Whitman; a study
Burroughs, John, 1837-1921
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Copyright, 1896, . | ‘ By JOHN BURROUGHS. v - \ “ aaron : All righ rved, (All rights reserved, ; ; - 42 ‘ 5 j i , = " ; 7 ' ka ae yc tye a i E , ) , i \ rt i . 2 f iY ‘ 4 5 4 * r ; ‘ if “Ti \ ¢ a ri os uf) ’ ' \ . ! dor 1 ‘ i : t a 4, rab eA ; f , * : yr f Peet's 4 P / " ‘ y ' bs e rita “3 Oy fe eee ere pa Bee 4 de . § Fi M : ’ in ¥ ive ; CONTENTS PAGE PRELIMINARY. . . : RE 5 Sate. sorte sare E BIOGRAPHICAL AND PERSONAL ° “ ; : 23 His Rutinc IDEAS AND AIMs . Z : : : at Seo His SELF-RELIANCE . : : < : : F A 85 His RELATION To ART AND LITERATURE. A : eeLOE His RELATION TO LIFE AND MORALS . A : : 169 His RELATION TO CULTURE. A 5 : . A - 205 His RELATION TO HIS COUNTRY AND HIS TIMES 2 229 His RELATION TO SCIENCE . ( : 5 3 A . 249 His RELATION TO RELIGION . - : : A . 257 A Finan Worp . 3 “ - . . 2 P - 263 “All original art is self-regulated, and no original art can’ be regulated from without ; it carries its own counterporse, and does not receive it from elsewhere,’? — TAINE. “ Tf you want to tell good Gothic, see if it has the sort of rough- ness and largeness and nonchalance, mixed in places with the ex- quisite tenderness which seems always to be the sign manual of the broad vision and massy power of men who can see past the work they are doing, and betray here and there something like disdain for it”? — RUSKIN. “ Formerly, during the period termed classic, when literature was governed by recognized rules, he was considered the best poet who had composed the most perfect work, the most beautiful poem, the most intelligible, the most agreeable to read, the most complete in every respect,—the neid, the Gerusalemme, a fine tragedy. To-day something else is wanted. For us the greatest poet is he who in his works most stimulates the reader’s imagination and re- flection, who excites him the most himself to poetize. The greatest poet is not he who has done the best, it is he who suggests the most ; he, not all of whose meaning is at first obvious, and who leaves you much to desire, to explain, to study, much to complete in your turn.’? — SAINTE-BEUVE. * WHITMAN PRELIMINARY I i ig writing of this preliminary chapter, and the final survey and revision of my Whitman essay, I am making ata rustic house I have built at a wild place a mile or more from my home upon the river. I call this place Whitman Land, because in many ways it is typical of my poet, —an amphitheatre of precipitous. rock, slightly veiled with a delicate growth of verdure, enclosing a few acres of prairie- like land, once the site of an ancient lake, now a garden of unknown depth and fertility. Elemental ruggedness, savageness, and grandeur, combined with wonderful tenderness, modernness, and geniality. There rise the gray scarred cliffs, crowned here and there with a dead hemlock or pine, where, morning after morning, I have seen the bald-eagle perch, and here at their feet this level area of tender humus, with three perennial springs of delicious cold water flowing in its margin; a huge granite bowl filled with the elements and potencies of hfe. The scene has a strange fascination for me, and holds me here day. 2 ; WHITMAN after day. From the highest point of rocks I can overlook a long stretch of the river and of the farm- ing country beyond; I can hear owls hoot, hawks scream, and roosters crow. Birds of the garden and orchard meet birds of the forest upon the shaggy cedar posts that uphold my porch. At dusk the call of the whippoorwill mingles with the chorus of the pickerel frogs, and in the morning I hear through the robins’ cheerful burst the sombre plaint of the mourning-dove. WhenI tire of my manu- script, I walk in the woods, or climb the rocks, or help the men clear up the ground, piling and burn- ing the stumps and rubbish. This scene and sit- uation, so primitive and secluded, yet so touched with and adapted to civilization, responding to the moods of both sides of the life and imagination of a modern man, seems, I repeat, typical in many ways of my poet, and is a veritable Whitman land. Whitman does not to me suggest the wild and un- kempt as he seems to do to many; he suggests the. cosmic and the elemental, and this is one of the dominant thoughts that run through my disserta-. tion. Scenes of power and savagery in nature were more welcome to him, probably more stimulating to him, than the scenes of the pretty and placid, and he cherished the hope that he had put into his “Leaves” some of the tonic and fortifying quality of Nature in her more grand and primitive aspects. His wildness is only the wildness of the great primary forces from which we draw our health and strength. Underneath all his unloosedness, or free PRELIMINARY 3 launching forth of himself, is the sanity and repose of nature. II I first became acquainted with Whitman’s poetry through the columns of the old “Saturday Press ” when I was twenty or twenty-one years old (1858 or 1859). The first things I remember to have read were ‘‘There was a child went forth,” ‘This Com- post,” “As I ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” ‘‘Old Ireland,” and maybe a few others. I was attracted by the new poet’s work from the first. It seemed to let me into a larger,. freer air than I found in the current poetry. Meeting Bayard Taylor about this time, I spoke to him about Whitman. “ Yes,” he said, ‘‘there is something in him, but he is a man of colossal egotism.” A few years later a friend sent me a copy of the Thayer & Eldridge edition of ‘‘ Leaves of Grass” of 1860. It proved a fascinating but puzzling book tome. I grazed upon it like a colt upon a moun- tain, taking what tasted good to me, and avoiding what displeased me, but having little or no con- ception of the purport of the work as a whole. I found passages and whole poems here and there that I never tired of reading, and that gave a strange fillip to my moral and intellectual nature, but nearly as many passages and poems puzzled or repelled me. My absorption of Emerson had prepared me in a measure for Whitman’s philosophy of life, but not for the ideals of character and conduct which he held up to me, nor for the standards in art to which 4 WHITMAN _ the poet perpetually appealed. Whitman was Emer- son translated from the abstract into the concrete. There was no privacy with Whitman; he never sat me down in a corner with a cozy, comfortable shut-in feeling, but he set me upon a hill or started me upon an endless journey. Wordsworth had been my poet of nature, of the sequestered and the idyllic; but I saw that here was a poet of a larger, more fundamental nature, indeed of the Cosmos itself. Not a poet of dells and fells, but. of the earth and the orbs. This much soon appeared to me, but I was troubled by the poet’s apparent ‘‘co- lossal egotism,” by his attitude towards evil, declar- ing himself “to be the poet of wickedness also;” by his seeming attraction toward the turbulent and the disorderly; and, at times, by what the critics had called his cataloguing style of treatment. When I came to meet the poet himself, which was in the fall of 1863, I felt less concern about these features of his work; he was so sound and” sweet and gentle and attractive as a man, and withal so wise and tolerant, that I soon came to feel the same confidence in the book that I at once placed in its author, even in the parts which I did not understand. I saw that. the work and the man were one, and that the former must be good as the latter was good. There was something in the man- ner in which both the book and its author carried themselves under the sun, and in the way they con- fronted America and the present time, that convinced beyond the power of logic or criticism. PRELIMINARY 5 The more I saw of Whitman, and the more I studied his ‘‘ Leaves,” the more significance I found in both, and the clearer it became to me that a new type of a man and a new departure in poetic lit- erature were here foreshadowed. There was some- thing forbidding, but there was something vital and grand back of it. I found to be true what the poet said of himself, — “* Bearded, sunburnt, gray-neck’d, forbidding, I have arrived, To be wrestled with as I pass for the solid prizes of the universe, For such I afford whoever can persevere to win them,’? — I have persevered in my study of the poet, though | balked many times, and the effect upon my own mental and spiritual nature has been great; no such “solid prizes”? in the way of a broader outlook upon life and nature, and, I may say, upon art, has any poet of my time afforded me. There are passages or whole poems in the “Leaves” which I do not yet understand (“‘Sleep-Chasings ” is one of them), though the language is as clear as daylight; they are simply too subtle or elusive for me; but my confidence in the logical soundness of the book is so complete that I do not trouble myself at all about these things. III I would fain make these introductory remarks to my essay a sort of window through which the reader may get a fairly good view of what lies be- yond. If he does not here get any glimpse or sug- gestion of what pleases him, or of what -he is look- 6 WHITMAN ing for, it will hardly be worth while for him to trouble himself+further. A great many readers, perhaps three fourths of the readers of current poetry, and not a few of the writers thereof, cannot stand Whitman at all, or see any reason for his being. To such my essay, if it ever comes to their notice, will be a curiosity, may be an offense. But I trust it will meet with a different reception at the hands of the smaller but rapidly growing circle of those who are beginning to turn to Whitman as the most imposing and sig- nificant figure in our literary annals. The rapidly growing Whitman literature attests the increasing interest to which I refer. Indeed, it seems likely that by the end of the century the literature which will have grown up around the name of this man will surpass in bulk and value that which has grown up around the name of any other man of letters born within the century. When Mr. Stedman wrote his essay upon the poet early in the eighties, he referred to the mass of this literature. It has probably more than doubled in volume in the intervening years: since Whit- man’s death in the spring of ’92, it has been added to by William Clark’s book upon the poet, Profes- sor Trige’s study of Browning and Whitman, and the work of that accomplished critic and scholar, so lately gone to his rest, John Addington Symonds. This last is undoubtedly the most notable contribu- tion that has yet been made, or is likely very soon to be made, to the Whitman literature. Mr. PRELIMINARY 7 Symonds declares that ‘‘ Leaves of Grass,” which he first read at the age of twenty-five, influenced him more than any other book has done, except the Bible, — more than Plato, more than Goethe. When we remember that the man who made this statement was eminently a man of books, deeply read in all literatures, his testimony may well offset that of a score of our home critics who find nothing worthy or helpful in Whitman’s work. One posi- tive witness in such a matter outweighs any number of negative ones. | IV For making another addition to the growing Whit- man literature, I have no apology to offer. I know well enough that “writing and talk” cannot “prove” a poet; that he must be his own proof or be forgotten; and my main purpose in writing about Whitman, as in writing about nature, is to tell read- ers what I have found there, with the hope of indu- cing them to look for themselves. At the same time, I may say that I think no modern poet so much needs to be surrounded by an atmosphere of com- ment and interpretation, through which readers may approach him, as does Whitman. His work sprang from a habit or attitude of mind quite foreign to that with which current literature makes us familiar, —so germinal is it, and so little isit beholden to the formal art we so assiduously cultivate. The poet says his work “connects lovingly with precedents,” but it does not connect lovingly with any body of poetry of this century. ‘‘Leaves of Grass” .is 8 WHITMAN bound to be a shock to the timid and pampered taste of the majority of current readers. I would fain lessen this shock by interposing my own pages of comment between the book and the public. The critic can say so many things the poet cannot. He can explain and qualify and analyze, whereas the creative artist can only hint or project. The poet must hasten on, he must infold and bind together, he must be direct and synthetic in every act. Re- flection and qualification are not for him, but action, emotion, volition, the procreant blending and sur- render. He works as Nature does, and gives us reality in every line. Whitman says: — “I charge you forever reject those who would expound me, for I cannot expound myself.”’ The type of mind of Whitman’s, which seldom or never emerges as a mere mentality, an independent thinking and knowing faculty, but always as a person- ality, always as a complete human entity, never can expound itself, because its operations are synthetic and not analytic, its mainspring is love and not mere knowledge. In his prose essay called “A Backward Glance o’er Travel’d Roads,” appended to the final edition of his poems, Whitman has not so much sought to expound himself as to put his reader in possession of his point of view, and of the considerations that lie back of his work. This chapter might render much that I have written superfluous, were there not always a distinct gain in seeing an author through another medium, or in PRELIMINARY 9 getting the equivalents of him in the thoughts and ideals of a kindred and sympathetic mind. But I have not consciously sought to expound Whitman, any more than in my other books I have sought to expound the birds or wild nature. I have written out some things that he means to me, and the pleas- ure and profit I have found in his pages. There is no end to what can be drawn out of him. It has been said and repeated that he was not a thinker, and yet I find more food for thought in him than in all other poets. It has been often said and repeated that he is not a poet, and yet the read- ers that respond to him the most fully appear to be those in whom the poetic temperament is paramount. I believe he supplies in fuller measure that pristine element, something akin to the unbreathed air of mountain and shore, which makes the arterial blood of poetry and literature, than any other modern writer. - We can make little of Whitman unless we allow him to be a law unto himself, and seek him through the clews which he himself brings. When we try him by current modes, current taste, and demand of him formal beauty, formal art, we are disap- pointed. But when we try him by what we may call the scientific standard, the standard of organic nature, and demand of him the vital and the char- acteristic, — demand of him that he have a law of his own, and fulfill that law in the poetic sphere, — the result is quite different. 10 WHITMAN More than any other poet, Whitman is what we make him; more than any other poet, his greatest value is in what he suggests and implies, rather than in what he portrays; and more than any other poet must he wait to be understood by the growth of the taste of himself. “‘I make the only growth by which I can be appreciated,” he truly says. His words are like the manna that descended upon the Israelites, “in which were all manner of tastes; and every one found in it what his palate was chiefly pleased with. If he desired fat in it, he had it. In it the young men tasted bread; the old men honey ; and the children oil.” Many young men, — poets, artists, teachers, preachers, — have testified that they have found bread in Whitman, the veritable bread of life; others have found honey, sweet poetic morsels; and not a few report having found only gall. VI In considering an original work like ‘‘ Leaves of Grass,” the search is always for the grounds upon which it is to be justified and explained. These grounds in this work are not easy to find; they lie deeper than the grounds upon which the popular poets rest. Because they are not at once seen, many readers have denied that there are any such grounds. But to deny a basis of reality to a work with the history of ‘Leaves ,of Grass,” and a basis well grounded on esthetic and artistic principles, is not to be thought of. PRELIMINARY eK The more the poet eludes us, the more we know he has his hiding-place somewhere. The more he denies our standards, the more we know he has standards of his own which we must discover; the more he flouts at our literary conventions, the more we must press him for his own principles and methods. How does he justify himself to him- self? Could any sane man have written the Chil- dren of Adam poems who was not sustained by deepest moral and esthetic convictions? It is the business of the critic to search for these principles and convictions, and not shirk the task by ridicule and denial. VII If there was never any change in taste, if it always ran in the same channels, — indeed, if it did not at times run in precisely opposite channels, — there would be little hope that Walt Whitman’s poetry would ever find any considerable number of readers. But one of the laws that dominate the progress of literature, as Edmund Sherer says, is incessant change, not only in thought and ideas, but in taste and the starting-points of art. <A radi- cal and almost violent change in these respects is indicated by Whitman, —a change which is in uni- son with many things in modern life and morals, but which fairly crosses the prevailing taste in poetry and in art. No such dose of realism and individualism under the guise of poetry has been administered to the reading public in this century. No such break with literary traditions — no such 12 WHITMAN audavious attempt to tally, in a printed page, the living concrete man, an actual human presence, instead of the conscious, made-up poet — is to be found in modern literary records. VIII The much that I have said in the following pages about Whitman’s radical differences from other poets — his changed attitude towards the universe, his un- wonted methods and aims, etc., — might seem to place him upon a ground so unique and individual as to contradict my claims for his breadth and univer- sality. The great poets stand upon common ground; they excel along familiar lines, they touch us, and touch us deeply, at many points. What always saves Whitman is his enormous endowment of what is “‘commonest, nearest, easiest,”” — his atmosphere of the common day, the common life, and his fund of human sympathy and love. He is strange because he gives us the familiar in such a direct, unexpected manner. His “‘ Leaves” are like some new fruit that we have never before tasted. It is the product of an- other clime, another hemisphere. The same old rains and dews, the same old sun and soil, nursed it, yet In so many ways how novel and strange! We cer- tainly have to serve a certain apprenticeship to this poet, familiarize ourselves with his point of view | and with his democratic spirit, before we can make much of him. The spirit in which we come to him from the other poets—the poets of art and culture—is for the most part unfriendly to him. PRELIMINARY 13 There is something rude, strange, and unpoetic about him at first sight that is sure to give most readers of poetry a shock. I think one might come to him from the Greek poets, or the old Hebrew or Oriental bards, with less shock than from our modern delicate and refined singers; because the old - poets were more simple and elemental, and aimed less at the distilled dainties of poetry, than the mod- ern.. They were full of action, too, and volition, —of that which begets and sustains life. Whit- man’s poetry is almost entirely the expression of will and personality, and runs very little~ to intel- lectual subtleties and refinements. It fulfills itself in our wills and character, rather than in our taste. IX Whitman will always be a strange ang unwonted figure among his country’s poets, and among Eng- lish poets generally, — a cropping out again, after so many centuries, of the old bardic prophetic strain. Had he dropped upon us from some other sphere, he could hardly have been a greater surprise and puzzle to the average reader or critic. Info a lit- erature that was timid, imitative, conventional, he fell like leviathan into a duck-pond, and the com- motion and consternation he created there have not yet subsided. All the reigning poets in this coun- try except Emerson denied him, and many of our minor poets still keep up a hostile sissing and cack- ling. He will probably always be more or less a stumbling-block to the minor poet, because of his 14 WHITMAN indifference to the things which to the minor poet are all in all. He was a poet without what is called artistic form, and without technique, as that word is commonly understood. His method was analogous to the dynamic method of organic na- ture, rather than to the mechanical or constructive method of the popular poets. x Of course the first thing that strikes the reader in “Leaves of Grass” is its seeming oddity and strangeness. If a man were to come into a dress reception in shirt sleeves and with his hat on, the feature would strike us at once, and would be mag- nified in our eyes; we should quite forget that he was a man, and in essentials differed but little from the rest of us, after all. The exterior habiliments on such occasions count for nearly everything; and in the popular poetry rhyme, measure, and the lan- guage and manners of the poets are much more than anything else. If Whitman did not do any- thing so outré as to come into a dress reception with his coat off and his hat on, he did come into the circle of the poets without the usual poetic habiliments. He was not dressed up at all, and he was not at all abashed or apologetic. His air was confident and self-satisfied, if it did not at times suggest the insolent and aggressive. It was the dress circle that was on trial, and not Walt Whitman. We could forgive a man in real life for such an PRELIMINARY 15 audacious proceeding only on the ground of his be- Img something extraordinary as a person, with an extraordinary message to convey; and we can par- don the poet only on precisely like grounds. He must make us forget his unwonted garb by his ‘unique and lovable personality, and the power and wisdom of his utterance. If he cannot do this we shall soon tire of him. That Whitman was a personality the like of which the world has not often seen, and that his message to his country and to his race was of prime Importance, are conclusions at which more and more thinking persons are surely arriving. His want of art, of which we have heard so much, is, it seems to me, just this want of the usual trap- pings and dress uniform of the poets. In the essen- tials of art, the creative imagination, the plastic and quickening spirit, the power of identification with the thing contemplated, and the absolute use of _ words, he has few rivals. xI I make no claim that my essay is a dispassionate, disinterested view of Whitman. It will doubtless appear to many as a one-sided view, or as colored by my love for the man himself. And I shall not be disturbed if such turns out to be the case. A dispassionate view of a man like Whitman is prob- ably out of the question in our time, or in any near time. His appeal is so personal and direct that readers are apt to be either violently for him or 16 WHITMAN violently against, and it will require the pers active. of more than one generation to bring out his true significance. Still, for any partiality for its subje ot which my book may show, let me take shelter be- hind a dictum of Goethe. Bo “T am more and more convinced,” says the great critic, “that whenever one has to vent an opinion on the actions or on the writings of others, unless _ this be done from a certain one-sided enthusiasm, or from a loving interest in the person and the work, the result is hardly worth gathering meg Sympathy and enjoyment in what we see is im fact the only reality, and, from such reality, reality aS a natural product follows. All else is vanity.” __ To a loving interest in Whitman and his work, which may indeed amount to one-sided enthusiasm, I plead guilty.. This at least is real with me, and not affected; and, if the reality which Goethe pre- dicts in such cases only follows, I shall be more than content. ia XIT In the world of literature, as in the world o physical forces, things adjust themselves after 5 while, and no impetus can be given to any name or fame that will finally carry it iayielsllll | limit of his real worth. However “one-sided” re enthusiasm for Whitman may be, or that of any of of his friends may be, there is no dnee et time he will find exactly his proper place and le My opinion, or any man’s opinion, of the work: PRELIMINARY 17 another, is like a wind that blows for a moment across the water, heaping it up a little on the shore or else beating it down, but not in any way perma- nently affecting its proper level. The adverse winds that have blown over Whit- man’s work have been many and persistent, and yet the tide has surely risen, his fame has slowly in- creased. It will soon be forty years since he issued the first thin quarto edition of “‘ Leaves of Grass,” and, though the opposition to him has been the most fieree and determined ever recorded in our literary history, often degenerating into persecution and willful misrepresentation, yet his fame has steadily grown both at home and abroad. The impression he early made upon such men as Emerson, Thoreau, William O’Connor, Mr. Stedman, Colonel Ingersoll, and others in this country, and upon Professors Dowden and Clifford, upon Symonds, Ruskin, Ten- nyson, Rossetti, Lord Lytton, Mr. Gilchrist, George Eliot, in England, has been followed by an equally deep or deeper impression upon many of the younger and bolder spirits of both hemispheres. In fact Whitman saw his battle essentially won in his own lifetime, though his complete triumph is of course a matter of the distant future. XIII But let me give without further delay a fuller hint of the attitude these pages assume and hold towards the subject they discuss. There are always, or nearly always, a few men born to each generation who embody the best thought and culture of that generation, and express it in approved literary forms. From Petrarch down to Lowell, the lives and works of these men fill the literary annals; they uphold the literary and sehol- arly traditions; they are the true men of letters; they are justly honored and beloved in their day and land. We in this country have recently, in the death of Dr. Holmes, mourned the loss of the last of the New England band of such men. We are all indebted to them for solace, and for moral and intellectual stimulus. Then, much more rarely, there is born to a race or people men who are like an irruption of life from another world, who belong to another order, who bring other standards, and sow the seed of new and larger types; who are not the organs of the culture or modes of their time, and whom their times for the most part decry and disown, — the primal, original, elemental men. It is here, in my opim- ion, that we must place Whitman; not among the minstrels and edifiers of his age, but among its prophets and saviors. He is nearer the sourees of things than the popular poets, — nearer the found- ers and discoverers, closer akin to the large, fervent, prophetic, patriarchal men who figure in the early heroic ages. His work ranks with the great primi- tive books. He is of the type of the skald, the bard, the seer, the prophet. The specialization and differentation of our latter ages of science alld eul- 18 WHITMAN rf PRELIMINARY 19 ture is less marked in him than in other poets. Poetry, philosophy, religion, are all inseparably blended in his pages. He is in many ways a rever- sion to an earlier type. Dr. Brinton has remarked that his attitude toward the principle of sex and his use of sexual imagery in his poems, are the same as in the more primitive religions. Whitman was not a poet by elaboration, but by suggestion; not an artist by formal presentation, but by spirit and conception; not a philosopher by system and after- thought, but by vision and temper. In his “ Leaves,” we again hear the note of des- tiny, — again see the universal laws and forces exem- plified in the human personality, and turned upon life with love and triumph. XIV The world always has trouble with its primary men, or with the men who have any primary gifts, like Emerson, Wordsworth, Browning, Tolstoi, Ib- sen. The idols of an age are nearly always secon- dary men: they break no new ground; they make no extraordinary demands; our tastes and wants are already adjusted to their type; we understand and approve of them at once. The primary men dis- turb us; they are a summons and a challenge; they break up the old order; they open up new territory which we are to subdue and occupy; the next age and the next make more of them. In my opinion, the next age and the next will make more of Whit- man, and the next still more, because he is in the 20 WHITMAN great world-current, in the line of the evolutionary movement of our time. Is it at all probable that Tennyson can ever be to any other age what he has been to this? Tennyson marks an expiring age, the sunset of the feudal world. He did not share the spirit to which the future belongs. There was not one drop of democratic blood in his veins. To him, the people were an hundred-headed beast. XV If my essay seems like one continual strain to attain the unattainable, to compass and define Whit- man, who will not be compassed and defined, I can only say that I regret it, but could not well help it. Talking about Whitman, Symonds said, was lke talking about the universe, and it is so. There is somewhat incommensurable in his works. One may not hope to speak the final word about him, to sum him up ina sentence. He is so palpable, so real, so near at hand, that the critic or expounder of him promises himself an easy victory; but before one can close with him he is gone. He is, after all, as subtle and baffling as air or light. . “T will certainly elude you, Even while you should think you had unquestionably caught me, behold! Already you see I have escaped from you.” It is probably this characteristic which makes Whitman an irrepressible figure in literature; he will not down for friend or foe. He escapes from all classification, and is larger than any definition PRELIMIN ARY 21 of him that has yet been given. How many times has he been exploded by British and American crit-. ics; how many times has he been labeled and put upon the shelf, only to reappear again as vigorous and untranslatable as ever! XVI So far as Whitman stands merely for the spirit of revolt, or of reaction against current modes in life and literature, I have little interest in him. As the “apostle of the rough, the uncouth,” to use Mr. Howells’s words, the world would long ago have tired of him. ‘The irruption into letters of the wild and lawless, or of the strained and eccen- tric, can amuse and interest us only for a moment. It is because these are only momentary phases of him, as it were, and because underneath all he em- braces the whole of life and ministers to it, that his fame and influence are still growing in the world. One hesitates even to call Whitman the poet of “democracy,” or of “personality,” or of ‘the mod- ern,” because such terms only half define him. He quickly escapes into that large and universal air which all great art breathes. We cannot sum him up ina phrase. He flows out on all sides, and his sympathies embrace all types and conditions of men. He is a great democrat, but, first and last and over all, he is a great man, a great nature, and deep world- currents course through him. He is distinctively an American poet, but his Americanism is only the door through which he enters upon the universal. 22 WHITMAN XVII Call his work poetry or prose, or what you will: that it is an inspired utterance of some sort, any competent person ought to be able to see. And what else do we finally demand of any work than that it be inspired? How all questions of form and art, and all other questions, sink into insignificance beside that! The exaltation of mind and spirit shown in the main body of Whitman’s work, the genuine, prophetic fervor, the intensification and amplification of the simple ego, and the resultant raising of all human values, seem to me as plain as daylight. Whitman is to be classed among the great names by the breadth and all-inclusiveness of his theme and by his irrepressible personality. I think it highly probable that future scholars and critics will find his work fully as significant and era-marking as that of any of the few supreme names of the past. It is the culmination of an age of individ- ualism, and, as opposites meet, it is also the best lesson in nationalism and universal charity that this century has seen. BIOGRAPHICAL AND PERSONAL I ALT WHITMAN was born at West Hills, Long Island, May 30, 1819, and died at Camden, N. J., March 26, 1892. Though born in the country, most of his life was passed in cities; first in Brooklyn and New York, then in New Or- leans, then in Washington, and lastly in Camden, where his body is buried. It was a poet’s life from first to last, — free, unhampered, unworldly, uncon- ventional, picturesque, simple, untouched by the craze of money-getting, unselfish, devoted to others, and was, on the whole, joyfully and contentedly lived. It was a pleased and interested saunter through the world, —no hurry, no fever, no strife; hence no bitterness, no depletion, no wasted energies. ‘A farm boy, then a school-teacher, then a printer, ed- itor, writer, traveler, mechanic, nurse in the army hospitals, and lastly government clerk; large and picturesque of figure, slow of movement; tolerant, passive, receptive, and democratic, — of the people; in all his tastes and attractions, always aiming to walk abreast with the great laws and forces, and to live thoroughly in the free, nonchalant spirit of his 24 WHITMAN own day and land. His strain was mingled Dutch and English, with a decided Quaker tinge, which came from his mother’s side, and which had a marked influence upon his work. The spirit that led him to devote his time and substance to the sick and wounded soldiers during the war may be seen in that earlier incident in his life when he drove a Broadway stage all one win- ter, that a disabled driver might lie by without starving his family. It is from this episode that the tradition of his having been a New York stage- driver comes. He seems always to have had a spe- cial liking for this class of workmen. One of the house surgeons of the old New York Hospital relates that in the latter part of the fifties Whitman was a frequent visitor to that institution, looking after and ministering to disabled stage drivers. ‘These drivers,” says the doctor, “like those of the omni- buses in London, were a set of men by themselves. A good deal of strength, intelligence, and skillful management of horses was required of a Broadway stage-driver. He seems to have been decidedly a higher order of man than the driver of the present horse-cars. He usually had his primary education in the country, and graduated as a thorough expert in managing a very difficult machine, in an excep- tionally busy thoroughfare. “Tt was this kind of a man that so attracted Walt Whitman that he was constantly to be seen perched on the box alongside one of them going up and down Broadway. I often watched the poet and BIOGRAPHICAL AND PERSONAL 25 driver, as probably did many another New Yorker in those days. “I do not wonder as much now as I did in 1860 that a man like Walt Whitman became interested in these drivers. He was not interested in the news of every-day life—the murders and accidents and political convulsions — but he was interested in strong types of human character. We young. men had not had experience enough to understand this kind of a man. It seems to me now that we looked at Whitman simply as a kind of crank, if the word had then been invented. His talk tous was chiefly of books, and the men who wrote them: especially of poetry, and what he considered poetry. He never said much of the class whom he visited in our wards, after he had satisfied himself of the nature of the injury and of the prospect of recovery. “Whitman appeared to be about forty years of age at that time. He was always dressed in a blue flannel coat and vest, with gray and baggy trousers. He wore a woolen shirt, with a Byronic collar, low in the neck, without a cravat, as I remember, and a large felt hat. His hair was iron gray, and he had a full beard and mustache of the same color. His face and neck were bronzed by exposure to the sun and air. He was large, and gave the im- _ pression of being a vigorous man. He was scru- pulously careful of his simple attire, and his hands were soft and hairy.” During the early inception of “ Leaves of Grass ” he was a carpenter in Brooklyn, building and sell- 26 WHITMAN ing small frame-houses to working people. He frequently knocked off work to write. his poems. 