ILLNESS
At the opening of 1873 Whitman had been just ten years in Washington, and was in the fifty-fourth of his age. Recent letters to his friends had told of more frequent spells of partially disabling sickness and lassitude.[528] On the evening of Thursday, January 23rd, he sat late over the fire in the Library of the Treasury Building, reading Lord Lytton’s What will he do with it?[529] As he left, the guard at the door remarked him looking ill.
His room was close by, just across the street; and he went to bed as usual. Between three and four in the morning, he awoke to find that he could move neither arm nor leg on the left side. Presently he fell asleep again; and later, as he could not rise, lay on quietly, till some friends coming in raised the alarm and fetched a doctor. After some six or seven years of preliminary symptoms,[530] Walt had now had a slight stroke of paralysis.
His first thought was of his mother, to whom he wrote as soon as he was able, reassuring her; for the newspapers had exaggerated his condition. Once before, he reminds her with grim humour, they had killed him off; but he is on the road to recovery; in a few days he will be back at his desk on the other side of the street.
Pete Doyle, Charles Eldridge and John Burroughs came in to nurse and companion him: Mrs. Ashton would have carried him to her house; Mrs. O’Connor, who did not share in the estrangement of her husband, was often at his bedside. And at the bed-foot, his mother’s picture was always before him.
He had scarcely begun to move about a little in his room before a letter from St. Louis told of the death of Martha, Jefferson Whitman’s wife, to whom the whole family was much attached, and Walt especially. The blow fell heavily on him.
On the last day of March,[531] he crossed the street again to his work; and by the end of April he was having regular electrical treatment, and working for a couple of hours daily, with an occasional lapse. His leg was very clumsy, and he complained of frequent sensations of distress and weakness in his head, but he seemed to be progressing as well as was possible.
Early in May, however, the old mother in Camden fell ill. Walt was very anxious about her;[532] at her age she could hardly recover from a serious illness, and his letters to her are pathetically full of loving solicitude. She grew rapidly worse, and although he was still but feeble, he could not remain away from her. On the 20th he hurried home, and on the 23rd, while he was with her, she died.[533]
The shock to Walt was terrible; and when, dreading the heat, he attempted to reach the coast, he had a serious relapse at the outset, and was brought back to Colonel Whitman’s, to the melancholy little house. And here he too, so it would seem, was to end his life.
Only a year before, in the preface to the reprint of his Dartmouth College poem,[534] he had declared that now—the Four Years’ War being over, and he himself having rounded out the poem of the “Democratic Man or Woman”—he was prepared for a new enterprise. He would now set to work upon fulfilling the programme of his Democratic Vistas; and put the States of America hand-in-hand “in one unbroken circle in a chant”. He would sing the song for which America waited, the song of the Republic that is yet to be.
Again, a year earlier, he had told in his Passage to India how he was ready to set forth upon the Unknown Sea.
And now, with his labours unaccomplished, his heart stricken and heavy with bereavement, joylessly he seemed to hear the weighing of the anchor and to feel his ship already setting forth. Where now was the old exaltation of spirit; where the eager longing for Divine adventure with which hitherto he had always contemplated death?
Now sorrow claimed him, and for a season he lost hold of joy and faith. He was as one abandoned by the Giver of Life, and isolated from Love. Thus deserted, he became utterly exhausted of vitality. It is as though for a time his soul had parted from his bodily life, and yet the life in the body must go on. If death had come now he would not have refused it; but his hour was not yet. Neither living nor dying, through the sad, dark days of long protracted illness and solitude, of physical debility and mental bewilderment—as it were, through year-long dream-gropings—he waited.
The light of his life seemed suddenly to have gone out.[535] Near as he had dwelt to death, in the tragedy of the war-hospitals and in the habit of his thought, he was wholly unprepared for the death of his mother.
He was a man upon whose large harmonious and resonant nature every tragic experience struck out its fullest note. Philosophy and religion were his, if they were any man’s; but he was not one of those who escape experience in the byways of abstraction. He took each blow full in his breast.
His mother was dead; that was the physical wrench which crippled him body and soul. He could not accustom himself to her death and departure.[536] He could not understand it, nor why he was so stricken by it. It seemed as though in her life his mother had given to her son something that was essential to that soul-consciousness in which he had lived, and that her death had broken his own life asunder, so that it was no longer harmonious and triumphant.
His mother was dead, and he was alone in Camden. Not perhaps actually alone, for his new sister, George’s wife, was always kindly; and so, indeed, was George himself. But spiritually he was alone. He had lost something, it seems, of the spiritual companionship which had made the world a home to him wherever he went. And now the human comrades who had come so close were far away. Washington and New York were equally out of reach; and he had lost O’Connor. Letters, indeed, he had; but they did not make up to him for the daily magnetic contact with the men and women whom he loved. Touch and presence meant more to him than to others, and these he had lost.
He was, then, very much alone; bereft at once, so it would seem, of the material and the spiritual consciousness of fellowship; standing wholly by himself, in the attitude of that live-oak he had once wondered at in Louisiana, because it uttered joyous leaves of dark green though it stood solitary.[537] He was like a tree blasted by lightning; yet he too continued to put forth his leaves one and one, letters of cheery brief words to his old comrades, and especially to Pete.[538] He was an old campaigner worsted at last, standing silently at bay; only determined, come what might, that he would not grumble or complain.
His circumstances were not all gloomy. Through the summer of 1873, Whitman remained with his brother, at number 322, Stevens Street, in the pleasant room his mother had occupied upon the first floor. Around him were the old familiar objects dear to him from childhood.
He was not wholly house-tied: two lines of street-cars ran near by,[539] and by means of one or other he contrived to reach the ferry, which he loved to cross and cross again, revelling in the swing of the tawny Delaware, and all the comings and goings of the river and ocean craft. Hale old captains still remember him well as he was in those days. Sometimes also he would extend his jaunt, taking the Market Street cars on the Philadelphia side of the river, and going as far as the reading-room of the Mercantile Library upon Tenth Street.[540]
But often he was too weak to go abroad for days together. His brain refused to undertake the task of leadership or co-ordination, and there was no friend to assist him. With his lame leg and his giddiness, he had at the best of times hard work to move about; but as he wrote to Pete, “I put a bold face on, and my best foot foremost”.[541]
During bad days he sat solitary at home, trying to maintain a good heart, his whole vitality too depressed to do more. “If I only felt just a little better,” he would say, “I should get acquainted with many of the [railroad] men,”[542] a class who affected this particular locality. But feeble as he was, it was long before he made any friends to replace the lost circle at Washington. Now and again some kindly soul, hearing that he was ill, would call upon him:[543] or Jeff would look in on his way to New York, or Eldridge or Burroughs, coming and going between Washington and New England.
Walt could not readily adjust himself to his new circumstances. His was not an elastic, pliable temper; but on the contrary, very stubborn, and apt to become set in ways; the qualities of adhesion and inertia increasing in prominence as his strong will and initiative ebbed. He kept telling himself between the blurs that disabled his brain, that he might be in a much more deplorable fix; that his folks were good to him; that his post was kept open for his return, and that his friends were only waiting to welcome him back to Washington.
But he could not pass by or elude the ever-present consciousness and problem of his mother’s death. At the end of August he wrote to Pete: “I have the feeling of getting more strength and easier in the head—something like what I was before mother’s death. (I cannot be reconciled to that yet: it is the great cloud of my life—nothing that ever happened before has had such an effect on me.)”[544] When we remember his separation from the woman and the children of his love, and all the experiences of the war, we may a little understand the meaning of these soberly written words, and the strength of the tie which bound together mother and son. Who knows or can estimate the full meaning of that relationship which begins before birth, and which all the changes and separations of life and death only deepen?
It is difficult to look calmly at this period of Whitman’s life. One resents, perhaps childishly, the fate which overtook this sane and noble soul. Surely he, of all men, had been faithful to the inner vision, and generous to all. He had fulfilled the Divine precept; he had loved the Lord his God with all the might of soul and body, and his neighbour as himself. From childhood up he had been clean and affectionate, independent and loyal, whole-heartedly obedient to the law as it was written in his heart, undaunted by any fear or convention.
He had prized health, and held it sacred, as the essential basis of freedom and sanity of spirit. And he had hazarded it without reserve and without fear, in the infectious and malarial wards of the hospitals.
He had opened his heart to learn the full chords and meanings of all the emotions that came to him; and when he had become a scholar in these, he became an interpreter of the soul unto itself, both in the printed page and in the relations of his life. In Leaves of Grass he gave, to whosoever would accept the gift, his own attitude towards life, and the results of his study of living. In the wards he gave himself in whatever ways he could contrive to the needy.
And he gave all. Twenty years at least of his own health he sacrificed, and gave freely, out of the overflow of his love, to the wounded in their cots. As I have before suggested,[545] he gave more than, physically speaking, he could afford. But he gave with joy, knowing that he was born to give, and that in giving himself irretrievably, he was fulfilling the highest law of his being, and fully and finally realising himself. It was the crowning proof not only of “Calamus,” but of his gospel of self-realisation.
Deliberate though his service was, not even Whitman himself could fully estimate the cost of his charity. But he accepted the consequences of all his acts as proper and due, being, indeed, implicit in the acts themselves. And now, when his very joy in life was called in to meet the mortgage he had given; when he was, as it were, stripped naked and left in the dark; he accepted his condition without declaiming against the Divine justice, or calling insanely upon God.
Year after year, he was patient, expecting the light to break again, the daylight beyond death. He had never professed to understand the ways of God, but he had always trusted Him. And when faith itself seemed for awhile to forsake him, his blind soul did but sit silently awaiting its return.
It was out of such a mood, lighted at times by moments of vision, that during 1874 and 1875 he wrote some of the noblest of his verses, notably the “Prayer of Columbus,” the “Song of the Universal,” and the “Song of the Redwood Tree”.
There are those who have suggested that Whitman’s illness was brought on by a life of dissipation; one supposes that such persons find in these poems the death-bed repentance of a maudlin old roué. But to the unprejudiced reader such a view must appear worse than absurd. Whitman never claimed to have lived a blameless life, but he did claim to have lived a sane and loving one; the evidence of all his writings, and of these poems especially, supports that claim.
Simple and direct, the “Prayer of Columbus” breathes the religious spirit in which it was conceived. Lonely, poor and paralysed, battered and old, upon the margin of the great ocean of Death, he pours out his heart and tells the secret of his life; for, as Whitman himself confessed, it is he who speaks under a thin historical disguise.[546]
What the end and result of all, he cannot tell—that is God’s business; but he has felt the promise of freedom, religious joy and peace. The way itself has always been plain to him, lit by an ineffable, steady illumination, “lighting the very light”. And now, lost in the unknown seas, he will again set forth, relinquishing the helm of choice; and though the vessel break asunder and his mind itself should fail, yet will his soul cling fast to the one sure thing; for though the waves of the unknown buffet his soul, “Thee, Thee, at least I know”.
In the “Song of the Universal”—apparently delivered by proxy at the Commencement Exercises of Tuft’s College, Massachusetts, midsummer, 1874[547]—Whitman reiterates his conviction that the Divine is at the heart of all and every life. The soul will at last emerge from evil and disease to justify its own history, to bring health out of disease, and joy out of sorrow and sin. Blessed are they who perceive and pursue this truth! It is to forward this wondrous discovery of the soul that America has, in the ripeness of time, arrived.
Without this faith the world and life are but a dream.
The “Song of the Californian Redwood”[548] still harps upon American destiny and upon the mystery of death. The giant of the dense forest, falling before the axes of the pioneers, declares the conscious soul that lives in all natural things. He complains not at death, but rejoices that his huge, calm joy will hereafter be incarnate in more kingly beings—the men that are yet to dwell in this new land of the West—and, above all, in the Godlike genius of America. The “Song of the Redwood Tree” is the voice of a great past, prophetic of a greater, all-continuing, all-embracing future, and, therefore, undismayed at its own passing.
Such were the weapons with which Whitman fought against despair; such the heroic heart which, amid confusion, restlessness and perplexity, still held its own.
COL. WHITMAN’S CORNER HOUSE, No. 431, STEVENS STREET, CAMDEN, 1904
At the end of September, 1873, the Whitmans had moved into a fine new brick house[549] which George, who was now a prosperous inspector of pipes, had built upon a corner lot on Stevens Street. It faced south and west, and Walt chose a sunny room on the second floor, as we should say, or, according to the American and more accurate enumeration, on the third. Here he remained for ten years.
The house still stands, well-built and comfortable; and though the neighbourhood is shabby and the district does not improve with time, the trees that stand before it give it a pleasant air upon a summer’s day. Walt was to have had a commodious room upon the floor below, specially designed for his comfort and convenience, but he preferred the other as sunnier and more quiet.
The family now consisted of three only, for Edward, the imbecile brother, was boarding somewhere near by in the country. Jeff was in St. Louis, the two sisters were married, Andrew had died. About Jesse we have no information; he may still have been living in Long Island or New York.
More than once Whitman wrote very seriously to Pete, gently preparing him for the worst;[550] but though confinement, loneliness and debility of brain and body made the days and nights dreary, there continued to be gleams of comfort. John Burroughs had begun to build his delightful home upon the Hudson, and called at Camden on his way north, after winding up his affairs in the capital. Among occasional callers was Mr. W. J. Linton, who afterwards drew the portrait for the Centennial edition of the Leaves. And Walt made the acquaintance of a jovial Colonel Johnston, at whose house he would often drink a cup of tea on Sunday afternoons.[551]
Then, too, the young men at the ferry, and the drivers and conductors on the cars, came to know and like him, helping him as he hobbled to and fro.[552] He was often refreshed by the sunsets on the river, and by the winter crossings through the floating ice;[553] while the sound and sight of the railroad cars crossing West Street, less than a quarter of a mile away, reminded him constantly of Pete Doyle, now a baggage-master on the “Baltimore and Potomac”.
He had a companion, too, in his little dog,[554] which came and went with him, and all these pleasant, homely little matters go to make his letters as cheerful as may be. If only he could be in his own quarters, and among his friends, he would be comparatively happy. It is the home-feeling and affection that he craves all the time; even a wood-fire would help towards that, but alas, brother George has installed an improved heater!
About midsummer, 1874, a new Solicitor-General discharged Whitman from his post at Washington.[555] Hitherto Walt had employed a substitute to carry on his work. But he had now been ill some eighteen months, and the prospect of his return was becoming so remote that he could not feel he had been treated unjustly.
From this time forward his financial position became precarious. The amount of his savings grew less and less, and his earnings were not large. Besides beginning to edit his hospital memoranda for publication, he wrote for the papers and magazines whenever his head allowed him to do so; and in England, as well as at home, there was still some demand for his book. But even the scanty sales-money did not always reach him, being retained by more than one agent who regarded the author’s life as practically at an end.[556]
FOOTNOTES:
[528] Camden, viii., 238-40; Calamus, 86.
[529] Bucke, 46; In re, 73.
[530] Camden, ix., 200.
[531] In re, 79.
[532] In re, 89.
[533] Calamus, 99; Bucke, 46.
[534] Comp. Prose, 272.
[535] Comp. Prose, 274 n.
[536] Calamus, 104, 109.
[537] L. of G., 105.
[538] See Calamus.
[539] See Calamus, 106.
[540] Ib., 111.
[541] Ib., 106.
[542] Ib.
[543] E.g., the late Mr. Wm. Ingram.
[544] Calamus, 109.
[545] see supra, 204.
[546] Calamus, 145; L. of G., 323.
[547] L. of G., 181.
[548] Ib., 165.
[549] Number 431; Calamus, 118.
[550] Calamus, 119, etc.
[551] Calamus, 126, 127.
[552] Ib., 133.
[553] Ib., 143.
[554] Ib., 137.
[555] Ib., 155.
[556] Bucke, 46.
CONVALESCENCE
All through 1875 the weakness continued; but in November he was well enough to pay a visit to Washington, accompanied by John Burroughs; and, the public re-burial of Poe taking place about that time in Baltimore, Doyle appears to have convoyed him thither.[557] There, sitting silently on the platform at the public function, he seems once again to have been cordially greeted by Emerson, but O’Connor, who was also present, made no sign.[558]
It was not till the following summer that Whitman’s old spirits began to return. Since his mother died he had passed three years in the valley of the shadow, and he was still lonely, sick and poor when his English friends came to his rescue.
He and his writings had been pulverised between the heavy millstones of Mr. Peter Bayne’s adjectives in the Contemporary Review for the month of December. In England, as well as in America, he had literary enemies in high places. But on the 13th of March the Daily News[559] published a long and characteristically fervid letter, full of generous feeling, from Mr. Robert Buchanan, who dilated upon the old poet’s isolation, neglect and poverty. It aroused wide comment, and some indignation on both sides of the Atlantic, among Whitman’s friends as well as among his enemies.
That he was never deserted by his faithful American friends a series of articles upon his condition, published in the Springfield (Mass.) Republican, bears witness.[560] But Buchanan’s letter evoked new and widespread sympathy, which was the means of saving Whitman from his melancholy plight. A fortnight later the Athenæum printed his short sonnet-like poem, “The Man-o’-War Bird”.
In the meantime, Mr. Rossetti, always faithful to his friend, had learned of his condition, and had written asking how best his English admirers might offer him assistance. Walt wrote in reply, stating that his savings were exhausted, that he had been cheated by his New York agents, and that in consequence he was now, for the new Centennial edition, which had just appeared, his own sole publisher.[561] If any of his English friends desired to help him, they could best do so by the purchase of the book. He wrote with affectionate gratitude, and quiet dignity. He was poor, but he was not in want.
There came, through Mr. Rossetti, an immediate, generous and most cordial response, and in the list of English and Irish subscribers appear many illustrious names. The invalid revived; “both the cash and the emotional cheer,” he wrote at a later time, “were deep medicine”.[562] He could now afford to overlook the bitter and contemptuous attacks which were being made upon him by an old acquaintance in the editorials of the New York Tribune.[563] And, which was at least equally important, he could contrive to take a country holiday.
TIMBER CREEK: THE POOL, 1904
About the end of April, or early in May, he drove out through the gently undulating dairy lands and the fields of young corn to the New Jersey hamlet of Whitehorse, some ten miles down the turnpike which leads to Atlantic City and Cape May.[564] A little beyond the village, and close to the Reading Railroad, there still stands an old farmhouse, then tenanted by Mr. George Stafford, and to-day the centre of a group of pleasant villas known as Laurel Springs.
It was here that Whitman lodged, establishing cordial relations with the whole Stafford family, relations which added greatly to the happiness of his remaining years. He became especially attached to Mrs. Stafford, who intuitively read his moods,[565] and to her son Harry.
A short stroll down the green lane, which is now being rapidly civilised out of that delightful category, brings one to a wide woody hollow, where amid the trees a long creek or stream winds down to a large mill-pool with boats and lily leaves floating upon it. Save for the boats and the people from the villas, the place has been but little changed by the quarter of a century which has elapsed since Whitman first visited it.[566] The walnut and the oak under which he used to sit among the meadow-grass are older trees, of course, and the former is now circled with a wooden seat; but the kecks and crickets, the shady nooks by the pool, the jewel-weed and the great-winged tawny butterflies are there as of old. And with them much of the old, sweet, communicative quiet.
At the creek-head, among the willows, is a swampy tangle of mint and calamus, reeds and cresses, white boneset and orange fragile jewel-weed, and above, from its mouth in the steep bank, gushes the “crystal spring” whose soft, clinking murmur soothed the old man many a summer’s day.
Here, early and late, he would sit or saunter through the glinting glimmering lights, and here Mother-Nature took him, an orphan, to her breast. The baby and boyhood days in the lanes and fields at West Hills, and among the woods and orchards came back to him and blessed him with significant memories. To outward seeming an old man, and near sixty as years go, in heart he was still and always a child. And for the last three years a broken-hearted, motherless child. He had been starving to death for lack of the daily ministry of Love.
TIMBER CREEK: “CRYSTAL SPRING” AND THE OLD MARL-PIT, 1904
At Timber Creek, by the pool and in the lanes, the touch of that all-embracing Love which pervades the universe was upon him. Without any effort on his part the caressing air and sunshine re-established the ancient relationship of love, in which of old he had been united to Nature. He would sit silent for hours, wrapt in a sort of trance, realising the mystery of the Whole, through which, as through a body, the currents of life flow and pulse. Woe to any one, however dear, who broke suddenly in upon his solitude![567]
His heart went out to the tall poplars and the upright cedars with their tasselled fruit, and he felt virtue flow from them to him in return. He believed the old dryad stories, and became himself truly nympholeptic, and aware of presences in the woods. In August, 1877, he writes: “I have been almost two years, off and on, without drugs and medicines, and daily in the open air. Last summer I found a particularly secluded little dell off one side by my creek, originally a large dug-out marl-pit, now abandoned, filled with bushes, trees, grass, a group of willows, a straggling bank and a spring of delicious water running right through the middle of it, with two or three little cascades. Here I retreated every hot day, and follow it up this summer. Here I realise the meaning of that old fellow who said he was seldom less alone than when alone. Never before did I come so close to Nature, never before did she come so close to me. By old habit I pencilled down from time to time almost automatically, moods, sights, hours, tints and outlines on the spot.”[568]
Unlike the ordinary naturalist he regarded the birds and trees, the dragon-flies and grey squirrels, the oak-trees and the breeze that sang among their leaves, as spirits; strange, but kindred with his own, members together with his of a transcendental life; and he communed with them. Something, he felt sure, they interchanged; something passed between them.
Their mystical fellowship had its ritual, as have all religions. The place was sacred, and he did off, not only his shoes, but all his raiment, giving back himself to naked Mother-Nature, naked as he was born of her. In the solitude, among the bare-limbed gracious trees and the clear-flowing water, he enjoyed many a sun-bath, and on hot summer days, in his bird-haunted nook, many a bathing in the spring; many a wrestle, too, with strong young hickory sapling or beech bough, conscious, as they wrestled together, of new life flowing into his veins.[569]
Whatever ignorance of names his Washington acquaintance may have discovered,[570] his diary at this time is full of nature-lore. It enumerates some forty kinds of birds, and he was evidently familiar with nearly as many sorts of trees and shrubs; while differentiating accurately enough between the sundry trilling insects, locusts, grasshoppers, crickets and katydids which populate the district, vibrant by day and night. Doubtless he had learnt much from the companionship of John Burroughs, but he was himself an accurate observer.
The story of his visits to Timber Creek and its vicinity from 1876 to 1882 is told in Specimen Days, with much else beside—a book to carry with one on any holiday, or to make a holiday in the midst of city work. It is, for the rest, an admirable illustration of the saying of the philosopher-emperor, that virtue is a living and enthusiastic sympathy with Nature.[571]
Three years of gradual convalescence were divided not only between the Stafford’s farm and the house on Stevens Street, but also with the homes of other friends whose love now began to enrich his life.[572] Of three of the most notable among his new comrades we must speak in passing. In the autumn of 1876 Anne Gilchrist took a house in Philadelphia, while in the following summer Dr. Bucke and Mr. Edward Carpenter came to Camden on pilgrimage.
Whitman often said in his later years that his best friends had been women, and that of his women friends Mrs. Gilchrist was the nearest. She was an Essex girl of good family, nine years younger than Whitman.[573] At school she had loved Emerson, Rousseau, Comte and Ruskin, and a little later she added to them the writings of Carlyle, Guyot and Herbert Spencer. Music and science, with the philosophical suggestions which spring from the discoveries of science, were her chief interests.
At twenty-three she married Alexander Gilchrist, an art-critic and interpreter. It was a wholly happy marriage; Anne became the mother of four children, and, beside being deeply interested in her husband’s work, contrived to contribute scientific articles to the magazines.
While compiling his well-known Life of Blake, Mr. Gilchrist fell a victim to scarlet fever. His widow, with her four young children and the uncompleted book, removed to a cottage in the country, and there, with the encouragement and help of the Rossetti brothers, she finished her husband’s task. Her life was now, as she said, “up hill all the way,” but the book helped her. And her close study of Blake, added to her scientific interests and her love of music, formed the finest possible introduction to her subsequent reading of Whitman.
Her task was concluded in 1863; it had tided her over the first two years of her bereavement; but her letters of sympathy to Dante Rossetti, heart-broken at the loss of his young wife, discover her gnawing sorrow yet undulled by time. Like Whitman, she had the capacity for great suffering. And like Whitman, too, she was helped in her sorrow by the companionship of Nature. And, again, she was a good comrade.
Unlike her grandmother, who was one of Romney’s beauties, Anne Gilchrist was not a handsome woman; but her personality was both vivid and profound, and increasingly attractive as the years passed. She was so serious and eager in temperament that, even in London, she lived in comparative retirement.
The letters which she exchanged with the Rossettis during a long period are evidence both of her common-sense and her capacity for passionate sympathy. They are often as frank as they are noble; revealing a nature too profound to be continually considerate of criticism. This gives to some of her utterances a half naïve and wholly charming quality, which cannot have been absent from her personality, and must have endeared her to the comrades whom she honoured with her confidence.
This high seriousness of hers made her the readier to appreciate a poet who, almost alone among Americans, has bared his man’s heart to his readers, careless of the cheap ridicule of those smart-witted cynics whom modern education and modern morality have multiplied till they are almost as numerous as the sands of the sea. She was a little more than forty when she first read Leaves of Grass and wrote those letters to W. M. Rossetti in which she attested her appreciation of their purpose and power.[574]
It was no light thing for a woman to publish such a declaration of faith; and in her own phrase,[575] she felt herself a second Lady Godiva, going in the daylight down the public way, naked, not in body but in soul, for the good cause. She was convinced that her ride was necessary; for men would remain blind to the glory of Whitman’s message until a woman dared the shame and held its glory up to them. And what she did, she did less for men than for their wives and mothers, upon whom the shadow of their shame-in-themselves had fallen.
Mr. Rossetti has described[576] her as a woman of good port, in fullest possession of herself, never fidgetty, and never taken unawares; warm-hearted and courageous, with full, dark, liquid eyes, which were at the same time alive with humour and vivacity, quick to detect every kind of humbug, but wholly free from cynicism. Her face was not only expressive of her character, but “full charged with some message” which her lips seemed ever about to utter. Her considerable intellectual force was in happy harmony with her domestic qualities, and filled her home-life with interest.
Such was the woman who, in November, 1876, at the age of forty-eight, brought her family to Philadelphia, in order that one of the daughters might study medicine at Girard College; and in whose home, near the college grounds, Whitman henceforward, for two or three years,[577] spent a considerable part of his time. The relationship of these two noble souls seems to have been comparable with that which united Michael Angelo and Vittoria Colonna, and they were at a similar time of life.
This, the Centennial year, was filled with thoughts and celebrations of American independence; among which we may recall the Exposition in Philadelphia—where throughout the summer, Whitman had been a frequent visitor—and the Centennial edition of his works. He had also celebrated the occasion by sitting for his bust to a young sculptor, in an improvised studio on Chestnut Street. The weather was too hot for a coat; and in his white shirt sleeves he would, at the artist’s request, read his poems aloud with naïve delight, which rose to a climax when the sound of applause from a group of young fellows on the stairs without, crowned his efforts. “So you like it, do you?” he cried to them; “well, I rather enjoyed that myself.”[578]
The old sad and solitary inertia was broken. Ill though he often was, the lonely little upper room held him no longer; nor was he any more shut up within the sense of bereavement. Jeff had come over from St. Louis, and his two daughters spent the autumn with their aunt and uncles in Stevens Street. All through the winter Walt was moving back and forward between George’s house, the Staffords farm, and Mrs. Gilchrist’s. He was cheerfully busy with the orders for his pair of handsome books, which were selling briskly at a guinea a volume.
Leaves of Grass had been reprinted from the plates of the fifth edition. Its companion, Two Rivulets, was a “mélange” compounded of additional poems, including “Passage to India,” and the prose writings of which we have already spoken, printed at various times during the last five years. “Specimen Days” was not among them, and did not appear till 1882. The title Two Rivulets suggests the double thread of its theme, the destiny of the nation and of the individual, American politics and that mystery of immortal life which we call death. They were not far asunder in Whitman’s thought.[579]
At the end of February, Mr. Burroughs met Walt at Mrs. Gilchrist’s, and thence they set out together for New York. Here, Whitman stayed with his new and dear friends, Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Johnston;[580] and presented himself in his own becoming garb at the grand full-dress receptions which were held in his honour; the applause which greeted him, and the atmosphere of real affection by which he was surrounded, compensating him for the always distasteful attentions of a lionising public, eager for any sensation.
He renewed also, and with perhaps more unmitigated satisfaction, his acquaintance with the men on the East River ferries, and the Broadway stages; and, finally, he ascended the Hudson to stay awhile with John Burroughs. This pleasant holiday jaunt was not without its tragic element; his friend, Mrs. Johnston, dying suddenly on his last evening in New York.
It was in May that Mr. Edward Carpenter visited him in Camden. After a brilliant Cambridge career, he was now a pioneer University Extension lecturer in natural sciences. But besides, or rather beyond this, a poet, in whom the sense of fellowship and unity was already becoming dominant.
EDWARD CARPENTER AT FORTY-THREE
In a note to his just-published preface, Whitman had spoken of the “terrible, irrepressible yearning”[581] for sympathy which underlay his work, and by which he claimed the personal affection of such readers as he could truly call his own. This also was the aim which underlay Mr. Carpenter’s first book of verses, Narcissus and Other Poems, published in 1873.[582]
Their author was already familiar with Leaves of Grass, which he had first read at about the age of twenty-five, and which he had since been absorbing, much as he absorbed the sonatas of Beethoven. They fed within him the life of something which was still but dimly conscious; something dumb, blind and irrational, but of titanic power to disturb the even tenor of an academic life. One remarks that both Mrs. Gilchrist and he shared to the full the modern feeling for science and its philosophy, and for music.
When he visited Whitman, Edward Carpenter was thirty-three; it was not till four years after this that he gave himself up to the writing of his own “Leaves,” coming into his spiritual kingdom a little later in life than did Walt. In many respects his nature, and consequently his work which is the outcome and true expression of his personality, was in striking contrast with that of his great old friend. Lithe and slender in figure, he was subtle also and fine in the whole temper of his mind; sharing with Addington Symonds that tendency to over-fineness, that touch of morbid subtilty which demands for its balance a very sweet and strenuous soul, such indeed, as is revealed in the pages of Towards Democracy.
He found Whitman’s mind clear and unclouded after the suffering of the last four years, his perception keen as ever.[583] Courteous, and possessed of great personal charm, he was yet elemental and “Adamic” in character. He impressed his visitor with a threefold personality: first, the magnetic, effluent, radiant spirit of the man going out to greet and embrace all; then, the spacious breadth of his soul, and the remoteness of those further portions in which his consciousness seemed often to be dwelling; and afterwards, the terrible majesty, as of judgment unveiled in him, a Jove-like presence full of thunder.
This last element in his nature was naked, ominous, immovable as a granite rock. When once you perceived it, there was, as Miss Gilchrist has remarked,[584] no shelter from the terrible blaze of his personality. But this rocky masculine Ego was wedded in him with a gentle almost motherly affection, which found expression in certain caressing tones of his widely modulated voice. While, to complete alike the masculine and feminine, was the child—the attitude of reverent wonder toward the world.
By turns then, a wistful child, a charming loving woman, an untamed terrible truth-compelling man, Whitman seems to have both bewitched and baffled his young English visitor.
Mr. Carpenter saw him at Stevens Street and Timber Creek, and again under Mrs. Gilchrist’s hospitable roof. They sat out together in the pleasant Philadelphia fashion through the warm June evenings upon the porch steps; and Walt would talk in his deliberate way of Japan and China, or of the Eastern literatures. He liked to join hands while he talked, communicating more, perhaps, of himself, and understanding his companion better, by touch than by words. His mere presence was sufficient to redeem the commonplace.
His visitor had also an opportunity of noting the efficiency of Whitman’s defences against the globe-trotting interview-hunting type of American woman. His silence became aggressive, and her words rebounded from it; he had disappeared into his rock-faced solitude where nothing could reach him. And a very few moments of this treatment sufficed, even for the brazen-armoured amazon.
During Mr. Carpenter’s visit, Mrs. George Whitman, whom Dr. Bucke has described as an attractive, sweet woman, was out of health, and her brother-in-law made a daily excursion down town and across the ferry to see her, and to transact his own affairs. In the heat of the following July she first opened the door to Dr. Bucke.[585]
He, too, had long been a student of Leaves of Grass, a student at first against his own judgment, and with little result beyond an annoying bewilderment to his sense of fitness, and of exasperation to his intelligence. But from the first, he felt a singular interior compulsion to read the book, which he could not at all understand. Its lack of all definite statement was the head and front of its offending to a keen scientific mind. But now after many years, he had come to recognise the extraordinary power of suggestion which was embodied in every page.
Dr. R. Maurice Bucke’s personality was strongly marked and striking; he had as much determination as had Whitman himself, and his whole face is full of resolute purpose.
Born in Norfolk, in 1837, but immediately transplanted to Canada, he was thoroughly educated by his father, who was a man of considerable scholarship and a minister in the Church of England.
In 1857, he crowned an adventurous youth passed in the mining regions of the Western States, by a daring winter expedition over the Sierras, in which he was so badly frozen that he afterwards lost both feet, but his tall and vigorous figure showed hardly a trace of this misfortune.
Returning to Canada, he studied medicine; and eventually, in 1877, became the head of a large insane asylum at London, Ontario. Here he introduced several notable reforms in the treatment of the patients, which were widely imitated throughout America.
He was a keen student of mental pathology, and for some time before his death was reckoned among the leading alienists of the continent. Certain interesting and suggestive studies of the relation which appears to exist between the so-called sympathetic nervous system and the moral and emotional nature, but especially his magnum opus, Cosmic Consciousness, published the year before his death (1901), reveal the direction of his dominant interest. From 1877, he was one of Whitman’s closest friends, and became subsequently his principal biographer.[586]
In the printed recollections of his first interview with Whitman,[587] Dr. Bucke recalls the exaltation of his mind produced by it; describing it as a “sort of spiritual intoxication,” which remained with him for months, transfiguring his new friend into more than mortal stature. It is another instance of the almost incredible power of the invalid’s personality.
RICHARD MAURICE BUCKE
Whitman’s own jottings and records of the period testify to his increasing physical vigour. He goes, for instance, to the Walnut Street Theatre, to a performance of Joaquin Miller’s The Danites, accompanied by his friend the author.[588] In the summer of 1878, and in the succeeding year, he is again a guest both of John Burroughs and of J. H. Johnston.[589] On the second occasion, he had delivered his lecture on the “Death of Lincoln” in the Steck Hall, New York; promising himself anew, that if health permitted, he would even now set forth on the lecture tour which he had so long contemplated.[590] But though, in the autumn, he made, with several friends, an extended tour of some sixteen weeks beyond the Mississippi, he did not accomplish this cherished scheme.
At night on the 10th of September, Whitman and his party left Philadelphia, westward bound. Walt delighted in the magic speed and comfort of the Pullman;[591] in which, lying awake among the sleepers, he was whirled all through the first night up the broad pastoral valley of the Susquehanna, curving with its thousand reedy aits about thick-wooded steeps; and on, over ridge and ridge of the Alleghanies, till morning found them at smoking Pittsburg.
Crossing the Ohio, almost at the point whence he had descended it thirty years before on that fateful southern journey, the good engine, the Baldwin, hurried them all that day through rich and populous Ohio and Indiana. Whitman was not disinclined to acknowledge a personality in the fierce and beautiful locomotive which he had already celebrated in a poem full of fire and of the modern spirit.[592]
They were due next morning at St. Louis, but about nightfall their headlong flight through the broad lands was arrested. The Baldwin ran foul of some obstacle, and suffered serious damage and consequent delay. Spending the third night in the city, they continued through a beautiful autumn day, across the rolling prairies of Missouri, feasting their eyes upon the wide farmlands full of the promise of bread for millions of men.
Nor material bread only. There is something in the vast aerial spaces of these prairie states, their great skies and lonely stretches, which exalts and feeds the soul; something oceanic, Whitman thought, “and beautiful as dreams”.[593] Central in the continent, this country had always seemed to him to correspond with certain central qualities in his ideal America, and to supply the background for the two men whose figures stood out supremely above the struggle for the union, Lincoln and Grant—men of unplumbed and inarticulate depths of character, and of native freedom of spirit and elemental originality of thought.
Whitman stayed for a while with friends upon the road, at Lawrence and Topeka. Many of the boys he had tended in the wards were now hale men out West, and they were always eager for sight of him; so that there were few places in America where he would not have found a hearty welcome.
He proceeded along the yellow Kansas River, through the Golden Belt, and over the Colorado table-lands, bare and vast as some immense Salisbury Plain, to Denver. In that young city he spent several days, dreaming his great dreams of a Western town that should be full of friends and strong for and against the whole world, breathing her fine air, sparkling as champagne and clear as cold spring water; falling in love with her people and her horses, and the little mountain streams which ran along the channel ways of her broad streets.
Thence, he made short trips into the Rockies; where the railroad winds among fantastic yellow buttes with steep sloping screes, and towering battlements; and the trains swing eagerly round a thousand curves to follow the bronze and amber path-finder, brawling in its sinuous ravine between the pinnacled, red, cloud-topped crags which it has carved and sundered.
Every break in the walls disclosed Olympian companies of august peaks against the high blue. Gradually the way would climb to the summit, its straightness widening, here and there, into sedgy mountain meadows closed about by keen-cut granite heights, the perfect record of laborious ages; and as the day advanced, the broad and restful light broadened and grew more serene as it shone afar on chains of snowy peaks.
Here in this tremendous mountain fellowship, with its shapes at once fantastic and sublime, its solemn joy and wild imagination, its infinite complex of form and colour suggesting vast emotions to the soul, Walt breathed his proper air and recognised the landscape of his deepest life. “I have found the law of my own poems,” he kept saying to himself with increasing conviction, hour after hour.[594] Like the lonely mountain eagle which he watched wheeling leisurely among the peaks, he was at home in this sternly beautiful, untamed, unmeasured land.
Towards the end of September, he turned East again from the mining town of Pueblo; leaving the Far West unseen[595]—Utah with its Canaanitish glories of intense lake and naked, ruddy, wrinkled mountains; the great grey desert of Nevada; and the forest-clad Sierras looking out across their Californian garden towards the Pacific. Stopping here and there with his former friends, he found his way to Jefferson Whitman’s home in St. Louis, and there remained over the year’s end.
This cosmopolitan Western city,[596] planted in the centre of that vast valley which the Mississippi drains and waters, and at the heart of the American continent, was intensely interesting to Whitman. He had an almost superstitious love for “the Father of Waters”; and many a moonlit autumn night he haunted its banks, its wharves and bridges, fascinated by the sound of the moving water as the river flowed through the luminous silence under the eternal stars.
Physically, St. Louis did not suit him: he was ill there for weeks together; but even so, he was happy in his own simple, human way. He went twice a week to the kindergartens, and there, for an hour together, he entertained the younger pupils with his funny children’s tales.[597] After the first moments of strangeness, and alarm at his size and the whiteness of his hair, nearly all the children quickly came to love old “Kris Kringle” or “Father Christmas” as they would call him;[598] and for his part, he was as happy among little children as a young mother.
Early in January, 1880, he returned home. All his delight in the West, gathered on his first journey up the Mississippi thirty years before, and since accumulating from many sources, notably from the young Western soldiers he had nursed, had been confirmed by this visit.
In only one thing was he disappointed. The men had seemed, to his searching gaze, fit sons of that new land of possibility; but in the women he had failed to find the qualifications he was seeking.[599] Physically and mentally, he saw them still in bondage to old-world traditions; instead of originating nobler and more generous manners, they were imitating the foolish gentility of the East. Whitman was very exacting in his ideal of womanhood; and perhaps it was mainly upon the ladies of the shops and streets that his strictures were passed; for there are others in that Western world, who are not far from her whom he has described in the “Song of the Broad-axe”—the best-beloved, possessed of herself, who is strong in her beauty as are the laws of nature.[600]
After six months at home among his books and his friends—to whom at this time he added, at least by correspondence, Colonel Robert Ingersoll, afterwards a member of the inner circle—Whitman set out upon another journey, in length almost equal to that of the preceding autumn. Early in June,[601] he crossed the bridge over Niagara on his way to London, Ontario; and now at his second sight, the significance of that majestic scene, which thirty years before he would seem to have missed, was discovered to him.
Staying with Dr. Bucke, he made frequent visits to the great asylum, with its thousand patients, under the wise doctor’s care. Walt’s own family life, with the tragedy of his youngest brother’s incapacity, had made the melancholy brotherhood of those whom he has beautifully described as the “sacred idiots”[602] especially interesting to him. He attended the religious services held in the asylum; joining with those wrecked minds in a common worship, and seeing the storms of their lives strangely quieted, as though a Divine love, brooding over all, had hushed them.[603] With many of the patients he became personally acquainted, and years afterwards recalled them by name, inquiring affectionately after their welfare.
Whitman was in better health than usual, and in excellent spirits. He loved the doctor, was happy and at home in his household, and on the best of terms with its younger members. Among the latter, his presence never checked the natural flow of high spirits, as does the presence of most grown-up persons: he was always one of themselves.
This, indeed, was a characteristic of Whitman in whatever company he was found, from a kindergarten to a company of “publicans and sinners”. The spirit of comradeship identified him with the others, and he was so profoundly himself that such identification took nothing away from his own identity. Among the young people of Dr. Bucke’s household his fun and humour had free and natural expression; as when, for example, one moonlit evening, he undertook the burial of an empty wine-bottle, addressing a magniloquent oration over its last resting-place to the goddess Semele.
He loved to linger at the table, telling stories after tea; and to recite or read aloud, when the family sat together in the dusk on the verandah; and sometimes, too, he would take his turn in singing some well-known song. For reading aloud, he would often choose some poem of Tennyson’s—“Ulysses” seems to have been his favourite.
At this time also, in a secluded nook in the grounds, he read leisurely over to himself, with the satisfaction which Tennyson’s work nearly always gave him, the newly published De Profundis.[604] His diary of these pleasant, refreshing weeks contains many notes of the thick-starred heavens and the merry birds, and the multitudinous swallows, which would recall to his well-stored mind the story of Athene and Ulysses’ return.[605]
His vital force seemed to be almost unimpaired. The noble calm of his presence, indeed, made him appear even older than he was; his fine hair was snowy white, and the high-domed crown which rose through it and grew higher and nobler with every year, gave him all claims to reverence.[606]
But, though at first sight he seemed to be nearer eighty than sixty years old, and though he was lame from paralysis, a second glance showed him erect and without a line of care or of senility upon his face. His complexion was rosy as a winter pippin, and his cheeks were full and smooth, for his heart was always young.
His host wished to show him Canada; in which country he was the more deeply interested through his settled conviction that it would presently become a part of the United States. The St. Lawrence and the Lakes, he always said, cannot remain a frontier-line; they are and should be recognised as a magnificent inland water-way, comparable with the Mississippi.
Towards the end of July[607] he set out upon this great road with his friend. Taking boat at Toronto, they descended by easy stages, stopping a night or two at Kingston, Montreal and Quebec, Whitman thoroughly enjoying all the new scenes and making friends everywhere on the way. He sat on the fore-deck in the August sunshine, wrapped in his grey overcoat, wondering at the grim pagan wildness of the lower St. Lawrence, nightly watching the Northern Lights, and appearing on deck before sunrise.
WHITMAN AT SIXTY-ONE, JULY, 1880
As they turned up the deep dark Saguenay and reached the mountain pillars of Eternity and Trinity, the mystery of northern river and height, with all they hold of stillness and of storm, communed with him. He saw infinite power wedded with an ageless peace; and all, however awful in its sublimity, yet far from inhospitable to an heroic race of men; nay, by its very awfulness, inviting and proclaiming the men who shall dare to dwell therein.
With the people of Canada, as a whole, he was well pleased. He liked their benevolent care for the weak and infirm in body and mind; and thought them in every respect worthy of the destiny which he believed that he foresaw—the destiny of citizenship in the Republic.
FOOTNOTES:
[557] Comp. Prose, 150.
[558] The incidents may not all belong to this visit.
[559] Bucke, 213.
[560] W. W. Autobiographia, 205 n.
[561] Comp. Prose, 311, 312; Donaldson, 29-31.
[562] Comp. Prose, 519.
[563] Bucke, 215, 216, etc.
[564] Cf. Comp. Prose, 75.
[565] MSS. Wallace.
[566] Comp. Prose, 75.
[567] MSS. Wallace.
[568] Comp. Prose, 96-98.
[569] Comp. Prose, 91, 92, 98.
[570] Ib., 84, 94, 116; cf. supra, 230.
[571] Ib., 193.
[572] MSS. Diary; Calamus, 170.
[573] Anne Gilchrist, by H. H. G.
[574] See supra, 225-7.
[575] Gilchrist, 190.
[576] Ib., Preface.
[577] MSS. Diary.
[578] In re, 370.
[579] Comp. Prose, 270.
[580] Bucke, 216, 217.
[581] Comp. Prose, 277 n.
[582] Tom Swan’s Edward Carpenter, 1902, and article by E. C. in Labour Prophet, May, 1894.
[583] Carpenter (a).
[584] G. Gilchrist, op. cit.; cf. Carpenter (b).
[585] Calamus, 10 n.
[586] MS. of Dr. E. P. Bucke, and W. W.’s Diary in Canada, v.
[587] Bucke, 50; Whit. Fellowship, Memories of W. W., by R. M. B.
[588] MSS. Diary.
[589] Comp. Prose, 106, 122.
[590] Ib., 506.
[591] Comp. Prose, 132, 149.
[592] L. of G., 358.
[593] Comp. Prose, 134.
[594] Comp. Prose, 136.
[595] Ib., 140.
[596] Calamus, 170-72.
[597] Bucke, 63.
[598] MSS. Berenson (a).
[599] Comp. Prose, 146.
[600] L. of G., 157.
[601] Comp. Prose, 153-58, and Whit. Fellowship Memo. of W. W. (Bucke); Bucke, 48.
[602] L. of G., 325.
[603] Comp. Prose, 154.
[604] Diary in Canada, 10, 11.
[605] Comp. Prose, 132.
[606] Bucke, 49.
[607] Diary in Canada, 41.