University of Virginia Library

THE GOOD GRAY POET.
Walt Whitman's unique figure in American literature—A sketch of the man and his life work, the fierce controversies he aroused, and the enthusiastic devotion of his admirers.

LESS than four years have passed since Walt Whitman was buried in Harleigh Cemetery, Camden; but already it is clear that the man and his work are in no danger of being forgotten when the generation that knew him in the flesh shall have passed away. As the controversies of his enthusiastic friends and his bitter critics are ended by the impartial verdict of calm deliberation, his remarkable writings have gained a more intelligent appreciation and a more general influence. Never during his life were they so widely discussed and so justly valued as today.

Walt Whitman is the strangest and most striking figure in the whole history of American literature. He defies comparison and classification. He does not fit any of the measuring sticks of criticism. We hardly know what to call his work. It has no rhyme, no meter, and no rhythm like the rhythm of any other singer; many deny that it is verse at all; yet certainly it is not prose. The intelligent reader who takes it up for the first time may be amused, perhaps, at the quaint simplicity of the first line his eye may happen to encounter; the next one may awe him by its majesty of thought and expression.

Never, during his life, was Whitman's audience a really large one—though it grew steadily, and has grown still more since his

Facsimile of Walt Whitman's Handwriting

[Description: A facsimile of Whitman's handwriting; the sample reads: "—I am selling a few copies of my Vols. new Edition, from time to time —most of them go to the British Islands—"]

death. Of the first edition of "Leaves of Grass" only about a dozen copies were sold, besides a number of presentation copies—several of which were returned to the author with insulting notes. Yet while some vituperated him, and the great mass held aloof, to many minds his writings were nothing less than a revelation. There arose a gradually widening coterie whose members regarded him with affection—as did quite or nearly all who knew him personally—and respected his writings as a new gospel for mankind.

The diversity of criticism was extraordinary. He was ridiculed and reviled on both sides of the Atlantic. Swinburne, who at first praised him warmly, afterwards compared him to a drunken apple woman reeling in a gutter. In 1865 he was dismissed from his clerkship in Washington because the chief of his bureau would not allow such a man to remain in the department. Even as late as 1882 a district attorney refused to permit "Leaves of Grass" to be published in Massachusetts. On the other hand, from the vast number of encomiums of Whitman that have been penned by well known men at home and abroad, let us take four specimens. This is what Emerson— then at the height of his fame and of his powers—wrote in 1855, when Whitman sent a copy of his first volume of poems to the sage of Concord:

This last sentence, with what by ordinary standards would be considered questionable taste, was printed on the binding of the second edition of "Leaves of Grass." The result was that many of Emerson's admirers severely criticised the sage's opinion, but he declined to withdraw or qualify his utterance further than by saying that it was a private letter.

In 1888, when it was thought that Whitman was near death, Robert G. Ingersoll was asked to speak at the poet's funeral. Colonel Ingersoll hesitated to undertake this. A copy of "Leaves of Grass" had long been in his library, but he could claim no intimate acquaintance with the book or its author. He was then asked to read the volume anew, and he promised to do so. Its influence upon his mature judgment was shown by what followed. Some time afterward, hearing that the old poet had rallied, but was helpless and in poverty, the colonel was so much moved that he offered to prepare a special lecture for Whitman's benefit. The result was the essay on "Liberty in Literature," delivered in Philadelphia in October, 1890, which netted nearly a thousand dollars for its beneficiary.

"Walt Whitman," declared Colonel Ingersoll, "has dreamed great dreams, told great truths, and uttered sublime thoughts. As you read the marvelous book called 'Leaves of Grass,' you feel the freedom of the antique world; you hear the voices of the morning, of the first great singers—voices elemental as those of sea and storm. The horizon enlarges, the heavens grow ample, limitations are forgotten—the realization of the will, the accomplishment of the ideal, seem to be within your power. Obstructions becomes* petty and disappear. The chains and bars are broken, and the distinctions of caste are lost. The soul is in the open air, under the blue and stars— the flag of nature."

Walt Whitman at Sixty One

[Description: Portrait of Whitman at age sixty-one; he is seated, 3/4 facing, wearing a coat, left hand in pocket. ]

These are strong words, but stronger yet were those of the eulogy that Ingersoll pronounced two years later, when the poet finally passed away: "A great man, a great American, the most eminent citizen of this republic, lies dead before us."

Both practical men of affairs and members of the inner circle of literary culture were profoundly influenced by Walt Whitman's "unparalleled and deathless writings," as they were termed by William M. Rossetti, who first introduced them to English readers by publishing a selection of them. Rossetti lent a copy to his friend Mrs. Gilchrist, who thus described her impressions, in a letter written a few days later (July, 1869):

Again, this is an extract from the full and complete study of Whitman published by that finished Oxonian scholar and critic, the late John Addington Symonds:

These four specimen expressions—to which many others might be added—are sufficient to show the extraordinary enthusiasm

with which Walt Whitman inspired some of the best contemporary minds. Had that enthusiasm been less extreme, and had its eulogies tended less toward hyperbole, it might have evoked less opposition from those who did not share in it.

Whitman's own utterances, characteristic as they were of the absolute frankness of his unconventional nature, were a target for many critics. He thus introduced himself to the public:

Then, after complaining of the subserviency of American letters to foreign forms and precedents, he went boldly on:

There is no boastfulness in all this, further than an absolutely frank statement of Whitman's thoughts and feelings. His estimate of himself—of his perfect originality, his utter disregard of established forms, and his typically American quality—is a remarkably just one; he gives it without the slightest pretense at the reticence that convention calls modesty. Not for an instant can it be maintained that he was in any sense a poseur, that he ever cultivated notoriety or indulged in eccentricities for business reasons, as some of the world's favorites have done. He was wholly devoid of mercenary motives, and seemed, throughout his life, to be almost entirely indifferent to financial considerations. "I have despised money," he says of himself.

"Whitman didn't even know how to make the dollar mark," an old friend of the poet's* told the writer. "I have a postal card written in 1887, a few days after he delivered his lecture on Lincoln at the Madison Square Theater, to tell me that Andrew Carnegie had sent him $350 for a box, making the total profit $600. Each time, instead of the dollar sign, he put the cent mark—a 'c' with a vertical line."

The same story is told, indeed, by Whitman's whole life. He was a Long Island farmer's son, who served his time as an apprentice in the office of a Brooklyn newspaper, and then for two or three years taught country schools in Queens and Suffolk counties. At twenty he started the Long Islander, in his native town of Huntington—a weekly paper which is still in existence. "Only my own restlessness prevented my establishing a permanent property there," he himself said; but he preferred to plunge into the more dramatic life of New York. In the metropolis he did all sorts of journalistic work, yet found much time for the study that he loved best, and which was the great formative influence of his character— the study of the people of the chief American city, of their work and play, their natures and occupations.

He had a "good sit," as he termed it, at the editorial desk of the Brooklyn Eagle, when a political disagreement led to his resignation, and he went—on the strength of an impromptu offer made and accepted one evening, between the acts, in the lobby of the old Broadway Theater—to New Orleans, to edit the Crescent. But he drifted back to the North, and opened a small book store and printing office in Brooklyn, where he also issued the Freeman newspaper.

"The superficial opinion about him," says a friend of those early days, "was that he was somewhat of an idler—a loafer, but not in a bad sense. He always earned his own living. He wore plain, cheap clothes, which were always particularly clean. Everybody knew him; every one, almost, liked him. 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. I hardly think his style of dress in those days was meant to be eccentric; he was very antagonistic to all show or sham."

At this time he became interested in some building ventures, which were profitable, and offered him the prospect of a fortune—a prospect from which he turned aside, without the slightest hesitation, to take up two other tasks. One of these was his literary life work, "Leaves of Grass"; the other, his self imposed mission to the sufferers of the civil war. When his brother George was wounded at Fredericksburg,

Walt Whitman went to the army on the Rappahannock, and nursed the wounded man back to life. Finding himself in the midst of thousands whose need was no less urgent, he remained as a volunteer hospital attendant, and worked unceasingly for the comfort of the soldiers. He toiled day and night, and denied himself the comforts and almost the necessities of life, in order to contribute to the relief of the distress and agony about him. His own constitution gave way under the terrible strain he put upon it, and in 1864 he was stricken down by a malarial and paralytic seizure. As soon as he was partially recovered—he never really regained his health—he went back again to his hospital work.

After the war President Lincoln—a man whom Whitman enthusiastically admired, and who had an appreciative regard for the poet—gave him a clerkship in the Interior department. Being forced to resign this, after Lincoln's death, he was transferred to the attorney general's office, where he remained till increasing physical disability incapacitated him for duty. He went to Camden, the New Jersey suburb of Philadelphia, and there the remaining years of his life were spent—at first in his brother's house on Stevens Street, and later in a little frame cottage, 328 Mickle Street, where he lived alone, with a single attendant. He died, after a long and gradual sinking of his bodily powers, in March, 1892.

During these last years, in spite of the dark clouds of poverty and physical weakness, nothing could mar the poet's patient and cheery philosophy. He was happy in the ministration of many devoted friends, in the knowledge that his work had found an assured place in literature, and that the bitterness of its critics had yielded to the kindly appreciation of a widening audience. All through his life, indeed, criticism had vexed him very little. When "Leaves of Grass" was first issued, and, to use his own words, "aroused such a tempest of anger and condemnation," he went off to the east end of Long Island, and "spent the late summer and all the fall—the happiest of my life—around Shelter Island and Peconic 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." His work was for the man that had ears to hear; the poet had no quarrel with him that heard it not. In this and other ways Whitman showed the "malice toward none," the "good will toward all," of his ideal American, Abraham Lincoln. His charity was as wide as mankind; all human beings, from king to slave, were his brothers. "He is democracy," Thoreau said of him. Whatever he hoped or claimed for himself, he hoped and claimed for

To the lowest human outcast he says, "Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you."

That noble line sums up the practical side of Walt Whitman's religion. He was sincerely religious, though he frankly declared his disregard of the orthodox creeds.

Accepted theology did not satisfy him; yet he was full of reverence for the spiritual side of life. He had two profound beliefs—in the existence of God and in the immortality of the soul. Technically Whitman may be classified as a pantheist—a believer in a divine spirit manifested in the universe and permeating every part of it—though his philosophy is by no means identical with that of Spinoza or any other pantheistic thinker.

The title of "Leaves of Grass" is characteristic and expressive. It is not the artificial blossom of the hothouse nor the stately flower of the ordered garden, but the native growth of the open, untilled

meadow. "I wished my work," the poet said, "to be something that would not easily die— something that neither cold nor heat would hinder from growing, nor trampling feet would kill." These lines are from one of Whitman's earliest utterances—the "Song of Myself." In his valedictory, the "Backward Glance O'er Traveled Roads," he thus sums up the purposes, the "bases and object urgings" of his life work:

It was curious, perhaps, that from the first Whitman received a more favorable hearing in Europe than among his fellow countrymen. Mme. Blanc ("Th. Bentzon") introduced him to French readers, Freiligrath to Germany, and Nencione to Italy. In England— a country always more tolerant than America of revolt against convention—"Leaves of Grass" found its readiest acceptance. Such men as Ruskin, Carlyle, Moncure Conway, and the late Lord Houghton (better known as Richard Monckton Milnes) were among its first champions. Irving, when in America, went to Camden to see the poet. Tennyson, though his own key was so widely different from Whitman's warmly admired him, and used to pen him a friendly letter at the beginning of each year. "Dear old man," one of the last of these began, "I, the older man, send you a New Year's greeting;" and one of the last letters written by the English laureate was a note of thanks to a correspondent in America, who had forwarded him a notice of the peaceful ending of the life of "brave old Walt."

A description has already been given of Whitman's appearance in the prime of his manhood. The portrait engraved on page 140 belongs to the same period; those on pages 138, 141, and 142 show him in later life, when in features and expression he bore a decided resemblance to Longfellow. The likeness may be strikingly shown by comparing the cut on page 138 with the portrait of the older poet published in MUNSEY'S in December, 1894. Whitman's face is Longfellow's, scarred by years of toil and suffering that never fell to the peaceful lot of the New England bard.

Here is the picture of the "good gray poet" drawn by one of his friends, William Douglas O'Connor, in his story of "The Carpenter," which gives a sympathetic and remarkable character study of Whitman:

Of personal anecdotes of Whitman, many are treasured in the recollection of those who knew him. To one of the closest of the friends of his later life—Mr. J. H. Johnston, of New York—we are indebted for some of the facts recited in this article, as well as for the material accompanying illustrations, culled from his unique collection of books, portraits, and other memorabilia of the poet. Whitman was a frequent visitor at Mr. Johnston's house, which thereupon became a Mecca for a host of pilgrims of all stations or conditions. One visitor might be Whitelaw Reid or John Burroughs, the next some old soldier whose wounds the poet had nursed in war time. One such man, the driver of one of the old Broadway stages, spent a whole afternoon with Whitman, whom none of his visitors delighted more. The veteran—grateful according to his means—had brought a coffee cup and saucer as a present for his old friend, who valued the trifling gift highly, and, happening to leave it in New York, had it sent after him to Camden.

One story of Whitman, which has probably never been published, tells of a visit he made to some Indian prisoners in Kansas, during his "wander years" before the civil war. It was at Topeka, the State capital, and with the poet were Governor St. John, the sheriff of the county, and John W. Forney, then clerk of the House of Representatives. Some thirty Indians, all of them chiefs, were grouped in the jail yard,

where they sullenly squatted with their blankets wrapped about them. The Governor was formally presented to them, but not a savage moved. They saw in the official the power that had taken away their liberty. The sheriff was introduced, and next Colonel Forney, with precisely the same result. Not an Indian would notice them. Then Walt Whitman, in his flannel shirt and broad brimmed hat, stepped forward and held out his hand—"partly out of mischief," he said in narrating the incident, "and partly out of mere curiosity to see what they would do." The leading chief looked at him for a moment, grasped his proffered hand with an emphatic "How!" and turned to mutter something to the other Indians. Thereupon each of the thirty aborigines rose and took the poet's hand in turn. "I suppose," said Whitman, "they recognized the savage in me—a comradeship to which their nature responded."

Perhaps, too, the keen eyed Indians agreed with what Abraham Lincoln said when he first saw Whitman: "Well, he looks like a man!"

Richard H. Titherington.