals. For he had certainly fallen into the most irregular habits. He lay late abed, and came down still later to breakfast; wrote for a few hours, and when the table was being laid for dinner, took down his big hat and sauntered out, to return presently after the meal was over and the dishes cold.[159] He was not intentionally inconsiderate, but he was wholly engrossed in his work, and so pre-occupied that he must often have been tiresome enough.

After dinner he disappeared altogether, spending the afternoon and evening in his own leisurely way; setting type, perhaps, on his book at Andrew Rome’s little office, and then going off to the opera or to some friend’s; and, as he came back, staying far into the night in talk with the young fellows on the ferry, or on one of the East River steamers. Sometimes Hannah or Jeff might accompany him, but as a rule he went alone.

If his family anticipated any change in his ways when[Pg 89] the book was out, they were doomed to disappointment. The new task was but begun; the methods approved themselves to his mind and were pursued. He had weighed everything over again that summer, as soon as the book was out, going away to the eastern shore of Long Island for months of thought and solitude.[160]

As one turns the ninety broad pages of the volume, with their large type, their long flowing lines, their odd punctuation and occasional slips in orthography, every detail telling of the individuality behind it, one feels a little of what it must have meant to its maker. Five times, they say,[161] he wrote and re-wrote, made and un-made it, and looking back it seemed as though for seven years it had been struggling with him for utterance.

He had written tales and verses with the others, but this book he knew was different from them all. It was not so much his writing as himself. It was a man, and, withal, a new sort of man. For better or worse it was Walt Whitman, a figure familiar enough to the common people of Brooklyn and New York, familiar and beloved—he was not unconscious of his exceptional power of attraction[162]—but a Walt Whitman whom, as yet, they understood very little, who had, indeed, but recently come to an understanding of himself, and who was now approaching to speak with them. Here is the frank declaration of himself, which he proffers to all. Now, at last, we shall understand one another, he seems to say.

It was the old, old need for expression, the ultimate and deepest necessity of man, which urged him to his task and made its publication possible. Self-revelation is, of course, continuous and inevitable upon its unconscious side. It is only when it becomes a deliberate act that it astonishes the beholder to outcries of admiration or indignant horror.

Now the passion that overwhelms the poet is near[Pg 90] akin to the lover’s, for he is a lover whose heart is transfigured by the presence of Beauty, the Beloved, immanent in his world. And only by a naked avowal can such passion be satisfied.

There are those, of course, who regard every self-revelation as an immodesty, and who will and do avert their eyes from all passion, crying shame. But some at least of the others, who are well aware of the weakness of words, and know how few can use them perfectly, will reverently approach such a confession as Whitman’s; not, indeed, as if it were that of a young girl, but as that of a man, naïve, yet virile, and of heroic sanity. And if they feel any shame they will frankly acknowledge it to be their own.

There is a kind of egoism which all self-revelation pre-supposes—the consciousness of possessing something supremely worthy of giving. This glorious pride is not incompatible with the profoundest humility, for it is divine, like the “I am” of Jehovah, the egoism of God.

If self-expression is the outcome of passion, its new incarnation has some of the wonder which attends a birth. The most virile of poets must here become as a woman; and the mystery which, for any mother, enwraps her first-born, clings for his Muse about her slender child by the great god of song. And when, as in the instance of this book of Whitman’s, the children of the Muse betray in every feature the abandonment of the remote passion in which they were conceived, one cannot oneself handle them without emotion.

Walt regarded the book with undisguised pride and satisfaction. Mother-like, he eyed it as the future saviour of men. He saw it prophetic and large with destiny for America. He was confident that the public would be quick to recognise that quality in it for which they had been so long half-consciously waiting. The people would read it with a new delight, for surely it must be dynamic with the joy in which it was written.

He often said in later years that Leaves of Grass was[Pg 91] an attempt to put a happy man into literature.[163] Others may discuss the optimism and the egoism of his pages, for of both qualities there is plenty in them, but, after all, they are but secondary there. As to the qualities themselves, we may hold contrary and even disparaging opinions of their value, they will certainly at times repel us. But primarily these pages portray the happy man, and a strong and happy personality has the divine gift of attraction. Byron may dominate the whole of Europe for a generation by the dark Satanic splendour of his pride; Carlyle may hold us still by his fierce, lean passion for sincerity; but Whitman draws us by the outshining of his joy.

Happiness is not less infectious than melancholy or zeal; and if it is genuine it is at least equally beyond price. As far as it goes, it seems to indicate that a man may be perfectly adjusted to this world of circumstances, which to us appears so often contrary. A happy and intelligent man of thirty-six, who has looked at life open-eyed, and is neither handsome, rich nor famous is worthy of attention. There is something half-divine about him; and we cannot but hope he may prove to be prophetic of the race.

Some such thought must have been in Emerson’s mind, when a few days after the perusal of Leaves of Grass, he wrote his acknowledgment to its unknown author.[164] The letter has been often quoted, but it is so significant that I must quote it again. For no other literary acknowledgment ever accorded to Whitman possesses anything like equal interest or importance.

Emerson was certainly the most notable force among American writers at that time; and one might add, the only figure of anything like the first magnitude. In Great Britain, the century had already produced the literature which we associate with the names of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats and[Pg 92] Carlyle, not to mention the earlier work of Tennyson, Browning and others. Emerson was the only American who could venture to claim rank with these, and then hardly equal literary rank. But in some respects his influence was greater, for his was certainly the clearest and fullest expression of the American spirit in letters. His words are therefore of importance to us:—

The epigrammatic style of the sentences, together with a strong flavour of sentiment, may set the reader in his turn rubbing his eyes, and wondering whether Emerson were consciously inditing a mere complimen[Pg 93]tary letter. But a second perusal renders such an idea untenable. The epigram and the sentiment were parts of the Emersonian mannerism. The letter was not penned in hot haste, after a first glance at the pages; a delay had taken place between reading and writing. Moreover, when about this time a visitor called at Concord, he was sent on his way to Brooklyn as upon a pilgrimage, with the significant words, “Americans abroad may now come home: unto us a man is born”.[165] Another epigram, uttered perhaps with a gentle smile, but without a flavour of irony.

Emerson was then a man of fifty-two. The first and second series of his lecture-essays had been published more than ten years, and the first volume of his poems in 1847; he was already famous in England as well as in America. But though he was in certain quarters the cynosure of admiration, in others he was the butt of ridicule. This same year the London Athenæum praised Irving because, as it said, his fancies were ideal, and not like Emerson’s merely typographical—because they did not consist, like the latter’s, in the use of verbs for nouns, in erratic punctuation, tumid epithets, which were startling rather than apposite, or in foreign forms and idioms.[166]

This though milder, is not unlike what many of the critics were soon to be saying with better reason of Whitman; and it is interesting to recall that in 1839, when he was Whitman’s age, Emerson was struggling to escape from the limits of metre into a rhythm that should suggest the wildest freedom; that should be “firm as the tread of a horse,”[167] vindicate itself like the stroke of a bell, and knock at prose and dulness like a cannon ball; a rhythm which should be in itself a renewing of creation, because it was the form of a living spirit. In later years, Emerson seems to have harked back again to the more regular forms, believing them to correspond to essential pulse-beats, or organic rhythm.[Pg 94] But his journal contains several little prose poems of the date of 1855 or 1856, notably the sketch of the “Two Rivers,” outlined partly in loose irregular metres.

This search of the Concord prophet after a new free rhythmical form, must have predisposed him to interest in such a book as Leaves of Grass, where the laws of metre are in force no longer. But beyond this, the older man felt a close kinship with the younger. Whitman had declared himself unequivocally for the faith in life which was Emerson’s gospel; and he smacked of the soil and air of America in a way that Emerson could not but love. Here at last was an actual incarnation of the ideas he had so long been hurling at the heads of the American people.

A beautiful and characteristic modesty is evident in the tone of the letter. Emerson might well have acknowledged the younger man as a pupil rather than as a benefactor; it was the same quality as had appeared in his reply to Frederika Bremer, when, five years earlier, she had been praising his own verses: “The Poet of America,” he answered gravely, “is not yet come. When he comes he will sing quite differently.”

The idea of an American poet was “in the air”. Intellectual America was in revolt; she would remain no longer a mere province of Britain; her writers should shape themselves no more upon merely English models. Lowell in his “Biglow Papers” and Longfellow in “Hiawatha” were among many who sought to exploit the literary soil of the New World. Whatever their success in this, they can hardly be said to have inaugurated a new literature. No American Muse had yet appeared upon the Heights of Helicon to spread a new hush over the world, and by her singing raise the place of song perilously near to the stars. But though she had not appeared she was eagerly expected; and Emerson’s letter is like nothing so much as the heralding cry that he had at last caught a glimpse of her across Whitman’s pages. It was but a glimpse, and he was yet in doubt; he must come to Brooklyn himself, must meet this fellow face to face, and see.

[Pg 95]

WHITMAN’S MANIFESTO

It is time that we ourselves took a view of the book, for we must see what Whitman had actually done during these last months, and gather what further indications we may as to his general notions of himself and of the world.

The volume consists of a long preface or manifesto[168] of the New Poetry, and of twelve poems by way of example. The preface commences with a description of America, the greatest of poems, the largest and most stirring of all the doings of men. “Here is action untied from strings, necessarily blind to particulars and details, magnificently moving in masses!” Here is a nation, hospitable, spacious, prolific; a nation whose common people is a larger race than hitherto, demanding a larger poetry.

He describes the American poet, who is coming to awaken men from their nightmare of shame to his own faith and joy. That poet is the lover of the universe, who beholds with sure and mystic sight the perfection that underlies all imperfection, for he sees the Whole of things. Past and future are present to him; and with them is the eternal soul. “The greatest poet does not moralise or make applications of morals—he knows the soul.” His readers become loving, generous, democratic, proud, sociable, healthy, by beholding in his poems the beauty of these qualities.

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“Seer as he is, the poet,” continues Whitman, “is no dreamer. He sees and creates actual forms.... To speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of animals, and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside is the flawless triumph of art. If you have looked on him who has achieved it, you have looked on one of the masters of the artists of all nations and times. You shall not contemplate the flight of the grey gull over the bay, or the mettlesome action of the blood horse, or the tall leaning of sunflowers on their stalk, or the appearance of the sun journeying through heaven, or the appearance of the moon afterward, with any more satisfaction than you shall contemplate him. The great poet has less a marked style, and is more the channel of thoughts and things without increase or diminution, and is the free channel of himself. He swears to his art, I will not be meddlesome, I will not have in my writing any elegance or effect, or originality, to hang in the way between me and the rest like curtains.... I will have purposes as health or heat or snow has, and be as regardless of observation.... You shall stand by my side and look in the mirror with me.”[169]

His words never pose before the reader for ornament, they are living things. And for this very reason, he follows no models; his thought is living and original; it must find a new form for its perfect expression, as a new seed would find new growth and leafage.

The poet appeals to every reader as to an equal, because in every reader he appeals to the Supreme Soul. Many may not hear him, but he appeals to all, and not to a coterie.

Whitman then proceeds to the praise of science. Knowledge, bringing back the mind from the supernatural to the actual, brings faith with it; and the soul is the divinest thing that science discovers in the universe. He turns to philosophy, and bids her deal candidly with whatsoever is real, recognise the eternal[Pg 97] tendency of all things toward happiness, and cease to describe God as contending against some other principle.

The poet deals with truth and with the actual. All else is but a sham and impotent. For everywhere and always, the soul which is the one permanent reality, loves truth and responds to it.

The poet is by nature prudent, as one who knows the real purpose of the soul and of the universe, and would act in accordance with that knowledge. He accepts the impulses of the soul as the only final arguments; and only the deeds which it dictates appear to him to be profitable. Living in his age, and becoming its embodiment, he is therewithal a citizen of eternity. The future shall be his proof: will his song remain at her heart? Will it awaken, century after century, the divine unrest, and as it were, create new souls forever?

As for the priests and their work, they are done. The American poets shall fill their place, and the whole world shall answer to their message. Their words shall be in the English tongue—the language of “all who aspire”—but they shall be the very words of the people of America; they shall be native to the soil, and redolent of the air of the Republic. Such poets shall be America’s own, and in them she will welcome her most illustrious visitors. They are her equals; for the soul of a man is as supreme as the soul of a nation. And America shall absorb them as affectionately as they have absorbed her.

Such is the gist of Whitman’s manifesto. Nature the Soul and Freedom; Simplicity and Originality of Expression—these, its dominant notes, recall at once Rousseau, Wordsworth and Shelley, with many another; while certain passages remind the reader that The Germ was but recently published across the sea, the manifesto of another movement associated with the names of the Rossetti family and with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. But whatever the reminiscences it awakens, Whitman’s preface is his own. The thoughts were not all originally his. But they had shaped themselves[Pg 98] newly in his brain and under his pen, and every line bears the stamp of originality.

Without staying to discuss the preface let us proceed to a rapid survey of the remaining pages. They are written, it would seem, for measured declamation, in a sort of free chant, which is neither prose nor verse, but whose lines coincide in length with natural pauses in the thought. Whitman himself spoke very deliberately, in a half drawl; he had a melodious baritone voice of considerable range and power, and one can well imagine how he would recite, when alone or with some intimate friend, the first lines, beginning:—

The lines are quite simple and direct; they are intended to place the reader at once in relation with the actual idler who recites them in the summer fields. He is an out-of-doors fellow, who lives whole-heartedly in the present, rejoicing in the world and observing it. He and his soul—he distinguishes decisively between the temporal and the eternal elements in himself whose equal balance, neither abdicating its place nor contesting that of the other, makes the harmony of his life—he and his soul commune together, and discover that the world means Love, and that the very grass is full of suggestions of immortality.

Everything indeed has its word for Walt Whitman; he understands what the streets are unconsciously saying; the animals of the country-side, the working men, the youths and the women, each and all are teaching him something of himself. All life appeals to him; he recognises himself in each of its myriad forms. And his thoughts are the half-conscious thoughts which lie in the minds of all. It is not only the happy and prosperous[Pg 99] whom he represents, but the defeated also, and the outcast.

All things have their mystical meanings; but especially are manhood and womanhood divine. There is nothing more divine than they. As for him, he is proud, satisfied, august. He has no sympathy with whimperings, or conformity to the ideas of others. Is not he himself the fellow and equal of the supreme Beings, of the Night, the Earth, and the Sea?

He has faith in the issue of time; he fully accepts all reality as a part of the whole purpose. He at least will be fearless and frank, and conceal nothing; all desires shall be expressed by him.

And to him all the bodily functions are wonderful. His whole life is a wonder and delight, beyond the power of words to utter. Sounds especially he enjoys; alluding to the passionate emotions aroused in him by the opera, and adding an obscure, erotic dithyramb on the ecstasy of touch, the proof of reality, for we understand everything through touch.

Everything is seen by him to be full of meaning, because he himself is a microcosm and summary of the universe “stuccoed with quadrupeds and birds all over”. He feels so vividly his personal kinship with the animals which are never pre-occupied about religion or property, that he thinks he must have passed through their present experience “huge times ago,” to include it now in his own.[171] Forthwith, he strings together in a rapid succession of dazzling miniatures, some of the contents of his personal memory; pictures out of his experience or his imagination, that remain vivid and significant to him. His sympathy makes them actually real to him; the figures in them are each a part of himself. “I am the man,” he cries, “I suffered, I was there.”[172]

But he has his own distinct personality. He is the friendly and flowing savage, full of magnetism, health and power—

[Pg 100]

He sees the divine that is in men, and how all the gods are latent in the race, and with them ever more besides. Even in the midst of their absurd littleness, which he fully recognises, he calls men to the reality of themselves, away from the religions of the priests to their own souls. He understands doubt very well, but he has faith, faith in an ultimate happiness for each and all.

He endeavours to express his sense of eternity, and of the friendliness of the world to him:—

[Pg 101]

Thus it seems to him that he has existed potentially from the beginning; that all the ages in succession have cared for him, and that now the whole world is full of his kin and lovers. He beholds the universe as gloriously infinite in its assured purpose: God has appointed a meeting-place where He waits for every soul. The way of the soul is eternal progress, and each one must follow that road. My pupils, he exclaims, shall become masters and excel me! They shall be wholesome, hearty, natural fellows, attracted to me because I neither write for money nor indoors.[174]

My religion is the worship of the soul. I am calm and composed, and satisfied about God, whom I do not in the least understand. Death and decay seem wholesome to him; they are the way of life by which he himself came to the present hour, wherein he realises the mystic reality, the life eternal, and the ineffable idea of happiness as the central purpose of the Universe:—

With an enigmatical farewell, he resumes his place in the life of the world, awaiting such of his readers as belong to him:—

The other poems are pendants to the first, offering further exemplifications of the precepts of the preface. He appeals, for example,[177] to his fellow workmen and workwomen, that they realise their own greatness and immortality, their own individual destiny; for nothing can ever be so worthy of their reverence as their own soul.

[Pg 102]

He bids them employ and enjoy this hour to the full,[178] for death comes, and it will not be the same as life. Yet death also will be good to the soul—all the signs assure the soul that it will be satisfied; and there is nothing which does not share in the soul-life.

In dreams[179] he recognises some free utterances of the soul, and in sleep, the great equaliser of men. As he watches them asleep all become beautiful to him with the beauty of the soul, which men also call Heaven. Diseased or vile they may be, but their souls forever urge them along the appointed way towards the goal. He seems to see all souls meeting together in sleep, mysteriously to circle the earth, hand in hand. He entrusts himself to sleep with the same security as to Death and Birth.

At the sight and touch of the human body,[180] he kindles with the delight of a Renaissance painter, a Botticelli or a Michael Angelo. The very soul loves the flesh, and the contact of flesh with flesh rejoices it. He writes of the magic force of attraction embodied in a woman; nor of attraction only, but of emancipation. He extols the strength and joy which is embodied in a man. The body of every man and woman, says he, should be as sacred to you as your own, for the body is almost the soul, and to desecrate the bodies of the dead is a little thing beside the shame that we put upon the bodies of the living.

He fills a page[182] with quick Hogarthian sketches of the lower types of faces, and then, turning about, acclaims the souls behind them as his equals. They too will duly come to themselves, following towards the light, after the Lord.

He loves thus to enlarge upon the poet’s office as[Pg 103] the Answerer[183] or sympathiser with all men, and how he should be welcome and familiar to each. In the poet’s company, the soul of each one quickens. And yet the poet is no greater than the least; his verses are not nobler than the kindly deed of any poor old woman.

He writes of 1848, the year of Revolutions,[184] somewhat in the style of “Blood Money,” and probably this page is one of the earliest of the fragments, and may date back to the year which it celebrates. In spite of the successes of tyranny, and the failures of the young men of Europe, he sees that Liberty herself is never foiled.

By way of sharp contrast[185] he directs a mocking and colloquial page of satire against the ’cute Bostonians of 1854. Whitman’s dislike of Boston is never for a moment concealed; Jonathan the Yankee he detests. And now he brings home to him the profits of his bargaining; he has dethroned King George only to set up in his place this Republican President, Pierce of New Hampshire, who in these loud-echoing streets employs the strength of America upon the capture of a fugitive slave.

Sometimes he is autobiographical.[186] “There was a child went forth,”—he recites—a country boy who, at West Hills and in Brooklyn, absorbed all the sights and sounds of his world into himself; till the early lilacs, the morning-glories, and the orchard blossom, the quarrelsome and the friendly boys and the bare-footed negro-children all became a part of him. His parents, too, in the daily life of the home as well as by heredity, entered into his make-up; the mother, wholesome, quiet and gentle, the father, virile and hot-tempered, with a streak of craft and astuteness running through him. And as they became a part of me, he says, so now they shall become a part of you that read this page.

Or at his naïvest, we see him standing open-mouthed and amazed, like a very child, before the sheer naked facts of his own story from the date of his birth to the[Pg 104] present hour;[187] and endeavouring to evoke a similar naïve attitude in the reader, not indeed towards the date of Whitman’s birth, but towards that of his own.

Upon a kindred note we turn the last page also[188]—for it is a proclamation of reverence, reverence for all the old myths; reverence for the high ideals; reverence too for Youth and for Age, for Speech and Silence, for true Wealth and true Poverty, always with stress upon the last member of each pair; for America, too, and for the Earth with its ineffable future; for Truth, for Justice, for Goodness—ay, and, he adds with conscious paradox, for Wickedness as well; above all for Life, but not less for Death. Great is Life, he concludes:—

How are we to sum up these pages, and figure out what it is they come to? No summary is likely to do justice to a book of poetry, which demonstrates itself by wholly other methods than argument, and it would be foolish for me to attempt it. But there is one point with which I must make shift to deal.

Beginning with a forecast of the New Poetry, as of something which should be in its essence indigenous to America, the natural expression of a new spirit and race and of its attitude towards the Self and the Universe, Whitman has boldly given examples to show what it was he meant. What are we to say of these? Do they give us a new art-form? or, if you will, a new kind of poetry? Do they bring us material for some new law of rhythm or metre?

These are deep questions, and dangerous to answer. For myself, I can but give an affirmative to them, accepting the smiles of the incredulous. And I must do so without a discussion which would here be tedious, even if I were able to make it profitable.

[Pg 105]

There is a simple test of the whole matter which one may oneself apply: Does Whitman’s method of writing arouse, in those who can read it with enjoyment, an emotion distinct in character from that aroused by the methods of all other poets? Does Leaves of Grass awake some quality of the Soul which answers neither to the words of Tennyson nor Browning, Emerson nor Carlyle? The proof by emotional reaction requires some skill in self-observation and more impartiality; but, on the whole, I think those who have tried it fairly seem to take my part, and to answer emphatically in the affirmative.

What then is this emotion which Whitman alone, or in special measure, evokes? It is a further hard but fair question, for it involves Whitman’s personality, and this book is an attempt to answer it. Briefly, it is the complex but harmonious emotion which possesses a sane full-blooded man of fully awakened soul, when he realises the presence of the Eternal and Universal incarnate in some “spear of summer grass”. One may call it the religious emotion; but it is not the emotion of any other religious poetry, saving perhaps some of the Hebrew prophets: and every prophet has his own cry. It is the emotion of a religion which is as large as the largest conceptions which man has yet formed of life; for Whitman, apart from any limitations in his thought, appears to have lived more fully and with fuller conscious purpose than did other men.

In order to make oneself understood at all one speaks in hyperbole, and doubtless I exaggerate. Whitman was, of course, no God among men, nor was he greater than other poets; in a sense he was even less than the least of them, so subjective was his genius; but since he consciously evokes a new emotion, he has his place among true artists, for Art is the power of evoking the emotion in others which one intends. And since the new emotion seems to be altogether ennobling when it is fully realised, being at once enlarging and integrating to the soul, we ought the more gladly to hail and acknowledge him.

[Pg 106]

I say a new emotion, not meaning, of course, that he is alone in calling up the soul, for no great poetry can leave the soul unstirred; but that no poetry of modern times stirs the soul in the same manner as does that of this full-natured man. So far, I think, we may acknowledge Whitman’s success as a poet, and I am not concerned to urge it further. There are many who do not respond to his writings in the way I have indicated, and they naturally refuse him the title. There are others who do, and who accord it to him; and I confess I am of the latter.

The only American poet who approaches him in sentiment is Emerson. Poems like “Each and All,” with its motive of the cosmic unity, “The perfect Whole,” or “Brahma,” with its reconciling all-inclusiveness, are very near in thought to Whitman; so again is “Merlin” with its

or “Woodnotes”—“God hid the whole world in thy heart”—or the exclamation “When worlds of lovers hem thee in” of the “Threnody”; or his “Test,” when he hangs his verses in the wind. The inspiration of the two men made them akin; but it was far from identical. There are sides of Leaves of Grass which are absent from Emerson’s writings, just as there are phases of Emerson’s thought which are never really touched by Whitman. But above all, while the works of both are exhilarating to the soul, the emotional reactions from them are quite distinct.

Considering Emerson’s influence at the time upon all that was most virile in American thought, we might feel certain that some part at least of his teaching had illuminated Whitman’s mind, and there is sufficient evidence in his own writings to prove it.[189] He said indeed, that it was Emerson who led him to a spiritual[Pg 107] understanding of America, and who finally brought his simmering ideas to the boil.[190] But he also vehemently asserted the independence of Leaves of Grass from any direct Emersonian or other literary influence; and in this the internal evidence of his book supports him. It is really impossible to confuse the flavours of Whitman and of Emerson.

One more comparison, and I will pursue the story. There is much which Whitman obviously shares with Shelley. Their kinship of inspiration is too significant for a passing note, and might well be followed over many pages. The writer of Leaves of Grass, and the youthful author of Queen Mab, had drunk at the same fountain of love and wonder.[191]

Shelley’s Defence of Poetry should be read alongside of the Preface of 1855. In it also you will find it stated that the poet lives in the consciousness of the whole; that he is not to be bound by metrical custom, the distinction between poets and prose-writers being but a vulgar error; it is sufficient if his periods are harmonious and rhythmical. Poetry is therein discovered as the great instrument of morality, for it exercises and therefore strengthens the imagination, which is the organ of love—that going-out of a man from himself to others, in which morality finds the final expression.

Here, as in Whitman’s pages, the permanence of poetry is asserted; its significance is not to be exhausted by the generation in which it found expression. Poetry is the motive power of action and creates utilities. It is the root and blossom of science and philosophy. Poetry is the interpenetration of a diviner nature with our own; it turns all things to loveliness, and strips off that film of use and wont which holds our eyes from the vision of wonder. The great poets are men of supreme virtue and consummate prudence. They are the world’s law-givers.

[Pg 108]

It must be enough for us to have noted the parallel, which might easily be pressed too far. There are regions of thought and expression in which their opposition would, of course, appear even more striking; we need not pursue the subject, remembering that much of what they share derives from the influence which we associate with the works of Rousseau.

Whatever our opinion of Whitman’s astonishing “piece of wit and wisdom,” we cannot be surprised that in some quarters it was received with contemptuous silence, and in others with prompt and frank abuse. The Boston Intelligencer,[192] for instance, credited it to some escaped lunatic; the Criterion[193] to a man possessed of the soul of a sentimental donkey that had died of disappointed love; while the London Critic,[194] comparing him to Caliban, declared he should be whipped by the public executioner.

It is, perhaps, more astonishing that some of the leading journals and reviews of America—the North American Review, Putnam’s Monthly, and the New York Tribune[195]—for example, noticed the book at some length and with friendly forbearance, if not with actual acclamation. The first of these gave the book, in its January issue (1856), three pages of discriminating welcome from the pen of Edward E. Hale, a religious minister of liberal mind and warm heart, whose own inner experience was not without resemblance to Whitman’s in its harmonious development and absence of spiritual conflict.[196]

Whitman was probably prepared for the abuse; it was the indifference of the public which astonished him. At first, it would seem, there was no sale whatever for the book;[197] and Emerson was the only one of its readers who found it specially significant.

Having spent the summer months in solitude in the[Pg 109] country,[198] Whitman decided upon a somewhat questionable method of advertisement: he contributed unsigned notices of his book to the Brooklyn Times,[199] with which he appears to have been connected,[200] and to a phrenological sheet issued by Fowler and Wells, his agents on Broadway. He fortified himself[201] for his task by observing that Leigh Hunt had written for the Press upon his own work, and even claimed the high example of Dante.

These articles, whose anonymity seems to infringe on the impartiality of the Press, and to be in some sense a breach of journalistic honour, are not a little astonishing. That in the phrenological journal may, perhaps, be dismissed as a mere publishers’ circular or puff, contributed, as such things frequently are, by the writer. As to the other, Whitman was for a while the editor of the Brooklyn Times, and may have written on himself while serving in this capacity, or perhaps at the request of the actual editor, doubtless his personal friend. Or, again, if we would excuse, or rather explain, his action, we may regard the reviews as his own attempt to look impersonally at his work.

Whatever we may think of the moral aspect of the notices, or however we may account for them, they have considerable interest as further expositions of his purpose, re-inforcing the Preface after an interval of meditation. As such, and as a corrective of popular misapprehensions, he doubtless intended them. In these pages he lays special emphasis on the American character of his work. He notes his studied avoidance of all foreign similes and classical allusions. He compares himself with Tennyson and other poets, only to declare that he is alone in understanding the new poetry, which will not aim at external completeness and finish, but at infinite suggestion; which will be an infallible and unforgettable hint—a living seed, not merely of thought, but of that emotional force which is of the Soul and alone can mould personality.

[Pg 110]

THE MYSTIC

In September, 1855, Mr. Moncure Conway, having heard of Whitman during a visit to Concord, called upon him in Brooklyn, with an introduction from Emerson. Walt was then living with his family in one of a row of small artisans’ houses, in Ryerton Street,[202] out of Myrtle Avenue. At the moment, however, he was correcting proofs in the little office where his book had been printed, and wore a workman’s striped blue shirt, open at the throat. A few days later, he called upon Mr. Conway, his sister and another lady, at the Metropolitan Hotel, where his manners and conversation were enjoyed and approved. He was then garbed in “the baize coat and chequered shirt” in which he appears in the Leaves of Grass portrait.

Mr. Conway in his story has somewhat confused the details of these visits with those of another paid by him upon a Sunday morning some two years later, when the Whitmans seem to have moved to a more commodious house on North Portland Avenue. The matter is not important, and we may follow the main lines of the picturesque account which he contributed in October, 1866, to the Fortnightly Review.[203]

According to this narrative, Whitman was discovered basking in the hot sunshine on some waste land outside Brooklyn. He was wearing the rough workman’s clothes of his choice, was as brown as the soil and as[Pg 111] grey as the grass bents. His visitor was at once impressed by the exceptional largeness and reality of the man, and by a subtle delicacy of feeling for which Leaves of Grass does not appear to have prepared him. Whitman was slow, serene, gracious; in spite of the grey in his hair and beard, and the deep furrows across his brow, his full red face and quiet blue-grey eyes were almost those of a child.

Returning to the house, the visitor noticed a quality about him which belonged by rights to the line-engraving of Bacchus which hung in the bare room he occupied. Like a Greek hero-god, he made one ask oneself whether he was merely human. And after crossing the bay with him, and bathing and sauntering along the beach of Staten Island, the visitor seems to have left in a condition of almost painful excitement, unable to give his thought to anything but Whitman.

A few days later, according to this account, Conway found him setting type for the next edition of his book. Although he was still writing occasionally for the press, Leaves of Grass continued to provide his principal occupation. They crossed the ferry together and rambled about New York. Nearly every artisan they met greeted Walt affectionately as an old friend, and not one of them knew him as a poet.

Together they went to the Tombs prison, Whitman always having acquaintances among the outcasts of society, and often visiting them in detention, both here and at Sing-Sing. Here, Conway had an opportunity of estimating the power over others which was wielded by this personality, whose latent force had so much moved himself. The prisoners confided in him, and on behalf of one he interviewed the governor of the prison. The victim had been detained for trial on some petty charge in an unhealthy cell. Whitman repeated the man’s story, and characterised it, with a sort of religious emphasis and deliberation, as a “damned shame”. It was manifestly upon the tip of the official tongue to rebuke Walt for impertinence; but though he was dressed as an artisan, his quiet determined gaze was[Pg 112] too much for the autocrat, who gave way before it and ordered the prisoner to be transferred to better quarters.

Other distinguished visitors called on him from time to time. Of Emerson’s own visits we know next to nothing, but they were frequent and very welcome, sometimes ending with a dinner at Astor House. We have a glimpse of Lord Houghton, sharing a dish of roast apples with his friendly host.[204] Ward Beecher, the famous Brooklyn preacher, was among the callers; and it was on their way from his church that, on Sunday, 9th November, 1856, Mrs. Whitman, in her son’s absence, received Bronson Alcott and Thoreau.

Both men belonged to the circle of Emerson’s Concord intimates, and both have left a record of the successful renewal of their visit upon the following day.[205] The lovable, mystical, oracular Alcott, the delight of his friends, seems to have been greatly attracted by Whitman, whom he knew already, and of whom he has spoken in terms of the highest praise. The mother, he found on that first visit, stately and sensible, full of faith in her son “Walter”; full, too, in his absence, of his praises, as being from his childhood up both good and wise, the faithful and beloved counsellor of brothers and sisters.

They spent two delightful hours with Walt next day, a Philadelphia lady accompanying them and sharing their intercourse with “the very god Pan,” as Alcott styles him. The conversation was to have been renewed on the morrow, but Walt failed to put in an appearance. He was apt to be vague about such appointments, and one could never be sure that he felt himself bound by them. Like a Quaker of the old school, he followed the direction of the hour, and his promises were tentative and well guarded.

Thoreau, too, the naturalist philosopher of Walden, wrote down his impressions of the interview. He was puzzled by Whitman, finding him in many ways a[Pg 113] strange and surprising being, outside the range of his experience. Rough, large and masculine but sweet—essentially a gentleman, he says; but the title is paradoxical and inappropriate, and he qualifies it immediately by adding that he was coarse not fine. As to the last point, after vigorously debating it, Whitman and he appear to have retained contrary convictions. But Whitman himself would have been the first to disclaim refinement, a quality which he associated with sterility. If Thoreau had said he was elemental, we would not now dissent.

They were not likely to understand one another. The two men present a remarkable contrast, though on certain sides they have much in common. Thoreau was about two years the older; his principal book of essays, called Walden after the site of his hermitage, had been published when he was about Whitman’s age. Physically he was most unlike the genial red-faced giant opposite to him. Slight and rather short, with long arms and sloping shoulders; mouth, eyes and nose seemed to tell of solitary concentrated thought. There was something in his face of the frontiersman, that woodland look one sees also in Lincoln’s portraits; something, too, of the shyness wood creatures have.

He disliked and avoided the generality of men. In this he would compare himself with Emerson, who found society a refuge from the shabbiness of life’s commonplace, while Thoreau’s own resource was always solitude. He was continually being surprised by the vulgarity of himself and of his fellows, continually flushing with shame, personal or vicarious; and he sought and found a refuge in the pure and lonely spirit that haunted Walden Pool.[206]

Whitman, on the other hand, though he loved solitude, seems, even in solitude, to have craved for movement. In this he was very far from the orientalism of Thoreau and its strenuous seeking after peace. He loved progress. His genius belonged not to the forest pool, whose re[Pg 114]flections were unrippled by a breeze—the mirror of the abstract mind—but to the surging passion of the ocean beach.

Similarly, in his attitude towards men, he was far removed from both Thoreau and Emerson. Emerson confessed he could not quite understand what Whitman so enjoyed in the society of the common people; and many a Democrat, if he were only as honest, would make the same confession. It was not that Emerson was in any sense of the word a snob; but the emotional side of his nature responded but feebly to certain of the elemental notes whose vibration is felt perhaps more frequently among the common people than elsewhere. Emerson’s fellowship was largely upon intellectual fields: Whitman’s almost wholly upon the more emotional.

Thoreau found society in disembodied thought, and emotional fellowship in the woods. But to Whitman the sheer contact with people, and especially the unsophisticated natural folk of the class into which he was born and among whom he was bred, was not only a pleasure but a tonic which he could barely exist without. In solitude, he became after a time, heavy, inert, lethargic. His mind itself seemed to grow stale. He was a mere pool of water left upon the beach, which loses virtue in its stagnant isolation.

Whitman seems to have been exceptionally conscious of the stream of electric life which is the great attractive power of a city, and which in itself tends to draw all young men and women into its current. It buoyed him up and carried him, giving him a sense of exaltation only to be compared with that which other poets have derived from the mountains, or the wind out of the West. His large body and intuitive mind craved for the magnetic stimulus and suggestion of people moving about him; he did not look to them to save him from the commonplace, nor did he shrink from them as bringing him new burdens of a common shame.

Coarse, actual, living humanity was his supreme interest and passion. And the delicacy and refinement[Pg 115] of the scholar was dreadful to him, because it separated him instantly from the vulgar and common folk. He was one of the roughs, he used to say; and so he was, but with a difference. It was this that puzzled his Concord friends who were quick to feel but slow to understand it. Their perplexity did not, however, turn into mistrust; for their appreciation of all that they understood was full and generous.

Thoreau hardly knew whether he was more repelled or attracted by this “great fellow” who seemed to be the personification of Democracy.[207] Like Tennyson at a later date, he was unable to define him, but stood convinced that he was “a great big something”.[208] A little more than human, Thoreau added; meaning a little larger than normal human development.

In any case, the man was an enigma. He wrote of those relations between men and women for which the poets choose the subtlest and most delicate words in their treasury, in syllables which seemed to Thoreau like those of animals which had not attained to speech. Yet even so, he spoke more truth, beast-like as his voice sounded, than the others. And Thoreau frankly reminded himself, if Whitman made him blush the fault might not be Whitman’s after all.

They did not talk very much or very deeply, as there were four to share the conversation. Thoreau, too, was in a rather cynical mood, and spoke slightingly of Brooklyn and America and her politics, which in itself was enough to chill the stream of intercourse. But they found a common interest in the Oriental writers with whom Whitman was but vaguely acquainted, the scholar advising upon translations. Thoreau and Emerson had both noted the resemblance between Leaves of Grass and some of the sacred writings of India; and the latter once humorously described the Leaves as a mixture of the Bhagavad-Gitá[209] and the New York Herald.[Pg 116][210] Thoreau died in 1862, and this was probably their only meeting.

Thoreau carried off with him a copy of the new edition of Whitman’s poems, fresh from the press, and some of the remarks I have alluded to refer especially to its contents, and to several of the new poems which we must now briefly consider, for it is obviously impossible to give any worthy account of Whitman without attempting at least to outline the successive expressions of his own views about himself, as they are set forth in his book.

None of the twenty new Leaves appears so important as the “Song of Myself,” but among them are some of the finest and most suggestive pages he ever wrote, notably the “Poem of Salutation,” and the “Poem of the Road”.[211] The book is now shorn of its prose preface, which would be a serious loss if large portions of it were not to be found broken into lines, and otherwise slightly altered, upon the later pages. It had been used as a quarry for poems, and some of the blocks underwent but little trimming.

In the “Salutation,” he identifies himself elaborately and in much detail, with all peoples of the globe, finding equals and lovers in every land. The universal survey is faithfully made; the poem is like a rapid passage through a gallery of pictures, and regarded as a whole, suggests the outlines of the world-wide field which its author desires the reader to view. Whitman asserts his comprehensive sympathy; like America he includes all men. He is one with them in their common humanity, and sympathises with them individually in the main purposes and desires of their lives.

The poem opens in the form of question and answer. Looking into Whitman’s face, the questioner sees as it were a whole world lying latent within his gaze and becoming actual as he looks. Taking the poet’s hand, he begs him to explain: Walt accedes with readiness, and immediately forgets the questioner.

[Pg 117]

The subject of the poem—man as the microcosm not only of the universe but of the Race—is not perhaps novel; but its meaning is none the less difficult to expound. For it bears directly upon the cosmic consciousness, in which, as I have said, many of us are wanting. There are some, however, who are at times aware of moods in which they realise the symbolic character of all objects; they see them, that is to say, as forms through which vivid emotions are conveyed to the soul. At such moments, the whole world becomes for them a complex of these symbols, whose authenticity they can no more doubt than the meaning of daily speech, and whose ultimate significance is of an infinite content, which forever unfolds before them.

Such moods were evidently frequent with Whitman, and perhaps became the norm of his consciousness. In them his eyes read the world, as though it were the writing of that infinite and supreme Soul which was himself, and yet not himself; that Soul of All, with which his consciousness was become mystically one. He felt the actual thrill and meaning of the World’s Words; words which he more fully describes or rather tries to suggest, in another poem, afterwards known as the “Song of the Rolling Earth”.[212] In order to explain Whitman’s meaning one would need to make a study of the roots of this kind of symbolism, a task which is here impracticable. We must be content instead with a glance at the poem itself.

he asserts; vast words, not indeed of dots and strokes, nor of sounds, but of real things which exist and are uttered. I myself, and not my name, he says suggestively, is the real word which the Soul understands. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear, not my words but Me, The Word. The words of great poets are[Pg 118] different from those of mere singers and minor poets, because they suggest these ultimate words, these presences and symbols. A symbol, be it remembered, always using the word in the sense indicated, is no arbitrary sign, it is a form or appearance, which seen through the eye—to use Blake’s happy formula—presents to the imagination an unimpeachable, distinct emotional concept.

To Whitman, everything became thus symbolic. He saw the Earth itself—the whole world about him—as a symbol, infallibly presenting to him a distinguishable idea or meaning; not indeed a thought, for the word fails to express something which must clearly be supra-intellectual—the perception of a conscious state of emotion.

Of what then was the Earth a symbol to Whitman’s sight? He says, frankly enough,[214] that he cannot convey the idea in print; but that as far as he can suggest it, it is one of progress, or amelioration; it is generous, calm, subtle; it includes the idea of expression, or the bearing of fruit; it is the acceptance of all things, and it is the general purpose which underlies them all.

I fear that those who seek for simple explanations in plain words will scarcely be satisfied with this. Perhaps Whitman is only reasserting in his own manner the familiar adage that God is the prince of poets, and that the universe is His Chapbook which He offers to all. If so, he either gives a new meaning to the words, or he has rediscovered their old vital sense and redeemed them from the stigma of rhetoric. I do not know whether after all the simple-sounding words are not the more elusive.

The Words of the Earth-Mother spoken to her children are, he would have us believe, ultimate and infallible; all things may be tried by them. That is what he means when he says he has read his poems over in the open air. He has proved them thus to see if their suggestion is that of the Earth. She sits, as it were, with[Pg 119] her back turned toward her children,[215] but in her hand she holds a mirror, the clear mirror of appearances which are true, and in that mirror we may see ourselves and her.

How much we can see, depends upon our own character. To the perfect man, the Face of the Mother is perfect: to the man ashamed, disfigured, broken, it appears to be such as he. Only the pure behold the Truth. There is no merely intellectual test of truth, for truth is known only by the Soul. As one looks into the mirror, and reads the thought behind appearances, not with the intellect but with the sight of the awakened soul, one grows to understand what Progress means, one sees a little further into the secrets of Love; one learns that the divine Love neither invites nor refuses.

The Sayers of Words are those who with pure insight—or as Coleridge would say, Imagination—behold things as they are apprehended by the cosmic consciousness; and thus beholding them as they truly are, find words which hint to the soul of that Reality which speaks through all appearance. After the sayers come the singers, the Poets who, building words together, create new worlds.

In another poem, the Open Road[216] becomes the symbol of Freedom, Acceptance, Sanity, Comradeship, Immortality and Eternal Battles.

[Pg 120]

Among the best known and most popular of the Leaves of Grass, it is also among those which are most filled with recondite and mystic meanings. Over these we must not linger, save to note the indication of the mystic sense by phrases like “the float of the sight of things” and “the efflux of the Soul”. The poem as a whole is marked by musical cadences, and is vivid from end to end with courage and the open air.

After the “Song of Myself,” Thoreau preferred the “Sun-down Poem,” which describes the crossing of Brooklyn Ferry.[217] It is filled with the thought that, even after half a century and in our own day, when others than he will be crossing, still he will be with them there unseen. The thoughts that come to him show him the Soul wrapt around in unconsciousness, and the things which, by contact with the clean senses, are presently realised as meanings by the Soul. The poem is a fine example of Whitman’s delight in movement, in masses of people, and in the surroundings of his city.

In the “Clef-poem,”[218] intended to strike the key-note, not only for his poems, but as it were for the universe itself with its innumerable meanings, he tells how, standing on the beach at night alone, he realised that all things—soul and body, past and future, here and there—are interlocked and spanned by a vast homogeneity of essence. The knowledge sweeps away all possibilities of anxiety about the future after death; experience can never fail to feed the soul. It contents him also with the present: no experience can ever be more wonderful to him than this of to-night, when he lies upon the breast of the Mother of his being. The future can be nothing but an eternal unfolding of this that he beholds already present in his body and Soul.

While dwelling upon the symbolical mysticism which cannot be ignored in Whitman’s whole habit of thought, I may add a further word upon its character.[219] Mysticism appears under several forms. The Indian guru,[Pg 121] winning the eternal consciousness by long practices in the gymnasium of the mind; the lover discovering it through the fiery gateways, and tear-washed windows of passion; the poet seeking it in the eyes of the Beauty that was before the beginning of the world; the Quaker awaiting its coming in silence and simplicity; the Catholic preparing for it by prayer and fasting, by ritual and ceremony; the lover of nature discovering it among her solitudes; the lover of man entering into it only by faith, in the strenuous service of his kind: all these bear witness to the many ways of experience along which the deep waters flow.

Belonging to no school, Whitman had relations with several of the mystical groups; he had least, I suppose, with that which seeks the occult by traditional crystal-gazing and the media of hypnotic trances or the dreams produced by anæsthetic drugs. He was a mystic because wonders beset him all about on the open road of his soul. In him mysticism was never associated with pathological symptoms; it was, as he himself suggests, the flower and proof of his sanity, soundness and health.

He had not learnt his lore from books. Plato and Plotinus, Buddha and Boehme, were alike but half-familiar to him; he never studied them closely as a disciple should. His thought may have been quickened by old Elias Hicks, and strengthened occasionally by contact with the Friends. It often recalls the more leonine, less catholic spirit of George Fox; and the vision of the Soul, standing like an unseen companion by the side of every man, woman, and child, ready to appear at the first clear call of deep to human deep, was ever present to them both, and in itself explains much that must otherwise remain incomprehensible in their attitude. But the world of Whitman was that of the nineteenth century, not of the seventeenth: Carlyle, Goethe and Lincoln, had taken the places of Calvin, Milton and Cromwell. In many aspects the mysticism of Leaves of Grass is nearer to that of The Republic and The Symposium, than to that of Fox’s Epistles and Journal; nearer, that is, to the Greek synthesis, than to the evangelical ardour of the[Pg 122] Puritan. Temperance he loved, but he hated the narrowness of negations.

To return to the book: the thought of the sanity of the Earth is brought to bear upon the problem of evil in a poem[220] which describes how, in spite of the mass of corruption returned to it by disease and death, the earth neutralises all by the chemistry of its laws and life. With calm and patient acceptance of evil, nature refuses nothing, but ever provides man anew with innocent and divine materials. And such, it would seem, is the inherent character of the Universe, and therefore of the Soul.

A poem,[221] whose opening cadences were suggested by the drip, drip, drip, of the rain from the eaves, presents the Broad-axe as the true emblem of America, Whitman’s substitute for the Eagle whose wings are always spread.

Here we enter the picturesque, muscular world of wood-cutters and carpenters so familiar to the author, and we are reminded of the older and more sinister uses and products of the axe. Seen by Whitman, the Broad-axe itself is a poem that tells of strenuous America, with her free heroic life and the comradeship of her Western cities, great with the greatness of their common folk. It tells him of the woman of America, self-possessed and strong; and of large, natural, naïve types of manhood. It even prophecies to him of Walt Whitman, and sings the “Song of Myself,” the message of the noble fierce undying Self. As a Cuvier can reconstruct an undiscovered creature from a single fossil bone, so might the poet seer have foretold America by this symbol of an axe.

The idea of America is further expounded in several[Pg 123] other poems, especially in the longest of the additions, which was afterwards expanded into “By Blue Ontario’s Shore”.[222] Much of its essential thought, however, and some of its actual phrasing belongs to the old Preface, and has therefore been already noted. It dwells on the potential equality of every citizen in the sight of America herself, an equality based upon the divine Soul which is in each; and also, upon Liberty, which is the ultimate and essential element of all individual life.

The thought of America calls up in Whitman’s mind the picture of that poet, that “Soul of Love and tongue of fire,” who will utter the idea which is America, and which alone can integrate her diverse peoples into one. And here Whitman flings off his cloak which concealed him in the Preface, and openly announces that it is he himself who incarnates the spirit of the land.

The poet is that equable sane man, in whose vision alone all things find and are seen in their proper place, for he sees each sub specie æternitatis—in its eternal aspect.

[Pg 124]

But while thus boldly declaring himself as the man that should come, he has of course no desire to stand alone, and attempts to outline the equipment necessary for future American poets. They must not only identify themselves in every possible way with America, they must be themselves creative and virile. Those who criticise, explain and adjudge, can only create a literary soil; they cannot produce the flower and fruit of poetry.

Returning to his favourite adage that a man is as great as a nation, he asserts that the true poet is America; frankly reading himself as a whole, he will see the meanings of America. Is then America also a symbol? Assuredly. She is the Republic; she is the Kingdom of God; she is Blake’s Jerusalem; but behold, she is already founded and four-square upon the solid earth.

That he was open-eyed to the materialistic spirit rampant throughout the continent while he was writing, is clearly shown in the bitter mockery of “Respondez,”[224] a poem afterwards suppressed. It is a challenge to thought; an ironic assertion of things that are false and futile, and which yet parade as realities. Though suggestive it is obscure, and its subsequent omission was wise.

Thoughts of the destiny of America,[225] and of the evil and imperfection which he saw about him, hindering, as it seemed, the realisation of that destiny, and of the destiny of individual souls, must often have moved him to passionate longing. He was not one of those who confuse good with evil; he always recognised the difference between right and wrong as among the eternal distinctions which could never cease to hold true. He hated sin as he hated disease, and recognised both as threatening and actual.

If he rarely denounces, it is because he has seen that the way of the soul is along the path of love and not of fear or of hate; and because he recognises the office of[Pg 125] sin in the story of the soul. He is not anxious about vice or virtue, but only about life and love. Love, at its fullest, is something different from virtue; it contains elements which virtue can never possess, and which most ethical codes consign to the category of vice. Such love alone is the expression of the soul; and every student of love discovers sooner or later that the soul has its own intimate standard for judging what is wrong and what is right, and when that which was wrong has now become right for it to do.

Love, then, is Whitman’s code. And when he seeks to call the youth of America away from selfishness and sin, he issues no new table of Thou-Shalt-Nots, but fills their ears with the words of their destiny, and of the meaning of America. For he knows that to sin is to choose a narrow and despicable delight, and that one must needs choose the nobler, larger joy when it becomes present and real. Hence he recalls all the aspirations that went to the birth of America, and describes the parts that women and men must fill if they are to be realised. He reminds his young readers of all the divine possibilities of manhood and of womanhood, and of how those possibilities are for them; and warns them that the body must necessarily affect the soul, for it is the medium through which the soul comes into consciousness.

Finally, in the new poems, Whitman makes more plain his attitude toward the woman question, as it is called. An American National Women’s Rights Asso[Pg 126]ciation had been founded in 1850, and although its agitation for the suffrage proved unsuccessful, the more general movement which it represented, especially the higher education of women, was gaining ground throughout America. The movement may be said to have been born in New York State, where Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Miss Susan B. Anthony were its most active leaders; but it owed much to Boston also, and notably to Margaret Fuller (Ossoli), whose tragic death had been an irreparable loss to the cause.[227]

Whitman was in cordial sympathy with everything that could forward the independence of women. But he disliked some outstanding characteristics of the movement. It was in part a violent reaction against the unwholesome sentimentalism of the past; a reaction which took the form of sexless intellectualism with a strong bent towards argumentation, perhaps the most abhorrent of all qualities to Whitman.

This movement for women’s rights seemed to him too academic and too superficial; college education and the suffrage did not appeal to him. But he was not the less an enthusiast for the cause itself, as he understood it. His views are simple and clear. A soul is a soul, whether it be man’s or woman’s; and as such, it is of necessity free, and the equal of others. A woman is every way as good as a man. This truth must be made effective in all departments of life.

Then, taking up the thought which underlies the teaching of Plato, a woman is a citizen; and an American woman must be as independent, as dauntless, as greatly daring as a man. Such as the woman essentially is, such will be the man, her son, and her mate. But—and it is here he differs from the leaders of the movement—sex is basic not only in society but in personal life; and the woman unsexed is but half a woman.

Two poems in the new edition, the nucleus of the subsequent Children of Adam, are devoted to these ideas. In the first,[228] he describes the women of his ideal:—

[Pg 127]

In the second,[229] he declares that life is only life after love—he means the passionate fulness of love—and indicates that womanhood is to be glorified not through a sexless revolt, but through the redemption of paternity. When the begetting of children is recognised to be as holy and as noble as the bearing of them, then the rights of women will be on the way to recognition.

If motherhood is the glory of the race, then a movement towards perpetual virginity brings no solution of our problem. The only solution lies in the independence of women, and in the evolution of a higher masculine ideal of the sex relation. The whole thing must be naturally and honestly faced. Until we so face it, we cannot understand a world in which it is so implicated, that sex is, as it were, a summing up of all things.

This last thought grew upon him, becoming more prominent in the next edition. In the present one it recurs in the open letter to Emerson printed in its appendix,[230] and gave a peculiar colour to the volume in the public eye. So much was this the case, that a prosecution seemed at one time imminent, many persons regarding the book as obscene. Among timid and conventional people, it seems to be established as a canon of criticism that it is always immoral to discuss immorality. They go but little farther who denounce the purity which is not defiled by pitch; or tear out by the roots all flowers that grow upon dung-heaps.

Such then, added to the old, formed the contents of the new edition of 1856. The appendix included Emerson’s letter, which Whitman had been urged to publish, by Mr. C. A. Dana, editor of the New York Sun,[Pg 128] and a personal friend of Emerson.[231] He succeeded in convincing Whitman, who appears at first to have doubted the propriety of such an action. There is no evidence that Emerson resented the use thus made of his glowing testimony, although he would probably have modified his words had he written in acknowledgment of the enlarged volume. A sentence from the letter appeared also upon the back of the book: “I greet you at the commencement of a great career.—R. W. Emerson.” This, together with the storm of indignation aroused by the absolutely frank language of the poems dealing with sex, gave the book notoriety and a rapid sale.

It is the least pleasing of the editions of Leaves of Grass, insignificant in appearance, and yet aggressive, by reason of that Emersonian testimonial. The open letter at the end, of which I have already spoken, is far from agreeable to read. It is careless, egotistical, naïve to a degree, and crowded with exaggerations. Addressing Emerson as master, it proceeds to denounce the churches as one vast lie, and the actual president as a rascal and a thief. It is so egregiously self-conscious that it makes the reader question for a moment whether all the egoism and naïveté of the preceding pages may not have been worn as a pose; but a moment’s further consideration gives the question a final negative. Few men are without their hours of weakness; and that Whitman was not among those few, the letter is proof if such were needed.

The letter is not void of interest, since it records the rapid sale of the previous edition of a thousand copies, and anticipates that in a few more years the annual issue will be counted by thousands. This sanguine forecast explains the permanent and otherwise unreasonable disappointment of Whitman at the reception of his book.

It still made its appearance devoid of the usual adornment of a publisher’s name upon the title-page.[Pg 129] Messrs. Fowler & Wells were again the principal agents, others being arranged with in the chief American cities, in London also, and Paris and Brussels. Plates were cast from the type, and a large sale was prepared for. But the New York agents soon withdrew, unwilling to face the storm of public opinion,[232] and perhaps the dangers of prosecution, and the book fell out of print when only a thousand copies had been issued.

The two ventures of 1855 and 1856 had brought Whitman little money, a mere handful of serious readers, and some notoriety. Though he did not give in, he began to look about him for some supplementary means of delivering his soul of its burden. His youthful success on the political platform, his love of crowds and of personal contact, his extraordinary popularity among the younger people, and his own keen sense of the power of oratory, turned his thoughts to lecturing.[233] He would follow the road which Emerson and Thoreau had taken. He would evangelise America with his gospel. Henceforward, as his mother said, he wrote barrels of lectures,[234] and at the same time he studied his new art more or less systematically. After his death a package of notes on Oratory, and the rough draft of a prospectus were found among his papers; the latter was headed, “15 cents. Walt Whitman’s Lectures.” It belongs to the year 1858.

By this time he had planned to write, print, distribute and recite throughout the United States and Canada a number of lectures—partly philosophical, partly socio-political, partly religious—with the object of creating what he conceived to be a new, and for the first time truly American attitude of mind. The lectures were ultimately to form a second volume of explanation and argument which would sustain the Leaves. He had now omitted any preface to the poems, the creative work standing alone. But having printed the second edition[Pg 130] and thus relieved his mind of its most pressing burden, he recognised that the work of explanation and of criticism remained.

Moreover, he conceived that his lectures would quicken public interest in his book; while, by showing himself, he hoped to dispel some of the misapprehensions which concealed his real meaning from the popular mind. He alludes whimsically in this memorandum to the offensive practice of self-advertisement, of which he was not unconscious, remarking that “it cannot be helped,” for it is the only way by which he can gain the ear of America, and bid her “Know thyself”.

Finally, he proposed to earn his living in this manner. He would have preferred to give his services without fee, in the Quaker fashion; but for the time being at least, he must make a charge of ten dollars (two guineas) a lecture, and expenses, or an admission fee of one dime (about sixpence) a head.

The idea of lecturing was probably as old as the idea of the Leaves of Grass; he seems to have been considering it ever since he returned from the South. But now he formulated his ideas, which were of course those underlying the Leaves, and thought much and cogently on the style and manner of public speaking. His conclusions betray an ideal for oratory as individual and as mystical as that for the poet’s art.

Whitman, the lecturer, is conceived as a prophet possessed by the tempestuous passion of inspiration. The orator is to combine the gifts of the great actor with the inspiration of the Pythoness and the spontaneity of the Quaker prophet. His gestures should be large, but reserved; the delivery deliberate, thought-awakening, elliptical, prophetic, wholly unlike that of the glib platform speakers of his day and our own. At first, erect and motionless, the speaker would impress his mere personality upon the assembly; then his eyes would kindle, like the eyes in that strange marble Balzac of Rodin’s, and from the eyes outward the whole body would take fire and speak.

[Pg 131]

He conceived of oratory not as the delivery of some well-prepared address, but as the focussing of all the powers of thought and experience in an hour of inspiration and supreme mastery. He saw how much it entailed—what breadth of knowledge, what depth of thought, what perfect flexibility of voice and gesture trained to clear suggestion, what absolute purity of body, what perfect self-control. For, he would say to himself, the great orator is an artist as supreme as Alboni herself; his voice is to be as potent as hers, and his life must show an equal devotion to its purpose.

In this conception of the orator we have then a most interesting parallel with that of the poet. And just as Whitman the poet stands part way between the writer of prose and the singer in verse, including in himself some of the qualities of each, and adding an inspiration wholly his own, so Whitman the orator appears in this vision standing between the actor-singer and the lecturer or preacher, improvising great words.

The political aspect of his enterprise is suggested by a brief memorandum, dated in April, 1857,[235] wherein he notes that the “Champion of America” must keep himself clear of all official entanglements, devoting himself solely to the maintenance of a living interest in public questions throughout the length and breadth of the land. Standing aside from the parties with their clamorous cries, he must hold the public ear by nobler tones.

In another place[236] he writes that as Washington had freed the body politic of America from its dependence upon the English crown, so Whitman will free the American people from their dependence upon European ideals. The mere publication of such frank, but private assertions of Whitman’s own faith in himself, will doubtless arouse a ready incredulity in the reader’s mind. It might, perhaps, seem kinder to his memory to suppress them altogether; but upon second thought it will, I think, appear possible that he was a better judge than others of his own ability. His personality was one of[Pg 132] extraordinary power, and his outlook of a breadth which was almost unique. And, as I have said, he felt himself to be an incarnation of the American spirit.

At the time, America was without leadership. Lincoln was still unseen; and Whitman was fully as capable of filling the highest office in the United States as several who have held it; while nothing in the circumstances or traditions of the White House made it absurd for any able citizen, of whatever rank, to entertain the thought of its tenancy. This would be especially true of a popular New Yorker, who made perhaps the best of all candidates for a Presidential campaign. The Republican party had but just been formed, and for the first time had fought an election. Thunderclouds of war were in the air, urged on by the ominous forces of slavery, and America was without a champion.

I think the idea of political leadership crossed Whitman’s mind at this time, and that he put it definitely aside. The hour cried out for the man, and the cry was not to go unanswered; but with all his power and all his goodwill and fervour, Whitman became slowly convinced that it was not to be he. He had seen too much of party manœuvres, and had too vigorous a love of personal liberty, to contend for office. But he did covet the power of a prophet to stir the heart of America, and appeal to her people everywhere in her name. He never gave up the idea of lecturing or lost his interest in oratory; but the lectures he planned, the course on Democracy and the rest, remained undelivered. It is as though he had prepared himself and stood awaiting a call which never came.

Instead, he turned once more to add new poems to his collection. A hint in explanation is to be found in a poem written about this time,[237] in which he tells how, having first sought knowledge, he then determined to live for America and become her orator; he was afterwards possessed by the desire for a heroic life of action, but was given the commission of song. Finally, another[Pg 133] change came over his spirit; the claims of his own life seized him; he could not escape from the passion of comradeship which overwhelmed him and wholly absorbed his thought.[238] We shall consider this phase in the next chapter, but before doing so, it will be well to recall the political events of the hour and the circumstances surrounding the advent of a new power and personality into American life.