At the time of Whitman's death, one of our leading literary journals
charged him with having brought on premature decay by leading a riotous
and debauched life. I hardly need say that there was no truth in the
charge. The tremendous emotional strain of writing his "Leaves," followed
by his years of service in the army hospitals, where he contracted
blood-poison, resulted at the age of fifty-four in the rupture of a small
blood-vessel in the brain, which brought on partial paralysis. A sunstroke
during his earlier manhood also played its part in the final break-down.
That, tried by the standard of the lives of our New England poets,
Whitman's life was a blameless one, I do not assert; but that it was a
sane, temperate, manly one, free from excesses, free from the perversions
and morbidities of a mammonish, pampered, over-stimulated age, I do
believe. Indeed, I may say I know. The one impression he never failed to
make--physically, morally, intellectually--on young and old, women and
men, was that of health, sanity, sweetness. This is the impression he
seems to have made upon Mr. Howells, when he met the poet at Pfaff's early
in the sixties.
The critic I have alluded to inferred license in the man from liberty in
the poet. He did not have the gumption to see that Whitman made the
experience of all men his own, and that his scheme included the evil as
well as the good; that especially did he exploit the unloosed, all-loving,
all-accepting natural man,--the man who is done with conventions,
illusions and all morbid pietisms, and who gives himself lavishly to all
that begets and sustains life. Yet not the natural or carnal man for his
own sake, but for the sake of the spiritual meanings and values to which
he is the key. Indeed, Whitman is about the most uncompromising
spiritualist in literature; with him, all things exist by and for the
soul. He felt the tie of universal brotherhood, also, as few have felt it.
It was not a theory with him, but a fact that shaped his life and colored
his poems. "Whoever degrades another degrades me," and the thought fired
his imagination.