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by Richard Maurice Bucke
Contents.
PAGES
Chapter II.�THE POET IN 1880.�PERSONNEL, Etc.
Face.�Senses.�Physique, ........ 49
Dress.�Ideal of Life.�Temper, 51
Singing.�Reciting Poetry, ........ 53
His Fondness for Children, ........ 55
After the Rest, a Repellent Side, 57
Chapter III�HIS CONVERSATION, 59 70
APPENDIX TO PART I
Excerpt from Letter, Mobile, Ala., 72
Introductory Letter, 1883 73 98
"The Good Gray Poet." (1865-6.) 99�130
Two Subsequent Letters, ........ 130�132
PART n.
Chapter I.�HISTORY OF LEAVES OF GRASS.
The Successive Editions, from 1855 to 1882, .... I35�147
The Attempted Official Suppression 149�151
Completed Works, 1882-83 153
Chapter II.�ANAL YSIS OF POEMS, Etc.
His Poetic and Prose Lessons, . . . . . . -155
His Rhythmic Interior, 157
His Central Poem, 159
Backgrounds of Meaning, l6l
The Theme of Sexuality, 163'
J. B. Marvin's Criticism, . . . . . . . .165
A Manly Friendship, Sane, Heroic, Passionate, . . . .167
W. W.'s Self-Drawn Portrait, i860, 169
Emotional Element of " Drum-Taps," ..... 171
" Prayer of Columbus," . . . . . . . '173
Chapter III�ANAL YSIS OF POEMS, Continued.
Difficulty of Understanding L. of G., ...... 175�176
The Poems " A Picture, of the World as Seen from the Standpoint of the Highest Moral Elevation," .... 178
The herald of a New Religious Era, . ..... 1S3
" The Bible of Democracy," 185
Exalt the Commonest Life, . . . . . , 187
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Contents.
APPENDIX TO PART II.�CONTEMPORANEOUS
CRITICISMS, Etc., 183S-1S83. Initials and Outlines, Brooklyn, 1855, 1856, Emerson to Carlyle, '. The " Imprints " of i860, . A Boston Critic " At a Loss," Criticism by Freiligrath (German), Letter of Mrs. Gilchrist, England A French Literary Opinion, From " Matador," New York, Idealism of Leaves of Grass, Poets' Tributes, . Arran Leigh, England, A Tourist's Interview, Frank W. Walters, England, Jaunt to the Rocky Mountains, 1879, Visit to Long Island Birthplace, 1S81, " Whenever the 14th of April Comes,' " Three Figures for Posterity," A Comment on the 1882 Suppression, George Chainey's Chicago Lecture, W. W.'s Late Illness, . W. Sloane Kennedy's Criticism, . " An Autobiography After its Sort," American Freethought and Freethinkers, Sonnet to W. W. by Robert Buchanan,
-206
195
197
199
201
202
204-
207
209
211
213
215
217
219�221
221
223
225
227
229
231
232
233
235
235
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Frontispiece.� Portrait of Walt Whitman, from Life, in 1864. Photo-Intaglio. Drawn by Herbert H. Gilchrist, England.
Facing Page 13.� House at West Hills in which W. W. was born. Drawn by Joseph Pennell. Eng. by Photo Eng. Co., N. Y.
Facing Page 15.� Ancient Burial Ground of the Van Velsors at Cold Spring Harbor, L. I., on the Homestead Farm. Drawn by Pennell. Eng. by P. E. Co., N. Y.
Facing Page 17.� Ancient Burial Ground of the Whitmans at West Hills, L. I., on the Homestead Farm. Drawn by Pennell. Eng. by P. E. Co., N. Y.
Facing Page 26.� Portrait from Life of Walter Whitman, the Poet's Father.
Facing Page 46.� Portrait from Life of Louisa (Van Velsor) Whitman, the Poet's Mother.
Facing Page 48.� Portrait from Life of Walt Whitman in 1880. Photo by Edy Bro.'s, London, Canada.
Facing Page 54.�W. W.'s Handwriting. Fac-simile.
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INTRODUCTION.
Now just entering his sixty-fifth year, Walt Whitman has become the object, in America and Europe, of such pronounced attacks, defences, inquiries, and of comments, assumptions, and denials, so various and inconsistent�with a certainty of steadily increasing interest, perhaps of still more pronounced attack and defence in the future�that a field may well be presumed to exist for statements about him from observation at first hand. Such contemporaneous statements, executed in their own way, form the purpose of the following pages. To arrest, at the time, some otherwise evanescent facts and features of the man�to sketch him on the spot, in his habit as he lived, and give a few authentic items of his ancestry, youth, middle life, and actual manners and talk, is the primary object of this volume; secondly, to put forth in regard to Leaves of Grass my own deliberate constructions of that work. I make no pretence that they are other than from a friendly point of view. " As it seems to me," might doubtless have served as heading for all I have written.
To balance, however, any proclivity, or danger of proclivity, in that direction, I have freely included in my book (Appendix, Part II.) the fullest representation from the enemies and most outspoken fault-findings and denunciations of Leaves of Grass and their author. I know that the poet himself welcomes such searching attacks and trials. He has told me that he considers them the means whereby Nature and Fate try the right of any thing or ambition, book or what-not, to exist. " If my light can't stand such gales," he once said to me, " let it go out�as it will then deserve to go out."
In short, and while I have no final authority to speak for Walt Whitman (who has himself more opposed than favored my enterprise), I do not hesitate to send forth the following pages, not only as the bona fide results of my own knowledge of the poet and study of his writings for many years past, but as direct testimony from the days and actualities among which he lives, and certainly representing the last feeling and verdict of persons (I have had correspondence or face-to-face meetings with many of them), who have been closest and longest in contact with him.
William D. O'Connor's " Good Gray Poet," of i865-'6, and, after eighteen years, his letter now written (1883), in confirmation and re-statement of that pamphlet, occupy a considerable part of the ensuing volume ; but they are both in courteous response to my solicitations, and will prove invaluable contributions to the future. They come from a scholar who has absorbed to its very depths the literature of the Elizabethan age, as illustrated by Shakespeare and Bacon �an ardent familiar of the great geniuses of all times�and a personal knower of Walt Whitman's life for the last twenty-five years. The judgments such a man, after such opportunities, has to announce, deserve, indeed, to be recorded.
Walt Wliitman said not long since to a friend that he did not want his life written, that he did not care in any way to lie ditTerentiated from the common people, of whom he was one. " Then," said his friend, " why did you differentiate yourself from ordinary men by writing Leaves of Grass .?" According to the poet himself, he has lived a common life ; and this is true, not in the sense that it has been like other lives, but that other lives in future are to be like it, and that his life is to be the common property of humanity. For this man, who has absorbed the whole human race, will, in the future, in turn, be absorbed by each individual member of the race who aspires to attain complete spiritual growth.
The claim made throughout the present work, both in that First Part of it which deals with the man Walt Whitman, and in the Second, which deals with the book Leaves of Grass, is, that the leading fact in both, the one as much as the other, is moral elevation ; that this is their basic meaning and value to us. The true introduction, therefore, to this volume, is the author's previous work, " Man's Moral Nature."* In that book he has discussed the moral nature in the abstract, pointed out its physical basis, and shown its historic development; while the sole object of the present work is to depict an individual moral nature, perhaps the highest that has yet appeared.
And now, before entering on the various subjects attempted and more fully detailed in my volume,, it will essentially serve the reader to run his or her eyes over an authentic and brief
Chronological forecast o/Y\'^alt Whitman's /rfe, and the successive publications ^Leaves of Grass.
1819. Born at West Hills�(see Specimen Days).
1820, '21, '22, and early half of '23. At West Hills. l823-'24. In Brooklyn, in Front street.
iS25-'3o. In Cranberry, Johnson, Tillary, and Henry streets. Went to
public schools. i83i-'32. Tended in a lawyer's office; then, a doctor's. i833-'34. In printing offices, learning the trade.
l836-'37. Teaching country schools on Long Island. " Boarded round." l840-'45. In New York city, printing, etc. Summers in the country. Some
farm-work.
* "Man's Moral Nature, an Essay." G. P. Putnam's Sons: N.Y., 1879.
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l846-'47. In Brooklyn, editing daily paper, the " Eagle."
i848-'49. In New Orleans, on editorial staff of daily paper, the " Crescent."
" i848-'49. About this time went off on a leisurely journey and working expedition (my brother Jeff with me) through all the Middle States, and down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Lived a while in New Orleans, and worked there. After a time, plodded back northward, up the Mississippi, the Missouri, etc., and around to, and by way of, the great lakes, Michigan, Huron, and Erie, to Niagara Falls and Lower Canada�finally returning through Central New York, and down the Hudson."� Personal Notes, W. W,
1850. Publishing " The Freeman " newspaper in Brooklyn.
185 1, '52, '53, '54, Carpentering�building houses in Brooklyn, and selling them.
l855' First issue of Leaves of Grass. Small quarto, 94 pages. Eight or
nine hundred copies printed. No sale. 1856. Second issue of Leaves of Grass. Small l dmo., 384 pages �32 poems �
published by Fowler ^ Wells, 308 Broadway, New York. Little or no
sale. i860. Third issue of Leaves of Grass, d^^^d pages, l2mo., published by Thayer
(&^ Eldridge, I16 Washington Street, Boston. 1862. W. W. leaves Brooklyn and New York permanently. Goes down to
the field of war. Winters partly in Army of the Potomac, camped along
the Rappahannock, Virginia. Begins his ministrations to the wounded. l863-'64. In the field, and among the army hospitals�(see Specimen Days).
1865. At Washington City, as government clerk.
1866. Prints "Drum Taps" and "Sequel to Drum Taps," poems written during the war, " President Lincoln's Funeral Hymn," and other pieces. 96 pages, i2mo. Washington. No publisher's name.
1867. Fourth edition of Leaves of Grass, ^'^Z pages, izmo. The poems now begin the order and classification eventually settled upon. New York. No publisher''s name.
1868. '69, '70. Employed in Attorney-General's Department, Washington. 1871. Delivers " After all, not to Create only," (" Song of the Exposition "),
at the opening of the American Institute, New York.
1871. Fifth issue of Leaves of Grass, â– ^^^ pages, and Passage to India, 120 pages, both in one volume, i2mo. Washington, D. C. Includes Drum
Taps, Marches now the War is over, etc. A handsome edition.
1872. Delivers " As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free," at the commencement, Dartmouth College, Hanover, N. H. (now, in i8S2-'83 edition, entitled " Thou Mother with thy Equal Brood.")
"1872. Took a two months' trip through the New England States, up the ConEccticut valley, Vermont, the Adirondacks region�and to Burlington, to see my dear sister Hannah once more. Returning, had a pleasant day-trip down Lake Champlain�and, the next day, down the Hudson."� Notes.
1873. Opening of this year, W. W. prostrated by paralysis, at Washington. Loses his mother by death.
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lO Introduction.
i874-'75. Living in Camden, New Jersey, disabled and ill.
1876. Sixth or Ceniennial issue of Leaves of Grass {printed from the plates
of the fifth, 1871, edition). Also another volume, Two Rivulets, composed
of prose and poems alternately. l877-'78. Health and strength now moderately improving.
1879. Journeys west to Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, etc. (see Specimen Days).
1880. Journeys to Canada, and summers there.
1881. Seventh issue of Leaves of Grass, J82 pages, 12mo. James R. Osgood 6^ Co., Boston. Six months after issue, J. R. Osgood ^^ Co. are threatened -ivith prosecution by Massachusetts District Attorney Stevens, and abandon the publication.
1882-'83. Eighth and f flat edition of Leaves of Grass, from same plates as 1881, Boston, edition, with last touches and corrections of the author, containing all the poems from frst to last � two hundred and ninety-three � printed wider W. IV.'s direct stipervision. Published by David McKay, 23 South Ninth Street, Philadelphia (formerly Rees Welsh &' Co.).
l882-'83. Prose writings, autobiography, etc., entitled Specimen Days and Collect. The author's parentage, early clays on Long Island, and young fuanhood in Nero York city. Three years^ experience in the Secession War, especially the army hospitals. Convalescent notes afterward. Also, some literary criticisms, and jaunts west and north. The latter part, Col-lect, includes Democratic Vistas, the successive Prefaces of Leaves of â– Grass, with many notes, and prose compositions of various years. 374 pages, i2tno. Published by David McKay, 23 South Ninth Street, Phila-delfhia.
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PART I.
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.
THE POET IN I'^Zo�PERSONNEL.
HIS CONVERSATION
APPENDIX � The Good Gray Poet, reprinted from the Pamphlet of 1866, with an Introductory Letter (1883), written for this Volume by William D. O'Connor.
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If Taine, the French critic, had done no other good, it would be enough that he has brought to the fore the first, last, and all-illuminating point, with respect to any grand production of literature, that the only way to finally understand it is to minutely study the personality of the one who shaped it�his origin, times, surroundings, and his actual fortunes, life, and ways. All this supplies not only the glass through which to look, but it is the atmosphere, the very light itself. Who can profoundly get at Byron or Burns without such help? Would I apply the rule to Shakespeare? Yes, unhesitatingly; the plays of the great poet are not only the concentration of all that lambently played in the best fancies of those times�not only the gathering sunset of the stirring days of feudalism, but the particular life that the poet led, Ihe kind of man he was, and what his individual experience absorbed. I don't wonder the theory is broached that other brains and fingers (Bacon's, Raleigh's, and more) had to do with the Shakespearian work�planned main parts of it, and built it. The singular absence of information about the person Shakespeare leaves unsolved many a riddle, and prevents the last and dearest descriptive touches and dicta of criticism.
Walt Whitman in " The Critic," Dec. 3d, 1881.
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CHAPTER I.
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.
Walt Whitman was born at West Hills, Huntington Township, Suffolk County, Long Island, New York State, May 31, 1819� the second of a family of nine children, seven boys and two girls.* The earliest lineal ancestor I am at present able to trace was Abijah W., born in England about 1560. The Rev. Zecha-riah W., his son, born 1595, came from England in the ship "True-Love" in 1635, and lived at Milford, Connecticut, whence his son Joseph W. some time before 1660 passed over to Huntington and settled there. From him (Savage's " Genealogical Dictionary," vol. 4, p. 524) the Long Island Whitmans descended. Although Joseph W. does not appear to have been very well off in 1660, there is evidence in the town records that he afterwards became so. It is probable that he or one of his sons purchased the farm at West Hills on which the poet's great grandfather, grandfather, and father lived.
The Whitmans were, and are still, a solid, tall, strong-framed, long-lived race of men, moderate of speech, friendly, fond of their land and of horses and cattle, sluggish in their passions, but
* Here is a list of the immediate family: The Parents. Walter Whitman, . . . ,
Louisa Van Velsor,
Sons and Daughters. Jesse Whitman, . Wall Whitman, . Mary Elizabeth, . Hannah Louisa, . An Infant, Andrew Jackson, George Washington, . Thomas Jefferson, . Edward,
Born. Died.
July 14, 1789. July II, 1855. Sept. 22, 1795. May 23, 1873.
March 2, 1818. May 31, 1819. Feb. 3, 1821. Nov. 28, 1823. March 2, 1825. April 7, 1827. Nov. 28, 1829. July 18, 1833. Aug. 9, 183s.
March 21, 1870.
Sept. 14, 1825. December, j86
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fearful when once started. During the American Revolution of i776-'83, they were staunch patriots or " rebels," and several of the name were soldiers under Washington, two of them officers of some rank.
The poet's father, Walter W., after a childhood passed at West Hills on his parents' farm, when about 15 was put apprentice to the carpenter's trade in New York City, and lived and worked there as youth and young man. He married in 1816. His business afterwards for many years extended into various parts of Long Island. He was a large, quiet, serious man, very kind to children and animals, and a good citizen, neighbor and parent. In his trade he Vas noted as a superior framer. Not a few of his barn and house frames, with their seasoned timbers and careful braces and joists, are still standing in Suffolk and Queen's counties and in Brooklyn, strong and plumb as ever.
On his mother's side the poet is descended from the Van Vel-sors, a family of farmers settled also on their own land near Cold Spring Harbor, three or four miles from West Hills. They seem to have been a warm-hearted and sympathetic race. An aged man who had known them well, said to me one day at Huntington, " Old Major Van Velsor was the best of men ; there are no better men than he was�and his wife was just as good a woman as he was a man." Walt Whitman's mother, Louisa Van Velsor, was their daughter. The family was of Holland Dutch descent. The men and boys were fond of horses, the raising of which from blooded stock was a large part of their occupation, and Louisa, when young, was herself a daring and spirited rider. As a woman and mother she was of marked spiritual and intuitive nature, remarkably healthy and strong, had a kind, generous heart, good sense, and a cheerful and even temper. Walt Whitman himself makes much of the feminine side of his ancestry. Both his grandmothers (with each of whom he spent a part of every year until he was quite a big lad), appear to have been specially noble and endearing characters. At the death of his own mother he spoke of her, and his sister-in-law Martha, as " the best and sweetest women I ever saw, or ever expect to see."
Not a little of the significance of the poet's Whitman and
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Van Velsor ancestry may be found in the ancient, grim, and crowded cemeteries of the two families and their branches, running back for many generations. To any "Old Mortality" these cemeteries�one at West Hills, the other about a mile from Cold Spring Harbor�would fully repay the trouble to visit. Looking on them as I did a couple of summers since, I thought them the most solemn, natural, impressive burial-places I had ever seen.
There is no doubt that both Walt Whitman's personality and writings are to be credited very largely to their Holland origin through his mother's side. A faithful and subtle investigation (and a very curious one it would be) might trace far back many of the elements of Leaves of Grass,'^- long before their author was born. From his mother also he derived his extraordinary affective nature, spirituality and human sympathy. From his father chiefly must have come his passion for freedom, and the firmness of character which has enabled him to persevere for a-lifetime in what he has called "carrying out his own ideal." I have heard him say, more than once, that all the members of his'-' father's family were noted for their resolution (which he called obstinacy), and that nothing ever could or did turn any of them
* Washington Irving taught the people of New York to laugh at their Dutch ancestors. John Lothrop Motley has made them proud of them as the connecting link between themselves and the heroic founders of the Dutch Republic. It is full time that the New Netherlands colonists should be rescued from the limbo of absurdity into which Irving's wit cast them. They deserve rehabilitation and a serious history. The merits of their descendants speak for them The old Knickerbocker families are still�and have been ever since the day when stout old Sir Robert Holmes seized the New Netherlands for England�among the first and best people in New York. If all the truth were known, we should be as proud of the ship " Goot Vrow" and the landing at Communipaw, as New Englandcrs are of the " May Flower" and Plymouth Rock. In Motley's pages what a noble people lives again ! No grander fight than theirs for freedom was ever fought. In the cases of Greece against Persia, Switzerland against Austria and Burgundy, the American Colonies against England, the first French Republic against Monarchial Europe, certain special advantages were on the weaker though winning sides, and brilliant victories in the field decided the struggle. But the poor and peaceable little Dutch Provinces in their stand against bitter religious persecution, plus intolerable tyranny, from the wealthiest and most warlike Kingdom in Europe, were beaten repeatedly ; yet they fought on, and when at last, wearied with slaughter, Spain gave over, and let them go free, it was not because she was defeated or lacked either men or means to carry on the contest, but because she saw that complete conquest of the Netherlands would mean the last Hollander dead in the last ditch, and the country the Dutch had reclaimed from the ocean once more sunk beneath its waves. Who can read thai history and not think of it with pride, if the blood of those heroic people flows in his veins ?� New York Tribune.
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from a course they had once positively decided upon. From father and mother alike, he derived his magnificent physique, and (until he lost it in 1873 through special causes to be spoken of later) his almost unexampled health and fulness of bodily life. Walt Whitman* could say with perhaps a better right than almost any man for such a boast, that he was
Well-begotten, and rais'd by a perfect mother.
The other main element which has to be taken into account in the formation of the character of the poet, is that he was brought up on Long Island, or as he often calls it, giving the old Indian name, Paumanok, a peculiar region, over a hundred miles long, "shaped like a fish, plenty of sea-shore, the horizon boundless, the air fresh and healthy, the numerous bays and creeks swarming with aquatic birds, the south-side meadows covered with salt hay, the soil generally tough, but affording numberless springs of the sweetest water in the world." In certain parts the scenery, especially about West Hills and Huntington, and along the north side, is very picturesque. Here and there inland or along the coast are magnificent views, among them a grand one from the summit of " Jayne's Hill," about a mile from the old Whitman farm. On the broad top of this eminence the boy Walt Whitman must have lingered many an hour looking far over the slopes, the crests covered with trees, and the valleys between dotted with farm-houses�to the south far off the just visible waters of the Atlantic, to the north glimpses of Long Island Sound. Perhaps, indeed, there are few regions on the face of the earth better fitted for the concrete background of such a book as Leaves of Grass. After seeing and exploring it, the mind appreciates what was said by William O'Connor, after spending some weeks on Long Island and its shores, "that no one can ever really get at Whitman's poems, and their finest lights and shades, until he has visited and familiarized himself with the freshness, scope, wildness and sea-beauty of this rugged Island."
While Walt Whitman was still a child his parents moved to
* At home, through infancy and boyhood, he was called " Walt," to distinguish him from his father " Walter," and the short name has always been used for him by his relatives and friends.
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Brooklyn. Here he grew up, but as lad and young man made frequent and long visits to his birth-place, and all through Queen's and Suffolk counties. He attended the common schools of Brooklyn until he was thirteen years of age, and then he went into a printing office and learned to set type. While still a youth of sixteen or seventeen he taught school in the country, and even then was writing for the newspapers and magazines. When he was about nineteen or twenty years of age (in 1839 and 1840) I find him publishing and editing the "Long Islander," a weekly newspaper at Huntington. Then he came to New York city to live.
For the next twelve years he seems to have been employed chiefly in printing offices as compositor, and quite often as newspaper and magazine writer. It was during those twelve and a few immediately following years�say from the age of 19 to 34 or '5� that he acquired his especial education ; and only those who know Leaves of Grass can understand the full meaning of that word in his case. It was perhaps the most comprehensive equipment ever attained by a human being, though many things that the schools prescribe were left out. It consisted in absorbing into himself the whole city and country about him, New York and Brooklyn, and their adjacencies; not only their outside shows, but far more their interior heart and meaning. In the first place he learned life�men, women, and children , he went on equal terms with every one, he liked them and they him, and he knew them far better than they knew themselves. Then he became thoroughly con-versant with the shops, houses, sidewalks, ferries, factories, taverns, gatherings, political meetings, carousings, etc. He was first the absorber of the sunlight, the free air and the open streets, and then of interiors. He knew the hospitals, poorhouses, prisons, and their inmates. He passed freely in and about those parts of the city which are inhabited by the worst characters; he knew all their people, and many of them knew him ; he learned to tolerate their squalor, vice, and ignorance; he saw the good (often much more than the self-righteous think) and the bad that was in them, and what there was to excuse and justify their lives. It is said that these people,
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even the worst of them, while entire strangers to Walt Whitman, quite invariably received him without discourtesy and treated him well. Perhaps only those who have known the man personally, and have felt the peculiar magnetism of his presence, can fully understand this. Many of the worst of those characters became singularly attached to him. He knew and was sociable with the man that sold peanuts at the corner, and the old woman that dispensed coffee in the market. He did not patronize them, they were to him as good as the rest, as good as he, only temporarily dimmed and obscured.
True, he knew, and intimately knew, the better off and educated people as well as the poorest and most ignorant. Merchants, lawyers, doctors, scholars and writers, were among his friends. But the people he knew best and liked most, and who knew him best and liked him most, .were neither the rich and conventional, nor the worst and poorest, but the decent-born middle-life farmers, mechanics, carpenters, pilots, drivers, masons, printers, deckhands, teamsters, drovers, and the like. These and their wives and children, their old fiithers and mothers, he knew as no one I think ever knew them before, and between him and them (especially the old folks, the mothers and fathers) in numberless instances existed the warmest attachments.
He made himself fiimiliar with all kinds of employments, not by reading trade reports and statistics, but by watching and stopping hours with the workmen (often his intimate friends) at their work. He visited the foundries, shops, rolling mills, slaughterhouses, woollen and cotton factories, shipyards, wharves, and the big carriage and cabinet shops�went to clam-bakes, races, auctions, weddings, sailing and bathing parties, christenings, and all kinds of merry-makings. (In their amplitude, richness, unflagging movement and gay color, Leaves of Grass, it may be said, are but the i)utting in poetic statements of the Manhattan Island and Brooklyn of those years, and of to-day.)
Amitl the rest of his training and exercise he was a frequent speaker at debating societies. On Sundays he occasionally went to the churches of the various sects of Christians, and sometimes the synagogues of the Jews, and if there had been Buddhist tern-
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pies, Mohammedan Mosfjucs, and Confucian Joss-houses accessible, he would undoubtedly have visited those with the same interest and sympathy. Then he went occasionally to the libraries and museums of all sorts. For instance, there was at this time in New York a very fine and full collecuon of Egyptian antiquities, and for over two years off and on he spent many an hour there ; he became friends with the proprietor. Dr. Abbott, a learned Egyptologist, and gleaned largely from his personal narrations. Reading did not go for so very much in Walt Whitman's education�he found he could get more from the things themselves than from pictures or descriptions of them drawn by others ; still his aim was to absorb humanity and modern life, and he neglected no means, books included, by which this aim could be furthered. A favorite mode of study with him was, after an early breakfast, to reach by stage or sometimes on foot, several miles from the city, some solitary spot by the sea-shore, generally Coney Island (a very different place then from what it is now), taking with him a knapsack containing a bite of plain food, a towel and a book. There he would spend the day in solitude with Nature, walking, thinking, observing the sea and sky, bathing, reading, or perhaps reciting aloud Homer and Shakespeare as he strode along the beach. These years he used to watch the English quarterlies and Blackwood, and when he found an article that suited him he would buy the number, ])erhaps second-hand, fur a few cents, tear it out, and take it witli him on his next sea-beach excursion to digest. Walt Whitman's life at this time was perhaps the happiest that has ever been lived j he speaks of himself as
Wandering, amazed at my own lightness and glee.
Whatever he did or saw seemed to give him pleasure. At one period of his life a special enjoyment in New York was riding up and down Broadway on an omnibus, sitting in front, watching the crowds and vehicles, and the limitless life of the swarming streets. Or crossing the East River, half the day or half the night in the pilot-houses of Brooklyn ferry-boats, watching the multitudes coming and going, observing the sights on the waters, feeling the quiver of the boat, the strong beat of the paddles, and
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the rush through the yielding water. Other times he would go out to sea with his friends of the pilot-boats, and all day and all night enjoy the salt air, the motion of the waves, the speed of the boat, the isolation, the deep feeling of communion with free Nature and the great brine. The simplest and most commonplace pursuits (and yet perhaps something rushing) suited him best; the main thing with him was that he was perfectly sound and well, and all life's delights were matters of course.
At one time, (I think along in his twenty-third year or thereabouts,) he became quite a speaker at the Democratic mass-meetings. He spoke in New York City and down at country gatherings on Long Island. He was quite popular at Jamaica, in Queen's County. (He had been a student at the Academy there when a big lad.) Though he took (in Brooklyn and New York, 1840-'55,) no strenuous personal part in "politics"�in the City, State and National elections�he watched their progress carefully, sometimes aided in the nomination of candidates, perhaps voted at the municipal elections, and always at the Congressional and Presidential ones.
Though all this practical, tumultuous, varied and generally outdoor life was enjoyment to Walt Whitman, there had come to his young maturity one supreme enjoyment, the Italian opera. And the climax of the opera to him was the singing of the famous contralto ^Iboni. It was during the time of which I am now speaking that she came to New York, and he did not miss hearing her one single night. I have heard him say that the influence of Alboni's singing upon him was a most important factor in his poetic growtii. He speaks of her in Leaves of Grass, as
The lustrous orb, Venus contralto, the blooming mother, Sister of loftiest gods.
Throughout all his life indeed the opera and the best music has been one of his chief delights. He heard all the good bands, orchestras, or soloists who came to New York from 1840 to i860, and I know that many passages of his poetry were suggested or inspired by one or other of them, and often written down at the moment, or immediately afterwards.
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To use the simple and hearty old scripture phrase, " the love of women " has, of course, been, and is in a legitimate sense, one of the man's elementary passions. I can only touch upon this subject, which is sufficiently set forth in the latter lines of the following extract from John Burroughs's " Notes " :
For a few years he now seems to be a member of that light battalion of writers for the press who, with facile pen, compose tale, report, editorial, or what-not, for pleasure and a living; a peculiar class, always to be found in any large city. Once in a while he appears at the political mass meetings as a speaker. He is on the Democratic side, at the time going for Van Buren for President, and, in due course, for Polk. He speaks in New York, and down on Long Island, where he is made much of. Through this period (1840-'55), without entering into particulars, it is enough to say that he sounded all experiences of life, with all their passions, pleasures and abandonments. He was young, in perfect bodily condition, and had the city of New York and its ample opportunities around him. I trace this period in some of the poems of " Children of Adam," and occasionally in other parts of his book, including " Calamus."
In 1847 S'^d '48 he was occupied in Brooklyn as editor of the " Daily Eagle " newspaper, (It is said to have been his strenuous and persistent advocacy that secured to the city the old Fort Greene battle-ground, now known as Washington Park.) About 1849, being now thirty years of age, having lived so far entirely on Long Island and Brooklyn and in New York, and besides the invariable though moderate labor necessary to pay his way, occupied himself enjoying and absorbing their shows, life and facilities, he started on a long tour through the Middle, Southern and Western States. He passed slowly through Pennsylvania and Virginia, crossed the Alleghany Mountains, took a steamboat at Wheeling, descended by leisurely stages the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans, and lived there some time, employed editorially on a newspaper, the "Crescent." Outside of work hours he occupied himself observing Southern life, people, the river, with its miles of levee and its multitudinous and peculiar scenes. He seems to have passed much the same sort of a time as in New York�that is, a life of the open streets and public places, hotels, theatres, evening drives and social meetings�(and [ know no city where such a life may be more enjoyable than
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New Orleans). He liked to go to the great French market for an early morning walk, for the sake of the peculiar stir and shows of the place�often took his breakfast at a coffee-stand there kept by a large, handsome mulatto woman. All who have lived in the Southern States, and love them (and who that has ever lived there can think of them without affection and longing ?) will feel in a hundred places, in reading Leaves of Grass, that Walt Whitman has caught and transferred to his pages the true atmosphere of that delicious and sunny region.
After staying about a year in New Orleans, he visited various other parts of the South, and then turned North again. Ascending the Mississippi to St. Louis, he stayed there for a time, then journeyed to Chicago, to Milwaukee, and so up to the Straits of Mackinaw. From there, turning east and south, after lingering awhile at Detroit, he slowly descended the great lakes to Niagara, and, with many lags and stoppages, crossed New York State and returned to Brooklyn.
In 1851 and '52 he published and edited a newspaper of his own, the '' Freeman," in Brooklyn. He afterward built and sold moderate-sized houses. At this last business he made money, and if he had continued would probably have become rich. (He seems to have thought there was danger of this, and that was one reason, no doubt, why he gave it up.) Early in the fifties Leaves of Grass began to take a sort of unconscious shape in his mind. In 1854 he commenced definitely writing out the poems that were printed in the first edition. Though most of this period was occupied with the house-building speculations, he made frequent excursions down Long Island, and at times would remain away in some solitary place, by the sea-shore or in the woods, for weeks at a time. The twelve poems which make • up the original 1855 edition finished, they were printed at the establishment of Andrew and James Rome, corner of Fulton and Cranberry Streets, Brooklyn, the poet himself assisting to set the type.
I insert here a short account furnished me (in Brooklyn in July, 1881) by a person who knew Walt Whitman soon after
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1849�that is, subsequent to his 30th year. I give it in the narrator's own words as I jotted them down at the time :
Walt Whitman had a small printing office and book store on Myrtle Avenue, Brooklyn, where after his return from the South he started the " Freeman " newspaper, first as weekly, then as daily, and continued it a year or so. The superficial opinion about him was that he was somewhat of an idler, " a loafer," but not in a bad sense. He always earned his own livuig. I thought him a very natural person. He wore plain, cheap clothes, which were always particularly clean. Everybody knew him, everyone almost liked him. We all of us (referring to the other members of his family, brothers, sisters, father and mother), long before he published Leaves of Grass, looked upon him as a man who was to make a mark in the world. He was always a good listener,-the best I ever knew�of late years, I thmk, he talks somewhat more�in those early years (i849-'54) he talked very little indeed. When he did talk his conversation was remarkably pointed, attractive, and clear. When Leaves of Grass first appeared I thought it a great work, but that the man was greater than the book. His singular coolness was an especial feature. I have never seen hma excited in the least degree: never heard him swear but once. He was quite gray at thirty. He had a look of age in his youth, as he has now a look of youth in his age.
The great International Exhibition or World's Fair of 1853 in New York, in that vast structure (Sixth Avenue and Fortieth Street) of glass and iron, never excelled for architectural sentiment and beauty, with its rare and ample picture collection from Europe, its statues, specimens of the fabrics of all nations, silver and gold plate, machinery, ores, woods of different countries, with its immense streams of visitors day and night, had for him a powerful attraction, kept up for nearly a year. Among his favorite haunts through the building were the area containing Thorwaldsen's colossal group of Christ and the twelve apostles, the department of woods and timber, the thousand works in the long picture gallery�a collection never surpassed in any land� and then occasionally to stand a long while under the lofty heavy glass dome.
Early in 1855 he was writing Leaves of Grass from time to time, getting it in shape. Wrote at the opera, in the street, on the ferry-boat, at the sea-side, in the fields, sometimes stopped work to write. Certainly no book was ever more directly written from living impulses and impromptu sights, and less in the
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abstract. Quit house-building in the spring of 1855 to print and jniblish the first edition. Then, "when the book aroused such a tempest of anger and condemnation everywhere," to give his own words as he has since tokl me, " I went off to the "cast end of Long IsUtnd, and spent the hite summer and all the "fall�the happiest of my life�around Shelter Island and Peco-" nic Bay. Then came back to New York with the confirmed "resolution, from which I never afterwards wavered, to go on "with my poetic enterprise in my own way, and finish it as well "as I could."
Early in July this year had occurred the death of his father, after a suffering of many years, from serious illness and prostration.
The memoranda which follow were written for this volume in 1881 by a lady�Miss Helen E. Price, of Woodside, Long Island�whose acquaintance with Walt Whitman, and his frequent temporary residence in her parents' family, make her peculiarly competent to present a picture of the man in those periods of middle life:
My acquaintance with Wall Whitman began in 1S56, or about a year after he pubUshed the first edition of Leaves of Grass. I was at that time living with my parents in Brooklyn, and although hardly more than a child in years, the impression made upon my girlish imagination by his large, grand presence, his loose, free dress, and his musical voice will never be elTaced. From that date until the death of his mother, in 1873, he was often a visitor at our house, as I at his, his mother being only less dear to me than my own.
So many remembrances of him in those by gone years come ci^owding to my mind that to choose what wdl be most characteristic, and most likely to interest those who know him only from his books, is a task to which I fear I shall prove unequal. On the other hand, anything I might write of him, his conversation especially, when deprived of the magnetism of his presence and voice, and of the circumstances and occasions which called forth the words, will, I am painfully aware, seem poor and tame.
I must prefiice my first anecdote of him with some description of a gentleman with whom many of my early recollections of his conversations are connected. At that time Mr. A. was living with his daughter's family, who occujiicd with us the same house. A. was a man of wiile knowleilge and the most analytical mind of any one I ever knew. He was a Swedenborgian, not formally belonging to the church of that name, but accepting in the
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main the doctrines of the Swedish seer as revealed in his works. Although the two men differed greatly on many points, such was the mutual esteem and forbearance between them, that during the many talks they had together, in which I sat by a delighted listener, it was only on one occasion (at the outbreak of our civil war) that I ever noticed the slightest irritation between them. Each, though holding mainly to his own views, was large enough to see truth in the other's presentation also. The subject of many of their early conversations was Democracy. No one who has even the slightest acquaintance with Walt Whitman's writings needs to be told what were and are his ideas on that subject�with what passionate ardor he espouses the cause of the people, and the fervent and glowing faith he has in their ultimate destiny. Mr. A. rather inclmed to the Carlylean and perhaps Emersonian idea, that from among the masses are to be found only here and there individuals capable of rightly governing themselves and others, as in myriads of grains of sand, there are only occasional diamonds�or in innumerable seeds, only a very few destined to develop into perfect plants. Some months after our first meeting with Mr. Whitman, my mother invited Mrs. Eliza A. Farnum (former matron of Sing Sing prison) to meet hmi at our house. In the beginning of conversation he said to her, " I know more about you, Mrs. Farnum, than you think I do; I have heard you spoken of often by friends of mine at Sing Sing at the time you were there." Then turning to Mr. A., who sat near by, he added in a lower tone, half seriously, half quizzically, " Some of the prisoners." This was said solely for Mr. A.'s benefit, as a kind of supplement to their talks on Democracy.
No one could possibly have more aversion to being lionized than Mr. Whitman. I could not say how many times, after getting his consent to meet certain admirers at our house, he has vexed and annoyed us by staying away. At one time an evening was appointed to meet General T., of Philadelphia, and a number of others. We waited with some misgivings for his appearance, but he came at last. Soon as the introductions were over, he sidled off to a corner of the room where there was a group of young children, with whom he talked and laughed and played, evidently to their mutual satisfaction. Our company, who had come from a distance to see Mr. Whitman, and did not expect another opportunity, were quite annoyed, and my mother was finally commissioned to get him out of his corner. When she told her errand, he looked up with the utmost merriment, and said, " O, yes�FU do it�where do you want me to sit ? On the piano ?" He went forward very good-naturedly, however, but I knew that his happy time for that evening was over.
A friend of ours, a very brilliant and intellectual lady, had often expressed a great desire to see him�but as she lived out of town it was difficult to arrange a meeting. One day she came to our house full of animation and triumph. " I have seen Walt Whitman at last," she said. " I was sitting in the cabin of the Brooklyn ferry-boat when he came in, I knew it was he; it
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couldn't be any one else; and as he walked through the boat with such an elephantine roll and swing, I could hardly keep from getting right up and rolling after him." The next time he called we related this to him; he laughed heartily, and frequently afterward alluded to his " elephantine roll."
Mr. Whitman was not a smooth, glib, or even a very fluent talker. His ideas seemed always to be called forth or suggested by what was said before, and he would frequently hesitate for just the right term to express his meaning. He never gave the impression that his words were cut and dried in his mind, or at his tongue's end, to be used on occasion; but you listened to what seemed to be freshly thought, which gave to all he said an indescribable charm. His language was forcible, rich and vivid to the last degree, and even when most serious and earnest, his talk was always enlivened by frequent gleams of humor. (I believe it has been assumed by the critics that he has no humor. There could not be a greater mistake.) I have said that in conversation he was not fluent, yet when a little excited in talking on any subject very near his heart, his words would come forth rapidly, and in strains of amazing eloquence. At such times I have wished our little circle was enlarged a hundred-fold, that others might have the privilege of hearing him.
As a listener (all who have met him will agree with me) I think that he was and is unsurpassed. He was ever more anxious to hear your thought than to express his own. Often when asked to give his opinion on any subject, his first words would be, " Tell me what you have to say about it." His method of considering, pondering, what Emerson calls " entertaining," your thought was singularly agreeable and flattering, and evidently an outgrowth of his natural manner, and as if unconscious of paying you any special compliment. He seemed to call forth the best there was in those he met. He never appeared to me a conceited or egotistical man, though I have frequently heard him say himself that he was so. On the contrary, he was always unassuming and modest in asserting himself, and seemed to feel, or at least made others feel, that their opinions were more valuable than his own. I have heard him express serious doubt as to what would be the final judgment of posterity on his poems, or " pieces" as he sometimes called them.
I have, however, seen in his character something that, for wan' of a better word, I would call vanity. I think it arose from his superabundant vitality and strength. All through those years he gloried in his health, his magnificent physical proportions, his buoyant and overflowirfg life (this was in the first ten years of my acquaintance with him), and whatever so-called oddity there was in his dress and looks arose, I think, from this peculiar consciousness or pride. We all thought that his costume suited him, and liked every part of it except his hat. He wore a soft French beaver, with rather a wide brim and a towering crown, which was always pushed up high. My sister would sometimes take it slyly just before he was ready to go, flatten the crown, and fix it more in accordance with the shape worn by others. All in vain; invariably on
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taking it up his fist would be thrust inside, and it would speedily assume its original dimensions.
One day, in 1S5S I think, he came to see us, and after talking awhile on various matters, he announced, a little diffidently I thought, that he had written a new piece. In answer to our inquiries, he said it was about a mocking bird, and was founded on a real incident. My mother suggested that he bring it over and read to us, which he promised to do. In some doubt, in spite of this assurance, we were, therefore, agreeably surprised when a few days after he appeared with the manuscript of " Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" in his pocket. At first he wanted one of us to read it. Mr. A. took it and read it through with great appreciation and feeling. He then asked my mother to read it, which she did. And finally, at our special request, he read it himself. That evening comes before me now as one of the most enjoyable of my life. At each reading fresh beauties revealed themselves to me. I could not say whose reading I preferred ; he liked my mother's, and Mr. A. liked his. After the three readings were over, he asked each one of us what we would suggest in any way, and I can remember how taken aback and nonplussed I was when he turned and asked me also.
He once (I forget what we were talkuig about�friendship, I think) said there was a wonderful dejsth of meaning (" at second or third removes," as he called it) in the old tales of mythology. In that of Cupid and Psyche, for instance; it meant to him that the ardent expression in words of affection often tended to destroy affection. It was like the golden fruit which turned to ashes upon being grasped, or even touched. As an illustration, he mentioned the case of a young man he was in the habit of meeting every morning where he went to work. He said there had grown up between them a delightful silent friendship and sympathy. But one morning when he went as usual to the office, the young man came forward, shook him violently by the hand, and expressed in heated language the affection he felt for him. Mr. Whitman said that all the subtle charm of their unspoken friendship was from that time gone.
He was always an ardent lover of music, and heard all the operas, oratorios, bands, and all the great singers who visited New York during those years. I heard him very frequently speak of Grisi, Mario, Sontag, La Grange, Jenny Lind, Alboni, Bosio, Truffi, Bettini, Marini, Badiali, Mrs. Wood, Mrs. Seguin; and I was never tired of listening to his accounts of them. Alboni he considered by far the greatest of them all, both as regards voice and emotional and artistic power. If I remember rightly, he told me that during her engagament in the city he went to hear her twenty nights. Brignoli in his prime he thought superior to Mario. Bettini, however, was his favorite tenor, and Badiali, the baritone, was another favorite. . In talking to him once about music I found he had read George Sand's "Consuelo," and enjoyed it thoroughly. One passage he liked best was where Consuelo sings in church at the very beginning of her musical career. He said he had read it over
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many times. I remember hearing him mention other books of George Sand's, "the Journeyman Joiner" and the " Devil's Pool," which he liked much.
But although he talked of music and books with me, and of politics, patriotism, and the news of the day with Mr. A., it was in talking with my mother on the spiritual nature of man, and on the reforms of the age and kindred themes, that he took special delight. These appeared to be his favorite topics, and she, having similar sympathies and tastes, would take an equal pleasure with himself in discussing them. It was the society of my mother that was certainly Walt Whitman's greatest attraction to our house. She had a nature in many respects akin to his own�a broad, comprehensive mind, which enabled her to look beyond and through externals into the esi,ence of things �a large, generous spirit in judging whoever she came in contact with, always recognizing the good and ignoring the evil�a strong deep faith in an infinite overruling goodness and power, and a most tender and loving heart. How many times has she taken in outcasts who have come to our door, and treated them to the best the house afforded, regardless of dirt, disease, everything but their humanity and suffering. How many times (not always however) has she been most wofully deceived and drawn into much trouble thereby. It made no difference, the next one that came would be treated with the same hospitality in spite of all remonstrance and argument. She has gone to that unknown world she was so fond of speculating upon, and never will the memory of her unselfish life, her exceeding love and charity, fade from the hearts of her children and friends. It was in her friendship, and in this women s circle �a mother and two daughters�that Mr. Whitman passed not a few of his leisure hours during all those years.
Walt Whitman, the most intuitive man I ever knew, had the least regard for mere verbal smartness. While seeing him listening with bent head to Mr. A.'s arguments upon some point on which they radically differed, I have often been reminded of that passage in his book,
Logic and sermons never convince ;
The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.
While admitting and appreciating the force of reason and logic, yet if they were in conflict with what he felt in the depths of his soul to be true, he would hold fast to the latter, even though he could give no satisfactory reason for so doing. Though he would himself pooh-pooh the assumption, I have no doubt also he had spells of singular abstraction and exaltation. I remember hearing my mother describe an interview she once had with him while we were living in Brooklyn during the early years of our acquaintance. Death was the subject of their conversation. For a few minutes, she said, his face wore an expression she had never seen before�he seemed rapt, absorbed. In describing it afterward, she said he appeared like a man in a trance. Is not this a clue to many pages in Leaves of Grass ? It would almost seem that in writing his poems he was taken possession of by a force.
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genius, inspiration, or whatever it may be called, that he was powerless to resist. We all felt this strange power on first reading his book, and that his poetry both was and was not part of himself. So that (as sometimes happened afterward) when he would say things at variance with what he had written, Mr. A. would remark to him, half jokingly, " Why, Walt, you ought to read Leaves of GrassT After the interview I have just described, my mother always felt that she had seen him in the state in which many of the earlier poems were conceived.
I never took notes of his conversations, and can only recall the general impression they made upon me. I can remember an occasional expression or opinion, but nothing of any importance. My brother and I were starting out one morning to choose a parlor carpet. Hearing of our errand he said, " What a good idea it would be to have the pattern of a carpet designed of leaves�nothing but leaves�all sizes, shapes, and colors, like the ground under the trees in autumn."
I met him once in the Brooklyn street cars, soon after an article appeared in "the Radical" entitled "A Woman's Estimate of Walt Whitman." He asked if I had read it. I answered that I had, and that I should think he would like to know the lady who wrote it. " No," he said, " that does not so much matter. I do not even know her name." After a pause, he added, " But it was a great comfort to me."
If I were asked what I considered Walt Whitman's leading characteristic, I should say�and it is an opinion formed upon an acquaintance of over twenty years�his religiotis senti7nent or feeling. It pervades and dominates, his life, and I think no one could be in his presence any length of time without being impressed by it. He is a born exaltL His is not that religion, or show of it, that is comprised in dogmas, churches, creeds, etc. These are of little or no consequence to him, but it is that habitual state of feeling in which the person regards everything in God's universe with wonder, reverence, perfect acceptance, and love. He has more of all this than any one I have ever met. The deeply earnest spirit with which he looks upon humanity and life is so utterly opposed to cynicism and persiflage, that these always chill and repel him. He himself laughs at nothing (in a contemptuous sense), looks down on nothing�on the contrary everything is beautiful and wonderful to him.
One day I called upon his mother in Brooklyn and found him there. When I was going home he said he would cross the feriy with me. On our journey we had to pass through one of the great markets of New York in order to reach the cars running to the upper part of the city. I was hurrying through, according to my usual custom, but he kept constantly stopping me to point out the beautiful combinations of color at the butchers' stalls, and other stands; but above all the fish excited in him quite an enthusiasm. He made me admire their beautiful shapes and delicate tints, and I learned from him that day a lesson I have never forgotten.
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One evening in iS66, while he was stopping with us in New York, the tea bell had been rung ten minutes or more when he came down from his room, and we all gathered around the table. I remarked him as he entered the room; there seemed to be a peculiar brightness and elation about him, an almost irrepressible joyousness, which shone from his face and seemed to pervade his whole body. It was the more noticeable as his ordinary mood was one of quiet, yet cheerful serenity. I knew he had been working at a new edition of his book, and I hoped if he had an opportunity he would say something to let us into the secret of his mysterious joy. Unfortunately most of those at the table were occupied with some subject of conversation; at every pause I waited eagerly for him to speak; but no, some one else would begin again, until I grew almost wild with impatience and vexation. He appeared to listen, and would even laugh at some of the remarks that were made, yet he did not utter a single word during the meal; and his face still wore that singular brightness and delight, as though he had partaken of some divine elixir. His expression was so remarkable that I might have doubted my own observation, had it not been noticed by another as well as myself.
I never heard him allude directly but once to what has been so severely condemned in his books. It happened in this way. He had come on from Washington and was stopping with us at the time (it was in 1866), preparing the new edition of Leaves of Grass just spoken of. My mother and I were busy sewing in the sitting-room when he came back from a two hours' absence and threw himself on the lounge. He said he had been offered veiy favorable terms by a publisher down town (we were living m the upper part of New York at that time) if he would consent to leave out a few lines from two of his pieces. " But I dare not do it," he said; " I dare not leave out or alter what is so genuine, so indispensable, so lofty, so pure." Those were his exact words. The intense, I might almost say religious, earnestness with which they were uttered made an impression upon me that I shall never forget.
Here is another authentic personal account out of those years �say from 1854 to '60�taken from the New York "World" of June 4th, 1882, and written by Thomas A. Gere:
Thirty years ago, while employed upon an East .River steamboat, I became acquainted with Walt Whitman, and the association has ever since been a treasured one by myself and the rest of my companion boatmen. He came among us simply as a sociable passenger, but his genial behavior soon made him a most welcome visitor. We knew somewhat of his reputation as a man of letters, but the fact made no great impression upon us, nor did he ever attempt a display of his gifts or learning that would in the least make us feel he was not " of us, and one of us," as he used to express it. In a charm-
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ingly practical democratic manner he took great pains to teach many valuable things to a hard-handed band of men whose life had afforded little time for books. In later years I have realized that "Walt"�he would allow no other salutation from us�has done much gratuitous work as a teacher, and in looking back I also realize his excellence as an instructor. A careful choice of words and terse method of explaining a subject were truly peculiar to him �at least the faculty was marvellous to us. In our long watches�he would pass entire afternoons and even nights with us�he would discourse in a clear, conversational sort of way upon politics, literature, art, music or the drama, from a seemingly endless storing of knowledge. He certainly urged some of us into a desire for attainments that perhaps would not otherwise have been aroused.
" My boy," he would often say, after simply but eloquently treating some theme, * you must read more of this for yourself," and then generously put his library at the listener's service. I have seen a youth swabbing a steamboat's deck with Walt's Homer m his monkey-jacket pocket! At all times he was keenly inquisitive m matters that belonged to the river or boat. He had to have a reason for the actions of the pilot, engineer, fireman and even deckhands. Besides, he would learn the details of everything on board, from the knotted end of a bucket-rope to the construction of the engine. " Tell me all about it, boys," he would say, " for these are the real things I cannot get out of books." I am inclined to think that such inquisitiveness must always have been an industrious habit with him, for his writings abound with apt technicalities.
Walt's appearance used to attract great attention from the passengers when he came on board the boat. He was quite six feet in height, with the frame of a gladiator, a flowing gray beard mingled with the hairs on his broad, slightly bared chest. In his well-laundried checked shirt-sleeves, with trousers frequently pushed into his boot-legs, his fine head covered with an immense slouched black or light felt hat, he would walk about with a naturally majestic stride, a massive model of ease and independence. I hardly think his style of dress in those days was meant to be eccentric; he was very antagonistic to all show or sham, and I fancy he merely attired himself in what was handy, clean, economical and comfortable. His marked appearance, however, obtained for him a variety of callings in the minds of passengers who did not know him. "Is he a retired sea captain?" some would ask; "an actor ? a military officer ? a clergyman ? Had he been a smuggler, or in the slave trade?" To amuse Walt I frequently repeated these odd speculations upon him. He laughed until the tears ran when I once told him that a very confidential observer had assured me he was crazy!
What enjoyable nights they were when Walt M'ould come to us after a long study at home or in some prominent New York library! He would, indeed, "loaf" and unbend to our great delight with rich, witty anecdotes
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and pleasant sarcasms upon some events and men of the day. At times he would be joined by some literary acquaintance, generally to our disgust, or perhaps I should say jealousy, for we fancied that in some way we rather owned Walt; but the long classical debates that would occur, and deep subjects that would be dug up, used to waste the night in a most exasperating degree.
Walt's musical ability was a very entertaining quality: he was devotedly fond of opera, and many were the pleasant scraps and airs with which he would enliven us in a round, manly voice, when passengers were few and those few likely to be asleep on the seats. Our best attention was given to his recitations. In my judgment few could excel his reading of stirring poems and brilliant Shakespearian passages. These things he vented evidently for his own practice or amusement. I have heard him proceed to a length of some soliloquy in "Hamlet," "Lear," " Coriolanus " and " Macbeth," and when he had stopped suddenly and said with intense dissatisfaction, " No! no! no! that's the way the bad actors would do it," he would start off again and recite the part most impressively.
It is believed and asserted that his works will yet rise to meritorious eminence. Of this I do not feel competent to speak. I did not know him as the " Gray-Maned Lion of Camden," or "America's Good Gray Poet," but simply as dear old Walt. T. A. G.
Walt Whitman kept on for some years, working probably half the time, (though his life those years was so leisurely and free, he averaged from six to seven hours regular labor every day from his thirteenth year to past fifty), making trips into the country, writing poems, and, above all, enjoying life as it has seldom been enjoyed�until the breaking out of the Secession War. That event, which affected the business and the feelings of every person in the country, had an extraordinary bearing upon him. His brother George had volunteered and gone to the front. One morning in the middle of December, 1862, just after the first Fredericksburg battle, they saw by the military news in the New, York -'Herald" that George was wounded, it was thought seriously. Walt Whitman at an hour's notice started for the army camp on the Rappahannock. He found his brother wounded in the face by a fragment of shell, but the hurt not serious and already healing. The poet stayed several weeks in camp, absorbing all the grim sights and experiences of actual campaigning (and nothing could have been gloomier or more bloody than the
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season fqllowing "first Fredericksburg") through the depth of winter, in the flimsy shelter-tents, and in the impromptu hospitals, where thousands lay wounded, helpless, dying. He then returned to Washington, in charge of some Brooklyn soldiers with amputated limbs or down with illness. He had no definite plans at that time, or for long afterwards; but attention to the Brooklyn friends led to nursing others, and he stayed on and on, gradually falling into the labor and occupation, with reference to the war, which would do the most good, and be most satisfactory to himself.
I have heard him say that he was as much astonished as any one at the success of that personal ministration in the army hospitals. To pay his way he began writing correspondence for the New York and other papers; his letters were accepted and quite handsomely remunerated. So he stayed at Washington month after month, engaged in the work of the hospitals, and from time to time visiting the battle-fields. His services seemed imperiously needed. At that period, indeed the gloomiest of the war, hundreds of the sick and wounded of both armies were literally perishing for the want of decent care. His work as now commenced and continued for two to three years has never been, and perhaps never will be fully told. Doubtless it best remains in the memories of the saved soldiers. In two extracts which follow presently, and perhaps still better by suggestion in W. D. O'Connor's "Carpenter,"* those three years are but outlined. A surgeon who throughout the war had charge of one of the largest army hospitals in Washington has told the present writer that (without personal acquaintance, or any other than professional interest) he watched for many months Walt ^Vhitman's ministerings to the sick and wounded, and was satisfied that he saved many lives. I do not believe this statement exaggerated. I believe, knowing Walt Whitman as I do, and having some knowledge of medicine, that the man did possess an extraordinary power, by which he must have been able in many cases to turn the scale in fiivor of life, when without him
* The Carpenter �A Christmas story�by the author of "The Ghost."�Putnam's Monthly Magazine, January, 1868.
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the result would have been death. The following extract is from a letter by John Swinton in the New York "Herald of April ist, 18/6:
For nearly twenty years I have been on terms of affectionate intimacy with Walt Whitman. I knew him in his splendid prime, when his familiar figure was daily seen on Broadway, and when he was brooding over those extraordinary poems which have since been put into half a dozen languages, and commanded the homage of many of the greatest minds in modern literature. From then to the time of his paralysis I know of his life and deeds. Rich in good works and in saddening trials, he has remained the same genuine man, in whom the well-springs of po-try give perpetual freshness to the passing years. His paralysis was the result of his exhausting labors among our sick and wounded soldiers in the hospitals near Washington during the war. I saw something of these labors when I was visiting the hospitals. I can testify, as countless others can, that for at least three years the " Good Gray Poet" spent a large portion of his time, day and night, in the hospitals, as nurse and comforter of those who had been maimed or otherwise prostrated in the service of their country. I first heard of him among the sufferers on the Peninsula after a battle there. Subsequently I saw him, time and again, iii the Washington hospitals, or wending his way there with basket or haversack on his arm, and the strength of beneficence suffusing his face. His devotion surpassed the devotion of woman. It would take a volume to tell of his kindness, tenderness, and thoughtfulness.
Never shall I forget one night when I accompanied him on his rounds through a hospital, filled with those wounded young Americans whose heroism he has sung in deathless numbers. There were three rows of cots, and each cot bore its man. When he appeared, in passing along, there was a smile of affection and welcome on every face, however wan, and his presence seemed to light up the place as it might be lit by the presence of the Son of Love. From cot to cot they called him, often in tremulous tones or in whispers; they embraced him, they touched his hand, they gazed at him. To one he gave a few words of cheer, for another he wrote a letter home, to others he gave an orange, a few comfits, a cigar, a pipe and tobacco, a slieet of paper or a postage stamp, all of which and many other things were in his capacious haversack. From another he would receive a dying message for mother, wife, or sweetheart; for another he would promise to go an errand; to another, some special friend, very low, he would give a manly farewell kiss. He did the things for them which no nurse or doctor could do, and he seemed to leave a benediction at every cot as he passed along. The lights had gleamed for hours in the hospital that night before he left it, and as he took his way towards the door, you could hear the voice of many a stricken hero calling, "Walt, Walt, Walt, come again ! come again ! "
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His basket and store, filled with all sorts of odds and ends for the men, had been emptied. He had really little to give, but it seemed to me as though he gave more chan other men.
Here also is a paragraph from the New York "Tribune," by G. S. McWatters, summer of iSSo:
While walking in the neighborhood of New Rochelle, Westchester County, a few days ago, I observed a man at work in a field adjoining the road, and I opened a conversation with him. He had served in the Union Army during the Rebellion, and I had no trouble in inducing him to fight some of his battles over again. He gave me a graphic description of how he was badly wounded in the leg; how the doctors resolved to cut his leg off; his resistance to the proposed amputation, and his utter despair when he found he must lose his leg (as they said) to save his life. As a last resort, he determined to appeal to a man who visited the hospital about every alternate day. This man was a representative of the Sanitary Commission [this of course is a mistake], and he described him as a tall, well-built man with the face of an angel. He carried over his broad shoulders a well-filled haversack, containing about everything that would give a sick soldier comfort. In it were pens, ink and paper, thread, needles, buttons, cakes, candy, fruit, and above all, pipes and tobacco. This last article was in general demand. When he asked a poor fellow if he used tobacco and the answer was " no " he would express some kind words of commendation, but when the answer was " yes," he would produce a piece of plug and smilingly say, " Take it, my brave boy, and enjoy it." He wrote letters for those who were not able to write, and to those who could he would furnish the materials, and never forgot the postage stamp. His good-natured and sympathetic inquiry about their health and what changes had taken place since he last saw them, impressed every patient with the feeling that he was their personal friend. To this man Rafferty (that was my informant's name) made his last appeal to save his shattered leg. He was listened to with attention, a minute inquiry into his case, a pause, and after a few moments' thought the man replied, patting him on the head, " May your mind rest easy, my boy; they shan't take it off." Rafferty began to describe his feelings when he received this assurance, and though so many years have passed since then, his emotions mastered him, his voice trembled and thickened, his eyes filled with tears, he stopped for a moment and then blurted out, slapping his leg with Lis hand, " This is the leg that man saved for me." I asked the name of the Good Samaritan. He said he thought it was Whitcomb or something like that. I suggested it was just like Walt Whitman. The name seemed to rouse the old soldier within him; he did not wait for another word from mje, but seized my hand in both of his, and cried, "That's the man, that's the name; do you know him ?"
The following extract from a letter by a lady addressed to the
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present writer will help to show how Walt Whitman saved money to get little comforts for those hospital inmates:
I remember calling upon him in Washington during the war, with Mr. T. He occupied a little room in the third or fourth story of a house where he could get the cheapest rent. He was just eating his breakfast; it was about lo A.M.; he sat beside the fire, toasting a slice of bread on a jackknife, with a cup of tea without milk ; a little sugar in a brown paper, and butter in some more brown paper. He was making his meal for the next eight hours. He was using all his means and time and energies for the sick and wounded in the hospitals.
Finally, the letter which follows�(one of hundreds that of course never dreamed of seeing print, recovered by me by a lucky accident), written by Walt Whitman himself to Mrs. Price, mother of the lady whose reminiscences are given some pages back�will help to throw light on this part of his life;
Washington, October nth, 1863.
Dear Friend : Your letters were both received, and were indeed welcome. Don'i mind my not answering them promptly, for you know what a wretch I am about such things. But you must write just as often as you conveniently can. Tell me all about your folks, especially the girls, and about Mr. A. Of course you won't forget Arthur, and always when you write to him send my love. Tell me about Mrs. U. and the dear little rogues. Tell Mrs. B. she ought to be here, hospital matron, only it is a harder pull than folks anticipate. You wrote about Emma, her tliinking she might and ought to come as nurse for the soldiers. Dear girl, I know it would be a blessed thing for the men to have her loving spirit and hand. But, my darling, it is a dreadful thing�you don't know these wounds, sickness, etc., the sad condition in which many of the men are brought here, and remain for days; sometimes the wounds full of crawling corruption, etc. Down in the field-hospitals in front they have no proper care (can't have), and after a battle go for many days unattended to.
Abby, I think often about you and the pleasant days, the visits I used to pay you, and how good it was always to be made so welcome. Oh, I wish I could come in this afternoon and have a good tea with you, and have three or four hours of mutual comfort, and rest and talk, and be all of us together again. Is Helen home and well? and what is she doing now? And you, my dear friend, how sorry I am to hear that your health is not rugged�but, dear Abby, you must not dwell on anticipations of the worst (but I know that is not your nature, or did not use to be). I hope this will find you feeling quite well and in good spirits�I feel so tremendously well myself�I will have to come and show myself to you, I think�I am so fat, good appetite, out considerably in
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the open air, and all red and tanned worse than ever. You see, therefore, that my life amid these sad and death-stricken hospitals has not told at all badly upon me, for I am this fall so running over with health I feel as if I ought to go on, on that account, working among all who are deprived of it�and O how gladly I would bestow upon them a liberal share of mine, dear Abby, if such a thing were possible.
I am continually moving around among the hospitals. One I go to oftenest these last three months is " Armory Square," as it is large, generally full of the worst wounds and sickness, and is among the least visited. To this or some other I never miss a day or evening. Above all, the poor boys welcome simple kindness, loving affection (some are so fervent, so hungering for this)�poor fellows, how young they are, lying there with their pale faces, and that mute look in the eyes. Oh, how one gets to love them, often, particular cases, so suffering, so good, so manly and yet simple. Abby, you would all smile to see me among them�many of them like children. Ceremony is quite discarded� they suffer and get exhausted and so weary�not a few are on their dying beds �lots of them have grown to expect, as I leave at night, that we should kiss each other, sometimes quite a number; I have to go round. There is little petting in a soldier's life in the fiekl, but, Abby, I know what is in their hearts, always waiting, though they may be unconscious of it themselves.
I have a place where I buy very nice home-made biscuits, sweet crackers, etc. Among others, one of my ways is to get a good lot of these, and for supper, go through a couple of wards and give a portion to each man�next day two wards more, and so on. Then each marked case needs something to itself. I spend my evenings altogether at the hospitals�my days often. I give little gifts of money in small sums, which I am enabled to do�all sorts of things, indeed, food, clothing, letter-stamps (I write lots of letters), now and then a good pair of crutches or a cane, etc. Then I read to them�the whole ward that can walk gathers around me and listens.
All this I tell you, my dear, because I know it will interest you. There is much else�many exceptions�those I leave out. I like Washington very well; I have three or four hours my own work every day copying, and in writing letters for the press, etc.; make enough to pay my way�live in an inexpensive manner anyhow. I like the mission I am at here, and as it is deeply holding me I shall continue.
\_0n a second sheef\ October 15.
Well, Abby, I will send you enough to make up lost time. I ought to have finished and sent off the letter last Sunday, when it was written. I have been unusually busy. We are having new arrivals of wounded and sick now all the time�some very bad cases. I have found some good friends here, a few, but true as steel�W. D. O'C. and wife above all the rest. He is a clerk in the Treasury�she is a Yankee girl. Then C. W. E. in Paymaster's Depart-
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Wa/^ WhitmaJt.
raent. He is a Boston boy, too�their friendship and assistance have been unswerving.
In the hospitals among these American soldiers from East and West, North and South, I could not describe to you what mutual attachments, passing deep and tender. Some have died, but the love for them lives as long as I draw breath. These soldiers know how to love too, when once they have the right person. It is wonderful. You see I am running oi? into the clouds (perhaps my element). Abby, I am writing this last note this afternoon in Major H.'s office�he is away sick�I am here a good deal of the time alone�it is a dark, rainy afternoon�we don't know what is going on down in front, whether Meade is getting the worst of it, or not�(but the result of the big elections permanently cheers us)�I believe fully in Lincoln�few know the rocks and quicksands he has to steer through and over. I inclose you a note Mrs. O'C. handed me to send you, written, I suppose, upon impulse. She is a noble Massachusetts woman, is not very rugged in health�I am there very much�her husband and I are great friends. Well, I must close�the rain is pouring, the sky leaden, it is between 2 and 3�I am going fo get some dinner and then to the hospital. Good-by, dear friends; I send my love to all.
W. W.
Three unflinching years of work in that terrible suspense and excitement of iS62-'5 changed Walt Whitman from a young to an old man. Under the constant and intense moral strain to which he was subjected (indicated in "A March in the Ranks Hard-press'd," and especially in "The Wound-Dresser," in " Drum Taps"), he eventually broke down. The doctors called his complaint "hospital malaria," and perhaps it was; but that splendid physique was sapped by labor, watching, and still more by the emotions, dreads, deaths, uncertainties of three years, before it was possible for hospital malaria or any similar cause to overcome it. This illness (the first he ever had in his life) in the hot summer of 1864, he never entirely recovered from�and never will. He went North for a short time, and after getting apparently better, returned to his hospital work;
Some time before the close of the war, he was appointed to a clerkship in the Department of the Interior ; but was shortly afterwards discharged by a new Secretary, Hon. James Harlan, "because he was the author of an indecent dook.'^ He was immediately given an equally good place (secured through the good offices of W, D. O'Connor and J. Hubley Ashton) in
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the office of Attorney-General James Speed. That dismissal brought out the pamphlet (to be given presently) called " The Good Gray Poet," which was adjudged at the time by Henry J. Raymond to be the most brilliant monogram in American literature. It is worth while to put on record here a brief memorandum of this dismissal. Walt Whitman at the period was dividing all his spare time between visits to the wounded and sick still left in several army hospitals at Washington, and composing the poem "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." The morning after he was dismissed, his friend, Mr. Ashton, (who had himself sat in the President's Cabinet, and who occupied a national legal position), drove down to the Patent Office and had a long interview with Secretary Harlan on the subject of the dismissal. The Assistant Secretary of the Interior, Judge Otto, was present, but took no part in the discussion. Mr. A. asked why Whitman was dismissed, whether he had been found inattentive to his duties or incompetent for them. Mr. Harlan said No, there was no complaint on those points; as far as he knew, W, was a competent and faithful clerk. Mr. A. said, "Then what is the reason?" Mr. Harlan answered, "Whitman is the author oi Leaves of Grass.^^ Mr. A. said, "Is that the reason?" The Secretary said, "Yes, it is"�and then made a statement essentially to the following purport: He was exploring the Department after office hours, and in one of the rooms he found Leaves of Grass. He took it up and thought it so odd, that he carried it to his own office awhile, and examined it. There were marks by or upon the pieces all through the book. He found in some of these marked passages matter so outrageous that he determined to discharge the writer, etc. Mr. A. responded by a brief statement of the theory of Leaves of Grass �that any bad construction put upon the passages alluded to was not warranted either by the actual principle of the poems or the intentions of the author. Mr. Harlan said he couldn't help that�the author oi Leaves of Grass was a free lover, etc. Mr. A. said, " Mr. Harlan, I knozo Walt Whitman personally and well, and if you will listen to me, I will tell you what his life has been and is." He then went on with quite a long narrative. Mr. Llarlan finally said, "You have
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changed my opinion of Mr. Whitman's personal character; but I shall adhere to my decision dismissing him." Mr. A. commenced some further remarks, when Mr. Harlan summarily said, "It's no use, Mr. A., 1 will not have the man who wrote Leaves of Grass in this Department, if the President himself were to order his reinstatement. I would resign myself sooner than put him back." Mr. Harlan then broke into a long and vehement tirade against the book and its writer, to which Mr, A. made no reply, but bowed and took his leave.
The following transient incidents and sketches of the man as he actually appeared on the streets of Washington from 1864 to '72, were jotted down at the time and on the spot:
An eye-witness and participator relates, in a letter to a friend, the following anecdote of Abraham Lincohi: It was in the winter-time, I think in '64, I went up to the White House with a friend of mine, an M. C, who had some business with the President. He had gone out, so we didn't stop; but coming down stairs, quite near the door, we met the President coming in, and we stept back into the East Room, and stood near the front windows, where my friend had a confab with him. It didn't last more than three or four minutes; but there was something about a letter which my friend had handed the President, and Mr. Lincoln had read it, and was holding it in his hand thinking it over, and looking out of the window, when Walt Whitman went by, on the White House walk in front, quite slow, with his hands in the breast-pockets of his overcoat, and a sizeable felt hat on, and his head pretty well up, just as I have often seen him on Broadway. Mr. Lincoln asked who that was, or something of the kind. I spoke up, mentioning the name, Walt Whitman, and said he was the author of Leaves of Grass. Mr. Lincoln didn't say anything, but took a good look, till Whitman was quite gone by. Then he says�(I can't give you his way of saying it, but it was quite emphatic and odd)�" Well," he says, " he looks like a Man." He said it pretty loud, but in a sort of absent way, and with the emphasis on the words I have underscored. He didn't say any more, but began to talk again about the letter; and in a minute or so we went off.
From Burroughs''s "Birds and Poeis."
I give here a glimpse of him in Washington on a Pennsylvania Avenue and Navy Yard horse-car, toward the close of the war, one summer day at sundown. The car is crowded and suffocatingly hot, with many passengers on the rear platform, and among them a bearded, florid-faced man, elderly but agile, resting against the dash, by the side of the young conductor, and
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evidently his intimate friend. The man wears a broad-brim white hat. Among the jam inside, near the door, a young Englishwoman, of the worlcing class, with two children, has had trouble all the way with the youngest, a strong, fat, fretful, bright babe of fourteen or fifteen months, who bids fair to worry the mother completely out, besides becoming a howling nuisance to everybody. As the car tugs around Capitol Hill the young one is more demoniac than ever, and the flushed and perspiring mother is just ready to burst into tears with weariness and vexation. The car stops at the top of the hill to let off most of the rear platform passengers, and the white-hatted man reaches inside and gently but firmly disengaging the babe from its stifling place in the mother's arms, takes it in his own, and out in the air. The astonished and excited child, partly in fear, partly in satisfaction at the change, stops its screaming, and as the man adjusts it more securely to his breast, plants its chubby hands against him, and pushing off as far as it can, gives a good long look squarely in his face; then, as if satisfied, snuggles down with its head on his neck, and in less than a minute is sound and peacefully asleep without another whimper, utterly fagged out. A square or so more, and the conductor, who has had an unusually hard and uninterrupted day's work, gets off for his first meal and relief since morning. And now the white-halted man, holding the slumbering babe also, acts as conductor the rest of the distance, keeping his eye on the passengers inside, who have by this time thinned out greatly. He makes a very good conductor, too, pulling the bell to stop or go on as needed, and seems to enjoy the occupation. The babe meanwhile rests its fat cheeks close on his neck and gray beard, one of his arms vigilantly surrounding it, while the other signals, from time to time, with the strap; and the flushed mother inside has a good half-hour to breathe, and cool, and recover herself.
From the Washington "Chronicle^'' May gth, i86g. On Pennsylvania Avenue or Seventh or Fourteenth Street, or perhaps of a Sunday along the suburban road toward Rock Creek, or across on Arlington Heights, or up the shores of the Potomac, you will meet moving along at a firm but moderate pace, a robust figure, six feet high, costumed in blue or gray, with drab hat, broad shirt collar, gray-white beard, full and curly, with face like a red apple, blue eyes, and a look of animal health more indicative of hunting or boating than the department office or author's desk. Indeed, the subject of our item, in his verse, his manners, and even in his philosophy, evidently draws from, and has reference to, the influences of sea and sky, and woods and prairies, with their laws, and man in his relations to them, while neither the conventional parlor nor library has cast its spells upon him.
From the New York "Evening Alail^'' Oct. I'jth, 1870. The papers here have all paragraphed Walt Whitman's return to town and to his desk-in the Attorney-General's office, after quite a long vacation. His
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figure is daily to be seen here moving around in the open air, especially fine mornings and evenings, observing, listening to, or sociably talking with all sorts of people, policemen, drivers, market men, old women, the blacks, or dignitaries; or perhaps, giving some small alms to beggars, the maimed, or organ-grinders; or stopping to caress little children, of whom he is very fond. He takes deep interest in all the news, foreign and domestic. At the commence, ment of the present war in Europe he was strongly German, but is now the ardent friend of the French, and enthusiastically supports them and their Repul)lic. Here at home he goes for general amnesty and oblivion to Secessionists. He speaks sharply of the tendency of the Republican party to concentrate all power in Congress, and make its legislation absolutely sovereign, as against the equal claims, in their spheres, of the Presidency, the Judiciary, and the single States.
Altogether, perhaps, "the good, gray poet" is rightly located here. Our wide spaces, great edifices, the breadth of our landscape, the ample vistas, the splendor of our skies, night and day, with the national character, the memories of Washington and Lincoln, and others that might be named, make our city, above all others, the one where he filly belongs.
Walt Whitman is now in his fifty-second year, hearty and blooming, tall, with white beard and long hair. The older he gets the more cheerful and gay-hearted he grows.
From a letter in Burroughs's "Notcs^"' N'ov. sSt/i, i8jo.
.... You ask for some particulars of my friend Wliitman. You know I first fell in with him years ago in the army. We then lived awhile in the same tent, and now I occupy the adjoining room to his. I can, therefore, gratify your curiosity. He is a large-looking man. While in tlie market the other day with a party of us, we were all weighed; his weight was 200 pounds. But I will just start with him like with the day. He is fond of the sun, and at this season, soon as it is well up, shining in his room, he is out in its beams for a cold-water bath with hand and sponge, after a brisk use of the flesh-brush. Then blithely singing�his singing often pleasantly wakes me�he proceeds to finish his toilet, about which he is quite particular. Then forth for a walk in the open air, or perhaps some short exercise in the gymnasium. Then to breakfast�no sipping and nibbling�he demolishes meat, eggs, rolls, toast, roast potatoes, coffee, buckwheat cakes, at a terrible rate. Then walking moderately to his desk in the Attorney-General's office�a pleasant desk, w ith large south window at his left, looking away down the Potomac, and across to Virginia on one side.
He is at present in first-rate bodily health. Of his mind you must judge from his writings, as I have sent them to you. He is not what is called ceremonious or polite, but I have noticed invariably kind and tolerant with children, servants, laborers, and the illiterate. He gives freely to the poor, accord-
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ing to his means. He can be freezing in manner, and knows how to fend off bores. Sometimes he and I only�sometimes a larger party of us�go off on rambles of several miles out in the country, or over the hills; sometimes we go nights, when the moon is fine. On such occasions he contributes his part to the general fun. You might hear his voice, half in sport, declaiming some passage from a poem or play, and his song or laugh about as often as any, sounding in the open air.
Walt Whitman continued to live in Washington until 1873. He had toward the last a salary of $1600 a year. He exercised the strictest economy, almost parsimony, in his own personal living, spending probably less than a quarter of his income upon himself, putting by about one-third of the remainder, and using the rest, first for a dear relative at home, and then for needy persons and the inmates of the army hospitals, his visits to which he continued as long as they remained in the Capital. He always looked well, and the greater part of the time felt well, but his health was never at the stage of perfection and unconsciousness it had been before his illness in 1S64, and he suffered occasional attacks of actual and sometimes severe sickness.
This condition of depressed vitality culminated in a paralytic seizure. He told me (one day in 1880) how it came on, almost or exactly in the following words: "On the night of 'the 22d of February, 1873, ^ "^^^^ ^^ the Treasury building in ' Washington ; outside it was raining, sleeting, and quite cold 'and dark. The office was comfortable, and I had a good fire. 'I was lazily reading Bulwer's * What Will He Do With It?' 'But I did not feel well, and put aside the book several times. ' I remained at the office until pretty late. My lodging-room ' was about a hundred yards down the street. At last I got up ' to go home. At the door of the Treasury one of the friendly ' group of guards asked me what ailed me, and said I looked 'quite ill. He proposed to let a man take his place while he ' would convoy me home. I said, No, I can go well enough. 'He. again said he would go with me, but I again declined. ' Then he went down the steps and stood at the door with his ' lantern until I reached the house where I lived. I walked up ' to my room and went to bed and to sleep�woke up about
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"three or four o'clock and found that I could not move my left " arm or leg�did not feel particularly uneasy about it�was in '' no pain and even did not seem to be very ill�thought it would "pass off�went to sleep again and slept until daylight. Then, " however, I found that I could not get up�could not move. "After several hours, some friends came in, and they immedi-"ately sent for a doctor�fortunately a very good one, Dr. W. " B. Drinkard. He looked very grave�thought my condition " markedly serious. I did not think so: I supposed the attack " would pass, off soon�but it did not."
And it never has passed off, and never will, although he has regained the use of his limbs to a considerable degree. This first attack kept him down for over two months, at the end of which time he was growing perceptibly better, when, on 23d May, the same year, his mother died somewhat suddenly. (In Camden, New Jersey. He was present at her death-bed.) That event was a terrible blow to him, and after its occurrence he became much worse. He left Washington for good, and took up his residence in Camden.
And now for several years, 1S73, '74, '75, his life hung upon a thread. Though'he suffered at times severely, he never became dejected or impatient. It was said by one of his friends that in that combination of illness, poverty, and old age, Walt Whitman has been more grand than in the full vigor of his manhood. For along with illness, pain, and the burden of age, he soon had to bear poverty also. A little while after he became mcapacitated by illness, he was discharged from his Government clerkship, and everything like an income entirely ceased. As to the profits of Leaves of Grass, they had never been much, and now two men, in succession, in New York (T. O'K. and C. P. S.), in whose hands the sale of the book, on commission, had been placed, took advantage of his helplessness to embezzle the amounts due�(they calculated that death would soon settle the score and rub it out). So that, although I hardly ever heard him speak of them, I know that during those four years Walt Whitman had to bear the imminent prospect of death, great pain and suf-
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fcring at times, poverty, his poetic enterprise a failure, and the face of the public either clouded in contempt or turned away with indifference. If a man can go through such a trial as this without despair or misanthropy�if he can maintain a good heart, can preserve absolute self-respect, and as absolutely the respect, love, and admiration of the few who thoroughly know him�then he has given proofs I should say of personal heroism of the first order. It was, perhaps, needed that Walt Whitman should afford such proofs; at all events he has afforded them. What he was, how he lived, kept himself up during those yeSrs, and how at the end partially recuperated, is so well set forth by himself in Specimen Days, that it would be mere impertinence for any one else to attempt to retell the tale. The illness his friends looked upon with so much dread has borne fruit in one of the sanest and sweetest of books, the brightest and halest " Diary of an Invalid" ever written�a book unique in being the expression of strength in infirmity�the wisdom of weakness�so bright and translucent, at once of the earth, earthy, and spiritual as of the sky and stars. Other books of the invalid's room require to be read with the blinds drawn down and the priest on the threshold; but this sick man's chamber is the lane, and by the creek or sea-shore�always with the fresh air and the open sky overhead.
CHAPTER II.
THE POET IN i^^o.�PERSONNEL, ETC.
»This chapter has been mainly written while Walt Whitman visited at the house of the writer in Canada, or while he and I were travelling together through the Provinces of Ontario or Quebec, or on the Lakes, or the St. Lawrence or Saguenay Rivers; and the greater part of it while we were in the same room.
First, as to his personal appearance, noted at the time. On the 31st of May, 1880, Walt Whitman was sixty-one years of age. At first sight he looked much older, so that he was often supposed to be seventy or even eighty. He is six feet in height, and quite straight. He weighs nearly two hundred pounds. His body and limbs are full-sized and well-proportioned. His head is large and rounded in every direction, the top a little higher than a semicircle from the front to the back would make it. Though his face and head give the appearance of being plentifully supplied with hair, the crown is moderately bald; on the sides and back the hair long, very fine, and nearly snow-white. The eyebrows are highly arched, so that it is a long distance from the eye to the centre of the eyebrow�(this is the facial feature that strikes one most at first sight). The eyes themselves are light blue, not large,�indeed, in proportion to the head and face they seemed to me rather small; they are dull and heavy, not expressive�what expression they have is kindness, composure, suavity. The eyelids are full, the upper commonly droops nearly half over the globe of the eye. The nose is broad, strong, and quite straight; it is full-sized, but not large in proportion to the rest of the face; it does not descend straight from the forehead, but dips down somewhat between the eyes with a long sweep. The mouth is full-sized, the lips full. The sides and
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lower part of the face are covered with a fine white beard, which is long enough to come down a little way on the breast. The upper lip bears a heavy mustache. The ear is very large, especially long from above downwards, heavy, and remarkably handsome. I believe all the^oet's senses are exceptionally acute, his hearing especially so; no sound or modulation of sound perceptible to others escapes him, and he seems to hear many things that to ordinary folk are inaudible. I have heard him speak of hearing the grass grow and the trees coming out in leaf. In the "Song of Myself" he mentions the "bustle of growing wheat." And as to scent, he says in Specimen Days, " There is a scent in everything, even the snow; no two places, hardly any two hours, anywhere, exactly alike. How different the odor of noon from midnight, winter from summer, or a windy spell from a still one." His cheeks are round and smooth. His face had no lines that expressed care, or weariness, or age�it was the white hair and beard, and his feebleness in walking (due to the paralysis) that made him appear old. The habitual expression of his face is repose, but there is a well-marked firmness and decision. I have never seen his look, even momentarily, express contempt, or any vicious feeling. I have never known him to sneer at any person or thing, or to manifest in any way or degree either alarm or apprehension, though he has in my presence been placed in circumstances that would have caused both in most men. His complexion is peculiar, a bright maroon tint, which, contrasting with his white hair and beard, makes an impression very striking. His body is not white like that of all others whom I have seen of the English or Teutonic stock�it is a delicate but well-marked rose-color. All his features are large and massive, but so proportioned as not to look heavy. His face is the noblest I have ever seen.
No description can give any idea of the extraordinary physical attractiveness of the man. I do not speak now of the affection of friends and of those who are much with him, but of the magnetism exercised by him upon people who merely see him for a few minutes or pass him on the street. An intimate friend of the author's, after knowing Walt Whitman a few days, said in a
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letter: "As for myself, it seems to me now that I have always known him and loved him." And in another letter, written from a town where the poet had been staying for a few days, the same person says: "Do you know, every one who met him here seems to love him."
The following is the experience of a person well known to the present writer. He called on Walt Whitman and spent an hour at his home in Camden, in the autumn of 1877. He had never seen the poet before, but he had been profoundly reading his works for some years. He said that Walt Whitman only spoke to him about a hundred words altogether, and these quite ordinary and commonplace ; that he did not realize anything peculiar while with him, but shortly after leaving a state of mental exaltation set in, which he could only describe by comparing to slight intoxication by champagne, or to falling in love ! And this exaltation, he said, lasted at least six weeks in a clearly marked degree, so that, for at least that length of time, he was plainly different from his ordinary self. Neither, he said, did it then or since pass away, though it ceased to be felt as something new and strange, but became a permanent element in his life, a strong and living force (as he described it), making for purity and happiness. I may add that this person's whole life has been changed by that contact (no doubt the previous reading of Leaves of Grass also), his temper, character, entire spiritual being, outer life, conversation, etc., elevated and purified in an extraordinary degree. He tells me that at first he used often to speak to friends and acquaintances of his feeling for Walt Whitman and the Leaves, but after a time he found that he could not make himself understood, and that some even thought his mental balance impaired. He gradually learned to keep silence upon the subject, but the feeling did not abate, nor its influence upon his life grow less.
Walt Whitman's dress was always extremely plain. He usually wore in pleasant weather a light-gray suit of good woollen cloth. The only thing peculiar about his dress was that he had no necktie at any time,, and always wore shirts with very large turndown collars, the button at the neck some five or six inches
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lower than usual, so that the throat and upper part of the breast were exposed. In all other respects he dressed in a substantial, neat, plain, common way. Everything he wore, and everything about him, was always scrupulously clean. His clothes might (and often did) show signs of wear, or they might be torn or have holes worn in them ; but they never looked soiled. Indeed, an exquisite aroma of cleanliness has always been one of the special features of the man ; it has always belonged to his clothes, his breath, his whole body, his eating and drinking, his conversation, and no one could know him for an hour without seeing that it penetrated his mind and life, and was in fact the expression of a purity which was physical as much as moral, and moral as much as physical.
Walt Whitman, in my talks with him at that time, always disclaimed any lofty intention in himself or his poems. If you accepted his explanations they were simple and commonplace. But when you came to think about these explanations, and to enter into the spirit of them, you found that the simple and commonplace with him included the ideal and the spiritual. So it may be said that neither he nor his writings are growths of the ideal from the real, but are the actual real lifted up into the ideal. With Walt Whitman, his body, his outward life, his inward spiritual existence and his poetry, were all one ; in every respect each tallied the other, and any one of them could always be inferred from any other. He said to me one day (I forget now in what connection), " I have imagined a life which should be that " of the average man in average circumstances, and still grand, "heroic." There is no doubt that such an ideal has been constantly before his mind, and that all he has done, said, written, thought and felt, have been and are, from moment to moment, moulded upon it. His manner is curiously calm and self-contained. He seldom becomes excited in conversation, or at all events seldom shows excitement; he rarely raises his voice or uses any gestures. I never knew him to be in a bad temper. He seemed always pleased with those about him. He did not generally wait for a formal introduction; upon meeting any person for the first
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time, he very likely stepped forward, held out his hand (either left or right whichever happened to be disengaged), and the person and he were acquainted at once. People could not tell why they liked him, they said there was "something attractive about him," that he " had a great deal of personal magneti-sm," or made some other vague explanation that meant nothing. One very clever musical person, who spent a couple of days in my house while Walt Whitman was there, said to me on going away, " I know what it is, it is his wonderful voice that makes it so pleasant to be with him." I said, "Yes, perhaps it is, but where did his voice get that charm ? "
Though he would sometimes not touch a book for a week, he generally spent a part (though not a large part) of each day in reading. Perhaps he would read on an average a couple of hours a day. He seldom read any book deliberately through, and there was no more apparent system about his reading than in anything else that he did, that is to say there was no system about it at all. If he sat in the library an hour, he would have half a dozen to a dozen volumes about him, on the table, on chairs and on the floor. He seemed to read a i^sw pages here and a few there, and pass from place to place, from volume to volume, doubtless pursuing some clue or thread of his own. Sometimes (though very seldom) he would get sufficiently interested in a volume to read it all. I think he read almost if not quite the whole of Renouf's " Egypt," and Brusch-bey's "Egypt," but these cases were exceptional. In his way of reading he dipped into histories, essays, metaphysical, religious and scientific treatises, novels and poetry (though I think he read less poetry than anything else). He read no language but English, yet I believe he knew a great deal more French, German and Spanish, than he would own to. But if you took his own word for it, he knew very little indeed on any subject.
His favorite occupation seemed to be strolling or sauntering about outdoors by himself, looking at the grass, the trees, the flowers, the vistas of light, the varying aspects of the sky, and listening to the birds, the crickets, the tree-frogs, the wind in the trees, and all the hundreds of natural sounds and shows. It was evident
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that these things gave him a pleasure that ordinary people never experience. Until I knew the man, it had not occurred to me (though I am moderately fond of outdoor life myself and have read what most of the poets say on the subject) that any one could derive so much absolute happiness and ample fulfilment from these things, as he evidently did. He himself never spoke of all this pleasure. I dare say he hardly thought of it, but any one who watched him could see plainly that in his case it was real and deep.
He had a way of singing, generally in an undertone, wherever he was or whatever he was doing when alone. You would hear him the first thing in the morning while he was taking his bath and dressing (he would then perhaps sing out in full, ballads or martial songs), and a large part of the time that he sauntered outdoors during the day he sang, usually tunes without words, or a formless recitative. Sometimes he would recite poetry, generally I tiiink from Shakespeare or Homer, once in a while from Bryant or others. His way of rendering poetry was peculiar but effective. I remember the " Midnight Visitor" from the French poet Murger, also Tennyson's " Ulysses," and Schiller's "Diver." *
* A letter from Camden, in the " Springfield Republican," July 23, 1875, says: The Camden mechanics and young men have a flourishing literary society here, called the " Walt Whitman Club ; " and some weeks since, they gave a musical and other entertainment for the benefit of the poor fund, at which Wlatman readily appeared as reader of one of his own poems. There was a crowded house, the report in the local paper saying, " Probably the best part of the audience drawn to the entertainment by a mixture of wonder and uncertainty what sort of a being Walt Whitman really was, and what sort of a thing one of his poems might prove to be." The report goes on to give the following account of his appearance and reading: A large, lame old man, six feet tall, dressed in a complete suit of English gray, hobbled slowly out to view, with the assistance of a stout buckthorn staff. Though ill from paralysis, the clear blue eyes, complexion of transparent red, and fulness of figure so well known to many New Yorkers and Washingtonians of the past 15 years, and in Camden and Philadelphia of late, all remain about the same. With his snowy hair and fleecy beard, and in a manner which singularly combined strong emphasis with the very realization of self-composure, simplicity and ease, Mr. Whitman, for it was he (though he might be taken at first sight for 75 or 80, he is in fact not yet 57), proceeded to read, sitting, his poem of the "Mystic Trumpeter." His voice is firm, magnetic, and with a certain peculiar quality we heard an admiring auditor call unaffectedness. Its range is baritone, merging into bass. He reads very leisurely, makes frequent pauses or gaps, enunciates with distinctness, and uses few gestures, but those very significant. Is he eloquent and dramatic? No, not in the conventional sense, as illustrated by the best known stars of the pulpit, court-room, or the stage ■�for the bent of his reading, in fact the whole idea of it, is evidently to first form an enormous mental fund, as it were, within the regions of the chest, and heart, and lungs�a
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tion for him. Perhaps, indeed, no man who ever lived liked so many things and disliked so few as Walt Whitman. All natural objects seemed to have a charm for him; all sights and sounds, outdoors and indoors, seemed to please him. He appeared to like (and I believe he did like) all the men, women and children he saw (though I never knew him to say that he liked any one), but each who knew him felt that he liked him or her, and that he liked others also. He was here entirely natural and unconventional. When he did express a preference for any person (which was very seldom) he would indicate it in some indirect way; for instance, I have known him to say, "Good-bye, my love," to a young married lady he had only seen half a dozen times.
He was especially fond of children, and all children liked and trusted him at once. Often the little ones, tired out and fretful, the moment he took them up and caressed them, would cease crying, and perhaps go to sleep in his arms. One day in the summer of 1880, several ladies, the poet and myself, attended a picnic given to hundreds of poor children in London. During the day I lost sight of my friend for perhaps an hour, and when I found him again he was sitting in a quiet nook by the river side, with a rosy-faced child of four or five years' old, tired out and sound asleep in his lap.*
For young and old his touch had a charm that cannot be described, and if it could, the description would not be believed except by those who know him either personally or through Leaves of Grass, This charm (physiological more than psycholog-
* Burial of Little Walter Whitman. �Among the late mortality in Camden, from heat, to young children, Colonel George W. Whitman and wife lost their infant son and only child Walter, less than a year of age. The funeral was last Friday. In the middle of the room, in its white coffin, lay the dead babe, strewed with a profusion of fresh geranium leaves and some tuberoses. For over an hour all the young ones of the neighborhood kept coming silently in groups or couples or singly, quite a stream surrounding the coffin. Near the corpse, in a great chair, sat Walt Whitman, the poet, quite enveloped by children, holding one encircled by either arm, and a beautiful little girl on his lap. The little girl looked curiously at the spectacle, and then inquiringly up in the old man's face. " You don't know what it IS, do you, my dear?" said he�adding, " We don't either." Of the children surrounding the coffin many were mere babes, and had to be lifted up to look. . There was no sermon, no ceremony, everything natural and informal, but, perhaps, there never was a more silently eloquent, simple, solemn and touching sight.� Philadelphia Ledger, July zo, 1876.
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ical), if imderstood, would explain the whole mystery of the man, and how lie produced such effects not only upon the well, but among the sick and wounded.
It is certain also, perhaps contrary to what I have given, that there is another phase, and a very real one, to the basis of his character. An elderly gentleman I talked with (he is a portrait painter and a distant relative of the poet), who has been much with, and knew him, particularly through the years of his middle age and later (1845 to 1S70), tells me that Walt Whitman, in the elements of his character, had deepest sternness and hauteur, not easily aroused, but coming forth at times, and then well understood by those who know him best as something not to be trifled with. The gentleman alluded to (he is a reader and thorough ?icc(i\i\.tr o{ Leaves of Grass) zgrtcs with me in my delineation of his benevolence, evenness, and tolerant optimism, yet insists that at the inner framework of the poet has always been, as he expresses it, "a combination of hot blood and fighting qualities." He says my outline applies more especially to his later years; that Walt Whitman has gradually brought to the front the attributes I dwell upon, and given them control. His theory is, in almost his own words, that there are two natures in Walt Whitman. The one is of immense suavity, self-control, a mysticism like the occasional fits of Socrates, and a pervading Christ-like benevolence, tenderness, and sympathy (the sentiment of the intaglio frontispiece portrait, which I showed him, and he said he had seen exactly that look in ''the old man," and more than once, during 1863-'64, though he never observed it before or since). But these qualities, though he has enthroned them, and for many years governed his life by them, are duplicated by far sterner ones. No doubt he has mastered the latter, but he has them. How "could Walt Whitman (said my interlocutor) have taken the attitude toward evil, and things evil, which is behind every page of his utterance in Leaves of Grass, from first to last�so different on that subject from every writer known, new or old�unless he enfolded all that evil within him? (To all of which I give place here as not essentially inconsistent�if true�with my own the-
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ory of the poet's nature, and also because I am determined to take the fullest view of him, and from all sides.)
In an article in the "Galaxy" for December, 1866, John Burroughs said :
Lethargic during an interview, passive and receptive, an admirable listener, never in a hurry, with the air of one who has plenty of leisure, always in perfect repose, simple and direct in manners, a lover of plain, common people, " meeter of savage and gentleman on equal terms," tem-. perate, chaste, sweet-breath'd, tender and affectionate, of copious friendsliip, with a large, summery, paternal soul that shines in all his ways and looks, he is by no means the " rough" certain people have been so willing to believe. Fastidious as a high caste Brahmin in his food and personal neatness and cleanliness, well dressed, with a gray, open throat, a deep sympathetic voice, a kind, genial look, the impression he makes upon you is that of the best blood and breeding. He reminds one of the first men, the beginners; has a primitive, outdoor look�not so much from being in the open air as from the texture and quality of his make�a look as of the earth, the sea, or the mountains, and " is usually taken," says a late champion of his cause, " for some great mechanic, or stevedore, or seaman, or grand laborer of one kind or another." His physiognomy presents very marked features�features of the true antique pattern, almost oV)solete in modern faces�seen in the strong, square bridge of his nose, his high arching brows, and the absence of all bulging in his forehead� a face approximating in type to the statued Greek. He does not mean intellect merely, but life; and one feels that he must arrive at his results rather by sympathy and absorption than by hard intellectual processes�by tlie effluence of power rather than by direct and total application of it.
In conclusion, I suppose I ought to say that there is another side to the picture, the indispensable exception that proves the rule. This man, the sight of whom excites such extraordinary affection, whose voice has for most of those who hear it such a wonderful charm, whose touch possesses a power which no words can express�in rare instances, this man, like the magnet, repels as well as attracts. As there are those who instinctively love him, so there are others, here and there, who instinctively dislike him. The furious assaults of the press during twenty-five years, the disgraceful action of Secretary Harlan in 1865, the continuous refusal of publishers to publish his poems, and of booksellers to sell them, the legal threats in 1882 of the Massachusetts Attor-
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ney-General, voiced by Boston's District Attorney Stevens�the cowardly throwing up of their contract by J. R. Osgood & Co.� persecution by the wretched Anthony Comstock and his pitiful "Society for the Suppression of Vice"�with all the prevalent doubt and freezing coldness of the literary classes and organs up to this hour�are fitting outcomes and illustrations of that other side. As his poetic utterances are so ridiculous to many, even his personal appearance, in not a kw cases, arouses equally sarcastic remark. His large figure, his red face, his copious beard, his loose and free attire, his rolling and unusually ample shirt-collar, without neck-tie and always wide open at the throat, all meet at times (and not so seldom, either,) with jeers and explosive laughter. Pages and extracts in this volume (see Appendix) give many samples of incredible misapprehension and malignance toward the book Leaves of Grass. They could be fully tallied with records of equal rancor, foulness, and falsehood against Walt Whitman personally. That such exist, and will probably continue, is doubtless according to a morbid attribute of humanity, and one of its most mysterious laws. A Washington reviewer some years since said on this subject:
Walt Whitman personally is a study, affording the strongest lights and shades. With all his undoubted instincts of perfection, he by no means sets up for a saint, but is a full-blooded fellow, with a life showing past blunders and missteps, and a spirit not only tolerant toward weak and sinful mortals, but probably a secret leaning toward them. Then he has not escaped the fate of personalities who rouse public attention, and canards, by originality and independence. Perhaps, too, he has that affectation sometimes seen�a grim amusement in tacitly taunting and inviting them. Singularly simple and plain, few men are so beloved as he�few have ever so magnetized; yet none afford more temptation to caricature or bogus anecdotes. The late summing-up of a first-rate judge of human nature, that personal knowledge of him un-1 erringly dissipates such fictions, is the best disposal of the whole matter.
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CHAPTER III. HIS CONVERSATION.
He did not talk much. Sometimes, while remaining cheery and good-natured, he would speak very little all day. His conversation, when he did talk, was at all times easy and unconstrained. I never knew him to argue or dispute, and he never spoke about money. He always justified, sometimes playfully, sometimes quite seriously, those who spoke harshly of himself or his writings, and I often thought he even took pleasure in those sharp criticisms, slanders, and the opposition of enemies. He said that his critics were quite right, that behind what his friends saw he was not at all what he seemed, and that from the point of view of its foes, his book deserved all the hard things they could say of it�and that he himself undoubtedly deserved them and plenty more. ,
When I first knew Walt Whitman I used to think that he watched himself, and did not allow his tongue to give expression to feelings of fretfulness, antipathy, complaint, and remonstrance. It did not occur to me as possible that these mental states could be absent in him. After long observation, however, and talking to others who had known him many years, I satisfied myself that such absence or unconsciousness was entirely real.
His deep, clear, and earnest voice makes a good part, though not all, of the charm of the simplest things he says; a voice not characteristic of any special nationality, accent, or dialect. If he said (as he sometimes would involuntarily on stepping to the door and looking out), "Oh, the beautiful sky!" or "Oh, the beautiful grass !" the words produced the effect of sweet music.
One evening he spoke quite freely of his British friends. Professor Dowden, Addington Symonds, Tennyson (who had sent him a letter warmly inviting him over there to T.'s house), Pro-
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fessor Clifford, and other and younger ones. I remember his glowing words of esteem and affection for Mrs. Gilchrist, and also for Robert Buchanan (whose denunciations and scathing appeal in the London papers at the time of the poet's darkest persecution, sickness, and poverty, made such a flutter in 1876).*
He said one day when talking about some fine scenery, and the desire to go and see it (and he himself was very fond of new scenery), "After all, the great lesson is that no special natural "sights, not Alps, Niagara, Yosemite, or anything else, is more "grand or more beautiful than the ordinary sunrise and sunset, " earth and sky, the common trees and grass." Properly understood, I believe this suggests the central teaching of his writings and life, namely, that the commonplace is the grandest of all things ; that the exceptional in any line is no finer, better, or more beautiful than the usual, and that what is really wanting is not that we should possess something we have not at present, but that our eyes should be opened to see and our hearts to feel what we all have.
On the evening of the ist of August, 1880, as we were sitting together on the veranda of the "Hub House," among the Thousand Islands of the St.'Lawrence, I said to Walt Whitman, " It seems to me surprising that you never married. Did you remain single of set purpose?" He said, "No, I have hardly " done anything in my life of set purpose, in the way you mean." After a minute, he added, " I suppose the chief reason why I "never married must have been an overmastering passion for "entire freedom, unconstraint; I had an instinct against form-" ing ties that would bind me." I said, " Yes, it was the instinct of self-preservation. Had you married at the usual age, Leaves of Grass would never have been written."
* He who wanders through the solitudes of far-off Uist or lonely Donegal may often behold the Golden Eagle sick to death, worn with age or famine, or with both, passing with weary waft of wing from promontory to promontory, from peak to peak, pursued by a crowd of prosperous rooks and crows, which fall screaming back whenever the noble bird turns his indignant head, and which follow frantically once more, hooting behind him, whenever he wends again upon his way. The rook is a " recognized" bird ; the crow is perfectly " established." But for the Eagle, when he sails aloft in the splendor of his strength, who shall perfectly discern and measure his flight?� Robert Buchanan, London Daily News, March 13. 1876.
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The same evening we talked about the use of alcohol, and we agreed that as mankind advanced in a noble individuality they would give up stimulants of all kinds as being always in the long run a mistake and unprofitable. He said, "The capital argument "against alcohol, that which must eventually condemn its use, "is this, that it takes away all the reserved control, the power "of mastership, and therefore offends against that splendid "pride in himself or herself whicli is fundamental in every man "or woman worth anything."
One day talking about religious experiences, Walt Whitman said, "I never had any particular religious experiences�never "felt that I needed to be saved�never felt the need of spiritual "regeneration�never had any fear of hell, or distrust of the "scheme of the universe. I always felt that it was perfectly "right and for the best."
On the 9th of August we were together at the Falls of Mont-morenci, near the foot of the stairs. There had been a good deal of rain, the river was high, and the falls finer than usual. I said, " Now, Walt, put that in a poem just as it is; if that could be done it would be magnificent." He said, "All such things " need at least the third or fourth remove; in itself it would be " too much for nine out of every ten readers. Very few " (he said, a little mischievously, perhaps), "care for natural objects "themselves, rocks, rain, hail, wild animals, tangled forests, "weeds, mud, common Nature. They want her in a shape fit "for reading about in a rocking-chair, or as ornaments in china, "marble, or bronze. The real things are, far more than they "would own, disgusting, revolting to them. This" (he added, half quizzically) "may be a reason of the dislike of Leaves of ''^Grass by the majority."
Walt Whitman, however, never mentions Leaves of Grass, unless first spoken to on the subject ; then he talks about it, and his purpose in writing it, as of any ordinary matter. I have never heard him myself say much on the subject, but I will give here some of his words taken from the "Springfield Republican," reported, I have reason to know, as they were said impromptu: "Well, I'll suggest to you what my poems have grown out of,
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" since you want to know so bad. I understand as well as any "one they are ambitious and egotistical, but I hope the founda-** tions are far deeper. We have to-day no songs, no expressions " from the poets' and artists' points of view, of science, of Ameri-"can democracy, and of the modern. Tlie typical war spirit of "the antique world, and its heroes and leaders, have been fully "depicted and preserved in Homer, and since. Rapt ecstasy and " Oriental veneration are in the Bible; the literature of those *• qualities will never, can never, ascend any higher. The ages "of feudalism and European chivalry, through their results and " personalities, are in Shakespeare. But where is the work, where "the poem, in which the entirely different but fully equal glories " and practice of our own democratic times, of the scientific, " the materialistic, are held in solution, fused in human person-" ality and emotions, and fully expressed ? If, for instance, by " some vast, instantaneous convulsion, American civilization " were lost, where is the poem, or imaginative work in any depart-" ment, which, if saved from the wreck, would preserve the char-"acteristics and memories of it to succeeding worlds of men?
" You speak of Shakespeare and the relative poetical demands "and opportunities, then and now�my own included. Shake-" speare had his boundless rich materials, all his types and char-" acters, the main threads of his plots, fully ripened and waiting " to be woven in. The feudal world had flourished for centuries� " gave him the perfect king, the lord, all that is heroic and grace-" ful and proud�gave him the exquisite transfigurations of caste, "sifted and selected out of the huge masses, as if for him, choice "specimens of proved and noble gentlemen, varied and romantic "incidents of the military, social, political and ecclesiastical " history of a thousand years, all ready to fall into his plots and " pages. Then the time comes for the evening of feudalism. A "new power has advanced, and the flush, the pomp, the accumu-" lated materials of those ages take on the complex gorgeousness "of sunset. At this point Shakespeare appears. By amazing " opportuneness, his faculty, his power, the feudalistic demands " on him, combine, and he is their poet. But for my poems, what " have 1 ? I have all to make �have really to fashion all, except
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" my own intentions�have to constructively sing the ideal yet " unformed America. Shakespeare sang the past, the formed; " I project the unformed, the future�depend on the future, and " have to make my own audience.
"Most of the great poets are impersonal; I am personal. " They portray their endless characters, events, passions, love-" plots, but seldom or never mention themselves. In my poems " all concentrates in, radiates from, revolves around myself. I " have but one central figure, the general human personality " typified in myself. Only I am sure my book inevitably necessi-" tates that its reader transpose him or herself into that central " position, and become the actor, experiencer, himself or herself, "of every page, every aspiration, every line."
In our family groups and sociable company, he was fond of telling little funny stories, bringing in comical sayings, generally trivial in themselves (sometimes quite venerable), deriving most of their charm�and they were very amusing�from special aptness to the case, and from his manner of telling them. In St. Louis, where he was a half invalid, one winter, he was in the habit of visiting, twice a week, the kindergarten schools, and spending an hour at a time among the young children, who gathered in swarms about him to listen to " The three Cats who took a Walk," or some other juvenile story. Lingering with us all at the table after tea was a favorite recreation with him. The following are some examples of his dry anecdotes, generally told to groups of little or larger children :
There was a very courageous but simple old woman, and some chaps agreed upon a plan to frighten her. One of them dressed up in black, with horns and tail, and made himself very frightful. In this rig he appeared to the old woman at night and said in a terrible voice, " Look at me ! " The old lady calmly put on her spectacles, looked him steadily all over and said, " Who are you? " *' I am the devil!" said he, in a deep voice. " You the devil, are you? " said the old woman composedly ; then calmly, after a pause� '■^ poor creetur .-'"
He was fond of the well-known story about a sailor ship-
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wrecked upon a strange coast, who wandering inland after a long jaunt saw a gibbet holding a murderer's corpse, and immediately burst out, " Thank God, at last I am in a Christian land."
A dry expression of his, talking about some one was, " Well, he has the good sense to like me." He used to tell about some man who said, when it was alleged that a certain fact was historical, "Oh, it's in the history is it? then I know it must be a lie." He would often give the following as " the wise Frenchman's reason : " " Do you say it is impossible ? then I am sure it will come to pass."
One day he said: "Among the gloomy and terrible sights of the Secession War were often extremely humorous occurrences. It was a sort of rule in many hospitals when certain that a patient would die, to give him almost whatever he wanted to eat or drink. Under these circumstances some of the men would ask for whisky, and drink it freely. One man, a rough Westerner, whose life was limited to a few hours, used to wake up in the night and call out to the watchman, ' Come, Bill, give me some whisky; you know we are going to die. Come, give me some whisky, quick !' "
He had many dry idioms from his old intimacy with omnibus drivers in New York and other cities. (He always "took to them" and they to him�and the same to this day; at Christmas, in Washington, Philadelphia, Camden, or where residing at the time, he has for years had a custom of dispensing to these drivers, on quite a large scale, presents of the strong warm buckskin gloves so serviceable in that occupation.) One little story was of an old Broadway driver, who, being interrogated about a certain unpopular new-comer, answered with a grin, "Oh, he's one o' them pie-eaters from Connecticut."
Walt Whitman was so invariably courteous and kind in his manner to every one, it might have been thought he could have easily been bored and imposed upon, but this was not at all the case. He had so much tact that he always found a way of escape. He had a horror of smart talkers, and particularly of being questioned or interrogated.- He had a very dry manner of dismissing intruders, or correcting those who went too far�not surly, but a
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peculiar tone of the voice, and glance of the eye, and sometimes a good-natured anecdote. A gentleman said to him one evening at tea-time, "I should not think, Mr. Whitman, that you were at all an emotional man." "Well," he replied drily, "there is *'an old farmer down in Jersey, who says nothing, but keeps up "a devil of a thinking; and there are others like him."
He once told me he had read a good many different translations of Homer, and that the one he liked best, after all, was Buckley's literal prose version. He did not care for either Lord Derby's or Bryant's. I was reading the " Iliad " one day as we sat on the veranda together, and I made some remark to the effect that it was praised on account of its age and scholarly associations rather than its intrinsic merit, and that if it was first published now, no one would care anything about it. "Well," he said, " perhaps not, but not for the reason you say. See," he said� the subject seemed to inspirit him, for he rose and walked slowly up and down, leaning on his cane, occasionally pausing�"See "how broadly and simply it opens. An old priest comes, op-" pressed with grief, to the sea-shore. The beach stretches far " away, and the waves roll sounding in. The old man calls his "divine master, Apollo, not to permit the foul insults and inju-" ries put upon him by the leader of the Greeks. Almost at once " in the distance an immense shadowy form, tall as a tree, comes "striding over the mountains. On his back he carries his quiver " of arrows, and his long silver bow. Just think of it," he said, "so daring, so unlike the cultivated prettiness of our poets�so "grim, free, large. No, no," he continued, ''don't make light " of the ' Iliad.' Think how hard it is for a modern, one of us, " to put himself in sympathy with those old Greeks, with their "associations." These are the words that he used, but to see them in print will convey only a faint impression of their effect, or of the man as he said them�the manner, the deep, rich melody of the finest voice I believe in the world.
He thinks much of Dr. John A. Carlyle's translation of Dante's " Inferno," has had the volume by him for many years, reads in it often, and told me he had learned very much from it, especially in conciseness�" no surplus flesh," as he describes it.
6
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He said very deliberately to me once that he believed he knew less, in certain respects, about Leaves of Grass than some of the readers of it; and I believe (strange as it may seem) that this is true. There are things in the book I am sure could never be fully appreciated from the author's point of view.
He said one day that he considered the most distinguishing feature of his own poetry to be " Its ?nodern?iess �the taking up in
* their own spirit of all that specially differentiates our era from 'others, particularly our democratic tendencies."
Another time he said : " The unspoken meaning of Leaves of ' Grass, never absent, yet not told out�the indefinable animus ' behind every page, is a main part of the book. Something ' entirely outside of literature, as hitherto written ; outside of art ' in all departments. Takes hold of muscular democratic viril-' itieS'without wincing, and puts them in verse. This makes it
* distasteful to technical critics and readers. I understand all
* those shrinking objections/' he said, "and consider them in ' one sense right enough; but there was something for me to 'do, no matter how it hurt or offended ; and I have done it."
He said further: "I don't at all ignore the old stock elements ' and machinery of poetry, but instead of making them main ' things, I keep them away in the background, or like the roots ' of a flower or tree, out of sight. The emotional element, for 'instance, is not brought to the front, not put in words 'to any great extent, though it is underneath every page. ' I have made my poetry out of actual, practical life, such as is ' common to every man and woman, so that all have an equal ' share in it. The old poets went on the assumption that there ' was a selection needed. I make little or no selection, put in ' common things, tools, trades, all that can happen or belongs to ' mechanics, farmers, or the practical community. I have not ' put in the language of politics, but I have put in the spirit; ' and in science, by intention at least, the most advanced points 'are perpetually recognized and allowed for."
He said to me once, " I often have to be quite vehement with 'my friends to convince them that I am not (and don't want to
* be) singular, exceptional, or eminent. I am willing to think
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" I represent vast averages, and the generic American masses� ** that I am their voice; but not that I should be in any sense "considered an exception to ordinary men."
Another time he said, "I have always considered the writing "and publication of Leaves of Grass an experiment. Time only "can tell how it will turn out."
"Remember, the book arose," he said, another time, "out of " my life in Brooklyn and New York from 1838 to 1853, absorb-"ing a million people, for fifteen years, with an intimacy, an "eagerness, an abandon, probably never equalled�land and "water. I have told you how I used to spend many half nights " with my friends the pilots on the Brooklyn ferry-boats. I some-" times took the wheel and steered, until one night a boat I was "steering nearly met with a bad accident. After that I would "not touch the wheel any more."
Walt Whitman and Rev. Mr. R. had a long conversation on the veranda one beautiful summer evening. Mr. R. wanted to get at the sources and birth oi Leaves of Grass from its author. The latter spoke as he always does, without any arriere pensee. Among other things, he said he had tried to do something that would on the one hand give expression to deepest religious thought and feeling, and on the other be in accord with the last results of modern science. He said, " I do not know that "I have succeeded, but at all events I have indicated what needs "to be done�and some one else may accomplish the task."
Another day Mr. R. said, talking of Colonel Robert Ingersoll: " He takes away what we have, and gives us nothing in its place �is there any good or service in that ?" He pressed Walt Whitman for an answer, to find out his opinion about Ingersoll's argument and about Christianity. Walt Whitman said at last: "Well, " I think the main and final point about the whole or any of these " things is�is it true?"
He several times spoke of President Lincoln, whom he considered the most markedly national. Western, native character the United States has yet produced. He never had any particular intimacy with Mr. Lincoln, but (being a personal friend of John Hay, confidential secretary) saw a good deal of L.�was
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much at the White House (1863 and '64), and knew the President's character behind the scenes. In after years he desired to keep the anniversary of Mr. Lincoln's death by a public lecture he had prepared (see Specimen Days), but he could get neither engagements, audiences, nor public interest,* and after delivering this lecture in 1879, '80, and '81, to small gatherings, he stopped it.
He said one Sunday morning after a previous merry evening: *' God likes jokes and fun as well as He likes church-going and " prayers." Once, after some conversation, he went on to speculate whether Luther was really as original and central a man as generally supposed, or whether circumstances ought not to be credited with a. good deal that seemed to flow from him�and whether his Reformation was of such value to the world as most Protestants think. He talked of great men generally, and how their apparent greatness is often due to the force of circumstances �often because it is convenient for history to use them as radiating points and illustrations of vast currents of ideas floating in the time, more than to any qualities inherent in themselves� and ended by discussing Renan's opinion of the relative greatness of Jesus, Jesus son of Sirach, and Hillel.
One evening he said he wondered whether modern poets might not best take the same "new departure" that Lord Bacon took in science, and emerge directly from Nature and its laws, and from things and facts themselves, not from what is said about them, or the stereotyped fancies, or abstract ideas of the beautiful, at second or third removes.
He once said no one but a medical man could realize the appropriateness (jeered at by the "Saturday Review," as proof positive that W. W. was no poet,) of his putting in the word "diarrhoea" in one of his hospital poems; a malady that stood third on the deadly list of camp diseases. In the same connection, he said that several pieces in Leaves of Grass could only be
* In one of the principal cities of the United States, the 15th anniversary of President Lincoln's death (April 15, 1880) was commemorated by this public address. The next morning the discriminating editor of the leading daily paper relegates all report of "the Death of Abraham Lincoln," as described and commented on by Walt Whitman, to a half-supercilious notice of five or six lines�and fills two columns of his journal with a lecture by a visiting English clergyman, on " the Evidential Value of the Acts of the Apostles"!
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thoroughly understood by a physician, the mother of a family of children, or a genuine nurse.
He never spoke deprecatingly of any nationality or class of men, or time in the world's history, or feudalism, or against any trades or occupations�not even against any animals, insects, plants, or inanimate things�nor any of the laws of Nature, or any of the results of those laws, such as illness, deformity, or death. He never complains or grumbles either at the weather, pain, illness, or at anything else. He never in conversation, in any company, or under any circumstances, uses language that could be thought indelicate. (Of course, he has used language in his poems which has been thought indelicate, but none that is S3.) In fact, I have never known of his uttering a word or a sentiment which might not be published without any prejudice to his fame. He never swears; he could not very well, since as far as I know, he never speaks in anger, and apparently never is angry. (I know that he himself will emphatically contradict me �that he will refuse to accept this, and a great many more of my outlines, as a true portrait of himself, but 1 prefer to draw and color for myself.) He never exhibits fear, and I do not believe he ever feels it. His conversation, mainly toned low, is always agreeable and usually instructive. He never makes compliments �very seldom apologizes�uses the common forms of civility, such as "if you please," and "thank you," quite sparingly� usually makes a nod or a smile answer for them. He was, in my experience of him, not given to speculating on abstract questions (though I have heard others say that there were no subjects in which he so much delighted). He never gossips. He seldom talks about private people even to say something good of them, except to answer a question or remark, and then he always gives what he says a turn favorable to the person spoken of.
His conversation, speaking generally, is of current affairs, work of the day, political and historical news, European as well as American, a little of books, much of the aspects of Nature, as scenery, the stars, birds, flowers, and trees. He reads the newspapers regularly (I used to tell him that was the only vice he had) ;
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yo ' Walt Whitman.
he likes good descriptions and reminiscences. He does not, on the whole, talk much anyhow. His manner is invariably calm and simple, belongs to itself alone, and could not be fully described or conveyed. As before told, he is fond of singing to himself snatches of songs from the operas or oratorios, often a simple strain of recitative, a sort of musical murmur,�and he sings in that way a large part of the time when he is alone, especially when he is outdoors. He spends most of his time outdoors when the weather permits, and as a general thing he does not stay in for rain or snow, but I think likes them in turn as well as the sunshine. He recites poetry often to himself as well as to others, and he recites well, very well. He never recites his own poetry (he does not seem to know any of it). Yet he sometimes reads it, when asked by some one he wants to gratify, and he reads it well. I do not know whether or not he can be said to sing well; but whether he does or not, his voice is so agreeable that it is always a pleasure to hear him.
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APPENDIX
TO PART I.
INTRODUCTORY LETTER
(NOW PREPARED, 1883, FOR THE PRESENT WORK) TO
THE GOOD GRAY POET (i865-'6),
BY
WILLIAM DOUGLAS O'CONNOR.
(71)
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From a letter to R. M. B.^ by W. F., Mobile, Ala., March, 1883. . . . For twenty-seven years have
A wild and many-weaponed throng Hung on the front, and flank, and rear
of Leaves of Grass, and the author has suffered two special public governmental insults for writing them. I hardly see how it could have happened any other way. But is it not a luckier fortune than eulogy would have been? It has developed in the poet himself an unflinching and sustained courage, fortitude, and perseverance without parallel in literature, and which will cast a peculiar and permanent glow over all his verse in the future. It has brought to his help a small minority of the most devoted and valiant champions that ever fought for man or cause. Best of all, it has formed that prefatory foreground and area specially needed in such cases, to test and try these most arrogant and relentless compositions. For, if Leaves of Grass succeed, they dethrone the old sovereigns, the long-settled poetic traditions of Asia and Europe, and compel Literature, perhaps Sociology and Politics, to a more revolutionary renaissance, a vaster stride, than any in the past.
(72)
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Mr. O'CONNOR'S LETTER. 1883.
Washington, D. C, U. S. A., February 22d, 18S3.
Dr. R. M. Bucke, London, Ontario, Canada. Dear Sir : It is nearly eighteen years since I published the impassioned protest against the mean and monstrous wrong done by the Hon. James Harlan to Walt Whitman, which you ask leave to reprint in your Appendix. The warmest friend of that old outburst might think of it as one might of the ring of flame he had seen Cotopaxi send with a blast into the tropic azure�a burning meteor thrown up to circle and shimmer for a moment in the upper air�then vanish. That it is to reappear and remain I shall owe to you. I thank you gratefully, but less for the kind personal honor your request does me, than for the opportunity you offer to make my otherwise ephemeral work a sharer in the enduring life assured to your volume. A pamphlet like mine, �crude, extemporaneous, fragmentary, the birth of an exigency, the utterance evoked by outrage, the voice of an indignant heart, �is, no matter what its cause or purpose, the accident of an hour, and can ordinarily have but the hour's existence. This is sternly true of far better compositions of this class than mine. Who reads now the masterly " Labienus " of Rogeard ? Who remembers those arrows of lightnings, the bright, barbed feuilletons of Paul Louis Courier? Even the shafts of the great sagittary, Rochefort, are already regathered into the black quiver of yesterday. But a book, with its long foreground of premeditation,�especially a book with such a subject, such an aim as yours, and written from yolir vantage-ground of science, and with your ardent intelligence and power,�can lay great bases for eternity. For my brochure to be linked to such a one is, therefore, a pledge of its perpetuity, and in this I feel cause for satisfaction. Not because of any merit I attach to pages of whose faults and deficiencies I am only too well aware, and which I wish I had had time and ability to make better, but because those pages hold the record of the one action of my life which I could wish might never be forgotten, even though it had brought upon me, and was still to bring, every
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misrortunc ami every dislionor. Long as I had revered Walt Wliitnian, and deeply as I had valued his book, I had never, up to the date of his expulsion from office, written a single line in his interest, considering, as I still consider, both him and his works subjects far beyond my powers. Even the twelve years of shamefid persecution, ostracism, and insult, which followeil llie publication of his second edition, the exclusion of any specimen of his poetry from the anthologies of American song, the closing of the doors of all periodicals to his contributions, the insolent rejections of ids work by the peddlers who call themselves publishers, the infamous calumnies invented and set in circulation by persons of repute respecting his personal conduct and character, the affectation of shuddering aversion practised in certain quarters at the sight of his face or the mention of his name, the showered misrepresentation and abuse of his poems by the reviewers and journalists,�even all this I witnessed and endured with as much ccunposure as is compatible with scorn, knowing, in the noble words of J'',llcry C'hanning, that "who writes by fate the critics shall not kill, nor all the assassins of the great review," certain that, in the trumjiet l)lirase of Leibnitz, *' Another time shall come, worthier than ours, in which, hatreiis being subdued, truth shall triumph," and that then Walt Whitman and his migiity volume would fail not of their meed of veneration. But when I saw the poetaster and the plagiary, the hypocrite and the prude, the eunuch and till- fop, the poisoner and the blackguard, the snake and the hog, the gnat and tin- niidi;r, all the creatures of the marsh and the copse, all the vermin of the kennel and the sewer, every monkey that mops and mows in the curule chair of Longinus fancying himself a critic, every chinch that poses on the triclinium of Horace imagining himself an author�when 1 saw the whole paltry anil venomous swarm condense, as in stune tale of enchantment, into a demon in the garb of an in(|uisitor; �when the llarlanunculi became resi)lved into the Harlan, and to moral animosity succeeded nuiterial consequences;�when I saw a man deprived of his employnient, publicly dcgratled, and an official stigma set upon his name, simply and only because he had once, years before, published an honest book�and noted that among all our scholars and literati not one voice�not a single one�was raised even in the faintest deprecation ol this dastardly outrage, welcomed insteail with the silence that gives consent, and with gibes and gulfaws of approval�then I felt that even for a writer so inexperienced ami obscure as I, the hour of <.luty had arrived, anil in the pages you reprint I did m) best, as 1 have said in another jilace, to secure for the infamy of Mr. Harlan's action undying remembrance. It is because I did this�it is because, as Dr. Ji>hnson says, I did what nobody else thought worth doing�that I am glad to have the record perpetuated in your volume. Let shame or credit follow, I care not which, nor have I ever cared. The man who tried to make an author suffer for his book I tried to brand ! This is all the claim I make for my pamphlet, anil that panqihlet is my act. 1 vaunt it and 1 stand by
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I have spoken, you will remcml)cr, of the hour of Mr. Harlan's explorations in the Department, and I rcj^rct now that in the haste of the comiwjsition I did not more elaborately ])lace this hour in amlicr. It was not enough that he chose to do a mean and monstrous action ; the manner of his doin^ it was still meaner and more monstrous. The liook had been for several years out of print. It was not in circulation. But in a drawer in the author's desk which stood in a room in the lower story of the Department building, there was a private copy filled with pencilled interlineations, erasures, annotations�the revisions which prepare a text for future publication. This copy was the one over which Mr. Harlan pored in the .still hours which followed the closinjj of the ofTicial day in the Department. But it was in his own office, in an upper story, that he pursued these secret studies. The book was always in its [ilace in the author's desk when he went home in the afternoon, and it was always there when he returned the next morninfj. It was in the interim that it was upstairs. Who was it that cdj^etl ahjuj^ the shadowy passaj^es of the hufje buildinjj from the Secretary's apartment�that quietly slipped down the dim stairway�that crept, crawled, stole, sneaked into the deserted room of his illustrious fellow-officer�that tiptoed up to the vacant desk�that put a furtive hand into the private drawer and drew out the private volume�that {glided back with it to the office of the Secretary ? When the hours of gloating were over, and the building was darker and dimmer under its few funereal gaslights, turned murkily low, who crept back down the dead-house corridors and stairways, with a volume in his hand, to the earlier visited aiiarlmcnt, sleallhily replaced the volume in the desk, and softly slunk away? Was it Tarluffe disguised as Aminidab Sleek, or was it the rampant god I'riapus masquerading as Paul Pry? Enough to know that these Department explorations and these sub-rosa examinations resulted in Mr. Harlan expelling Walt Whitman from his position for having once upon a time published a v(jlume containing a little reference to some facts in universal physiology. This reference, it seems, shocked the Methodi.st virtue that had endured without flinching the daily conversation of Lincoln�Lincoln, under whom Mr. Harlan had accepted and held his Secretaryship � a President as soundly good and as frankly gross as Luther or Rabelais.
Mr. Harlan was the Secretary of the Department of the Interior. His charge included the public lands and the mines, the interests of the settlers and the diggers of ore, the fortune and fate of the red aborigines, the awards of the pensions and the tracts given in bounty to the soldiers and sailors, the promotion and safeguards of the myriad inventions through the issuance of their patents, the mighty task of the census when ordered, tlie care of the national insane and deaf and dumb, the supervision of vast territorial interests; in brief, an immense part of the ordinance, prosperity and development of the country. To execute the public business under his care, he had three thousand officers. As Secretary, his conduct of affairs could
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enhance the welfare of the nation ; as statesman, his recommendation could mould the future. From all this lofty niinistL-rial function, he stooped to the meanness and shame of the pick-pry inquisition, and the brutal and insolent expulsion described�his victim a poet illustrious in the verdict of the fittest of two worlds.
When I dealt with this abominable action as it deserved�although I no more than recognized it in its obvious character as an audacious assault upon the liberty of letters, and a flagrant and enormous breach of administrative propriety�although I merely flung the light upon it in its avowed intentions and proportions, and properly refuted the pretences upon which it claimed to be justified, by plainly bringing into opposition the superb purity and grandeur of the poem it attacked, as certified by the noblest minds of two continents, and the simple and sublime life of the poet it persecuted, as known to many of his countrymen�it was of course quite natural and logical that all the leading literary and many of the other journals in this country, which for years had been devoted to the defamation of which Mr. Harlan's conduct was the bright consummate flower, should respond by alleging that I was making mountains out of molehills, that my censure and my eulogy were alike inordinate ; and that they should enter, as they did, into express extenuatioris and defences of the Secretary, coupled with their little sneers and scoffs at my vindication of the man he had wionged. You can judge of the force they brought to their task by the summary I offer of the points made upon me by the strongest article of all, the writer in this instance a prosperous and eminent man. By this literary magnate I was gravely reminded that Mr. Hawthorne lost his place in the Salem Custom House when the Whigs came into power, under our precious system of rotation in office, and hence in effect, that the Hon. Mr. Harlan's expulsion of Walt Whitman was quite a venial and normal act�as like the Whig dismissal of Hawthorne as one pea is like another pea. I was coldly informed that the gross wrong inflicted upon Mr. Whitman was "the mere loss of an office"�nothing more�nothing whatever ; and I was made to feel that I had the assurance upon the honor of a refrigerator. Furthermore, that this " mere loss of an office" furnished no proper occasion for such a denunciation of the outrage, and such an apotheosis of its object, as were given in my pamphlet. For cool ignoring of all the circumstances of the case as set forth in my indictment, and for the simple and absolute frigidity of its belittling of Mr. Jiarlan's damnable action, I think this article in comparison makes Wrangel Land in the height of the Arctic winter an image of all that is bland and warm. Beside it, the icy sepulchre itself would seem a summer resort for consumptives. It never occurs to the dry light of mind of this just and intelligent critic, taking him on his own chosen ground, that there would have been some difference between Hawthorne civilly dismissed from office because of a change of administration, and Hawthorne brutally expelled with ignominy, because he had
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Mr, O'Connor's Letter �1883. 'jy
celebrated (some think covertly justified), in the sombre and splendid pages of the " Scarlet Letter," the adultery of Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne. It never occurs to this icily brilliant reviewer that expulsion for such a cause would be necessary to establish parity between Hawthorne's case and Walt Whitman's�and of course he never so much as glances sidelong at the consideration of the enormous uproar an expulsion on account of the "Scarlet Letter" would have created, though nobody knew this better than he. It never dawns for a moment on this prosperous and well-fed gentleman that to a poor man, hunted then by our literary ku-klux, almost outlawed at that time by the Kemper-county gang who carry out the shot-gun policy in our literature and journalism, " the mere loss of an office" might cut off the means of subsistence, and be no matter for whiffling away as a mere trifle. But why corrtment ? Did he ever really think, or any of his tribe, that the expulsion of an author from a public employment on account of his book could be made to appear a small matter? While such as I are in the world, it can never be a small matter; it will always be a great matter, and among the greatest of great matters, in the lasting verdict of every man and woman who knows the relation of thought to life, of books to the fortunes of mankind. Suppose Chaucer had been ejected from his post of Comptroller of Customs under the third Edward, on account of some of that outrageous Gallo-Saxon license of conception and expression which so often wantons in his pages. Does any one fancy that our scholars and essayists, even at the distance of six centuries, would treat the incident coolly, or as of no importance? Suppose Defoe, on account of the broad pictures in " Moll Flanders," or the " Memoirs of a Cavalier," had been deprived of any one of his employ-tnents under William or Anne. What sympathy or defence would the minister get that did it, from the biographers of the creator of " Robinson Crusoe " ? Suppose Charles Lamb had been fired out of his clerkship in the India House, because of his defence of the fairy obscenities of Farquhar and Wycherly ? Vi'ouldn't there be heat in the blood of London in the Old World, and Boston in the New, over the record that such a thing had ever been done to sweet old Elia? Suppose Burns had been considered, in the holy name of virtue, chastity, decency, Christian civilization, morally unfit to measure Scotch malt forever, and turned out of his gaugership because of the ithyphallic audacities he showered on the Scotch Harlans in " Holy Willie's Prayer"! Wouldn't literature ring with the outrage? Yea, verily; and well do the literati know it, who tried to make out that Mr. Harlan's immortal disgrace was the merest bagatelle, and mocked at my pamphlet as one of the curiost-ties of literature because it denounced his action on the scale of its proper magnitude.
Enough said, both of him and them. "A dog's obeyed in office," but the next one the humor of politics dresses up for a Secretary's chair, like Toby in a Punch and Judy show, will think seriously before he gives an order for the
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yS Appendix to Part T.
expulsion of an author on account of the book he had once published. The prospect both for Mr. Harlan and his literary apologists grows steadily worse as time goes on, and the character and value of Walt Whitman's book become established. This is no case of an abuse of power practised upon an author of the grade of Chaucer, or Defoe, or Lamb, or Burns. The gross wrong done by Mr. Harlan was done to a poet whom all time and every land will remember, and the dimensions of the insult and the outrage will be gauged by the measure of that universal and eternal fame. Whatever basis the contemptible scribblers of the day gave it, steadily crumbles. It is not in the nature of things, it is not in the control of the whole Dunciad, that the vast and sane affirmations, the simple and gorgeous beauty, the biblical and demiurgic power of Leaves of Grass, can continue to be themes for the ass reviewer's blattering bray. All the literati that ever hee-hawed from the rick in their prior existence, before the metempsychosis which placed them in the chairs of criticism to continue their symphonies, cannot drown the omni-prevalent voice of a work of genius. I remember a scene long ago in Faneuil Hall, when an attempt was made to silence a matchless orator, the incomparable Wendell Phillips, then in the prime of his indescribable forensic powers. He stood that evening in the full relief of his severe grace and beauty upon the lighted platform of the historic hall�from brow to foot all noble, like those knights of Venice Ruskin describes; the vast floor and galleries before and around him densely thronged; and central in the audience was a mob of stevedores and truckmen, the hired Alsatia of that class of merchants whose truckling servility to the Slave Power nourished in it the strength for rebellion, and at length brought on our Civil War. The moment the orator began, this swarm of hirelings became a roaring maelstrom; they whirled around en masse without cessation in the middle of the concourse, yelling, howling, shouting, without a moment's intermission, and for some time the noise was deafening. But, gradually, amidst the tumult there was heard something marvellous. The orator had continued speaking with tranquil composure,�with his easy, almost careless grace,�with that memorable beauty of tone and demeanor veiling earnest feeling, as a Phidian vase might veil the Delphic fire within; and above the hoarse, unintermitted, tremendous uproar of the mob, in its preconcerted continuity, was heard his quiet voice! I never can forget the thrill it gave me. Not a word, not an accent was lost. Even the mob heard it, and strained their bull-throats to drown it. In vain. Paramount over all the clamor, that sweet and penetrating tone was heard, silverly asserting itself in even and uninterrupted flow, as clear and alien as the notes of the nightingale above the brawl of a flooded gorge; and it went on until it conquered wholly, and in silence, broken only by the sublime roar of acclamations, the splendid fountain of that eloquence was streaming upward in full silver flower. So dominant above the animal tumult of its defamers, so conquering and to conquer, is the voice of the book we champion. Over the clamor of the whole
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menagerie it is heard by the minds it has enlightened, the hearts it has comforted, the souls it has deeply stirred, and this voiceless multitude is the vanguard of the future.
Meanwhile the book has achieved the vantage-ground, hardly less valuable than its cordial recognition in certain quarters, of having been regularly bid for and issued by a business house, instead of being published, as previously, by its author only. It is an advance, which should, for the honor of our letters, be complemented by a corresponding change in the tone of criticism. But the welcome given the reappearance of the work proves, that, even after the lapse of twenty years, our reviews are in the same hands�that is to say, paws. The criticisms are, to be sure, somewhat improved since the former day when a filthy and malignant philistine in the London " Saturday Review " wrote that the author deserved to be scourged at the tail of the hangman's cart by the public executioner. Whoever seeks the missing link between the libidinous swell and the ferocious chimpanzee, might find it in this noble and decent criticaster. This amenity of criticism was prompted by the series of poems entitled "Children of Adam;" and you know what physiologic dignity, what sanctities of purely human love and passion, what savor of natural sanity, what wealth of esoteric communication, what rapture of moral elevation, wliat adumbrations of holiness, are enshrined within those glorious verses, and give them their magnetic scope and fervor. They had the added honor some years afterward of causing one of Astor's gentlemen, who sometimes obscurely and feebly paddles in Castaly, to style their venerable author with fine scorn, " this swan of the sewers." I could retort upon Dr. Macnobody that he is a buzzard of the club-house kitchen, but this might be thought personal. Of-the more recent notices it may be remarked that they are generally less poignant and more dull than their old prototypes. Some of them, as in the '• Atlantic Monthly," show instinctively cordial perceptions quenched in abject cowardice. The review in the New York "Times," marked by great talent, is a singular example of stultification, the writer diplomatically annulling in one passage what he has just said in another, this process being pursued throughout with a mechanical uniformity which is simply comical. The one in the " Nation" is in artistic keeping with the tone of that chilly journal, and is otherwise only noticeable for its cold and brutal falsehoods. One of its indictments appears again in an article in " The Woman's Journal," signed with the initials of the Rev. Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The exceeding value of this accusation warrants its reproduction, and also its rescue from the oblivion of the anonymous. What, think you, is this weighty finding? .Actually, now�really, now�Mr. Higginson avers that Walt Whitman ought to become the focal point of million-fingered scorn for having served in the hospitals! It appears that the old poet performed a pathetic, a suljlime, an immortal service �he tended the wounded and dying soldiers throughout the whole war, and for years afterward, until the last hospital disappeared. O, but tliis was in-
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famous! Shame on such " unmanly manhood," yells the Rev. Mr. Higginson! He should have personally " followed the drum," declares this soldier of the army of the Lord, himself a volunteer colonel. In bald words, instead of volunteering for the ghastly, the mournful, the perilous labors of those swarming infernos, the hospitals, Walt Whitman should have enlisted in the rank and file. From all which, I gather that Mr. Higginson would have cast a stone at Jean Valjean for going down without a musket into the barricades. I beg leave to tell this reverend militaire that if Longfellow had gone from Cambridge to serve in the hospitals, as Walt Whitman served, the land would have rung from end to end, and there would have been no objurgations on his not enlisting in the army, from the pen of the Rev. Thomas Wentworth Higginson. I also beg leave to tell him, since he brings personalities into fashion, that Walt Whitman's work of comfort and charity beside the cots of the Union and rebel soldiers, will last as long, and stand as fair, as the military bungling and blundering which distinguished this clergyman turned colonel, and evoked such agonized curses from his commanding officer at Port Royal. Better be a good nurse like Walt Whitman, than a nondescript warrior like the Rev. Col. Higginson.
The remainder of his article is quite taken up with an attack upon a few erotic verses in Oscar Wilde's poems, about which Mr. Higginson, as badly read as badly bred, says there is " nothing Greek," because they do not " suggest the sacred whiteness of an antique statue," although, as Mr. Higginson ought to know, there is a mass of literature, ranging from Aristophanes, Anacreon, Sappho, Longus, etc., to such as Mimnermus and Alcman, which they do suggest, and which Mr. Higginson could hardly describe as having "nothing Greek," but which could give Mr. Wilde a good many points in erotic composition, if that has anything to do with making him Hellenic. On the strength of these poetic audacities of Mr. Wilde, the Rev. Mr. Higginson lumps him in with Walt Whitman for reprobation, holding them both up in contrast with Sir Philip Sidney, whom he appears to consider the proper model of a poet, and calls (quoting Fulke Greville, I suppose), " a brave example of virtue and religion." I read this effusion with infinite amusement. Is it credible that the Rev. Mr. Higginson has never seen the " Astrophel and Stella" of that very Sir Philip Sidney he vaunts so roundly ? He puts on the face of Nightgall the jailor, Sorrocold the torturer, Mauger the headsman, Mawworm the gospeller, and Moddles the weeper, all in one�he is dark, cruel, implacable, denunciatory, and disconsolate, all together�over the terrible fact that " the poems of Wilde and Whitman lie in ladies' boudoirs." Does he think that the "Astrophel and Stella" of Sir Philip Sidney is the sort of poem that ought preferably to " lie in ladies' boudoirs " ? This work, a galaxy of songs and sonnets, some of them exquisite, was inspired, be it remembered, by a married M'oman, Lady Rich, who figures in it as Stella, and is addressed by Sidney as Astrophel. The husband, Lord Rich, is repeatedly mentioned in terms of the ut-
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most contumely and insult. In one of the songs (the second) the fourth stanza of which is specially lascivious, the poet limns in glowing terms the lovely wife sleeping, steals a voluptuous kiss, and blames himself for not having taken the extremest advantage of her slumber! In another song (the fourth) there is protracted and vehement amorous solicitation for her person to be yielded to him, ending with a strain of whimpering dejection because of her refusal! The eighth song is in a similar style. In the fifty-second sonnet he fables a contest between Virtue and Love for the possession of Stella, which he proposes to settle by letting Virtue have the lady on the condition that her voluptuous body be yielded to Love and him! In the tenth song his thought dwells in gloating anticipation of carnal enjoyment with her, and runs and revels in a rosy riot of amorous images, prolonged through half a hundred lines ! These are specimens of the staple of the poetry this virtuous clergyman would seem to choose for the accompaniment of ladies'boudoirs! Ah, Mr. Higginson ! it will take the effacing memories of Zutphen�it will take some of the immortal water the dying Sidney yielded from his flask to the parched lips of the wounded soldier, to wash away, for some of us, from the fame of one of the last of England's chevaliers, the stain of these disgraceful poems� poems which dishonor the wife while they insult the husband, and whose author is nevertheless your chosen exemplar of manly excellence�brought forward to shame by contrast Oscar Wilde for the sin of publishing a few verses far less bold than the verses of the Rev. Dr. Donne, or the " Venus and Adonis " of Shakespeare�brought forward also to darken Walt Whitman because in a few of his lines he has celebrated with grave simplicity the noble amative impulse gi^eat Nature feels forever through all her immensity ! So much for the criticism wherewith the Rev. Mr. Higginson decorates " The Woman's Journal."
As for the review in the " New York Tribune," it would seem to have been written, as Sir Walter Scott says " Amadis de Gaul" was written, in a brothel. The writer leads off by saying that the poems have " been read behind the door; " that " they have been vaunted extravagantly by a band of extravagant disciples, and the possessors of the books have kept them locked up from the family;" which makes you think that the critic is simply, as the Hon. Thomas H. Benton called Pettee, "a great liar and a dirty dog," until, reading further, you find him declaring that the book, which he has already elegantly called "the slop-bucket of Walt Whitman," has for a principle "a belief in the preciousness of filth," is " entirely bestial," full of " nastiness and animal insensibility to shame," and that the chief question it raises "is whether anybody, even a poet, ought to take off his trousers in the marketplace; " which makes you at once set down the reviewer as indubitably, in the phrase of the moralist Hawkesworth, " a lewd young fellow," and " a great liar and a dirty dog" besides. The whole article is thoroughly obscene. It is characterized throughout by what might be called the indecent exposure
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of the mind, and is a disgrace to even its author and to the journal in which it appears.
Better and worse than the stuff these scurrilous dreams are made of is an article by Mr. Clarence Cook, in the " International Review," which I have read with mingled feelings of regret and indignation. It is almost incredible to find this gentleman, who ought by his intellectual connections to be better informed, and who should have education enough to know the truth without information, asserting and assuming through his whole essay that Leaves of Grass is a derivation from the writings of Emerson. He says that the prose preface to the original edition of the poem shows " where the author came from intellectually ;" that " Mr. Whitman had been for a long time milking the New England transcendentalists," and that " most of it is an echo of Emerson himself, minus his music and his wit." Furthermore, that Walt Whitman in his poetry " does nothing more than enlarge and exaggerate the 'Nature ' and the first volume of ' Essays,' of his master." It was long ago published authentically in Mr. Conway's widely copied and circulated article, what is the fact, that Walt Whitman had never read Emerson at all until after the publication of his first edition; and he was quite as mnocent of any knowledge of the papers in the " Dial," despite the preface which Mr. Cook fancies an echo of Emerson and Concord. But he had read Kant, Schelling, Fichte.and Hegel, as Mr. Cook, if he had taken the trouble to read the book he was reviewing, could have seen plainly, and the thought of that giant quaternion, which, in fact, is rather an expression of what is in the minds of all men in our age, than anything that ha-; been communicated to them by the four philosophers, is precisely the thought of which Mr. Emerson, in this country, like Cousin in France, is, in his writings, without any derogation to his own proper originality, the carrier or interpreter; so that all the indebtedness Mr. Cook oracularly fancies, is referable to the German source both minds had drunk from, though in Walt Whitman's case it is easy to see that his own powerful and sensitive genius, naturally in rapport with the thought of his age, far better accounts for the ideas of his book than any acquaintance with the well-heads of modern philosophy. This ridiculous notion of Leaves of Grass as a sort of rowdy amplification of Emerson, began twenty years ago with some amusing persiflage in " Putnam's Magazine"�the harmless fancy of my old friend Mr. George William Curtis, who sometimes softly, sweetly, slips into ad captandums with irresponsible indolent grace. It was taken up again, and enforced, not at all harmlessly, but with malicious iteration, by Mr. Bayard Taylor, in a seriesof gratuitous and inappropriate editorials, published seven years ago in the " New York Tribune," with the object of breaking down a certain movement in behalf of Mr. Whitman, and it gave me then, in conjunction with some of his other representations, a new idea of what might be meant by the old saying that " a tailor is the ninth part of a man." Now it comes up again, with the pertinacity of wood-wax or the Canada thistle, among a lot of similar superstitions.
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in this " International Review" article, making me think of the Spanish proverb, " God sends meat, but the devil sends cooks." The meat is Leaves of Grass, and the esthetic Clarence being cuisinier, a nice dish he makes of it, with his bogus recipes ! Did it ever occur to any of these gentlemen who derive Walt Whitman's thought from Emerson's, to compare the two in their palpable and tremendous dissimilarities ? Where, for one instance out of a hundred, is the pantheistic doctrine in the Z^aw^j, which is the constant assertion and implication in the Essays ? Where, for another instance, do you find in Emerson the haughty and rejoicing faith in the immortality of the personal soul, which peals from end to end of Leaves of Grass like the trumpet of the resurrection ? It would be well for Mr. Clarence Cook's reputation as a critic, if the utter sciolism his dealing with this branch of his subject betrays, had no worse concomitants. But he goes on, and dropping into apologies in a friendly way, he slips in as their basis a string of defamations regarding the noble frankness of those passages of the book in which Emerson found " the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire." In the face of this imprimatur he has the Himalayan effrontery to represent that Emerson was originally "in the marble purity of his mind" very much shocked at these passages. "At first," says Mr. Cook, "he could not see the wood-god for his phallus." I beg to compliment Mr. Cook on the marble purity of this image, which does not, however, precisely remind one of the marble faun, nor of the good satyr the poet heard playing his flute in the heart of the twilight on Mount Janiculum.
But Mr. Cook's metaphors concern me less than his calumnies, and I would really like to know what evidence he has that Emerson was ever, first or last, shocked at Walt Whitman's volume. For in proof of his bold assertion he advances not one word. " Later," he continues, " Emerson wrote a letter to Whitman, in which he said, ' I greet you at the beginning of a great career'�" and the ice being thin here, he deftly skates away into an old worn-out impertinence about Mr. Whitman's "breach of confidence," as he calls it, in printing this sentence from a communication not confidential " in letters of gold on the back of a new edition of his book," as it certainly deserved to be printed, and as Mr. Whitman had an unquestionable right to print it. But this letter of Emerson's in which he expressed his cool, deliberate judgment of Leaves of Grass, and told precisely how it affected him, what was it, and why did he not bring it forward ? Here it is, and I invite you and your readers to decide whether it bears out, by any exjDression or implication, Mr. Clarence Cook's misrepresentations:
" 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 seemed the sterile and
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" stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the tem-"perament, 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 encour-" aging."
This was Mr. Emerson's judgment on Leaves of Grass, and never, to his undying honor, did he retract it. I call your attention to its scope, its absolute comprehensiveness. If there was anything in the book of which he disapproved he had the plain opportunity to say so, and it was his imperative duty to say so. On the contrary, he gives the poem�he gives the very edition of it Mr. Cook says had shocked him�the most unreserved, the most unqualified, the most unbounded approval. He calls it the most extraordinary piece of intellect and wisdom America has yet contributed; he congratulates the author on the liberty and valor of his thought; and he finds especial delight in the courage of treatment which marks the whole performance, and which, he says, and Walt Whitman's critics would do well to remember, large perception only can inspire. This is the proof Mr. Cook shies from supplying, of the way Leaves of Grass " shocked " Mr. Emerson ! He has no other, for the sentence he ascribes to Mr. Emerson as his judgment upon the book or its author�" Strange that a man with the brain of a god should have a snout like a hog "�was never uttered by Emerson at all. In a matter of this importance I insist upon the purity of the text, and Mr. Cook has reported this flashing moment of the wise wrong. The mot as it was really uttered ran thus, " Strange that a man should have the brain of a god and the snout of a hog," and in this shape it was said of Walt Whitman by Mr. E. P.Whipple in 1855 or thereabouts, and reported to me, with great glee, fresh from his lips, by one of his dear friends, who afterwards ran away with the trust funds and beggared the widow and the orphan�a natural consequence of his delight in such sarcasms. The habit of murder, De Quincey warns us, inevitably leads to procrastination and Sabbath-breaking, and a man who admires Mr. Whipple's wit may be expected, sooner or later, to make off with the cash of the community. I will only remark upon this particular jeti d''esprit that in its vitreous brilliancy, and the perfect moral absurdity of its antithesis, to say nothing of the falsehood of its application, it is entirely worthy of its true author, and I leave Mr. Cook to its continued enjoyment. But I assure him that his success in the correct ascription of epigram is not such as to inspire me with an unfaltering trust that Wendell Phillips iTttered the pleasantry he
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attributes in turn to him. When I gratefully remember that Mr. Phillips wrote me that he placed Walt Whitman's " Democratic Vistas" in equal honor on the same shelf with his beloved Tocqueville, and when I recall with equal gratitude the glowing and ample welcome he gave my pamphlet defence of the slandered poet, I have little reason to assume on Mr. Cook's authority that that clear and generous voice expressed even the light disparagement the reviewer puts into currency. Still, Mr. Cook may claim something from my bounty, and I will give him this as a donation. Let me suppose that Mr. Phillips, in his own enchanting fashion, really did say of Leaves of G7-ass, as our gossip reports him�" here be all sorts of leaves except fig leaves"�but added with a graver modulation, " including those of the Tree of Life, whose leaves are for the healing of the nations"! That this is the true version, though a guess, I will venture my last obolus, and go in debt to Charon !
Of Mr. Cook's remaining "International" excursions in criticism, it is not necessary to say anything. When he declares the poem destitute of beauty and proportion, and absolutely wanting in art, I might remind him that Rus-kin, who is a tolerable authority in these respects, having forgotten considerably more of aesthetic law than Mr. Cook ever knew, has recently, if the public journals say truly, uttered a eulogium upon Leaves of Grass, which hardly sustains this weighty dictum. When he charges as the " worst fault of all" in the book " its absolute want of humor," I might venture to suggest that, although the rich mirthful temperament of the author, which all who know him know well, is evident enough in the opulent cheerfulness and the mellow tone of his work. Leaves of Grass is not, as Mr. Cook appears to fancy, an attempt at comedy, nor can it be considered the " worst fault of all" that we do not split our sides wiih laughter over the book of Isaiah. When he pronounces the work utterly " without taste," I could retort upon him that there are only ten baskets of taste let down from heaven for each generation, and he and nimble men like him have always got them all, which is probably the reason why none of the great geniuses in poetry ever had any, from Aristophanes to Moliere, or from y^schylus to Victor Hugo. But there is only one point upon which I care to offer a serious comment. In speaking of the first issue of Leaves of Grass, Mr. Cook says that in it was expressed " scorn of the conventions of society by one who never knew them, and was as ignorant of society as a Digger Indian." When I came upon this stroke of ignorant insolence I felt my blood stir, and Mr. Cook owes it to my forbearance if I do not make him feel what resources the English language has for the chas-iscinent of offences of this description. What does he mean by publishing as a secies of Yahoo a man who all his life has been the honor and ornament of society as good as Mr. Cook ever entered ? whose high spiritual cultivation is as apparent in his personal manners as in his poetry; and who never, even in thought, could be guilty of such insufferable low-breeding as this sentence of his critic displays ? I remember, years ago, the eminent son of the most
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eminent man in New England, at the very top of the highest and most exclusive Boston society, coming from his first interview with Walt Whitman, whom he had met with distrust and prejudice, and all we could get from him as to what had passed was the abstracted, iterated rejoinder, the expression of his prevailing impression�" He is a perfect gentleman." In his young manhood Walt Whitman was an intimate friend of Bryant, his companion in many long country rambles. He was a welcome guest, when I first knew him, at some of the best and wealthiest houses in New York. It was the same when he was with us here. It was the same when he was with me once in Providence. It was the same during his recent visit to Boston. It was the same when he was with you in Canada. Yet Mr. Cook prates of his ignorance of society and its conventions, and matches him, in reference, with the very lowest western savage. I used to think Mr. Clarence Cook, when I slightly knew him many years ago, a gentleman, although a somewhat superfine one, but one would think he desired to forfeit all claim to such consideration. He says, in the latter part of his article, that for much that Walt Whitman has written it would not be easy to repay him with grateful words. It is a sorry way to show gratitude, this reproduction of stale and shallow figments, most of them denied and refuted time and again; and this utterance of as brutal a personal insult, couched in utter falsehood, as one man could well offer to another.
Such, up to this date, is the best specimen we can offer in America of a review of Leaves of Grass in its new edition. Let me show you, in this connection, the kind of knave a literary editor can be. The New York " Tribune" reprinted this article of Clarence Cook's, in which, it is just to Mr. Cook to say, he had imbedded several paragraphs favorable in some degree to the work and its author; one praising its original typographical appearance, the poet's own get-up; another eulogizing some of the poems by name; and notably another, from which I give the following sentences: " It would be a " thousand pities were the author judged by the few passages, perhaps not two " pages in all, where his frankness pushes him to say things that are only " coarse because they are said. Of indecency, of essential grossness, there is " in the book really nothing. It is easy to believe the author as pure-minded, " as incapable of doing or thinking evil, as any best man among us who vi'ould " blush to be seen in his shirt-sleeves by a woman." These favorable paragraphs, the one quoted from being in direct opposition to the obscene review previously published in the " Tribune," its literary editor suppressed in reproducing the article, sending it out thus shorn to a million of readers. The animus is evident. Such is the treatment received by the grandest book of poetry uttered in the English tongue for over two centuries. And it is grand! Well might Emerson greet its author at the beginning of a great career! Nothing equal to it has appeared in Celto-Saxon literature since Shakespeare.
I mean what I say, and I have considered my words. It is the first poetic
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work in the English language since Shakespeare�let them deny it who dare �that sounds the trumpet for a new advance; that is not merely original but aboriginal; that pours forth the afflatus for another movement; that is in its theory and purpose a new departure. " Solitary, singing in the West," the poet himself says, " I strike up for a New World."
Consider the cardinal poets since the age of Elizabeth. We all know the absolute high level, below that Elizabethan mountain range, constituted by Milton. Great and noble as he is, he is not even the poet of that Puritanism whose harsh spell left him, like the prince in the Arabian story, half breathing flesh and half marble. The lofty mood of Ann Hutchinson and Sir Harry Vane is not expressed in his poetry. What is Pope ? The philosophy of Bolingbroke felicitously arrayed in facile iambics�a theism fit, as Heine says, to be the religion of watch-makers; a popular paraphrase, almost a court disguise, of Homer; some splendid intercolumniations of polished urban satire; these are his masterpieces. What is Dryden ? A masterly satiric talent without a conscience. What is Walter Scott ? In his verse, only a superb storyteller. In Wordsworth we have a strong but circumscribed intelligence. Once only, in his noble ode upon Immortality, he rose and broadened into the serene region of the great ideas. Below that, he is great only in a true perception of some common things�a stalk of celandine, a village rustic, a mountain cloud. But his kosmos is Westmoreland, and he is radically the centaur of the parson. In Burns there are true songs, wild gleams, immortal pulses, arrested by an early death. In Keats death also soon stopped that copious rich flowering into English verse of the Greek rose and asphodel. What leader of the nations might not the all-noble Byron have become, had he but lived to make ripe the continental promise which appears in the broad European picturings, the magnanimous intellections, the clarion blasts of rebellion, that fill " Childe Harold"; which appear still clearer in "Don Juan," whose fearless stripping of the veil from the monstrous hypocrisy of society, whose aggrandizement of humanity and liberty, and whose mines of liberal and revolutionary epigram, give it the rank of one of the greatest poems ever inspired by the pure moral sentiment! And Shelley�had he but grown to maturity, and gathered force and become intimate with rude life, what fire upon the altar of what gods would not have been pale beside that which sparkles in the ashes of his lines! If Tennyson had continued as he began, the loyal outgrowth of Shelley and Byron, the developed poet of "Maud," of "Clara Vere de Vere," of " Ulysses " and " Locksley Hall" .... but he soon learned that kind hearts are less than coronets, and simple faith than Norman blood;�he shrank back into aristocracy;�and now at the last analysis, what is he? An ethereal delight of poesy; no less; no more. I speak only of Celto-Saxon poetry, not of the mighty births of the French romantic movement. In my own country, in the United States, that poetry, aside from Leaves of Grass, has not appeared in a single racy specimen. The
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only possible exception, though in a minor key, is the weird and lovely lyric verse of Edgar Poe, perfectly distinctive, shrining a strange mythology of personal love and sorrow, and having its roots in certain parts of our southern life. But poetry such as his only influences, it does not emancipate or lead. Not one of our poets has had broad or deep aims. Longfellow, with exquisite literary grace and human benignity, yields only centos and distillations. Whittier makes local ballads. Emerson has produced a handful of mystic jewels, rose diamonds and white, a virtuoso's joy, like the gems of Andrew Marvell or Vaughan. Bryant's fame rests on " Thanatopsis," a thing of faithless beauty, though a joy forever, but which internal evidence shows stolen, and which might have been written in Sherwood Forest, or by Omar Khayyam, so little does it smack of any particular soil. In fine, the last supreme performance in poetry, before any of the poets I have named, was Elizabethan. The last full signal for a great march�for an exodus out of old conventions, old dogmas, old ideas, old theories, was Shakespeare.
What is Shakespeare's new departure? It is this : He is the first poet that ever devoted the drama to the physiology of the human passions�the chief problem. Bacon says, of moral philosophy; the knowledge that philosopher proclaimed wanting in the antique past; the condition indispensable, he declares, to the human advancement. That initial body of natural history demanded by Bacon has been supplied by Shakespeare, in the interest of the human race. This is his cardinal distinction as a poet; this makes his greatness and his glory.
An old and valued friend of mine, whose opinions are entitled to deep respect, has lately said that the Greek dramatists, especially .^^schylus, excel Shakespeare in their treatment of the passions. I am sorry not to be able to think this true. Indeed, it seems to me it would be far nearer the truth to say that the Greek dramatists, in their colossal spectacular operas, never treated the passions at all. Much wisdom, much deep lore, much lofty morality, much fearful history, much dread theology, and questioning of that theology, expressed in tremendous passionate situation, these tragedies have indeed, but this is their whole staple. No one can better feel its majesty than I, nor can any one more than I appreciate the sublimity of the appalling thunder-crash of fatal circumstance which bursts forth in pealing reverberations against that drama's religious and legendary depth of gloom, or the stupendous power of what must have been its lovely and mournful groupings, its horrible and magnificent denouements, its strange and supra-mortal living tableaux, as of gigantic animated sculpture, moving to breath-suspending music. But I affirm that never in a single instance did the Greek poets devote their tragedies to the exhibition of the passions in their evolution�in their circumstantial development from grade to grade of action�such as we see in " Hamlet," in " Othello," in " Tear." Indeed, the very conditions of their drama precluded such an exhibition. The theatre of Athens was built to ac-
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commodate thirty thousand spectators. To such a concourse the tragedy of " Macbeth," even with Kemble and Siddons in the chief parts, would have seemed a play of dwarfs�the tragic expression unseen, the gestures those of puppets, the voices almost lost, the sense incoherent, in the vastness of that stage and auditorium. In such a space nothing but a form of drama, of the nature of a spectacular opera, conceived in a gigantic mould, and suggesting the superhuman, would have been possible. Instead of the subtle passional metaphysics which Shakespeare, availing himself of the limits of the modern stage, can make dramatically evident�better still, can make by language alone even more evident to the solitary student of his pages�the Greek dramatist had to substitute such conceptions, ideas, conclusions, as might be broadly expressed in imposing stage effects, with adjuncts of scenic action and music. Hence actions rather than passions; hence a succession of tableaux ; a tremendous, significant, sombre, sounding show. Hence upon the vast Athenian stage only two interlocutors at a time upon the scene, besides the choruses�.^Eschylus bayed at as an audacious innovator for introducing three; the stature of these actors raised to a supra-mortal height by the cothurnus; their size increased by voluminous draperies; their faces discharged of all but the one expression, by the awful and petrific mask; their voices augmented to thunderous or silver-shrilling tones by the brazen trumpet of the mouth-piece; and the verses of the tragedy intoned and sung by the duo or trio of histrions, or by the pealing voices of the choirs, ranged in dramatic sympathy with their action. In fact, if we can imagine an appalling and mysterious legend played by titanic statues of dreadful bronze and marble against a scene of eld, those statues become animate and vocal and resembling little that is human, we can gain some idea of the impression of a Greek tragedy. Something of its fearful and beauteous weirdness is suggested by that eerie line of Cowper, where, musing in his garden, he sees " a statue walk." Except to the evocation of the soul this form of supreme art is forever gone; the superb, the terrible, the enchanting spectacle, the astounding accumulation of catastrophes, the piled-up agonies, the marble loveliness, the celestial pathos, the horrent grandeurs, the Corybantic dances, the Eolian music, once ocular and auricular to the Greek audience, and surcharged with meaning not of this world, made evident through the senses to the souls of the auditors�all this can only be dimly recovered by the imagination; and of the august Greek tragedies (such as remain to us) we have nothing but the meagre and almost unintelligible librettos, no more to us than the librettos of great modern operas, except�a formidable exception indeed�that, unlike the librettos of "William Tell," of "Don Giovanni," of "II Puritani," or the rest, they were written by mighty poets and in the pentecostal language of poetry. Still, they are but librettos, the broken fiery lines of a dying firework of Promethean fire, the caput mortiiuni, the mere skeleton, the vacant framework of what was once in its enacting an orbicular and living drama.
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vital, glowing, sublime and enormous, the work of men like gods. As librettos�mere outlines which the representations are needed to complete� they cannot fairly be brought into comparison with the text of Shakespeare, a text as full to the reader as to the play-goer�fuller, indeed, so long as Shakespeare can be butchered to make a schoolboy's holiday by the gang of Barnums who run the modern stage, and mangle his dramas, and disembowel his meaning, with that brutish indifference to art and truth and human progress, which is fed by sole regard for fat receipts at the ticket-office. But, completed by the exercise of the conceptive power, the dry though mighty bones of these librettos, again clothed with their terrible and magnificent life, the Greek drama (although ylischylus has unquestionable features of resemblance) differs radically in form and motive from the drama of Shakespeare, and is intrinsically removed from comparison. I think Aristotle gives the full account of it when he says that its object was to move the soul with pity and terror; and the criticism that has been justly given in censure upon Aristotle as a philosopher in regard to his treatment of the human passions, namely, that he only considers the rhetorical or artificial means whereby they may be excited, and neglects to compile thc'r natural history, may be made in no spirit of censure, but in simple descriptiveness, in regard to the Greek tragedies, inasmuch as their authors only regarded in their composition the means of exciting the passions of those who were to behold them played, and attempted in the works themselves no analysis or synthesis of any of the passions�not one. This undertaking was reserved for Shakespeare, and I affirm that the entire novelty of the conception and the scientific accuracy and massive comprehensiveness, as well as the supreme power and beauty of its execution, constitute his special and distinctive greatness as a poet. The main scope and purpose of the Shakespeare drama are definitely given by Lord Bacon in connection with his assertion that the compilation of the natural history of the human passions is the first duty of philosophy, and that it is particularly the province of poetry. In this connection he describes the Shakespearean work perfectly. Therein, he says, " we may find painted forth "with great life how passions are kindled and incited; how pacified and " refrained; and how again contained from act and further degree; how they " disclose themselves; how they work; how they vary; how they gather and "fortify; how they are inwrapped one within another; and how they do "fight and encounter one with another; and other the like particulars." " That is to say," remarks Dr. Kuno Fischer, quoting this passage : " Bacon " desires nothing less than a natural history of the passions; the very thing " that Shakespeare has produced. Is not," he says further, " the inexhaustible " theme of Shakespeare's poetry the history and course of human passion ? " In the treatment of this special theme, is not Shakespeare the greatest of " all poets, nay, is he not unique among them all ?" Strange, I must remark, in passing, that the illustrious Kantian (and the observation applies to Gervi-
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nus as well) should have gone so far in this matter, and not taken the step that would seem inevitable ! But the fact remains, admitted on all sides, its significance only remaining unperceived�Shakespeare is the poet of that particular knowledge of human nature which Bacon declares necessary " in order " that the precepts concerning the culture and cure of the mind may be "rightly concluded upon;" and no matter what the myriad-figured, many-millioned play of the imagination which attends his work�no matter how profuse and rich the pageant, wherein kings, lords, prelates, gentlemen, clowns, fairies, ghosts, trades, employments, wars, elements, cities, landscapes, antique and modern shows, appear in uni multiplex projection, and form in ensemble the immense profile of Europe from the view-point of the Elizabethan age�no matter how ample the pour of learning, wisdom, apothegm, axiom, wit, humor, literary felicity, dazzling metaphor, noble imagery, classic allusion, every verbal grace and grandeur, as from a cornucopia heaped with constellations�no matter how deep the summer of his verse, the purpose to present the physiology of the human passions runs through it all; and his drama stands the perfect suppliance of an immense defect in ancient philosophy, and the foremost division of that scientific movement of his time for the relief of the human estate, the extension of the empire of man over Nature, the transformation of the world into Paradise, which still continues,and which we call Baconian. His main purpose does not, of course, prevent the inclusion of collateral purposes, only less vast�parables of a new philosophy, as in the "Tempest" and the "Midsummer Night's Dream;" special solutions of political problems, as in " Coriolanus " and " Julius Caesar;" in one instance a complete epic of the Wars of the Roses�the series of historical plays which Bacon calls "history made visible." But the main purpose remains other than the special purposes of these.
To the historical plays, with their high-stomached lords, their dragon rancors, their stormy feudal splendor, I think Walt Whitman gives undue weight in his estimate of Shakespeare's world. He seems to derive from them his powerful generalization of Shakespeare as the poet of Feudalism. This would be true of Walter Scott, a man sounder and healthier in his moral nature than in his intellect, and who saw the horrible grandeur of the feudal past through a glamour of beauty : it would be measurably true of Tennyson; I doubt if it is true of Shakespeare. Certainly " King John," " Richard the Second," " Richard the Third" and the rest, do not affect the mind with the winsome charm of " Ivanhoe" or " The Talisman." Their atmosphere is one of barbarous and tumultuous gloom, and they do not make us love the times they limn. They seem simply and rudely historical in their motive, as aiming to give in the rough a tableau of warring dynasties, and carry to me a lurking sense of being in aid of some ulterior design, probably well enough understood in that age, which perhaps time and criticism will reveal. The literature of the Middle Ages, issued under the jealous eye of a military despot-
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ism, is extremely insidious; often needs to be read between the lines; and there is deep suggestion in Bacon's saying that " we ought to be much beholden to Machiavel, who writes what men do, and not what they ought to do." In Machiavel himself what dark nobility, when in " The Prince"�that hideous masterpiece�at the utter cost of his fair fame, at the price of giving his very name to become a byword among men�he teaches the tyrant so minutely, and with such perfect candor, all the arts by which a free people may be subjugated, that the people become masters of the trick too! "The ostent evanescent" has its application to much of the great literature of those times�at least to the penetrating eye that finds the ostent of that literature deceitful; and it is impossible to believe that the greatest of the Elizabethan men could have sought to indoctrinate the ages with the love of feudalism which his own drama in its entirety, if the view taken of it herein be true, certainly and subtly saps and mines. The only supreme tyrant is Ignorance. To destroy this, as the Shakespeare drama assists to destroy it�to destroy this by teaching man the science of his own nature�is to deliberately forelay for the destruction of the whole Olympus of lesser tyrants, feudal and other, of which Ignorance is the Jove. If I sought to express the Shakespeare drama in the image of a person, I would not choose the eidolon of any feudal emperor. My choice would be a man like P'rancis Bacon�so majestic in his presence, Osborne, his contemporary, says of him, that he awed all men upon occasion into reverence, and yet, continues Osborne, so much one of the commonalty that he could pass from talk with a lord about his hawks and hounds to out-cant a London chirurgcon in his slang, so that all sorts of men thought him one of themselves; Francis Bacon, wise with all the lore of all the ages, the companion and counsellor of princes, the familiar of gypsies and tinkers and sailors as well; deep-eyed with long insight into the minds of men of every degree; master of multiform experiences; travelled, elegant, courtly, august, intrepid, loyal, gentle, compassionate, sorrowful, beautiful; clothed from fondness for sumptuous apparel in purple three-piled velvet, rich laces and the hat with plumes, yet loving�another anecdote tells of him�to ride with bared head, in the warm and perfumed rains of spring, that he might feel upon him, he said,the universal spirit of the world! Such would be the image of the man I would choose to express the Shakespeare drama� an image, by the way, not much like the infamous caricature made of him by that brilliant thimble-rigging Scotch scoundrel, Macaulay, with the noble and honorable object of spiting Basil Montagu.
Still, let it be distinctly admitted, although the imputation of feudalism may be rejected, the point of view in the Shakespeare drama is always that of the court. The court perfume streams, like a necessity of authorship, less from choice than circumstance, through all this mighty and beneficent creation. For the plebeian jioint of view, maintained unconsciously throughout, despite the learning, despite the patrician themes or characters chosen, despite even
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the voluptuous dainty elegance and charm of some of the lyrics and epigrams, contrast the works of Ben Jonson. The son of the bricklayer appears throughout, and it is the bricklayer's son of the mournful age of Elizabeth and James, before the people was born. Strange grace of chance if, in that age, the patrician spirit, which may easily be the natural birthright of any farmer or mechanic now�at least in this country�should have animated one as lowly born as Shakespeare, so as to tincture all his works with an odor, clinging as the musk of Nepaul! But the fact cannot be unperceived�the outlook of the Shakespeare drama is from the court; the sympathy, though universal, is from the social above, never from the below; the implied life of the author is that of the gently born and bred, not of the tradesman or the laborer. In every page we feel the superior social grade. It is the best spirit of the best Elizabethan noble. One would say the author was a lord. Truly�but a lord as Buddha was a prince.
The times have gone by when the court was the generalization of the nation, and the typical man, either as person or poet, was necessarily of the aristocracy. The change has come to pass which the great Elizabethan men darkly toiled to accomplish, in an age when the new was stirring in the old� the dawn of which appeared for a little while a few years after they had passed away, in the Commonweal of Vane and Hampden, which Cromwell quenched in cloud. In every country in Christendom the people has been born, and in this has come to sovereignty. That democratic sovereignty, a political fact here to-day, will be a social fact here to-morrow, and of that fact in its present and its future, and of that New World which is the arena of its evolution, Walt Whitman is the poet, and Leaves of Grass is the poem. The very resistance to the work, as when a foreign journal denounced "its rank republican insolence," proves its democratic scope and character; the very criticism of its foes, who " cannot dispraise but in a sort of praise," supports its claim. Next in the order of intellectual succession to Shakespeare, its author appears in his typical mechanic's garb, as the portrait in the book shows him, a workman sprung from a race of workmen, a representative poet of the people; such here specifically, and collaterally throughout the world. " The people� the poor," says a recent reviewer, sympathetically defining. Alas! no: the poor are not the people! " The poor," says Victor Hugo, " are the mournful commencement of the people ! " The people are the inhabitants of the country when political organization has secured for them the power of the sceptre, and social organization has endowed them with the opulence of the crown. From power and wealth in equitable distribution results the great spiritual patrician race worthy to be called the people. That race in its mighty infancy is here�a baby Hercules, who in its cradle has strangled monsters, and whose manhood and the labors of whose manhood are to come.
I have gazed for years into this grand orb of poetiy; I have mused upon
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its wild elegance and splendor, its tranquil and candid reproduction of things gross and delicate as they are in the sphere of the great Pan, its august masculine and feminine ideals, its teeming shows of historic and current life, its magic changing palingenesis of the populous cities, the diversified landscapes, the picturesque solitudes, the genrd male and female figures, the infinite fauna and flora, the skies, mountains, streams, prairies of our Continental West, all recreated here in their several idiosyncrasies, under every diversity of times and seasons, vital and magnetic, a scenic whole exhaling delicious natural odors, swept by free winds, alive and moving in harmony to the marching measures, the glorious rolling music of a rhythmus, caught, one might divine, from the movements, copious and unequal, of the surf sweeping in forever upon the beaches where the poet wandered as a child. I have brooded long upon it all, and I have compared it with the famous poems of the supreme men of all ages, and found it in no wise inferior to the best, as many besides me have felt, and the near future will declare; but I should shrink, faint-hearted in my conscious inferiority, from any effort at its adequate interpretation. It spreads before us all, a superb cosmorama of the West, populous, colossal and golden, under the ascending race of the rejoicing sun. Who am I that I should unfold the mystic reminiscences of this Universal Poem, reveal its oracular suggestions, comment upon its sublime annunciations, interpret its prophetic voices, declare anything of what it is to every reader with an awakened soul ? Sometimes I think it might be considered the poem of embodiment. It indicates the august kosmic fact of numberless material entities held in cohesion by spirit, which ni time loosens and departs. In a more restricted consideration, it appears as the poem of the embodied human soul. Other writers have celebrated the body, others the spirit, until we feel them almost in disconnection. Take, as opposing poles, Rabelais and Shelley. In Rabelais there is a creation, gross, enormous, carnal, full-blown, laughing, obscene, alimentative, bibulous, excrementitious, loathsome and magnificent. It is the fearful apotheosis of the flesh, the monstrous apocalypse of the abdomen become lord paramount�man submerged in his lusts and appetites. The conception could only have proceeded from a mighty intellect and a great moral nature. In Shelley there is evolved an image, phantasmal, super-celestial, inessential, divinely wan and lovely, the ghost become consubstantial with a music unearthly and wandering, a shape of woven perfume, an odic force grown palely visible, a perceived pneuma, an apprehended essence, an ethereal apparition, the presence of the violet-breathing night-wind of the spring. The eidolon of his poetry is as incredible in its beauty as in its utter removal from carnality. It is like a dream of the soul remembered in a dream. Its extreme sublimation will forever make it incomprehensible to any but the most imaginative minds�to aught but the clairvoyant sense that comes into rapport with thought clinging to the dim boundaries of the world: and Shelley can never have the fame his genius deserves, so far is his work removed from the
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reality and^passion of our lives. His merits as a poet are inexpressible. Not least among them is the altogether new ideal of woman, radiant, heroic, noble, and exalte, which appears in his pages. His poetry suggests in its furthest rapt remove from realization, almost from apprehension, the unbodied soul. The athletic spirituality of Leaves of Grass has no kinship to the spirit of the " Gargantua," and it is far nearer to the divine afflatus of the " Epipsychidion." But the creation of the book is its author's own�as original as sui genei-is � and that creation is, within the limits of the present reference, the strongest, amplest, most definite projection of the soul incarnate�of the representative human being�which has ever been thrown into literature. In it the spirit and the flesh appear as a unit, in perfect equilibrium, in the mutual interpene-tration and consubstantiality appropriate to the ideal Adam. Were humanity to disappear from the globe, and this poem alone to remain, the being of another species than ours, finding it among the ruins, could recover from its pages full knowledge of what manner of man had inhabited here, as surely as Lamarck or Owen from the fossil vestiges can reconstruct the vanished mastodon. The great affirmation which pervades the whole conception is the veracity of consciousness. Let us bow down before this supreme word ! Behind it there is nothing. It indicates the true finality, and in it is the entire proof of life. To be aware is all. To be aware is to be. Memory�the personal past�is consciousness retained : anticipation�the personal future� IS consciousness projected. • It is this divine fact that the poet, as he himself says, sings in so many ecstatic songs, and out of it has emerged his transcendent conception of the incarnate soul�the human creature, male or female, the female equal to the male�the being, dual and unitary at once, like the globe of two hemispheres�the insulated identity, type of all human identities, the woman, the man. A creature of substantial body, parts and passions; divine in every organ and attribute, not one of which is to be omitted or contemned in celebration, since each and all are intermutual in their adaptation, as they must be in an organic whole; infinite and omnigenous in character, without origin and without end, and grown and growing through sympathy by the accrument of myriad experiences; shaped, propelled, developed alike by good and evil, as under the mechanical law of the composition of rival forces, effects are resultant; prepared for m the earthly advent by all the cyclic preparations of the globe, and continued in endless course by all the operations of things; eternal m personal identity, the phases at once merged and retained, as infancy is both lost and kept in childhood, childhood in youth, youth in maturity, and so on forever ; fathomless, abysmal, immense and interminable as Nature, to which he or she is related as a constant vital influence forever influenced; representative, at any given stage of his or her evolution, of the innumerable lower beings, progressing to that level, to sink in turn that level, and continue on; representative, m the best estate, of the intrinsic spiritual greatness and majesty of each and all of the rest through whatever the
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pitiable, grotesque or vile disguises of appearance incident to the processes of transformation; heir to an omnific personal destiny which is alike the destiny of each and all; governed through all the nature by the egoistic pride, and by love and the necessity for love, as by two paramount vital springs; conscious at the summit of the highest knowledge of the eternal mystery in which all beings must remain to each, and of the eternal mystery one must be to one's-self; and, from that lofty summit, joyous, haughty, transfigured in the sense of the democratic constitution of the Universe, in which all between the worm and the god are equal, being all organically necessary to the whole, and of which perpetual ascension, perpetual transfer and promotion, is the law. Such, in my apprehension, and in a crude, didactic account of it, is this majestic conception, which, in the poet's work, is expressed in a thousand magnetic and eloquent sentences, in a thousand vivid and wondrous verbal pictures, and with a power of alto-relievo statement and illustration which the fancy-dealers in letters can never deal in. It is far enough removed from the conception wherewith Mr. Harlan's Messiah, Wesley, startled England, when he defined man as " half brute and half devil." The body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, says the rapt apostle; and of this text Walt Whitman's book is, within the limitations of this view of it, the ample, the electric, the robust and unrivalled commentary. As such it offers a new foundation for our philosophy, our politics, our life, above all for our religion�a religion to be greater than the world has ever seen, and worthy of these shores.
To others better equipped for the grateful labor, I will leave it to descant upon what is correlated to the conception I have so imperfectly touched�the matchless presentation of the representative man and woman of this country. In Shakespeare there are no ideals in the sense of exemplars of human excellence, or if so to any degree, it is in artistic and moral subordination to what seems his main aim, namely, to create types or models showing the operation of the perturbations or tempests of the mind. In Leaves of Gi-ass the ideals are distinct, and nothing could be more resplendent or commanding. They will haunt the imagination of this country, they will haunt the imagination of the world, until they are realized in " the life that shall be copious, vehement, spiritual, bold," which the poet prophesies�in "the great individuals, fluid as Nature, chaste, affectionate, compassionate, fully armed"�in " the breeds of the most perfect mothers"�" the myriads of youths, beautiful, gigantic, sweet-blooded"�"the race of splendid and savage old men"�" the hundred millions of superb persons," which appear in his sublime annunciation as belonging to the future of America. Women have especial cause to be grateful to Walt Whitman. The noblest ideal of woman ever contributed appears in his pages. His supreme presentation of her in the natural privilege of her motherhood�in her all-enclosing, all-determining and divine maternity, is of more than any former majesty, and is unparalleled in philosophic depth and truth, as it is in august and tender beauty. I would fain
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dwell upon this feature of his book, as I would upon the crowded and splendid cartoon of the United States, in all their diversified truth of essence and appearance, in all their multiplicity and variety of life, which his pages offer broadly to contemplation. There are few national works which have so fully imaged the distinctive form of a land and its people. Homer has given to the ages a wondrous picture of the old Pelasgic civilization; Rome, when the city was the world, glows in the tragic light of dying liberty and virtue in the mighty pages of Juvenal; amidst the great fulgurations of the laughter of Rabelais, we see the gross swarming life of old Paris and Touraine; and France, as in the magic mirror of Agrippa, in all the horror and grandeur of the feudal past, the revolutionary combat and the anguish of the present, the superb promise of the future, and in the supreme glory of compassion which streams from the poet's own mighty heart, lives in the poetry, the drama, the romance of the illustrious Victor Hugo; but in what poem have all the things which make up the show of a people's life appeared with such comprehensive and vivid reality, such national distinctiveness and such strength of charm, as in Leaves of Grass ? Above all, the wonder of it is, to me, the marvel that what M'as thought commonplace and prosaic is restored in the book to the superbest poetry by the revelation of its intrinsic significance�by the establishment of its mystical relation. The common objects as well as the most beautiful and striking�the ordinary events and incidents as well as those of the greater series�the rude, plain, simple, unlettered people, as well as the elevated and heroic�all appear in the poem in an equality of consideration, unrobbed of the deep interior value which truly belongs to every figure, to every object and emblem in the divine procession of life. Such mighty and democratic handling of a theme, without rejection or evasion, reveals the great master, just as the true sculptor is seen, when, after you have gazed at a number of the stone dolls which adorn our Capitol, in which the fact of the genr6 costume is commonly sought to be dodged by the artifice of a marmoreal cloak, you turn to David's noble bronze of Jefferson, in which the grace, the strength, the fire, the life of the. figure are fused into every detail of the frankly rendered old colonial garb. The great master is equally revealed in the poems of the war for the Union, around which the orbit of the book is now arranged. Of these poems it may be said that they alone of all the song born from that struggle are in the true key. Apart from their clear, fresh and vital picturing�the sad and stormy truth and color of their scenery�they are surcharged with the peculiar tragic pathos which civil war must always inspire in hearts deeply noble, and will be accepted in all our latitudes, North and South alike, since they can be read without unmanly exultation by the victor, and without humiliation by the vanquished. The word " Reconciliation" spans them all:
Word over all, beautiful as the sky;
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost. That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash ag»in, and ever again, this soiled world;
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For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the cofTin�I draw near.
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.
A few years ago there was an old man in this city, an eminent officer of the government, formerly a judge, with whom I sometimes conversed, and the idol of whose thought and life was Jefferson. He set great value upon Leaves of Grass, but the works and life of the author of the Declaration of Independence made his central theme, of which he never wearied, nor, indeed, made others weary, he discoursed upon it so eloquently well. He has passed from among us; but I can still see in memory, his old, wrinkled, earnest, smiling face, and dark, sunken eyes tinged around with black, and hear his low, eager voice, as with the ardor of a boy he unrolled his dissertation upon some sentence of the sage of Monticello, or, kindling into some niagian gloss upon his text, foretold in a sort of measured ecstasy the complete ultimate triumph of the democratic principle, and the transfiguration of government and society in the operation of the ideas of his master. But always as the climax of his rapt argument, or at the close of any stage thereof, before it mounted to a higher proposition, he would say, bending his old head forward, his voice trembling with intensity, his face glowing into a deeper wizard smile, his dark eyes shining in their swarthy circles�" and here," he would exclaim, "here is where our glorious Walt comes in and confirms Jefferson!" No description could convey a sense of the tone of utter satisfaction and triumph ift v^fhich he announced his prophet confirmed by his poet, nor of the tremulous fervor, the supreme unction with which the words " our glorious Walt" were uttered. I take the remembrance of those words, as I would a wild flower from the kind old scholar's grave, and lay it on our poet's book as my latest offering, worth more than the little tribute I hav* ever brought, or all that I could ever bring. " Our glorious Willy" was the phrase the author of the "Faery Queen" threw, like a star, upon the name of Shakespeare, in the days ■when the term " a willy" was simply a euphuism for " a poet," and no more. "Our glorious Walt," the utterance of lips that fondly loved the name of Jefferson, and yielded the words in homage to the bard who has carried into literature earth's greatest dream, is at least an honor equal to that Spenser gave, and goes to an object no less worthy of such honor. For to have conceived and written Leaves 0/Grass �to have been of the old heroic strain of which such books alone are born�to have surcharged the pages with their world of noble and passionate life�to have done all this, to have dared all this, to have suffered for all this�is to be the true brother of Shakespeare.
Pardon my imperfect contribution to your volume. You know how hastily I have written, using the little tjme left by tlie pressing tasks of the Life-Saving Service. And with cordial wishes for the success of your book. Believe me, Dear Sir,
Faithfully yours,
William Douglas O'Cpnnor.
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THE GOOD GRAY POET.
A VINDICATION.
Washington, D. C, Sept. 2, 1865.
Nine weeks have elapsed since the commission of an outrage, to which I have not till now been able to give my attention, but which, in the interest of the sacred cause of free letters, and in that alone, I never meant should pass without its proper and enduring brand.
For years past, thousands of people in New York, in Brooklyn, in Boston, in New Orleans, and latterly in Washington, have seen, even as I saw two hours ago, tallying, one might say, the streets of our American cities, and fit to have for his background and accessories thtir streaming populations and ample and rich facades, a man of striking masculine beauty�a poet�powerful and venerable in appearance; large, calm, superbly formed ; oftenest clad in the careless, rough, and always picturesque costume of the common people; resembling, and generally taken by strangers for some great mechanic or stevedore, or seaman, or grand laborer of one kind or another; and passing slowly in this guise, with nonchalant and haughty step along the pavement, with the sunliglit and shadows falling around him. The dark sombrero he usually wears was, when I saw him just now, the day being warm, held for the moment in his hand; rich light an artist would have chosen, lay upon his uncovered head, majestic, large, Homeric, and set upon his strong shoulders with the grandeur of ancient sculpture. I marked the countenance, serene, proud, cheerful, florid, grave; the brow seamed with noble wrinkles; the features, massive and handsome, with firm blue eyes; the eyebrows and eyelids especially showing that fulness of arch seldom seen save in the antique busts; the flowing hair and fleecy beard, both very gray, and tempering with a look of age the youthful aspect of one who is but forty-five; the simplicity and purity of his dress, cheap and plain, but spotless, from snowy falling collar to burnished boot, and exhaling faint fragrance; the whole form surrounded with manliness as with a nimbus, and breathing, in its perfect health and vigor, the august charm of the strong.
We who have looked upon this figure, or listened to that clear, cheerful, vibrating voice, might thrill to think, could we but transcend our age, that we had been thus near to one of the greatest of the sons of men. But Dante stirs no deep pulse, unless it be of hate, as he walks the streets of Florence; that shabby, one-armed soldier, just out of jail and hardly noticed, though he
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has amused Europe, is Michael Cervantes; that son of a vine-dresser, whom Athens laughs at as an eccentric genius, before it is thought worth while to roar him into exile, is the century-shaking /Eschylus; that phantom whom the wits of the seventeenth century think not worth extraordinary notice, and the wits of the eighteenth century, spUittering with laughter, call a barbarian, is Shakespeare; that earth-soiled, vice-stained ploughman, with the noble heart and sweet bright eyes, abominated by the good and patronized by the gentry, subject now of anniversary banquets by gentlemen who, could tliey wander backward from those annual hiccups into time, would never help his life or keep his company�is Robert Burns; and this man, .vhose grave, perhaps, the next century will cover with passionate and splendid honors, goes regarded with careless curiosity or phlegmatic composure by his own age. Yet, perhaps, in a few hearts he has waked that deep thrill due to the passage of the sublime. I heard lately, with sad pleasure,* of the letter introducing a friend, filled with noble courtesy, and dictated by the reverence for genius, which a distinguished English nobleman, a stranger, sent to this American bard. Nothing deepens my respect for the beautiful intellect of the scholar Alcott, like the bold sentence " Greater than Plato," which he once uttered upon him. I hold it the surest proof of Thoreau's insight, that after a ct)n-versation, seeing how he incarnated the immense and new spirit of the age, and was the compend of America, he came away to speak the electric sentence, " He is Democracy !" I treasure to my latest hour, with swelling heart and springing tears, the remembrance that Abraham Lincoln, seeing him for the first time from the window of the east room of the White House as he passed slowly by, and gazing at him long with that deep eye which read men, said, in the c[uaint, sweet tone, which those who have spoken with him will remember, and with a significant emphasis which the type can hardly convey, " Well, he looks like a Man!" Sublime tributes, great words; but none too high for their object, the author of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman, of Brooklyn.
On the 30th of June last, this true American man and author was dismissed, under circumstances of peculiar wrong, from a clerkship he had held for six months in the Department of the Interior. His dismissal was the act of the Hon. James Harlan, the Secretary of the Department, formerly a Methodist clergyman, and president of a Western college.
Upon the interrogation of an eminent oflicer of the Government, at whose instance the appointment had, under a former Secretary, been made, Mr. Harlan averred that Walt Whitman had been in no way remiss in the discharge of his duties, but that, on the contrary, so far as he could learn, his conduct had been most exemplary. Indeed, during the few months of his tenure of office,
* Pleasure a mean lie saddened. Stopping en route at Cambridge, the bearer of this letter was informed by one of its most distinguished resident authors, that Walt Whitman was " nothing but a low New York rowdy," " a common street blackguard," and he accordingly did not venture to present the letter.
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TJie Good Gray Poet. (i865-'6). loi
he had been promoted. The sole and only cause of his dismissal, Mr. Harlan said, was that he had written the book of poetry entitled Leaves of Grass. This book Mr. Harlan characterized as " full of indecent passages." The author, he said, was "a very bad man," a " free lover." Argument being had upon these propositions. Mr. Harlan was, as regards the book, utterly unable to maintain his assertions, and, as regards the author, was forced to own that his opinion of him had been changed. Nevertheless, after this substantial admission of his injustice, he absolutely refused to revoke his action. Of course, under no circumstances would Walt Whitman, the proudest man that lives, have consented to again enter into office under Mr. Harlan ; but the demand for his reinstatement was as honorable to the gentleman who made it as the refusal to accede to it was discreditable to the Secretary.
The closing feature of this transaction, and one which was a direct consequence of Mr. Harlan's course, was its remission to the scurrilous, and in some instances libellous, comment of a portion of the press. To sum up, an author, solely and only for the publication, ten years ago, of an honest book, which no intelligent and candid person can regard as hurtful to morality, was expelled from office by the Secretary, and held up to public contumely by the newspapers. It only remains to be added here, that the Hon. James Harlan is the gentleman who, upon assuming the control of the Department, published a manifesto, announcing that it was thenceforth to be governed " upon^ the principles of Christian civilization."
This act of expulsion, and all that it encloses, is the outrage to which I referred in my opening paragraph.
I have had the honor, which I esteem a very high one, to know Walt Whitman intimately for several years, and am conversant with the details of his life and history. Scores and scores of persons, who know him well, can confirm my own report of him, and I have therefore no hesitation in saying that the scandalous assertions of Mr. Harlan, derived from whom I know not, as to his being a bad man, a free lover, etc., belong to the category of those calumnies at which, as Napoleon said, innocence itself is confounded. A better man in all respects, or one more irreproachable in his relations to the other sex, lives not upon this earth. His is the great goodness, the great chastity of spiritual strength and sanity. I do not believe that from the hour of his infancy, when Lafayette held him in his arms, to the present hour, in which he bends over the last wounded and dying of the war, any one can say aught of him, which does not consort with the largest and truest manliness. I am perfectly aware of the miserable lies which have been put into circulation respecting him, of which the story of his dishonoring an invitation to dine with Emerson, by appearing at the table of the Astor House in a red shirt, and with the manners of a rowdy, is a mild specimen. I know too the inferences drawn by wretched fools, who, because they have seen him riding apon the top of an omnibus; or at Pfaff's restaurant; or dressed in rough
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clotlies suitable for his purposes, and only remarkable because the wearer was a man of genius; or mixing freely and lovingly, like Lucretius, like Rabelais, like Francis Bacon, like Rembrandt, like all great students of the world, with low and equivocal and dissolute persons, as well as with those of a different character, must needs set him down as a brute, a scallawag, and a criminal. Mr. Harlan's allegations are of a piece with these. If I could associate the title with a really great person, or if the name of man were not radically superior, I should say that for solid nobleness of character, for native elegance and delicacy of soul, for a courtesy which is the very passion of thoughtful kindness and forbearance, for his tender and paternal respect and manly honor for woman, for love and heroism carried into the pettiest details of life, and for a large and homely beauty of manners, which makes the civilities of parlors fantastic and puerile in comparison, Walt Whitman deserves to be considered the grandest gentleman that treads this continent. I know well the habits and tendencies of his life. They are all simple, sane, domestic, worthy of him as one of an estimable family and a member of society. He is a tender and faithful son, a good brother, a loyal friend, an ardent and devoted citizen. He has been a laborer, working successively as a farmer, a carpenter, a printer. He has been a stalwart editor of the Republican party, and often, in that powerful and . nervous prose of which he is master, done yeoman's service for the great cause of human liberty and the imperial conception of the indivisible Union. He has been a visitor of prisons, a protector of fugitive slaves, i constant voluntary nurse, night and day, at the hospitals, from the beginning of the war to the present time; a brother and friend through life to the neglected and the forgotten, the poor, the degraded, the criminal, the outcast, turning away from no man for his guilt, nor woman for her vileness. His is the strongest and truest compassion I have ever known. I remember here the anecdote told me by a witness, of his meeting in a by-street in Boston a poor ruffian, one whom he had known well as an innocent child, now a fullgrown youth, vicious far beyond his years, flying to Canada from the pursuit of the police, his sin-trampled features bearing marks of the recent bloody brawl in New York, in which, as he supposed, he had killed some one; and having heard his hurried story, freely confided to him, Walt Whitman, separated not from the bad even by his own goodness, with well I know what tender and tranquil feeling for the ruined being, and with a love which makes me think of that love of God which deserts not any creature, quietly at parting, after assisting him from his means, held him for a moment, with his arm around his neck, and, bending to the face, horrible and battered and prematurely old, kissed him on the cheek, and the poor hunted wretch, perhaps for the first time in his low life, receiving a token of love and compassion like a touch from beyond the sun, hastened away in deep dejection, sobbing and in tears. It reminds me of the anecdotes Victor Hugo, in his portraiture of Bishop Myriel, tells, under
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a thin veil of fiction, of Charles Miolles, the good Bishop of Digne. I know not what talisman Walt Whitman carries, unless it be an unexcluding friendliness and goodness which is felt upon his approach like magnetism; but I know that in the subterranean life of cities, among the worst roughs, he goes safely; and I could recite instances where hands that, in mere wantonness of ferocity, assault anybody, raised against him, have of their own accord been lowered almost as quickly, or, in some cases, have been dragged promptly down by others; this, too, I mean, when he and the assaulting gang were mutual strangers. I have seen singular evidence of the mysterious quality which not only guards him, but draws to him with intuition, rapid as light, simple and rude people, as to their natural mate and friend. I remember, as I passed the White House with him one evening, the startled feeling with which I saw a soldier on guard there�a stranger to us both, and with something in his action that curiously proved that he was a stranger�suddenly bring his musket to the "present" in military salute to him, quickly mingling with this respect due to his colonel, a gesture of greeting with the right hand as to a comrade, grinning, meanwhile, good fellow, with shy, spontaneous affection and deference, his ruddy, broad face glowing in the flare of the lampions. I remember, on another occasion, as I crossed the street with him, the driver of a street-car, a stranger, stopping the conveyance, and inviting him to get on and ride with him. Adventures of this kind are frequent, and " I took a fancy to you," or " You look like one of my style," is the common explanation he gets upon their occurrence. It would be impossible to exaggerate the personal adhesion and strong, simple affection given him, in numerous instances on sight, by multitudes of plain persons, sailors, mechanics, drivers, soldiers, farmers, sempstresses, old people of the past generation, mothers of families� those powerful, unlettered persons, among whom, as he says in his book, he has gone freely, and who never in most cases even suspect as an author him whom they love as a man, and who loves them in return.
His intellectual influence upon many young men and women�spirits of the morning sort, not willing to belong to that intellectual colony of Great Britain which our literary classes compose, nor helplessly tied, like them, to the old forms�I note as kindred to that of Socrates upon the youth of ancient Attica, or Raleigh upon the gallant young England of his day. It is a power at once liberating, instructing, and inspiring.�His conversation is a university. Those who have heard him in some roused hour, when the full afflatus of his spirit moved him, will agree with me that the grandeur of talk was accomplished. He is known as a passionate lover and powerful critic of the great music and of art. He is deeply cultured by some of the best books, especially those of the Bible, which he prefers above all other great literature, but principally by contact and communion with things themselves, which literature can only mirror and celebrate. He has travelled through most of the United States, intent on comprehending and absorbing the genius and history of his
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country, tliat he might do his best to start a literature worthy of her, sprung from her own [loiity, and tallying her own unexampled magnilicence among the nations. To the same end, he has been a long, patient, and laborious student of life, mixing intimately with all varieties of experience and men, with curiosity and with love. He has given his thought, his life, to this beautiful ambition, and, still young, he has grown gray in its service. He has never married; like Giordano Bruno, he has made Thought in the service of his fellow-creatures his bclla donna, his best beloved, his bride. His patriotism is boundless. It is no intellectual sentiment; it is a personal passion. He performs with scrupulous fidelity and zeal the duties of a citizen. For eighteen years, not missing once, his ballot has dropped on every national and local election day, and his influence has been ardently given for the good cause. Of all men I know, his life is most in the life of the nation. I remember, when the first draft was ordered, at a time when he was already per-formmg an arduous and perilous duty as a volunteer attendant upon the wounded in the field�a duty which cost him the only illness he ever had in his life, and a very severe and dangerous illness it was, the result of poison absorbed in his devotion to the worst cases of hospital gangrene, and when it would have been the easiest thing in the world to evade duty, for though then only forty-two or three years old, and subject to the draft, he looked a hale sixty, and no enrolling officer would have paused for an instant before his gray hair�I remember, I say, how anxious and careful he was to get his name put on the enrolment lists, that he might stand his chance for martial service. This, too, at a time when so many gentlemen were skulking, dodging, agonizing for substitutes, and practising every conceivable device to escape military duty. What music of speech, though Cicero's own�what scarlet and gold superlatives could adorn or dignify this simple, antique trait of private heroism ?�I recall his love for little children, for the young, and for very old persons, as if the dawn and the evening twilight of life awakened his deepest tenderness. I recall the affection for him of numbers of young men, and invariably of all good women. Who, knowing him, does not regard him as a man of the highest spiritual culture? I have never known one of greater and deeper religious feeling. To call one like him good seems an impertinence. In our sweet country phrase, he is one of God's men. And as I write these hurried and broken memoranda�as his strength and sweetness of nature, his moral health, his rich humor, his gentleness, his serenity, his charity, his simple-heartedness, his courage, his deep and varied knowledge of life and men, his calm wisdom, his singular and beautiful boy-innocence, his personal majesty, his rough scorn of mean actions, his magnetic and exterminating anger on due occasions�all that I have seen and heard of him, the testimony of associates, the anecdotes of friends, the remembrance of hours with him that should be immortal, the traits, lineaments, incidents of his life and being�as they come crowding into memory�his seems to me a
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character which only the heroic pen of Plutarch could record, and which Socrates himself might emulate or envy.
This is the man whom Mr. Harlan charges with having written a bad book. I might ask, How long is it since bad books have been the flower of good lives? How long is it since grape-vines produced thorns or fig-trees thistles? But Mr. Harlan says the book is bad because it is " full of indecent passages." This allegation has been brought against Leaves of Grass before. It has been sounded long and strong by many of the literary journals of both continents. As criticism it is legitimate. I may contemn the mind or deplore the moral life in which such a criticism has its source; still, as criticism it has a right to existence. But Mr. Harlan, passing the limits of opinion, inaugurates punishment. He joins the band of the hostile verdict; he incarnates their judgment; then, detaching himself, he proceeds to a solitary and signal vengeance. As far as he can have it so, this author, for having written his book, shall starve. He shall starve, and his name shall receive a brand. This is the essence of Mr. Harlan's action. It is a dark and serious step to take. Upon what grounds is it taken ?
I have carefully counted out from Walt Whitman's poetry the lines, perfectly moral to me, whether viewed in themselves or in the light of their sublime intentions and purport, bnt upon which ignorant and indecent persons of respectability base their sweeping condemnation of the whole work. Taking Leaves of Grass, and the recent small volume, "Drum-Taps" (which was in Mr. Harlan's possession), there are in the whole about nine thousand lines or verses. From these, including matter which I can hardly imagine olijec-tionable to any one, but counting everything which the most malignant virtue could shrink from, I have culled eighty lines. Eighty lines out of nine thousand ! It is a less proportion than one finds in Shakespeare. Upon this so slender basis rests the whole crazy fabric of American and European slander and the brutal lever of the Secretary.
Now, what by competent authority is the admitted character of the book in which these lines occur? For, though it is more than probable that Mr. Harlan never heard of the work till the hour of his explorations in the Department, the intellectual hemispheres of Great Britain and America have rung with it from side to side. It has received as extensive a critical notice, I suppose, as has ever been given to a volume. Had it been received only with indifference or derision, I should not have been surprised. In an age in which few breathe the atmosphere of the grand literature�which forgets the superb books and thinks Bulwer moral, and Dickens great, and Thackeray a real satirist�which gives to Macaulay the laurel due to Herodotus, and to Tennyson the crown reserved for Homer, and in which the chairs of criticism seem abandoned to squirts, and pedagogues, and monks�a mighty poet has little to expect from the literary press save unconcern and mockery. But even under these hard conditions the tremendous force of this poet has
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achieved a relative conquest, and the tone of the press denotes his book as not merely great, but illustrious. Even the copious torrents of abuse which have been lavished upon it have, in numerous instances, taken the form of tribute to its august and mysterious power, being in fact identical with that still vomited upon Montaigne and Juvenal. On the other hand, eulogy, very lofty and from the highest sources, has spanned it with sunbows. Emerson, our noblest scholar, a name to which Christendom does reverence, a critic of piercing insight and full comprehension, has pronounced it " the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed." How that austere and rare spirit, Thoreau, regarded it may be partly seen by his last posthumous volume. He thought of it, I have heard, with measureless esteem, ranking it with the vast and gorgeous conceptions of the Oriental bards. It has been reported to me that unpublished letters, received in this country from some of Europe's greatest, announce a similar verdict. The " North American Review," unquestionably the highest organ of American letters, in the course of a eulogistic notice of the work, remarking upon the passages which Mr. Harlan has treated as if they were novel in literature, observes: "There is not anything, perhaps (in the book), which modern usage would stamp as more indelicate than are some passages in Homer. There is not a word in it meant to attract readers by its grossness as there is in half the literature of the last century, which holds its place unchallenged on the tables of our drawing-rooms." The London " Dispatch," in a review written by the Rev. W. J. Fox, one of the most distinguished clergymen in England, after commending the poems for " their strength of expression, their fervor, their hearty wholesomeness, their originality and freshness, their singular harmony," etc., says that, " in the unhesitating frankness of a man who dares to call simplest things by their plain names, conveying also a large sense of the beautiful," there is involved "a clearer conception of what manly modesty really is than in anything we have in all conventional forms of word, deed, or act, so far known of," and concludes by declaring that " the author will soon make his way into the confidence of his readers, and his poems in time will become a pregnant text-book, from which quotations as sterling as the minted gold will be taken and applied to every form of the inner and the outer life." The London " Leader," one of the foremost of the British literary journals, in a review which more nearly approaches perception of the true character and purport of the book than any I have seen, has the following sentences:
" Mr. Emerson recognized the first issue of the Leaves, and hastened to welcome the author, then totally unknown. Among other things, said Emerson to the new avatar, ' I greet you at the beginning of a great career which yet viust have had a long fore^rotoid somciolicre for such a starts The last clause was, however, overlooked entirely by the critics, who treated the new author as one self-educated, yet in the rough, unpolished, and owing nothing to in^truction. The authority for so treating the author was derived
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from himself, who thus described in one of his poems, his person, character, and name, having omitted the last from the title-page,
'Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos. Disorderly, fleshy, and sensual,'�
and in various other passages confessed to all the vices, as well as the virtues, of man. All this, with intentional wrong-headedness, was attributed by the sapient reviewers to the individual writer, and not to the subjective-hero supposed to be writing. Notwithstanding the word ' kosmos,' the writer was taken to be an ignorant man. Emerson perceived at once that there had been a long foreground somewhere or somehow ;�not so they. Every page teems with knowledge, with information; but they saw it not, because it did
not answer their purpose to see it The poem in which the word
' kosmos' appears explains in fact the whole mystery�nay, the word itself explains it. The poem is nominally upon himself, but really includes everybody. It begins:
' I celebrate myself,
And what I assume, you shall assume; For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.'
In a word, Walt Whitman represents the kosmical man � he is the Adamus of the Nineteenth ce7ttitry � not an individual, but MANKIND. As such, in celebrating himself, he proceeds to celebrate universal humanity in its attributes, and accordingly commences his dithyramb with the five senses, beginning with that of smell. Afterwards, he deals with the intellectual, rational, and moral powers, showing throughout his treatment an intimate acquaintance with Kant's transcendental method, and perhaps including in his development the whole of the German school, down to Hegel�at any rate as interpreted by Cousin and others in France and Emerson in the United States. He certainly includes Fichte, for he mentions the egotist as the only true philosopher, and consistently identifies himself not only w ilh every man, but with the universe and its Maker; and it is in doing so that the strength of his description consists. It is from such an ideal elevation that he looks down on Good and Evil, regards them as equal, and extends to them the like measure of equity. . , . Instead, therefore, of regarding these Leaves of Grass as a marvel, they seem to us as the most natural product of the American soil. They are certainly filled with an American spirit, breathe the American air, and assert the fullest American freedom." The passages characterized by the Secretary as " indecent" are, adds the " Leader," "only so many instances adduced in support of a philosophical principle, not meant for obscenity, but for scientific examples, introduced, as they might be m any legal, medical, or philosophical book, for the purpose of instruction."
I could multiply these excerpts; but here are sufficient specimens of the competent judgments of eminent scholars and divines, testifying to the intellectual and moral grandeur of this work. Let it be remembered that there is nothing in the book that in one form or another is not contained in all great poetic or universal literature. It has nothing either in quantity or quality so offensive as everybody knows is in Shakespeare. All that this poet has done is to mention, without levity, without low language, very seriously, often devoutly, always simply, certain facts in the natural history of man and of life,
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and sometimes, assuming their sanctity, to use them in illustration or imagery. Far more questionable mention and use of these facts are common to the greatest literature. Shall the presence in a book of eighty lines, similar in character to what every great and noble poetic book contains, be sufficient to shove it below even the lewd writings of Petronius Arbiter, the dirty dramas of Shirley, or the scrofulous fiction of Louvet de Couvray ? to lump it in with the anonymous lascivious trash spawned in holes and sold in corners, too witless and disgusting for any notice but that of the police�and to entitle its author to treatment such as only the nameless wretches of the very sewers of authorship ought to receive?
If, rising to the utmost cruelty of conception, I can dare add to the calamities of genius a misery so degrading and extreme as to imagine the great authors of the world condemned to clerkships under Mr. Harlan, I can at least mitigate that dream of wretchedness and insult by adding the fancy of their fate under the action of his principles. Let me suppose them there, and he still magnifying the calling of the Secretary into that of literary headsman. He opens the great book of Genesis. Everywhere " indecent passages." The mother hushes the child, and bids him skip as he reads aloud that first great history. It cannot be read aloud in " drawing-rooms " by " gentlemen" and " ladies." The freest use of language, the plainest terms, frank mention of forbidden subjects; the story of Onan, of Hagar and Sarai, of Lot and his daughters, of Isaac, Rebekah, and Abimelech, of Jacob and Leah, of Reuben and Bilhah; of Potiphar's wife and Joseph; tabooed allusion and statement everywhere; no veils, no euphemism, no delicacy, no meal in the mouth anywhere. Out with Moses! The cloven splendor on that awful brow shall not save him.
Mr. Harlan takes up the Iliad and the Odyssey. The loves of Jupiter and Juno, the dalliance of Achilles and Patroclus with their women; the perfectly frank, undraped reality of Greek life and manners naively shown without regard to the feelings of Christian civilizees�horrible ! Out with Homer !
Here is Lucretius: Mr. Harlan opens the " De Rerum Natura," and reads the vast, benign, majestic lines, sad with the shadow of the intelligible universe upon them; sublime with the tragic problems of the Infinite; august with their noble love and compassion for mankind. But what is this ? " Ut quasi transactis soepe omnibus rebus," etc. And this: " More ferarum quad-rupedumque magis ritu." And this: " Nam mulier prohibet se consipere atque repugnat," etc. And this: " Quod petiere, premunt arete, faciuntque dolorem," etc. Enough. Fine language, fine illustrations, fine precepts, pretty decency! Out with Lucretius! Out with the chief poet of the Tiber side!
Here is ^schylus; a dark magnificence of cloud, all rough with burning gold, which thunders and drips blood ! The Greek Shakespeare. The gorgeous and terrible ^schylus ! What is this in the " Prometheus " about Jove
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and 16 ? What sort of detail is that which, at the distance of ten years, I remember amazed Mr. Buckley as he translated the Agamemnon ? What kind of talk is this in the " Choephori," in " The Suppliants," and in the fragments of the comic drama of " The Argians " ? Out with ^schylus !
Here is the sublime book of Ezekiel. All the Hebrew grandeur at its fullest is there. But look at this blurt of coarse words, hurled direct as the prophet-mouth can hurl them�this familiar reference to functions and organs voted out of language�this bread for human lips baked with ordure�these details of the scortatory loves of Aholah and Aholibah. Enough. Dismiss this dreadful majesty of Hebrew poetry. He has no "taste." He is " indecent." Out with Ezekiel!
Here is Dante. Open the tremendous pages of the " Inferno." What is this about the she-wolf Can Grande will kill ? What picture is this of strumpet Thais?�ending with the lines:
"Taida e, la puttana che rispose Al drudo suo, quando disse: Ho io grazie Grandi appo te? Anzi meravigliose."
What is this also in the eighteenth canto ?
"Quivi venimmo, e quindi giCi nel fosso Vidi gente attuffata in uno stereo Che dagli uman privati parea mosso: E mentre ch' io 14 giu con I'occhio cerco, Vidi un col capo si di merda lordo, Che non parea s'era laico o cherco."
What is this line at the end of the twenty-first canto, which even John Car-lyle flinches from translating, but which Dante did not flinch from writing ?
"Ed egli avea del cul fatto trombetta."
And look at these lines in the twenty-eighth canto:
"Gi4 reggia, per mezzul perdere o luUa Com' io vidi un, cosi non si pertugia Rotto dal mento insin dove si trulla."
That will do. Dante, too, has " indecent passages." Out with Dante !
Here is the book of Job: the vast Arabian landscape, the picturesque pastoral details of Arabian life, the last tragic immensity of Oriental sorrow, the whole overarching sky of Oriental piety, are here. But here also the inevitable '• indecency." Instead of the virtuous fiction of the tansy bed, Job actually has the indelicacy to state how man is born�even mentions the belly ; talks about the gendering of bulls, and the miscarriage of cows ; uses rank idioms; and in the thirty-first chapter especially, indulges in a strain of thought
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no Appendix to Part I.
and expression which it is amazing does not bring down upon him, even at this late date, the avalaHches of our lofty and pure reviews. Here is certainly " an immoral poet." Out with Job !
Here is Plutarch, prince of biographers, and Herodotus, flower of historians. What have we now ? Traits of character not to be mentioned, incidents of conduct, accounts of manners, minute details of customs, which our modern historical dandies would never venture upon recording. Out with Plutarch and Herodotus!
Here is Tacitus. What statement of crimes that ought not to be hinted ? Does the man gloat over such things? What dreadful kisses are these of Agrippina to Nero�the mother to the son ? Out with Tacitus ! And since there are books that ought to be publicly burned,* by all means let the stern grandeur of that rhetoric be lost in flame.
Here is Shakespeare: "indecent passages" everywhere�every drama, every poem thickly inlaid with them; all that men do displayed, sexual acts treated lightly, jested about, mentioned obscenely; the language never bolted; slang, gross puns, lewd words, in profusion. Out with Shakespeare !
Here is the Canticle of Canticles: beautiful, voluptuous poem of love literally, whatever be its mystic significance; glowing with the color, odorous with the spices, melodious with the voices of the East; sacred and exquisite and pure with the burning chastity of passion, which completes and exceeds the snowy chastity of virgins. This to me, but what to the Secretary ? Can he endure that the female form should stand thus in a poem, disrobed, unveiled, bathed in erotic splendor? Look at these voluptuous details, this expression of desire, this amorous tone and glow, this consecration and perfume lavished upon the sensual. No! Out with Solomon !
Here is Isaiah. The grand thunder-roll of that righteousness, like the lion-roar of Jehovah above the guilty world, utters coarse words. Amidst the bolted lightnings of that sublime denunciation, coarse thoughts, indelicate figures, indecent allusions, flash upon the sight, like gross imagery in a midnight landscape. Out with Isaiah !
Here is Montaigne. Open those great, those virtuous pages of the unflinching reporter of man; the soul all truth and daylight, all candor, probity, sincerity, reality, eyesight. A few glances will suflice. Cant and vice and sniffle have groaned over these pages before. Out with Montaigne !
Here is Hafiz, the Anacreon of Persia, but more; a banquet of wine in a garden of roses, the nightingales singing, the laughing revellers high with festal joy; but a heavenly flame burns on every brow; a tone not of this sphere is in all the music, all the laughter, all the songs ; a light of the Infinite trembles over every chalice and rests on every flower; and all the garden is divine. Still when Hafiz cries out, " Bring me wine, and bring the famed
* Mr. Harlan had said that Leaves of Grass ought to be pubUcly burned.
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veiled beauty, the Princess of the brothel," etc., or issues similar orders, Mr. Harlan, whose virtue does not understand or endure such metaphors, must deal sternly with this kosmic man of Persia. Out with Hafiz!
Here is Virgil, ornate and splendid poet of old Rome; a master with a greater pupil, Alighieri�a bard above whose ashes Boccaccio kneels a trader and arises a soldier of mankind. But he must lose those fadeless chaplets, the undying green of a noble fame; for here in the " .^Eneid " is " Dixerat; et niveis hinc atque hinc Diva lacertis," etc., and here in the " Georgics " is " Quo rapiat sitiens Venerem, interiusque recondat," etc., and there are other verses like these. Out with Virgil!
Here is Swedenborg. Open this poem in prose, the " Conjugial Love," to me, a temple, though in ruins; the sacred fane, clothed in mist, filled with moonlight, of a great though broken mind. What spittle of critic epithets stains all here? "Lewd," "sensual," "lecherous," "coarse," "licentious," etc. Of course these judgments are final. There is no appeal from the tobacco-juice of an expectorating and disdainful virtue. Out with Swedenborg!
Here is Goethe: the horrified squealing of prudes is not yet silent over pages of " Wilhelm Meister: " that high and chaste book, the " Elective Affinities," still pumps up oaths from clergymen: Walpurgis has hardly ceased its uproar over Faust. Out with Goethe !
Here is Byron: grand, dark poet; a great spirit�a soul like the ocean; generous lover of America; fiery trumpet of liberty; a sword for the human cause in Greece ; a torch for the human mind in " Cain; " a life that redeemed its every fault by taking a side, which was the human side; tempest of scorn in his first poem, tempest of scorn and laughter in his last poem, only against the things that wrong man; vast bud of the Infinite that Death alone prevented from its vaster flower; immense, seminal, electrical, dazzling Byron. But Beppo�O! But Don Juan�O, fie! Not to mention the Countess Guiccioli�ah, me ! Prepare quickly the yellow envelope, and out with Byron!
Here is Cervantes: open "Don Quixote," paragon of romances, highest result of Spain, best and sufficient reason for her life among the nations, a laughing novel which is a weeping poem. But talk such as this of Sancho Panza and Tummas Cecial under the cork trees, and these coarse stories and bawdy words, and this free and gross comedy�is it to be endured ? Out with Cervantes!
Here is another, a sun of literature, moving in a vast orbit with dazzling plenitudes of power and beauty; the one only modern European poet and novelist worthy to rank with the first; permanent among the fleeting; a demigod of letters among the pigmies; a soul of the antique strength and sadness, worthy to stand as the representative of the high thought and hopes of the Nineteenth century�Victor Hugo. Now open " Les Miserables." See the great passages which the American translator softens and the English translator tears away. Open this other book of his, " William Shakespeare," a book
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with only one grave fault, the omission of the wonls "a Poem" from the title-page ; a book whieh is the eourageous arch, the eompreheiuling sky of criticism, but which no American publisher will dare to issue, or if he does will expurgate. Out with Hugo, of course!
Here is Juvenal, terrible and splendid fountain o\ all satire; inspiration of all just censure; exemplar of all noble rage at baseness; satirist and moralist sublimed into the poet; the scowl of the unclouded noon above the low streets of folly iind of sin. But what he withers, he also shows. The sun-stroke of his poetry reveals what it kills. Juvenal tells all. His fidelity o{ exposure is frightful. Mr. Harlan would make .short work of him. C>ut with Juvenal !
Open the divine " Apocalypse." What words are these among the tluinder-ings and lightnings and voices? Is this a poem to be read aloud in parlors? (for such appeai-s to be the test of propriety and purity). At least, John might have been a little more choice in language. Some of these texts are " indecent." Yes, indeed! John must go !
Here is Spenser. Encyclop;vdic poet of the ideal chivalry. It is all there. Amadis, Esplandian, Tininte the White, Palmerin of England, all those Paladin romances were but the leaves; this is the llower. A lost dream of valor, chastity, courtesy, glory�a dream that marks an age of human history�glimmers here, Iax in these depths, and makes this unexplored obscurity divine. "But is the 'Faery Queen' such a book as you would wish to put into the hands of a lady?" What a question! Has it not been expurgated? Out with Spenser!
Here is another, a true soldier of the human emancipation; one who smites amid uproars of laughter; the master of Titanic farce; a whirlwind and earthquake of derision�Rabelais. A nice one for Mr. Harlan ! One glimpse at the chapter which explains why the miles lengthen as you leave Paris, or at the details of the birth and nurture of Gargantua, will suffice. Out with Rabelais�out with the great jester of France, as Lord Bacon calls him!
And here is Lord Bacon himself, in one of whose pages you may read,* done from the Latin by Spedding into a magnificent golden thuiuler of English, the absolute defence of the free spirit of the great authors, couplcil with stern rebuke to the spirit that would pick and choose, as dastard and circmi-nate. Out with Lord Bacon !
Not him only, not these only, not only the writers are under the ban. Here is Phidias, gorgeous sculptor in gold and ivory, giant dreamer of the Infinite in marble; but he will not use the fig-leaf. Here is Rembrandt, who paints the Holland landscape, the Jew, the beggar, the burgher, in lights and glooms of Eternity; and his pictures have been called " indecent." Here is Mozart, his music rich with the sumptuous color of all sunsets; and it has been called "sensual." Here is Michael Angelo, who makes art tremble with a new and
* Novum Orsnuum; Aphorism CXX.
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strange afflatus, and gives Europe novel and suljlinne forms that tower above the ecnturies, and accost tlie Greek ; and his works have been called" bestial " I Out with them all!
Now, except Virgil, for vassalage to literary moflels, and for grave and sad falsehood to liljcrty; except (ioethc for his lack of the final ecstacy of self-surrender which completes a poet, and for coldness to the great mother, one's country; except Spenser for his remoteness, and Uyron for his immaturity, and there is not one of those I have named that does not belong to the first order of human intellect. But no need to make discriminations here; they are all great; they have all striven; they have all served. Moses, ilomer, Lucretius, /TCschylus, KzekicI, Dante, Job, Plutarch, Herodotus, Tacitus, Shakespeare, Solomon, Isaiah, Montaigne, Ilafiz, Virgil, .Swedenborg, Goethe, I>yron, Cervantes, Hugo, Juvenal, John, Spenser, Rabelais, Jiacon, Phidias, Kemijrandt, Mozart, Angelo�these are among the demi-gods of human tliought; the souls that have loved and suffered for the race; the light-liringers, the teachers, the lawgivers, the consolers, the liberators, the inspired inspirers of mankind; the noble and gracious beings who, in the service of humanity, have borne every cross and earned every crown. There is not one of them that is not sacred in the eyes^of thoughtful men. But not one of them do the rotten taste and morals of the Nineteenth century spare. Not one of them is qualified to render work for bread under this Secretary ! Do I err ? Do I exaggerate? I write without access to the books I mention (it is fitting that this ])iece of insolent barbarism should have been committed in almost the only important American city which is without a public library !j�and with the exception of three or four volumes which I happen to have by me, I am obliged to rely for my statements on the memory of youthful readings, eight or ten years ago. But name me one book of the first order in which such passages as I refer to do not occur 1 Tell me who can�what poet of the first grade escapes this brand " immoral," or this spittle " indecent" ?
If the great books are not, in the point under consideration, in the same moral category as Leaves of Grass, then why, either in translation or in the originals, either by a bold softening which dissolves the author's meaning, or ]jy aljsolute excision, are they nearly all expurgated? Answer me that. By one process or the other, Brizeux, Gary, Wright, Gayley, Carlyle, everybody, expurgates Dante; Langhorne and others exjjurgate Plutarch; Potter and others ex|jurgate Tl-^schylus; Gifford, Anthon and others expurgate Juvenal; Creech, Watson and others expurgate Lucretius; Bowdlcr and others expurgate .Shakesfieare; Nott (I believe it is) expurgates liafiz; Wraxall and Wilbour expurgate Hugo; Kirkland, Hart and others expurgate Spenser; somebody expurgates Virgil; somebody expurgates Byron; the Oxford scholars dilute Tacitus ; Lord Derby expurgates Homer, besides making him as ridiculous as the plucked cock of Diogenes in translation ; several hands expurgate Goethe; and Archbishop Tillotson in design expurgates Moses,
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Ezekiel, Solomon, Isaiah, St. John, and all the others�a job which Dr. 'Noah Webster executes, but, thank God, cannot popularize. What book is spared ? Nothing but a chain of circumstances, which one might fancy divinely ordained, saves us the relatively unmutilated Bible. Nearly every other great book bleeds. When one is not expurgated, the balance is restored by its being cordially abused. Thanks to the splendid conscience and courage of Mr. W^ight, we can read Montaigne in English without the omission of a single word. Thanks also to Smollett, Motteux and others, Cervantes has gone untouched, and we have not as yet a family Rabelais. Neither have we as yet a family Mankind nor a family Universe; but this is an oversight which will, doubtless, be repaired in time. God's works will also, doubtless, be expurgated whenever it is possible. Why not ? One step to this end is taken in the expurgation of Genius, which is His second manifestation, as Nature is His first! Go on, gentlemen! You will yet have things as " moral" as you desire!
I am aware that as far as his opinion, not his act, is concerned, Mr. Harlan, however unintelligently, represents to some extent the shallow conclusions of his age, and I know it will be said that if the great books contain these passages, they ought to be expurgated. It is not my design to endeavor to put a quart into people who only hold a gill, nor would I waste time in endeavoring to convert a large class of persons whom I once heard Walt Wliitman describe, with his usual Titanic richness and strength of phrase, as " the immutable granitic pudding-heads of the world." But there is a better class than these; and 1 am filled with measureless amazement, that persons of high intelligence, living to the age of maturity, do not perceive, at least, the immense and priceless scientific and human uses of such passages, and the consequent necessity, transcending and quashing all minor considerations, of having them where they are. But look at these sad sentences�a complete and felicitous statement of the whole modern doctrine�in the pages of a man I love and revere: " The literature of three centuries ago is not decent to be read; we expurgate it. Within a hundred years, woman has become a reader, and for that reason, as much as, or more than, anything else, literature has sprung to a higher level. No need now to expurgate all you read." He goes on to argue that literature in the next century will be richer than in the classic epochs, because woman will contribute to it as an author� her contribution, I infer, to be of the kind that will not need expurgating. These, I repeat, are sad sentences. If they are true, Bowdler is right to expurgate Shakespeare, and Noah Webster the Bible. But no, they are not true! I welcome woman into art; but when she comes there grandly, she will not come either as expurgator or creator of emasculate or partial forms. Woman, grand in art, is Rosa Bonheur, painting with fearless pencil the surly, sublime Jovian bull, equipped for masculine use; painting the powerful, ramping stallion in his amorous pride; not weakly nor meanly flinch-
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ing from the full celebration of what God has made. Woman, grand in art, will come creating in forms, however novel, the absolute, the permanent, the real, the evil and the good, as yEschylus, as Cervantes, as Shakespeare before her; with sex, with truth, witli universality, without omissions or concealments. And woman, as the ideal reader of literature, is not the indelicate prude, flushing and squealing over some frank page; it is that high and beautiful soul, Marie de Gournay, devoutly absorbing the work of her master Montaigne, finding it all great, greatly comprehending, greatly accepting it all; fronting its license and grossness without any of the livid shuddering of Puritans, and looking on the book in the same universal and kindly spirit as its author looked upon the world. Woman reading otherwise than thus�shrinking from Apulcius, from Rabelais, from Aristophanes, from Shakespeare, from even Wycherlcy, or Pctronius, or Aretin,or Shirley�is less than man, is not ideal, not strong, not nobly good, but petty, and effeminate, and mean. And not for her, nor by her, nor by man, do I assent to the expurgation of the great books. Literature cannot spring to a higher level than theirs. Alas! it has sprung to a lower.
The level of the great books is the Infinite, the Absolute. To contain all, by containing the premise, the truth, the idea and feeling of all, to tally the universe by profusion, variety, reality, mystery, enclosure, power, terror, beauty, service; to be great to the utmost conceivability of greatness�what higher level than this can literature spring to? Up on the highest summit stand such works, never to be surpassed, never to be supplanted. Their indecency is not that of the vulgar; their vulgarity is not that of the low. Their evil, if it be evil, is not there for nothing�it serves; at the base of it is Love. Every poet of the highest quality is, in the masterly coinage of the author of Leaves of Grass, a kosmos. His work, like himself, is a second world, full of contrarieties, strangely harmonized, and moral indeed, but only as the world is moral. Shakespeare is all good", Rabelais is all good, Montaigne is all good, not because all the thoughts, the words, the manifestations are so, but because at the core, and permeating all, is an ethic intention�a love which, through mysterious, indirect, subtle, seemingly absurd, often terrible and repulsive, means, seeks to uplift, and never to degrade. It is the spirit in which authorship is pursued, as Augustus Schlcgel has said, that makes it either an infamy or a virtue; and the spirit of the great authors, no matter what their letter, is one with that which pervades the Creation. In mighty love, with implements of pain and pleasure, of good and evil. Nature develops man; genius also, in mighty love, with implements of pain and pleasure, of good and evil, develops man; no matter what the means, that is the end.
Tell me not, then, of the indecent passages of the great poets ! The world, which is the poem of God, is full of indecent passages! " Shall there be evil •' in a city and the Lord hath not done it ?" shouts Amos. " I form the light.
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"aiul create ilaikness; I make peace, and create evil; I, the Lonl, ilo all these " things," thunders Isaiah. " This," says Coleridge, " is the deep abyss of the •'mystery of God." Ay, and the profound of the mystery of genius also! Evil is part of the economy of genius, as it is part of the economy of Deity. Gentle reviewers endeavor to find excuses for the freedoms of geniuses. " It is to prove that they were above conventionalities." " It is referable to the age." " The age permitted a degree of coarseness," etc. " Shakespeare's indecencies are the result of his age." Oh, Ossa on Pelion, mount piled on mount, of error and folly! Wliat has genius, spirit of the absolute and the eternal, to do with the detlnitions of position, or conventionalities, or tli£ age ? Genius puts indecencies into its works, because God puts them into His world. Whatever the special reason in each case, this is the general reason in all cases. They are here, because they are there. That is the eternal why.�No; Aljjhonso of Castile thought that, if he had been consulted at the Creation, he could have given a few hints to the Almighty. Not I. I play Alphonso neither to genius nor to God.
What is this poem, for the giving of which to America and the world, and for that alone, Its author has been dismissed with ignominy from a Government crtice ? It is a poem which Schiller might have hailed as the noblest specimen of naive literature, worthy of a place beside Homer. It is, in the first place, a work purely and entirely American, autochthonic, sprung from our own soil; no savor of Europe nor of the past, nor of any other literature in it; a vast carol of our own land, and of its Present and Future ; the strong and haughty psalm of the Republic. There is not one other book, I care not whose, of which this can be said. I weigh my words and have considered well. Every other book by an American author implies, both in form and substance, I cannot even say the European, but the British mind. The shadow of Temple Bar and Arthur's Seat lies dark on all oim" letters. Intellectually, we are still a dependency of Great Britain, and one word�colonial�eompreheiuls and stamps our literature. In no literary form, except our newspapers, has there been anything distinctively American. I note our best books�the works of Jefferson, the romances of Brockden Brown, the speeches of Webster, Everett's rhetoric, the divinity of Channing, some of Cooper's novels, the writings of Theodore Parker, the poetry of Bryant, the masterly law arguments of Ly-sander Spooner, the miscellanies of Margaret Fuller, the histories of Hil-dreth, Bancroft and Motley, Ticknor's "•History of Spanish Literature," Judd's " Margaret," the political treatises of Calhoun, the rich, benignant poems of Longfellow, the ballads of Whittier, the delicate songs of Philip Pendleton Cooke, the weird poetry of Eilgar Poe, the wizard tales of Hawthorne, Irving's " Knickerbocker," Delia Bacon's splendid sibyllic book on Shakespeare, the polilical economy of Carey, the prison letters ami immortal speech of John Brown, the lofty patrician eloi^ucnce of Wendell Phillips, and
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those (liamonfls of the first water, the {^reat clear essays and greater poems of Emerson. This literature has often commandinir merits, and much of it is very precious to me ; but in respect to its national character, all that can be said is that it is tinged, more or less deeply, with America; and the foreign model, the foreign standards, the foreign ideas, dominate over it all.
At most, our best books were but struggling beams; behold in Leaves of Grass the immense and absolute sunrise! It is all our own ! The nation is in it! In form a series of chants, in substance it is an epic of America. It is distinctively and utterly American. Without model, without imitation, without reminiscence, it is evolved entirely from our own polity and popular life. Look at what it celebrates and contains! hardly to be enumerated without sometimes using the powerful, wondrous phrases of its author, so indissoluble are they with the things described. The essences, the events, the objects of America; the myriad varied landscapes; the teeming and giant cities; the generous and turbulent populations; the prairie solitudes, the vast pastoral plateaus; the Mississippi; the land dense with villages and farms; the habits, manners, customs; the enormous diversity of temperatures; the immense geography; the red aborigines passing away, " charging the water and the land with names;" the early settlements; the sudden uprising and defiance of the Revolution; the august figure of Washington; tlie formation and sacredness of the Constitution ; the pouring in of the emigrants; the million-masted harbors; the general opulence and comfort; the fisheries, and whaling, and gold-digging, and manufactures, and agriculture; the dazzling movement of new States, rushing to be great; Nevada rising, Dakota rising, Colorado rising; the tumultuous civilization around and beyond the Rocky Mountains, thundering and spreading; the Union impregnable; feudalism in all its forms forever tracked and assaulted; liberty deathless on these shores; the noble and free character of the people; the equality of male and female; the ardor, the fierceness, the friendship, the dignity, the enterprise, the affection, the courage, the love of music, the passion for personal freedom; the mercy and justice and compassion of the people; the popular faults and vices and crimes; the deference of the President to the private citizen; the image of Christ forever deepening in the public mind as the brother of despised and rejected persons; the i)romise and wild song of the future; the vision of the Federal Mother, seated with more than antique majesty in the midst of her many children; the pouring glories of the hereafter; the vistas of sjilendor, incessant and branching; the tremendous elements, breeds, adjustments of America� ■with all these, with more, with everything transcendent, amazing, and new, undimmed by the pale cast of thought, and with the very color and brawn of actual life, the whole gigantic epic of our continental being unwinds in all its magnificent reality in these pages. To understand Greece, study the " Iliad" and " Odyssey;" study Leaves of Grass to understand America. Her democracy is there. Would you have a text-book of democracy ? The writings of
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JcfTerson are good; Dc Tociiuevillc is better; but tlic great poet always contains liislorian and pliilosoplior�and to know the comproliending spirit of tills country, you shall question these insulted pages.
Yet this vast and patriotic celebration and presentation of all that is our own, is but a part of this tremendous volume. Herein addition is thrown in poetic form, a philosophy of life, rich, subtle, composite, ample, adequate to these great shores. Here are presented superb types of models of manly and womanly character for the future of this country, athletic, large, naive, free, dauntless, haughty, loving, nobly carnal, nobly spiritual, equal in body and soul, acceptive and tolerant as Nature, generous, cosmopolitan, above all, religious. Here arc erected standards, drawn from the circumstances of our case, by which not merely our literature, but all our performance, our politics, art, behavior, love, conversation, dress, society, everything belonging to our lives and their conduct, will be shaped and recreated. A powerful alllatus from the Infinite has given this book life. A voice which is the manliest of human voices sounds through it all. In it is the strong spirit which will surely mould our future. Mark my words: its sentences will yet clinch the arguments of statesmen ; its precepts will be the laws of the people ! From the beams of this seminal sun will be generated, with tropical luxuriance, the myriad new forms of thought and life in America. And in view of the national character and national purpose of this work�in view of its vigorous re-enforcement and service to all that we hold most ]irccious�I make the claim here, that so far from defaming and persecuting its author, the attitude of an American statesman or public officer towards him should be to the highest degree friendly and sustaining.
Beyond his country, too, this poet serves the world. He refutes by his example the saying of Goethe, one of those which stain that noble fame with baseness, that a great poet cannot be patriotic; and he dilates to a universal use which redoubles the splendors of his volume, and makes it dear to all that is human. I am not its authorized interpreter, and can only state, at the risk of imperfect expression and perhaps error, what its meanings and purpose seem to me. But I see that, in his general intention, the author has aimed to express that most common but wondrous thing�that strange assemblage of soul, body, intellect�beautiful, mystical, terrible, limited, boundless, ill-assorted, contradictory, yet singularly harmonized�a Human Being, a single, separate identity�a Man�himself; but himself typically, and in his universal being. This he has done with perfect candor, including the bodily attributes and organs as necessary component parts of the creation. Every thinking ]')erson should see the value and use of such a presentation of human nature as this. I also see�antl it is from these parts of the book that much of the misunderstanding and otTence arises�that this poet seeks in subtle ways to rescue from the keeping of blackguards and debauchees, to which it has been abandoned, and to redeem to noble thought and use, the great element
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of amativcness or sexuality, with all its acts and organs. Sometimes by direct asscrtirtn, sometimes by implication, lie rejects tlie prevailing admission that this element is vile; declares its natural or normal manifestation to be sacred and unworthy shame; awards it an equal but not superior sanctity with the other elements that compose man; and illustrates his doctrine and sets his example by applying this element, with all that pertains to it, to use as jjart of the imagery of poetry. Then, besides, diffused like an atmosphere throughout the poem, tincturing all its quality, and giving it that sacerdotal and prophetic character which makes it a sort of American Bible, is the pronounced and ever-recurring assertion of the divinity of all things. In a sjiirit like that of the Egyptian ])riesthood, who wore the dung-beetle in gold on their crests, perhaps as a symbol of the sacrednessof even the lowest forms of life, the poet celebrates all the Creation as noble and holy�the meanest and lowest parts of it, as well as the most lofty; all equally projections of the Infinite; all emanations of the creative life of God. Perpetual hymns break from him in praise of the divineness of the universe; he sees a halo around every shape, however low; and life in all its forms inspires a rapture of worship.
How some persons can think a book of this sort bad, is clearer to me than it used to be. Swedenborg says that to the devils, perfumes are stinks. I happen to know that some of the vilest abuse Leaves of Grass has received, has come from men of the lowest possible moral life. It is not so easy to understand how some persons of culture and judgment can fail to perceive its literary greatness. Making fair allowance for faults, which no great work, from " Ilamlet" to the world itself, is perhaps without, the book, in form as in substance, seems to me a masterpiece. Never in literature has there been more absolute conccptive or presentative power. The forms and shows of things are bodied forth so that one may say they become visible, and are alive. Here, in its grandest, freest use, is the English language, from its lowest compass to the top of the key; from the powerful, rank idiom of the streets and fields to the last subtlety of academic speech�ami)le, various, telling, luxuriant, pictorial, final, conquering; absorbing from other languages to its own purposes their choicest terms; its rich and daring composite defying grammar; its most incontestable and splendid trium|jhs achieved, as Jefferson notes of the superb Latin of Tacitus, in haughty scorn of the rules of grammarians. Another singular excellence is the metre�entirely novel, free, flexible, melodious, corresponsive to the thought; its noble proportions and cadences reminding of winds and waves, and the vast elemental sounds and motions of Nature, and having an equal variety and liberty. I have heard this brought into disparaging comparison with the metres of Tennyson; the poetry also disparaged in the same connection. I hardly know what to think of people who can talk in this way. To say nothing of the preference, the mere parallel is only less ludicrous and arbitrary than would be one between Moore and Isaiah. Tennyson is an exquisite and sumptuous poet of the third,
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perhaps the fourth order, as certainly below Milton and Virgil as Milton and Virgil are certainly below .^schylus and Honaer. His full-fluted verbal music, which is one of his chief merits, is of an extraordinary beauty. But in this respect the comparison between him and Walt Whitman is that between melody and harmony�between a song by Franz Abt or Schubert and a symphony by Beethoven. Speaking generally, and not with exact justice to either, the words of Tennyson, irrespective of their sense, make music to the ear, while the sense of Walt Whitman's words makes a loftier music in the mind. For a music, perfect and vast, subtle and more than auricular�woven not alone from the verbal sounds and rhythmic cadences, but educed by the thought and feeling of the verse from the reader's soul by the power of a spell few hold�I know of nothing superior to " By the Bivouac's fitful flame," the " Ashes of Soldiers," the " Spirit whose Work is done," the prelude to " Drum Taps," that most mournful and noble of all love songs, •Out of the Rolling Ocean,the Crowd," or "Outofthe Cradle endlessly Rocking," " Elemental Drifts," the entire section entitled " Song of Myself," the hymn commencing " Splendor of Falling Day," or the great salute to the French Revolution of '93, entitled " France." If these are not examples of great structural harmony as well as of the highest poetry, there are none in literature. And if all these were wanting, there is a poem in the volume which, if the author had never written another line, would be sufficient to place him among the chief poets of the world. I do not refer to " Chanting the Square Deific," though that also would be sufficient, in its incomparable breadth and grandeur of conception and execution, to establish the highest poetic reputation, but to the strain commemorating the death of the beloved President, commencing " When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed," a poem whose rich and sacred beauty and rapture of tender religious passion, spreading aloft into the sublime, leave it unique and solitary in literature, and will make it the chosen and immortal hymn of Death forever. Emperors might well elect to die, could their memories be surrounded with such a requiem, which, next to the grief and love of the people, is the grandest and the only grand funeral music poured around Lincoln's bier.
In the face of works like these, testimony of the presence on earth of a mighty soul, I am thunderstruck at the low tone of the current criticism. Even from eminent persons, who ought to know how to measure literature, and who are friendly to this author, I hear, mingled with inadequate praises, the self-same censures�the very epithets even which Voltaire not more ridiculously passed on Shakespeare. Take care, gentlemen ! What you, like Voltaire, take for rudeness, chaos, barbarism, lack of form, may be the sacred and magnificent wildness of a virgin world of poetry, all unlike these fine and ordered Tennysonian rose-gardens which are your ideal, but excelling these as the globe excels the parterre. I, at any rate, am not deceived. I see how swiftly the smart, bright conventional standards of modern criticism
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would assign Isaiah or Ezekiel to the limbo of abortions. I see of how limited worth are the wit and scholarship of these "Saturday Reviews" and "London Examiners," with their doppelgangers on this side of the Atlantic, by the treatment some poetic masterpiece of China or Hindustan receives when it falls into their hands for judgment. Anything not cast in modern conventional forms, any novel or amazing beauty, strikes them as comic. Read Mr. Buckley's notes, even at this late day, on a poet so incredibly great as ^^schylus. Read an yEschylus illustrated by reference to Nicholas Nickle-by, Mrs. Bombazine, and Mantalini, and censured in contemptuous, jocular or flippant annotations�this, too, by an Oxford scholar of rank and merit. No wonder Leaves of Grass goes underrated or unperceived. Modern criticism is Voltaire estimating the Apocalypse as " dirt," and roaring with laughter over the leaves of Ezekiel. Why ? Because this poetry has not the court tread, the perfume, the royal purple of Racine�only its own wild and formless incomparable sublimity. Voltaire was an immense and noble person; only it was not part of his greatness to be able to see that other greatness which transcends common sense as the Infinite transcends the Finite. These children of Voltaire, also, who make the choirs of modern criticism, have great merits. But to justly estimate poetry of the first order is not one of them. "Shakespeare's 'Tempest' or 'Midsummer Night's Dream,'or any " such damned nonsense as that," said one of this school to me a month aero. " Look at that perpendicular grocery sign-board, tlie letters all fantastic and reading from top to bottom, a mere oddity: that is Leaves of Grass,'' said another, a person of eminence. No, gentlemen! you and I differ. I see, very clearly, the nature of a work like this, the warmest praise of which, not to mention your blame, has been meagre and insufficient to the last degree, and which centuries must ponder before they can sufficiently honor. You have had your say; let me have at least the beginning of mine: Nothing that America had before in literature rose above construction; this is a creation. Idle, and worse than idle, is any attempt to place this author either among or below the poets of the day. They are but singers; he is a bard. In him you have one of that mighty brotherhood who, more than statesmen, mould the future; who, as Fletcher of Saltoun said, when they make the songs of a nation, it matters not who makes the laws. I class him boldly, and the future will confirm my judgment, among the great creative minds of the world. By a quality almost incommunicable, which makes its possessor, no matter what his diversity or imperfections, equal with the Supremes of art, and by the very structure of his mind, he belongs there. His place is beside Shakespeare, ^schylus, Cervantes, Dante, Homer, Isaiah�the bards of the last ascent, the brothers of the radiant summit. And if any man think this estimate extravagant, I leave him, as Lord Bacon says, to the gravity of that judgment, and pass on. Enough for me to pronounce this book grandly good and supremely great. Clamor, on the score of its morality, is nothing but a form of turpi-
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tude; denial of its greatness is nothing but an insanity; and the roar of Sodom and tlie laughter of IJedlam shall not, by a iiair's breadtli, swerve my verdict.
As for those jxissages wliich liave been so strangely interpreted, I have to say that nothing but the horrible inanity of prudery, to which civilization has become subject, and which atVects even many good persons, could cloud and distort their palpable innocence and nobleness. What chance has an author to a reasonable interpretation of such utterances in an age when squeamish-ness, the Siamese twin-brother of indelicacy, is throned as the censor of all life ? Look at the nearest, the commonest, and homeliest evidences of the abysm into which we have fallen. Here in my knowledge is an estimable family which, when the baby playing cvji the tloor kicked up its skirts, 1 have repeatedly seen rush en masse to pull down the immodest petticoat. Here is a lady whose shame of her body is such tliat she will not disrobe in tlie presence of one of her own sex, and thinks it horrible to sleep at night witiiout being swaddled in half her garments. Everywhere you see women perpetually glancing to be sure their skirts are quite down; twisting their heads over their shoulders, like some of the damned in Dante, to get a rear view; drawing in their feet if so much as a toe happens to protrude beyond the hem of the gown, and in various ways betraying a morbid consciousness which is more offensive than positive immodesty. When I went to the hospital, I saw one of those pretty and good girls, who in muslin and ribbons ornament the wards, and are called " nurses," pick up her skirts and skurry away, Hushing hectic, •with averted face, because as she passed a cot the poor fellow who lay there happened, in his uneasy turnings, to thrust part of a manly leg from beneath the coverlet. I once heaid Enierson severely censured in a private company, five or six pereons present, and I the only dissenting voice, bcc.uiso in one of his essays he had used the word "spermatic." When Tennyson publi>hed the " Idyls of the King," some of the journals in both America and England, and several persons in my own hearing, censured the weird and magniliceut •'Vivien," one of his finest poems, as "immoral" and "vulgar." When Charles Sumner, in the debate on Louisiana, characterized the new-lormeil State as " a seven months' child, begotten by the bayonet, in criminal conjunction with the spirit of caste"�a stroke of absolute genius�lie was censured by the public prints, and reminded that therp were ladies in the gallery 1 Lately the " London Observer," one of the most eminent of the British journals, in a long and labored editorial on the bathing at Margate, denounced the British wives and matrons in the severest terms for sitting on the beach when men were bathing in "slight bathing-dresses" (it was not even pretended that the men were nude)�and even went the length of demanding of the civil authorities that they sliould invoke the interference of Parliament to stop this scandal I Thesfi are fair minor specimens of the prudery, worse than vice, but also the concomitant of tiie most shocking vice, which
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prevails everywhere. Its travesty is the dressing in pantalettes the " limbs " of the piano; its insolent tragicomedy is the expulsion of Shakespeare from office because he writes " indecent passages " ; its tragedy is the myriad results of wrong, and crime, and ruin, carried fnto all the details of every relation of life.
A civilization in which such things as I have mentioned can be thought or done is guilty to the core. It is not purity, it is impurity, which calls clothes more decent than the naked body�thus inanely conferring upon the work of the tailor or milliner a modesty denied to the work of God. It is not innocent but guilty thought which attaches shame, secrecy, baseness, and horror to great and august parts and functions of humanity. The tacit admission everywhere prevalent that portions of the human physiology are base; that the amative feelings and acts of the sexes, even when hallowed by marriage, are connected with a low sensuality; and that these, with such subjects or occurrences as the conception and birth of children, are to be absconded from, blushed at, concealed, ignored, withheld from education, and in every way treated as if they belonged to the category of sins agaiast Nature, is not only in itself a contemptible insanity, but a main source of unspeakable personal and social evil. From the morbid state of mind which such a theory and practice must induce are spawned a thousand guilty actions of every description and degree. There is no occurrence in the vast and diversified range of sexual evil, from the first lewd thought in the mind of the budding child, the very suspicion of which makes the parent tremble, down to the last ghastly and bloody spasm of lust which rends its hapless victim in some suburban woodland, that is not fed mainly from this mystery and mother of abominations, to whose care civilization has remitted the entire subject. The poet who, in the spirit of that divine utility which marked the first great bards and will mark the last, seeks to make literature remediate to an estate like this, works in the best interests of his country and his fellow-beings, and deserves their gratitude. This is what Walt Whitman has done. Directly and indirectly, in forms as various as the minds he seeks to influence; in frank opposition to the great sexual falsehood by which we are ruled and ruined, he has thrown into civilization a conception intended to be slowly and insensibly absorbed, and to ultimately appear in results of good�the conception of the individual as a divine democracy of essences, powers, attributes, functions, organs�all equal, all sacred, all consecrate to noble use; the sexual part the same as the rest, no more a subject for mystery, or shame, or secrecy, than the intellectual, or the manual, or the alimentary, or the locomotive part �divinely commonplace as head, or hand, or stomach, or foot; and, though sacred, to be regarded as so ordinary that it shall be employed the same as any other part, for the purposes of literature�an idea which he exemplifies in his poetry by a metaphorical use which it is a deep disgrace to any intellect to misunderstand. This is his lesson. This is one of the central ideas which
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rule the myriad teeming play of his vohime, and interpret it as a law of Nature interprets the complex play of facts which proceeds Iroiu it. This, then, is not license, but thought. It may be erroneous, it may be chimerical, it may be ineffectual; but it is thought, serious and solemn thouglit, on a most diflicult and deeply immersed question�thought emanating from the deep source of a great love and care for men, and seeking nothing but a pure human welfare. When, therefore, any persons undertake to outrage and injure its author for having given it to the world, it is not merely as the pigmy incarnations of the depraved modesty, the surface morality, the filthy and libidinous decency of the age, but it is as the persecutors of thought that they stand before us. It is no excuse for them to say, that such treatment of Walt Whitman is justifiable, because his book appears to them bad. Waiving every other consideration, I have to inform them that on this subject they should not permit themselves the immodesty of a judgment. It is not for such as they to attempt to prison in the poor cell of their t)pinion the vast journey and illumination of the human mind. No matter what the book seems to them, they should remember that an author deserves to be tried by his peers, and that a book may easily seem to some persons quite another thing from what it really is to others.
Here is Rabelais, a writer who wears all the crowns; but even Mr. Harlan would consider Walt Whitman white as purity beside him. " Filth," " zany-ism," "grossness," "profligacy," "licentiousness," "sensuality," "beastliness"�these are samples of the epithets which have fallen, like a rain of excrement, on Rabelais for three hundred years. And yet it is of him that the holy-hearted Coleridge�an authority of the first order on all purely literary or ethical questions�it is of him that Coleridge says, and says justly: " I " could write a treatise in praise of the moral elevation of Rabelais' work " which would make the Church stare, and the Conventicle groan, and yet " would be the truth, and nothing but the truth." The moral elevation of Rabelais! A great criticism, a needed word. It is just. No matter for seeming�Rabelais is good to the very core. Rabelais' book, viewed with reference to ensemble, viewed in relation, viewed in its own proper quality by other than cockney stanilards, is righteous to the uttermost extreme. So is the work of Walt NVhitman, far other in character, and far less obnoxious to criticism than that of Rabelais, but which demands at least as liberal a judgment, and which it is not for any deputy, however high in ofillce, to assign to shame.
I know not what further vicissitude of insult and outrage is in store for this great man. It may be that the devotees of a castrated literature, the earthworms that call themselves authors, the confectioners that pass for poets, the flies that are recognized as critics, the bigots, the dilettanti, the prudes and the fools, are more potent than I dream to mar the fortunes of his earthly hours; but above and beyond them uprises a more majestic civilization in the
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immense and sane serenities of futurity; and the man who has achieved ihat sublime thing, a genuine book ; who has written to make his land greater, her citizens Ijetter, his race nobler; who has striven to serve men by communicating to them that wiiich they least know, their own nature, their own experience; who has thrown into living verse a philosopliy designed to exalt life to a higher level of sincerity, reality, religion ; who has torn away disguises and illusions, and restored to commonest things, and the simplest and roughest people, their divine significance and natural, antique dignity, and who has wrapped his country and all created things as with splendors of sunrise, in the beams of a powerful and gorgeous poetry�that man, whatever be the clouds that close around his fame, is assured illustrious; and when every face lowers, when every hand is raised against him, turning his back upon his day and generation, he may write upon his book, with all the pride and grief of the calumniated /Eschylus, the haughty dedication that poet graved upon his hundred dramas: To TiMli!
And Time will remember him. lie holds upon the future this supreme claim of all high poets�behind the book, a life loyal to humanity. Never, if I can help it, shall be forgotten those immense and divine labors in the hospitals of Washington, among the wounded of the war, to which he voluntarily devoted himself, as the best service he could render to his struggling country, and which illustrate that boundless love which is at once the dominant element of his character, and the central source of his genius. How can I tell the nature and extent of that sublime ministration ? During those years, Washington was a city in whose unbuilt places and around whose borders were thickly planted dense white clusters of barracks. These were the hospitals�neat, orderly, rectangular, strange towns, whose every citizen lay drained with sickness or wrung with pain. There, in those long wards, in rows of cots on either side, were stretched, in all attitudes and aspects of mutilation, of pale repose, of contorted anguish, of death, the martyrs of the war; and among them, with a soul that tenderly remembered the little children in many a dwelling mournful for those fathers, the worn and anxious wives, haggard with thinking of those husbands, the girls weeping their spirits from their eyes for those lovers, the mothers who from afar yearned to the bedsides of those sons, walked Walt Whitman, in the spirit of Christ, soothing, healing, consoling, restoring, night and day, for years; never failing, never tiring, constant, vigilant, faithful; performing, without fee or reward, his self-imposed duty; giving to the task all his time and means, and doing everything that it is possible for one unaided human being to do. Others fail, others flag; good souls that came often and did their best, yield and drop away; he remains. Winter and summer, night and day, every day in the week, every week in the year, all the time, till the winter of '65, when for a few hours daily, during six months, his duties to the Government detain him; after that, all the time he can spare, he vibits the hospitals. What does
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he do ? See. At the red aceldama of Fredericksburg, in '62-'3, he is in a hospital on the banks of the Rappahannock; it is a large, brick house, full of wounded and dying; in front, at the foot of a tree, is a cart-load of amputated legs, arms, hands, feet, fingers; dead bodies shrouded in army blankets are near; there are fresh graves in the yard; he is at work in the house amang the officers and men, lying, unclean and bloody, in their old clothes; he is upstairs and down; he is poor, he has nothing to give this time, but he writes letters for the wounded ; he cheers up the desponding; he gives love. Some of the men, war-sad, passionately cling to him; they weep; he will sit for hours with them if it gives them comfort. Here he is in Washington, after Chancellorsville, at night, on the wharf; two boatloads of wounded (and oh, such wounded!) have been landed; they lie scattered about on the landing, in the rain, drenched, livid, lying on the ground, on old quilts, on blankets; their heads, their limbs bound in bloody rags; a few torches light the scene; the ambulances, the callous drivers are here; groans, sometimes a scream, resound through the flickering light and the darkness. He is there, moving around; he soothes, he comforts, he consoles, he assists to lift the wounded into the ambulances; he helps to place the worst cases on the stretchers; his kiss is warm upon the pallid lips of some who are mere children; his tears drop upon the faces of the dying. Here he is in the hospitals of Washington�the Campbell, the Patent Office, the Eighth Street, the Judiciary, the Carver, the Douglas, the Armory Square. He writes letters; he writes to fathers, mothers, brothers, wives, sweethearts; some of the soldiers are poor penmen; some cannot get paper and envelopes; some fear to write lest they should worry the folks at home; he writes for them all; he uses that genius which shall endure to the latest generation, to say the felicitous, the consoling, the cheering, the prudent, the best word. He goes through the wards, he talks cheerfully, he distributes amusing reading matter; at night or by day, when the horrible monotony of the hospital weighs like lead on every soul, he reads to the men; he is careful to sit away from the cot of any poor fellow so sick or wounded as to be easily disturbed, but he gathers into a large group as many as he can, and amuses them with some story or enlivening game, like that of " Twenty Questions," or recites some little poem or speech, or starts some discussion, or with some device dispels the gloom. For his daily occupation, he goes from ward to ward, doing all he can to hearten and revive the spirits of the sufferers, and keep the balance in favor of their recovery. Usually, his plan is to pass, with haversack strapped across his shoulder, from cot to cot, distributing small gifts; his theory is that these men, far from home, lonely, sick at heart, need more than anything some practical token that they are not forsaken, that some one feels a fatherly or brotherly interest in them; hence, he gives them what he can; to particular cases, entirely penniless, he distributes small sums of money, fifteen cents, twenty cents, thirty cents, fifty cents, not much to each, for there are many, but under
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the circumstances these little sums are and mean a great deal. He also distributes and directs envelopes, gives letter paper, postage stamps, toliacco, apples, figs, sweet biscuit, preserves, blackberries; gets delicate food for special cases; sometimes a disli of oysters or a dainty piece of meat, or some savory morsel for some poor creature who loathes the hospital fare, but whose appetite may be tempted. In the hot weather he buys boxes of oranges and distributes them, grateful to lips baked with fever; he buys boxes of lemons, he buys sugar, to make lemonade for those parched throats of sick soldiers; he buys canned peaches, strawberries, pears; he buys ice cream and treats the whole hospital; he buys whatever luxuries his limited resources will allow, and he makes them go as far as he can. Where does he get the means for this expenditure? For Walt Whitman is poor; he is poor, and has a right to be proud of his poverty, for it is the sacred, the ancient, the immemorial poverty of goodness and genius. He gels the means by writing for newspapers; he expends all he gets upon his boys, his darlings, the sick and maimed soldiers�the young heroes of tlie land who saved their country, the laborers of America who fought for the hopes of the world. He adds to his own earnings the contributions of noble souls, often strangers, who, in Boston, in New York, in Providence, in Brooklyn, in Salem, in Washington and elsewhere, have heard that such a man walks the hospitals, and who volunteer to send him this assistance; when at last he gets a place under Government, and till Mr. Harlan turns him out, he has a salary which he spends in the same way; sometimes his wrung heart gets the better of his prudence, and he spends till he himself is in difficulties. He gives all his money, he gives all his time, he gives all his love. To every inmate of tlie hospital something, if only a vital word, a cheering touch, a caress, a trifling gift; but always in his rounds he selects the special cases, the sorely wounded, the deeply despondent, the homesick, the dying; to these he devotes himself; he buoys them up with fond words, with caresses, with personal affection; he bends over them, strong, clean, cheerful, perfumed, loving, and his magnetic touch and love sustain them. He does not shrink from the smell of their sickening gangrene; he does not flinch from their bloody and rotten mutilations; he drawsnigher for all that; he sticks closer; he dresses those wounds; he fans those burning temples ; he moistens those parched lips; he washes tliose wasted bodies; he watches often and often in the dim ward by the sufferer's cot all night long; he reads from the New Testament, the words sweeter than music to the sinking soul; he soothes with prayer the bedside of the dying; he sits, mournful and loving, by the wasted dead. How can I tell the story of his labors? How can I describe the scenes among which he moved with such endurance and devotion, watched by me, for years?
Few know the spectacle presented by those grim wards. It was hideous. I have been there at night when it seemed that I should die with sympathy if I stayed;�when the horrible attitudes of anguish, the horizontal shapes of
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cndnvcr on the white cots, the quiet sleepers, the excruciated emaciations of men, the hlooily handages, the snioU of iiUisteicd sores, the dim h\niplij;ht, tlie king white ward, the groans of some patient half hidden bchiiul a screen, naked, shorn of both arms, hehl by the assistant upon a stool, made up a scene whose well-compounded horror is unspeakable. Now realize a man witluuit worKily inducement, without reward, from love and compassion only, giving up his life to scenes like these; foregoing pleasure and rest for vigils, as in chambers of torture, among the despairing, the mangled, the dying, the forms upon which shell and rifle and sabre had wrought every bizarre atrocity of mutilation; immuring himself in tlie air of their sighs, their moans, the mutter and scream of their delirium ; breathing the stench of their putrid wounds ; taking up his part and lot with them, living a life of ]irivation and denial, and hoarding his scanty means for the relief and mitigation of their anguish. That man is Walt Whitman! I said his labors have been immense. The word is well chosen. 1 sj^eak within bounds wlien I say that, during those years, he has been in contact w itii, ami, in one form or another, either in hospital or on the held, personally ministered to upward of one hundred thousand sick and wounded men. You mothers of America,these were your sons! Faithfully, and with a mother's love, he tended them for you ! Many and many a life has he saved�many a time has he felt his heart grow great with that delicious triumph�many a home owes its best beloved to him. Sick and wounded, officers and privates, the black soldiers as well as the white, the teamsters, the poor creatures in the contraband camps, the rebel the same as the lo) al�he dill his best for them all; they were all sulTerers, they were all men.�Let him pass. I note Thoreau's saying, that he suggests something more than human. It is true. I see it in his book and in his life. To that something more than lunuan which is also in all men�to the hour of judgment, to the hour of sanity, let me resign him. Not for such as I to vindicate such as he. Not for him, perhaps, the recognition of his day and generation. But a life and deeds like his, lightly esteemed by men, sink deep into the memory of Man. Great is the stormy fight of Zutphen; it is the young lion of English Protestantism springing in haughty fury for the defence of the Netherlands from the bloody ravin of Spain; but Philip Sidney passing the llask of water from his own lips lo tiie dying soldier looms gigantic, and makes all the foregrc.uiid of its noble purpose and martial rage; and whatever be the verdict of tlie yresent, sure am I that hereafter and to the latest ages, when Bull Run and Shiloh and Port Hudson, when Vicksburg and Stone River and Fort Donel-son, when Pea Ridge and Chancellorsville and Gettysburg and the Wilderness, and the great march from Atlanta to Savannah, and Richmond rolled in flame, and all the battles for the life of the Republic against her last internal foe are gathered up in accumulated terraces of struggle upon the mountain of history, well-relieved against those bright and bloody tumultuous giant tableaux, ami all the ilust and thunder of a noble war, the men and women
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of America will love to gaze upon the stalwart form of the good gray poet, bending to heal the hurts of their wounded and soothe the souls of their dying, and the deep and simjile words of the last great martyr will be theirs,� " Well, he looks like A man."
So let me leave him. And if there be any who think this tribute in bad taste, even to a poet so great, a person so unusual, a man so heroic and loving, I answer, that when, on grounds of taste, foes withhold detraction, friends may withhold eulogy; and that at any rate I recognize no reason f(jr keeping back just words of love and reverence when, as in this case, they must glow upon the sullen foil of the printed hatreds of years. To that long record of hostility, I am only proud to be able to oppose this record of affection. And with respect to the crowning enmity of the Secretary of the Interior, let no person misjudge the motives upon which I denounce it. Personally, apart from this act, I have nothing against Mr. Harlan. He is of my own party; and my politics have been from my youth essentially the same as his own. I do not know him; I have never even seen him; I criticise no attitude nor action of his life but this; and I criticise this with as little personality as I can give to an action so personal. I withhold, too, as far as I can, every expression of resentment; and no one who knew all I know of this matter could fail to credit me with singular and great moderation. For, behind what I have related, there is another history, every incident of which I have recovered from the obscurity to which it was confided; and, as I think of it, it is with difficulty that I restrain my just indignation. Instead of my comparatively cold and sober treatment, this transaction deserves rather the pitiless exposure, the measureless,stern anger, the red-hot steel scourge of Juvenal. But I leave untold its darkest details, and, waiving every other consideration, I rest solely and squarely on the general indignity and injury this action offers to intellectual liberty. I claim that to expel an author from a public office and subject him to public contumely, solely because he has published a book which no one can declare immoral without declaring all the grand books immoral, is to affix a penalty to thought, and to ob'-truct the freedom of letters. I declare this act the audacious captain of a series of acts, and a style of opinions whose tendency and effect throughout Christendom is to dwarf and degrade literature, and to make great books impossible, except under paias of martyrdom. As such, I arraign it before every liberal and thoughtful mind. I denounce it as a sinister precedent; as a ban upon the free action of genius; as a logical insult to all-commanding literature; and as in every way a most serious and heinous wrong. Difference of opinion there may and must be upon the topics which in these pages I have grouped around it, but upon the act itself there can be none. As I drag it up here into the sight of the world, I call upon every scholar, every man of letters, every editor, every good fellow everywhere who wields the pen, to make common cause with me in rousing upon it the full tempest of reprobation it deserves. I remember Tennyson,
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a spirit of vengeance over the desecrated grave of Moore; T think of Scott rolling back the tide of obloquy from Hyron; I see Addison gilding the blackening fame of Swift; I mark Southampton befriending Shakespeare ; I recall Du Bellay enshielding Rabehiis; I behold Hutten fortressing Luther; here is Boccaccio lifting the darkness from Dante, and scattering flame on his foes in Florence; this is Bembo protecting Pomponatius; that is Grostete enfolding Roger Bacon from the monkish fury; there, covered with light, is Aristophanes defending .fcchylus; and if tliere lives aught of that old chivalry of letters, which in all ages has sprung to the succor and defence of genius, I summon it to act the part of honor and duty upon a wrong which, done to a single member of the great confraternity of literature, is done to all, and which flings insult and menace upon every immortal page that dares transcend the wicked heart or the constricted brain. God grant .that not in vain upon this outrage do I invoke the judgment of the mighty spirit of literature, and the fires of every honest heart!
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