_From the Camden Post, N.J., June 2, 1890_ _He attends and makes a
speech at the celebration of Walt Whitman's birthday_.--Walt Whitman
is now in his seventy-second year. His younger friends, literary and
personal, men and women, gave him a complimentary supper last Saturday
night, to note the close of his seventy-first year, and the late curious
and unquestionable "boom" of the old man's wide-spreading popularity,
and that of his "Leaves of Grass." There were thirty-five in the room,
mostly young, but some old, or beginning to be. The great feature was
Ingersoll's utterance. It was probably, in its way, the most admirable
specimen of modern oratory hitherto delivered in the English language,
immense as such praise may sound. It was 40 to 50 minutes long,
altogether without notes, in a good voice, low enough and not too low,
style easy, rather colloquial (over and over again saying "you" to
Whitman who sat opposite,) sometimes markedly impassion'd, once or
twice humorous--amid his whole speech, from interior fires and volition,
pulsating and swaying like a first-class Andalusian dancer.
And such a critical dissection, and flattering summary! The Whitmanites
for the first time in their lives were fully satisfied; and that is
saying a good deal, for they have not put their claims low, by a long
shot. Indeed it was a tremendous talk! Physically and mentally Ingersoll
(he had been working all day in New York, talking in court and in his
office,) is now at his best, like mellow'd wine, or a just ripe
apple; to the artist-sense, too, looks at his best--not merely like a
bequeath'd Roman bust or fine smooth marble Cicero-head, or even Greek
Plato; for he is modern and vital and vein'd and American, and (far more
than the age knows,) justifies us all.
We cannot give a full report of this most remarkable talk and supper
(which was curiously conversational and Greek-like) but must add the
following significant bit of it.
After the speaking, and just before the close, Mr. Whitman reverted to
Colonel Ingersoll's tribute to his poems, pronouncing it the capsheaf
of all commendation that he had ever receiv'd. Then, his mind still
dwelling upon the Colonel's religious doubts, he went on to say that
what he himself had in his mind when he wrote "Leaves of Grass" was not
only to depict American life, as it existed, and to show the triumphs of
science, and the poetry in common things, and the full of an individual
democratic humanity, for the aggregate, but also to show that there
was behind all something which rounded and completed it. "For what,"
he ask'd, "would this life be without immortality? It would be as a
locomotive, the greatest triumph of modern science, with no train to
draw after it. If the spiritual is not behind the material, to what
purpose is the material? What is this world without a further Divine
purpose in it all?"
Colonel Ingersoll repeated his former argument in reply.