WALT WHITMAN IN 1884

THE next time I saw Walt Whitman was the 17th June 1884. He had then left Stevens Street, owing to the removal of his brother, but was still living in Camden, in a small house which he had himself part-purchased—328 Mickle Street. He had at that time, for housekeepers, an elderly workman and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Lay, with whom he was on easy terms, and with whom he had his meals. In appearance I thought him much the same as in 1877—a trifle thinner perhaps, and certainly more infirm. Some expression of weariness too I thought I saw, which would likely arise from the increased confinement of his life. “I keep going,” he said, “much the same. Visits from English friends are perhaps my chief diversion.” Then, after tender inquiries, especially for Mrs. Gilchrist (who was now in London), “have just had a visit from Oscar Wilde—who told me about England; I made him do the talking—rather liked him. I have occasional letters from Dowden—a steady friend—and others. Bucke’s book[1] is going off slowly—not much cared for by my friends—but I like it. I opposed the book all along, till Bucke, getting fairly out of patience, came one day and said, ‘Now I am just as obstinate as you, and I intend to bring it out whether you like it or no—so you had better make the best of the matter and help to make it authentic as far as you can’; whereupon I caved in, laughing heartily, and wrote the account of my birthplace and antecedents which occupies the first twenty-four pages of the book.”

“I thought that there was a germinal idea in Bucke’s book—the idea that ‘Leaves of Grass’ was above all an expression of the Moral Nature. As to O’Connor’s letters—I must say I like them. They are comforting. Just as any woman likes a man to fall in love with her—whether she returns it or not—so to have once aroused so eloquent and passionate a declaration is reassuring and a help to me.” We then spoke of the money-making and gentility business at New York—I remarking that I thought it had all increased considerably since I was there in ’77, and he corroborating, though holding that it probably had to be gone through “for reasons.”

Here I find the following passage among my notes: “I am impressed more than ever with W.’s contradictory, self-willed, tenacious, obstinate character, strong and even extreme moods, united with infinite tenderness, wistful love, and studied tolerance; also great caution [he says: ‘the phrenologists always say that caution is my chief characteristic—did you know that?’] and a certain artfulness, combined with keen, penetrating and determined candour; the wild-hawk look still there, ‘untamable, untranslatable,’ yet with that wonderful tenderness at bottom.”

The next day Walt came over, at noon, to Crowell’s hotel, where I was staying; we dined and went to Fairmount Park in the afternoon. Talked a little about social questions. W.: “I believe, like Carlyle, in men; I think that notwithstanding all set-offs the great capitalists and masters of private enterprise have, in America at least, been useful. I have myself had all along a tender feeling for Co-operation, but for that doubt whether a committee or an elected person could or would do the work.” As to England, he seemed to think that emigration would relieve it, and he looked upon the law and custom of entail as the “hard-pan underlying your social institutions.” “I like and welcome all agitation, even the fiercest, but like Carlyle have little belief in reform talk. Society, like a person in middle life, is set, and you have to make the best of it. I am, I hope, a bit of a reformer myself. Yes, we must grow generous, ungrasping masters of industry; absurd as the idea would seem to most now-a-days, I believe that is the upshot of what is going on. The creation of a large, independent, democratic class of small owners is the main thing—though it is never once mentioned by our economists and politicians. I am satisfied that for America Free Trade and open admission of all foreigners is an integral part of its theory; the future of the world is one of open communication and solidarity of all races; and if that problem cannot be solved in America it cannot be solved anywhere.”

We drove to Fairmount Park in a ’bus, walked a little, sat at the refreshment tables, and listened to the band—Walt absorbed and quiet for the most part, recognised by a few among the well-dressed crowd, but seeming to hold himself aloof with almost an air of hauteur—looking fine withal in his grey suit and with grey uncovered head, tho’ perhaps a little weary. He asked me somewhat about my life and doings at home.

The following evening I stayed to supper with Whitman in the little kitchen of his home, in company with Mr. and Mrs. Lay. They seemed homely decent people, rather dull and quiet. Walt, who was dressed just in shirt and trousers—for the weather was hot—kept things going. Afterwards we sat in the front room with Folger McKinsey, a young Philadelphian of literary leanings, who had come in. Walt talked about Shakespeare, the Bacon theory, the greatness of the historical plays, the “dragon-rancours” of the barons, King Lear, &c. “I will not be positive about Bacon’s connection with the plays, but I am satisfied that behind the historical Shakespeare there is another mind, guiding, and far, far reaching, giving weight and permanent value to what would otherwise have been only two plays a year written for a witty, alert, jocose audience—chiefly of young gallants.”

The conversation turned somehow on death. W.: “It is in reality a very different affair from the romantic stage view of it; deathbed speeches and ‘scenes’ are of the rarest occurrence. I have witnessed hundreds of deaths, and as a rule it seems just a matter of course—like having your breakfast, or any other event of the day, and met with indifference at the last, and with apathy, or unconsciousness.”

After an hour or two we went out and walked a little through the Camden streets—Walt, as usual, with plentiful greetings to passers-by. He would insist on our coming into a shop and having some refreshment, and then a few minutes later at the corner of a street, left us, I remember, with that queer brusque manner of his which so often offended his friends—just coldly saying “Ta-ta,” and going off as if he didn’t care if he never saw us again!

The next morning (June 30) was my last visit to Whitman; we had a long and intimate conversation. He was very friendly and affectionate, and sat by the open window downstairs enjoying the wafts of fragrant air, while he talked about “Leaves of Grass.” “What lies behind ‘Leaves of Grass’ is something that few, very few, only one here and there, perhaps oftenest women, are at all in a position to seize. It lies behind almost every line; but concealed, studiedly concealed; some passages left purposely obscure. There is something in my nature furtive like an old hen! You see a hen wandering up and down a hedgerow, looking apparently quite unconcerned, but presently she finds a concealed spot, and furtively lays an egg, and comes away as though nothing had happened! That is how I felt in writing ‘Leaves of Grass.’ Sloane Kennedy calls me ‘artful’—which about hits the mark. I think there are truths which it is necessary to envelop or wrap up.” I replied that all through history the old mysteries, or whatever they may have been called, had been held back; and added that probably we had something yet to learn from India in these matters. W.: “I do not myself think there is anything more to come from that source; we must rather look to modern science to open the way. Time alone can absolutely test my poems or any one’s. Personally, I think that the ‘something’ is more present in some of my small later poems than in the ‘Song of Myself.’”

This was the last I saw of Whitman. I left him sitting there by the window in his downstairs room, close to the street and the passers-by—his clear eye undimmed by age, his rugged, loving nature unaltered; though there was a certain grave weariness in his otherwise majestic presence, which gives one a touch of sadness when one thinks that he had still nearly eight years to pass of increasing physical disablement and of continually diminishing vitality, culminating at last in serious bodily misery and wretchedness, before death might relieve him of the burden of the flesh.

It seems strange at first that Whitman’s death should have been of such a lingering character—three months, from Christmas 1891, to near the end of the following March, in a dying state nearly all the time, with much restlessness, sleeplessness, misery, and even pain at times. But in some ways this was in consonance with his physical temperament—his extraordinarily voluminous hold on life, all phases of it, his extreme tenacity, his strong implication in the life of the body and the senses, his affectionate and unceasing love towards his friends, and his marked and obdurate egoism—all things which held him to life, and needed a long process of disentanglement, fibre by fibre as it were, before he could be released.

Volume—voluminousness—was one of Walt’s most notable features. Physically it was so—as witness his ample proportions, his keen and well-furnished senses; mentally the same—a mind well stocked, interested in every subject, balancing, weighing, comparing, slow-moving, but never retracing its steps; emotionally and by temperament the same, with an immense range of emotion, and volume of feeling when roused, but slow, deliberate, cautious, lethargic, and at times even lumpishly immovable. This voluminousness is the key to his literary style, which at its best is magnificent—thought after thought culled from every side and department of life, ranged in successive line and phrase, marshalled and held in suspense as it were in huge array, till at last they are hurled upon the reader in one mass and with overwhelming power; but which style at its worst is cumbersome and disjointed. It is this voluminousness which goes with the whole florid full emotional nature of the man, fond of materials and plenty of materials, not especially careful of order or arrangement, not too studiedly clear or concise in thought and expression, but always ample and inclusive.

Another main point in Whitman’s character is, I think, best expressed by the word “cussedness.” I have touched on it once or twice: the contrary moods, the spirit of refusal, the wilfulness, which by their at times necessary opposition and antagonism to his ample and loving humanity formed, I believe, a great tragic element in his nature—and possibly prevented him ever being quite what is called “happy in love affairs.” He celebrates in his poems the fluid, all-solvent disposition, but often was himself less the river than the rock. In these moods, fixed, silent, and unquestionable, he was a thing you might try your strength upon, but which you were not likely to move! In the slow downward slope of his head from back to front, and in the lines of his eye and brow, tenacity was written; it looked out upon you from the small, well-defined pupil set under its long, curtain-like lid; and there was at times in his face, as I have said, the look as of a precipice, sheer, with breakneck ledges. One can imagine how this portion of his character, at any rate in his younger days, must have conflicted with his equally innate and imperious craving for human love and fellowship, and what suffering the conflict must have brought to him at times. R. W. Emerson said to me once (1877) of Whitman that when he came to know him he found him “a wayward, fanciful man.”[2] This was not probably meant to be a complete account of the man, yet it indicates Emerson’s perception of certain characteristics in him. In later years the large, equable human heart asserted itself more and more, and nothing could be more beautiful than the tolerance towards old and young of all sorts which he exhibited; while the waywardness became refined into something majestic. I remember old Mr. Pearsall Smith, of Philadelphia, who knew Whitman very well, saying that one of the things which impressed him most about Walt was his “magnificent No!”—how sometimes when invited out, or asked to do anything which he did not care to do, there would roll forth—unqualified by any thanks, or explanation, or excuse—the simple negative, with a great round O, and yet, as a rule, with a large sunny amiability which made offence impossible.

I have two portraits—photographs—which I am fond of comparing with each other. One is of Whitman, taken in 1890; the other, taken at about the same time and at the same age (seventy years), is of an Indian Gnani or seer. Both are faces of the highest interest and import; but how different! That of Whitman deeply lined, bearing the marks of life-long passion and emotion, aggressive and determined, yet wistful and tender, full of suffering and full of love, indicating serenity, yet markedly turbid and clouded, ample in brow and frame and flowing hair, as of one touching and mingling with humanity at all points—withal of a wonderful majesty and grandeur, as of the great rocks (to return always to that simile) whose summits pierce at last the highest domain.

The other portrait, of a man equally aged, shows scarcely a line on the face; you might think for that and for the lithe, active form that he was not more than forty years old; a brow absolutely calm and unruffled, gracious, expressive lips, well-formed features, and eyes—the dominant characteristic of his countenance—dark and intense, and illuminated by the vision of the seer. In this face you discern command, control, gentleness, and the most absolute inward unity, serenity, and peace; no wandering emotions or passions flit across the crystal mirror of the soul; self-hood in any but the highest sense has vanished—the self has, as it were, returned to its birthplace—leaving behind the most childlike, single-hearted, uncensorious, fearless character imaginable.

Yet just here one seems to miss something in the last character—the touch of human and earthly entanglement. Here is not exactly the great loving heart which goes a few steps on the way with every child of man; here is not the ample-domed brow which tackles each new problem of life and science. Notwithstanding evident signs of culture and experience in the past, notwithstanding vast power of concentration in any given matter or affair when necessary, the face shows that heart and intellect have become quiescent, that interest in the actual has passed or is passing away.

Whitman’s immense moody and emotional temperament—he calls it “turbulent” himself—forms a factor of his character and writings, which has perhaps not been sufficiently considered—especially by some of his admirers, who, as so often happens, are more concerned to present an ideal personality than a real portrait. There are indeed some of his biographers who are at pains to explain that many of his expressions of sympathy and participation in the weaknesses and sins of humanity are to be taken as theoretical or allegorical expressions, having by no means a personal interpretation. Yet surely this is to take the clay out of the brick, the marble out of the statue. While it is obvious that no man could have in one lifetime run through all the experiences mentioned in “Leaves of Grass,” the whole point of the matter is that the author actually finds in himself the capability of these experiences, and quite personally identifies himself with them. It is, in fact, just these earth-entanglements, in a character so cosmic in its range as his, which are of special import as giving direction and effect to his individuality and to his work. Not only is it clear that without his voluminous enfoldment in the earth-life—the Nessus-shirt of Hercules—he could not well have performed the mighty works that he did; but it is difficult to see how, without some of that obduracy and egotism of his, he could have held his own against the great surge of obloquy and ridicule which covered his first appearance on the field of literature. Whitman saw (somewhere within himself) the typical man of a new era; and he gave himself to the utterance of what he saw. It stood in the most glaring and irremediable contrast to the genteel ideal of the civilisation around him. Alone, he had to confront the whole of modern society. Now then, if ever, strength was needed. Now then tenacity, obstinacy, wilfulness; they had to be made the most of. If they were faults they were such as could ill be spared. His was perhaps the most deliberately daring advance ever made in literature; and it is difficult to believe that it could have been made except by one in whom the rocky elements of character were abundantly present. “Leaves of Grass” itself has this quality of undeniable “thereness”; and when the critics have had their say and expended all their shafts upon it, it still remains solid and untouched—like the earth, which survives all the theories of the geologists and surrenders itself to none.

There is a third point. In many ways Whitman marks a stage of human evolution not yet reached, and hardly suspected, by humanity at large; but in no respect is this more true than in respect of his capacity of Love. If you consider Whitman’s life you will see that Love ruled it, that he gave his life for love. There were other motives no doubt, but this one ultimately dominated them all. It permeates like a flame his entire writings; it took him to the battlefield and the hospitals in succour of the wounded soldiers; it led him (before the war) deep into the life and comradeship of the people—all phases; after the war it united him in bonds of tender and life-long friendship with many,[3] both men and women; it surrounded his death-bed with devotion, and brought thousands to his funeral. For it he gave away his possessions and the material means of life, he gave his prospects of professional success, he gave health, fame—all that a man can give—and accepted illness and obscurity, and oftentimes long and painful loneliness and betrayal even of love itself.[4]

He was a man in whom the power of love was developed to an extraordinary degree. Yet (thanks to him) this was no attenuated or merely spiritual love, but was a large and generous passion, spiritual and emotional of course, but well rooted in the physical and sexual also. In him the various sides and manifestations of the passion were so blent, that instead of weakening they recognised and reinforced each other; and, coming into touch with humanity, as he did with a kind of careless equalness from all these sides; piercing through the layers and folds of caste, through differences of race, climate, character, occupation; despising distances of space and time; he drew men and women of the most varied nature and habits to himself, saved them from their own little selves—from their own little virtues and vices—and united them in the solidarity of humanity, by their common attachment to him. “Leaves of Grass” is the meeting-ground of the human race. There every nationality, every creed, every trade, every atom of humanity is represented, and all are fused in the great loving soul that overbroods them.

If it seems difficult to reconcile this great and abounding charity of Whitman with his strong egotism, it is perhaps not needful to reconcile them. They may have been two necessarily opposite poles of his nature. At any rate to assert this love—physical, sexual, emotional, spiritual—extending to all races, castes, to the most despised and degraded, to the near home and far off, to the virtuous and to the criminal, to men as well as to women, to the animals even—in all its phases and utterances; and to assert this egoism, plainly, unblushingly, in all its forms—confidence, pride, self-esteem, desire, and delight in all the natural powers and appetites—Whitman deliberately set himself. In doing so he (necessarily) upset all former and formal moralities, and exposed himself to the fiercest opposition; but some day—when it has come to be recognised that the medium in which the true ego, the soul, lives and moves is neither gain nor fame, nor duty nor denial, but indeed love and love alone—it will be seen that “Leaves of Grass” is, perhaps of all books ever written, the most natural and nobly inevitable.

A fourth point which I will venture to touch on in this estimate of Whitman—perhaps the most vital of all, but impossible to be adequately seized or expressed—is what may be called his ‘illumination.’ “Leaves of Grass,” of course, would not have been written without it; it runs behind every page—“the vision and the faculty divine.” This perception in the universal, this power of seeing things apart from the mundane self, and independent of their relation to that self, appears to be a kind of transcendent faculty in man; which occasionally manifests itself, and which brings him—it may perhaps be said—into relation with another order of existence. Indeed the strangeness of the sensation, and the intoxication of this vision, appears sometimes to be so great that—as in the case of the blinding glare at the mouth of Plato’s cavern (“Republic,” bk. vii.)—the beholder after witnessing it is unhinged for ordinary life, and can neither see the things of the world in their accustomed light, nor describe clearly what else it is that he has seen. This it is, no doubt, that constitutes the partial ‘mania’ of the poet (Plato’s “Phædrus”), and which accounts also for the fact that many people of mystical tendency, after a momentary illumination of the kind, relapse into a sort of drivel for the rest of their natural lives—circling always round something which they have neither clearly apprehended nor can conclusively forget—but out of the memory of which they hatch systems and ‘revelations’ and dogmas without end. And indeed, if we suppose, with Dr. Bucke, that the faculty is one that is gradually evolving in human nature, there can be nothing more likely than that its first exercise should be accompanied by much doubt and illusion and disturbance of the intelligence generally, and even of the moral nature.

In the case of Whitman, however, the immense sanity of his intelligence and his immense grasp of the actual world prevented any serious dislocation of the kind; and, though the mania and intoxication are at times almost terrific (as in the ‘Song of Myself’), he never loses his hold on actual facts, but manages at last to draw them in a great web over himself, and to show the whole world transparent with the illumination within.

This faculty of perception in the universal must not be looked upon as a mere intellectual discrimination of certain facts or objects; it is rather, I take it, a conscious identity with the object (“I am the mash’d fireman with breastbone broken”); in which consciousness the emotional and sensational elements are fused with the intellectual, just as they are in the consciousness of one’s own existence and actions. It is a universal light which falls as it were on the interior side of all objects, enabling the person that moves along it to penetrate to their very essence and to perceive their abiding relation to each other. And the faculty begins to develop itself normally in those (as one would expect) whose emotional and intellectual nature is becoming universal. When sympathy and intelligence on the ordinary plane have grown so far as to bring the man into free and unprejudiced relation with almost every phase of existence, then this new perception dawns upon him; the scales fall from the eyes which have always before seen by the light of self, and he sees by the light “which never was on sea or land.” “Willst du ins Unendliche schreiten, geh’ nur im Endlichen nach allen Seiten,” says Goethe; not that the mere travelling through the finite of itself brings one to the ‘infinite,’ but that it prepares the human being as it were for his translation into it, when the time comes.

With Whitman it would seem that he had travelled along the finite in pretty well every direction, when, about the age of thirty-five or thirty-six, or near that time, this new order of consciousness, and of being, opened out upon him. Instead of upsetting his broadly-based voluminous nature, it immediately established that nature, forming the nucleus to its endless ramifications, and the key and reconcilement of its contrary moods. His luxuriant turbulent emotional passional self acknowledged instantly its Lord in the universal (“swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and the knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth”); and became dedicated to that service thenceforward; and all the conflicting elements of his own nature and of general nature were seen—as they must be in such a case—to have their justification and their use. “The moth and the fish-eggs are in place.”

With Whitman the new perception was eminently sane and undistorted. It is probable indeed that never in historical times has the cosmic intuition found a fuller and more complete utterance; for it was not dwindled away into any mere thin and other-worldly ecstasy, denying in a kind of spiritual excess the claims of the body and the intellect, but was blent and harmonised, in fiery union, with the very widest practical experiences and the inferences of a singularly rich nature. For the first time in history do we hear the voice of a prophet who really knows and really accepts the whole range of human life.

The last twenty-five of Whitman’s years were overshadowed by the clouds of partial and intermittent paralysis. From the miracle of health and strength which he had been before the war, it was his destiny to come near to being a chronic invalid. Unfitted for active life, unfitted even for much literary work, he quietly accepted his lot; and being unable to express his message in any more resounding way, was content to fashion the commonplaces of his daily life to its utterance; and no one, I think, could witness the dignity and simple beauty of this later life without feeling that here, in its way, was a poem as pregnant as “Leaves of Grass.” Gentle and humane in manners, the rocky bases of his nature—if such had been conspicuous before—now covered with tender herbage and flowers, making the most of small details, fond of children, and with a pleasant cheery word for all, letting life come and go with large equanimity, he was a man whom the simplest could approach without effort, and who was loved by hundreds who never read a word of his writing. If he had a preference, it was for the “common people.” The unconscious, uncultured, natural types pleased him best, and he would make an effort to approach them. The others he allowed to approach him.