V * * * ° , ^ <£ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ >>> (V V * o -^ <* if , . o V' ?/>,*<■ %. ^ VV\. V" # % 1 ^aqj"w G° V ^ \ * O v ,.' *"/"<« "" O o v «- v *.°/-.' v S> a* %> c3 ^ 0° V ^mS c? ia & , r Ho <# S^ ^<* ".I »'%■- i> ***** % v\,-;^\ v Vr*'*^ r^v V * "O -^ ' A& ^ ' r * -\; ^ ft n . N^* _P\v V ft n . V . (A\ V ft ^ V^» ^O v Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2011 with funding from The Library of Congress http://www.archive.org/details/waltwhitmanmanhiOObaza WALT WHITMAN THE MAN AND HIS WORK WALT WHITMAN THE MAN AND HIS WORK BY LEON BAZALGETTE Translated from the French by Ellen. FitzGerald Department of English, Chicago Normal College Garden City New York DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 1920 COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OP TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN FEB -5 !920 ©CI.A559684 TO THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER BEST TYPE OF THE COMMON AVERAGE FOR WHOSE STORIES OF THE WAR AND OF LINCOLN I DEDICATE THIS TRIBUTE TO THE POET OF THE WAR AND OF LINCOLN o PREFACE M. Bazalgette's introduction, so expressive of the deep feeling which inspired him to build a French dwelling for Whitman, explains why this elaborate structure should be- come our own. To advance a taste of a personality is the main purpose of M. Bazalgette's biography and he surely succeeds. This enthusiastic rendering of Whitman's life into a complete dramatic unit, its lights and shades fully balanced, suggests that Whitman, in our neglect of him as a poet, may have been lucky after all; for here he tran- scends the mere bounds of a literary figure, and becomes a complete national asset, the man in whom was incarnated the whole life of America. So thoroughly does M. Bazal- gette create a superman for us that Whitman becomes as impressive as Milton to Blake and the reader is tempted to paraphrase Blake's beautiful exclamation: And did this man really dwell among us? Whitman has never lacked devoted biographers in his own country, and by this free ample use of their work M. Bazal- gette may raise the question of his sharp emphasis on Ameri- can neglect of him. Admitting that Whitman is a negligible force with the American masses, as compared with Long- fellow and Whittier, whose saintlike faces bless every Ameri- can child at his school tasks, whose verse is as familiar as the portraits, Whitman himself is responsible, much more than the American people. There is a profound paradox in this whole issue between viii PREFACE Whitman and the people he exalted. They could but in- terpret him according to their light. They had been used to literary expression from men of simple lives and Whitman inaugurated very unprofessional literature in a very pro- fessional way. A poet who announces himself as: Turbulent, fleshy, sensual eating, drinking and breeding, is only one with Hamlet and several other characters in Shake- speare who were really trying to make their world better. Trained readers know how to value such confessions but the average man takes these literary conventions seriously, and hence misses the really great message of the poet. For this reason I have felt justified in abridging M. Bazalgette's treat- ment of the New Orleans episode, not that it may not be true but that it is a mystery which neither H. B. Binns nor he can clear by elaborate guess work; I have also as much as is consistent with the unity of the book lightened his emphasis on the Leaves of Grass conflict. Again the people were led by their normal light. They had always known that Democracy was good and America great. What they were unprepared for was that a subject pro- foundly moral like sex should be made merely objective and scientific. Again only the trained in art know that the nude is beautiful. But M. Bazalgette's biography may do much toward a right reading of Whitman, for the whole of his work is part by part built into this firm structure and needs to be read and reread now if ever. That much neglected piece Primer for Americans 1 has its real place. It might well have been the foundation of Mr. Mencken's The American Language. Specimen Days and Drum Taps and the whole of Whitman's relation to the war and his interpretation of all war may force upon the American people the thought that if Whitman cannot be with Longfellow and Whittier, he 'It appeared for the first time in the Atlantic Monthly, 1904. PREFACE ix can be with Grant and Lincoln, as forces in our history. Had M. Bazalgette written his biography in 1919, or had someone else felt that a new interpretation of Whitman is needed, not because it is his centenary year but because the world is little better than chaos for the want of his great philosophy, I feel sure that the interpretation of Whitman would be first political, and that all that he wrote is subordi- nate to this. History has proved Whitman true. His centrip- etal personality, his poetical conception of science, his ex- periments in verse are each and all less than that in war or peace, or, at the council table his mystical conception of man and institutions is the only politics to live by. Whitman is the greatest romantic because he wrote a new Contrat Social: America as he conceived it is the great romance. Whether or not he was aware of it, the long foreground Emerson spoke of included the best French philosophy from Ros- seau, and Blake's glorious idea of America as another por- tion of the infinite. These have been the two motives in offering this biography as a centenary tribute. Not the least of M. Bazalgette's praise of Whitman is Whitman's power to recreate the soul. Surely it came from his prophet power to dream of things to come. Now more than ever this soiled world needs his faith; now more than ever Amer- ica must make his faith her own: And thou America, For the scheme's culmination, its thought and its reality, For these (not for thyself) thou hast arrived. Thou too surroundest all, Embracing carrying welcoming all, thou too by pathways broad and new, To the ideal tendest. . . . Is it a dream? Nay but the lack of it the dream, And failing it life's lore and wealth a dream, And all the world a dream. E. F. TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface vii Author's Introduction xv PART ONE ORIGIN AND YOUTH Long Island (1819-1841) CHAPTER PAGE I. Birthplace and Ancestors ..... 3 II. West Hills Farm 19 III. Years of Youth and Apprenticeship . . 29 PART TWO THE MULTITUDINARY LIFE New York (1841-1855) IV. Literary Beginnings 45 V. The Man of Crowds 54 VI. To the South and to the Love of Woman 72 VII,>*Walt Whitman, a Cosmos" .... 91 xii TABLE OF CONTENTS PART THREE "LEAVES OF GRASS" Brooklyn (1855-1862) CHAPTEB PAGE VIII. The Great Design 115 IX. The First Song 131 X. Walt Insulted 141 XI. Emerson and Whitman 152 PART FOUR THE WOUND DRESSER Washington (1862-1865) XII. At the Bedside of the Dying . . . 171 XIII. The Wound 179 XIV. The Comrade Heart 186 XV. Hymns of the War and of Lincoln. . 193 XVI. O'Connor's Lash 202 PART FIVE THE GOOD GRAY POET Washington (1865-1873) XVII. The Great Companions; Peter Doyle, the Conductor 209 XVIII. First Victory of "Leaves of Grass" 222 XIX. The Stricken Oak 234 TABLE OF CONTENTS xm CHAPTER XX. XXI. XXII. XXIII. XXIV. PART SIX THE INVALID Camden (1873-1884) PAGE Through Abandonment and Sorrow. . 247 The Nature Bath 260 Across the Continent 265 Another Persecution 271 Dawn of Glory 279 PART SEVEN THE SAGE OF CAMDEN Camden (1884-1888) XXV. The Invalid at Home 289 XXVI. The Soul of Walt 294 XXVII. Days in the Cottage 304 XXVIII. XXIX. XXX. XXXI. XXXII. PART EIGHT THE SETTING SUN Camden (1888-1892) A New Assault Foiled 313 Meditation at Twilight 325 Hour of Apotheosis 334 The Deliverance 344 A Pagan Funeral 349 AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION . . . . But I do not undertake to define you, hardly to understand you, I do at this moment but name you, prophecy you, I do only proclaim you ! The America which dreams and sings, back of the one which works and invents, has given the world four universal geniuses: Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. However great her other poets and thinkers may be, they have, after all, but a national significance and do not so deeply touch the heart of humanity. And among these four figures, one of them more and more dominates the group: it is Walt Whitman. Poet, seer, one hesitates to define him. He is both and much more besides. Through him a whole continent is sud- denly an exultant voice. In listening to him, one seems to hear some huge rough rhapsodist from the antique world who had passed over America to confess the desires, the marvels, and the faith of the Modern Man, — the Vedic hymns of our age, fresh, rich, multiple. They thrill with the birth of an era. So ample are his proportions that America, aside from a handful of followers, has never known his supreme signifi- cance. She ignores him. Little it matters perhaps! She has plenty of time to know him, when, at the seventh day, she rests from her labours. And he has plenty of time to wait. Has he not said somewhere, thinking of his own case: "The proof of the merit of a poet may be strictly deferred to the day when his country shall have absorbed him as lovingly as he absorbed his country." xvi AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION In awaiting that time the world is about to offer to Walt Whitman another testimony. The conviction of some fine minds, expressed in many languages, is that he should be considered indisputably not only as the first of American poets, but as the most powerful poet and the most modern of the whole nineteenth century. A conviction at which one may smile "a priori"; it grows nevertheless from day to day. Many, who do not share this, may avow that there is no one in modern times so wonderfully vast. His verse has to an astonishing degree the quality which only a dozen sover- eign geniuses before him possessed: that of speaking to the whole world. They answer, stronger than any other voice the aspiration, the needs, the fervour, everything be- longing to a young humanity, everything directed to the future. His work is big with revelation as decisive for Europeans as for Americans. These may try in vain to ap- propriate Walt Whitman; he escapes them; passes all fron- tiers, and speaks to all the people of earth. It is not the purpose here to present an "exotic," but to remove the barrier which denies us a living source of beauty and of love at which generations may be refreshed. In a way, Walt Whitman is much closer to us than if he were of our blood. He does not emerge from the shades of time or the fogs of space, like some imposing figure, all solitary and afar. He is a big elder Brother who clears our way after having breathed our atmosphere, travelled our roads, ex- perienced our appetites, ruminated our thoughts. We would wrong him less in ignoring him than in transforming him into a poetical curiosity. The reader may easily see that this work has not been for me a mere literary enter- prise: something very different indeed. It is the fruit of a communion with his work, his character, so close and fervent that I seem to have lived for years near him. One must not be surprised then to meet here traces of my personal feeling toward both. If I have succeeded in understanding, and AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION xvii making understood (of that I am not very sure), this individuality of a new type it is only by having loved him so much. Whatever emotion of beauty or humanity the future may hold for me, I feel indeed that this prolonged contact with such a revealer will remain the great impression of my life. In France, Walt Whitman for twenty -five years has roused, among those able to read him in the original, a small number of vivid admirers. Though it is not rare to-day to see his name cited, he still remains unknown to the public. Since this ignorance is bound to disappear some day, is it not better to introduce him whole in his work and his life than by fragments and sketches? At least this method has seemed to me surer and more in keeping with his importance. Hence this volume, dedicated to the man, and conceived as a kind of introduction to the reading of Leaves of Grass. It goes without saying that these pages have no interest, if they have any, except in relation to that great Book: it is that especially which has to be explored to understand him who built it. I am not unmindful of any in this country who have hon- oured Walt Whitman and I honour them in turn, at the be- ginning of this work. To the name of Gabriel Sarrazin shall always be linked the honour of having first saluted Whitman amply and magnificently and of having sounded his depths. Precious to me is the encouragement which I have received since the idea possessed me of building, to the measure of my strength, a French dwelling for the American bard. What I owe to my predecessors, to the biographers of Walt Whitman, to his friends who published their memoirs, and especially to those who edited the Camden Edition and to my friend, Horace Traubel, is sufficiently evident in the fol- lowing pages dotted with references. It was never my inten- tion to put out a work of erudition, but to print a full-length portrait, as real and living as possible, of a man about whom one may cram volumes without defining completely. The xviii AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION matter is inexhaustible. I would at least try to present an advance taste of his personality. 1 This work, such as it is, slowly and tenderly pursued, I offer to-day with the hope of conveying to other minds the marvellous revelation contained in the personality of Walt Whitman. How many times I stopped in writing these pages, disconcerted by the grandeur and wonder of the fig- ure that I feel so near, persuaded that I was not per- meated enough by his especial atmosphere and his intimate significance. What does the sailor who courses the sea all his life know of it? — I say to myself. The surface. He has been able to take some soundings; but what is that to the leaping abyss? In reality the ocean remains to him unknown; and I well understand the unwonted scruple of an Addington Symonds who was unable till the last moment to complete the work which he had long prepared on the man more revered than all, to whose mastery he yielded and whose book he absorbed verse by verse. I have nevertheless persevered, ruled by an instinct stronger than all scruples. O may I not have failed! Above all, may I not have weak- ened the character of the great Liver, the character whose reality seems to baffle the effort of painters! October, 1907. L. B. iThe author notes specially these biographers: H. B. Bians, Bliss Perry, Horace Traubel. PART ONE ORIGIN AND YOUTH Long Island (1819-1841) BIRTHPLACE AND ANCESTORS At the close of the last century, an American artisan-poet summed up in one page his many-sided life. For long years he had been an invalid and he knew his end was near; he faced it in perfect peace and he was happy in casting a last backward glance on himself and the incidents of the journey whose last stage he was completing. He died the following year. This summary, laid down by an old man, is enough to show us that like many of his countrymen, he pursued a wide range of occupations: he was a printer, country school teacher, carpenter, volunteer nurse, and besides he made poems. But who would suspect all the depth and immensity which these simple and almost commonplace lines concealed, where might be recognized the description of an individual who, whatever he was, at least was akin to hundreds of others? How perceive that from this page emerges a monu- ment of solitary proportions, a life of the simplest bigness, the amplest, fullest, most extraordinary which has perhaps been lived on earth? A life open, joyous, expansive, multi- tudinary, enjoying deep draughts yet imperturbed and nat- ural, a life which has passed outright into a strange, phe- nomenal book, without parallel in its origin, character, signi- ficance. A life which makes the great adventurers or busiest captains of modern industry appear indeed poor, the more one has penetrated its depth and seized its ensemble. A life which seems to break the word to live in order to re- create it with new meaning. To describe this life, it -will suffice to follow this table of contents penned by Walt Whitman when close to death, 3 4 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK But at the very opening of the first chapter a strange uneasi- ness overcomes you: the difficulty of including the thousand aspects of a life at once so individual and so universal ap- pears well nigh insurmountable. The fear of marring, dis- torting, or clouding this great figure makes you falter in the attempt. A momentary awe is felt before this mystery which is alike vast and very simple. To conquer this disquietude we shall cling narrowly to the truth which in his life is so beautiful that to respect it scrupulously is the surest means of exalting the man. The truer one remains, the vaster is his measure. And in care- fully maintaining exactitude, we shall try above all to keep that central interior truth, which shall be unaffected by the omission of a date or an incident. Never the practice of subordinating detail to mass is more essential than for a full- length portrait of a Walt Whitman. To depict such a man living, it is necessary to show him in the concrete reality of his daily life. It is to preserve the colour, the atmosphere of the life lived and its natural savour, that I efface myself as much as possible, in the humility of a compiler, behind those who were in personal contact with him and caught him on the spot. The subject is too big for a biographer to seek pretext for making an effect. There is one chief fact, of which we are never to lose sight in these pages: the identity of the man and his book. Identity realized to a degree heretofore undreamed of and so perfect that all effort to sever them would be vain. "Read- ing him in his printed pages, seeing him near the fireside, are all one," 1 says one of his friends. The second of his biog- raphers likewise noted: "His body, his outward life, his in- ward spiritual existence and poetry, were all one; in every respect each tallied with the other, and any one of them could always be inferred from the other." 2 A similar appreciation is from one of the great companions of his life who declares iBucke, Traubel, and Harned: In Re Walt Whitman> p. 117. *Bucke: Walt Whitman, p. 51. BIRTHPLACE AND ANCESTORS 5 that Walt Whitman every day is the "living commentary" of his book. 1 So we shall unceasingly evoke the work to explain the man, and reciprocally, when we try to define the poet- prophet. If this point of view is misconceived, both will be for us an enigma. It is but artificially and for a moment that we can separate the book from him who thus conceived it, without doubt in order to give himself more fully still than in life. This one — the poem-individual — is essentially indissoluble; the in- dividual appears in reality great as a poem, the poem offers itself to us as an individual. Let us recognize here that the novelty of the subject excludes the precise methods of biog- raphers, and that a more scientific rigour is not to be expected in the recital of the fife of Walt Whitman than he himself put into the living of it. Whatever may be the value of the book left by the Ameri- can bard — and in truth it is incalculable — it is no exaggera- tion to affirm that the man seems still more extraordinary. "Walt Whitman in his person is greater than his book or what his book imports," says one of the intimate friends of his old age. "He is made of that heroic stuff which creates such books." 2 In reality, they are both but the visible and invisible aspect of the same Personality. No detail shall be idle which compels us to penetrate further into the compre- hension of the living himself. The chapters of his life are the natural steps which lead us to the threshold of his poem, that we may enter in the right mood. Without this, we should undoubtedly stray long about the house before finding the door. The essential is that the man become familiar to us and reveal himself to us as he appeared to all who saw him pass along the pavements of New York, Washington, Phila- delphia. We can in full measure understand the great Elizabethan dramas, the Odyssey, the Song of Songs, or the l John Burroughs: Birds and Poets, The Flight of the Eagle, p. 213. See also Notes of the same, p. 13. tQamderis Compliment to Walt Whitman, p. 23. 6 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORE Rig Veda with knowing scarcely anything of their authors. I do not believe that we could fully appreciate Leaves of Grass, ignorant of him who projected his all-powerful person- ality in this ode-epic of the modern Me. The Atlantic! From it he came, the old Northman; the far distant murmur of the ocean responded to his first cries; the tumult of its leaping waves formed the accompaniment of his first meditations; the rhythm of its tides, the undula- tion of its shores dictated to him the law of his poems; its breezes toughened his skin; its salt penetrated his flesh. He exhales an odour of the sea god; he expresses the ample rough- ness of one. He, himself, in his old age loved to be com- pared to some sea captain retired to his cabin, and dreaming of the voyages of the olden time. Walt Whitman might have been a sailor like the Williamses and the Kossabones of his maternal line had he not preferred the more audacious ven- ture, the sea of humanity. . . . Long Island stretches opposite the North American con- tinent, like a fish with its head about to strike into the midst of it, as if snapping Manhattan Island where rises New York. From Brooklyn to the promontory of Mont auk, which marks one of the two extremities of its tail, this gigantic cetacian measures nearly one hundred and twenty -five miles by an average breadth of twelve to thirteen miles. A chain of irregular hills which runs the entire length of the island and separates it into two ridges outlines its dorsal fin. 1 The Indians called it Paumanok and Walt Whitman adored the rude sonority of this name. Large, uncultivated stretches — forests of spruce, waste land, sand, salt marshes — communicate to this territory a wild, rough aspect. The south coast is bounded by flats, with immense lagoons, and in front of these straits and long bars of sand, natural dikes sustain the assaults of the Atlantic. Innumerable cone-shaped little islands il. Hull Piatt: Walt Whitman, p. 1. BIRTHPLACE AND ANCESTORS 7 sprinkle the large south bay. To the east, on the stretches of the promontory which push into the open sea, are light- houses. During storms, these bars have often seen ship- wrecks, and these redoubtable, whitish looking shores keep the secret of many a tragedy of the sea. Region of winds and waves, region rude and little attractive, impress of a splendid desolation; immensity confronts one on every side, and an incessant subdued or furious clamour of the waves seems like an echo of it. The odour of marsh grass fills the bays. Not long ago all kinds of water game and fish abun- dantly stocked these shores, inhabited by a race of men fierce and hard like the Vikings, long since extinct. In violent contrast with this arid and solitary coast, the region of hills and the northern slope which they shelter, especially toward the centre, are smiling and cultivated. It is a country of hills and vales, pastures and woods — where abound the oak, fir, walnut, chestnut, acacia. Numerous fruit trees, springs, little streams of pure and shining water, and villages of low-built houses with their impressive little cemeteries remind one of Normandy, or of the English Suf- folk, "the Constable country." The environment here is essentially peasant and patriarchal; and at the commence- ment of the nineteenth century this fertile middle part of Long Island richly nourished its farmers. 1 Little country roads wound between hedges, binding the pastures and farms whose door yards were gay with lilacs. The numerous windings of the land formed infinitely varied perspectives. Beyond the waters of the strait, the coast of Connecticut is faintly outlined. The north coast, picturesque and indented, is a safe shelter of coves and inlets. Such is the double character, savage and soft, maritime and pastoral, of this island-whale, which an immense bridge now binds to New York. Time has much modified with- out destroying the charms of its undulating fields and the fierce splendour of its coasts. 1. Hull Piatt: Walt Whitman, p. 8. 8 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK At the humble beginnings of the great migration which brought Northern Europeans to the settlement of a new continent, two currents of different origin were diffused in Long Island. From New Amsterdam (the future New York) the Dutch advanced toward the centre of the island, occupy- ing all the western part, and notably Queens County. A little later, toward 1650, some English colonists, quitting the settlements of Massachusetts and Connecticut, crossed the sound to settle in Suffolk County, situated to the east. These two contingents, very distinct in origin, to which were added some Indians who were found toward the promontory of Montauk, and a small number of blacks, constituted the "Paumanackers" or Long Islanders. Thus the basis of the population of the island was allied directly to two great stocks which formed the foundation of the American na- tionality and whose fusion has determined the predominant character of the people. Whatever has been the importance of the other initial contingents, like the Scotch-Irish, the Swedes, or the Huguenots, and some modifications which the after currents have carried to that secret chemistry in which a new people is elaborated, the contributions of the Netherlands and of Great Britain remain the essential ones. And kept apart by its insularity from the great floods of immigration, and of the vast enterprises which transformed the continent, Long Island was able for a long time to con- serve these two elements of its population in an almost pure state, and to remain like a fragment of Primitive America, the base and security of future America. The people of the villages applied themselves to agriculture, stock raising, fishing, ship building. They were renowned as excellent farmers and hardy sailors. Toward 1820, the entire island did not possess sixty thousand inhabitants 1 : to-day Brooklyn alone counts nearly a million and a half. In the middle part of the island, about three miles from the village of Huntington, and slightly to the east of the m. B. Binns: Life of Walt Whitman, p. 3. BIRTHPLACE AND ANCESTORS 9 limit of Queens and Suffolk counties, which marked also the beginning of the line of cleavage of the two nationalities, is situated the village of West Hills, to which belonged the patrimonial farm of the "Whitman homestead" where the great-grandfather, the grandfather, and the father of the poet had lived, cultivating their estate. The origin of the American Whitmans goes back to the time of Elizabeth. The acknowledged ancestor was a cer- tain Abijah Whitman of whom old England saw the birth about the year 1560, and whose three sons crossed the Atlan- tic. The first, Zechariah, who was born in 1595 and became a clergyman, sailed in 1635 in the True Love, and settled in Milford, Connecticut. Five years later, the second son, John, who was born in 1602, embarked in the same vessel, and steered toward Weymouth, Massachusetts. He died in 1692, having had five daughters and five sons, all living in 1685; one of the latter, Samuel, lived to be a centenarian 1 and another, Reverend Zechariah Whitman, of Hull, Massachu- setts (nephew of the other Zechariah) was a graduate of Harvard (1668), whom the annals of Dorchester describe as a Vir pius, humilis, orthodoxies, utilissimus. 2 It was, one believes, the posterity of John which spread across New Eng- land and the whole of America the name of Whitman, borne by thousands of individuals, living proof of the vigour and fecundity of the original stock. The third son of Abijah, Robert, born in 1615, came to America in the Abigail in 1635, married in 1648, and lived till 1679. It is the first of the three brothers who interests us here for to him is attached the geneology of the poet. A son of the Reverend Zechariah of Milford, named Joseph, 3 crossed Long Island Sound sometime before 1660, and settled in ^ucke: Walt Whitman, p. 14. 2 0. L. Triggs: Selection from Walt Whitman, Introduction, p. xvi. 'It appears that this Joseph Whitman was not the son of the Reverend Zechariah Whitman of Mil- ford, who died without children. He may have come from Stratford, Conn., and should have seen the light of day in England (Bliss Ferry: Walt Whitman, pp. 2-3). It is a geneological point which no doubt future biographers will clear up. 10 WALT WHITMAN—THE MAN AND HIS WORK the village of Huntington, which was founded in 1653 by the colonists of Massachusetts upon land bought from the Indians. 1 It is only known that he won a fair sub- sistence, that he lived some thirty years and was named by his fellow townsmen for different public employments. 2 It was he, or perhaps one of his sons, whose name remains un- known, 3 who bought the farm of West Hills. This unknown son himself had a son named Nehemiah, born about 1705, who married Sarah White, who lived from 1713 to 1803 4 . The oldest of their four sons, Jesse, was born in 1749 and died in 1803. He married, in 1775, Hannah Brush, daughter of Tredwell Brush, and had by her three sons, one of whom, Walter, was born July 14, 1789, the very day of the taking of the Bastille, and who was the father of the poet. An exceptional vigour appears to have been the chief char- acteristic of the family. The Whitmans were in general tall and solidly built. One pictures them as tranquil and rather grave, very firm of character and chary of speech, exclusively occupied with their land and their cattle : rude men whom no power on earth could move and who seemed to partake of the tranquil force of the elements. They were remarkable for their longevity and their fecundity: from the ancestor who came from England to the family line of Walt, large families were an uninterrupted tradition. There are accorded to his great-grandfather, Nehemiah Whitman, twenty-two grand- sons and granddaughters, and beyond these others of whom trace has been lost. 5 It was a race of ample and rich virility, built for enduring work, and without the least trace of feebleness or degeneracy. It contributed fundamental and massive qualities, which make builders of cities. Although among the Whitmans of iBliss Perry: Walt Whitman, p. 2. m.: p. 3. ' 8 BIiss Perry (Walt Whitman, p. 3.) cites a John Whitman, Sr., who filled some municipal functions between 1718 and 1730, and who might be, according to him, the father of Nehemiah. *Camden Edition, Introduction, pp. xii-xiv. *Id., p. xii. BIRTHPLACE AND ANCESTORS 11 New England a number were ministers, professors, and grad- uates of Harvard or of Yale, 1 those of Long Island always remained outside the liberal professions. Good farmers, excellent citizens, some among them artisans, not one among the descendants of Zechariah has left traces of mental distinc- tion. All were and remained of the people, manual workers, farmers "with little or no formal culture and with no marked artistic tastes in any direction." 2 Their posterity form "an uninterrupted succession of simple workingmen, the best although the most obscure foundation of democracies." 3 They enjoyed, however, a certain ease and belonged to "that class which worked with their own hands and marked by neither riches nor real poverty." From father to son for nearly a century and a half their farm of West Hills gave them a living. They were hospitable, solicitous of ease and of the education of their children, and their reputation in the county was excellent. 4 From the beginning the property which they possessed must have been considerable, and Nehemiah knew how to augment it. But because of a suc- cession of adverse circumstances it came much diminished into the hands of Walter, the father of the poet. Some individuals of the family are distinguished by a few unlooked for characteristics. For example, Sarah White, the great-grandmother of Walt, seems to have realized the ideal of a virago. Of dark complexion, chewing tobacco like an old man, brusque and erect, she showed to strangers a repellent countenance, and was tender only to the little Negroes always hanging at her skirts. A consummate horsewoman, she was seen, after she became a widow, riding out every day to visit her land and to direct her slaves, swear- ing like a pagan when she found them at fault. She died at the age of ninety. 5 Hannah Brush, grandmother of the poet, *0. L. Triggs: Selections, Introduction, p. xvi, *Camden Edition, Introduction, p. xvii- "Id.: p. xviii. *John Burroughs: Notes, p. 120. *Camden Edition, Introduction, p. xx. 12 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK was an orphan, reared by her Aunt, Vashti Piatt, proprietor of an important farm and of numerous slaves, in the eastern part of the island. She was a school-teacher for a time and besides an excellent seamstress, a woman of the old school, fair and robust, of natural distinction, fine, intelligent, and gay. 1 As she had lived through the Revolutionary period down to 1834, her grandson, who knew her till he was fifteen, heard her recount her memories and knew from her the fiery spirit which animated his ancestors of that great epoch. 2 During the war of Independence, the Whitmans were not- ably among the most enthusiastic "rebels" of the island. Many among them had served under Washington, some as officers, such as the son of Nehemiah who was killed as lieutenant at the Battle of Brooklyn : an event the poet was to interpret in one of his poems, History of a Centenary? Major Brush, uncle of Hannah Brush, expiated in an English prison the ardour of his patriotism. If the Whitmans belonged to the most vigorous British element in one section, their neighbours, his mother's family, the; Van Velsors, who lived nearly three miles from West Hills, on the boundary of Queens County, could equally pass for typical representatives of the old Americanized Dutch. The Van Velsors, like the Whitmans, lived for many generations upon the same farm, situated in a pictur- esque corner at the border of the solitary road which rises from Cold Spring Harbour, a small port opening upon the sound. The date of their arrival in the county is uncertain; but the first of the name had certainly come with the Dutch colo- nists of New Amsterdam, who were dispersed in the west of Long Island. The ancestor, the farthest removed whom one can name, is the legendary "Kossabone, Old Sea Wolf," who died at the age of ninety. Walt, in one of his poems, Wamden Edition, Introduction: p. xx. *Triggs: Selections, Introduction, p. xvi. 9 Camd$n Edition, Introduction, p, xix* BIRTHPLACE AND ANCESTORS 13 evoked, from family traditions, his impressive death in his great arm chair, facing the sea and the vessels, his dying eye following their evolutions. 1 It is conjectured that Mary or Jenny Kossabone, who married the great-grandfather of the poet, Garrett Van Velsor, a cloth weaver, deceased in 1812, was his granddaughter. The second of the six issues of this marriage was "Major" Cornelius, who united with Naomi (shortened to Amy) Williams, one of the six children of "Captain" John Williams and Mary Woolley. Naomi Van Velsor died in 1826 and the Major in 1837. The poet knew them in his infancy: and it was of them that Whitman's mother, Louisa Van Velsor, was born. Despite their proximity and their life so closely alike, and the identity of their aspirations, the Van Velsors and the Whitmans differed remarkably one from the other. Among the Whitmans, the British stock, the chief trait was firmness of character, verging almost upon hardness; the maternal ancestors were indebted to their Low Country origin for their abundant vitality and joviality. Among the farmers of Cold Spring a good humour dominated, a bonhomie, a warm, communicative cordiality, natural to a people in possession of the art of living: they had something more flush, more plastic, more varied, and more open, than their neighbours. There must be added to these characteristics an indomitable spirit of hardness, and of liberty which had so magnificently proved the race in the mother country and which persisted in the new world. The Van Velsors were farmers, stock raisers, artisans, sailors. Cornelius, the one who stands out as the most picturesque of the group, offers the perfect type of the Americanized Hollander. His grandson describes him for us as stout, red, jovial, frank, with a sonorous voice and a characteristic physiognomy, 2 "the best of men," affirms someone in the neighbourhood who knew him well. 3 The l Leates of Grass, p. 395. tCompUte Prose, p. 5. •Backer Walt Whitman, p. 15. 14 WALT WHITMAN—THE MAN AND HIS WORK Van Velsors were noted for their blood horses, which they reared and cared for themselves. 1 The Major always owned beautiful horses and his sons followed his example. 2 His wife, Naomi Williams, belonged to a family which from father to son were sailors. Her father, John Williams, a kind and charitable man fond of good cheer, was Captain and joint owner of a schooner plying between New York and Florida, and his brother was likewise a sailor. Both perished at sea. 3 Naomi is pictured as truly adorable with a presence of sweet- ness and intimate charm. Generous, hospitable, knowing how to care for her children, of elevated soul, deep, intuitive, she showed herself in every way the worthy spouse of the excellent " Major." Her grandson kept a particularly touch- ing memory of her, which one day inspired this strophe: Behold a woman! She looks out from her quaker cap, her face is clearer and more beautiful than the sky. She sits in an armchair under the shaded porch of the farm house, The sun just shines on her old white head. Her ample gown is of cream-hued linen, Her grandsons raised the flax, and her grand-daughters spun it with the dis- taff and the wheel.* The Williamses were probably of Welsh stock. The poet, however, made little of this origin: and whatever may be the likelihood of it, one must acknowledge that nothing particu- larly celtic appeared in the forming of Walt Whitman. An influence on the contrary, of which he acknowledges indubitable traces in him, was that of the Van Velsors, the good people of Holland. It is but right that he felicitates him- self in yielding to it. No European race has carried across the world a blood more precious, a more energetic principle of ^Complete Prose, p. 6. *John Burroughs: Notes, p. 78, s Complete Prose, p. 0. ^Leaves of Grass, p. 355. BIRTHPLACE AND ANCESTORS 15 vitality and fecundity, than that of the Netherlands, which notably constitute, chronologically and characteristically, the founding of the state of New York. "Not the Scotch-Irish stock itself, or the Jewish, is more dourly and stubbornly prepotent in human society than is this Dutch strain in America. . . . These original stocks tinge and saturate humanity through generations. . . . Few realize how the Dutch element has percolated through our population in New York and Pennsylvania. As late as 1750 more than one-half of New York State were Dutch. The rural Dutch to-day almost always have large families of children, and form in every respect the most solid element in their com- munity. In New York City and in Brooklyn and Albany it is superfluous to say that to belong to a Dutch family is to belong to blue blood, the aristocracy. . . ." x In the United States the Hollander has carried his realist instinct, positive and earthy, his solid intelligence, his methodical spirit, his passion for independence, and above all his mag- nificent physical qualities of health and of poise. Destined to assist in building the foundation of the American edifice, he was the guarantee of its aplomb, and its solidity, as his brothers of the Southern hemisphere assure the future of the South African Federation. Without the British element, it is probable that the United States would not exist to-day: but without the Dutch element it is certain it would not have attained its present grandeur. Bucke is thus right in affirm- ing that New Yorkers should be as proud of the ship Gooi Vrow and the debarking of the first Dutch, as the inhabitants of New England are of the Mayflower and of Plymouth Rock. 2 The race of Netherlands is above all a mother-race. Its presence upon a new soil was a blessing to the nation which one day should develop there. Other influences marked the spot where the poet was to be born, and affected particularly his parents. The sect of ^Bucke: In Re Walt Whitman, p. 197. W. S. Kennedy: Reminiscences of Walt Whitman, p. 89. »Bucke: Walt Whitman, p. 17 (Notel 16 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK Quakers or Friends was strongly implanted in Long Island, which was to become one of their centres. The shoemaker, George Fox, its founder, when on his pilgrimage in America met attentive auditors among the Paumanackers and his word had awakened echoes in the soul of this rude and in- dependent population when he came in 1672, to preach to the people in the open air, as in the time as the Apostles. 1 Many recollections of that time still live in the memory of the Islanders when Walt was a child. One of the great Quaker figures, the preacher, Elias Hicks, was born on Long Island and had evangelized it. He was a radical spirit who, finding the doctrine of the society too form- alistic, had fomented a dissent. Hicks despised creeds, churches, and every organization of the religious life. Re- ligion for him consisted in spiritual emotion, in a "secret, ecstatic silence," which in obedience to a Divine Law speaks in the depth of the individual conscience. All exterior mani- festations were in his eyes but lies. "Seek the truth only within yourself ' ' : such was one of his essential precepts . "He is the most democratic of the religionists — the prophets," 2 wrote Walt Whitman in a brief tract which he tardily conse- crated to Elias Hicks, to carry out an idea of his youth in rendering homage to one who had expressed the religious aspirations of his ancestors. Thus the Hicksites were af- firmed as the left of quakerism, which was itself the extreme left of the rich variety of sects issuing from the Reformation. It is important to know the expressly original and hetero- dox character of this society of Friends, which represents sentiment extremely adverse to dogma. They have neither ministers nor sacraments. The divinity of Christ and the authority of the Scriptures mean much less to them than the "interior light" which illumines the conscience of every man upon earth, and which they made the rock of their doctrine. The Quakers were people of ultra simple manners, in- Womplete Prose, p. 477. nd., p. 457. BIRTHPLACE AND ANCESTORS 17 flexible and opinionated, headstrong, narrow, fundamentally pacifist, abhorring oppression under all forms, political as well as spiritual: all in all, religious individualists. Their exclusive obedience to the appeal from within, which they judged a divine order manifested to man, gave to their character a special stamp, a rigidity which manifested itself in their habits and their social conduct. They were looked upon with suspicion by the other sects, who disapproved of their excessive independence — and found themselves, notably in colonial times, in radical opposition to the Puritans. Opposed to these, who leaned toward intolerance and theoc- racy, quakerism represented the origin of the most modern principles, such as the separation of church and state, equal- ity of all religious denominations, free trade, justice to the aborigines. The Friends were discontented with England, and reached America to find themselves cruelly persecuted by the Puritans of New England. 1 By the strength of their obstinacy, they succeeded in doing away with the proscrip- tion of heretics in Massachusetts. The prosperous Quaker colony of Pennsylvania became the hive from which swarmed through the West the bearers of the libertarian spirit, the pioneers. 2 Such is the spirit, synonym of the fierce and irre- concilable independence, of the old Quakers who, under a rude surface, bore the vital element of democracy and of the modern world. These men queer, but simple and great, despite their absurd narrowness, who refused to uncover before any one, were he the president of the United States, who thee'd and thou'd everybody, and forbade any inscrip- tion upon their graves, were the stoics of our age and the ancestors of the more recent free, religious thinkers. The country might esteem itself happy which in its beginnings had them, for from them came men like Thomas Paine and Lincoln. With the Whitmans as with the Van Velsors, the sect l Complcte Prose, p. 477. «John Fiske: The Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America. 18 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK numbered adherents or met sympathy. The grandfather Whitman, Jesse — who likewise knew Thomas Paine 1 — had been in his youth the intimate companion of Elias Hicks, to become later his admirer. The father of the poet followed his sermons assiduously: and Walt himself remembers to have been present, as a small child, at one of his last preach- ings. 2 The whole family was more or less tinged with quak- erism. On his mother's side traces of it manifest them- selves : Amy Williams, if she was not perhaps a true Quakeress, as her grandson has told us, inclined strongly toward the sect. 3 This particularly sane and strengthening atmosphere of the society of Friends the poet could absorb by all his pores from his family and in his travels about the island. We see how this spirit of independence and heterodoxy would reappear in him, enlarged, transmuted, and what invisible and strong bonds, beyond the most patent divergencies, attached to the old Quakers the most modern and most en- franchised of men. In his pages on Elias Hicks one sees these secret affinities very closely, so that one can there re- cover the advances of religious individualism in its march beyond Christianity. i H. B. Binns: Life of Walt Whitman, p. xxv. Complete Prose, p. 465 . *H. B. Binns: Life of Walt Whitman, Appendix A, pp. 347-348. II THE WEST HILLS FARM On June 8, 1816, Walter Whitman married Louisa Van Velsor, a daughter of one of the farmers of Cold Spring. Like his fathers, Walter Whitman cultivated the farm of West Hills. But the support it yielded the family in his boyhood was meagre, and at fifteen he left the farm for New York to apprentice himself to carpentry. When he re- turned to the country he undercook the business of general building and carried his tools to the different parts of the island where his work called him. He was considered a first-rate craftsman, doing conscientious, durable work. "Not a few of his barn and house frames" — wrote Bucke in 1883 — "with their seasoned timbers and careful braces are still standing in Suffolk and Queens Counties and in Brook- lyn, strong and plumb as ever." 1 He was a kind of giant, measuring more than six feet, said a man of the neighbourhood, of physique as solid and massive as his buildings, with countenance serious and rather taciturn. Morally he was fundamentally honest, calm, and rigid, a man of great firmness. His features bespoke strength and sincerity, that kind of serene and austere primi- tive energy so often seen in portraits of men of "the antique time," so strikingly unlike the restless mobility and fatigue of contemporary faces. There is, moreover, lurking about the mouth and eye, a certain hardness. Walt confesses that, in his youth, he often had tempestuous discussions with his father, roused by his parental authoritativeness : little storms which the excellent mother, natural peace maker, l Bucke: Walt Whitman, p. 15. 19 20 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORE always dispelled. 1 In a poem wholly penetrated with im- pressions of his childhood, a certain little interior picture evokes a scene of this kind which might well have been in- spired by a memory of the paternal home. 2 Like his kin- dred Walter Whitman was rather slow and placid, but once without command of himself he was violent as a cyclone. His son, nevertheless, kept affectionately close to him till his death, and could write truthfully of his father and mother: "As for loving and disinterested parents, no child or man has ever had more reasons to bless and to thank them than I." He was a fine, a true Whitman, this husband of Louisa. However, his strong qualities do not seem to have favoured him in his struggle for existence. Unlucky or too honest, perhaps without a sense of business, the good workman knew constant care and, in dying, left nothing to his family for patrimony except regret. His wife, Louisa Van Velsor, was, if we are to believe her son, a wife and mother of exceptional character; when we look at her portrait, we must credit his enthusiastic tes- timony, who declared he saw in her "the most suave woman whom he had ever seen or known or expected to know." 3 It is one of those faces from which sovereignly radiates beauty and an infinite benevolence. Something unspeakably amia- ble and powerful, at the same time tender and strong, looks out from this good old face, still agreeable and smiling at sixty. It is easy to believe one's self looking at the magnificent and fecund image of earth or of the mother of men, equal to any task, like that of bringing forth a new race. How eloquent this face, rich and racy of the peasant, which reflects a light of interior contentment and eternal youth. She had nine chil- dren and lived poor. She was an * ' ample woman ' ' according to Whitman's expression, who glorified in her person the virtues of the women of the Dutch race, serene, maternal, and fruitful. l Camden Edition, Introduction, p. xvi. ^Leaves of Grass, p. 283. 8 See the daguerreotype reproduced: The Wound Dresser, p. 47. THE WEST HILLS FARM 21 She was, to be sure, a simple, illiterate woman, whose world was her household. But like her mother, she possessed intuitive qualities very intimate and almost divine, which belong to superior women. In her letters to her family, which she could write only with difficulty, she reveals in- comparable spiritual gifts. 1 She irregularly followed religious exercises, a little indifferent to the denomination of the church which she frequented : she pretended to be a Baptist, but, in reality, her preferences drew her rather toward the Quakers. Like her husband, she did not practice and was content to affirm her sympathy for the same sect, in going to hear Elias Hicks. Religious observance of any kind in the home there was none. 2 To those who saw her only in her old age, she appeared elderly, grave, "imposing and contained," full of "simple, organic energy." 3 She was in truth a typical example of those "powerful, uneducated persons" whom her son was to exalt. 4 She was far superior to her husband 5 and Walt Whitman confessed himself in- debted to this admirable woman for his more intimate quali- ties; his genius did not prevent his acknowledging himself the spiritual son of this humble housewife. And it was the clear perception of this debt, proudly confessed, which strengthened the bond which united them. An exceptional tenderness, beyond a filial attachment, always existed be- tween Walt and his mother. "He never speaks of her," says his friend John Burroughs, "without love and passion flooding his face." 6 His correspondence, his conversation, his works in prose and in verse are sprinkled with allusions to his "dear mother," all proving a passionate affection and a respect almost religious. WHien he writes to her, he seems to become a little child telling her his love and his daily iBueke: Walt Whitman, Man and Poet, Cosmopolis, June, 1898, p. 687; 2 Bucke: In Re Walt Whitman, p. 38; % Qamden Edition, Introduction, p. xxfi; 4 Bucke: In Re Walt Whitman, p. 353: ^Camden Edition, Introduction, p. xxii. •John Burroughs: Notes, p. 121. 22 WALT WHITMAN—THE MAN AND HIS WORK thoughts. And after her death, he characterized her from the depths of his sorrow, "the most perfect and most mag- netic character, the most rare combination of the practical, moral and spiritual, the least selfish of all whom he had ever known. . . .' ?1 He has otherwise immortalized her in the monument which he has dedicated to her among his Songs of Parting in a strophe the sorrow of which is so poignant. 2 In these two beings so representative of their origin, two complementary races united. We shall see later what this fusion signifies, when it comes to be realized in the life of their offspring, with the addition of genius and even of some- thing more than genius. The maternal contribution tem- pered with its experienced optimism and benevolence and generous affectionateness, whatever he may have had of se- verity and of tension, of the rigid and narrow in the char- acter of the Whitmans; and in one point at least, the in- clinations of the two families combined and drew them to- ward spiritual independence. The union of these two races was therefore the extraor- dinary promise of a completer human type, one profiting by all the power of a new soil. It is not an artifice of the panegyrist to see the exceptional natural advantage which attended the coming of this truly predestined man. Abys- mal mystery of hereditary transmissions, successive ming- lings, as in a series of crucibles, the slow and sure human preparation ! These words of Doctor Bucke, the biographer of the poet, are here invested with particular authority: "No conclusion of modern science is surer than this : that there is no great man without great ancestors, that to produce a supreme personality it is first necessary that exceptional stock be prepared. Then indeed many shall be called for the one who is chosen." 3 It may be asserted that this exceptional stock was veri- l Complete Prose, p. 274 (Note). ^Leaves of Grass, p. 376. 8 Bucke: Walt Whitman, Man and Poet, Cosmopolis, June, 1889, p. 687. THE WEST HILLS FARM 23 tably "prepared" when Walt was born, May 31, 1819, at the West Hills farm, second son of Walter Whitman, the carpenter, and of Louisa Van Velsor. He found in his cradle the enormous strength and health accumulated by his family, nowise diminished like the family fortune, but increased each generation. He was the issue of a race of manual labourers, peasants, artisans, sailors, of individuals skilled in various kinds of business, but equally mingling with the earth and sea, with the air, with elemental things. He belonged to the chosen race of the common people, sprang from a soil admirably virgin, to be converted into intellectuality and art. Not one of his family had been affected by culture, falsified by an excessive development of sensibility, vitiated by the miseries of urban life. Nothing but a natural soil about this young branch. He was an off -shoot, sprouting from the most authentic American trunk, from the very heart of the race. And to be indeed of pure race, signified for an American, to be the issue of a mixed blood; likewise, in a democracy real and not fictitious, to be of high birth, one must come from average people, the sanest portion of the mass, and not from titled and privileged men. In this respect the infant of West Hills was of high birth. His forebears, women as well as men, represented the nucleus of individuals superior in energy and vitality, by which the United States was truly to be built. They were great per- sonages of the people. Walt much later had the right to be proud of them, and in truth he was. He could well, in his candid, limitless pride say Well begotten, and raised by a perfect mother . . . and reflecting on all his ancestors, dedicated from century to century to great primordial labours, could proclaim: I come from people in their proper spirit. The location of West Hills is particularly pleasant. It is a retired spot among hills where vegetation is luxuriant. In 24 WALT WHITMAN—THE MAN AND HIS WORK the midst of orchards are farms, prairies, old roads bordered with dense tufted hedges, and shaded here and there with great trees. Insects, birds, springs, game, and flowers abound; here unfolds the very heart of the farm region of Long Island. As for the estate of the Whitmans — "it was," according to their descendant, "a fine domain, five hundred acres, all good soil, gently sloping east and south, about one-tenth woods, plenty of grand old trees." There were, he further tells us, "broad and beautiful farm lands of my grandfather (1780) and of my father. There was the new house (1810), the big oak a hundred and fifty or two hundred years old; there the wells, the sloping kitchen-garden, and a little way off even the remain sof the dwelling of my great-grandfather (1750-'60) still standing, with its mighty timbers and low ceilings. Near by, a stately grove of tall, vigorous black walnuts, beautiful, Apollo-like, the sons or grandsons, no doubt, of black walnuts during or before 1776. On the other side of the road spread the famous apple orchard over twenty acres, the trees planted by hands long mouldering in the grave (my uncle Jesse's), but quite many of them evidently capable of throwing out their annual blossoms and fruit yet." 1 The primitive ancestral home still remains and is to-day used as a wagon shed. The newer one where the poet was born is now occupied by a farmer and life has not left it. It is a small two-story house, a little stoop in front. Its slop- ing walls, its grassy court before the entrance, the lilac bush decorating its front, the barrier of wood and the well curbs near by, give it a stamp savouring of the rustic and the an- tique. The habitation is humble in appearance but comfort- able. 2 Aside from a wing built on the right, it is still as it was built nearly a century ago. And in a region which the proximity of the enormous metropolitan city transforms l Complete Prose, p. 4. m. B. Binns: Life of Walt Whitman, p, 8. THE WEST HILLS FARM 25 little by little into a suburb, the place still retains the charm of solitude and of nature. West Hills is near enough to the sea for its confused noises to be heard; especially on peaceful nights, after a storm, the muffled and distant rumbling of the waves produce a mar- vellous effect. Walt always kept the echo of the "mystic surf- beat of the sea." Very near the farm is the elevation, Jaynes Hill, the culminating point of the island. From this height, which is perhaps but a hundred yards, a marvellous panorama of fields, wood, hills, bounded by the waters of the sound on one side, by the ocean on the other, surrounds and subdues you. More than once in his youth the poet made its ascent to impregnate himself with space and wind, to embrace the immense horizon of land and sea. The whole region abounds in striking and varied perspectives. As for the life which the family of the old farm lived at the beginning of the last century, it is described in these lines, by John Burroughs, the earliest of the Whitman biogra- phers, and who had in the writing of his books advice and suggestions from Whitman himself : The Whitmans lived in a long story-and-a-half farm-house, hugely tim- ber'd, which is still standing. A great smoke-canopied kitchen with vast hearth and chimney, form'd one end of the house. The existence of slavery in New York at that time, and the possession by the family of some twelve or fifteen slaves, house and field servants, gave things quite a patriarchal look. The very young darkies could be seen, a swarm of them, toward sundown, in this kitchen, squatted in a circle on the floor, eating their sup- per of Indian pudding and milk. In the house, and in food and furniture, all was rude, but substantial. No carpets or stoves were known, and no coffee, and tea or sugar only for the women. Rousing wood fires gave both warmth and light on winter nights. Pork, poultry, beef, and all the ordinary vegetables and grains were plentiful. Cider was the men's com- mon drink, and used at meals. The clothes were mainly homespun. Journeys were made by both men and women on horse-back. Both sexes labor'd with their own hands — the men on the farm — the women in the house and around it. Books were scarce. The annual copy of the al- manac was a treat, and was pored over through the long winter evenings. I must not forget to mention that both these families were near enough 26 WALT WHITMAN—THE MAN AND HIS WORK to the sea to behold it from the high places, and to hear in the still hours the roar of the surf; the latter, after a storm, giving a peculiar sound at night. Then all hands, male and female, went down frequently on beach and bathing parties, and the men on practical expeditions for cutting salt hay, and for clamming and fishing. 1 The Van Velsors lived a similar kind of life. From among his memories, the poet evokes "their vast kitchen and ample fireplace, and sitting room adjoining, the plain furniture, the meals, the house full of merry people, my grandmother Amy's sweet old face in its quaker cap, my grandfather, the * Ma- jor' " — 2 all the dear farm decorations which were so familiar to him in his childhood. Less lucky than that of the Whit- mans, the "long irregular house a sombre gray brown, with walls covered in shingles, with the outhouses, the stable, and the vast barn," of the Van Velsors has long since disap- peared and "the plow has passed over its foundations." These last lines date from a journey which the poet made to West Hills when he" was sixty-three years old. After having lived and worked, he was seized with a desire to see his native home. All the religious sentiment which attaches one to a line of ancestors and to a corner of the soil is revealed in the touch- ing page where the old man gives an account of his visit to the little cemeteries, lonely and wild, nature in full swing, conquered by vegetable life, where his relatives were resting: July 29, 1881. — After more than forty years' absence (except a brief visit, to take my father there once more, two years before he died), went down Long Island on a week's jaunt to the place where I was born, thirty miles from New York City. Rode around the old familiar spots, viewing and pondering and dwelling long upon them, everything coming back to me. — I now write these lines seated on an old grave (doubtless of a century since at least) on the burial hill of the Whitmans of many generations. I Fifty and more graves are quite plainly traceable, and as many more de- j cay'd out of all form — depress'd mounds, crumbled and broken stones, cover'd with moss — the gray and sterile hill, the clumps of chestnuts out- I iJohn Burroughs: Notes, pp. 78-79. 'Complete Prose, p. 5. THE WEST HILLS FARM 27 side, the silence, just varied by the soughing wind. There is always the deepest eloquence of sermon or poem in any of these ancient graveyards of which Long Island has so many; so what must this one have been to me? My whole family history, with its succession of links, from the first settlement down to date, told here — three centuries concentrate on this sterile acre. The next day, July 30, I devoted to the maternal locality, and if pos- sible was still more penetrated and impress'd. I write this paragraph on the burial hill of the Van Velsors, near Cold Spring, the most significant depository of the dead that could be imagin'd, without the slightest help from art, but far ahead of it, soil sterile, a mostly bare plateau — flat of half an acre, the top of a hill, brush and well grown trees and dense woods bordering all around, very primitive, secluded, no visitors, no road (you can not drive here, you have to bring the dead on foot, and follow on foot). Two or three score graves quite plain, as many more almost ribb'd out. My grandfather Cornelius and my grandmother Amy (Naomi) and nu- merous relatives nearer or remoter, on my mother's side, lie buried here The scene as I stood or sat, the delicate and wild odor of the woods, a slightly drizzling rain, the emotional atmosphere of the place, and the inferr'd reminiscences, were fitting accompaniments. 1 This same emotion we feel in our turn before the two sketches illustrating Bucke's book, where the etcher Pennell knew how to translate with such intensity and mute and poignant eloquence the anonymous graves where sleep the ancestors who prepared the coming of the poet. We find ourselves in the presence of origins. And we should interrogate them without haste before following the man in his moving and diverse career; they forever fash- ioned him and his work; they furnished him a base so solid and so vast in life and in art that each of his steps is firmer, each of his songs freer, by the effort of the generations which preceded him. We encounter them everywhere in the course of his life, blended with his acts and his verse. He owes them his amplitude, his health, and his strength. Walt Whitman is not a magnificent flower blooming suddenly and artificially. He is a product of nature, amplified by the august individuality which was granted him by superaddi- Womplete Prose, p. 4. 28 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK tion. Whence the particular interest which adheres in dis- covering his roots and the soil into which they penetrate. This prelude, which holds in germ the motif of the drama, this momentary pause upon the threshold before entering, to give us time to examine the surroundings, the situation, the aspect of the extraordinary dwelling where we are guests, is not meant to please a vain ambition of a biog- rapher. The poet himself commands us not to neglect any of the elements which concurred in his genesis. They contribute truly to one essential part, to an explanation of the wonderful riddle which he is. It is only after having studied all the depth of the influences from soil, from race, from ancestors, from environmment, that we can seize the real meaning of these verses : My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air, Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same, l . . . . leaves of Grass, p. 29. Ill YEARS OF YOUTH AND APPRENTICESHIP The child received the Christian name of Walter, but the family dropped the last syllable, no doubt to distinguish him from the father. 1 This familiar name of Walt was retained and definitely adopted by the poet after the first edition of his book, as truer and more intimate. He wished to be for all but Walt Whitman, as he was for his family, and posterity will not know any other name. And already one writes simply Walt, as one says Jean Jacques. Walt was four years old when his parents quitted the farm among the hills to live in the big town which was developing at the western extremity of Long Island. It was no longer a time when one was born and died in the same spot, near the bones of one's ancestors, and the mobility of the period encroached even upon them. Circumstances had changed since the close of the Revolution, an epoch of prosperity for the family, and the father came to try his luck in Brooklyn where at that time there was much building. The Whitmans remained in town for twelve years, during which the carpenter followed his trade with varying fortune, without ever becoming rich, to the time when a grave illness of the mother recalled them to the country. The household of three children — Walt was the second and a fourth was soon to be born — settled in Front Street at the water's edge, not far from "New Ferry" which plied between Brooklyn and New York. It was probable that Walter Whitman speculated in his work, by mortgaging or reselling the little houses which he built: the frequent re- iBueke: In Re Walt Whitman, p. 35. 29 30 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK ' movals of his family seemed to indicate this. 1 After a stay in Cranberry Street they removed to "a pretty house" says the poet — which the father had built in Johnston Street. Then it was to Tillary Street that they migrated. About 1830 we find them at last in Henry Street. 2 It was thus a somewhat nomadic life which the child lived during his first years, though these successive habitations followed close upon one another. Brooklyn at that time, the humble kernel of the enormous agglomeration now absorbed by greater New York, was still a quiet little village very rural in character. 3 It was there that Walt, to use his own words, quitted his frocks and be- came a boy bold enough to begin exploring the surrounding world, and to adventure alone into the streets, as far even as the store of the corner grocer, who later became mayor. He seems to have manifested very early independent and vagabond instincts. He was often seen on the neighbouring ferry whose employees took a fancy to the little fellow who went aboard and made a tour with them. The child already yielded to the attraction of moving ships which after were to inspire him with a veritable passion. He watched with astonished eyes the horses which so drolly stepped round and round in the centre of the boat to produce the motive force. It was at the turning of an epoch, and the first steamboat had yet to be used in the service. Thus from the age that he could take to his little legs he lived the carefree, independent, dawdling life, life in the open with all its risks, a child of the people who blossoms on the streets, drawn to places by his awakening intelligence, the same obscure instinct of migration, of curiosity and adven- ture which animates primitive humanity in its flight across the world; however futile may seem the remark, in reality it is not, for it matters in the future development of the in- dividual that the first memories of his childhood are not iH. B. Binns: Life of Walt Whitman, pp. 13-14. ^Complete Prose, p. 9. Bucke: Walt Whitman, p. 8. Complete Prose, pp. 10-11. YEARS OF YOUTH AND APPRENTICESHIP 31 linked with ideas of confinement, and of subordination to a narrow surveillance. Sixty years later Walt still kept vivid these impressions of his life as a boy, scarcely out of his mother's arms. This is the place for an incident of his fifth year, a type of anecdote often found in the youth of men of genius, as if to mark them with the sign of their predestination. John Bur- roughs has told it for us: On the visit of General Lafayette to this country, in 1824, he came over to Brooklyn in state and rode through the city. The children of the schools turn'd out to join in the welcome. An edifice for a free public library for youths was just then commencing and Lafayette consented to stop on his way and lay the corner-stone. Numerous children arriving on the ground, where a huge irregular excavation for the building was already dug, sur- rounded the heaps of rough stone, several gentlemen assisted in lifting the children to safe or convenient spots to see the ceremony. Among the rest, Lafayette, also helping the children, took up the five-year-old Walt Whit- man, and pressing the child a moment to his breast, and giving him a kiss, handed him down to a safe spot into the excavation. 1 The poet in his old age still recalled among the memories of that distant epoch 2 the arrival of Lafayette in Brooklyn. His parents then lived in Tillary Street. The hero with a manly figure and a fine face had come by the Old Ferry and was received with great pomp at the foot of Fulton Street. 3 Walt at that time went to school, that is to say to the pub- lic school. He made but a short stay — about six years — allowed to the children of the common people, forced early into practical life. He also frequented a Sunday school at St. Ann's. And this primary teaching remained the only foundation of methodic and formal instruction of his whole life, 4 to which later he added the treasure of his reading and tfohn Burroughs: Notes, p. 80. Wiary in Canada, pp. 5-7. Complete Prose, p. 9. 4 No other instruction was his till his ultimate passing as student to the Jamaica Academy (Long Island) indicated by Bucke, Walt Whitman, p. 22, and which in any case must have been very short and almost insignificant. As he taught later at this place, Binns' Life of Walt Whitman p. 33, there is per- haps confusion. 32 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK his studies. The son of the carpenter was not a privileged one. In 1831 he was employed as a boy in the office of a lawyer in Fulton Street, where he was given a fine desk and a window nook to himself. His "boss" was very kind and helped him with his writing. He moreover gave his little clerk a ticket to a big circulating library, — which Walt later called the most signal event of his boy life. Then he plunged with de- light into every kind of romance: the entire series of Thou- sand and One Nights he went through; then the novels and poems of Walter Scott, without counting other marvels. 1 It was a veritable feast. Next he was placed with a doctor, likewise as errand boy. At fourteen it was time to decide upon a business and he entered as apprentice the composing room of a weekly paper, the Long Island Patriot, to learn the printer's trade. At last he hit upon his work, for through all the ups and downs of his many-sided life it was in printing offices that he long found his principal occupation. The proprietor of the Patriot, S. E. Clements, paid atten- tion to his apprentices and sometimes took Walt out walk- ing: on Sunday he conducted them to a church which re- sembled a fortress. In the office Walt had for colleague and friend an old revolutionary character who had seen Wash- ington and who recounted for him many stories of heroic times. After that, he worked on the Long Island Star, the journal of Alden Spooner, 2 who later recollected his appren- tice as a notably idle boy: 3 epithet which Walt was to en- counter the whole of his life, very unjustly, however. Prom these years the poet remembered vividly an im- pression made upon the mind of the boy observer. One day in January, when walking on Broadway, he saw "a bent, feeble but stout-built very old man, bearded, swathed in rich furs, with a great ermine cap on his head, led and as- l Complete Prose, p. 9. 2 Complete Prose, p. 10. 3 H. B. Binns: Life of Walt Whitman, p. SO. YEARS OF YOUTH AND APPRENTICESHIP 33 sisted, almost carried, down the steps of his high front stoop (a dozen friends and servants, emulous, carefully holding, guiding him) and then lifted and tuck'd in a gorgeous sleigh, envelop'd in other furs, for a ride. Well, I, a boy of per- haps thirteen or fourteen, stopp'd and gazed long at the spectacle of that furswathed old man, surrounded by friends and servants, and the careful seating of him in the sleigh. I remember the spirited, champing horses, the driver and his whip, and a fellow-driver by his side, for extra prudence. The old man, the subject of so much attention, I can almost see him now. It was John Jacob Astor." 1 The son of Long Island farmers in passing the New York millionaire was petri- fied before the revelation of the enormous display of wealth. Though living in Brooklyn, during the school and appren- ticeship years, Walt did not say good-by to the farm at West Hills nor at Cold Spring. Every summer he returned to pass his vacations with his grandparents to make pro- longed stays with them. It was thus that he came to know his gentle grandmother, Naomi, with her quakeress cap, his jovial grandfather, Cornelius, and Hannah Whitman, his other grandmother. A good part of his childhood and adoles- cence was thus passed exploring in every sense the country and the borders of the island to the point of feeling them as near as if he had not been from them for four years. It is he himself we must question in order to know the impres- sions which these magnificent months of nature and of lib- erty left upon him: Inside the outer bars or beach this south bay is everywhere compara- tively shallow; of cold winters all thick ice on the surface. As a boy I often went forth with a chum or two, on those frozen fields, with hand-sled, axe and eel-spear, after messes of eels. We would cut holes in the ice, some- times striking quite an eel-bonanza, and filling our baskets with great, fat, sweet, whitemeated fellows. The scenes, the ice, drawing the hand-sled, cutting holes, spearing the eels, etc., were of course just such fun as is dearest to boyhood. The shores of this bay, winter and summer, and my doings there in early life, are woven all through L. of G. One sport I was very l Complete Prose, p. 12. 34 WALT WHITMAN—THE MAN AND HIS WORK fond of was to go on a bay-party in summer to gather sea-gull's eggs. (The gulls lay two or three eggs, more than half the size of hen's eggs, right on the sand, and leave the sun's heat to hatch them.) The eastern end of Long Island, the Peconic bay region, I knew quite well too — sail'd more than once around Shelter island, and down to Mon- tauk — spent many an hour on Turtle hill by the old light-house, on the extreme point, looking out over the ceaseless roll of the Atlantic. I used to like to go down there and fraternize with the blue-fishers, or the annual squads of sea-bass takers. Sometimes, along Montauk peninsula, (it is some 15 miles long, and good grazing,) met the strange, unkempt, half- barbarous herdsmen, at that time living there entirely aloof from society or civilization, in charge of those rich pasturages, of vast droves of horses, kine or sheep, own'd by farmers of the eastern towns. Sometimes, too, the few remaining Indians, or half-breeds, at that period left on Montauk peninsula, but now I believe altogether extinct. More in the middle of the island were the spreading Hempstead plains, then (1830-'40) quite prairie-like, open, uninhabited, rather sterile, cover'd with kill-calf and huckleberry bushes, yet plenty of fair pasture for the cattle, mostly milch-cows, who fed there by hundreds, even thousands, and at evening, (the plains too were own'd by the towns, and this was the use of them in common,) might be seen taking their way home, branching off regularly in the right places. I have often been out on the edges of these plains toward sundown, and can yet recall in fancy the interminable cow-processions, and hear the music of the tin or copper bells clanking far or near, and breathe the cool of the sweet and slightly aromatic evening air, and note the sunset. Through the same region of the island, but further east, extended wide central tracts of pine and scrub-oak, (charcoal was largely made here,) monotonous and sterile. But many a good day or half -day did I have, wandering through those solitary cross-roads, inhaling the peculiar and wild aroma. Here, and all along the island and its shores, I spent inter- vals many years, all seasons, sometimes riding, sometimes boating, but generally afoot, (I was always then a good walker,) absorbing fields, shores, marine incidents, characters, the bay-men, farmers, pilots — always had a plentiful acquaintance with the latter, and with fishermen — went every summer on sailing trips — always liked the bare sea-beach, south side, and have some of my happiest hours on it to this day. As I write, the whole experience comes back to me after the lapse of forty and more years — the soothing rustle of the waves, and the saline smell — boyhood's times, the clam-digging, barefoot, and with trowsers rolPd up — hauling down the creek — the perfume of the sedge-meadows — the hay-boat, and the chowder and fishing excursions. . . .' Complete Prose, p. 7. YEARS OF YOUTH AND APPRENTICESHIP 35 The memory of this happy period remained dear as ever to the poet, past the period of his virility. Describing the southern coast of the isle, fatal to so many ships, he noted that, "As a youngster I was in the atmosphere and tradition of many wrecks — of one or two almost an observer." Off Hempstead beach, for example, was the loss of the ship, "Mexico" in 1840 (alluded to as the "Sleepers" in Leaves of Grass. 1 Later still he evoked "old Moses," one of the freed slaves of West Hills, "a great friend of my childhood." 2 The sea especially took possession of him at this time with its odour, movement, its noises, its vastness. Already at this period he was inspired to sing of the sea. 3 The perfumes of seaweed and of sea fish clung to him, and he had, he tells us, the look of a " water dog." As a certain captain said of Walt, " I can smell salt water ten miles away in just seeing him." 4 What animal strength and what largeness these in- tervals of life, wild, exultant, diffusive of unconscious joy, near the sea and on it, were preparing for the individual! And we think of these verses in which this reflection of his childhood is expressed : There was a child went forth every day, And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became, And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day, Or for many years or stretching cycles of years. The early lilacs became part of this child, And grass and white and red morning-glories, and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird, And the Third-month lambs, and the sow's pink-faint litter, the mare's foal and the cow's calf, And the noisy brood of the barnyard or by the mire of the pond-side, And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there, and the beautiful curious liquid, And the water-plants with their graceful flat heads, all became part of him. . . . 6 l Complete Prose, p. 7. 'Id., p, 414. \ Vd., p. 88. . *0. L. Triggs: Selections, Introduction, p. xxii. *Leav68 of Orass, pp. 282-283. 36 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK Walt at sixteen was one of the employes in a printer's office in New York. However, his work — and it was to be always thus with him — absorbs him but little. A fever to know seizes him. He lives intensely these hours in which every generous adolescent burns to measure himself with the world. Quivering with intellectual ardour, he devours a multitude of novels, and indiscriminately all the books which fall into his hands. He frequents lectures in Brooklyn and his neighbourhood, and takes an active part in debates. He goes ardently to the theatre, as much as his means will permit. 1 It is the period of the awakening of all his curiosi- ties. Not content to read and to speak in public, he writes poems and little novels for reviews and journals. It is about his seventeenth year that there appeared in his life the first of those brusque interruptions which the Ameri- can temperament and spirit of initiative foster. He aban- dons his case and reaches his island, where presently he be- comes the improvised master of a village school. Without doubt the desire to be near his parents, who had left the city — other children had come to the carpenter, and the birth of the last boy had cost the mother, however robust, months of illness — was not remote from this resolution. Ac- cording to the custom of that time he "boarded round" in the families of his pupils, where boys and girls mingled, often the same age as the teacher. The recollection of one of them projects a vivid glimmer upon this period of his youth. I transcribe it in all its savour: I went to school to him in the town of Flushing, Long Island. He taught the school at Little Bay Side. We became very much attached to him. His ways of teaching were peculiar. He did not confine himself to books, as most of the teachers then did, but taught orally — yes, had some original ideas all his own. I know about that, for I had heard of others who tried l Complele Prose, p. 13. YEARS OF YOUTH AND APPRENTICESHIP 37 oral teaching. But the plans he adopted were wholly of his own concep- tion, and most successful. He was not severe with the boys, but had complete discipline in the school. Before and after school and at recess, he was a boy among boys, always free, always easy, never stiff. He took active part in games of frolic. It seemed his object to teach even when we played. . . . Whitman was very fond of describing objects and incidents to the school. He would not do this privately, but to all hands. He would give quite a good deal of time to any subject that seemed worth while. He was always interesting, a very good talker, able to command the attention of scholars, of whom, by the way, there were seventy or eighty. Our ages ranged six- teen, seventeen, eighteen years old, yet many, too, were young shavers like myself The girls did not seem to attract him. He did not specially go anywhere with them or show any extra fondness for their society. . . . Walt was a good story teller. Oh ! excellent; was both funny and serious. Did I say he had his own notions how to punish a scholar? If he caught a boy lying, he exposed him before the whole school in a story. But the story was told without the mention of any names. No punishment be- yond that. He had such a way of telling his story that the guilty fellow knew who was meant. He would do this in the case of any ordinary offence; but, if the offence was grave enough, the whole school was taken into the secret. . . . My memory of Walt is acute, unusually acute — probably because his personality had such a peculiar and powerful effect upon me, even as a boy. I had other teachers, but none of them ever left such an impress upon me. And yet I could not mention any particular thing. It was his whole air, his general sympathetic way, his eye, his voice, his entire geniality. I felt something I could not describe. What I say, others will also say. I think he affected all as he did me. They have admitted it, yet, like me, can give no definite reasons. No one could tell why. Their memory of him is exactly like mine. There must be something in it; it is not imagina- tion. . . . Whitman had dignity, and yet at the same time he could descend to sociability. The very moment he stepped across that school door-sill he was master. He had authority, but was not severe. 1 We obeyed and respected him. U"n a little novel published by Walt in 1841 in which he presents a scene of a brutal schoolmaster, a characteristic passage is found: "That teacher was one little fitted for his important and responsible office. Hasty to decide, and inflexibly severe, he was the terror of the little world he ruled so despoti- cally, punishment he seemed to delight in. Knowing little of those sweet fountains which in children's breasts ever open quickly at the call of gentleness and kind words, he was feared by all for his sternness, and loved by none. I would that he were an isolated instance in his profession." — Complete Prose, P. S38. 38 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK One thing is sure. As far as Walt's goodness of character goes, you can report me pretty fully and as strongly as you choose. Even back in the school-days, those of us who knew him, his scholars there on Long Island, felt, somehow, without knowing why, that here was a man out of the average, who strangely attracted our respect and affection. 1 This testimony, so affirmative and so curious, must be placed near that of another Long Islander who was likewise his pupil. Interrogated by Doctor Johnston, one of the English admirers of the poet, an old farmer, named Sand- ford Brown, formulated in these terms the opinion which he retained of his old teacher: Walter Whitman, or "Walt," as we used to call him, was my first teacher. He "kept school" for 'bout a year around here. I was one of his scholars, and I used to think a powerful deal on him. I can't say that he was exactly a failure as a teacher, but he was certainly not a success. He warn't in his element. He was always musin' an' writin,' 'stead of 'tending to his proper dooties; but I guess he was like a good many on us — not very well off, and had to do somethin' for a livin'. But school-teach- in' was not his forte. His forte was poetry. Folks used ter consider him a bit lazy and indolent, because, when he was workin' in the fields, he would sometimes go off for from five minutes to an hour, and lay down on his back on the grass in the sun then get up and do some writin', and the folks used ter say he was idlin'; but I guess he was then workin' with his brain, and thinkin' hard, and then writin' down his thoughts. ... He kept school for a year and then his sister succeeded him. 2 Whether he was successful or not in teaching where his ascendant personality and his resources could supplemenl his meagre education, Walt kept up for at least three years this life of village schoolmaster, interrupted by visits to the farm which his parents had retaken since their return to the country. He taught at Babylon at the edge of the Great South Bay where he used to catch eels and lobsters, at Ja- maica, at Woodbury, at Whitestone. 3 It was then that in ^■Fellowship Papers, 1894. (I. H. Pratt, Walt Whitman, pp 6-10.) 2 J. Johnston: A Visit to Walt Whitman, p. 70. S H. B. Binns: Life of Walt Whitman, pp. 28-29. YEARS OF YOUTH AND APPRENTICESHIP 39 journeying through the island he took possession of it and knew its population. In the course of this somewhat no- madic life how many firesides, how many divers types — fishers, farmers, grazers — he had occasion to visit and to observe! He himself called these years "one of my deepest lessons of human nature behind the scene and in the masses." 1 In the interval — he was then nineteen years old — the young Whitman realized another of those experiences, the sum of which later made for him an incomparable knowledge of humanity. He loved to print both literally and figura- tively. For the year and a half during which he taught, we find him at the head of a journal, the Long Islander, which he founded at Huntington, the market town near West Hills, and which still stands, after more than sixty years. His brother George, who was then ten years older, was co- proprietor. Walt was manager, editor in chief, composi- tor, pressman, and apprentice, combining in his own person the elements of one edition. Despite his multiple occupations, the work in the office of the Long Islander did not monopo- lize all his time; sometimes the manager could be seen in the midst of his friends, with a ring suspended from a ceiling by a thread and forcing it to reach a hook ia the wall. When the ring was hooked the player won a piece of pie or a five- cent piece. 2 Or perhaps he played a game of whist. His readers were indulgent and Walt was in no hurry. But there were times when he worked uninterruptedly, and again when he merely played. He had to be allowed his own way. That which undoubtedly satisfied him was that his business as printer and his literary talents found opportunity to fuse. These months in which he printed, edited, and distributed the little sheet came to be a particularly happy phase of his adolescence, and the following lines express this delight: Complete Prose, p. 10. J Bucke: In IU Walt Whitman, p. 37. 40 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK I was encouraged to start a paper in the region where I was born. I went to New York, bought a press and types, hired some little help, but did most of the work myself, including the press work. Everything seem'd turning out well; and (only my own restlessness prevented me gradually establishing a permanent property there) I bought a good horse, and every week went all round the country serving my papers, devoting one day and night to it. I never had happier jaunts — going over to southside, to Babylon, down the south road across to Smithtown and Comae, and back home. The experiences of those jaunts, the dear old fashion'd farmers and their wives, the stops by the hay-fields, the hospitality, nice dinners, occasional evenings, the girls, the rides through the brush, come up in my memory to this day. Others besides Walt kept the memory of this time. Two years after the death of the poet, some friends, on a pilgrim- age to Long Island, found still some villagers who had known the young director of the Long Islander and did not hesitate to evoke his figure. Two of the forefathers of the hamlet clearly remembered his powerful personality, brimful of life, revelling in strength, careless of time and the world, of money and of toil, a lover of books and of jokes, delighting to gather round him the youth of the village in his printing-room of evenings and tell them stories and read them poetry, his own and others. That of his own he called his yawp, a word which he afterward made famous. 1 Walt was twenty-two when he left his school and his island to return to New York. Other ambitions were stirring within him which teaching could not by its nature satisfy. Adolescence was at an end and with it years of apprenticeship. A vast field of experience was open to him, where we are presently to see him expand in contact with men and things and reach his plenitude. The proofs which we possess of the poet's youth, beyond those which he himself tells, and the evidences which we are to cite, are of themselves singularly poor. They suffice to prove for us that he already possessed an emphatic person- ality : the recollection of the first of his pupils is astonishingly «L Hull Piatt: Walt Whitman, pp. 11-12. YEARS OF YOUTH AND APPRENTICESHIP 41 significant in this respect. He showed in his face and his glances something very powerful and very sweet, that inex- pressible quality which emanates from certain individuals like an aroma and irresistibly attracts sympathy. Among the young men of the village he appeared different, not by an essential superiority, but very peculiarly a singular lad who avoided grossness of speech, and whom no one could induce to drink or to be part of low games. Without the shadow of pose, but under the rule of an innate instinct, he had a great self-respect which forbade the familiar diversions of the gay youth of his own age. But above all he was himself. The love of independence which possessed him as a boy, the tempestuous discussions with his father, little inclined to jest on the subject of au- thority, was confirmed with years. He early left home, and the experience which he already had of the big city tended to fortify his individualistic tendencies. Walt was not an enemy of work, far from it, but he was an enemy of work pro- longed and mechanical, foreseen and measured like the day of a cab horse between the shafts. On this head, he was determined to follow his own will and to obey only his own instinct. When he by chance helped in the field, he passed for a do-nothing, because he was seen, as Sandford Brown says, sometimes to put down the scythe, the fork, or the rake to stretch under a tree solicited by a thought which was worth more than the work of fork or scythe: why resist it since it came to him? His Quaker ancestors, did they resist the inner call? Even to his family, with whom he always retained the most affectionate relations, he remained a puzzle. His sweet and intuitive mother, despite the particular bond of tender- ness which held her to her second son, did not always under- stand him. Something in him escaped her. Besides, he was never certain what to do with his life : Walt was not one of those adolescents who, their studies and ap- prenticeship ended, make straight toward a box which they occupy till death. He did not know, he waited, he watched 42 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK the world about him. In the depth of his heart a sea of con- fused desires moved him, and he experienced their delight and their torture. Under a happy countenance and a tran- quil manner he concealed a very vivid sensibility, and his youth already knew profound emotions. Walt at twenty years had boundless health and unusual strength. He had grown very fast and reached his develop- ment at about sixteen years. 1 Tall and broad shouldered, he was the living proof that the blood of the Whitmans flowed in him pure and plentiful. He already impressed one by his appearance of a young athlete, 2 with gray-blue eyes, which looked directly at one, a face oval and regular, a com- plexion extraordinarily fair, and hair an intense black. 3 With something of a magnificent abandon, full of anima- tion and gayety, great lover of games and adventure, he gave himself to them with joyous heart once a pleasure party was planned. There was no one more boisterous and more turbulent than he when leading a band of young boys. Wherever his errant life led him, he was easily the chief. Walt was a youth of genuine pluck. Fishing, boating, long tramps afoot were his favourite recreation: he would have nothing to do with hunting. He was never seen in church. There were certain moments when a particular gravity spread over his face: and his companions asked if it was in- deed the same youth who in a moment exulted in the joy of living and abandoned himself totally to the intoxication of youth and strength. Already the duality of the man was apparent and marked him with a special sign. ^Complete Prote, p. 16. aBucke: In Re Walt Whitman, p S3 'Bliss Perry: Walt Whitman, p. 9 PART TWO THE MULTITUDINARY LIFE New York (1841-1855) IV LITERARY BEGINNINGS However eager we are to see the genesis of such an in- dividual, the period of plenitude which opens at the time of his return to the metropolis more powerfully allures us. The years in New York— whose Indian name Manahatta, which means "place around which there are hurried and joyous waters, continually," 1 was dear to him — the years in which he became conscious of himself, and whence his work has de- rived, are the marvellous and unique experience upon which his personality rises. It is then that the magnificent and loose drama of his life knits, and our attention tightens in seeing it live and move. Twelve to fifteen years — the long period preceding the appearance of his poem — suggest more than can be actually verified, a luxuriant life wholly enveloped in a warm light reflected by some facts which have come to us. For the precise facts of Whitman's life to his thirty-fifth year are perhaps rarer than any of its phases. No analyst lived beside him to preserve the history of a man who had no his- tory, of one who lived lost in the crowd, occupied simply in living and absorbing his time. Walt was not revealed to himself and to the world. Some autobiographic pages, a document here and there, allow us at least to conjecture what he then lived through, in the flowering of his manhood. Ten lines of a contemporary, an impression from life, quickly noted, the description of a gesture or a trait of character, many times tell us more of his personality than a journal rigorously kept. ! W. S. Kennedy: Reminiscences of Walt Whitman, p. 64: Diary in Canada, p. 55. 45 46 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK Because the information relative to this period is scant we renounce here, more than elsewhere, a rigorous following of the chronology of events in order to express the general sense and the particular nature of an epoch fecund in diverse, in- timate, and multiple experience. And we must confess that what was undoubtedly very great in these magnificent years remains impossible to reproduce and must rest in shadow. In 1841 Walt finally quitted his school-teaching and re- turned to New York stirred by a new ambition. He had edited a journal, as a youth, and the great town opened, boundless, before his young desire. A great boy of twenty- two who appeared at least twenty -five, of exceptional vitality, and a singular assurance, was thus about to be lost in the eddies of a crowded and eager city. The city should not, however, devour him : it was he who was to absorb it, its men and things, its aspects and crowds, its sufferings and joys. Walt, in these New York years, lives a mixed life: half labourer, half journalist, he followed a trade, solely for a living, according to a method (or an absence of method) in- variable with him. For five years he worked as compositor in printing offices in New York, without allowing himself to be absorbed by his daily task. In summer this incorrigible idler, this lover of air and of sun, often escaped from the work- room to the woods or the shores of his island. And to be able to prolong his sojourn there he does not disdain now and then to hire himself as a gardener, just as simply as he sets type. In returning to New York, Walt had a desire, which with- out mastering him — that would have been contrary to his disposition — preoccupied him seriously during the five or six following years: that of "taking up literature!" For Walt was a writer. He had published little tales and poems in periodicals. This vocation was affirmed since his four- teenth year and he continued in his easy way to follow it till he became a new man, a time when all this literature was dispersed like a soft smoke on the horizon. One would be led to believe, in a life of which one poem LITERARY BEGINNINGS 47 is the soul, the key, the final solution, that its literary be- ginnings should have a particular importance. They are hardly that with a Walt Whitman. It is the life experiences of the period we are now entering which are primary and significant in the formation of his personality. The man would be diminished in nothing, if he had not published in his youth. Nor would he be any greater either. He would remain the same to us. His juvenilia are like the sprouts of shrubbery which bear no fruit; they may be pulled up with- out loss. Whitman has told us himself how the idea of writing came to him: "On jaunts over Long Island as a boy and young fellow nearly half a century ago, I heard of or came across in my own experience, characters, true occurrences, in- cidents which I tried my 'prentice hand at recording: I pub- lished these pages during my occasional visits to New York City." Elsewhere, he confides to us his first impressions as author: his beginnings were described toward 1832 as "sentimental bits" inserted in the Long Island Patriot where he commenced his apprenticeship as compositor. "Soon after, I had a piece or two published in the Mirror of George P. Morris, then a celebrated and elegant journal of New York. I remember with what half-suppressed ex- citement I used to walk to the big, fat, red-faced, slow mov- ing very old English carrier who distributed the Mirror in Brooklyn : and when I got one, opening and cutting the leaves with trembling fingers. How it made my heart double-beat to see my piece on the pretty white paper in nice type." 1 From that time on Walt persevered. Exactly at the time of his arrival in New York a story of his published in the August number of the Democratic Review had a vivid suc- cess. Death in the Schoolroom — a kind of moral story in- spired by his experience as schoolmaster — made a sensation and was widely copied in the press. 2 This flattering recep- ^Complete Prose, p. 187. 2 John Burroughs: Notes, p. 80; and H. B. Binns: Life of Walt Whitman, p. 83. 48 WALT WHITMAN—THE MAN AND HIS WORK tion fortified the literary ambitions of the young man. It was the commencement of his regular collaboration with this review, then in full fashion and in which a pleiad of future great men published: Poe, Hawthorne, Whittier, Lowell, and Bryant. From 1841 to 1845 the signature W.W., or Walter Whitman, frequently appeared in it and the young printer gave copy elsewhere. The New World, in whose composing room he worked on returning to the city, inserted some of his verse. Some sketches, some stories, appeared in Brother Jonathan, 1 in Columbian Magazine, in the American Review, and in the Broadway Journal, directed by Edgar Allan Poe, whom he went to see one day in his office and found kind and attractive but subdued and a bit jaded. 2 He wrote at the same time for journals like the New York Sun, Aurora Tatler, Statesman, the Democrat, the Trib- une. 3 At that time the publicist in him expended itself youth- fully. Later, Walt was the last one to be mistaken as to the value of these "crude and boyish" pieces. He would have wished them in eternal oblivion if he had not feared their surrep- titious issue. One day he unwillingly decided to publish some of them as appendix to his CollefttA A brief examination of these youthful pages is enough to explain why he was reluctant to reprint them. They au- thorize no hope and prove only what a detestable writer at that distant period the poet of the Leaves of Grass proves himself. Nothing is more conventional and more mediocre than these stories of grandiose idea; their naive and flat form, and their melodramatic manner, are intolerable. The greater part of them, beneath their pathos and inflation, show an in- tention plainly moralistic. Their author, then in the full crisis of humanitarianism, sought in literature but a means iBliss Perry: Walt Whitman, p. 26. ^Complete Prose, p. 12. Hd., p. 187. «W., p. 334. LITERARY BEGINNINGS 49 to vivify instruction. His recent biographer, Mr. H. B. Binns, has very closely characterized this phase of his youth: "The moral consciousness of Whitman was then predomi- nant; he was an advocate of 'causes.' But his moralizing sprang out of a real passion for humanity which took the former sentiment; sentiment which was thoroughly genuine at bottom, but which, in its expression at the time, became false and stilted enough to bear the reproach of sentimen- tality." 1 Not but that one may discover, very exceptionally indeed, in the banality of these little stories, some ingenious or poetic motive, however inevitably spoiled by awkward treatment. Thus the idea of the widow scattering flowers indiscrimi- nately upon all the graves in a cemetery because she could not find her husband's. Sometimes a passage, a line, holds atten- tion, because it suggests certain fugitive correspondence be- tween the Whitman of five and twenty and the much later one. Thus one of his stories, One Wicked Impulse, closes, after the ordinary gamut of incidents frightfully tragic, upon the curious impression of the guilty one who finds in the bosom of nature absolution of his crime. She receives him, the assassin, as she receives the most innocent of the sons of earth, rejecting no one, admitting the most vile to her com- munion. It is truly interesting to find this as the first indica- tion of the sentiment, which later is to flower so magnifi- cently in the man and his poems — the ardent sympathy for the fallen and the pariahs, the full and entire acceptance of all outlaws. Phrases like these are like an annunciation: "Ah! that good morning air — how it refreshed him — how he lean'd out, and drank in the fragrance of the blossoms below, and almost for the first time in his life felt how beautiful indeed God had made the earth, and that there was wonder- ful sweetness in mere existence." 2 *H. B. Binns: Life of Walt Whitman, pp. 34-35. ^Complete Prose, p. 344.— see also Bucke: In Re Walt Whitman, p. 340 (Note); Camden Edition, IX, pp. 130-133, 146-148. Bliss Perry: Walt Whitman, p. 24. 50 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK But how rare are such gleams! The juvenilia deserve en masse charitable and purifying oblivion. It is astonishing, above all, to find no point of contact between the real man — such as he already manifested himself — and his writings: what is certain, I believe, is that the latter were but accessory, despite the undeniable sincerity of his reformatory ardour. In any case, it instructs us but in a mediocre way as to his intimate self. As for the verse pieces of this period, they are poorer and more colourless if possible than the prose. At most only one of them, The Blood Price, inspired by his anti-slavery passion is really moving, stands out from its colourless com- pany. Whitman, after his new birth, inclosed with signi- ficant quotation marks the word poesy when he applied it to his distant lucubrations, proving all his disdainful pity for this pseudo-lyricism. A purely conventional notion of the poetic form then possessed him: later he declared how much he struggled to free himself from it. He went even further. Emboldened by his success as story teller and versifier, he wrote, soon after his return to New York, a novel. Here likewise the quotation marks were imposed, for the term seems a bit pretentious in view of this production. Franklin Evans, A Tale of the Times, was offered to the world as a "temperance novel." It was published in a supplement of the New World, the weekly in whose composing room the author worked. The journal approved the affair, and the masterpiece — which had been written on command and was paid for in advance 1 — was announced to the public in a sensational manner, of which this is a sample: "Friends of temperance, ohe! Franklin Evans or the drunkard. A Tale of the Times, by a popular American writer. This novel, which is dedicated to the tem- perance societies and to the friends of temperance in the United States, will make a sensation. ... It has been written especially for the New World by one of the best ( J H. Traubel: With Walt Whitman in Camden, p. 93. LITERARY BEGINNINGS 51 novelists of the country, with the intention of aiding the great work of reform, and of snatching young men from the demon of intemperance," etc., etc. . . .* This violent acclamation was not vain, for Franklin Evans was a great suc- cess and was printed, it was said, to the twentieth thousand. The title alone explains its literary type. It is the terrible and extraordinary history of a young man whom alcohol leads to vice and to all miseries, and who pledges to practise in future the strictest rules of abstinence. Its style is flam- boyant with a redoubtable odour of Puritan sanctity. Even Whitman, this crisis passed, may wish that one would keep silent as to this sin of three and twenty. He never spoke of nor showed pride in it himself, even at the time it was written. When any one alluded in his presence to this "novel" he did not hesitate to laugh at it. 2 A short time before his death his intimate friends searched everywhere for this old "stuff"; the author on learning this told them that he "hoped indeed by the grace of God" this search would be fruitless. "I do not know how I came to write it," he remarked, "all that I know is that I was simply in the raw and the unripe, that is all." And he sarcastically pretended that his famous "tem- perance novel" was written on the table of a saloon with a reinforcement of spirit ous liquors. That it was nothing but an intellectual caprice, is possible; but it appears doubtful whether Walt was at this time an exemplary "water drinker." He was always too richly alive and too free to subject himself to an absolute rule. But he was passionately interested in the problem of hygiene, temperance, and physical culture. The abundant notes, 3 belonging to the period of Franklin Evans, confirm this: page after page, even treatises, on walking, swimming, etc. . . . Lost among this declamatory mass some curi- ous paragraphs establish, in spite of everything, a kind of l Camden Edition, Introduction, pp. xxiv-xxv; Id., VHI, p. 262. *Bucke: In Re Walt Whitman, p. 39. "Camden Edition', Witt, pp. 261-274. 52 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK concordance between the literature of five and twenty, so ardent to espouse "causes," and the later man. The juve- nile tone of the following lines proves the man of plenitude and of triumphant health, who was in truth the young apostle, temporarily embedded in moralism. "What pity may we feel for the flabby, lymphatic, half -grown puny crea- tures, called men and women, of whom the earth is full ! What wonder that such morbid abortions are tempted to kindle within their sluggish systems some sparkler of genial life by transient exhilaration! . . . God's elixir of life is won- drously compounded of sunlight, and pure air and water; of the perfume of flowers, of music, and the continual change of hours and seasons. We drive each other to quaff the fiery fountain which bubbles up from hell by robbing one another of the exhaustless animal joy which our Creator would pour upon us from all living and moving things. To drink to fulness of the nectar which Nature distils is to be intoxicated with health! 1 It is necessary to keep in mind in thinking of the future Walt this pitiless disdain of the strong man face to face with the feeble one, the man of the cabinet, the dreamer forgetful of his body, the neurasthenic, who in the midst of these re- proofs he induces to swim, to walk, to exercise with dumb- bells, to live in the open air. By this single fragment one sees what passion already pushed the young man to defend causes from which he afterward turned. Even in his lay sermons, Walt by instinct repudiates the prudish and posed accent of literature familiar to the family. He could not escape from his excessive and generous temperament, and in this crisis of moralism he remained fundamentally the being of nature described in these lines . From another point of view the memory of the lance broken in favour of abstinence will ap- pear significant when we reply to the accusations of drunken- ness and debauch which were hurled later at the great pagan, by malignantly perverting some of his poetical affirmations. Wamden Edition, VIII, pp. 263-264. LITERARY BEGINNINGS 53 But of all this preaching literature nothing will last. The man issues from it unharmed. It simply demonstrates that in the time of his youth certain racial tendencies sought expression to later retreat and disappear forever. All the Quakers of his line were behind him when he was profuse and enthusiastic for the abolition of slavery, and of capital pun- ishment, and when he combatted alcohol. "I promptly got away beyond all that," he declared one day to his friends. But it was a sentiment very strong while it lasted. 1 How can we doubt it? He had the idea of accomplishing great things, and the ardours of apostolate consumed him. He recognized quickly that he was deceived as to the way, for the venture of Franklin Evans had no successor. Al- ready the crowds with their enormous reality circled about him, through him; and their contact, warm, electric, to which he abandoned himself, prepared the metamorphosis from which he would rise a new man. Wamden Edition, Introduction, p. xxv. THE MAN OF CROWDS Let us hasten to see the man live very far from these trifles —the work of his early years. Despite his literary aspira- tions, Walt is not temperamentally a writer. His real self expanded in the open air and in free companionship, in the track of the immense inquiry which he slowly pursues with the view of fathoming his city, his nation, his time. Profound is the word by which Bucke denominated these New York years, the time in which the poet received his "education." Never has one dreamed of the like. A man sprung from the people is about to prove democracy for him- self by compassing at leisure the entire scale of sensations which a great modern city with its surroundings can offer. Endowed with vast and varied appetites, enjoying faculties receptive and extraordinarily communal, this tranquil and uncommissioned inquirer finds himself in the centre of a moving and swarming collectivity, energetic and feverish. The particular emotional intensity which this contact yields him he will one day report to us. With real simplicity Walt Whitman lets us see most of the experiences of this boundless time. We shall let him express them here in his own words which have a flavour and an ac- cent of truth which no translation can supply : Living in Brooklyn or New York City from this time forward my life then identifies itself curiously with Fulton Ferry, already becoming the greatest of its sort in the world for general importance, volume, variety, rapidity, and picturesqueness. Almost daily later ('60 to '70) I crossec on the boats, often up in the pilot-houses where I could get a full sweep, absorbing shows, accompaniments, surroundings. What oceanic currents, eddies, underneath — the great tides of humanity also, with ever-shiftii 54 THE MAN OF CROWDS 55 movements. Indeed, I have always had a passion for ferries; to me they afford inimitable, streaming, never-failing, living poems of the river and bay scenery, all about New York island, any time of a fine day — the hurry- ing, splashing sea-tides — the changing panorama of steamers, all sizes, often a string of big ones outward bound to distant ports — the myriads of white- sail'd schooners, sloops, skiffs, and the marvelously beautiful yachts — the majestic sound boats as they rounded the Battery and came along to- wards 5, afternoon, eastward bound — the prospect off towards Staten Island, or down the Narrows, or the other way up the Hudson — what refreshment of spirit such sights and experiences gave me years ago (and many a time since). My old pilot friends, the Balsirs, Johnny Cole, Ira Smith, William White, and my young ferry friend, Tom Gere — how well I remember them all! Nothing could be more characteristic than this love for the ferries, moving routes between water, earth, and sky, satisfying the appetite for motion and space which tormented the heart of the young man. Throughout his poems how we see them pass and repass with their crowds, with the odour and perspec- tive of the water. Standing by the side of the pilot, Walt was never weary of the breath and press of the people, above the moving waters, seething and rhythmic; one with the great natural force; he watched the human tide as well as the sea. . . . This endless pageant, combined with the odours of the salt air, the noises and colours of the bay, plunged him into a strange intoxication. He was wont to dilate, and to expand in the presence of the landscape and in the thousands of confronting faces, to dream, to be gorged with visions, his eye taking in the bay, his meditation en- circling the globe. 1 In the heart of the city another spectacle equally thrilled him. It was Broadway, the great central artery of Man- hattan, carrying along its pavements the most feverish crowd in the world. In the eddies of this human flood Walt was wont to plunge every day, watching its continuous move- ment with an unceasing and fascinated eye. The tramping, the cries, the oceanic murmur, the files of vehicles, the mass Complete Prose, p. 11. 56 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK of faces held for the big curious child, at once both actor and observer, an enormous mystery and a whole world of beauty. The pulsations of humanity afoot accelerated his own life and stimulated him to intoxication. Broadway offered him not only the spectacle of anonymous pedestrians, but that of notables of the day. " Here I saw during those times, Andrew Jackson, Webster, Clay, Seward, Martin Van Buren, filibuster Walker, Kossuth, Fitz Greene Halleck, Bryant, the Prince of Wales, Charles Dickens, the first Japa- nese ambassadors, and lots of other celebrities of the times. Always something novel or inspiriting; yet mostly to me the hurrying and vast amplitude of those never-ending human currents." 1 When Manhattan celebrated some extraordi- nary occasion, it was also an event for the lover of "populous pavements." At the sight of and in contact with the vast sea of crowds, everything of the naive, the infantile, and primitive leaped within him as in the presence of a great planetary phenomenon. And what a crowd! New York on a holiday saluting the arrival of some great celebrity, "Manhattan with millions of feet walking upon the pave- ments," " with all that indescribable human roar and magnet- ism, unlike any other sound in the universe — the glad exulting thunder shouts of countless unloos'd throats of men." 2 The immense processions with torches, fire works, noise of wild bands, at the time of presidential elections, the crowds free and abounding. . . . To observe the crowd, Walt selected a choice place: the seat of a Broadway omnibus, by the side of the driver, from where he took in the crowds of the street, as from the pilot's cabin on the ferries he overlooked the waters of East River. He has told us about those famous omnibus jaunts, the joy of his youth and of his mature age, with a picturesque hearti- ness from which looks out a youthful, candid soul, marvelling at everything: ^Complete Prose, p. 12. Hd., p. 12. THE MAN OF CROWDS 57 One phase of those days must by no means go unrecorded — namely, the Broadway omnibuses, with their drivers. The vehicles still (I write this paragraph in 1881) give a portion of the character of Broadway — the Fifth Avenue, Madison Avenue, and Twenty-third Street lines yet run- ning. But the flush days of the old Broadway stages, characteristic and copious, are over. The Yellow-birds, the Red-birds, the original Broadway, the Fourth Avenue, the Knickerbocker, and a dozen others of twenty or thirty years ago, are all gone. And the men specially identified with them, and giving vitality and meaning to them — the drivers — a strange, natural, quick-eyed and wondrous race — (not only Rabelais and Cervantes would have gloated upon them, but Homer and Shakespere would) — how well I remember them, and must here give a word about them. How many hours, forenoons and afternoons — how many exhilarating night- tikes I have had — perhaps June or July in cooler air — riding the whole length of Broadway, listening to some yarn (and the most vivid yarns ever spun, and the rarest mimicry) — or perhaps I declaiming some stormy passage from Julius Caesar or Richard (you could roar as loudly as you chose in that heavy, dense, uninterrupted street-bass). Yes, I knew all the drivers then, Broadway Jack, Dressmaker, Balky Bill, George Storms, Old Elephant, his brother Young Elephant (who came afterward), Tippy, Pop Rice, Big Frank, Yellow Joe, Pete Callahan, Patsy Day, and dozens more; for there were hundreds. They had immense qualities, largely animal — eating, drinking, women — great personal pride, in their way — perhaps a few slouches here and there, but I should have trusted the gen- eral run of them, in their simple good-will and honour, under all circum- stances. Not only for comradeship, and sometimes affection — great studies I found them also (I suppose the critics will laugh heartily, but the influence of those Broadway omnibus jaunts and drivers and declamations and escapades undoubtedly enter 'd into the gestation of Leaves of Grass). 1 Of a whole world of joys and emotions there still remains one of his favourite pastimes at this period, the frequenting of the theatre. From childhood, the stage exercised a real fascination for him. Later, when writing for newspapers, he was on the free list and profited by the privilege to the full. 2 The impression which he received must have been profound, and after having written many times in these auto- biographic pages his memoirs of the theatre, he reviewed them again some months before his death. Complete Prose, p. 13. na. t B . 13. 58 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK Walt found before the footlights, as in the promenades along the great highways, the sensation of the crowd. The vibrant atmosphere of the great hall crowded with listening spectators, the electric human thrill which the dramatic phenomenon produced, the emotion which reverberated from the stage to the audience, the strong magnetism which freed this exchange, he felt in every minute cell. One easily imagines that the audience was as absorbing as the piece — perhaps more. The spectacle which thrilled him was divided between the auditorium and the play. One feels, in these lines, powerful and peculiar, that sensation of the crowd un- der the spell of a theatrical performance and his own wild joy in it: The old Park theatre — what names, reminiscences, the words bring back! Placide, Clarke, Mrs. Vernon, Fisher, Clara F., Mrs. Wood, Mrs. Seguin, Ellen Tree, Hackett, the younger Kean, Macready, Mrs. Richardson, Rice — singers, tragedians, comedians. What perfect acting! . . . Fanny Kemble — name to conjure up great mimic scenes withal — perhaps the greatest. I remember well her rendering of Bianca in "Fazio." Nothing finer did ever stage exhibit — the veterans of all na- tions said so, and my boyish heart and head felt it in every minute cell. . . . . Fanny Kemble play'd to wonderful effect in such pieces as "Fazio, or the Italian Wife." The turning-point was jealousy. It was a rapid-running, yet heavy-timber'd, tremendous wrenching, passionate play. Such old pieces always seem'd to me built like an ancient ship of the line, solid and lock'd from keel up — oak and metal and knots. One of the finest characters was a great court lady, Aldabella, enacted by Mrs. Sharpe. 0, how it all entranced us, and knock'd us about, as the scenes swept on like a cyclone. 1 At the date given, the more stylish and select theatre (price, 50 cents pit, $1.00 boxes) was "The Park". . . . English opera and the old come- dies were often presented in capital style; the principal foreign stars ap- pear'd here, with Italian opera at wide intervals. The Park held a large part in my boyhood's and young manhood's life. 8 ... I saw played marvelously at this time all the plays of Shakespere (I read them care- Womplete Prose, pp. 13-14. 8/d., pp. 426-27, THE MAN OF CROWDS 59 fully the evening before.) 1 Actually I cannot perceive anything more beautiful than the elder Booth in Richard III or Lear (do not know in which of the two roles he was the better), or Iago (or Pescara or Sir Giles Overreach, to go outside of Shakspere) — or Tom Hamblin in Macbeth — or old Clarke, either in the ghost in Hamlet or as Prospero in the Tempest, with Mrs. Austin as Ariel and Peter Richings in Caliban. Other dramas, and fine players in them, Forrest as Metamora, Damon or Brutus — John R. Scott as Tom Cringle or Rolla — or Charlotte Cushman as Lady Gay Spanker in London Assurance. 2 ... (I could write a whole paper on Clarke's peerless rendering of the Ghost in Ham- let at the Park. 3 . . . There were many fine old plays, neither tragedies nor comedies — the names of them quite unknown to to-day's current audiences. "All is not Gold that Glitters," in which Charlotte Cushman had a superbly enacted part, was of that kind. ... I saw Charles Kean and Mrs. Kean (Ellen Tree) — saw them in the Park in Shakspere's King John. He of course was the chief character. She played Queen Constance. Tom Hamblin as Faulconbridge, and probably the best ever on the stage. It was an immense show-piece. . . . The death scene of the King in the orchard of Swinstead Abby was very effective. Kean rushed in, gray-pale and yellow, and threw himself on a lounge in the open. His pangs were horribly realistic. (He must have taken lessons in some hospital.) 4 It was to the old popular Bowery Theatre, where Booth and Forrest triumphed before an audience of workingmen, that his most moving memories are attached, and this prefer- ence for the big drama furnishes a precious index to his char- acter and tastes at this time. The elegant society of New York and Boston then interdicted these two master actors, "probably because they were too robust." Recalling from that period the occasion of either Forrest or Booth, any good night at the old Bowery, packed from ceiling to pit with its audience mainly of alert, well dressed, full blooded young and middle-aged men the best average of American born mechanics — the emotional nature of the !He wrote elsewhere: "As a young fellow, when possible I always studied a play or libretto quite carefully over, by myself (sometimes twice through) before seeing it on the stage — read it the day or two days before. Tried both ways not reading some beforehand: but I found I gained most by getting that sort of mastery first, if the piece had depth (surface effects and glitter were much less thought of, I am sure those times) . . ." Complete Prose, p. 515. tProsc Works, p. 22. 3 Id., p. 423. egan to build small houses of two or three stories, for ^Complete Prose, pp. 441-42. »Bucke: Wall Whitman, p.' 25. 88 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK labouring men. When he finished one, he sold it and com- menced another, not without enjoying in the interval stu- dious leisure on the wild coast of his island. He built on his own account, doing all the work with his own hands. He left in the morning, like the workman, carrying in his little basket his luncheon, prepared by his mother, and came back in the evening, the day done. 1 There was at that time a great rise in property and building in Brooklyn and the occasion appeared propitious to pocket good profits. Even Walt, in spite of himself, made money. If he had continued to speculate in his houses, he would have realized a small fortune. At least any reasonable man, in his situa- tion, would have profited by this providential and unique chance to hoard money. But Walt was not reasonable ap- parently. To the sad surprise of his family, who never un- derstood this incorrigible, he relaxed, neglected his work, then in 1854 left it altogether, renouncing with gaiety of heart his most brilliant prospects. Perhaps he had had the vague fear of awaking rich some fine morning and that would have been for him the supreme humiliation. He had never done anything for money : this time he deliberately affirmed by his conduct the most beautiful silent scorn of it. Fortune and he had no common language. Walt did not wish her for a companion. He had also another reason for abandoning his fruitful speculations, and this was irresistible and peremptory. It is that the careless boy with eyes open large upon life and so naively joyous of his magnificent health, the big boy, idler and dawdler, in love with the open air and direct contact with . men, was big with an idea which came to be the axis of his entire existence. Already for many years a transformation was slowly operating in the depths of his being. Another Walt was about to be born. Something solicited all his strength, all his thought, all the instinct of his life: true, he did not know what it was, but it was surely something great. ij. T. Trowbridge: Reminiscences of Walt Whitman, the Atlantic Monthly, February, 1902, p. 163. TO THE SOUTH 89 To his Intense gaze, the world appeared in a new light and he was absorbed in the contemplation of the marvels which now were being revealed to him. Since his thirtieth year, his inner life was lavishly enriched; the entire man was fo- cussing his strength to direct it toward an end which he sought to formulate aright. Outwardly he was always the son of the carpenter, but in himself, he was no longer such. He had hours of gravity and of abstraction when one would have believed him transported upon a Tabor. And after ardent years passed in listening, in meditating, in accumulat- ing, in surmising the result of the phenomenon to which he was a prey, he had to leave every other task to consecrate himself to this work. For now he knew. His task was given him exactly. He prepared himself to face the doing of it with the tranquil assurance with which he faced every- thing. His brother George paints him for us at this epoch, living on Portland Avenue in a big house with his fam- ily. Walt appeared always the same simple man, affec- tionate and singular, who baffled his family by his abso- lute lack of practical sense. He 'passed his time in "writing a little, working a little, loafing Jl little, he got up late, began to write, then went out for the whole day; he wrote considerable, one knows not what." For a long time he had entirely stopped publishing the sleepy stories which he produced in his twenty-fifth year. Everybody in the house had regular work except him. 1 Sometimes he would go to the most solitary parts of Long Island on the shore in the woods and remain there entire weeks. 2 In 1853 New York saw a great Universal Exposition. Almost the whole year Walt passed numerous days and evenings in the vast brick and glass building, detailing all the marvels of art come from Europe which were exhibited there. This great onlooker entered into the thought and sentiment of »Bucke: In Re Walt Whitman, p. 35. 2 J3ucke: Walt Whitman, p. 24. 90 WALT WHITMAN—THE MAN AND HIS WORK the Old World, to learn what went on in the continent of his ancestors, and he profited eagerly by it. There was not only a rich collection of pictures, of sculptures (among them the colossal group of Thorwaldsen, Christ and the Twelve Apostles), pieces of jewellery, objects of art, but samples of wood, minerals, machines of all lands, "every sort of work, of product, of labour, coming from the workers of all na- tions," 1 which offered him a subject of "inexhaustible study." At that moment when he was himself, a prey to inner travail, of fusion and of coordination, this inventory of the riches of the world and of human labour, with the sense of univer- sality and unity revealed in it, particularly fascinated him. He felt the powerful pulse of the crowds of visitors under the great dome in an accumulation of marvels. With his miraculous power of absorbing and speculating, one may imagine what a world of knowledge and impressions he was able to acquire there. That same year he had to take his sick father to Hunting- ton. The old carpenter, feeling his decline, was drawn to his original home and wished to breathe again his native air. Walt was then among the scenes of his childhood. Now, the great crisis of his life was about to unfold. The time was near. Walt was about to reveal suddenly the reason of his coming, to justify his being, his race, and his time. The work, adequate to his personality, which he bore within him since he had listened to the inner call, arrived at maturity. All his life up to this had been but the prelude to the great enterprise, which henceforth shall be one with himself. Womplete Prose, p. 505, VII "WALT WHITMAN, A COSMOS" Before the personality of Walt Whitman acquires a new- meaning and moves about the central event of his life we shall halt a moment to consider the man face to face, such as he appeared about his thirtieth year. We shall discover in scrutinizing some of the intimate depths of his nature that the very core of himself seems to indefinitely expand, allow- ing glimpses of secret and subtle qualities which one feels but does not analyze. In this glorious epoch of plenitude he virtually conceives his work without having yet planned, expressed, performed it. He presents himself as a marvellous type, unforgettable, the standard of a race; cell of the American Democracy and prototype of the world democracy, the stroller of New York, the "well engendered" son of the people, rich in correspon- dence with everything and everybody, who realizes a new aspect of humanity and marks an age of the world. How- ever magnificent, however eternal may be for us his book, Walt, the man in the flesh who is about to put it forth, is at least its peer at this moment. He is, I repeat, at this period of brilliant and warm youth more than at any other, his book in life. The perfect concordance between the interior Walt and his physical appearance is a genuine subject of astonishment. Nature had made him marvellously one. The man was very tall, broad shouldered, of massive frame, and admirably proportioned. His face, before acquiring that incomparable Olympian majesty old age was to impress upon it even in his portraits, still ravishes us with its rare beauty. His high-arched eyebrows marking a large forehead, eyes clear blue, nose 91 92 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK very strong and absolutely straight, were framed in a perfect oval ruddy face, tanned by the open air, sun, and sea, and covered with a beard and a moustache which he never shaved. Before thirty — was it after his journey to New Orleans? — his black hair became gray, and the contrast of these silver threads with the appearance of extreme youth radiating from his face produced a very unusual impression. He was from head to foot a man who impressed one by his unusual pro- portions and the nobility of his carriage. In repose he evoked in the ensemble of his person and not by his face alone Greek beauty — not that of the decadence which fills our museums with its jaded type, but the strong, primitive, Hellenic type, that is to say, absolute harmony in rude power. In all his physiognomy, a certain primitive bar- baric expression was prominent and marked him, among city-bred men, as a piece of natural rock in an artificial park. Never, in the street, was he seen to hurry; though the natural grace of all of his movements was extreme, his walk was rather heavy and slow, and in moving forward he bal- anced his great body like a rhythm which was compared to the roll of an elephant. His voice, well modulated, charm- ing, was one of his attractions. The eye was not large and his mild glance, little expressive of intelligence and vivacity, rather colourless, not piercing but absorbing, suggested that of the big mammals. The senses were with him of a remark- able perfection and acuteness; "he seemed to perceive sounds that others did not hear," 1 avowed his brother George. His subtle sense of smell, which made him detect a particular odour at different hours of the day, approached that of the savage and the beast. Everything concurred to make the athletic and bearded boy who nonchalantly sauntered along the pavements of Broadway a specimen of splendid human animality, well equipped, perfectly poised, aplomb, free from the blemishes which come to the civilized in expiation of his iBucke: In Re Walt Whitman, p. 37. "WALT WHITMAN, A COSMOS" 93 moral refining. Never man issued more complete and more normal from a block of living stuff. An invariable and radiant health to the time of his matur- ity, when he became an invalid, was like the flower of this rare organism. This health was his pride. "I doubt," he tells us, "if a heartier, stronger physique, more balanced upon itself, or more unconscious, more sound, ever lived, from 1835 to 1872 ... (I considered myself invulnera- ble). 1 The physical joy which emanated from his person was to the verge of copious and excessive so that it was al- most embarrassing, according to certain interlocutors. 2 His entire body aglow, of a ruddy super-abundance, seemed to elude the daily miseries of life. At a period when, after a long time, he knew only retrospectively these advantages, Walt thus described what he calls health: "In that condi- tion the whole body is elevated to a state by others unknown — inwardly and outwardly illuminated, purified, made solid, strong yet buoyant. A singular charm, more than beauty, flickers out of, and over, the face — a curious transparency beams in the eyes, both in the iris and white — the temper partakes also. Nothing that happens — no event, rencontre, weather, etc. — but it is confronted — nothing but is subdued unto sustenance — such is the marvellous transformation from the old timorousness and the old process of causes and. effects. Sorrows and disappointments cease — there is no more borrowing trouble in advance. A man realizes the venerable myth — he is a god walking the earth, he has a new eyesight and hearing. The play of the body in motion takes a previously unknown grace. Merely to move is then a happiness, a pleasure — to breathe, to see, is also. . . ." 3 A more than ample frame bears the stamp of his origin and, from head to foot, Walt proves himself of the imperial race of manual workers, foundation and raison d'etre of the ^Complete Prose, p. 522. 2 John Burroughs: Walt Whilman, p. 52. ^Complete Prose, p. 502. 94 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK American democracy. Centuries of silent labour close to the earth and to the sea, centuries of robustness and open air, were necessary to prepare such a representative: it would have been impossible to cultivate any city -bred generations to produce this tan-skinned Bacchus, drunk with the wine of life. It is the truth which the famous portrait of the poet confides to us, the portrait which takes the place of the author's name in the first edition of his book, and which ac- companies it in its transformation. This young man, in workman's dress, with an indifferent attitude, and at the same time firm, modest, and arrogant, with a calm, decided visage, whose glance, cast upon you, questions and follows you, appears to have arisen to justify his people, the men of the average, the silent heroes of the common people, the builders of cities, the modern Atlantes, arrived at the calm consciousness of sovereignty. The man in shirt sleeves who stands before you, his hand on his hip, his left hand in his pantaloons pocket, the felt hat tipped to the side, has the absolute attitude of a king. And he is, in effect, the in- dividual-king. No court mantle could equal in majesty the insolent and natural looseness of his dress, the irreducible freedom of his whole figure. He comes as an ambassador of a new race, charged to promulgate his life throughout the world. This portrait etched by McRae after a daguerreotype taken in July, 1854, is the document which shows us the physical aspect of the man at thirty-five, that is to say, at the very time when after years of searching and groping, he formulated the first songs of his poem. Dated from the same year, another daguerreotype has also come to us. It is a portrait bust, whose expression is strange. The face contains something of the faun and of the Christ at the same time. The epicurean lips which contrast with a certain thinness of feature and intense melancholy of glance give him an ambiguous expression not met with in another portrait. Whatever may be the beauty of this, I believe it "WALT WHITMAN, A COSMOS" 95 will be necessary to consider it as rather exceptional: it is per- haps more suggestive than the full-length portrait, but cer- tainly less true. Is it possible to recognize there the trace of the sorrow which the bringing forth of his book caused him, in the course of the years which preceded its coming? There exists a kind of commentary on the first of these portraits, which, in the definite edition of his book, serves as a frontispiece to the Song cf Myself, and it is to himself that we owe it. After the most ingenuous of immodesties, the poet took care to describe himself in the course of an anony- mous article upon himself which he sent to the Brooklyn Times, when his poem and his personality were defenselessly exposed to lying interpretations. It is both the deep coloured sketch which we have of the man at this period and his signally veracious transmission to the future: Of American breed, of reckless health, his body perfect, free from taint from top to toe, free forever from headache and dyspepsia, full-blooded, six feet high, a good feeder, never once using medicine, drinking water only — a swimmer in the river or bay or by the seashore — of straight atti- tude and slow movement of foot — an indescribable style evincing in- difference and disdain — ample limbed, thirty-six years (1855) — never dressed in black, always dressed freely and clean in strong clothes, neck open, shirt-collar flat and broad, countenance of swarthy transparent red, beard short and well mottled with white, hair like hay after it has been mowed in the field and lies tossed and streaked — face not refined or in- tellectual, but calm and wholesome — a face of an unaffected animal — a face that absorbs the sunshine and meets savage or gentleman on equal terms — a face of one who eats and drinks and is a brawny lover and em- bracer — a face of undying friendship and indulgence toward men and women, and of one who finds the same returned many fold — a face with two gray eyes where passion and hauteur sleep, and melancholy stands behind them — a spirit that mixes cheerfully with the world. 1 Heir of two races which blended in him, Walt owed par- ticularly to that of Holland one of the main traits of his temperament: his pyramidal phlegm, his equable humour, x The Brooklyn Daily Times: September 29, 1855, Reproduced in Bucke's Walt Whitman, p. 195. This is but a transposition in prose of a fragment suppressed after the edition of 1860 of the "Song of the Broad Axe" (See Bucke: Walt Whitman, pp. 168-169). 96 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK his feeling for the concrete, his vast optimism, his strict propriety, his sensuousness, his propension to affectionate comradeship, all came to him by the channel of the Van Velsors. Surely the British stock would never have pro- duced a being moving through life with that invincible, placid manner, nonchalant and idle, the immutable inner content- ment, that appetite for things for their own sake, that perfect and smiling serenity. To his English ancestors, he is above all indebted for his excessive individuality, the terrible firm- ness of his moral structure. But that which one must ad- mire supremely is the equilibrium which realized in his person the qualities of the two races which he fused in the crucible of one superior individuality. It strikes us as still more strongly evident when we examine as Bucke has done the results which the same combination came to in the poet's brothers. Jesse, the oldest brother, was an incapable, who during his life could but do a hired man's work. The third son, Andrew, a feeble and mediocre man, disappeared at thirty-six. George, the fourth, represented the Whitman type in all its purity: virile, loyal, sincere, and righteous. He conducted himself heroically during the War of Secession and was made colonel. A magnificent character for a man of action, but devoid of all imagination and intuition. Jeff, the fifth — the favourite companion of Walt on many a jaunt — was, on the contrary, a tender, sensitive, divining character who, almost without instruction, became by sheer force of work a great en- gineer. He inherited the maternal qualities but not the robustness of the Whitmans. The last one, Edward, was an idiot. A total of three failures and two successes, each in one direction — which show us the trials, the gropings, the checks of nature in the work of preparing one superior type. Walt, alone, the second son, represents the perfect fusion of the two races, whose qualities acquire in combining in him a new power. This phenomenon of metachemistry Bucke has formulated in a page which clears not only the formation "WALT WHITMAN, A COSMOS" 97 of the individuality of the poet, but the genesis of a represent- ative man, of all time — thus, in truth, Walt Whitman not only possessed the qualities of the Whitman and Van Velsor, but these were all intensified in him to an almost superhuman degree; he was more a Whitman man than his father or his brother George, more a Van Velsor than his mother or his brother Jeff, and he possessed besides qualities unsuspected in his family to his time. 1 Truly nature conducted herself royally toward the son of the carpenter of West Hills. She realized in him one of her absolute masterpieces. And genius, the intensifier par excellence, endowed him by a superaddition of creative force corresponding to his physical proportions. With all this grandeur manifested in the setting of his per- sonality as man, Walt practised a simplicity of attitude and of manner which did not distinguish him from the people, his daily company. One can imagine a youth radiating with strength and brilliant natural superiority going through life with a grave and distant air; he was a most common- place everyday person exempt from any shade of pose, even the one of wishing to avoid it. Perfectly at ease with every- one, he certainly proved himself closer to the mother of a family on the way to market, or to a man handling a broom on a Broadway sidewalk, than to a philosopher, a lawyer, or a doctor. One has but to read the letters to his mother or to one of his uneducated friends to understand all the child-like in- genuousness in this great, full-grown, tranquil athlete. When he was not abandoned to his genius, Walt preferred the divine commonplaceness which made up the life of an ordinary man. He never abandons his place in the ranks of the "average," he belongs to this with all his fibre, proving it, yet is on .the other hand the peer of the greatest interpreters of the race. Conventions have so taught us to join the idea of individ- ual superiority to distinction of intellect and of manners that we cannot suppress our surprise to see him so close to the ^ucke: Walt Whitman, Man and Poet, Cosmopolis, June, 1898. x>. G89. 98 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK common run of men, so genuine, conformable to the mass, so devoid of the life of comfort. He was endowed with all the elementary appetites, which the simplest people mani- fest, as "common" and little complex as the peasant or the woodpecker, who eats, drinks, and procreates, as free of manner as the docker at the harbour, or the mason at his work, as free of constraint and of prejudices as the tramp in the road. He presents himself such as he is with his strong, healthy instincts of which he is not ashamed any more than he is of the fine body which he does not attempt to adorn. He affirms himself such as he is and rejoices in finding himself so elemental. Some have called him cynic for this, they who have not understood him. And according as he approaches maturity, this basic simplicity, whose roots reach far into the soil of the race, is but accentuated. "His only eccen- tricity is to be free from eccentricity." 1 The picturesque rustic carelessness of his dress remains legendary. During the first years of his life in New York, the time when he published his "literature" in the popular reviews, Walt, returning from his island, thought well to sacrifice to the taste of the day in adopting a frock coat — a flower on the lapel — and a high hat. 2 Little by little this dress was simplified, and from the time when the idea of the work to be accomplished began to torment him, he was never seen except clad in an unchangeable suit of gray cloth or serge, never black, as he describes it for us. A big-brimmed felt hat, convenient for rain or sun, protected his head. More often his waistcoat was unbuttoned, and when it was very warm, he was seen coming along in his shirt sleeves with as much dignity as if he wore a fashionable coat. Despite this dress which a bourgeois would have called slouchy, he was remarkable for the invariable and scrupulous neatness of his linen, a corollary of his minute care of his body. He tfohn Burroughs: Notes, p. 86. JBucke: In Re Walt Whitman, p. 34- "WALT WHITMAN, A COSMOS" 09 exhaled the good odour of the bath and of fresh linen. To the eyes of certain people, who do not see how this dress cor- responds to the whole man, this cool disdain of fashion is often interpreted as a simple passion for advertising. In matters of eating, he always preferred simple and sub- stantial dishes. No masterpiece of the modern kitchen was worth as much to him as a clam, which as a child he had fished, and according to him the king of the shellfish of his island. When he lived by himself he was seen every morning to take his knife from his pocket, to cut large slices of bread and butter them for his luncheon. He was an extremely moderate drinker. He never smoked. To an advanced age, he lived either with his relatives, where living was very modest, or in a boarding house or in a bachelor's room. His errant penates knew only the simple furnishing which a work- man would easily have qualified as poor. His needs were small in number and those which could be supplied any- where; provided that he had a bed, washstand, a small deal table and a chair, the rest was indifferent to him. A luxurious interior would have seemed intolerable to him. He had the aversion of a Quaker for anything that was ostenta- tion and form. 1 One recognizes, nevertheless, in all his man- ners an ease and liberty entirely opposed to preoccupation which rules the narrow and measured existence of a man well groomed, shaven, dressed and cared for. He loved to show himself barbarian, and he was one in all the force of spontane- ity and independence of the word. A fierce instinct kept him away from the unchangeable ways traced and followed by mere convention. "Society" and its fantasticalities, its pretty manners, gestures and speech, smelling of perfume, would have nauseated him. Although no living being was ever excluded from his sympathies, one sees that the effeminate personage jaded and varnished, standing in parlours, had upon him the effect of an emasculate, and that with all the naivete of the natural man he luimistakably "MD. L. Triggs: Selections, Introduction, p. xviii. 100 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK despised him. The sentiment of social hierarchy was null in him. He was a man among men, great and sweet toward all. In his daily life, although he did not live it as a real Bohemian, he showed himself an irregular, one careless of what other men cared for. When he lived with his parents in Brooklyn, it was rarely, according to his brother George, that he was at a meal on time. If a wish seized him to leave the house it mattered little to him that it was the hour that the family sat down to the table. He paid no attention to them and returned two hours later to sit down and eat. A mountain across the doorway would not have changed his resolution. He did everything in his own time, when he was ready. 1 As in the time of his youth in which the epithet of idler was gratuitously bestowed upon him in his neighbourhood, people who judged him according to the ordinary standard were inclined to see in him one possessed to do nothing. His apparent nonchalance and his slowness baffled their judg- ment. In reality he was incessantly active; and when one reviews the work of his life, one is struck with the colossal task which he really performed. Indeed hard workers can- not show the equivalent of labour which the enormous quan- tity of documents, extracts, notes, commentaries, analyses, projects in every sense, found after his death, suggest but feebly. Let us add that this do-nothing not only would not depend upon any one while he was an invalid, and paid his board regularly when he lived under the family roof, but pecuniarily supported his family, his old mother, his feeble-minded brother, during a good part of his life, with the product of the labour of his hands. 2 But it was useless to demand of him feverish work, harsh and breathless. He had too much inner repose to break his back. He seemed to have all time and never moved except in his own way. WTiile others gathered bank notes in their drawer, he ac- iBucke: In Re Walt Whitman, p. 36. 2Bucke: Walt Whitman, Man and Poet, Cosmopolis, June, '98, p. 690. "WALT WHITMAN, A COSMOS" 101 cumulated, without stopping, treasures of observation, of study, of impressions, of emotions, which he would render to the world after having imposed upon them the new stamp of his self. That was his raison d'etre here below, as to others is assigned the alignment of figures in an office or the management of materials in a factory. With the ob- stinacy of his race, he follows an instinct in refusing to run with the dollar hunters. The riches which he coveted did not demand pursuits where one suffocated. From idler to rake, the transition is natural, and after he had published the first songs of his poem, one of the most common accusations against him, very grave in America, was of being a man of dissolute morals. The appearances were at first glance against Walt, whose way of living and whose poetic affirmations were too unusual to escape rep- robation. Nevertheless, just as in the case of his idleness, appearance was a liar. There is not anything in him to be praised or blamed, but all evidences established with certi- tude that he was a person of great reserve in conduct. In associating with women, we have mentioned his extreme dis- cretion. He had perhaps a too exalted idea of the sex rela- tion to corrupt it. Walt had a singular respect for himself. This very high conception of propriety included conversation and daily conduct. In his language and in his manners, a native distinction allied itself curiously with his perfect freedom; never, on his part, a word or a gesture of ribaldry. Among his comrades of the street, this behaviour added to his prestige because it was never accompanied with any ar- rogance, any hypocrisy. Walt was not a prude. He was simply, but fundamentally, a clean man in his choice of words as well as in his dress. Dirt for its own sake, literally or figuratively, was contrary to his instinct. And instinct guided the man entirely. The strange boy possessed a power of attraction which the witnesses of his life, friendly or indifferent, are one in declaring exceptional and irresistible. It proceeded not 102 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK only from the charm of his voice and the cordiality of his manners: the physical individual in repose attracted like a lover. This particular magnetism, the character and effects of which have a fundamental importance in the psychology of the poet and the comprehension of his work, prove more than the natural aroma of his magnificent physique abound- ing in health: it is like the sensible sign of his omnipotent individuality. No one knew how to define what he felt in his presence: it was something unspeakably great which did not depend upon his figure only, his height, or his carriage, but which flowed from his total personality. There is not a word to qualify this irradiation, which John Burroughs, who yielded as so many others, elect spirits as well as uncultivated natures, names a "new and mysterious bodily quality." 1 Every individual, by the sole fact that he lives, exercises an attraction, however feeble it may be. It is probable that, with Walt Whitman, this attribute was, by reason of his formidable individuality, carried to a hundredfold power. He attracts as a crowd attracts imperiously by the sole fact of living and of passing. In the street the simple pas- sersby yielded to this fascination, which he did nothing to provoke. At every step, without any exterior reason, strangers turned their eye toward the man of elephantine movement and looked at him a moment for the unique pleas- ure of looking at him, sometimes with a smile of content- ment and of silent amity. These yielded in spite of them- selves to the mysterious sensation of an unusual presence. The obscure ones of whom he made habitual company in New York proved him to the utmost and the outcasts, we are told, were transformed by his contact. When he was the author of Leaves of Grass, visitors quitted him, after an interview with him, as if illumined, incapable of thinking of any other thing than of him, and the joy of finding them- selves near him, Orators, philosophers, poets, have exercised a spiritual ^oliti Burroughs: Notes, pp. 13-14. "WALT WHITMAN, A COSMOS" 103 charm their contemporaries are glad to witness : Emerson, for example, positively ravished his listeners. The magnetism of Walt's presence was of another kind. It was the outpour- ing, not only of an athletic man, but an athletic personality. To the visible superabundance of his vitality, his power as man, loving all, feeling all, equal to no matter what task, united in producing this mystery of nature. There was no other mystery than this of one colossal individuality such as the world knows but at long intervals. But it is above all as the possessor of this power that Walt appears so great, before even his work is shaped — his work in which he poured out the same magnetism beaming from himself. It is easy to see that endowed with such strength of attrac- tion, and, above all, tormented himself by the thirst of affec- tion, the poet had throughout his life such attachments in number and diversity the like of which one rarely sees. He was passionately loved by the most frustrate beings as well as by noble souls : especially by the primitive and the vigor- ous. All along the road of his life he travelled surrounded by comrades whose absolute confidence responded to his own, kept alive about him to his last day the atmosphere of ten- derness which his heart needed and which affected him, he said, as the natural phenomena, sun, wind, odour affected him. Of all the joys of his life, the supreme joy for Walt was per- haps to walk arm in arm with one of these labourers who was ignorant of his genius but who felt in his tiniest cells that he was a superb companion, that one could not but love him. Watch him pass with slow step, a sweet smile lighting his bearded face, in these juvenile and impudent lines wher.e he himself pictures himself: Not a dilettant democrat — a man who is a double part with the common people, and with immediate life — who adores streets — loves docks — loves to talk free with men, — loves to be called by his given name and does not care that any one calls him Mister. Knows how to laugh with laughers — loves the rustic manner of workers — does not pose as a proper man, neither for knowledge or education — eats common food, loves the 104 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK strong smelling coffee of the coffee sellers in the market, at dawn — loves to eat oysters brought from the fisherman's boat — loves to be one of a party of sailors and workers — would quit no matter what time a party of elegant people to find the people who love noise, vagrants, to receive their caresses and their welcome, listen to their rows, their oaths, their ribaldry, their loquacity, their laughing, their replies — and knows perfectly how to pre- serve his personality among them and those of his kind. 1 One of his cardinal attributes was what we shall call his Catholicism, giving to this word its original meaning. He was all acceptation, neither debater nor calculator. Rep- robation was no part of his nature, and dialectics glided over him without breaking through his singular indifference. At the time when he frequented the debating societies, he was interested in oratorical controversies; now as he deepened his new self, he put them from him absolutely. He was sensible only to the mute arguments suggested by things. Reasoning intelligence does not culminate in him: according to the famous saying, he was more open to truths which proved themselves than to truths to be proved. This may be judged as an anti-modern tendency if perspicacity of the first order which was his, and his amazing prophetic sense, had not largely compensated his dialectic poverty. Walt Whit- man was intuition incarnate. "He seemed to be related, and as finely related with spiritual facts by his mentality" — we can say in reversing a judicious sentence of O. L. Triggs — "as he was related to Nature by his exquisite senses and physical constitution." 2 He possessed the key which gives access to the secret compartments of life, and concrete nature seemed to unroll before him like an open book. He heard it speak, as he heard his interlocutors. Reasoning would have been superfluous. Things themselves published their sig- nifications and justified their place. Walt was endowed to a marvellous degree with a primitive, ingenuous, total sense Another Version of the Article (cited above) of the Brooklyn Daily Times, September 29, '55 — See In Re Walt Whitman, pp. 23, 24. ?Q. L. Triggs:, Selections, Introduction, p. xxvij* "WALT WHITMAN, A COSMOS" 105 of the material. All that was purely intellectual was subor- dinated in him to the human and physical element. 1 This silent absorption of the truth of life showed itself by the singular placidity diffused by his whole person. He was one who saturated himself slowly with powerful and primitive emotions, who enjoyed with a total inhalation sensuous and spiritual, with an intense but continent passion, and without the least frenzy. Among the dull, care-worn, contracted faces which the great city, noisome in its titanic labour, pre- sented, Walt paraded his clean and restful figure, beaming with the smile of a child. That was the singular thing. This imperturbability, however intimately American he was, surely made him nearer to the Oriental than to a New Yorker of the nineteenth century. He seems to have come from another world than the eager city which he sang and exalted. He belonged to it with his whole being, yet he was like some sojourner from afar, astray on its populous pavements. Per- haps he was the prototype of a new kind of American. To the eyes of Europeans, the Yankee seems phlegmatic; but to his compatriots themselves the phlegm of Whitman was baffling. One might say that he partook of the immense in- difference of Nature. Events appeared to affect him no more than pieces of inorganic matter, and in circumstances in which the least excitable of men would have lost his head, leaped with indignation, or burst with laughter, he never flinched. All idea of pose necessarily out of the question (it is enough to have considered Walt but a second to be per- suaded that he had not an ounce of pose in his manners), was it the lack of nervosity or perfect stability? If we take into account the electric impressionability inhering in the pages of his work, we are inclined to believe that a miraculous equilibrium was the reason of this detachment of the "un- affected animal." If you deem the eye of the pachyderm stupid, perhaps you will find the look of Walt expressionless — even slow and sleepy. The eye of Walt contains a reflec- tion Burroughs: Walt Whitman, p. 61. 108 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK tion of the inner cosmic peace, a little of the divine peace of eternity. We therefore find ourselves before one of those numerous antimonies of which superior beings are made. If, by his invincible penchant toward indolent and dawdling absorp- tion of life, Walt evokes rather the South, he displays a temperament truly of the North, by his absolute empire over himself. The same individual who vibrated in his very depths to imponderable psychic emotions, and who, in the evening of life thinking with a shuddering of heart and of the senses, confessed his "numerous tearing passions" was capable of Himalayan impassableness. The ardent curiosity which drew him toward all aspects of multitudinous life, the thrill of his vivid sensibility, all is resolved into that sovereign calmness which his friends loved. A man who has pushed his investigations in the spiritual domain as far as any one re- mains throughout by his attitude the brother of the rumi- nants and the hills. And we admire this unusual blending, in recognizing how much the world of emotions thus pro- claims its affinities with the inorganic world. All the con- trasts converged in his being to recompose a synthesis in which the universe appeared one in him. There are no more water-tight compartments; the material world and the spiritual world operate the supreme reconciliation in the body and soul of one individual, "Walt Whitman, a cosmos." Walt's imperturbability is based on an absolute inner composure. Not less does the repose of his countenance bear the imprint of the life into which he was plunged than does this serenity belong to an epoch of restless- ness, agitation, and conflict. It should be sufficient to assert that he bore within him something very old or very new. This elemental and invariable happiness, born of a perfect balance of his faculties, not of a heroic resolve to "see life en rose," he possessed to an astounding degree. It beamed upon him plentiful and spontaneous and evinced it- "WALT WHITMAN, A COSMOS" 107 self as the instinct of enjoying all his other instincts. His perfect equable temper was but its reverberation. However adverse fortune showed itself, he lost not a jot of his con- fidence. Nothing more easy than to be agreeable with him: never was he to be surprised into raising a discussion. Persons and things were adapted to him as if the great Artisan long before had prepared them for his use. His sweet, tranquil temper forced all misunderstanding and dissipated reserve. He had a clarifying presence. One immediately perceived, on meeting him, that all his physical majesty was accorded him that he might radiate goodness. Beneath this tolerance and this benignity there was no mawkishness: he had, one feels, a rock-like will, a terrible and unconquerable will, which was the foundation of the structure of his personality. When he so wished, he was capable of displaying a mute haughtiness, in which suddenly culminated all the giant infrangibility of his self. But these occasions are rare: the magnificent and warm simplicity of his greeting was the rule. Any resolution which he had to take never made him seek counsel of any one, and he was slow in his decision. Before adopting it, he was inclined to examine, weigh, balance, for and against it, to allow the arguments to rest and ripen. Walt was not impulsive: circumspection was strong in him and came perhaps from his ancestors mingling with things of the soil. But once his resolution was taken, he would not yield, even if he knew that he was wrong. He had by heritage a strong dose of patience and stubbornness and followed always the "inner call," which his Quaker an- cestors recognized as the supreme power in the world. His disregard of the opinion of another was total, and for him one may say a dead letter. Blame as well as praise left him perfectly indifferent. Touching his personal business, his reserve was extreme. He imparted his plans to no one and he had very decided notions as to what concerned himself alone. Toward certain indiscreet questioners — after he had 108 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK published his poem — he had a manner of his own, not hard, but peremptory, to prove that he intended to remain the master of his house. The entire man was marked with a great natural dignity. Vulgar familiarities did not belong to him. Without even taking into account the exclusive privacy of his life, of the feminine attachments of which no one intimate with him received the secret, this communal and fervent being who pushed freedom to the baring of himself in his poems, had a strong tendency to be secret. He did not permit certain locks to be opened. Walt not only was not inclined to speak of himself but, in general, he spoke very little. His pleasure was to make his interlocutors talk, question, learn. Those close to him have shown the marvellous listener he was. The role of the person silent in conversation fitted him perfectly and that something large, open, and natural, which belonged pecu- liarly to him invited the confidence and provoked the effu- sion of others. He cultivated a certain contempt for business — he had scarcely any aptitude for it, and he let it be known that no matter what business meant to his alert and enterprising compatriots, it did not concern him. When a transaction did not please him, he refused outright the most tempting offers. He ignored concessions. He worked all his life, as an amateur, just enough to earn money for his living and for that of his mother and infirm young brother, thus passing from one business to another, according to the innate in- stinct he had of changing pasture, breaking away, taking vacation whenever the desire took hold of him to be alone in some lost corner of his island, or to make an excursion on the sea where some pilot friend tempted him. The joy of life, the need of contact with life to feel it pass into him, kept him incessantly beyond too absorbing needs. He was closed to the notion of money, and he never had the idea, before he was fifty, of saving part of his salary. The gold "WALT WHITMAN, A COSMOS" ^ 109 fever which exactly at this time was drawing all seekers of adventure to California did not lure him from Brooklyn pavements. Another more serious search engrossed him. For his family, pecuniary care had all the importance which it holds in the families of the poor: for him none. To be sure he had to work that his mother might prepare the meal : but it was a natural thing, like breathing or walking, and he did not trouble to speak of it. The flowers of the field are not disturbed by the water which their celestial nourisher sends them every day. They wait, because they do not doubt. We have noted the one occasion offered him to make money and his regal disdain of it. He was truly for all men of "good sense," an incomprehensible youth. He was not stupid surely, but why so closed to human ambi- tions? . . . He had an idea in the back of his head, one knows not what, which he followed with a sweet, inflexible obstinacy. Is it not strange that a boy like this, without the shadow of patrimony, having only his two strong hands and his calm, heavy brain to live by, would not allow him- self to be drawn by any hope of profit? "He had offers of literary work, good offers," says his brother, "and we thought that he had chances to make money. Yet, he would refuse to do anything except at his own notion — most likely when advised would say: 'We won't talk about that', or anything else to pass the matter off." 1 There was nothing but to let him alone; he was intractable. Moreover, his family did not understand him, though his evident superiority forced itself upon them. He was so different. The father, who certainly never grasped the nobility of this great idler of a boy, was compelled like the others, after ineffectual ratings, to accept him as nature made him. His exquisite mother, bound to him by an infinite tenderness, failing in her humble mind to penetrate the singularities of the child whom she cherished simply with the divine indulgence of love, agreed that after all it was JBueke: In Re Walt Whitman, p. 33. 110 WALT WHITMAN—THE MAN AND HIS WORK perhaps "poetry" the odd things which Walt wrote. For the entire household he was a mystery. But one sole thing could be affirmed, that he was the most affectionate of sons and of brothers, and that in some way impossible to define, he was superior to all of them. "Not only the family asked counsel of him," avows George, his brother, "even when he was a mere youth, but the neighbours also. All of us re- spected his judgment and had consideration for it. He was like us — and yet he was different from us. Strangers, the neighbours, felt that there was something in him out of the ordinary." 1 The more we seek to define it the more conspicuous is the fundamental ingenuousness of the man. From the depth of him awakens the simple, candid, wondering soul of a child, come down for the first time on the road of life. He had need, like a baby, of tenderness and of caresses, he had need to watch the world pass, to know and absorb the slightest details. This enormous candour is perhaps, of all the traits of his character, that which justifies the most fully all the secret reasons of his individuality and of his work. His athletic proportions do not forbid us to see, even to his last day, the soul of a little child: and indeed curiously allied to his strong masculinity one feels in him something of the feminine and the maternal. 2 Everything existed to give him joy, someone said: indubitable sign of simple hearts. He never ceases to contemplate the pageant of the universe, and the joy of living persisted with Walt, just as new as on the day his eyes opened for the first time upon life. He seemed to pass his days enjoying emotions which men in maturity have outgrown, and to experience to ecstasy the Eden joy of the golden age. A soul of incredible youth and of infinite primitiveness was preserved fresh in him to the very grave. In Brooklyn and on Broadway Walt became a familiar iBucke: In Re Walt Whitman, p. 38. 8 Jolm Burroughs: Walt Whitman, p. 49. "WALT WHITMAN, A COSMOS" 111 figure. In the street, the passersby recognized his high stature, his felt hat, his characteristic gait. Sometimes strangers would ask, on seeing him approach, so simple and so big, to what class, to what profession, to what earthly race, he could possibly belong. The gray of his beard and his hair made him appear older than his age, and the most varied conjectures were put forth. "Is he a retired sea cap- tain ?" asks one, "an actor, an officer, a clergyman? Was he once a brigand, or a Negro trader?" "To amuse Walt I frequently repeated these odd speculations upon him. He laughed until the tears ran when once I told him that a very confidential observer had assured me he was crazy." 1 After all, what was he, this strange boy? Was he journal- ist, task master, printer, or some great personage disguised in a suit of serge and a big felt hat? One does not know what to say. He was Walt, and these four letters ensphere all that one can say of him and of other things besides. He was like a demigod of Hellas, again a semi-barbarian, which a miracle had projected at this time in the heart of an Ameri- can city. It is of the poet alone that we must ask an ex- planation of himself contained in these verses of "Song of the Answerer" : Then the mechanics take him for a mechanic, And the soldiers suppose him to be a soldier, and the sailors that he has follow'd the sea, And the authors take him for an author, and the artists for an artist, And the laborers perceive he could labor with them and love them, No matter what the work is, that he is the one to follow it or has follow'd it, No matter what the nation, that he might find his brothers and sisters there. The English believe he comes of their English stock, A Jew to the Jew he seems, a Russ to the Russ, usual and near, removed from none. 2 iBucke: Walt Whitman, p. S3. 2 Leaves of Grass, p. 136. 112 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK For he had that in him which justified all conjectures. With everyone he awakened the sentiment of a close rela- tionship. One hesitates to apply to him one epithet more fixed than the other because he had the title to nearly all of them. He was as exceptional as he was ordinary, and he proved the maximum power of the average man and by this he escaped all averages. One would say that his family extended from the man on the wharf to the President of the White House: his sole presence seemed to establish a bond between all and reveal universal relations. We have stated, in examining his origins, how he was Dutch, how strongly he was a son of the Quakers. How much more he appears an American by these contrasts blended in the crucible of a young nationality which partakes of all the races of the Occident! But how much more still, infinitely more, he is man, a man-humanity ! Walt Whitman was an original product of the American soil, a native, an individuality "of new stamp, sui generis" 1 And it is not vain to recognize in him the prototype of a fu- ture humanity, prepared from the foundation of the cen- turies to flourish upon a virgin soil and to mark an era of the species. I am the credulous man of qualities, of ages, of races, 2 speaks Walt Whitman somewhere in his poem. This char- acter of universality is like the final touch which imprints his giant personality with a grandeur well nigh superhuman. At this point, despite his proximity, he appears to certain of his contemporaries like a legendary figure. William O'Con- nor, his friend, describes him a little later with the char- acteristics of a Voyager of the Ages, making a pilgrimage through the world, like Wotan of the Nibelungen. 3 The man was so vast, that still inhabiting the earth, he surpassed common proportions, and was clothed with immortality. iBucke: In Re Walt Whitman, p. 196. ^Leaves of Grass, p. 22. S W. D. O'Connor: The Carpenter, Putnam's Magazine, January, 1868, p. 55. PART THREE "LEAVES OF GRASS" Brooklyn (1855-1862) VIII THE GREAT DESIGN The climax of this life is before us : it is between the age of thirty-five and forty-five that Walt Whitman reaches and passes the summit whose wondrous light lives in him and his work. Two events control the years of 1855-1865, one the publication of the first song of his poem, the other his par- ticipation in the Civil War: both, if not of equal importance as to his future, at least are fundamental in the history of his life. It is between these two dates that the man is full grown. We shall now try to elucidate the first one. His thirtieth year having been passed, a great change was wrought in Walt. In appearance, he remains the same man or almost, and his characteristic traits, such as they already appeared when he taught school in Long Island, remain identical. Nevertheless, although the metamor- phosis whence issues the new man who shall occupy us from now on was wholly inner, it is discoverable by certain de- tails, attentively studied, and the more fruitful if the study keep close to him and even in his very setting. Walt of the storiettes, Walt the politician and journalist, who in living his nonchalant life tried to make his impression upon the world in traditional ways, has given place, by disappear- ing little by little, to a new Walt who is absorbed more and more in the contemplation of things and seeks to render more striking and more intimate his communion with life. It was a little after his return from New Orleans that he experienced the first symptoms of this regeneration. The great journey which he had just made into the middle of the continent, the atmosphere of Louisiana, the love shock which he had undoubtedly experienced — all contributed to. 115 116 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK his fecundity. And he listened with a native fidelity to the inner call. True he did not know how to distinguish what the voice was murmuring. It was a new sensation. He would test it further. The spectacles about him which he knew so well all appeared to him in new light, and in him- self a strange, subconscious power solicited him. It was like a measureless expanding of his spiritual being, a prolongation of himself into the external world. He im- agined himself drawn into a new cycle of existence. The people of the village landscape, all environmental things, were before him like an enormous book, which he had many a time read over, but whose pages appeared to him at pres- ent big with meanings heretofore not heeded. With re- awakened eyes he set himself to read anew the old every- day book, and each of its paragraphs plunged him into astonishment. I remained like one absent and I listened to the splendid lessons of things and the reasons of things. They are so splendid that I nudge myself to listen. I do not know what that may be which I hear — I do not know how to say it to myself — it is all so marvelous. Then a religious sense of life filters into him to the full. He must seize the suggestions which haunt him and wait in the expectation of the phenomenon at work within him. Although he perceives something entrancing, the final sensa- tion was long confused. At the same time, an "imperious conviction" forced him to formulate everything which stirred within him. He perceived clearly an impulse. He felt himself called. He had something to do or to say; something must come forth. He was the interpreter of a revelation, he was called to a mission. As to that, no doubt! The powers imparted to him were such that he could not dis- obey, "as total and irresistible as those which make the sea flow or the globe revolve." 1 A revelation, a mission. . . . , Wompleie Prose, p. 268. THE GREAT DESIGN 117 But what? Under what form? There was the uncer- tainty. How express the inexpressible which was buzzing at his ears, the new passion which carried him away? By what words or by what acts interpret the whisper, powerful and sweet, of the thousand confused voices of this sea of impressions which was breaking over him? He had to lis- ten, to see, to search. . . . The daimon which had taken possession of his soul would not let him escape, it would show him the way to deliver his message. In awaiting the sign which should be his destiny Walt plunges with still more entirety into the human tide, and into the realities about him. He does not draw aside, like the ascetics, to contemplate his new self. More and more he consorts with his friends, the people — stage-drivers, boatmen, travellers, men of the street. There is something intensified, more fervent, in the affection drawing him to them. He al- ways had sympathy for the simple and the rude, but now he experiences near them a graver, more emotionalized feeling, a more complete abandon and communion. It was then that he definitely adopted the free and picturesque work- man's garb which he had worn as a printer-apprentice, the garb which among idlers gave him a little celebrity. He felt himself troubled by an incessant need of camaraderie and companionship, which only plain people could fully satisfy. Heretofore it was rather the need of knowledge which had made him mingle with the world. To his thir- tieth year he manifested himself the great bystander, the great inquirer, the great absorber. Now aspirations of fra- ternity dominate his sensibility, he needs to embrace, to breathe, to enjoy individuals, to be loved as he loves. O the joy of my soul leaning pois'd on itself, receiving identity through materials and loving them, observing characters and absorbing them, My soul vibrated back to me from them, from sight, hearing, touch, reason, articulation, comparison, memory, and the like. 1 ^Leaves of Grass, p. 146. 118 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK His outlook was not the same as that before 1848. It was like a total deepening of himself, in which the world, viewed from a different angle, participates. Little by little his life moves about one centre — the luminous sheaf of the new concordances which manifest themselves every day be- tween his me and his not me — and he pencils innumerable notes in which are reflected the state of his soul and his trans- formed consciousness. His life, richly lived up to this, but without any other aim than to live, converges absolutely toward one great design whose accomplishment will occupy him to the very last day of his life. After ten years of literary and journalistic Bohemia the man awakens, inundated by a faith whose expression he is searching. Various interpretations as to the nature of this crisis, the capital event of the poet's life, have been at- tempted by his biographers. We are not surprised that they are misleading: because there are no scales for a test so im- ponderable. The awaking of genius is a phenomenon which does not become clear by the aid of argument. For it was surely to the birth pangs of a genius that Walt was a prey from the time he had felt a total renewal of his conscious- ness. According to Bucke, whose opinion we cite by reason of his authority as the "authorized" biographer of Whitman, at a precise epoch of his life which we do not know, but that it was toward his thirty-second or thirty -third year, a sud- den illumination was bestowed upon him as upon the great prophets of history, Buddha, Paul, or Mahomet, by which he was endowed with a new and superhuman sense which Bucke calls "cosmic consciousness." Describing the phe-» nomenon rigorously like a scientific fact, he comments upon certain passages of Leaves of Grass which appear to confirm his hypothesis. 1 Thus, in admitting this conjecture Walt had known positively his road to Damascus. I confess that I feel within me an insurmountable anti- iBucke: In Re Walt Whitman, pp. 329-347. THE GREAT DESIGN 119 pathy to this explanation of a fact, which we should accept as we accept the grass, the wave, or the pebble, without sub- jecting the mind to the torture of discovering first causes. Mr. Binns, who revived this recently in adapting it to his own temperament, has not more convinced me. It is in- disputable that Walt was dowered with a "cosmic conscious- ness" to a degree which a very small number of men or super- men have attained, and I find particularly happy the for- mula of Bucke, which may stand. As to the explanation itself, in the simplest form of Bucke's statement, it seems to me almost puerile. To make a miracle intervene in such a life is it not to belittle it? All the greatness of the poet protests against such a postulate, and his formidable realism forbids any esoteric explanation. In the whole of his being and in the entirety of his life he presents himself to us in the brilliant light of humanity. Now genius, even that of a prodigious poet-prophet such as Walt Whitman appears, is not, I am sure, outside humanity. And every conjecture which tends to represent him with the features of someone Illuminated, even of a very Saint, is evidence of an incom- prehension of the man. How vain to found upon certain poetic affirmations the proof of a supernatural vision, which had from one moment to another transformed him! I cannot be awakened, for nothing looks to me as it did before. Or, else I am awake for the first time, and all before has been a mean sleep. 1 Is it not clear that he is moved here by the illumination of genius? Why wish to Hx a precise date for this transforma- tion, when all that we know of the inner travail of Walt during the six or seven years which preceded the flowering of his book proves that it was not instantaneous, but slow and gradual. Why not hold to the simple truth of certain confessions of the poet, such as: "After continued personal ambition and effort, as a young fellow, to enter with the rest ^Camden Edition, Ul, p. 287. 120 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK into competition for the usual rewards, business, political, literary, etc. — to take part in the great melee, both for vic- tory's prize itself and to do some good — after years of those aims and pursuits, I found myself remaining possessed, at the age of thirty-one to thirty-three, with a special desire and conviction. Or rather, to be quite exact, a desire that had been flitting through my previous life, or hovering on the flanks, mostly indefinite hitherto, had steadily advanced to the front, defined itself, and finally dominated everything else." 1 Surely Walt sufficiently explains himself. The beginning of this metamorphosis seems to me simpler and greater than all the piled-up hypotheses. For fifteen years he was in the grip of life. He bathed himself in floods of impressions, of visions, of sounds, of joys. He lived as few beings on the earth have lived. He absorbed realities with the appetite of a young giant. In his imperturbable manner, he was gorged with emotions, he enjoyed through all his pores. For thirty years all the life with which he was satiated, all the accu- mulated joys, the thousand shows and assimilated expe- riences germinate in him, flower into a new consciousness by whose light the recesses of the universe, the secrets of the world of souls, the supreme "laws not written" were before him like the words of a book. Walt has been en- grossed by facts, by men, by objects, by influences of nature. It was their prolonged contact, every day, free, which awak- ened, at a propitious moment, the powers sleeping in him. His new self was the natural fruit of his immense quest. The final explanation of the crisis is fully contained in this word of sublime candour, which he addresses to himself: Walt, you contain enough, why don't you let it out then? 2 Why be astonished at such a wonderful result, when de- termined by genius, the intensifier par excellence? He had ^Leaves of Grass, p. 426. Hd., p. 50. . THE GREAT DESIGN 121 met that amplitude by his extraordinary individuality. In this reacting to the world exercised upon him, in acknowl- edgment of the joyous confidence which he lavished upon it, his self remains the principal factor; and ancestral influences, races, environment, his previous life, all concur in preparing this result which astonishes. He had a heart full of the substance of life and one drop sufficed to overflow it. And now he was inundated. An interior light appeared and grew, till its rays enveloped finally the entire horizon, placing in relief the smallest de- tails of the landscape and their place in the divine ensemble. Through the identity of his being and of the world he per- ceives the unity of all, so that there flows into him the sense of the miracle of creation. To the extent that the pulsa- tions of the external world echo within him, and that he himself is projected into this external world, the universal relation and the great consubstantiality of things, their monomultiplicity, become illumined with certitude. He arrives at the consciousness which supreme geniuses alone of the race have possessed, and it is not in his brain that it dwells only: his little finger is also penetrated with it. He is mastered by the power of a thing lived and felt, as one is by heat or cold. It is not a philosophic conviction, but a reality of every day which he will never weary in proving. When he contemplates himself, it is the radiant abyss of the whole he fathoms and when he casts his glance about him, it is his own being which he sees reflected in the face of things. Iden- tity, identity! Law supreme! Walt slowly walks in a universe of wonders which his days are not long enough to count. For these new truths which he discovers everywhere are but confided to him that he may in his turn reveal them to the world. He is the man predestined to be the inter- preter of a great Idea and, confident in his star, he obeyed and yielded himself to the impetus. . . . That undoubtedly was the whole miracle, and the revela- tion which Walt received was akin to those which have given 122 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK birth in the past to the marvellous legends of Sinai, of the road to Damascus, of the voice of the Maid, or the nymph Egeria. Only there was one difference: it is that perhaps such a revelation was never manifested to a man whose physical constitution, radiant and magnetic personality, attributes, character, marked him as king of his kind, before even he yielded to it. But between the Walt before and the Walt after the crisis there was no interruption. The second was superadded to the first, the new man sprang from the old one, as a flower from the stem, as the stem from the seed, after the strength of the soil had determined its germination. For years the great Idea was incarnated under successive forms in proportion as it elucidated itself. It simmered a long time in him before arriving at the boiling point. He did not settle all at once on the medium by which he was to make himself heard, that is to say, of communicating his message to the world. Entirely self-absorbed in the con- templation of the great world, he revolved in his mind many projects. Walt's metamorphosis took form in exalting in him the autochthonous and of increasing tenfold the innate pas- sion which he possessed of his race, his soil, and his time. He was American in every fibre, and the previous revelation, which discovered to him both his own being and humanity about him, clarified the image of a heroic individual, the individual American, the democrat of the nineteenth cen- tury, and the magnificent Federation of States, in growth like an organism, expanding every day, beyond rivers and mountains and deserts to the limits of the sea-guarded continent. It was then in glorifying this new human type, and this collectivity united by new bonds, that Walt would fulfill his mission. He was come to justify his time and the labour of his people. He had made the trial of Democracy and he was about to publish his testimony. His deep knowl- edge of the crowd and of all the aspects of multitudinous humanity were a deposit within him of an enthusiastic faith; THE GREAT DESIGN 123 upon this his new spiritual insight would enable him to erect the monument which he would dedicate to the exaltation of the modern times. Among these projects, these embryos, these tentatives which he had in mind before coming to the definitive ex- pression of himself, it is necessary to mention the Primer, recently discovered among his papers. We possess only the outlines of the book which he wished to give this singular title. It was, as a variant indicates, a "First Book of Words or A. B. C. for the use of young Americans, of Scholars, Orators, Professors, Musicians, Judges, Presidents, etc." (Notice the significant place which presidents occupy, the tail of the procession led by the individual, King of Democracy.) The note of the future poem already vibrates in this sketch. In developing his theme, which is to exalt the life of words, the evocative and representative power of words, which come to us charged with realities, which are realities, to affirm the importance of the voice, accent, to incite America to create boldly a rude speech, iiew, autochthon- ous, suggestive, full of idiomatic expressions, in touch with the time, the character of the people, instead of European expressions, anti-modern, which have no signification for the humanity of the new world — Walt proves himself al- ready in possession of some of his fundamental motifs. The substance of Leaves of Grass was already formed at the time of the first editing of this outline, whose date remains uncer- tain. One merely knows that he worked on it till 1857 and that he made additions to it later. The Primer, in his original intention, was to be the subject of a lecture; but later he had the idea of making a book of it. But lecture and book were abandoned, and the Primer remained in its rudimentary form. It is that the sap circulating in these pages flowed into another project, the one definitive and actual, his poem; the form alone remained inchoate. 1 During a sufficiently long period the idea of fulfilling his , *Walt Whitman: An American Primer, Edited by Horace Traubel. 124 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK mission in lecturing throughout the country preoccupied him. According to the colourful expression of his mother, he then wrote whole "barrels" full of subjects for lectures. Discourse appeared to him the mode the most direct and most effective of widely spreading the truths which he champ- ioned. That was the cherished idea which he weighed, debated, looked at on all sides, with the slowness and the circumspec- tion which he always showed in the elaboration of his plans; and to do this he was fully prepared since his adolescence. He devoted himself to a thorough study of the art of oratory, of gesture, of elocution, and of tonality, etc. . . . He was even drawn into debating clubs which he assiduously frequented and at the age when the first ardours of battle seethed within him. At one and twenty, when he was still at Long Island, he had discoursed abundantly, and not with- out success, in the meetings prepared for the election of Van Buren to the presidency. 1 His recitations of Shakespeare and Homer, alone near the sea, or to his friends, the coachmen and boatmen, likewise prepared him for the role of orator. He had in mind a vigorous, living, simple, and striking man- ner of expressing himself in public, as remote from the nasal- ity of the preacher or the shouting of platform politicians, as from the parlour talker. He would try upon his auditors the effect of his personal magnetism and would establish such communion between them and him that they would take part, that is to say, in the action — in his discourse. He wishes "to hurry and plow up the soil of the hearer con- stantly dropping seed therein, to spring up and bear grain or fruit many hours afterward, perhaps weeks and years afterward." 2 The papers published after his death by his testamentary executors are scattered with fragments, sketches, and indexes relative to his platform project. He was so strongly attached to this, that in spite of the appear- iH. B. Binns: Life of Walt Whitman, p. 33. *Camden Edition, VIII, p. 251. THE GREAT DESIGN 125 ance of his poem, he resumed it in 1857 and '58 and engaged all practical means to execute it. His plan was to travel through the country with a program of lectures, which he would deliver for a moderate price and of which he would himself sell advance printed copies. 1 They made "an in- tegral part of his schemes for self -presentation." 2 Very early in his life the idea of presenting himself direct allured him. Such was his faith in the miracle of his own presence and the certitude that he had always had of the effluence of his personality physical and moral: nevertheless he made a speech, but once, the 31st of March, 1851, at the Artists Union of Brooklyn. The text of this address appeared in a daily 3 and he even kept some paragraphs in the selection of his juvenilia, 4 which show us that at this time the man al- ready was passing through the first phase of his crisis. There is a notable passage where he strongly puts forth heroic beauty of conduct, that is to say beauty lived, as against the represented beauty by artists, which shows him big with his new consciousness. This first intention of lecturing through the country, never completely abandoned, but unceasingly postponed, shows at least how from the beginning he felt the importance of his mission. We already clearly perceive that he was not con- cerned for himself, as are other geniuses, in the production of a literary Work, verse or prose, in an artistic or an oratori- cal work, conceived for itself, but in an apostolate best adapted to his idea. He was to translate and to give him- self, him, Walt Whitman, in the form the- most appropriate to his time and his milieu. He was stirred to put himself in touch with humanity. That had come to be the great ambition of his life and so re- mained : an ambition as immense as his share of human am- l Camden Edition, Introduction, pp. liv-vii. 2 Id., IX, p. xvi. 3 Brooklyn Daily Advertiser, April 3, 1851. See extracts in Bliss Perry's Walt Whitman, pp. 50-55. Complete Prose, p. 371. 128 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK bition was small. And now he perceived that his ten or fifteen previous years had been dominated by the idea of ful- filling a mission to humanity something greatly beyond the vain hopes of the candid and proud hours of adolescence. Per- haps he would realize it by these lectures. In the end fate was fulfilled in other ways. Whatever preparations he made for the role of lecturer and whatever was his prestige as a man, we easily understand why the great project should remain on paper. His temperament was too hostile to a manifesta- tion of this kind. However free and natural had been his manner of addressing an audience, his profound aversion to all parade would have been an almost insurmountable ob- stacle. Every platform is a play in miniature and to every good orator certain gifts of the actor are indispensable. And Walt, although he adored it, was certainly not gifted for the theatre. These shrouded preparatory years (1851-54) and these suggestive notes which have come to us can alone suggest the character, hint a period of internal effervescence and of labour, fervent, assiduous, persistent; Volume IX of the Cam- den Edition, padded with signs, with notations, with hints, preserves the reflection of this. Thought fuses from him in long jets, as though he were trying the mould into which to pour it. That which especially strikes one is that his diverse projects, during these ardent and meditative years in which the man is labouring to rid himself of his matrices, do not dif- fer except in expression, still badly defined. Since he had listened to the clear call of his renewed consciousness, "the flush of his faith had been from the beginning one and the same character." The moment comes in 1854 probably when these various plans which he had meditated -had to be put away to make room for a work whose great lines, heretofore glimpsed, now impose themselves upon his mind. At the time he counted on resuming later his other projects: and the event disap- pointed him. It was in climbing the scaffolding of his THE GREAT DESIGN 127 houses, hammer and saw in hand, that the idea came to him of a poem which should be as the Gospel of the new spirit, such as his race and his time potentially contained, a great native Book for the use of the living of to-day; and during the intervals left him from the business of carpentry, slackened circumstantially, he revolved and matured it. It was the final realization of his great design, and all the essence of his previous sketches was accumulating for it, creating a new form whose contours, still indefinite, were to be after all very different from the primitive project. For if this was to be positively a poem, the raison d'etre of the book as well as its proportions should be made a thing outre, strange, new, without precedent. . . . But the essential — it was that Walt was to be able to express himself. The gestation had been long. After five years of listening, ruminating his plans, taking notes almost everywhere, under the immediate dictation of impressions before the living model, at the Opera, on the pavements, on the ferries, near the sea, obedient to the inspiration of the moment which brought to birth some- times some poetical lines, sometimes the paragraph of a lecture, he had come at last to master the bond which would make one whole of these particles; he had done with frag- ments. In the elaboration of his work he had advanced, as in life, without hurry or feverishness, in idling, in pausing, in repassing a number of times the same roads, waiting that the fruit be ripe to pluck it. Walt then, compelled by his poetical call, quitted his carpentry and set to work. The task was difficult, and ac- cording to his own confession the writing of it did not come easily. He constructed a thing entirely new, and he had to endure the terrible struggle of great innovators with their material. He had especially great trouble in leaving out of his work "the stock 'poetical' touches" of which convention had filled the poetical arsenal — those he himself at one time used, and of which he was now eager to rid himself at one stroke. One time, we are told, pushed by desire for solitude 128 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK and liberty, lie retreated to a wild and desolate promontory to the east of Long Island where not a living being dwelt; there he wrote a first version, and dissatisfied with it, he threw it into the sea. 1 He loved to recite to himself, in pac- ing along some lonely shore, fragments of his work, as he had many times declaimed Homer and Shakespeare, to test their effect in the open air, accompanied by the deep bass of the ocean. He destroyed as many as five manuscripts before obtaining his definite text. Walt was obstinate like the old Quakers of his family and he wrestled hand to hand with the word till he had conquered it. Early in the summer of 1855 the book was ready. Walt did not have the absurd idea of carrying his manuscript to a publisher, who would no doubt have asked if he were jesting with him. Walt was a printer and could say with Miche- let: "Before writing books, I have actually composed them: I have put together the letters before putting together the ideas." Above all, it would have been expensive to have placed his leaflets in mercenary hands, and he was intensely eager that all the details of the make-up of the volume should be in his own hands. He had his own idea in the matter and was not indifferent to the book, for the manuscript was well prepared. He went then to his friends, Andrew Rome and his brother who kept a job printing office in Brooklyn, at the corner of Fulton and Cranberry streets, and arranged with them for the printing of the volume. He went himself every day before the case and composed with his own hands the greater part of it. .Walt duly preserved his self-posses- sion and never allowed the movements of his intimate being to appear on his face of the "unaffected animal," at this | decisive moment more than at any other; but one suspects the emotion which in spite of himself must have sometimes | penetrated him while undisturbed he set his type. HIS BOOK, his BOOK! His Bible, for whose message he had searched during the years, to be formulating the paragraphs ! *0. L. Triggs: Selections, Introduction, p. xxiii. THE GREAT DESIGN 129 The revelation which he was about to spread through the world, and which should re-echo beyond the centuries: it was there, between his fingers, he was handling syllables of fire. . . . The man with the ruddy face and grayish beard should have lived then grave and intense moments, en- veloped in the mantle of his placidity. The poet revised his proofs slowly, sometimes carrying them to the seaside to re- read again aloud and to verify the impression which his pages gave in nature's setting. The volume appeared in the first days of July, 1855. Walt realized his enterprise in secret. He confided to no one, and unless by certain fugitive symptoms, by his more frequent escapes, by the number of pages which he was writ- ing, it is hardly possible that his family discerned the intense travail which was being wrought in him. His book had grown like seed sown, which spreads invisible and silent, beneath the soil. Who among his relatives and comrades would ever have suspected that this Walt, the idler, the friend of coachmen and of pilots, the frequenter of Broadway, the quiet and affectionate boy, so close to the heart of the simple, could cherish a design as mad, as unsuitable as that of being the singer of his Race and his Age? Without any preliminary advertisement, without ceasing a single instant to show himself the most everyday of men, this great phleg- matic being gave at one stroke his measure, and projected beyond him his real self, his formidable self, concealed from all. If Walt took the wisest precautions with a view of pro- ducing with his book the maximum of effect, he could not have succeeded more in amazing people than he did in an- nouncing himself with this sudden positiveness and this terrible assurance. For the little household the event almost coincided with a bereavement. July 11th, some days after the bringing out of the enigmatic book, the old carpenter died. The last farmer of West Hills died at the very hour when his son proved to the world the virility of the blood from which he sprang. Walt, who loved him, accepted this loss , 130 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK with a fortitude with which he confronted all strokes of fate, and continued on his way. The hour struck in his life: it was when after having ab- sorbed all that the world offered to him of emotion, he gave himself as nurture, when, after having been fertilized, he be- came in his turn procreator. For Walt was not ungrateful to life; he returned to the great current all that he had re- ceived from it with his Personality superadded. IX THE FIRST SONG One cannot resist an emotion when slowly fingering this small quarto, for which the bard of the New World himself set the type, and to whose pages he committed his great message. O the poor and fantastic volume, banal and touching — generations shall respectfully defile before it, per- haps, when it lies in the hall of honour of a great museum, not far from the first folio of Shakespeare. . . . Bound in dark green cloth, very ordinary looking, a naive decoration of flowers and leaves on the cover; in the middle sprawls, repeated on the other side, in gilt letters, now faded, this singular title, this enigmatic title, at once humble and haughty, this title which includes a whole program, itself a marvellous conception, simple and profound like all great things of genius: Leaves of Grass. To render it more eloquent the letters which compose it are extended a little awkwardly in tiny roots and leaves: these are not dead and rigid forms of the alphabet but living letters which germinate and imbibe their substance anywhere One hundred pages, printed in large type on ordinary paper, and the text, by its strange arrangement, gives, at first glance, the impression of a pell-mell of uneven verse sentences: that is all the volume. From the first page no light comes, for it contains only the title, Leaves of Grass, followed by these words: Brooklyn, New York, 1855. This singular anonymat suggests a blending of pride and of modesty : a name is read though, that of Walter Whit- man, but concealed where, according to the American custom, is inscribed "All rights reserved." To make up for this, a portrait faces the title, the famous portrait which we 131 132 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK have described, of a young man, in workman's garb, with a bearing at once firm and nonchalant, with the air of a sailor, a docker, or a cowboy. Walt signed his book with himself instead of his name. To some this singular likeness ap- peared a defiance, to others a pose. In reality, the author does not pose, he imposes with a cool assurance. The make- up of the book shows an inelegance, perhaps intentional, and suggests, outwardly a positive taste of the primitive. The contents are more difficult to describe. However accustomed we may be to all the audacities of form and feeling, the strange man who did not wish to sign his name except with his likeness baffles still at first contact. After a preface of ten pages, printed in double columns, itself but a long poem in prose, where the author expounds and develops the essentials of his great Idea, follow a dozen lyric bits, without other titles than the volume. One of them, the first, fills more than half the quarto : it is the future Song of Myself — key of the entire work, such as we now have it. Are these then poems? We do not know. These verses have a rhythm as the wind and the sea have a rhythm— a rhythm which one does not perceive till one has closely scrutinized them; but any versification were it the most comprehensive — to lay aside rhyme, the very idea of which is remote — would not know how to justify them. The work of a fool or a mystifier, readers must think, even in- telligent ones, of the year 1855; and we need not be much astonished that, to our own day even, Leaves of Grass appears to the mass a riddle. These lyric pages repelled at once by their chaotic and barbaric expression. Their enormous novelty raised an obstacle between the generality of readers and the man who sings himself, him and his nation, distinct yet blended in one | same embrace. They were like rude chants, filled with raucous accents of a new world where no literature has yet sprung, and they revealed a formidable exaltation of created things and of limitless life. One might believe the anony- THE FIRST SONG 133 inous rhapsodist tried to force the entire onomatopoeia of wild nature into his book. Since the age of the great bards of Greece and of India, the world had unlearned the sound of such a voice which resurged from the bosom of modern humanity with an accrued power, charged with new significance, bodying forth the aspirations of an Aboriginal of American cities. From these pages sprang a new Adam, resplendently nude, who shocks by his unwonted proportions and his disdain of all ornament, big, bearded, exhaling the wild odour of life. ... In his preface, which is itself a manifesto, the new author explained his design: according to him the United States offered to a true and great poet the most splendid themes the ages and civilizations have known. These States conceal an enormous beauty which native bards not rhymers manipulating syllables and emotions imported from Europe, should justify by their songs, tallying them to the immensity of the continent, to the fecundity of its people, to the appetites of a proud race, fluent and free. And the portrait in the book seemed to say, accentuating as it were, the noble and calm confidence in himself from whom flowed the preface: "I, Walt Whitman, American of the people, I am come to show the way to these new bards, to sing America as she needs to be sung and thus reveal her to herself. As in former times, the portrait of kings in court costume was published, at the head of the chapter dedicated to their reign, I present me to you as the poetical represent- ative of an age, as the one by whose mouth America is sung." And with a candid faith and an overwhelming audacity the man in the large felt hat, the friend of stage-drivers and of boatmen, celebrated himself, the delights of his body and the intoxications of his heart, with the shouts of a lover, returning in floods the bewildering joys which the world gave him. When you hold this book in your hands you forget that you touch a book: you touch a man who thrilled, rejoiced, was exalted, was diffused, in linking his people, his time, and yourself to his fervours, to his colossal faith, to 134 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK his intoxicated joy. Walt introduced his personality into this book, and the book lives by the very rhythm of his life. He has not introduced only his great and throbbing heart, he has put there his body, the lineaments of his face, his voice, and even his dress. Leaves of Grass, it was a gift Walt Whitman made of himself to you, to me, to the nearest and the farthest, to the Crowd, the most authentic of his companions. Eight hundred copies of the book were printed; these were put on sale in two or three bookstores in New York and Brooklyn. Walt at first fixed the price at two dollars; then not wishing that the price be an obstacle to its circulation, he reduced it one-half. 1 A free list was furnished to the journ- als, to the principal reviews, and to reputable writers. What welcome did the public give to the book into which Walt actually translated himself? At first it was silence. With- out the name of the author, scarcely offered for sale, an- nounced in only one or two friendly newspapers, the volume had nothing to call attention to it. After a certain time, the booksellers, not seeing a single buyer come, asked that the unsold copies be taken away. As for the copies sent to the celebrities, many were returned to the author with insulting comment. It was the prelude to the tempest of abuse to which for long years the man and his work were subjected. Literary men of well-established reputation considered as an affront the sending of this book. Whittier, the great Whittier, threw, we are told, the book into the fire. 2 The Quaker poet disowned the son of Quakers. It is also known that in one editorial room Leaves of Grass, read aloud, furnished an hour of fun to a roomful of New York re- porters, the worse for idleness. 3 And that was pretty much all. Laughter, gross words; there was Walt, with his message left and not paid for. »H. B. Binns: Life of Walt Whitman, pp. 87-88. ^Camden Edition, Introduction, p. liii. Donaldson: Walt Whitman, the Man, p. 51. 3 John Burroughs: Notes, p. 16. THE FIRST SONG 135 Leaves of Grass was out about fifteen days when the author, one morning early, received the following letter, addressed to "Mr. Walter Whitman," a letter which he reread many times from heading to signature, before being sure he was not the sport of an illusion: Concord, Mass., July 21, 1855. Dear Sir, — I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of "Leaves of Grass." I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seems the sterile and stingy Nature, as if too much handi- work or too much lymph in the temperament were making our Western wits fat and mean. I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things, said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire. I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and en- couraging. I did not know, until I last night saw the book advertised in a newspaper, that I could trust the name as real and available for a post-office. I wish to see my benefactor, and have felt much like striking my tasks, and visiting New York to pay you my respects. R. W. Emerson. Thus the great Emerson, then at the height of his reputation, honoured in England as well as America, under- stood. Walt had read right: it was not a perfunctory ac- knowledgment which he had in his hands, but the warmest and freest acceptance which he could have hoped for his message. With his prophet eye, the sage of Concord pierced the rude envelope of his poem, and penetrated its inmost reality. And the man who incarnated the highest thought and the highest poesy of America saluted him as an equal, even as a master, and bowed before him. . . . This astonishing letter, this historic letter, which was — and 136 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK which will always be — as much honour to one who wrote it as to the man who deserved it, was indeed a thunderbolt. Walt was able to foresee much, but he had not foreseen this. And however colossal was his assurance from the first, and clear the conviction of the bearing of his book, he felt possibly, at this very moment, that he had conquered, should he wait centuries. The opinion of Emerson, was it not worth the approbation of a thousand readers? And wholly indifferent as he proved to insults as to panegyrics, the com- fort to him must have been immense. Any other beginner — for, in the new way he had entered upon Walt could but begin — receiving such a letter would have been crazed. With nothing in his cool manner which would betray the emotion he was experiencing, Walt con- tinued to receive the few reviews which here and there Leaves of Grass called forth. The scornful silence of the greater part of the critics and the indifference of the public appeared authoritative. At best from time to time some derisive judgments created diversion, in which the author was treated as a buffoon. The book was not opened ex- cept to create ridicule or exasperation. Walt, running through these appreciations, felt a warmth penetrate him in thinking of Emerson's letter, which was there, in his portfolio. It was then that Walt, seeing his work misunderstood and vilified — he was not prepared for such an ignominious re- ception — and feeling alone with it, bethought himself of a great expedient. Since no one came to lift aloft his trampled banner, he would himself recover it and in com- batting defend the assault. He had friends on the press — he had belonged to it himself for twelve years — and he would use both for his fight. This queer boy, who would not have lifted a finger for the winning of notoriety, and who, not once in his life, made an interested visit to an influential man, wrote three virulent and glowing articles on his book and on himself, which appeared, anonymously, in the Brooklyn Daily Times of September 29th, the Democratic Review of the THE FIRST SONG 137 same month and the Journal of Phrenology of Fowler and Wells, who accepted the agency of his book. 1 By their freedom, the bold and crude way in which the poet describes his personality, and defines the character of his work, these pleas pro domo present themselves as precious documents. A tropical individualism culminates and expands in them with an unmatched luxuriance. Some confessed themselves shocked by such a method of advertising. It was not that. As for the poet, he was not concerned with the success or failure of his book, because his vanity as an author was nothing : but the future of his Idea meant more to him than all the world. In his heart he believed in the revelation which Leaves of Grass announced, as in the movement of the stars. His day would come; but, wise man, he also knew that destiny helps them who help themselves. Emerson was not satisfied to write to the author all the surprise and joy which the reading of his poems gave him. He spoke of them to his friends 2 and to visitors who made the Concord pilgrimage. When one of them, Moncure Con- way, the historian of Thomas Paine, came, he presented to him the quarto with the foliage decorated cover, saying to him: "Americans who are abroad can now return: unto us a man is born." 3 "No man with eyes in his head," says Emerson again to Conway in lending him Leaves of Grass, "but could recognize a real poet in that book." And Con- way was eager to go and see the one Emerson had spoken of in such words. 4 His expression of the power of Walt is un- forgettable: "I went off to myself sleepless with thinking of this new acquaintance. . . . He has so magnetized me, so charged me, with something indefinable." Walt, not having succeeded in selling his disdained book, was reduced to distributing it among his friends and relatives 1 These three articles have been reprinted in In Re Walt Whitman. ^Camden's Compliment to Walt Whitman, p, 61. 'John Burroughs: Walt Whitman, p. 50. 4 Moncure Conway's Walt Whitman, Fortnightly Review, October 15, 1866. 138 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WOEK who probably did not understand it at all but who, through kindness or simple politeness, could not refuse it. The sale of the first edition was null: those of the eight hundred copies which were not gifts must have been thrown away or destroyed, 1 torn up or sold as old paper. It found, however, one buyer, the only one probably : a man stopped in front of a bookstore in Brooklyn, opened the volume, then paid for it. It was John Swinton, who became later a warm friend of Whitman. 2 There was no doubt of it: it was a fiasco. In the general silence, broken only by insulting raillery, there was the magnificent letter of Emerson, and that was all. Walt, in thinking on the fate of his book, thought sometimes that that was enough. Two or three newspapers took the book seriously : The New York Tribune where later insults were not spared him, and Putnam's Magazine dedicated to him sympathetic paragraphs. The only really enthusiastic article which he read is the one of Everett Hale, published in the North American Review of January, 1856: "The book is worth going twice to the store to buy. . . . It does not contain a word intended to attract the reader by its gross- ness." 3 The advice was not followed; but the irony! The unique testimony, frankly eulogistic, which Leaves of Grass produced, was signed by a clergyman. . . . This un- expected precursor merits the homage of the future. It would be wholly to misunderstand Walt to suppose that the frigidity of this reception made him lose a grain of his courage. From day to day, the plan of his enterprise was defined in his own mind. For it was not a complete and definitive book which he meant to offer: the dozen poems represent but the first stratum of a work to which his life was to be consecrated, and which was to grow, story by story, reaching proportions which he already saw; but life iBucke: Walt Whitman, p. 138. H. Traubel: With Walt Whitman in Camden, p. 92. 2 H. Traubel: With Walt Whitman in Camden, p. 24. 8 W. S. Kennedy: Reminiscences of Walt Whitman, p. 85. THE FIRST SONG 139 alone in the successive phases of his individuality should determine its completion. As his friend Bucke indicated later, "a profound part of the plan of the work was the way by which many things in it were left free for future adjust- ment." 1 Leaves of Grass came into the world at an epoch of tur- gescence and unrest in American letters. New aspirations, ideas, which corresponded with economic and political changes, disturbed the literary world. Among the confused notions which floated in the air which young writers seized, was that of an autochthonous literature, which should no longer be subject to European models. The American mind sought an expression of itself and deemed itself ripe for ac- quiring a poetical nationality. With these preoccupations, the lyrists borrowed their motifs from Indian legends — a method somewhat superficial of thus exalting, thus coming close to the origin, the truth of their race. In the salient work of the preceding years certain of these aspirations were visible. From 1848 to 1850 Whittier published The Bridal of Pennacook, the collection of Voices of Liberty, and the Songs of Labour. The Bigelow Papers of Lowell were of 1848, and the Hiawatha of Longfellow, an attempt at an indigenous epic, appeared some months after Leaves of Grass. The theme of these works was certainly American, but their spirit and form were scarcely so: those were of literature — sometimes excellent. A simple comparison between Hia- watha and Leaves of Grass suffices to show how wide apart were the two books appearing the same year. And Emerson was, moreover, among all, the one who most clearly formu- lated the ideal, and suggested, in his discourses, that there should be a real American poet. It was he who was truly the Precursor. This transformation which was operating in American letters was accompanied by an effort of literary decentral- ization. For some time the activity monopolized by New »Bucke: Walt Whitman, p. 137. 140 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK England spread to New York, before but little concerned with literature, and a stirring Bohemia of writers, journalists, poetasters, searching to find in the Metropolitan city the intellectual prestige which had not yet disquieted it. Walt was part of this for some years after he left his island with literary schemes, and the success of the Democratic Review, where he first published his stories, corresponded to this awakening. Some New York writers won celebrity, notably R. H. Stoddard and Bayard Taylor, around whom gravitated a whole coterie of versifiers and essayists, all working more or less at journalism for a living, and some of whom acquired a name. Walt did not belong to this coterie — and he was soon to make himself felt. In short the supremacy, till then uncontested, of the New England writers threatened to be cut into by the new group of New Yorkers. Walt, with his book, seemed then to arrive exactly at the moment to fulfill the desire which suggested but did not de- fine that something new and indigenous whose need was tormenting the American soul. But there: it was so new and so indigenous and Leaves of Grass incarnated the idea which was in the air in a fashion so rude, so adequate, and real, that no one consented to recognize it. The book was flouted by all or nearly all except the great Emerson, who never proved better than in this circumstance his power of prophet. As is usual with fate, the conventional efforts answering to the new aspirations were accepted, and Walt's "barbaric yawp" which no one expected — and whose form and sub- stance were both outlandish — was to be received by shouts and ridicule. There was the man, he whom all anticipated and called for, but as none had dreamed him so great he was passed by without a salute. After half a century America still fails to recognize him. WALT INSULTED Not only was he not discouraged by his rebuff, but he was prepared to commit the same offense with a new daring. Far from exhausting his power, the first spurt of it accelerated its effusion and this time poems burst from him in full leaf- age, heavy and pithy, branching in rich verse. Walt had a cycle to encompass and he pursued at that moment one of his most decisive advances. In the middle of the summer of 1856, just one year after his first attempt, he brought out a second edition. The book was considerably enlarged: it was 16 mo of 385 pages, containing twenty new poems, and this time each poem had a distinct title. The work, in growing, was dis- tinguished as living beings are: more than that, the author was given, after his first bits, to a labour of correction and of revision, which he was to pursue faithfully to the verge of his death. Now the volume bore his name on the cover, also ornamented with leaves. The Preface to the edition of 1855 had disappeared, or rather was transmuted into poems, and the portrait, which made an integral part of the plan of Leaves of Grass, was retained. Walt did not have a publisher, but his friends, Fowler & Wells, the proprietors of the Phrenological Cabinet, on Broadway, were responsible for placing it on sale. Their name did not appear on the first page. Profiting by his first experience, the poet took precaution that the book should not pass unnoticed. He showed the glorious letter of Emerson to his friend, Charles A. Dana, editor of the New York Sun, and Dana, who was also Emerson's friend, advised him outright to publish it: it was 141 142 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK truly too decisive, too magnificent, to be kept in a portfolio. Walt then decided to append it to his poems, followed by a reply in a juvenile strain, one even somewhat rash in its inconsiderate pride, in which he reaffirms the need of a literature candidly autochthonous and manifests his au- dacious intention of satisfying it; the letter also contained a solemn homage to his dear "Friend and Master" Emerson, for having first signalled the shores of the "new continent of interior America.' ' This reply, to speak true, was not very happy and, the day he wrote it, his usual discretion forsook him. Not only did he publish Emerson's letter after his poems, but with the splendid audacity of a beginner and in the very American spirit of an advertisement, he had printed in gold letters on the back of the cover this sentence: "I salute you at the commencement of a great career, It. W. Emerson," which flashed above the name of the author. "I regarded that letter as the chart of an emperor," Walt Whit- man said later, to justify that audacity — for which he never sought to be excused, believing he did right. Since the great voice of Emerson, amid derision, was raised in his favour, he lifted his name like a standard. The appendix also con- tained the collection of reviews which his book had received for the year. These he placed impartially under the eye of the public. Naturally it was insult and ridicule which dominated these pages. Leaves of Grass in this transitory phase of its development already startles by its tremendous beauty. Only the first story of the structure, whose completion he will work at all his life, was built, but such as it was then, it calls forth wonder. He is more master of his art later with his power disciplined; but never does he display so much passion, superabundance, torrential violence. The very titles have immensity, showing the poet in all the intoxication of his genius and of his idea. Listen to them rather: A Poem of Women, Poem of Numbers in One, Poem of the Wonder of the Resurrection of the Wheat, Poem of Singers and of Words of WALT INSULTED 143 PoemSy Poems of Liberty for Asia, Africa, Europe, America, Australia, Cuba and the Archipelago, Poem of Absolute Mira- cles, A Poem of Propositions of Nudity, Poem of Speakers of Words of the Earth .... One seems listening to some First Man uttering in the morning of the world universal words which name things and encircle the earth. In them his arms reach the confines of the globe, his voice dilates beyond the seas. You are overcome by the bewildering and the boundless in these outbursts of an adorer of the total life. And it is not a hollow verbalism nor the cadence of periods which subdues you : you are possessed by these living words whose power is not of other books, but rather of real things. Nevertheless the public did not better understand. The letter of Emerson, whose name shone like a beacon, forced attention, but could not open understandings. If, the first time, the effort of Walt was received with marked indiffer- ence, now it raised a storm of opprobrium and vituperation. A flood of insults, from full throats, rolled upon the 16 mo where were engraved these words in gold letters: "I salute you at the commencement of a great career, R. W. Emerson." After a half century has passed, one cannot, without smiling, turn over the leaves of the brochure 1 in which, four years later, Walt impassively published these testimonies — the most offensive as the most comic, the most furious as well as the most foolish. The vocabulary of insult is somewhat the same at all times and in all countries : but here truly the measure is more than full. The author of Leaves of Grass was more than a fool, he was a satyr: his book was not only a literary crime, but an insult to morals. And while the bigots foamed, the "literary critics," the mob of scribblers dragged in the mire the would-be poet, ignorant of the first principle of the versifier's art. Walt was caught between two fires : he had to endure the malicious or rabid attack of the Boston Puritans or the rude clap-trap ^Leaves of Grass Imprints. 144 WALT WHITMAN—THE MAN AND HIS WORK of his New York confreres. The literary coterie and the parlour flutists writhed in listening to this formidable bass. This bearded giant, with the manners of a docker, who thundered his raucous verses and aspired to the sacred title of bard! It was too droll. A man unshaven and vulgar, a buffoon, who knew nothing of rhyme, and who showed him- self thoroughly ignorant of the niceties which make a real poet, such as salons and academies honour 1 . . . . This brute makes a sensational entrance into literature, with his slow, heavy tread, like the roll of the elephant. He should be returned to his zoological garden. . . . Walt was especially the victim of venomous attacks of a clique of journalists and litterateurs, from whom he always kept aloof. All the coterie more or less conscientiously showed its malice in covering Walt with epigrams and jests. Walt Whitman was a vulgar advertiser, too mediocre to be distinguished in the usual ways of literature: he had published this extraordinary work merely to attract violent attention to himself. So that instead of being de- fended by the New York group, as prototype of a new litera- ture, completely free of New England influence, the author of Leaves of Grass more than the insults of Boston had to meet the assault of these men who harassed him because he was not of them, and from the height of their pettiness, they had but contempt for this rudes indigestaque moles. . . . Walt on his part had but sorry esteem for the "New York scribblers." 2 In a cursory review of this singular brochure of delirious pages of ineptitude and savage enmity, an admirable little monument erected among so many in all ages to human stupidity, one sees all that Walt had to endure these first years — and long afterward — the calvary which he had to climb, with no one near to support him except his own i W. S.JKennedy: Reminiscences of Walt Whitman, pp. 97-98. 2H. Traubel: With Wall Whitman in Camden, pp. 55-61. WALT INSULTED 145 magnificent impassiveness , his own pride of the strong man. He was alone with his work and his immense optimism, and he listened to the insults. For the man himself as much as the book — the man whom he had put into his book was the victim of calumnies. We can understand their fierceness if we consider as a parallel instance what Emile Zola endured when he began. In the paragraphs of the dailies he is shown as a blend of the bully, the satyr, and the clown. Stories were hawked about in which he sometimes figured as an omnibus driver, who dismounted to prepare his poetical salmagundi, sometimes as a kind of Buffalo Bill in red shirt and boots prepared to fight the buffalo. By the vastness of his message he had sown the storm and he commenced to reap it. His capacity as a great innovator was justified by the fury which he encountered. The need of quiet and the out-of-doors after the work of printing his book and the scandal which it called forth drove the poet to the wilds of his island. He needed to be alone with himself and nature, that nature in whose presence he had written some of his first pages; to be close to the sea which had revealed to him the rhythm of his poems, whose rude voice came to him again to justify the rudeness of his verses as when he reread them walking on the beach. . . . "When the book everywhere raised such a storm of anger and condemnation," he said to his friend, Bucke, "I went to the head of Long Island and remained there the end of the summer and the entire autumn — the happiest of my life — around Shelter Island and Peconic Bay. I went to New York later, confirmed in the resolution from which I have never been separated — to follow my poetical enterprise according to my own way, and to complete it the best I could." 1 Fowler & Wells, his publishers, printed and bound an edition of a thousand copies; at least they made the plates, to be prepared for a large issue. In the face of the tempest iBucke: Walt Whitman, p. 26. 146 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK which Leaves of Grass raised they did not wish to compromise their business, then prosperous, and perhaps feared the law- suits threatened by some: they suspended the sale. The number of copies sold could not be counted : it was not large, but there was some undeniable progress. Of the first edition, no more than one or two copies were asked for — some hundreds of this one were disposed of because of the sentence from Emerson in gold letters on the back, and the noise it made — enough to cover the expense of the publishers. But the final result proved identical: after two trials at sea Walt's ship was forced to reenter port because of the violence of contrary winds. He had to wait the propitious moment. He waited four years. Notwithstanding this, the second appearance of Leaves of Grass made a stir in the better literary circles. The work was provocative, it attacked prudery and literary prejudices. And out of all the controversy, a result, the most important of all, came: the battle began. The scandal roused by the bigots and snobs exercised the peril of complete indifference. They were present at the first skirmishes of a battle which lasted during the poet's life, and which endures to-day, for or against Leaves of Grass. The first protesters were to be the surer builders of the final victory. In the eyes of a few Walt became a personality — strange, detestable, or attractive — as he was, for ten years, among the crowd of his anonymous comrades of the people. The most interesting call which he received after the edition of 1856 was from Thoreau, who came to see him in Brooklyn one day in November. The author of Walden, another great book which appeared two years before, was accompanied by Bronson Alcott, the transcendentalist philosopher, who had already come to see Walt. Both were intimates of Emerson. If Alcott seemed to have admired Walt Whitman unre- servedly, the latter made, upon "the young god Pan" as Emerson called his friend Thoreau, an impression curious and profound, which we find described with admirable sin- WALT INSULTED 147 cerity in two of his letters to Harrison Blake. 1 The lover of nature and the anarchist dreamer found himself both attracted and repelled by the florid-faced giant and his un- usual book, which won him by bewildering him. His in- stinct of the primitive and his artistic sensibility carried him forcefully toward the man who translated with such power the elemental emotions of life, but his savage misanthropy separated him from the passionate lover of crowds. Thoreau was truly much impressed — and did not conceal it — by the personality of Whitman not less than by his poetical message. His testimony has a singular value. He expected to be met by a loud-voiced boxer, with rowdyish manners, and he found himself before a good Colossus, gentle and calm, whose flushed face contrasted not less astonishingly with his gray beard, than his simple and courteous manners clashed with the picture made of him, from his poems. " He is apparently the greatest democrat which the world has seen," wrote Thoreau in recalling his visit. "He suggests sometimes something superhuman ... he is a great type." Thoreau told Walt that Leaves of Grass reminded him of the great oriental poems and asked if he knew them. Walt an- swered, "No, tell me about them." One passage of their con- versation was sufficient to flash the difference in their spiritual outlook. The Walden hermit expressed unreservedly all the contempt the crowd inspired in him, universal suffrage, politics, adding, "What is there in the people?" and Walt was shocked in his intimate feeling. It seemed to him that Thoreau insulted the good people of Brooklyn of whom he was proud, and his comrade workers. 2 Here was a curious instance, enough to weaken all possible conjectures: alone, opposed by silence and execration, fine souls, men of letters like Emerson, Thoreau, Sanborn, Conway, whom education, mode of life, heredity, should have kept aloof from this poet, recognized the particular l H. D. Thoreau: Letters to Various Persons, pp. 141-2, 146-8. *H. H. Gilchrist: Anne Gilchrist, p. 237. 148 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK grandeur of the man and his book. From the first, it was only the Concord group who were aware that something out of the usual and truly new had sprung from the American soil — however serious may have been their reserve. "I feel that he is essentially foreign to me," wrote Thoreau after his visit to Brooklyn; "but his appearance captivates me. . . ." And as Leaves of Grass unchained the light- nings of Boston, the fortress of Puritanism, it transpires that Walt had, in Massachusetts, his first admirers and his most irreconcilable adversaries. The same year Emerson sent to Carlyle the volume which he was the first to salute, and with it this note : "One book, last summer, came out in New York, a nondescript monster, which yet had terrible eyes and buffalo strength, and was indisputably American — which I thought to send you; but the book throve so badly with the few to whom I showed it, and wanted good morals so much, that I never did. Yet I believe now, again, I shall. It is called 'Leaves of Grass,' — was written and printed by a journeyman printer in Brooklyn, New York, named Walter Whitman; and after you have looked into it, if you think, as you may, that it is only auctioneer's inventory of a ware- house, you can light your pipe with it." * Emerson spoke in the same way to another, with his sweet smile and his pene- trating irony in which there was no malice, that Leaves of Grass affected him as a compound of Bhagavad-Gita and the New York Herald. Cleverness was respected at Concord and humour always had its rights. The speech circulated and was interpreted as an epigram without reflecting that always in the deep thought of Emerson there was perhaps something implied in that pleasantry. So, for the second time, Walt did not succeed in delivering his message. A more serene season had undoubtedly come. In the interval, he reconsidered a favourite project which he had already had in mind, when he was seeking a means of ex- pression, that of lecturing throughout the country. He ^Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson, H, p. 251, WALT INSULTED 149 needed to be understood. For this he would have to induce others to understand. Perhaps if he were to explain himself face to face with the public, he would force a hearing, his living and magnetic word would penetrate the wall of mis- understanding which separated him from the world. He needed to create a "popular foretaste of himself" 1 which should prepare the way for his message. He even formu- lated his project in a note, found among his papers after his death. From now on, two concurrent expressions. They are to expand, amic- able, coming from a common source, but each carrying its individual and distinct mark. First, the Poems, Leaves of Grass as of Intuitions, the Soul, the Body, (male or female) descending laws, social routine, creeds, literature, to celebrate the inherent, the red blood one man in himself and one woman in herself. Songs of thoughts and wants hitherto suppressed by writers. Or it may be avowed to give the personality of Walt Whitman, out and out evil and good whatever he is or thinks, that sharply set down in a book, the spirit commanding it. Second, Lectures, of Reasoning, comparisons, Politics, the intellectual, the aesthetic, the desire for knowledge, the sense of richness, from an American point of view. Also in Lectures, the meaning of Religion as statement, everything from an American point of view. 2 He thus thought of fashioning for the United States two "athletic volumes," for his printed lectures would form another book, which should explain the first. He lingered a while about this project, finally to abandon it. He left the Leaves to battle alone for itself. People would under- stand when the time came. In any case, the opinion of the outside world had no in- fluence upon his real self. He lost nothing of his immanent optimism; he abided the moment to launch his bark a third time. He had time with him. . . . Those who carry in their breasts eternal things always have time. No — Walt was not hurried, and above all, he had no reason to abandon Wamden Edition, Introduction, p. liv. 7 Id., pp. lv-lvi. 150 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK his destiny: "I am sure of one thing," writes Bucke, "and it is that the attitude and course of Walt Whitman these following years (the failure of the 1856 edition) form the most heroic part of all his career. He went on his way with the same enjoyment of life, the same ruddy countenance, the same free, elastic stride, through the tumult of sneers and hisses, as if he were surrounded by applause; not the slight- est degree abashed or roused to resentment and opposition. The poems written directly after the collapse of this second edition are, if possible, more sympathetic, exultant, arrogant, and make larger claims than any." 1 As to Walt's occupations during the four years following the second edition of Leaves of Grass no precise detail has come to us. He continued probably his favourite mode of life — moderate work — he gave six or seven hours a day to remunerative work 2 — interrupted by idling on the streets, on the ferries, hours passed with the frank lads of cordial manners, or in excursions on the bay or to the country. We only know, thanks to vistas on his life then, that they were sunny, communal years, when he lived, more freely than ever, the life of his poems. The intensity of his poetical labour at this time proves that the great part of it was given to the constructing his book, which grew a story every time it was returned to him. Not only he reached then the age of his greatest creative power, but he is close to his fortieth year, quickly reached, quickly passed, when his individuality as man was supreme. His marvellous health was in full tide, and all his faculties, including the one which empowered him to look into the souls of men as into an open book, reached their complete flowering. A rough and royal beauty was wholly his, such as still strikes us in an admirable portrait, undated, but which must have been about I860. 3 His contact with iBucke: Walt Whitman, pp. 141-142. m.: p. 34. 'Reproduced in Camden Edition, I, p. WALT INSULTED 151 everyday humanity was never more fervent, his need to absorb and to expand never more fully satisfied than then. It was between 1855 and 1861 that he passed a great number of hours with his friends, the pilots and stage drivers, and that he knitted in the world of workingmen the most solid bonds. Thomas Gae's testimony of Walt at this time is vivid — his gladiatorial frame, his tender solicitude toward a hard-handed band of men. 1 It is evident also from his notes that an intense intellectual labour filled these years. He began to absorb history, geog- raphy, literature, by his own method, that is to say, without method, but abundantly. He was never in a hurry, and he appeared always to be idle: yet he had time for everything. It was believed that he united in himself many men's lives. Above all, his poetical development absorbed him. He carries his poems in manuscript and reads them to right listeners. It was thus he read that superb lyric "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" to the Price family, his Brooklyn neighbours, and explained the incident which inspired it. Strange abstraction and exaltation marked his moods. 2 iBucke: Walt Whitman, pp. 32-34. Hd.: pp. 25-31. XI EMERSON AND WHITMAN Two or three years after the second edition, Leaves of Grass sprouted wonderfully; Walt had in manuscript a hundred new poems. The summer of his work was come. Thus, one fact was proved, that despite the violent rebuke to his previous efforts, he had succeeded in propagating a cer- tain "advanced taste of himself." The Boston publishers, Thayer and Eldridge, open to new experiments, offered to arrange for a new edition of his book, which had been out of print since 1856. i Toward the close of the winter of 1860 Walt went to Boston to supervise the printing of a volume, a task which was and remained to the end, for a skilled workman like himself, minute, slow, and personal. He remained there the entire spring. The environment was new to him; he was as yet unacquainted with New England, so he studied at leisure the life of the street, the city, and its suburbs. Some happy memories cling to this visit. Emerson put himself out many times to see Whitman, and it is in the course of these interviews that the two men had a conversa- tion destined to be famous. " In Boston when people have to talk, they go to the Common; let us go there," said Emerson. That day, he wished to make himself thoroughly clear to his friend on a point which he had at heart; the matter was important, at the moment when Whitman was preparing a new edition of h's poems. Some years later, when again in Boston, Walt summarized in these words the substance of this historic conversation: I walk'd for two hours, of a bright sharp February mid-day twenty-one years ago, with Emerson, then in his prime, keen, physically and morally 152 EMERSON AND WHITMAN 153 magnetic, arm'd at every point, and when he chose, wielding the emotional just as well as the intellectual. During those two hours he was the talker and I the listener. It was an argument-statement, reconnoitring, review, attack, and pressing home (like an army corps in order, artillery, cavalry, infantry), of all that could be said against that part (and a main part) in the construction of my poems, "Children of Adam." More precious than gold to me that dissertation — afforded me, ever after, this strange and paradoxical lesson; each point of E.'s statement was unanswerable, no judge's charge ever more complete or convincing, I could never hear the points better put — and then I felt down in my soul the clear and un- mistakable conviction to disobey all, and pursue my own way. "What have you to say then to such things?" said E., pausing in conclusion. "Only that while I can't answer them at all, I feel more settled than ever to adhere to my own theory, and exemplify it," was my candid response. Whereupon we went and had a good dinner at the American House. And thenceforward I never waver'd or was touch 'd with qualms (as I confess I had been two or three times before) . l **- ^ Emerson appealed to him with a real and pressing affection of an elder brother, manifesting all the communicable fervour of a great soul; and Walt, with whom firm sweetness was stronger than his more decisive words, felt deeply touched by the warm sympathy which Emerson showed him that day. He did not reply; he had within him reasons which reason did not know. 2 The whole relation between Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson may be disposed of here. 3 It presents a double aspect: work to work and man to man. This petty problem might be judged futile: however, is it not well to determine the situation and reciprocal attitude of the most original thinker and of the greatest poet of the United States? An Emerson and a Whitman are of such importance to the world that nothing obscure should subsist between their renown. Had Whitman read Emerson before 1855, date of the first edition of Leaves of Grass ? Some, basing upon the evident ^Complete Prose, pp. 183-184. 2 W. S. Kennedy: Reminiscences of Walt Whitman, p. 77. *The order of this chapter is reversed. Tr. 154 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK analogy between such conceptions as are equally dear to the two writers, have been quick to see in the Essays the initial source and the determining cause of the first draught of Leaves of Grass. J. T. Trowbridge notably represents this opinion; it is amplified by George William Curtis in Putnam's Magazine about 1860, and oftenrenewed since by those whom the overwhelming originality of Whitman offended. Trowbridge, admiring Leaves of Grass only with reticence, declares nevertheless that nothing equal to Song of Myself had appeared in English sirce Shakespeare. 1 But for him the first part of the book reflects the influence of Emerson. This assertion Trowbridge supports by different facts, such as certain affirmations of Walt in his reply to Emerson, pub- lished in the Appendix to the Edition of 1856, and the send- ing of the copy of Leaves of Grass to the latter; but above all, on a declaration which Whitman made to himself in 1860 at Boston. While Walt was working at carpentry about 1854, he read one day, while taking his solitary mid-day meal, a volume of Emerson which he had put into his basket with his luncheon. It was a revelation. Filled just then with vague aspirations, this electric contact illuminated his very depths, and discovered him to himself. He formulated the event in these characteristic terms: "I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to boil. " 2 Opposed to this statement, which Trowbridge energetically supports, there is an express statement of WTiitman himself which contradicts it absolutely. Being frankly asked by his friend, W. S. Kennedy, as to the fact, Whitman declared, in a letter dated February 15, 1887, that he had not read Emerson before publishing his first edition. 3 Already an- other of Whitman's friends, John Burroughs, who wrote his Notes on Walt Whitman in 1867 from direct information from him, was careful to state this. It is after Emerson's *W. S. Kennedy: Reminiscences of Walt Whitman, p. 79. 2 J. T. Trowbridge: Reminiscences of Walt Whitman, the Atlantic Monthly, February, 1902, p. 163. 3 W. S. Kennedy: Reminiscences of Walt Whitman, p. 76. j EMERSON AND WHITMAN 155 famous letter saluting Leaves of Grass, and his visit to Whitman in the summer of 1855, that the latter read Nature and the Essays; he remembers putting the volume in his little basket with his food and napkin one time, when, as usual, he went to pass the whole day on the then deserted beach of Coney Island to read, to bathe, to lie in the sun, and dream. 1 Walt declares, moreover, in this same letter, like many other young men, he had at one time "Emerson on the brain," also, he says, "that came late and affected only the surface." And he considers wit i satisfaction this crisis of his youth a stage habitual to "young men of eager minds." 2 This is the debate. The contradiction looks flagrant. To resolve it and to show that it is but apparent, W. S.Kennedy has expended much erudition and eloquence. According to him, Walt knew the reputation of Emerson before 1855, and could and did read the reviews of his works and some articles on him in the Democratic Review, in which Whitman was, as we know, habitual collaborator between 1841 and 1847, and where many pages of copious citations appeared on the philosophy already known in intellectual America. In a word, according to W. S. Kennedy, Walt then knew Emer- son without knowing him outright, which amply justifies the sending of a copy of Leaves of Grass. 3 To our notion, the question should be envisaged from a point of view somewhat different. First of all, it is not necessary to accept literally, we believe, either the statement of Trowbridge or that of Whitman. To that of Whitman, especially, there is no reason to attach an absolute impor- tance. . It is not questioning his greatness to state his superb indifference to dates. All who have studied him before know this tendency to inaccuracy in the matter of figures, which was certainly characteristic, though illness and old 'John Burroughs: Notes, pp. 16-17. ^Complete Prose, p. 317. 3 W. S. Kennedy: Reminiscences of Walt Whitman, pp. 79-83. 156 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK age may have aggravated it; and, even in the course of his reply to Kennedy, where he declares that he did not know Emerson before 1855, he deceives himself by ten years with- out knowing it. Besides, being endowed with the curiosity of an "omniverous reader" as was Walt in his youth, and his interest so keen for all manifestation of the thought of his time, it is indeed difficult to conceive that he had not been in contact with Emerson, then the most original thinker, of whom the press spoke, whose lectures and books aroused such enthusiasm and discussion between 1845 and 9 55. And having known and absorbed him — if only by fragments, his way of reading — he could not but be seized with his signi- fication and with his greatness, not but feel the rapport — sure, intimate, and marvellous — between his idea, which he had not yet formulated, and the invigorating, new, refreshing conception of Emerson. In truth, he must have felt strength- ened by a voice coming from a region entirely unlike his own. There, we believe, is found the sense and explanation of his open letter to his "dear Friend and Master" written in 1856, when he experienced by his own confession a crisis of Emersonism, and when, exhalting Individualism, "this new continent" of interior America, he added: "These shores, it is you who have discovered them. I say that it is you who have conducted the States, that it is you who have conducted me to them. . . ." There is, moreover, a hypothesis which seems to confirm — and to convert even into a quasi-certitude — a note from Whitman's hand recov- ered among his papers, one which accompanies a review article of May, 1847, 1 a note which establishes unmistakably that the thought of Emerson was familiar to him when he wrote it. It was not in the least necessary that he absorb a whole volume of Emerson; with his extraordinary intuition, some paragraphs were enough for him to penetrate the funda- mental thought of the philosophy. I avow that these affirmations appear to me superfluous: ^Camden Edition, IX, pp. 159-16D. EMERSON AND WHITMAN 157 to speak the truth, the fact is not to be doubted. Walt would not have been Walt if he had kept Emerson outside of his vast search into life and contemporary ideas. I am, therefore, disposed to charge to his faulty memory the state- ment in his letter to W. S. Kennedy. I also think, conscious as he was of his fundamental originality, of the perfect authenticity of his poem and of his message, he would show a certain momentary impatience in listening to his spiritual affinity with Emerson reasoned about — some small souls disposed to make him his "disciple." Whence the tone a little lively and very categorical of that letter, where he so vehemently and without restriction declares an inde- pendence. Shall it be said that I accept in its rigour the verbal decla- ration which Trowbridge attributes to Y/hitman? By no means. Admitting that he had known fragments of Emer- son in the years previous to his poem is not at all equivalent to claiming that the author of Song of Myself is indebted to him for his first inspiration. It is impossible not to see in this assertion a pure naivete. What have such or such philosophy, such or such written pages, to do with the in- spiration of Walt Whitman? Leaves of Grass has sprung directly from reality itself, from the heart of concrete things in contact with his personality. It is the very song of things, of beings, till then considered as improper to be translated in- to poetry, which takes flight from an individual. Things, beings, pageants, that living ensemble, these are responsible for this poem. Emerson, who evolved in a sphere totally opposed to that of Walt, could but give him a momentary support — perhaps precious, precisely because by all which differentiated them. We can easily admit that a certain chapter or theme from such a thinker affected him like a spur. But Emerson, most surely, was not for Whitman what East River pilots had been, harbour workers, actors at the Battery, Broadway coachmen, the spectacle of the Bay, Long Island shores, or the towns along the Mississippi or the 158 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK Great Lakes; these are what furnished the real stuff of a book which, according to the picturesque expression of Kennedy, juts up "as unique in character as the flora and fauna of a Galapagos Island emergent from the blue waters of the Pacific." 1 It is this multitudinous humanity and the large- ness of nature which were the primitive source and •continu- ance of his inspiration, which nothing written was capable of determining. To say that Whitman is a differentiated product of Emerson's philosophy is to declare that under another climate the elephant could spring from the deer, or the bison from the peacock. Emerson and Whitman belonged to different species. Thus in a certain sense the poet was fully right when he wrote to his friend: "It is of no im- portance whether I read Emerson before starting or not." 2 The originality of this book is the most absolute perhaps which has ever been manifested in literature. It would be equally obtuse not to see the concordances which actually exist between the two men. Emphatically opposed to their heredity, their education, their tempera- ment, their spiritual tendency, yet upon certain points their parallelism is undeniable. Why would he not joyously salute Leaves of Grass at its birth, he who seven years before traced among others the prophetic lines of Man Thinking? which stir us with an electric thrill when, in reading them, we think of Walt Whitman? And what more natural than these concordances? We have remarked that from 1845 to '50, an intense period of renewal of the literature and the soul of America, certain ideas were in the air, which all con- temporaries were absorbing more or less. Some common aspirations, felt by Emerson and by Whitman some years apart, were formulated by them in their vastly different work. Whitman could not cast a shadow on the suave and won- *W. S. Kennedy: Reminiscences of Walt Whitman, p. 79. *Id.:p.76. 3 The author must refer to The American Scholar of Emerson. Tr. EMERSON AND WHITMAN 159 derful Emerson. To exalt the first is not to diminish the second. They are two great priests of Individualism and Optimism: one issues from the sphere of intellect, the other from the sphere of life lived. Each, in his way, occupies a supreme place, though Walt Whitman, from the more uni- versal point of view, immensely surpasses Emerson. What were, on the other hand, the personal relations of the two men? What, above all, was Emerson's intimate opinion of Whitman? The question is not worth stopping for, except that by reason of it Whitman was subjected to certain base calumnies. We have Emerson's enthusiastic inspired letter, written under the impulse of his admiration and his emotion, when he received Leaves of Grass; the real Emerson is discovered there. When Walt, universally re- viled, published it as his defense and fixed a phrase of it in gold letters on the back of the second edition, Emerson was for a moment vexed; 1 but he remained outwardly calm. He saw immediately all the embarrassment which that untimely publication was bound to bring him as a patron of V^hitman. Emerson was not deceived; there was tumult enough, and some printed in full-length letters that he was crazy. This hue-and-cry was annoying to a man thoroughly peaceable, accustomed to the quiet of his closet. Then when four years later the third edition of Leaves of Grass appeared, Emerson strongly regretted seeing the pages retained which in their conversation in Boston Common he had begged Walt to suppress. Side by side with the radical Emerson, who is one of the most exalted minds, the most advanced, the most admirable of the age, there was another Emerson of univer- sity education, philosophic, clerical, bookish, formal, de- scendant of an ecclesiastical line, the eminent respectable citizen of literary and bourgeois Concord, slave of incredible prejudices, the Emerson, for example, who said to a young girl visiting him on Sunday who wished to play the piano: iBliss Perry: Walt Whitman, p. 115. 160 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK "No, no, I pray you . . . to-day is Sunday." 1 The Emerson of life and the Emerson of the book were not al- ways identical, as was Whitman. To that Emerson, whom we no longer know, but who, at that time, was as real as the other, some rudeness of the artisan-poet, as well as his vivac- ity of language, was not acceptable. But there were first of all Emerson's family and his immediate neighbours to whom the personality of the "rough" of Brooklyn was rather odious, and who looked upon Emerson's admiration for his book as a regrettable weakness. These friends, people bigoted and narrow, were pleased, because of the calumnies and tittle-tattle, to exaggerate the annoyance of Emerson at the time of the stormy publication of his letter, to mar some innocent pleasantries he let fall, and to transform into posi- tive proof against the man, the antipathy which Emerson experienced toward the most coloured passages of Leaves of Grass. Indeed, later Woodbury made himself the inter- preter of this mischievous enmity, in attributing to Emerson various perversities intended for Whitman. 2 These calumnies, bigoted and "respectable," do not bear investigation. The truth remains that the great and loyal Emerson never retracted the enthusiastic words of his letter, nor withdrew his friendship. There is only needed, to prove it, certain private letters, which peremptorily establish this and which some day will surely be published: 3 the atti- tude of Emerson leaves no doubt as to his sentiments. When overseeing the printing of his book it was Emerson who many times came from Concord to see him. 4 Would he have done this if he was seriously angry at the publication of his letter? And, in general, in his personal relations with Walt, it was always he who made advances, who sought him, at- tracted by that enormous power which he felt but could not define because it surpassed him. Walt, it seems, when in- iH. H. Gilchrist: Anne Gilchrist, pp. 233-234. 2 Woodbury: Talks with Emerson. »I. Hull Piatt: Walt Whitman, p. 31; H. Traubel: With Walt Whitman In Camden,Voh I, p. 180. 4 John Burroughs: Walt Whitman, pp. 66-67. EMERSON AND WHITMAN 161 vited by Emerson to come to Concord declined the in- vitation, true to an instinctive dislike of a purely literary company, which he would be sure to meet there. It was inevitably noticed that in preparing his collection of poems for Parnassus, in 1875, Emerson did not include a single fragment of Whitman. The reason for this very probably is that he thought Leaves of Grass rather as rhythmic prose or some other new form than as poetry properly so called. Emerson did not by that disclaim Whitman; and in various circumstances he knew how to offer the poet some evidence of his personal attachment and his consideration. Walt, on his part, showed a deep affection for Emerson. He showed this to the man as well as to his writings. "From the first visit which he made at Brooklyn in 1855 and the two hours which we passed together, I experienced an af- fection, and a singular attachment for him, by his contact, conversation, company, magnetism ... we probably had a dozen (perhaps twenty) of these interviews, conver- sations, promenades, etc., — five or six times (sometimes in New York, sometimes in Boston) we had good long dinners together. I was very happy — I do not think, nevertheless, that I was entirely at my ease with him: it was always he who did the talking and I am sure that he was equally happy 1 . . . ." By the tone of certain pages which Walt has written of Emerson, it is easily seen how much he revered the man. The insistence of Emerson during their famous conversation in Boston Common, in wishing to make him suppress the passages in Leaves of Grass, not only left no unpleas- ant trace in Walt's mind, but he considered it as a proof of genuine affection, "which I felt then, and feel to this hour, the gratitude and reverence of my life could never repay." 2 Walt Whitman judged with clairvoyance the writer and thinker, perceiving nicely the "darkness" and *W. S. Kennedy: Reminiscences of Walt Whitman, pp. 76-77. 'Id.: p. 77. 162 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK "sunny expanses" of his work. He accorded him the first place among the poetical initiators of the New World, and gave him rank with Washington, Lincoln, and Grant. 1 "Emer- son is not far from being our greatest man," he declared in 1890, to an English visitor, "in fact, I believe him to be our very greatest man." But above all, the solemn, touch- ing lines, which he wrote near the new-made grave of Emer- son, remain the supreme salutation of Whitman to Emerson : "A just man, poised on himself, all-loving, all-enclosing, and sane and clear as the sun. . . . It is not we who come to consecrate the dead, we reverently come to receive, if so it may be, some consecration for ourselves and our daily work." 2 Those who yielding to bigoted and formalist prejudices wished to change the relations of these men have but tried to tarnish one of the splendid pages of the literary history of the United States. It is vain, however; for the last echo of these calumnies is vanished, posterity hears only the joyous accents of Emerson, saluting Leaves of Grass at its birth and the solemn farewell words of Walt Whitman before the coffin of the great precursor. During his stay in Boston Walt knitted literary friend- ships which for a short time were to influence the destiny of his book. Again this curious anomaly was proved: it was in the Puritan city to whose temperament all the liberal instincts of the man and poet were opposed that he found comprehensive sympathy. He met in Charles Eldridge, his publisher, a real comrade, not less than an admirer. It was also during this visit that he made the acquaintance of John Townsend Trowbridge. 3 The first edition of Leaves of Grass won him instantly, and despite the numerous re- ^ucke: In Re Walt Whitman, p. 111. ^Complete Prose, p. 189. 3 The account of this meeting — Reminiscences of Walt Whitman, the Atlantic Monthly, February, 1902. The extract is omitted. It is one of the many pen portraits of Whitman, and another testimony to the power of his personality. EMERSON AND WHITMAN 163 serves of his rather formalist character, he did not hesitate to reverence the genius of the man whom he met in the first hours of his struggle. Other interesting memories attach to these months when, far from Manhattan, Walt corrected the proofs of his new Leaves. It was at this time that he heard Father Taylor, pastor of the church for poor sailors, whom some friend, Emerson perhaps, had pointed out. He who kept strictly away from oratory finds himself more at ease, and nearer the infinite in the great cathedral of the world, and was deeply stirred by the extraordinary words of the old sailor, as much as his parents, in his childhood, had been by the ser- mons of Elias Hicks, the Quaker preacher, "with black eyes which sparkled at times like meteors." Quiet Sunday forenoons, I liked to go down early to the quaint ship cabin looking church, where the old man ministered. . . . Father Taylor was a moderate-sized man, indeed almost small (reminded me of old Booth, the great actor, and my favorite of those and preceding days,) well advanced in years, but alert, with mild blue or gray eyes, and good presence and voice. Soon as he open'd his mouth I ceas'd to pay any at- tention to church or audience, or pictures or lights and shades; a far more potent charm entirely sway'd me. ... I remember I felt the deepest impression from the old man's prayers, which invariably affected me to tears. . . . For when Father Taylor preach'd or pray'd the rhetoric and art, the mere words (which usually play such a big part), seem'd altogether to disappear, and the live feeling advanced upon you and seized you with a power before unknown. Everybody felt this marvelous and awful in- fluence. One young sailor, a Rhode Islander, (who came every Sunday, and I got acquainted with, and talk'd to once or twice as we went away,) told me, "that must be the Holy Ghost we read of in the Testament." 1 In June or July the book at last appeared. It was a very beautiful 12mo, incomparably superior in appearance to the other two editions: it is evident in running over these 456 pages, printed on choice paper, that a serious firm met the expense of the volume. Nevertheless, certain unusual arrangements preserved its particular stamp. The title on ^Complete Prose, p. 386. 164 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WOXtK the first page spreads in letters naively written and or- namented, and above the date, "1860-61," inscribed at the foot of the page, one may read: "year '85 of the States." On the cover appeared various primitive emblems, and also throughout the volume : a sunrise on the sea, a globe in space, a butterfly poised on a hand. Walt did not like the volume at all, simple product of confection : he held that the exterior should carry the imprint of a personality. The characteris- tic likeness which accompanied the first two editions — and appeared to the sixth, to accompany ever after the volume through its evolution — was replaced by a reproduction of a portrait in oil painted by Charles Hine in 1859, in which Walt looks like an old sea captain. One hundred and twenty -four new poems were added to the thirty-three original pieces. The volume was completely changed. Not only had it formidably grown, but its frag- mentary aspect had disappeared. For the first time it was presented as an organic whole with a prelude and a finale; and the author in it pronounced already the essential word that his book is not a mere book, but a man who comes to speak and to offer himself to you; is Procreator who would engender a new and haughtier race of men for America and for the world, the numberless family of children of the New Adam. The poems were distributed in four groups : Demo- cratic Songs, Leaves of Grass, Children of Adam, Calamus, followed by some others bearing an individual title. Obedient to a Quaker impulse, he numbered the months as they are in the calendar of Friends: first month, second month, etc., instead of January, February, etc. Walt was of his time, but he was also of his family; and in everything he remained faithful to the interior call. In the fourth part, Calamus, he published the thirst for im- passioned comradeship, of the close affection of man to man, which tormented him to the verge of sorrow, and was indeed with him insatiable. Although it has been abolished by later manipulations, EMERSON AND WHITMAN 165 this edition is the most highly coloured, the most challeng- ing, the most audacious of the editions of Leaves of Grass. The Walt Whitman of his fortieth year is there revealed in the wild, with all his ardent virility. And despite the suc- cessive rearrangements, and of the author's incessant labour on his poems, it contains the bulk of the first half of the book, as we have it to-day. Between the edition of 1855, the fin- ishing touch, that of 1860 marks a decisive advance, in which the poems begin to be definitely reduced to order. The principal contours of the future edifice are already to be found there. This time, Whitman was sailing under happy auspices. For a serious edition he had the support of a worthy house, with its means of publicity, and the vessel with its new rig- ging, with its hold reenforced, was big enough to resist the gale. The adventure, too, was different. The ship did not immediately gain the high sea; it tacked, profiting by favourable winds, but making little by little its path. And Walt watched his banner float in the rear in the morning sun. The book had a moderate but sure sale. Two or three thousand copies were issued, and was not this a success for such a work? For Hve years, because of the fierce opposi- tion which Walt's "barbaric yawp" raised, curiosity was awakened. One wished to see what was at the bottom of this terrible man, whom legend made alternately a clown or a satyr. He was not in any case an ordinary man. He who had advanced, unhurt by this hooting, roused the in- terest of thinking men: and some studied this phenomenon in the pages of his book. The extravagances and excesses which at first provoked laughter or fury, shocked less this time. The public made, in a word, the first step, not to- ward acceptance, but toward inquiry. The sale of the volume was one sign and the publishers, who had faith in their poet, were firm in their determination to support him. From time to time a sympathetic review 166 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK appeared, and Walt, according to his custom, himself came to the rescue by sending to friendly papers anonymous arti- cles. But the most important point was that a weekly pub- lication defended him with great warmth. 1 The New York Saturday Press was an aggressive organ, where young writers exalted every boldness, they sent sharp arrows at the man- darins of literature, and particularly at the majestic Philis- tines of Boston : its editor, Henry Clapp, was a frequenter of Pfaff's German restaurant, where the "Bohemians," of whom Walt was one, met, and where W. D. Ho wells was introduced to him in August of the same year. More than all, the Atlantic Monthly, the Boston literary review which Lowell edited, had shown some consideration for him in publishing a poem in the April number. 2 Thayer and Eldridge pub- lished also Leaves of Grass Imprints* There is then ground for hope; the dawn of attention seems to be breaking. Perhaps in the end Walt will succeed in ful- filling his mission. But it was ordained that the audacious enterprise was to meet disaster. For the greater glory of the poet, perhaps, adverse fate was not immediately van- quished, and the number of obstacles kept pace with the formidable advance of the book on its time. The ship of Walt, set out this time in fairer weather, was stranded on a bank which no pilot could have avoided. It was the eve of the Secession War, the vast event which ab- sorbs everything, swallowing all which is written or pub- lished of the poems or of the attention given them. Wlien it burst, the publishing house was ruined. The firm, Thayer and Eldridge, whose receipts were not forthcoming, failed, dragging Leaves of Grass in its fall. And all the hopes founded on this edition were suddenly and pitiably mowed down. Then bad luck pursued Walt for six years. The book a tfohn Burroughs: Notes, p. 1. 2 Bliss Perry: Walt Whitman, p. 127. s Bueke: Walt Whitman, pp. 199-200. EMERSON AND WHITMAN 167 third time disappeared. But what could not disappear again, what was the shelter from all storms, and what was infinitely more important than the success or failure of one particular edition, is that some people in the world — very few indeed, but by the inherent value of the work, its in- fallible power of contagion, that was enough — a few people acquired a taste for the book. And it was never to be torn from the heart of them. Walt had been heard by perhaps a dozen elect souls, who would never let his message perish, but who would exalt and transmit it. His tree had taken root. It was the commencement of everything, the prelude of future victories. Leaves of Grass would never from now on be without defense against the champions of "poesy" and "morality." This edition of 1860 notably won two men who lead a company of great companions, two men who are not only to be dear and faithful friends, but champions of his work before the world: John Burroughs, future poet and nat- uralist, and William Douglas O'Connor. Walt met O'Con- nor one day in the office of Eldridge, his publisher, who was bringing out a novel of his. He was a journalist who, like Thoreau, lost his place for having ardently espoused the cause of John Brown. 1 He was a young man of twenty-eight, enthusiastic, gener- ous, good looking, one of the noblest natures, the completest, the most attractive which it was possible to meet, and Walt was immediately drawn to him. He merely saw him then: presently circumstances brought about a close association. Besides, a new soil was prepared in which the seed sowed by the poet should germinate. Some copies of the two pre- vious editions reached England without provoking any other emotion than rare and obscure attacks. But that of 1860, accepted by some young men, was destined, in a few years, to win for Walt fervent admiration. In the hall, until then empty, where the bard of the New »H B. Binns: Life of Walt Whitman, p. 190. 168 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK World put forth his strange verses, some listeners entered very softly. And they heard that powerful and tender voice, stirred in spite of themselves ; and the impassive man pursued his recital, as before the limitless audience of the humanity of the future, whose judgment he seems to foresee. PART FOUR THE WOUND DRESSER WASHINGTON (1862-1865) XII AT THE BEDSIDE OF THE DYING However surfeited this life may already appear, a sudden event is about to penetrate and fill it, which, without break- ing its unity, is its dividing line. Between the man such as we know him and the man after the war one sees the passing of a profound emotion; and of the numerous breaks in his life this is the most violent. Walt for many years finds himself torn from his home, from himself, from his work; he is plunged into a feverish, tragic atmosphere, charged with pain and poison, all in the accomplishment of a sad and radiant duty whence will issue at once the helplessness of his old age and the perfection of his personality. We are now at the threshold of a unique experience, some aspects of which envelop a sacred mystery of humanity: this much- alive man gives to it the unsuspected limit of his strength, showing through it all the legendary and superhuman individual which he had introduced in his poems and whose reality was thus to be proved. Walt, after having offered himself to everyone in his poems, is about to give himself in person to thousands of human beings athirst for him. The storm clouds were gathering when he returned to New York. The nomination of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency precipitated the crisis; the Union was threatened, and some of the slave states formed themselves into a con- federation to maintain at any cost the privilege on which their prosperity was built. It was the eve of the Civil War, in which North and South were about to engage in a pro- longed, bloody struggle. Whitman, who since his youth had followed with atten- 171 172 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK tive eye the inner polities of his country, and who knew its hidden springs, was passionately interested in the crisis at hand. He had foreseen it and he knew that a grave and decisive hour had come. Under his immense exterior apathy he vibrated intensely to all that convulsed the national life. He was super-American. And to him it mattered more than to all the world that America, bearer of the modern idea, the democratic idea, his idea, should come victorious from the crisis. The Civil War was the great shock of his life. In some lines of touching simplicity, he noted the first mo- ment of the redoubtable conflict. 1 Walt lived through the beginning of the war in the atmosphere of the street, sharing the emotion of the crowd and the stupor following the first defeat. His whole being was seized: the feverish reading of telegrams, the noise of passing convoys in the street, the marching of troops, all pushed into the background the normal preoccupations of his life. And at the sight of the great city which was arming for war, impassioned odes to the banner of the Union, the Union in peril, burst from his heart like a cry of love. Forty years had I in my city seen soldiers parading, Forty years as a pageant, till unawares the lady of this teeming and tur- bulent city, Sleepless amid her ships, her houses, her incalculable wealth, With her million children around her, suddenly, At dead of night, at news from the south, Incens'd struck with clinch'd hand the pavement. A shock electric, the night sustained it, Till with ominous hum our hive at daybreak pour'd out its myriads. From the houses then and the workshops, and through all the doorways, Leapt they tumultuous, and lo! Manhattan arming. . . . War! an arm'd race is advancing! the welcome for battle, no turning away; War! be it weeks, months, or years, an arm'd race is advancing to welcome it. 2 Complete Prose, p. 16. ^Leaves of Grass, pp. 219-221. AT THE BEDSIDE OF THE DYING 173 In New York men were enlisting en masse; his brother George, one of the first. He himself was not enrolled among the combatants; the inner call, which he followed in every- thing, did not bid him go. He watched, listened passion- ately, leaving to circumstances the responsibility of deciding his part in the drama. He knew the South and was far from hating it, but his fervent sympathy was now with the Northern cause. Victory for the North meant salvation for the Union. Not a doubt as to this, and any other opinion to him was impious. Presently the interior call was heard in an unexpected man- ner. While running through the daily lists of the wounded in the terrible battle of Fredericksburg (December 13, 1862) he read the name of his brother George, who had made the en- tire campaign with the 51st Regiment of the volunteers of New York, a simple soldier who was already a captain; he was described as struck in the face by the bursting of a shell, and seriously wounded. Walt left instantly. He would nurse his brother and send back news to his anxious family. After three days of suffering and fatigue, having been sent in the confusion of camps and hospitals from one to another, he reached his brother George at Rappahannock. He found himself suddenly thrown amidst the cruel reali- ties of the aftermath of a battle, face to face with the wounded, the dying, the dead. One of the first sights he met in camp was a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, at the foot of a tree within ten yards of the house, a full load for a one-horse cart. 1 He had gluttonously fed of life till then, and he now was satiated not with death alone, but with the unbearable horrors attending a battle-field. The cap- tain's wound was not serious; he already was recovering, and Walt was free to visit the camp, especially the field hospital, where the wounded, without care, were heaped in disorder, still clad in their blood-stained uniforms. He went among l Complefe Prose, p. 20. 174 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK these sufferers and spoke to them. He was without means and bitterly realized his helplessness. He wrote letters under their dictation to parents; he went among the hospital tents of the army of the Potomac — the miserable tents where lay thousands of wounded, and some dying. He familiarized himself with the sights of the field. He looked, studied, identified himself with all. In his brother's regiment he discovered Brooklyn friends. On December 28th he left Falmouth to convoy the wounded and ill, many of them his own townsmen, to Washington. He had no precise plan at the time. It is under the sole stress of events that he began the extraordinary task which was about to absorb him, body and soul, for the following years. Now that he found himself among the great army of the mutilated and feverish who were filling the capital, an imperious force held him. He had touched suffering, and was under its magnetic attraction. He was wholly fascinated. Walt followed his instinct faithfully. And his instinct bade him attach himself to these panting, bleeding men who had need of a hand to dress their wounds, to remain near these poor, tortured hearts, suffering for the look or the word which would inspire them with courage. This time the call was heeded. And it is then that naturally, without being tied to any program by the sole strength of the bond which united him to his wounded, he undertook little by little the role which he was to fill during the war, that of "volunteer nurse." He was far from suspecting, that moment, that the 16th of December, 1862, he had quitted Brooklyn never to return again except as a visitor. It is in January, 1863, that he commenced his daily visits to the sick and wounded in that vast lazar-house which Washington then was, encircled by improvised villages, where sometimes fifty, sixty, seventy thousand sufferers were cared for. In proportion as he came in contact with this crowd of the helpless, an experience little by little came AT THE BEDSIDE OF THE DYING 175 to him. He realized his inability to lift himself to the gran- deur and extent of their suffering; he was not, however, as helpless as in the first days. His large instinct of humanity trained by the weeks passed at the bedside of the sick sug- gested to him now a hundred little devices — so great in re- sults — by which the anguish of the hospital and physical pain might be mitigated. He regulated his ministry by a method all his own. Thanks to his Notes of the War, his letters to his mother, and his articles to newspapers, we know what constituted his hospital service. It is strongly stamped with his person- ality and is marginally vouched for by the nurse, the sanitary inspector, as well as the ordinary charitable visitor. Walt in the hospitals was the unique, the great and good Walt, a real man who, among the stricken soldiers, found, in his ample heart at once manly and maternal, all the original ways of helping them. It was his custom to pass through one or many wards of a hospital, stop a moment before each bed, offer the patient a trifle, a biscuit, an orange, a sheet of writing paper, a stamped envelope, tobacco, a bit of money, or, if he had noth- ing more to offer, simply a smile, a word of friendship, a nod of the head, neglecting no one. He was sure to notice, among the rows of young men, those who needed particularly his care, the downcast, the prostrate, whom the feeling of their abandon and the dismal atmosphere of the hospital plunged into a black stupor. These needed comfort and solace more than medicine: their recovery depended upon it. One of his customary tasks was to sit at the bedside of the weak and sick, and write letters to their mothers, brothers, sisters, sweethearts, who for months were without news of their soldier. He also brought to them history texts, illustrated reviews and the daily papers which passed from hand to hand. He kept in a notebook the need, the wish, the pain of each one, the trifle which he was to bring in his next visit to arouse pleasure and consequently health. 176 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK Nothing was petty or useless when it served to soothe some poor languishing fellow. He knew that the odour of lemon in the hand caused joy to a feverish patient. He knew a man's delight in tobacco, in hearing him read, recite a poem, or conduct a guessing game. The wounded Rebels and the blacks received from him the same attention as the Union soldiers. The man of crowds thus practised his invariable method, which was to keep in touch with individuals; but how much more at this tragic hour, at the bedside of the anguished and dying, in the distress and foulness of a hos- pital in war time! Whatever was the catholicity of his sympathy, Walt devoted much of his time to those whom he called his "special cases." In the hospitals the number of very young men, from sixteen to twenty, the greater number coming from the country, was considerable. It was to some of these boys, enfeebled by fever or wounds, weakened by homesick- ness, upon whom his patient tenderness was exercised and wrought miracles. Here is one, for instance, among so many others : June 18th. — In one of the hospitals I find Thomas Haley, Company M, 4th, New York cavalry — a regular Irish boy, a fine specimen of youthful physical manliness — shot through the lungs — inevitably dying — came over to this country from Ireland to enlist — has not a single friend or acquaintance here — is sleeping soundly at this moment, (but it is the sleep of death) — has a bullet-hole straight through the lung. I saw Tom when first brought here, three days since, and didn't suppose he could live twelve hours — (yet he looks well enough in the face to a casual observer). He lies there a fine-built man, the tan not yet bleach'd from his cheeks and neck. Poor youth, so handsome, athletic, with profuse beautiful shining hair. One time as I sat looking at him while he lay asleep, he suddenly, with- out the least start, awaken'd, open'd his eyes, gave me a long steady look, turning his face very slightly to gaze easier — one long, clear, silent look — a slight sigh — then turned back and went into his doze again. Little he knew, poor death-stricken boy, the heart of the stranger that hover'd \ ^Complete Prose, p. SI. AT THE BEDSIDE OF THE DYING 177 This silent and tender vigil at the bedside of the dying evokes the stanza in which the poet is pictured on the battle- field, a whole night, near the body of a combatant: Vigil strange I kept .on the field one night; When you my son and my comrade dropt at my side that day, One look I but gave which your dear eyes return' d with a look I shall never forget, One touch of your hand to mine O boy, reach'd up as you lay on the ground, Then onward I sped in the battle, the even-contested battle, Till late in the night reliev'd to the place at last again I made my way, Found you in death so cold dear comrade, found your body son of respond- ing kisses, (never again on earth responding,) Bared your face in the starlight, curious the scene, cool blew the moderate night-wind, Long there and then in vigil I stood, dimly around me the battle-field spreading, Vigil wondrous and vigil sweet there in the fragrant silent night, But not a tear fell, not even a long-drawn sigh, long, long I gazed, Then on the earth partially reclining sat by your side leaning my chin in my hands, Passing sweet hours, immortal and mystic hours with you dearest comrade — not a tear, not a word, Vigil of silence, love and death, vigil for you my son and my soldier. 1 Most of the youths, lying for weeks in the hospital, were friendless, poor, far from home. The feeling of loneli- ness, together with the peculiar general misery permeating a hospital, profoundly depressed them. Surgeons, nurses particularly, did their duty, many with great devotion and even heroism. But the number of victims increased, the service was bound to become routine, indifferent, even cold. ' 'Oh, I wish that you, or rather women having the same quali- ties as you and Mat" [his sister], he wrote to his mother — "were here in crowds to be placed as matrons before the unhappy soldiers sick and wounded. Your presence alone would be enough. Oh, what good that would do." And again: "Mothers full of maternal love, however mi trained ^Leaves of Grass, p. 238. 178 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK they might be, but carrying with them the memory of the home and the magnetic touch of hand, are the true nurses." 1 And something in the character of Walt fitted him for this healing power; with his obtrusive masculinity he had for them a reserve of latent femininity and the tenderness of a good mother. He was himself like the good odour of home to young boys, eager for soothing love. None would have known as he did how to unlock closed hearts, how to make them open at the caress of his hand and his voice. He was the mother to the sick youth, as well as the comrade, with a world of tenderness for the young Americans stricken by sickness and wounds. It is during these years that he truly won this magnificent title, at the head of one of his poems (its aureole to remain forever about his name) — Wound Dresser — of wounds spiritual as well as physical. Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals, The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand, I sit by the restless all the dark night, some are so young, Some suffer so much, I recall the experience sweet and sad, (Many a soldier's loving arms about this neck have cross'd and rested, Many a soldier's kiss dwells on these bearded lips). 2 l The Wound Dresser, p. 42. ^Leaves of Grass, pp. 243-4. XIII THE WOUND In practising this priesthood of humanity Walt be- longed absolutely to no one. He was called "his own mis- sionary. " To work in complete independence apart from paid employes, simply to prove himself a man well dis- posed and affectionate among the sick men to whom he gave his overflowing strength was the whole secret of his mission. He was thus alone, left to the suggestion of his instinct and to his own resources. Since the first weeks of his arrival in Washington he had to organize a little his material life, to find some modest income for himself and his dear wounded. Toward the close of 1863 a friend came to visit him, in a poor bare little room, the cheapest he could find, in the third story of an old build- ing; it was literally a garret, containing scarcely any furni- ture but a bed, a deal table, and a little sheet-iron stove. "I found him preparing his luncheon . . . cutting bread with a pocket knife preparing to toast it; all his uten- sils were of the simplest." 1 He was lucky in meeting, as soon as he reached the capital, a friend whose acquaintance he had made in Boston two years and a half before. And such a friend! The most generous heart, the noblest, the completest which fate could throw in his way. ... It was Douglas O'Connor, who left his city and his profession for a position in the Lighthouse Bureau. He and his wife welcomed Walt as one of their own children — though old, he was always a big child; and for six months he not only had his place at their table, but he had all the little attentions which his mother and his sister were J J. T. Trowbridge: Reminiscences of Wait Whitman, Atlantic Monthly, November 2, 1902, p. 16S. 179 180 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK wont to give him in Brooklyn. Walt found in the O'Connor home hearts of his own calibre; never did he leave the house without a promise to return; and he was soon to find in O'Connor his most ardent champion. Major Hapgood pro- cured him work in the office of military paymaster. He kept accounts for a few hours every day, and received enough pay for his daily needs. Occasionally he sent to New York and Brooklyn newspapers hospital notes and was liberally paid for them. Long afterward, when he collected his Notes of the War, he utilized these letters some of which, very long, are living pictures, where the lamentable army of victims are seen in their misery and their multiple suffering. 1 He did what he could himself, out of his scant means to supply his numerous little presents to the wounded; he had scruples about making outside appeal, even for such a pur- pose. For a long time he thought of giving lectures through- out the country to collect money needed for the sick. Once in February, 1863, he wrote to a faithful friend in Boston, James Redpath, that a little money would be a great help for his work, and his friend responded to the appeal. Mr. Redpath, with Walt's touching letter, sought the help of Emerson, who had rich and generous friends, and Emerson himself was wholeheartedly in favour of the work of his friend Whitman. Little by little good souls, men and women in- terested in his work, sent him subscriptions as well as con- fidence, relying on him entirely to distribute the money wisely to the soldiers. Then he could distribute oranges, cakes, cream, pieces of silver — this with great devotion. The desolating impotence of the first days was over. 2 In October, 1863, he returned to Brooklyn for a month. John Hay, who was a*friend of O'Connor, procured him a pass. 3 Then he came back to his post a few days before he *Three of these articles have been reprinted by Bueke with the title The Wound Dresser, a collection of letters of Whitman to his mother during the war. ^Complete Prose, p. 51. 'Blisa Perry: Walt Whitman, pp. 141-142. THE WOUND 181 received news of the death of his brother Andrew. His mother was very lonely but the hospitals were now part of his life. He would not quit the wards full of pale youths ex- cept to help in the landing of new boatloads of wounded, hurried from the battle-fields, or perhaps for a brief sojourn to the army among the tent-hospitals of the camp, where dis- tress was still more frightful. In a hospital at Armory Square, close to the wharf, where were crowded those unable to be carried farther — the worst cases — was his most arduous labour. Walt was himself astonished at his extraordinary self-possession so close to unnamable horrors. It was when outside the hospital in his room or out walking, that he thought of the bloody scenes; when he was near some poor devil whose flesh was eaten by corruption, he would feel a sudden convulsion pull at his heart and tremble from head to foot. 1 Or perhaps pierced by an emotion which brought him to tears, he would take from his pocket a notebook, pencil a few lines: the embryo of a future poem. 2 The astonishing quietude of his nature served him marvellously in these circumstances; he could control his emotion and assist with the exterior im- passiveness of a man of science at all the sights of the hospital. The smiling face, the sweet humour in the pres- ence of the sick concealed a soul in grief. He writes to his old mother : " How miserable appear all the petty pride and vanity of this world in the midst of scenes like this — these tragedies of soul and body. To see such things and not to be able to prevent them is terrible. I am almost ashamed to be so well and free from all sickness." In seeing so many innocent victims, thousands of men and boys formed for a splendid and fecund life mowed down, he experienced the colossal horror of the war, though he recognized proudly the need successfully to finish the struggle in which the destiny of the country was at stake. He himself would enlist un- 1 The Wound Dresser, pp. 123-124. 2 Bucke: Walt Whitman, p. 171. J^AN 182 WALT WHITMAN— THE IVjEAN AND HIS WORK hesitatingly if his presence was more needed in the ranks than in the hospitals. With all his absorbing care of the sick, his increasingly awakened curiosity would not allow him to neglect a study of the aspects of Washington in war time, and all the details of the life of the soldier, on the march in camp, at rest, re- ceiving pay, or in the aftermath of battles. He looked not only at the slow, interminable procession through the streets of ambulances carrying the wounded to the hospitals, at the dreary squads of captured deserters, but when a regiment marching to the front halted in the street, he mingled with the men, listened, asked questions. The vigorous beauty of the native Americans, from field and factory, was to him a continual subject of wonder. Were they not the justifi- cation of that enthusiastic faith in America which he had expressed in his poems? His emotional and impulsive nature, sensitive to the electric thrill of the crowd, responded intensely to the starry banner, Yankee Doodle, the rhythmic tread of a regiment of cavalry, all the trumpets, drums, cymbals, the march of an armed regiment. He was seized with the same emotion as the man in the street. He had never experienced the like before. He was stirred most by the manoeuvring ground. The special reality of troops in the field, with tragic suggestion they roused after battle, in which sixty thousand men were left on the ground, gave to these frequent shows a terrible beauty which penetrated his very heart. With an attentive ear he listened to the reports of battles from the sick and convalescent who had fought in them; their story of the skirmishes, the action, the battle-field, details of which the daily papers, with their colourless and free summary, said nothing. Thus he penetrated these inner- most aspects of the reality of the war, learned history at its very sources, the history which never gets into books. One day he visited a camp of black troops and noticed how fine they looked. Some War Memoranda published later abound THE WOUND 183 in impressionistic vignettes of the life of the soldier in the field — such as the astonishing picture of the wounded on a moon- light night — part of the battle of Chancellorsville. 1 He used to go to the Capitol during stormy sessions rejoicing in the sumptuous building and noting the mediocre orators. He loved to stride through the empty corridors or to see the sun set on the Genius of Liberty crowning the structure. But all of these were but crumbs of his life at that time; his work in the hospitals kept him by the power of fate. Early in 1864, evoking the coming years, he saw no other prospect than to be consecrated to the sick and wounded so long as they needed him. The call was heard: he obeyed. It was the spring of the year 1864 that the terrible battles of the Desert and of Spottsylvania took place. The crowd of wounded brought into Washington was enormous. In May the appalling flood still kept growing. The greater part of the newcomers remained long in the army uncared for; their wounds, hastily dressed or not at all, were inflamed and putrid from exposure. Quick amputations were in progress. Many lost their minds. Since the war began the hospitals had not offered such a horrible sight. Walt redoubled his work in the effort to be equal to the superhuman task. The result was that at the end of May he fell ill. This time human endurance reached its limit, the worst was come. He braced himself to the task; he neither could nor would leave his wounded at this critical moment. But he soon had to yield and to remain for days from the hospitals sending someone else in his place. The good giant was wounded for the first time in his life and for life. He did not lack warning, but his faith in his own strength was boundless and his health was proof against everything. The summer preceding he suffered from dizziness, deafness, sore throat. Several times the doctor told him to refrain from this too-constant contact with the poisoned air of the Complete Prose, pp. 28-30. 184 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK wards. He, however, so sure of his phenomenal health, paid no attention, entirely absorbed in his duty. Added to all this, in the height of the summer while assist- ing at an amputation of a gangrenous limb, he gashed his right hand; it happened with one of the "special cases" — a Rebel. The inflammation reached the arm, which began to swell. It healed rapidly and he gave little attention to the trifling accident which one day was to be of grave consequence. He wrote as usual to his mother of his perfect health, his weight, his appearance. But at the beginning of June, 1864, as a result of his enormous labour in the crowded hospitals, and of the extreme heat, the symptoms of the preceding summer reappeared, but with quickened strength. "It is proba- ble," he wrote his mother, "that the poison of the hospital has affected my system and I see it is more than I supposed. Some days I believe I am better, and I feel revived, but, some hours after, I have a new attack." 1 He did not get better. He had too long absorbed the poison from wounds and at last the corruption reached him. More than malaria, the repeated shocks and anguish of these frightful years, the torture of his loving heart before the hecatombs, the perpetual effort to preserve his self-possession in the presence of the suffering and the dying, the enormous strength ex- pended in heartening the distressed boys ended in sapping his athletic constitution. He had suffered too much in seeing suffering; his was moral illness as well as physical. And after having lifted so many of the prostrate, he himself was prostrated. The doctors ordered an immediate change of air and in July he left for Brooklyn, where he intended to remain the weeks needed to recuperate. He had to remain six months. He had been heroic and loving; now he was exposed to peril; his physical perfection was at stake — one day or another, if not to-day, surely later — the heavy ransom of the lives *The Wound Dresser, p. 197. THE WOUND 185 he saved — he, so proud of his vigour arid his untouched vital- ity, he who knew no illness, and who by these terrible years, at the age of forty-six, at the very climax of his power, was transformed at one stroke into an old man. A respite in Brooklyn and New York gave him new aplomb and he re- turned to Washington. Nevertheless, something remained, some unknown fatal germ which, slyly hiding, would one day smite him. The war marked him, also, as one of its victims. XIV THE COMRADE HEART To any one dying, thither I speed and twist the knob of the door, Turn the bed-clothes toward the foot of the bed, Let the physician and the priest go home. I seize the descending man and raise him with resistless will, despairer, here is my neck, By God, you shall not go down ! hang your whole weight upon me. 1 dilate you with tremendous breath, I buoy you up, Every room of the house do I fill with an arm'd force, Lovers of me, bafflers of graves. 1 Had he not justified, in the course of these years, this proud affirmation of his poem? By the power of his tender- ness and his personal magnetism he many a time had saved lives pledged to the grave. He had offered his neck to the weak, and spent his resistless will like the Walt Whitman who sang himself in Leaves of Grass. He had accomplished work forbidden to the doctor and the priest. This mission of Walt in the hospital represents the time when "the mysterious bodily quality," 2 which always won him the silent homage of glances in the street and untold sympathy, reached its highest power. It was then that his magnetism radiated with an intensity commensurate with the suffering everywhere visible. It would be difficult to suggest the effect of the presence of the man on the wounded if eye-witnesses had not pictured it for us: we know that his very presence was powerful enough to change the at- *Leaves of Grass, p. 66. 2 John Burroughs: Notes, pp. 13-14. 186 THE COMRADE HEART 187 mosphere of an entire ward. He was rich with the whole of humanity which he had already absorbed. His giant individuality operated as a tonic. He was more than a medicine to the prostrated boys. In some cases where science was impotent the doctors would say: "Turn him over to Whitman. Perhaps he will save him." * Walt never boasted of the immense service he rendered. Yet his labour, when it is considered, staggers the imagina- tion. He estimated that he individually visited from eighty to a hundred thousand wounded and ill; as for the number of lives saved, that remains the secret of love. Close friends who every day saw him pass or went with him alone knew the truth aside from the attendants of the hospitals. O'Connor recalls a picture of him unforgettably beautiful when on a midnight visit to his home. He came to ask for supper, his coat on his arm, his cuffs turned up, shod in great regiment slippers, very straight and tall, appearance rude and majestic; he was returning from a convoy of wounded. O'Connor later, in flaming words, charged Amer- ica to remember what this simple man, without other reason than his heart, had done for her sons. 2 And Bucke inscribed this homage in his book: "Those who joined the ranks and fought the battles of the Republic did well; but when the world knows, as it begins to-day to know it, of the way this man — with no encouragement, without the least obligation, with simplicity, without drum-beating nor any approving voices — went into these immense lazar-houses, and conse- crated his days and nights, his heart and his soul, and finally his health and his life to the sick and wounded sons of Amer- ica, it will say that he did better." 3 Great was the spiritual effort of the Wound Dresser in this persistent task. Great also was the moral effect which these years produced in him. He left the hospitals with the deep l Camden Edition, Introduction, p. ki. m. O'Connor: The Good Gray Poet in Bucke's Walt Whitman, pp. 123-128. 3 The Wound Dresser, pp. 199-200. 188 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK conviction of having lived sacred moments which no word was able to convey; this is why he loved to keep silent about his experience. "Those three years I consider the greatest privilege and satisfaction (with all their feverish excitement and physical deprivations and lamentable sights), and, of course, the most profound lesson of my life. ... It aroused and brought out and decided undreamed-of depth of emotion in me." 1 The emotion was so intense and pro- longed it broke him at last. This mission always remained to him of a character quasi- religious, so much was it a fervour. He was bound to the victims of the war by an unspeakable union. His great mother-like heart bled for the sons of his race, sacrificed in full force, for all the robust boys, from field and shop, "intelligent, independent, tender in feeling, accustomed to a life free and healthful." He believed that men never loved one another as he and some of the poor wounded boys, dying and loving one another. In his confession to his mother and to his friend, Mrs. Price, he speaks of the profound tender- ness of the young soldiers, how marvellously they respond to affection. 2 Many a time the holy mystery of suffering and love was for him so rich that he could well say that he re- ceived more than he gave in that exchange of tenderness. One of the few times he broke silence on this subject, so intimate and moving, was in the presence of his friend Sidney Morse, the sculptor who made a bust of the poet toward the close of his life. He said : The most precious time of my life, my love for my mother and my love for those dear boys, Secessionists and Unionists. ... It seemed to me, during all this time, that I was not far away caring for strangers but absolutely at home with my own flesh and blood. ... I do not know why I speak of this but I want to show you the little note books with blood spots. . . . 3 Complete Prose, p. 72. 'Both letters are in The Wound Dresser, pp. 128-129. *Bucke: In Re Walt Whitman, p. 391. THE COMRADE HEART 189 Oh, the little notebooks made of leaves folded and fastened with a pin, the dozen little notebooks, yellow, blotched with blood, filled with notes at the bedside of patients, watching the dead, or at the clinic, the notebooks where the comrade wrote the name, cases, wants of the invalid, accounts from the field of battle from the mouth of the wounded, and which he tenderly kept — for himself alone, full as they were of memories impossible to be "said or sung." 1 They were like a tabernacle where a thousand sorrows were kept, a thou- sand tearing emotions, a thousand untranslatable secrets. A depth of human tenderness dwells in their pages. Beyond this tragic and soothing experience, which stirred the depths of his being, unique lessons from the war came to Walt Whitman. Not only new songs jetted from him by this taking up arms for the great cause of the Union, but hi all his later poetry, enriched by impressions and emo- tions, the reflection of the war was extended, of a war en- larged to the confines of the world and deepened by a spirit- ual meaning. He went so far as to say that, without the capital event of the years 1861-1865 and his hospital life, Leaves of Grass would not have existed. Although three editions appeared before the war, this apparent paradox is true. The poet meant to say that without the war his book would have remained unfinished and that it came, in unexpected and compulsory collaboration, to perfect the work begun, and to give it its plenary signification. One of the great results of the struggle is that it allowed him to confront his country and his race, to acquire the definitive consciousness of all the reality and the grandeur of the States, united by a stronger than the federal bond. "I never knew what young Americans were," he wrote, "till I had been in the hospitals." 2 More than any other he was able to appreciate in the hospitals where "the marrow of the tragedy concentrated" 3 ^Complete Prose, p. 1. *The Wound Dresser, p. 116. s Comj>}cIe Prose, p. 74. 190 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK the courage of the fighters, the native strength of the race, the character of the men. He was close to those from all the regions of the vast continent, from New England, from Virginia, from New York, and Pennsylvania and from the West, the volunteersfromthe centre and the Great Lakes. He communicated with his country entire represented by thousands of fallen youth. And the feeling of the unity of his land through the multiplicity of its types and ter- ritories seized him as if he had been transported to the top of a mountain from whence his look could encompass total America. "It may have been odd," he remarked when he saw troops filing by him at night, "but I never before so realized the majesty and reality of the American people en masse. It fell upon me like a great awe." 1 A great light came to him, he discovered "authentic America" as he loved to repeat. His aboriginal faith issued from this period of blood and of horror, tempered, justified, tenfold enlarged. And the supreme lesson of this contact with America one and undivided was that he could verify the concrete reality of one of his ideas, perhaps the dearest of all his ideas, the one at all events which radiates with the most brilliancy about his work and his personality. Walt at the same time that he made proof of America made proof of comradeship. Rather, comradeship was the key to his gospel, such as he understood it; by the light of his communal instinct and such as certain periods of his life illustrate, it established it- self as something immense and new, the highest and most essential of human emotions. In every soul he perceived the germ of deep and tender feeling which awakens at the con- tact of another soul, and this natural attraction, at once physical and moral, which draws man to man is according to him, at the base even of social solidarity, more real than bonds formed by interest and rewards. And the frontiers of a nation do not stop the flight of this pure manly emotion of Complete Prose, p. 43. THE COMRADE HEART 191 friendship, which after having penetrated the whole con- tinent projects through the whole world its millions of threads, invisible, woven inextricable. Comradeship is the woof of a world democracy as well as American democracy. Walt knew this better than any one, this sentiment exquisite and strong. It entered into his life, surrounded by com- panions, and the most natural symbol of him is his arm about the neck of a friend. It was there in the hospitals, according to the happy expression of Triggs, that "he perceived the new chivalry arising, the chivalry of comradeship. He saw that love lay latent in all hearts, and that a practical com- radeship already existed among men." 1 An immense peace filled Walt now that he saw the triumph of his Idea. His great dream of Democrat and modern Apostle was not vain, since reality took pains to confirm it. He was right, and his book, which was himself, was also right; and that book would perhaps be right one day before the world as it was right for him. He had also other lessons from the experiences of this short and sublime period. A daily witness of physical pain and agony, he passed in every sense the limits of life and death. If he had studied before the source and secret of life, he had now heaped observations on the mystery of death. He derived a great lesson, one he verified a thousand thousand times: death, in reality, is not surrounded by the terror which our imagination, filled with fantasies, conjures when we are close to it. And Walt would never forget it, as the second part of Leaves of Grass proves where he sings the divine peace of death without terror, death the other form of life, and sings with the serene certitude and even joy of a soul who knew it for a good neighbour and was untor- mented by the enigma of the beyond. If the poet — without knowing it — carried within him a poison germ from all the wounded his fervent comrade soul 1 0. L. Triggs: Selections, Introduction, p. xxxiii. 192 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK impelled him to bend over, he also went from the hospitals — and of that he was clearly conscious — with the blessed mem- ory of these years of tenderness and of sorrow, as fruitful for him, the individual, as for the nation itself, renewed in its depths. XV HYMNS OF THE WAR AND OF LINCOLN In January, 1865, he again filled his post in Washington; his mission was not to be abandoned. The hospitals with their fascinating reality remained; and as long as they sheltered the sick of body and soul, Walt continued his visits. He gained, in his good Brooklyn, a new supply of vigour and felt himself strong as before. However, it was no longer "the same unconscious and perfect health," which had abounded in him up to this time; and he confessed that it was his first appearance in the character of a man not entirely well, but that would go over in due time. 1 His material condition, on the other hand, was changed. His career was shaping itself to a new sudden turning, per- haps the most unexpected: Walt, the dreamer, Walt, the incorrigible "amateur," the follower of his own instinct, became a clerk in the service of the Government. He lacked then a few years of fifty, and the close care of the wounded had for a moment lulled his old passion for roving and change; more than that he had a fair income, and he saw, in a fixed monthly wage, the opportunity for more regular and more generous distribution in the hospitals. Thus it was with pleasure that some months after his return to Washington he received work in the Department of the Interior, in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Some friends, interested in his mission, found employment for the Wound Dresser. Before obtaining it, one of them, J. T. Trowbridge, had failed in an attempt in March, 1863, with the Secretary of the Treasury, S. P. Chase. Although iBliss Perry: Walt Whitman, pp. 152-153. 193 194 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK he had presented in favour of his protege, a letter of recom- mendation from Emerson, Chase would not admit the author of Leaves of Grass as one of his assistants. 1 The Secretary of the Interior this time did not have the same scruples as his colleague of the Treasury; perhaps he was ignorant of the poetic personality of his employe. But no matter, Walt was provided for. He received honourable pay for work but little absorbing. Never had he earned so much money — except perhaps at the time when his building enterprise put him for a moment on the road to fortune, which he was care- ful to put from him with prudent haste. This money allowed liberality without changing any- thing in his manner of living. He remained at his desk during the day and devoted his Sundays and sometimes his evenings to the wounded. They remained his steady pre- occupation. The war was not finished; and even after the victory and the disbanding of the armies, there was ample work still in the hospitals. The final battles, March, April, before Richmond, were sanguinary ones and the last victims had to lie for months awaiting almost hopeless recovery. Walt did not forget these sufferers; they were still its victims. Every Sunday he loaded and shouldered his haversack and journeyed to these who needed the strength of him. All the year 1865 and a great part of 1866 he continued his Sunday visits. Burroughs who sometimes went with him writes: "Words are poor and feeble things in an affair of this kind. . . . His magnetism was unbelievable and inex- haustible. Dim eyes became bright at his approach. . . . A fortifying air filled the ward and neutralized its bad odours. 2 One after another of the hospitals closed; soon there was but one, Harewood Hospital, secluded in a wood northeast of the city, last resort of the incurably wounded, those obstinately ill, and the unfortunate without house or home. Four or ^ve wards were still full of their sad occupants; and Walt kept on, »J. T. Trowbridge: Reminiscences of Walt Whitman. Atlantic Monthly, February, 1902, p. 163, 8 John Burroughs: Notes, pp. 12-13. HYMNS OF THE WAR AND OF LINCOLN 195 trying "if he could do something" for these veterans of sor- row. This was seen when years later, passing their immense army in review for the last time, he addressed to all the dead in the war the solemn adieu of one who ever kept their mem- ory sacred. 1 At the very moment when the struggle was near its end, he was preparing to unveil the monument more enduring still, which he had built in secret for them. During the years of feverish commotion all poetry apparently disap- peared in the gulf that yawned at the nation's feet : but from this very gulf it had arisen, and in the soul of the Wound Dresser, steeped in profound emotions, new poems burst forth. His book was not swallowed up in the storm; it had silently grown a story. In the first days of the war the shock which he suffered on seeing his city and America take arms was translated into flaming odes which seemed penetrated with the holy fire of the Prophets. Under the daily inspiration of the enrollment en masse, of telegrams read aloud of the passing of troops through the streets of New York, he wrote the larger part of his Drum Taps. He left the manuscript at home when he went to care for his brother George. Bye and bye, his per- sonal experience in the hospitals and camp, the tragedies he had seen, the unspeakable emotion experienced among the wounded, gave birth to other poems in feeling still more in- tense. The collection took shape toward the end of 1863. When he was spending a month in Brooklyn with his mother, in November of the same year, he wrote to his friend El- dridge: "I must be continually bringing out poems — now is the hey day — I shall range along the high plateau of my life and capacity for a few years now, and then swiftly descend." 2 On his return to Washington, one day a friend came and found him in his garret; he took the manuscript from his trunk and read fragments of it with strength and feeling and 1 The Million Dead, Too. Summed Up. Complete Prose, p. 72. *Bliss Perry: Walt Whitman, p. 143. 196 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK with a voice of ricli but not resounding tone. 1 He revised the poems the following year and put the finishing touch to them during the six months' enforced vacation in Brooklyn. Now the volume was ready and he intended to "move Heaven and earth" to have it appear. 2 It was the old, old difficulty. The Boston publishers, when pressed, refused to be respons- ible for Drum Taps. Now that Walt had employment and a salary, he could resort to his favourite method. He was his own publisher, as he had been and would be. For years he had worked as a printer, he thoroughly knew the business, and he kept in touch with the pressmen of New York. It was there he gave his manuscript to be printed early in 1865. The book was ready at the beginning of April. The poet happened to be in Brooklyn, came perhaps to revise the last proofs, when a fresh thunderbolt shook the country: Abra- ham Lincoln was assassinated! In the existing circum- stances, after the surrender of Lee, the war scarcely over, such an event could but stupify and crush the whole nation prostrate before him in whom was incarnated the cause of the Union in the period of suffering, the greatest citizen and the greatest president. Walt was struck to the heart. " We heard the news very early in the morning," he wrote in Specimen Days, "Mother was getting breakfast, and the other meals later, as usual; but the whole day not one of us ate a single mouthful. We each drank a half cup of coffee; that was all. We spoke little. We bought all the morning and evening papers and then a number of special editions, and we passed them silently one to another. 3 Lincoln had more than Whitman's deep love. He had studied him at close range, and the one-time raftsman from the West who, with a firm and prudent hand, had guided the Union during the tempestuous years, was in his eyes the ij. T. Trowbridge: Reminiscences of Walt Whitman, Atlantic Monthly, February, 1902, p. 163. •Bliss Perry: Walt Whitman, p. 149. 9 Complete Prose, p. 20. HYMNS OF THE WAR AND OF LINCOLN 197 highest type of democracy. He was a man and a type after his own heart who justified his faith and his philosophy. The first time that he saw him was in Brooklyn, in February, 1861, the day when the new president made that singular entrance into New York, the event Whitman describes with the hand of a master. From the top of an omnibus blocked by the crowd, Walt leisurely studied and noted "his look and gait — his perfect composure and coolness — his unusual and uncouth height, his dress of complete black, stove pipe hat pushed back on his head, his dark brown complexion, seamed and wrinkled yet canny-looking face, black curly head of hair, disproportionately long neck, and his hands held behind as he stood observing the people." 1 He saw Lin- coln again in Washington, where he became to him a familiar figure. In the streets he often met the President's carriage and in summer every evening, on his way to his lodging out of town, he passed by Walt's home. Sometimes Walt mingled with the enormous and picturesque crowd which on reception days besieged the White House. And he did not fail to see the canny shrewdness of that face, even the plain- ness with the "deep latent sadness" 2 which the vast respon- sibilities of the times had imprinted there but where the "old goodness and tenderness" 3 remained. The face of Lin- coln exercised on the great reader of souls a powerful attrac- tion: beneath the deep-cut lines he saw a "subtle and indirect expression" 4 which no portrait could reproduce. That "something else" was surely the personality of this man, extraordinary and at the same time common ; and the poet of personality sought to decipher its puzzle. Later he became intimate with John Hay, the future Secretary of State, then private secretary to Lincoln . Walt knew in a confidential way some aspects of the real man. ^Complete Prose, p. 303. *Id., p. 37. •Id., p. 57. «/ WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK These vacation habits grew upon Walt. The hospitality of the family of J. H. Johnston made him a home in the city; they lived opposite Central Park, and one of his favourite pas- times in the beautiful May afternoons was to sit in a Fifth Avenue stage watching the "Mississippi of horses and rich vehicles, by hundreds and thousands," a swift-moving procession. While the flow of carriages passed before the great lover of movement and of mass, he drew from a Park policeman comment on the American rich, "Lucky brokers, capitalists, contractors, grocers, successful political strikers, rich butchers, dry goods folks, etc.," exhibiting family crests on panels or horse trappings, suggestive of "soaps and es- sences" and a European garnish. Walt noted the com- ments of the policeman "as a doctor notes symptoms." He also watched the big liners leave for Europe, responding keenly to the crowds at the wharf. In quitting his dear New York his farewell words were: "More and more, the old name absorbs into me — Manhattan — the place en- circled by many swift tides and sparkling waters. How fit a name for America's great democratic island city. The word itself, how beautiful; how aboriginal; how it seems to rise with tall spires, glistening in sunshine, with such New World atmosphere, vistas and action." 1 Three months later, after an interval at Camden and the Staffords, Walt, leaning on his invalid cane, started on his way. His old vagabond heart yielded to a great enterprise; he now felt equal to it. The future he did not know: perhaps there would come a day of total helplessness. He would travel thousands and thousands of miles toward the West on a longer journey than any he had made in twenty-five years. The poet left to discover the almost limitless regions which he had so often explored in his dreams, he was to tread the soil, meet face to face the people he had introduced into his poems, and to come near, more freely than in 1848, the immensity of the continent, its riches, its incomparable diversity, its unity. 1 Complete Prose, p. 507. ACROSS THE CONTINENT 267 In mid-September (1879) he left Philadelphia and reached Pittsburg, black with the coal smoke of factories, crossed Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and stopped but one night in St. Louis; he continued his journey to the West. "What a fierce weird pleasure to lie in my berth at night in the luxuri- ous palace-car, drawn by the mighty Baldwin . . . dis- tances joined like magic. . . . On we go rumbling and flashing, with our loud whinnies thrown out from time to time; or trumpet blasts, into the darkness. Passing the homes of men, the farms, barns, cattle — the silent villages. And the car itself, the sleeper, with curtains drawn and lights turned down — in the berths the sleepers — on, on, on, on, we fly like lightning through the night — how strangely sound and sweet they sleep!" 1 is his note of it. He crossed Missouri and admired its pastoral splendour, made a stop in Kansas at Lawrence, and at Topeka; crossed the Kansas plains and into Colorado. At Denver, the city of the Rocky Mountains, he rested, having encompassed three-fifths of the continent. There he was profoundly stirred. Denver and the gorges of Colorado intoxicated him with their marvels. He responded anew to the unspeakable magnificence of the scenery fulfilling and more than fulfilling his anticipations by its astonishing reality. Denver, a modern, busy city, between peaks and plains, immediately captivated him and for days he lingered in its beautiful streets breathing the pure air of the plateaus, and delighting in the streams of crystalline water from the mountains, visiting the smelting works where precious metals were piled in pyramids. He wished to end his days there. In an excursion to the Rocky Mountains before the wild panorama of rocks, streams, valleys, snowy summits, before such a marvellous Walhalla this thought struck him: "I have found the law of my own poems." He felt a "new Womplele Prose, pp. 132-133. 268 WALT WHITMAN— THE MAN AND HIS WORK sense," a new joy spring up in him. 1 He was not crushed by these marvels, he had on the contrary the sensation of being in his element, among realities adequate to his instinct. Denver was the limit of his journey. He went from there to Pueblo and on to Topeka; viewing plains of cactus and wild sage, and herds of cattle feeding. The prairies, oceanic levels of pasturage which occupied from north to south the middle part of the continent, were with Denver the most pro- found and most lasting impression of all his travels. 2 At Topeka he visited in prison thirty captured Indian chiefs. The assistants were surprised to seethe sullen, silent prisoners respond to Walt's greeting. "I suppose that they recognized the savage in me, something in touch with their own na- ture." 3 He was again overtaken by prostration, and was detained three months at St. Louis with his brother Jeff and two nieces. He lost no time in exploring the queen city of the Mississippi, its resources, people, products, environment. He saw the giant slaughter houses, the large glass factories, or lingered in the evening by the great spinal river. As he expressed himself to reporters who came to interview him, he was discovering the real America of which eastern cities were but the advance guard, and his faith in the future of his nation was increased twofold now that he had touched for- midable realities which he had not till then been aware of. America to his mind was not yet conscious of the possibilities she concealed and one day surely a literature, poems, art, in- dividualities, an average such as the world never saw, would jet forth from the colossal reservoir of plains, rivers, moun- tains. Everything up to this time which had been done in poetry in America was unauthentic and false, not in accord with the immensity of her resources. The era of great Na- tives, truly modelled on their own soil, was not yet come. They would issue and spread, after the pioneers and builders, ^Complete Prose, p. 136. Hd., pp. 132-140. 'Bucke: In Re Walt Whitman, pp. 382-383. ACROSS THE CONTINENT 269 to carry on and perfect the work of the creators of indispens- able material riches. Whitman returned to Camden the first days of January, 1880, "in his average health and with strength and spirits good enough to be mighty thankful for, " as the Camden Post reported. This journey to the West, late in life, was a last and solemn justification of the great Idea which had illu- mined his life and which fertilized his work. "Prodigious marvels, revelations which I would not for my life have lost, " as he wrote to his great friend Anne Gilchrist. 1 This turn across the continent gave an edge to his appetite for pil- grimages, landscapes, people, and new places. Five months later he was in Ontario, Canada, the guest of his devoted friend Doctor Bucke who was head physician of an asylum for the insane. True to his literary instinct Walt kept a diary of his impressions of the asylum, the surroundings, re- joicing in the odour of hay, in the freedom of the prairies. With Doctor Bucke he made a slow exploration of east Canada, reached Toronto, and from there sailed on Lake Ontario and afterward the entire course of the St. Lawr- ence. He was alive to every suggestion of the ample, rich country revealed to him — faces, manners, scenery. Wild Saguenay above the mouth of the St. Lawrence was filled with a kind of "pagan sacredness." He marvelled at Canada as a land of waters, forests, snows, a land of happy men and women; not a privileged class only, but of the mass, great, healthy, happy. Later he thought Canada must become one with the United States. After his long journey the little adorable woody corner of Timber Creek saw him most faithfully return to it. The tiny valley where in contact with nature he recaptured enough of strength and suppleness to be allowed a long ab- sence, was to him like a fountain of health, to which he re- turned whenever he felt again the need to test the strength of his friends, water and trees. !She had returne