CHAPTER XIX

HE BECOMES A HOUSEHOLDER

Emerson and Longfellow died within six months of Whitman’s Boston visit; the former being buried in that graveyard at Sleepy Hollow where Walt had so recently stood by the green mounds that mark the resting-places of Hawthorne and of Thoreau.[652] Carlyle had died a year earlier; Carlyle who so deeply impressed his impetuous pathetic personality upon all that he handled, and who was one of the principal literary influences upon Whitman during his later years, as Emerson had doubtless been an inspiration in the earlier. And while Walt had been working on the Osgood proof-sheets, James Garfield, the friend who used to hail him as he passed on Pennsylvania Avenue riding with Pete Doyle, shouting out some tag from the Leaves, and who had now become President of the United States, died amid the mourning of the nation.

Whitman’s daily life had been poorer these last two or three years, since Mrs. Gilchrist’s return to England, but new friends were continually added to his circle. Among these was Mr. W. S. Kennedy, who was working for awhile on one of the Philadelphia papers, and has since published a notable collection of reminiscences and memoranda of his relations with the Camden poet.

The Christmas of 1882[653] brought him a delightful gift in the friendship of a Quaker family. Mr. Pearsall Smith was a wealthy Philadelphia glass merchant, who with his wife had, till recently, been a member of the Society of Friends. He had had a remarkable career as an evangelist, both in his own country and in Europe; his eloquence and magnetic personality having been instrumental in changing the course of many lives. His wife also was an active worker in the fields of religion and philanthropy; and their home in Germantown—one of the suburbs of Philadelphia most remote in every sense from plebeian Camden—became a meeting-place for men and women interested and engaged in the work of reform. By this time, however, Mr. Pearsall Smith himself, finding in human nature more forces than were accounted for in the evangelical philosophy, had withdrawn from active participation in its labours.

The elder of his daughters, Miss Mary Whitall Smith, a thoughtful and enthusiastic college girl, came back from New England, where she was studying, fired by a determination to meet Walt Whitman. Her parents discovered with dismay that she had read the Leaves, at first with the consternation proper to her Quaker training, but later with ardour. Respectable Philadelphians, and especially members of the Society of Friends, were disposed to regard the poet as an outrageous, dangerous person, who lived in a low place, among disreputable and vulgar associates. His works were classed by them with the wares of obscene book-vendors, as absolutely impossible.

The parents’ consternation at their daughter’s resolve may well be imagined. But being wise parents, they were prepared to learn; and Mr. Smith eventually drove her over in a stylish carriage behind a pair of excellent horses.

They found Whitman at home. He descended slowly, leaning on his stick, to the little stuffy parlour where they were waiting; and with a kindly, affectionate amusement received the girl’s homage. Her father immediately and impulsively asked the old man to drive back and spend the night with them. This was the spontaneous kind of hospitality which most delighted Walt, and after a moment’s hesitation, in which he weighed the matter, he decided in favour of his new friends and their excellent equipage. His sister-in-law quickly produced the boots and other necessaries, and they set forth. Whitman loved to drive and to be driven, and as he sat on the back seat by his adoring young friend, he heartily enjoyed the whole situation. It was indeed enough to warm an old man’s heart.

After listening to her avowals, he recommended Miss Smith to study Emerson and Thoreau, but was evidently well pleased with her praise. Genuine devotion he always accepted.

He stayed a couple of days on this occasion; delighting in long drives along the Wissahickon Creek, and showing himself very much at home among the young people of the household.

From this time on, and until the family left for England in 1886, he was their frequent visitor; and in later years—while reverently remembering Mrs. Gilchrist, who died in 1885—he came to speak of Mary Whitall Smith as his “staunchest living woman friend”. His letters to her father also are evidences of a close intimacy between the two men. Thus it seems permissible to speak here at greater length than usual of their relations, which serve besides to illustrate others not less affectionate.

Often during the college vacations, when the house was filled with merry young folk, Whitman would sit in the hall to catch the sounds of their laughter, enhanced by a little distance; or from his corner, leaning upon his stick, he would look on for hours together while they danced. Spirits ran high on these occasions, and all the higher for his smiling presence. He enjoyed everything, and not least the wholesome incipient love-making which he was quick to notice, and encourage.

Often he was full of fun; and still, as in the old days, he sang gaily as he splashed about in his bath, a delighted group of young people listening on the landing without to the strains of “Old Jim Crow,” some Methodist hymn, or negro melody. At night, before retiring, he would take a walk under the stars, sometimes alone, sometimes with his girl friend, who could appreciate the companionableness of silence.

He was always perfectly frank, as well as perfectly courteous; if he preferred solitude he said so; and if, when at table, his hostess proposed to read aloud some long family letter, and asked him in an aside whether he would like to hear it, he would smile and answer, No.

He came to see them usually in his familiar grey suit; but in winter he wore one of heavier make, which was, however, provided with an overcoat only; indoors, he then put on the knitted cardigan jacket seen in some of his portraits. On one occasion, when some local literary people were invited to meet him, he appeared unaccustomedly conscious of his clothes. Uncomfortable at the absence of a coat, he tried the overcoat for awhile; but becoming very hot before the dinner was done, he beat a retreat into the hall; and there divesting himself of the burden, returned in his ordinary comfortable dress. Such incidents admirably illustrate his simple and homely ways.[654]

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Henceforward, though records are multiplied, the movement of Whitman’s life is less and less affected by outer events, and becomes yearly more private and elusive.

There is little to record of 1883, save that shortly after his sixty-fourth birthday there appeared the biographical study of Whitman by his Canadian friend. Like the earlier and smaller sketch by John Burroughs, Dr. Bucke’s volume was revised and authenticated by the poet, and is an invaluable record. Though fragmentary and far from exhaustive, it is written by one of the very few who can be said to have caught the real significance of the life and personality of the author of Leaves of Grass. That he fully understood Whitman, neither he nor his poet friend ever suggested; but then one must add that Whitman always laughingly asserted he did not by any means understand himself.[655]

As a result of the sales of the Philadelphia edition and the royalties which they brought him, the old man was now enabled to carry a long-cherished plan into execution.

On March the 26th, 1884,[656] he left his brother’s house, and removed to a little two-story cottage on Mickle Street, near by. Here he installed himself, at first with an elderly workman and his wife, and afterwards under the more efficient régime of Mrs. Mary Davis, a buxom New Jersey widow of comfortable presence, who brought into the house that homely atmosphere which Whitman had so long been seeking.[657]

Downstairs, in the little front parlour, he carried on what remained to him of his own publishing—the old autograph editions which he had not entrusted to Mr. McKay; and over it, upstairs, was his bedroom, which he liked to compare with a big ship’s cabin. In the backyard were lilacs, which he loved; and a shady tree stood in the side-walk in front.

He found his little “shack,” as he called it, pleasant and restful, and his own. He was not much worried by the rasping church choir and the bells, which jangled cruelly loud for such sensitive hearing every Sunday; nor by the neighbourhood of a guano factory, which was noticeable enough to the most ordinary nose.[658] Here his friends from far and near were frequent visitors, Dr. Bucke, John Burroughs and Peter Doyle among them; and in June came Edward Carpenter from England on his second visit.[659]

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Carpenter had now issued his slender green Towards Democracy, that strange, prophetic, intimate book, so unlike all others, even the Leaves which it most resembles. It was seven years since the two men had met, and the older had grown thinner and more weary-looking. He had not been worsted in the long struggle with time and illness, but they had left their mark upon his body.

The visitor renewed his first impressions of that complex personality; felt again the wistful affection mingled with the contradictiousobstinacy; recognised the same watchful caution and keen perception, “a certain artfulness,” and the old “wild hawk look” of his untameable spirit; but, beneath all, the wonderful unfathomed tenderness.

Whitman manifestly had his moods, “lumpishly immovable” at times, at times deliberately inaccessible. He took a certain wilful pleasure in denial, for the quality of “cussedness” was strong in him. And his friends admired his magnificent “No,” issuing from him naked and unashamed, just as mere acquaintances dreaded it.

But in other moods he was all generosity, and you knew in him a man who had given himself body, mind and spirit to Love, never contented to give less than all.

Among the topics of their conversations was the Labour Movement, in which Carpenter was actively interested. Whitman professed his belief in co-operation, at the same time reiterating his deeply-rooted distrust of elected persons, of officials and committees. He had lived in Washington; and besides, his feeling for personal initiative, his wholesome and passionate love of individuality, and its expression in every field, set him always and everywhere against mere delegates and agents. Above all things, he abhorred regimentation, officialism and interference. “I believe, like Carlyle, in men,” he said with emphasis. He hoped for more generous, and, as he would say, more prudent, captains of industry; but he looked for America’s realisation to an ever-increasing class of independent yeomanry, who should constitute the solid and permanent bulk of the Republic.

Regarding America from the universal point of view, as the standard-bearer of Liberty among the nations, he thought of Free-trade as a moral rather than a merely economic question. Free-trade and a welcome to all foreigners were for Whitman integral parts of the American ideal. “The future of the world,” he would say, “is one of open communication and solidarity of all races”; and he added, with a dogmatism characteristic of his people, “if that problem [of free interchange] cannot be solved in America, it cannot be solved anywhere”.

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In considering Whitman’s attitude towards the Social Problem, and especially the Labour Problem, whose development in America he had been watching since the close of the war, one must consider the conditions of his time and country.[660] The Industrial Revolution, which is still in progress—and which in its progress is changing the face of the globe, disintegrating the old society down to its very basis in family life—has revealed itself to us in the last generation, much more clearly than to Whitman, who grew up seventy years ago in a new land.

We can see now that, though it may prelude a reconstruction of human society and relations in all their different phases, it is itself destructive rather than constructive. We recognise that it does not bring equality of opportunity to all, as its earlier observers had predicted;[661] but that, on the contrary, it destroys much of the meaning of opportunity; the control of capital which is the motive power of modern industrial life, falling more and more into the hands of a small group of legatees, on whose pleasure the rest of the community tends to become dependent for its livelihood.

And we see the results of this new economic condition in the character of the populations of those vast cities into which the Industrial Revolution is still gathering the peoples of Europe and America. Among these, the spirit of individual enterprise and initiative is continually choked by the narrow range of their opportunity. Their lives become the melancholy exponents of that theory of the specialisation of industry against which the humanitarians of the age have all inveighed.

Serious as it was becoming in the New World, the Labour Question had not yet, in Whitman’s time, assumed an aspect so menacing as in the Old. Even to-day the proportion of Americans engaged in agriculture is four times as large as that which rules in Great Britain; and except in the North Atlantic States, the rural population does not seem to be actually losing ground;[662] though its increase is much less rapid than that of the urban districts, into which more than a third of the population is now gathered, as against a fifth at the close of the war, or an eighth in the middle of the century. At the time of Whitman’s death nearly three-quarters of the total number of American farmers were the owners of their farms; and it was in these working proprietors, with the similar body of half-independent artisans who were owners of their houses, that he placed his social faith. These were, as we have seen, the men whom he regarded as citizens in the fullest sense.[663]

In this view he was doubtless influenced by Mill, whose Principles of Political Economy he seems to have studied soon after its appearance in 1848. Roughly speaking, Mill had supplemented the teaching of Adam Smith, that individual liberty is the one sure foundation for the wealth of nations, by describing the proper sphere of social intervention in industrial matters. His picture of the future industry—the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers selected and removable by themselves—has been quoted as the socialist ideal.[664]

And Mill was deeply influenced by the early Socialists.[665] Their activity in Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century was so remarkable that it must have come under the notice of Whitman. Robert Owen, intoxicated with what was perhaps a rather shallow conception of the great truth of human perfectibility, had spent his life and wealth in unsuccessful but most suggestive social experiments. No less optimistic were his French contemporaries, St. Simon and Fourier.

In striking contrast with them and their doctrinaire systems, Proudhon, the peasant, who presents not a few points of agreement with Whitman, looked forward to voluntarism as the final form of society, and detested alike the theoretic elaboration and the sexual lubricity of his amiable but, on the whole, unpractical compatriots.

The failure of the risings of 1848, and the succeeding period of reaction, checked the socialist movement,[666] and social reform was left for awhile to middle-class Liberalism, with its philanthropic ignorance of the real needs of the workers; until, in the last generation, the demands of labour, the pressure of poverty and the aspirations of social enthusiasts, have together furnished the motive power for a further struggle for the collectivist ideal of “intelligent happiness and pleasurable energy” for all.[667]

This recent movement was at first most unequally yoked with an unbeliever in the brilliant, fatalistic theory of Karl Marx. Marx was a year older than Whitman; his acute Hebrew intellect was trained under the Hegelian system of thought, but he was apparently destitute of the finer historic sense, as well as of Hegel’s idealism.[668] The humanitarian character of the social movement is now once more sweeping it far beyond his formulas; but in Whitman’s time the Marxian theory dominated Socialism.

In Long Island and New York, during the period of Whitman’s youth, the social condition was, on the whole, free from serious disorders, save those incident upon growth and rapid development. The spirit of Elizabethan enterprise, the practical achievement of brave and ardently conceived ideas, ruled in that democratic society wherein his habit of mind was shaped, and of which it was in large degree a natural product. Whitman’s youth and early manhood were little touched by evidences of any social disease so deep-seated as to encourage ideas of revolution. It is true that the vested interests of the slave party made themselves felt in New York; but neither to him nor to the “Free-soil” party did the anti-slavery movement suggest that other change which the political title they adopted brings so vividly before the mind to-day. “Free-soil” had for him no definitely Socialistic significance.

And it was only, as we have seen, after the war that the accentuation of the labour problem brought it into prominence in the American cities. Whenever, thereafter, Whitman, leaving the comparative quiet of his own surroundings, revisited the metropolis, or wandered to some great western centre of industry, he realised dimly the progressive approach of the crisis.

The increase in the accumulation of wealth was far outrunning even the rapid increase in population; but a large proportion of this wealth was being concentrated in a few hands which threatened to control the national policy. Manufacture was facilitated by the immense influx of immigrants who swelled the dependent city populations, and these immigrants coming more and more from the south-east of Europe, that is to say, from the most backward, ignorant and turbulent nations, promised by their presence to create a social problem in the North and Middle West not less acute if less extensive than that of the negro in the South.

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Democracy looks with suspicion on the very poor,[669] quoth Whitman, meaning that the poverty of the poor incapacitates them for citizenship. That, I think, is one of the great and final arguments against the policy of laissez faire under existing circumstances.

Things would go very well if left to themselves, says the philosophic theorist, and so even Whitman is often inclined to declare.[670] But just as the organised party of slavery, in the fifty years before the war, refused to leave things to right themselves, so the party of property to-day interferes, more or less unconsciously, with the principle which it so loudly proclaims. It is because of the existence of innumerable sacrosanct parchments, customs and traditions, and all the subtly clinging fingers of mortmain, that laissez faire remains an empty phrase. If we could burn the parchments and loose the fingers, men might go free. But still for the sake of the nation’s health the poor would need to be assisted to rise out of the helpless condition into which society has allowed them to be thrust and held.

We have noted Whitman’s hearty approval of Canada’s benevolent institutions for the incapable; he fully recognised the duty of society toward such as these.[671] And however hesitating his declarations on a subject which he was willing to leave to younger men, the main principle of his social economy, the right of each individual to be well born, carries us far from the policy of any party dominant to-day in our political life.

He recognised this right as far more fundamental than any secondary privilege which has been accorded to property for social convenience. And it is because this right continues to be denied to millions of future citizens, to the most serious peril of the whole Republic, and apparently for no better reason than that its recognition must impede the present rate of increase in material development, that the Socialist party has arisen in America. It is safe to say that it is the only party which deliberately aims at social amelioration and the equal opportunity of all citizens; and in this respect it seeks to realise Whitman’s ideal. In so far, however, as it clings to European theories, and identifies itself solely with a section of the nation, proclaiming a class-war in the interests, not of America or of Humanity, but of Labour—large, and inclusive as the term may be—it seems directly to antagonise that ideal.

Whitman would certainly be belied by the label of “Socialist”; but “Individualist” would as little describe him. He was, and must always remain, outside of parties, and to some extent in actual antagonism to them; for while recognising its purpose and necessity, he was essentially jealous of government and control. He wanted to see the Americans managing their own affairs as little as possible by deputy, and, as far as possible, in their own persons. That, I take it, is the only form of collectivism or social life which is ultimately desirable; and all political reform will aim at its practical realisation. It depends most of all upon the simultaneous deepening of social consciousness and sympathy and increase of the means and spirit of individual independence. Only by these simultaneous developments can we hope to see established that Society of Comrades which was the America of Whitman’s vision.

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On the practical side of the Labour Question the old man occasionally expressed his emphatic dislike of certain sides of Trade Unionism, and probably misunderstood, as he clearly mistrusted the movement. “When the Labour agitation,” he would say, “is other than a kicking of somebody else out to let myself in, I shall warm up to it, maybe.”[672] And of the workman he added: “He should make his cause the cause of the manliness of all men; that assured, every effort he may make is all right”.

But he was a poor man himself, judged by modern standards, and he had a profoundly human and practical sympathy with the lives of the poor. He knew exactly where their shoe pinched. And thus, whatever his dislike of Unionism, he was an admirable administrator of charity. His delight in giving made him the willing almoner of at least one wealthy Philadelphia magnate,[673] and during severe winters he was enabled to supply his friends, the drivers of the street cars, with warm overcoats. In his diary, alongside of the addresses of those who purchased his books, are long lists of these driver friends, dimly reminiscent of the hospital lists which he used to keep in Washington.

Walt was always an incurable giver of gifts, and these, one may be sure, never weakened the manly independence of their recipients. His admiration for generous men of wealth, like George Peabody, has found a place in Leaves of Grass.[674] For he saw that to love is both to give and to receive, and in that holy commerce both actions alike are blessed.

His interest in social work is shown in a hitherto unpublished letter written about this time to Mary Whitall Smith, who had married and gone to England, and who sent him accounts of the work being done among the poor of the East End through the agency of Toynbee Hall. Of this he writes at noon on the 20th of July, 1885: “The account of the Toynbee Hall doings and chat [is] deeply interesting to me. I think much of all genuine efforts of the human emotions, the soul and bodily and intellectual powers, to exploit themselves for humanity’s good: the efforts in themselves I mean (sometimes I am not sure but they are the main matter)—without stopping to calculate whether the investment is tip-top in a business or statistical point of view.

“These libations, ecstatic life-pourings as it were of precious wine or rose-water on vast desert-sands or great polluted river—taking chances for returns or no returns—what were they (or are they) but the theory and practice of the beautiful God Christ? or of all Divine personality?”[675]

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CHAPTER XX

AT MICKLE STREET

The presidential election of the autumn of 1884 brought the long Republican régime to an end. During the twenty-four years of its continuance the old party cries had become almost meaningless, and the parties themselves ineffective, while political life had grown increasingly corrupt from top to bottom.[676] The only practical demand of the hour was for a good government, and this required a change of party. Whitman, with a number of independent Republicans known as “Mugwumps,” supported the Democrat, Mr. Grover Cleveland. With his return to the White House the South may be said to have returned to the Union, after a generation of bitter estrangement.

In the following summer Whitman had a slight sun-stroke, which rendered walking much more difficult.[677] For several months he was a good deal confined to his little house, but his friends promptly came to the rescue with a horse and light American waggon.[678]

He was overcome with gratitude for the gift—driving, as we have seen, was one of his delights—and he promptly began to make full use of his new toy. He soon disposed of the quiet steed, thoughtfully provided, and substituted one of quicker paces, which he drove furiously along the country roads at any pace up to eighteen miles an hour.[679] Rapid movement brought him exhilaration, and he displayed admirable nerve upon emergency.

Though he was getting old, his capacity for enjoyment was as great as ever. He enjoyed everything, especially now that at sixty-five he was, for the first time in his life, a householder; he enjoyed his quarters, his friends, his food, and in a grim way his very suffering. “Astonishing what one can stand when put to one’s trumps,”[680] he wrote on a black day. While he could rattle along the roads in his waggon, he was naturally happy enough, and he encouraged all opportunities for pleasure. He enjoyed his food, and he now relaxed some of the stricter rules of temperance which hitherto he had followed.

During periods of his life, as a young man and through the years at Washington, he was practically a total abstainer, and till he was sixty he only drank an occasional toddy, punch, or glass of beer. After that he followed the doctor’s advice and his own taste, enjoying the native American wines, and at a later period, champagne.

Stories of heavy drinking were circulated by the gossips, and were tracked at last to the habits of a local artist, who imitated Whitman in his garb, and somewhat resembled him.[681] Walt’s head was remarkably steady, and it need hardly be said that he was always most jealous of anything which could dispute with him his self-control.

In 1885 and several subsequent years[682] a popular caterer on the river-side, a mile or two below Camden, opened the summer season, about the end of April, with a dinner to some of his patrons, and Whitman was one of those who did fullest justice to his planked shad and champagne. For the latter he would smilingly admit an “incidental weakness”.[683]

His temperance had given him a keen relish for fine flavours, and he enjoyed all the pleasures of the senses without disguise, and with a frank, childlike response to them. This responsiveness, more almost than any other thing, kept his physical nature supple and young. His consciousness was never imprisoned in his brain, among stale memories and thoughts whose freshness had faded; it was still clean and sensitive to its surroundings, and found expression in the noticeably fresh, rich texture of his skin.

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It was well that he should practise these simple pleasures, for apart from his own ailments, which increased with time, he was still troubled with financial difficulties. The purchase of the house had not been exactly prudent, as it added considerably to his expenses, and the success of the Philadelphia edition was not long continued. The royalty receipts soon dwindled to a very little stream, and his other earnings—though he was well paid for such contributions as the magazines accepted, and was retained on the regular staff of the New York Herald—were not large.[684]

Word went round among his friends, both in America and in England, that the old man was hard up again, and a second time there was a hearty response. A fund, promoted by the Pall Mall Gazette at the end of 1886, brought him a New Year’s present of £80,[685] and individual friends on both sides of the sea frequently sent thank-offerings to him.

Some Boston admirers attempted at this time to secure for him a Government pension of £60 a year,[686] in recognition of his hospital work. But Whitman disliked the plan, and though it was favourably reported upon by the Pensions Committee of the House of Representatives, he wrote gratefully but peremptorily refusing to become an applicant for such a reward, saying quite simply, “I do not deserve it”.[687] His services in the Attorney-General’s Department seem to have been adequately paid, and one is glad the matter was not pressed. The hospital ministry could not have been remunerated by an “invalid pension”; it was given as a free gift, and now it will always remain so.

From time to time special efforts were made by his friends to remove any immediate pressure of financial anxiety. Whitman, who was on the one hand generous to a fault, and on the other not without a pride which consented with humiliation to receive some of the gifts bestowed, manifested a boyish delight in money of his own earning, and it did his friends good to see his merriment over the dollars taken—six hundred of them[688]—at his Lincoln lecture of 1886 in the Chestnut Street Opera House. By way of profit-sharing he insisted on presenting each of the theatre attendants with two dollars.

The repetition of the lecture in New York the following spring, at the Madison Square Theatre, before a brilliant company of distinguished people, including Mr. James Russell Lowell, “Mark Twain,” Mr. Stedman, and Whitman’s staunch admirer, Mr. Andrew Carnegie, brought him a similar sum;[689] while Colonel Ingersoll’s lecture for his benefit in 1890 was yet more productive, and the birthday dinners also contributed something to his funds. But the mention of these financial matters must not be construed into a pre-occupation with the subject in the old man’s later years; it troubled his friends far more than it troubled him.

After the gift of the horse and waggon, Mr. W. S. Kennedy and others planned to provide Whitman with a cottage at Timber Creek.[690] The idea delighted him; he craved for the pure air and the living solitude of the woods. But his health became too uncertain for the realisation of the scheme, and the remainder of his days was spent in Camden.

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The little house in quiet, grassy Mickle Street,[691] standing modestly between its taller neighbours, with the brass plate, “W. Whitman,” on the door, and the mounting-stone opposite, was becoming a place of frequent pilgrimage, and it has often been lovingly described.

During the earlier years, Walt’s favourite seat was at the left-hand lower window, and there the children would call out to him, and he would answer brightly as they went by to school. The walls and mantel-shelf were covered with portraits, and as to the books and papers, so long as he used the room, it was beyond the wit of any woman to keep them within bounds. But it was afterwards, when he was more confined to his bedroom, that they fairly broke loose.

He seems to have enjoyed this native disorder, for in the big, square, three-windowed upper room they occupied not only the shelves and chairs and table but the floor itself. “His boots,” says a friend—who, when Mrs. Davis was out, used to effect an entrance at the window to save her host descending the stairs—“his boots would be standing on piles of manuscript on a chair, a half-empty glass of lemonade or whiskey toddy on another, his ink-bottle on still another, his hat on the floor, and the whole room filled with an indescribable confusion of scraps of paper scrawled over with his big writing, with newspapers, letters and books. He was not at all eager to have order restored, and used to grumble in a good-natured way when I insisted upon clearing things up a bit for him.”[692]

He liked to think and speak of the room as his den or cabin; it was his own place, and bustling with his own affairs.[693] Here were his old-time companionable books: the complete Scott of his youth, and a volume of poets which he used in the hospitals; his friend Mr. E. C. Stedman’s Library of American Literature; studies of Spanish and German poets, and Felton’s Greece; translations of Homer, Dante, Omar Khayyam, Hafiz, Saadi; Mr. Rolleston’s Epictetus—a constant friend—Marcus Aurelius and Virgil; with Ossian, Emerson, Tennyson and Carlyle, and some novels, especially a translation of George Sand’s Consuelo; and last, and best read of all, Shakespeare and the Bible. The book of Job was one of his prime favourites in the beloved volume which was always by him in later years.

Perilously mingled with the papers was wood for his stove, over whose crackling warmth he would sit in the cold weather, ensconced in his great rattan-seated, broad-armed rocker, with the wolf-skin over it; his keen scent relishing the odour of oak-wood and of the printer’s ink on the wet proofs which surrounded him.

Visitors usually waited in the room below for his slow and heavy step upon the stairs. There the canary sang its best, as though to be caged in Whitman’s house was not confinement after all; and a bunch of fragrant flowers stood on the window-sill. A kitten romped about the premises, which were inhabited besides by a parrot, a robin, and a spotted “plum-pudding” dog; not to mention Mrs. Davis, and eventually her two stepsons. One of these, Warren Fritzinger, who had been a sailor and three times round the world, afterwards became Walt’s nurse, while his brother Harry called his first child Walt Whitman, to the old man’s delight.

Among the visitors was a young Japanese journalist, who afterwards published an amusing but ill-advised record of their conversations,[694] a document which seems to the English mind somewhat more injudicious than other Whitmanite publications, which certainly do not err on the side of reticence. After his first visit, Mr. Hartmann maintains that Walt shouted after him, “come again,” and this injunction from time to time he fulfilled, naïvely recording his own desperate attempts to cope with the long silences which threatened to overwhelm his forlorn sallies into all conceivable regions of conversation.

The older man would sit absent-mindedly, replying with an ejaculation or abruptly clipped phrase, or impossible sentence; but chiefly with his monosyllabic “Oy! oy?” which served, with a slight inflection, for almost any purpose of response. They say that Whitman grew garrulous, or at least less laconic, in his old age;[695] but Mr. Hartmann hardly found him so.

One day, when Mrs. Davis was absent, they lunched together on “canned lobster” and Californian claret in the kitchen. The sun shone on the grass in the little back garden, on the pear-tree half-smothered in its creeper, and the high boarded fence; and on the hens, poking in and out through the open door, and recalling the old farm life at West Hills. Whitman talked of the West, and of Denver, his queen-city of the West.

Over another similar meal, he declared his love for the Heart of Midlothian, and his distaste for the gloomy poets from Byron to Poe. They discussed music among their many topics. Mr. Hartmann declared himself a Wagnerian, but Whitman confessed his ignorance of the “music of the future”; Mendelssohn, of course, he knew; and in later life he had discovered Beethoven as a new meaning in music, and had been carried out of himself, as he says, seeing, absorbing many wonders.[696] But he was brought up on the Italians; it was from Verdi and his predecessors, interpreted by Alboni, Bettini and others, that he had learnt the primal meanings of music, and they always retained his affection.

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About the middle of May,[697] 1887, a sculptor, who had already studied Whitman in the Centennial year, came on from Washington to Mickle Street. Mrs. Davis sided some of the litter in the parlour; and the old man sat for him there as amiably as ten years before in the improvised studio on Chestnut Street.

They talked much of the President, on a portrait of whom Mr. Morse had been working. Whitman had a high opinion of Mr. Cleveland, and displayed a lively interest in all the personal details his friend could supply.

During the sittings Herbert Gilchrist arrived from England, where his mother had died of a painful disease some eighteen months earlier; and he set up his easel also. Callers came from far and near; while dozens of children entered with a word or message from the street, and older folk looked in at the window.

Whitman was not very well even for him, and he missed his solitude. But he was a delightful and courteous host. The three men often lunched together, while several English visitors—taking Whitman on their tour even though they missed Niagara[698]—sat down to a bite of beef, a piece of apple-pie, and a cup of tea poured out by the reverend host in the hot little kitchen.

Good Mrs. Davis watched her old charge and friend with some anxiety, as this constant stream of visitors flowed in and out; but she herself rose more than equal to every emergency. She had for lieutenant a coloured char-woman, born the same day as Whitman, who felt herself for that reason responsible in no ordinary degree for the general appearance of the premises. The sculptor and she often found themselves in conflict. As for his clay, she disdained it along with the whole genus of “dirt”. She succeeded in white-washing the delightful moss-covered fence, and would, he felt sure, have liked to treat both him and his work in the same summary fashion. They debated theological problems together, to Whitman’s amusement, and he would have it that Aunt Mary came out of these encounters better than the artist.

“How does your Satan get work to do,” the latter would ask, “if God doeth all?”

“Never you fear for him,” she retorted. “He’s allers a-prowlin’ around lookin’ fer a chance when God’s back is turned. There ain’t a lazy hair on his head. I wish,” she added significantly, “I could say as much for some others.”[699]

Beside Aunt Mary other characters appear upon the pages of his friends’ journals; notably a garrulous, broad-brimmed Georgian farmer, who had served in the Confederate army. He was the father of a large family, which he had brought up on the Leaves. As for himself, he had the book by heart, and was never so happy as when reciting his favourite passages at Sunday School treat or Church meeting. He knew Emerson’s writings with almost equal intimacy, but complained that these set his soul nagging after him, while Whitman’s were soothing to it. With Walt he declared that he loafed and invited his soul; with Waldo, his soul became importunate and invited him.[700]

Meanwhile, he admitted, his farm ran more to weeds than it should. Doubtless, during his pilgrimage the weeds prospered exceedingly; for he stayed long, and sad to say, in the end he went away a “leetle disappointed”. “I have to sit and admire him at a distance,” he complained, “about as I did at home before I came.” Walt liked him, and was amused by his talk, but his advice, his criticism and his interpretations to boot, were overmuch for a weary man.

There came one day a “labour agitator,” who required an introduction or testimonial of some sort from Whitman; and he also went away disappointed. In answer to all his loud-flowing, self-satisfied declarations, Whitman merely ejaculated his occasional colourless monosyllable; and when at last the discomfited man took his leave, the poet’s absent-minded “Thanks!” was more ludicrously and baldly opportune than intentional.[701]

Humorous as they appeared at the time, there was another side to interviews of this character; for it began to be noised about that Whitman was quite spoilt by his rich friends, and had lost his interest in and sympathy with the American working-man. This was due, of course, to a complete misunderstanding. The old fellow who lived in his “little shack” on Mickle Street, and dined in Germantown in his cardigan jacket, might have a world-reputation, but he was not forgetful of the people from among whom he sprang and to whom he always belonged.

At the same time it is true, as we saw, that he did not himself profess to understand or to approve the party organisation of labour. He was rather inclined to sit in his corner and have faith, and to listen to what the younger men had to say. In any case, he saw no remedy for present troubles in the exploitation of class feeling; he could see no help in urging the battle between two forms of selfishness.

Generosity and manhood were his constant watchwords, whether for labour or for the nation. No circumstances, he would say, sitting in his room broken by the suffering of years, can deprive a hero of his manhood. But he would add his conviction that the Republic must be in peril as long as any of her sons were being forced to the wall, and his wish that each “should have all that is just and best for him”.

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The sculptor and his sitter had many a long evening chat together, the shadows of the passers-by cast by the street light and moving across the blind. The old man’s mellow and musical, but somewhat uncertain, voice filled at these times with a confidential charm.

One night he wrote out a tentative statement of his general views, declaring for Free-trade, and for the acknowledgment of the full human and political equality of women with men. He regarded the world as being too much governed, but he was not against institutions in the present stage of evolution, for he said that he looked on the family and upon marriage as the basis of all permanent social order. He seems to have disliked and even condemned the practices of the American Fourierist “Free-lovers,”[702] though Love’s real freedom is always cardinal in his teachings. Anything like a laxity in fulfilling obligations, but especially the ultimate obligations of the soul, was abhorrent to him.

He was not a critic of institutions; and he accepted the work of the churches and of rationalism as alike valuable to humanity. He added to his statement various personal details; saying, half-interrogatively, that he thought if he was to be reported at all, it was right that he should be reported truthfully. This feeling was undoubtedly very strong with him from the day when he wrote anonymous appreciations of the Leaves in the New York press.[703]

Talk turned sometimes to the Washington days, to Lincoln’s yearning passion for the South, to the affectionate admiration felt by the Union veterans for the men and boys who fought under Lee, and to the terrible rigidity of the Southern pride. Such talk would often end in reminiscences of the hospitals; and Whitman told his friend that he would like him to cut a bas-relief showing Walt seated by a soldier’s cot in the wards. It had been his most characteristic pose, if one may use the word; and such a study would have shown him at his own work, the work in which he was most at home, surrounded by the boys who were his flesh and blood.[704]

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