Whitman gave himself to men as men and not as scholars or poets, and gave
himself purely as a man. While not specially averse to meeting people on
literary or intellectual grounds, yet it was more to his taste to meet on
the broadest, commonest, human grounds. What you had seen or felt or
suffered or done was of much more interest to him than what you had read
or thought; your speculation about the soul interested him less than the
last person you had met, or the last chore you had done.
Any glimpse of the farm, the shop, the household--any bit of real life,
anything that carried the flavor and quality of concrete reality--was very
welcome to him; herein, no doubt, showing the healthy, objective, artist
mind. He never tired of hearing me talk about the birds or wild animals,
or my experiences in camp in the woods, the kind of characters I had met
there, and the flavor of the life of remote settlements in Maine or
Canada. His inward, subjective life was ample of itself; he was familiar
with all your thoughts and speculations beforehand: what he craved was
wider experience,--to see what you had seen, and feel what you had felt.
He was fond of talking with returned travelers and explorers, and with
sailors, soldiers, mechanics; much of his vast stores of information upon
all manner of subjects was acquired at firsthand, in the old way, from the
persons who had seen or done or been what they described or related.
He had almost a passion for simple, unlettered humanity,--an attraction
which specially intellectual persons will hardly understand. Schooling and
culture are so often purchased at such an expense to the innate,
fundamental human qualities! Ignorance, with sound instincts and the
quality which converse with real things imparts to men, was more
acceptable to him than so much of our sophisticated knowledge, or our
studied wit, or our artificial poetry.