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A LIFE OF WALT WHITMAN
BY THE SAME WRITER
MOODS AND OUTDOOR VERSES
("RICHARD ASKHAM")
FOR THE FELLOWSHIP
[Illustration: _Walt Whitman at thirty-five_]
A LIFE OF WALT WHITMAN
by
HENRY BRYAN BINNS
With Thirty-three Illustrations
METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
First Published in 1905
TO
MY MOTHER
AND
HER MOTHER
THE REPUBLIC
PREFACE
To the reader, and especially to the critical reader, it would seem
but courteous to give at the beginning of my book some indication
of its purpose. It makes no attempt to fill the place either of a
critical study or a definitive biography. Though Whitman died thirteen
years ago, the time has not yet come for a final and complete life
to be written; and when the hour shall arrive we must, I think, look
to some American interpreter for the volume. For Whitman's life is
of a strongly American flavour. Instead of such a book I offer a
biographical study from the point of view of an Englishman, yet of
an Englishman who loves the Republic. I have not attempted, except
parenthetically here and there, to make literary decisions on the value
of Whitman's work, partly because he still remains an innovator upon
whose case the jury of the years must decide--a jury which is not yet
complete; and partly because I am not myself a literary critic. It is
as a man that I see and have sought to describe Whitman. But as a man
of special and exceptional character, a new type of mystic or seer.
And the conviction that he belongs to the order of initiates has
dragged me on to confessedly difficult ground.
Again, while seeking to avoid excursions into literary criticism, it
has seemed to me to be impossible to draw a real portrait of the man
without attempting some interpretation of his books and the quotation
from them of characteristic passages, for they are the record of his
personal attitude towards the problems most intimately affecting his
life. I trust that this part of my work may at any rate offer some
suggestions to the serious student of Whitman. Since he touched life at
many points, it has been full of pitfalls; and if among them I should
prove but a blind leader, I can only hope that those who follow will
keep open eyes.
Whitman has made his biography the more difficult to write by demanding
that he should be studied in relation to his time; to fulfil this
requirement was beyond my scope, but I have here and there suggested
the more notable outlines, within which the reader will supply
details from his own memory. As I have written especially for my own
countrymen, I have ventured to remind the reader of some of those
elementary facts of American history of which we English are too easily
forgetful.
The most important chapters of Whitman's life have been written by
himself, and will be found scattered over his complete works. To
these the following pages are intended as a modest supplement and
commentary. Already the Whitman literature has become extensive, but,
save in brief sketches, no picture of his whole life in which one may
trace with any detail the process of its development seems as yet to
exist. In this country the only competent studies which have appeared
are that of the late Mr. Symonds, which devotes some twenty pages to
biographical matters, and the admirable and suggestive little manual of
the late Mr. William Clarke. Both books are some twelve years old, and
in those years not a little new material has become available, notably
that which is collected in the ten-volume edition of Whitman's works,
and in the book known as _In re Walt Whitman_. On these and on essays
printed in the _Conservator_ and in the _Whitman Fellowship Papers_ I
have freely drawn for the following pages.
Of American studies the late Dr. Bucke's still, after twenty years,
easily holds the first place. Beside it stand those of Mr. John
Burroughs, and Mr. W. S. Kennedy. To these, and to the kind offices of
the authors of the two last named, my book owes much of any value it
may possess. I have also been assisted by the published reminiscences
of Mr. J. T. Trowbridge, Mr. Moncure Conway, and Mr. Thomas Donaldson,
and by the recently published _Diary in Canada_ (edited by Mr.
Kennedy), and Dr. I. H. Platt's Beacon Biography of the poet.
Since I never met Walt Whitman I am especially indebted to his friends
for the personal details with which they have so generously furnished
me: beside those already named, to Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Johnston, Mr.
J. Hubley Ashton, Mrs. W. S. Kennedy, Mrs. E. M. Calder, Mr. and Mrs.
(Stafford) Browning of Haddonfield (Glendale), Mr. John Fleet of
Huntington, Captain Lindell of the Camden Ferry, and to Mr. Peter G.
Doyle; but especially to Whitman's surviving executors and my kind
friends, Mr. T. B. Harned and Mr. Horace Traubel. To these last, and
to Mr. Laurens Maynard, of the firm of Messrs. Small, Maynard & Co.,
the publishers of the final edition of Whitman's works, I am indebted
for generous permission to use and reproduce photographs in their
possession. I also beg to make my acknowledgments to Mr. David McKay
and Mr. Gutekunst, both of Philadelphia.
Helpful suggestions and information have been most kindly given by my
American friends, Mr. Edwin Markham, Professor E. H. Griggs, Mr. Ernest
Crosby, Dr. George Herron, Professor Rufus M. Jones of Haverford,
Mr. C. F. Jenkins of Germantown, and Mr. and Mrs. David Thompson
of Washington. Mr. Benjamin D. Hicks of Long Island has repeatedly
replied to my various and troublesome inquiries as to the Quaker
ancestry of Walt Whitman, and Dr. E. Pardee Bucke has furnished me
with an admirable sketch of his father Dr. R. M. Bucke's life and the
photograph which I have reproduced. In England also there are many to
whom I would here offer my most grateful thanks. And first, to Mr.
Edward Carpenter, whose own work has always been my best of guides in
the study of Whitman's, and whose records of his interviews with the
old poet in Camden have given me more insight into his character than
any other words but Whitman's own. He has also read the MS., and aided
me by numberless suggestions. Mrs. Bernard Berenson, who for some years
enjoyed the old man's friendship, has supplied me with an invaluable
picture of his relations with her father, the late Mr. Pearsall Smith,
and his family, and has generously lent me various letters in her
possession, and permitted me to make reproductions from them. Mr. J.
W. Wallace, of the "Bolton group," has allowed me to read and use his
manuscript description of a visit to Camden in 1891; and another of the
same brotherhood, Dr. J. Johnston, whose admirable account of a similar
series of interviews in the preceding year is well known by Whitman
students, has supplied me with a photograph of the little Mickle Street
house as it then was.
To Mr. William M. Rossetti and to Mr. Ernest Rhys I am indebted for
valuable suggestions; and for similar help to my friends, Professor W.
H. Hudson and Messrs. Arthur Sherwell, B. Kirkman Gray and C. F. Mott.
Finally, the book owes much more than I can say to my wife.
While gratefully acknowledging the assistance of all these and others
unnamed, I confess that I am alone responsible for the general accuracy
of my statements, and the book's point of view, and I wish especially
to relieve the personal friends of Whitman from any responsibility for
the hypothesis relating to his sojourn in the South, beyond what is
stated in the Appendix. To all actual sins of commission and omission
I plead guilty, trusting that for the sympathetic reader they may
eventually be blotted out in the light which, obscured though it be,
still shines upon my pages from the personality of Walt Whitman.
H. B. B.
LONDON, _January, 1905_.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE vii
TABLE OF CONTENTS xiii
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xv
ABBREVIATIONS EMPLOYED IN THE NOTES xvii
INTRODUCTION: WHITMAN'S AMERICA xix
CHAP.
I. THE WHITMAN'S OF WEST HILLS 1
II. BOYHOOD IN BROOKLYN 10
III. TEACHER AND JOURNALIST 28
IV. ROMANCE (1848) 46
V. ILLUMINATION 56
VI. THE CARPENTER 79
VII. WHITMAN'S MANIFESTO 95
VIII. THE MYSTIC 110
IX. "YEAR OF METEORS" 134
X. THE TESTAMENT OF A COMRADE 148
XI. AMERICA AT WAR 171
XII. THE PROOF OF COMRADESHIP 190
XIII. A WASHINGTON CLERK 205
XIV. FRIENDS AND FAME 221
XV. ILLNESS 247
XVI. CONVALESCENCE 258
XVII. THE SECOND BOSTON EDITION 278
XVIII. AMONG THE PROPHETS 289
XIX. HE BECOMES A HOUSEHOLDER 301
XX. AT MICKLE STREET 314
XXI. "GOOD-BYE, MY FANCY" 325
APPENDIX A 347
APPENDIX B 349
INDEX 351
METHUEN'S CATALOGUE OF BOOKS
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
WALT WHITMAN AT 35, from a daguerrotype _Frontispiece_
in possession of Mr. J. H. Johnston
HIS MOTHER, from a daguerrotype in possession of Mr. Traubel 6
WEST HILLS: THE WHITMAN HOUSE FROM THE LANE (1904) 8
W. W.'S FATHER 14
WEST HILLS: HOUSE FROM YARD 28
NEW ORLEANS ABOUT 1850 48
R. W. EMERSON 92
W. W. AT 40, from a photo, in the possession of Mr. D. McKay 140
W. W. AT 44, from photo, in possession of Mr. Traubel 179
WILLIAM DOUGLAS O'CONNOR 190
JOHN BURROUGHS IN 1900 201
ANNE GILCHRIST, from an amateur photograph 225
W. W. AT ABOUT 50 227
PETE DOYLE AND W. W., by permission of Messrs. Small, Maynard 231
& Co., from a photo, by Rice, Washington, 1869
PETER G. DOYLE AT 57, from a photo, by Kuebler, Philadelphia 233
NO. 431, STEVENS STREET, CAMDEN (1904) 240
FACSIMILE OF MS. OF PORTION OF PREFACE TO 1876 EDITION, 243
_L. of G._
TIMBER CREEK, THE POOL 259
TIMBER CREEK, BELOW CRYSTAL SPRING 261
EDWARD CARPENTER AT 43 267
DR. R. M. BUCKE 270
W. W. AT 61 276
MR. STAFFORD'S STORE, GLENDALE (1904) 286
MART WHITALL SMITH (MRS. BERENSON) IN 1884 302
W. W. AND THE BUTTERFLY; AGED 62; from photo, 304
by Phillips & Taylor, Philadelphia
FACSIMILE OF AUTOGRAPH LETTER TO MR. R. P. SMITH, 315
in possession of Mrs. Berenson
MICKLE STREET, CAMDEN, from a photo, by Dr. J. Johnston 317
FACSIMILE OF AUTOGRAPH POST CARDS (1887-88), 326
in possession of Mrs. Berenson
W. W. AT 70, by permission of Mr. Gutekunst, Philadelphia 331
ROBERT G. INGERSOLL 334
W. W. AT 72, from a photo, of Mr. T. Eakins, 338
by permission of Messrs. Small, Maynard & Co.
HORACE TRAUBEL 342
THE TOMB, HARLEIGH CEMETERY (1904) 346
ABBREVIATIONS
_The following abbreviations are used in the Notes._
Bucke = R. M. Bucke's _Walt Whitman_, 1883.
Burroughs = John Burroughs' _Note on Walt Whitman_, 1867.
Burroughs (2) = John Burroughs' _Note on Walt Whitman_. Second
Edition.
Burroughs (_a_) = John Burroughs' _Whitman: A Study_, 1896.
Carpenter = E. Carpenter's "Notes of Visits to W. W." in _Progressive
Review_: (_a_) February, 1897; (_b_) April, 1897.
_Camden's Compliment_ = _Camden's Compliment to W. W._, 1889.
_Cam. Mod. Hist._ = _Cambridge Modern History: United States._
_Comp. Prose_ = _W. W.'s Complete Prose_, 1898.
Calamus = _Calamus, Letters of W. W. to Pete Doyle_, 1897.
Camden = _Camden Edition_ (10 vols.) _of W. W.'s Works_, 1902.
Donaldson = T. Donaldson's _W. W.: The Man_, 1897.
_En. Brit. Suppt._ = _Encyclopædia Britannica: Supplement, United
States._
_Good-bye and Hail_ = _Good-bye and Hail, W. W._, 1892.
_In re_ = _In re W. W._, 1893.
Johnston = Dr. J. Johnston's _Notes of a Visit to W. W._, 1890.
Kennedy = W. S. Kennedy's _Reminiscences of W. W._, 1896.
_L. of G._ = _Leaves of Grass_, complete edition of 1897: followed by
numerals in brackets, edition of that year.
_Mem. Hist. N.Y._ = J. G. Wilson's _Memorial History of New York_.
Roosevelt = T. Roosevelt's _New York_, 1891.
Symonds = J. A. Symonds's _W. W.: A Study_, 1893.
_Wound-Dresser_ = _The W. D., Letters of W. W. to his Mother_, 1898.
_Whit. Fellowship_ = _Whitman Fellowship Papers_, Philadelphia, 1894.
MANUSCRIPTS.
MSS. Berenson = Letters in possession of Mrs. Bernard Berenson.
MSS. Berenson (_a_) = Reminiscences contributed to this volume.
MSS. Carpenter = Letters in possession of E. Carpenter.
MSS. Diary = A Diary (1876-1887) in possession of H. Traubel.
MSS. Harned = Papers in possession of T. B. Harned.
MSS. Johnston = Papers in possession of J. H. Johnston, New York.
MSS. Traubel = Papers in possession of H. Traubel.
MSS. Wallace = J. W. Wallace's Diary of a Visit to W. W. in 1891.
INTRODUCTION
WHITMAN'S AMERICA
The men of old declared that the lands of adventure lay in the West,
for they were bold to follow the course of the sun; and to this day the
bold do not look back to seek romance behind them in the East.
Whether this be the whole truth or no, such is the notion that
comes upon the wind when, journeying westward in mid-Atlantic, you
begin to know the faces on ship-board, and to understand what it is
that is in their eyes. Strange eyes and foreign faces have these
voyagers--dwellers upon Mediterranean shores, peasants from the borders
of the Baltic, or dumb inhabitants of the vast eastern plains, huddled
now together in the ship. But in them is a hope which triumphs over
the misery of the present as it has survived the misery of the past,
and to-day that hope has a name, and is America. For America is indeed
the hope of the forlorn and disinherited in every land to whom a hope
remains. From the ends of the earth they set out, and separated from
one another by every barrier of race and language, meet here upon the
ocean, having nothing in common but this hope, this dream which will
yet weld them together into a new people. For the comfortable dreamer
there is Italy and the Past, but for many millions of the common
people of Europe and of Italy herself--and the common people too have
their dream--America, the land of the Future, is the Kingdom of Romance.
Nor to these only, but, as I think, to every traveller not unresponsive
to the genius of the land. For it is the genius of youth--youth with
its awkward power, its incompleteness, its promise. And the home
of this genius must be the land not only of progress and material
achievement, but also of those visions which haunt the heart of youth.
America is more than the golden-appled earthly paradise of the poor,
it is a land of spiritual promise. And more perhaps than that of any
nation the American flag is to-day the symbol of a Cause, and of a
Cause which claims all hearts because ultimately it is that of all
Peoples.
And America has another claim to be regarded as truly romantic. Hers is
the charm of novelty. It is not the glamour of the old but of the new,
and the perennially new. Some four centuries have passed since the days
of Columbus, centuries which have dimmed the lustre of many another
adventurous voyage into dull antiquity, but America is still the New
World, and the exhilarating air of discovery still breathes as fresh in
the West as on the first morning.
With that discovery there dawned a new historic day whose sun is not
yet set. We instinctively put back the beginning of our own era to the
time of Elizabeth, that Virgin Queen in whose colony of Virginia the
American people was first born, to grow up into maturity under its
statesmen.
And if we see but vaguely in the greyest hours of our dawn the figure
of the Discoverer, while beyond him all seem strange as the men of
yesterday--if we behold our own sun rising on the broad Elizabethan
hours--how fitting it is that the New World should be peopled by those
who still retain most of the temper of that generous morning! The
American of to-day with his thirst for knowledge, his versatility,
his quick sense of the practicable, his delight in the doing of
things, his directness and frankness of purpose, his comradeship
and hospitality, his lack of self-consciousness--with all the naïve
inconsistencies, the amiable braggings, the mouthings of phrases, and
the love of praise which belong to such unconsciousness of self--with
his glowing optimism, his belief in human nature, his faith and
devotion to his ideals--the American of to-day is in all these things
the Elizabethan of our story. America is the supreme creation of
Elizabethan genius--its New World, to which even that world which we
call "Shakespeare" must give place.[1]
The Romance of America is not only new, it is like a tale that is being
told for the first time into our own ears. And like some consummate
story whose chapters, appearing month by month, hold us continually
in expectant suspense, its plot is still evolving and its characters
revealing themselves, so that as yet we can only guess at its
_dénouement_.
I call it a Romance, for it is indeed a tale of wonder; but unlike
the old romances its bold realism is not always beautiful. The style
of its telling is often loud, its words blunt, its rhythm strange and
full of changes. But it has a large Elizabethan movement which cannot
be denied. Denounce and deprecate as we will, all that is young in us
responds to it. The story carries us along, at times by violence and in
our own despite, but so a story should. It may be the end will justify
and explain passages that to-day are but obscure: no story is complete
until the end, and America has not yet been told. It is still morning
there: and the heart of it is still the heart of youth.
* * * * *
The unprejudiced and candid visitor will be provoked to criticism by
much that he sees in the United States; but even his criticism will be
prompted by the possibilities of the country. It is this sense of its
possibilities which captures the imagination, and fills the mind with
the desire to do--to correct, it may be--but in any case to do.
The incentive to action is felt by everyone, American or immigrant, and
dominates all. Here for the first time one seems to be, as it were,
in a live country, among a live people whose work is actually under
its hand and must occupy it for years to come. In England things are
different; the country does not so audibly challenge the labourer to
till and tame it. It does not say so plainly to every man--_I want you:
here is range and scope for all your manhood_. Only the seer can read
that word written pathetically across all this English countryside
whose smooth air of completion conceals so blank a poverty. In America
the very stones cry out, and all who run must read. And thus the whole
American atmosphere is that of action.
* * * * *
The Chinese, that most practical of peoples, have an old saying that
the purpose of the true worship of heaven is to spiritualise the earth.
It is a reminder that materialism and mysticism should go hand in hand.
Now the American is often, and not unjustly, accused of sheer
materialism. But by temper he is really an idealist. The very
Constitution of the United States, not to mention the famous
_Declaration_, is no less transcendental than the _Essays_ of Emerson,
nor less weighty with deep purpose than the speeches of Lincoln. All
these are characteristic utterances of the American genius; they have
been attested by events, and sealed in the blood of a million citizen
soldiers.
And how, one may ask, could the citizens of a State which more than
any other manifestly depends for its life upon communion in an ideal
be other than idealists? Gathered from every section of the human
race, this people has become a nation through its consciousness of a
Cause; its members being possessed not of a common blood, tradition
or literature, but of a purpose and idea sacred to all. If then the
national life depends upon the living idealism of the people, the
actual unquestionable vigour of this national life may be taken as
evidence of the strength of that idealism. But, on the other hand,
the nation's present pre-occupation with its merely material success
conceals the gravest of all its perils, because it threatens the very
principle of the national life.
Thus held together by its future, and not as seem most others,
by their past, the American nation has been slow in coming to
self-consciousness, slow therefore in producing an original or
national art. Hitherto it has been occupied with its own Becoming; and
to-day, to virile Americans, America remains the most engrossing of
occupations, the noblest of all practicable dreams.
The spirit of the Renaissance has here attempted a task far graver than
in Medician Florence or Elizabethan London: to create, namely, not so
much a new art as a new race. It has here to achieve its incarnation
not in line and colour, not in marble nor in imperishable verse, but
in the flesh and blood of a nation gathered from every family of Man.
And for that, it is forever assimilating into itself scions of every
European people, and transforming them out of Europeans into Americans.
Vast as such a process is, the assimilation of all their surging
aspirations and ideals into one has been hardly less vast. It is little
wonder then that America has been slow in coming to self-consciousness.
What is wonderful is her organic power of assimilation. And now there
begin to be evidences in American thought of a spiritual synthesis, the
widest known. As yet they are but vague suggestions. But they seem to
indicate that when an American philosophy takes the field it will be
pragmatical in the best sense; too earnestly concerned with conduct and
with life to be careful of symmetry or tradition; directed towards the
future, not the past. It will be a philosophy of possibilities founded
upon the study of an adolescent race.
It seemed natural to preface this study of Whitman with a sketch of the
American genius. Doubtless that genius has other aspects than those
here presented, and to some of these, later pages will bear witness;
but the impression I have attempted to reproduce is at least taken from
life. It is, moreover, not unlike that of Whitman himself as presented
in his first Preface, and is even more suggestive of the America of his
youth than that of his old age.
Every thinker owes much to his time and race, and Whitman more than
most. He always averred that the story of his life was bound up with
that of his country, and took significance from it. To be understood,
the man must be seen as an American. As a Modern, we might add, for the
story of his land is so brief.
Dead now some thirteen years, and barely an old man when he died,
his personal memory seemed to embrace nearly the whole romance. His
grandfather was acquainted with old Tom Paine, whose _Common Sense_
had popularised the Republican idea in the very hour of American
Independence: he himself had talked with the soldiers of Washington,
and as a lad[2] he had met Aaron Burr who killed the glorious Hamilton,
sponsor for that Constitution which when Whitman died was but a century
old.
In the seven decades of his life the American population had multiplied
near seven-fold, and had been compacted together into an imperial
nation. It seemed almost as though he could remember the thirteen poor
and jealous States, with their conflicting interests and traditions,
their widely differing climates, industries and inhabitants, separated
from one another by vast distances--and how they yielded themselves
reluctantly under the hand of Fate to grow together in Union into the
greatest of civilised peoples; while central in the story of his life
was that Titanic conflict whose solemn bass accompaniment toned and
deepened loose phrases and popular enthusiasms into a national hymn.
Himself something of a poet--how much we need not attempt to
estimate--he did continual homage to that greater Poet, whose works
were at once his education and his library--the genius of America. None
other, ancient or mediæval, discoursed to his ear or penned in immortal
characters for him to read, rhythms so large and pregnant. It was the
prayer and purpose of his life that he might contribute his verse to
that great poem; and his life is like a verse which it is impossible
to separate from its context. That he understood, and even in a sense
re-discovered America, can scarcely be denied by serious students of
his work. I believe that the genius of America will in time discover
some essential elements of herself in him, and will understand herself
the better for his pages.
* * * * *
Belonging thus to America as a nation, the earlier scenes of Walt
Whitman's story are fitly laid in and about metropolitan New York.
It was not till middle life and after the completion and publication
of what may be regarded as the first version of his _Leaves of
Grass_--the edition that is to say of 1860--that he removed for a
while to the Federal capital where, throughout the War, the interest of
America was centred. Afterwards he withdrew to Camden, into a sort of
hermitage, midway between New York and Washington.
Though his heart belonged to the West, the Far West never knew him.
Both north and south, he wandered near as widely as the limits of
his States. He knew the Mississippi, the Great Lakes, and the Rocky
Mountains; but all that vast and wonderful country which reaches west
from Colorado towards Balboa's sea was untrodden by his feet. A circle
broadly struck from the actual centre of population, and taking in
Denver, New Orleans, Boston and Quebec, includes the whole field of his
wanderings within a radius of a thousand miles. He was not a traveller
according to our modern use of the word; he had never lost sight for
many hours of the shores of America; even Cuba and Hawaii were beyond
his range.
But he had studied nearly all the phases of life included in the
Republic. His birth and breeding in the "middle States" gave him a
metropolitan quality which neither New England nor the South could
have contributed. Of peasant stock, himself an artizan and always
and properly a man of the people, he was of the average stuff of
the American nation; and his everyday life--apart from the central
and exceptional fact of his individuality--was that of millions of
unremembered citizens. Whitman was not only an American type, he was
also a type of America.
The typical American is not city born. Rapidly as that sinister fate
is overtaking the Englishman, the native American is still of rural
birth.[3] And, as we have said, Whitman was of the average; he was born
in Long Island of farming folk.
But he was a modern, and the modern movement throughout the world is
citywards. Everywhere the Industrial Revolution is destroying the
economy of our ancestors and creating another; diverting all the
scattered energy which springs out of the countryside into the great
reservoirs of city life, there to be employed upon new tasks.
Modern life is the life of the town, and for many years it was
Whitman's life. But again every town depends for its vitality and
wealth upon the countryside. The city is a mere centre, factory and
exchange. It cannot live upon itself. It handles everything but
produces none of all that raw material from which everything that
it handles is made. Especially is this true of the human stuff of
civilisation. Men are only shaped and employed in cities--they are not
produced there. The city uses and consumes the humanity that is made
in the fields. And Whitman, who was drawn into the outskirts of the
metropolis as a child, and as a young man entered into its heart, was
born among wide prospects and shared the sane life of things that root
in the earth. He was the better fitted to bear and to correlate all the
fierce stimuli of metropolitan life.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Cf._ _Camb. Mod. Hist._, 736; Burroughs (_a_), 240; Bryce's
_American Commonwealth_, i., 10, 11, etc.; _L. of G._, 436 n.
[2] MSS. Harned.
[3] _Cf._ _En. Brit. Suppt._
WALT WHITMAN
CHAPTER I
THE WHITMANS OF WEST HILLS
The old writers[4] tell how Long Island was once the happy hunting
ground of wolves and Indians, the playing place of deer and wild
turkeys; and how the seals, the turtles, grampuses and pelicans
loved its long, quiet beaches. Seals and whales are still occasional
visitors, and its coasts are rich in lore of wrecks, of pirates and of
buried treasure.
A hundred years ago it could boast of hamlets only less remote
from civilisation than are to-day the villages of that other "Long
Island"--the group of the Outer Hebrides--which, for an equal distance,
extends along the Scottish coast from Butt of Lewis to Barra Head. The
desultory stage then occupied a week on the double journey between
Brooklyn and Sag Harbour. Beyond the latter, Montauk Point thrusts its
lighthouse some fifteen miles out into the Atlantic breakers. Here the
last Indians of the island lingered on their reservation, and here the
whalers watched for the spouting of their prey in the offing.
A ridge of hills runs along the island near the northern shore, rising
here and there into heights of three or four hundred feet which
command the long gradual slope of woods and meadows to the south, with
the distant sea beyond them; to the north, across the narrow Sound,
rises the blue coast line of Connecticut.
* * * * *
It is on the slopes below the highest of these points of wide vision
that the Whitman homestead lies, one of the pleasant farms of a land
which has always been mainly agricultural. Large areas of the island
are poor and barren, covered still with scrub and "kill-calf" or
picturesque pine forest, as in the Indian days. But the land here is
productive.
From the wooded head of Jayne's Hill behind the farm, the township of
Huntington stretches to the coast where it possesses a harbour. It was
all purchased from the Indians in 1653, for six coats, six bottles,
six hatchets, six shovels, ten knives, six fathom of wampum, thirty
muxes, and thirty needles.[5] The Indians themselves do not seem to
have caused much anxiety to the settlers; but a generation later, it
is recorded that in a single year no fewer than fifteen of the wolves,
which they had formerly kept half-tamed, were killed by the citizens of
Huntington.
The next troublers of the peace were the British troops. For here,
a century later, during the last years of the War of Independence,
Colonel Thompson of His Majesty's forces pulled down the Presbyterian
Church, and with its timbers erected a fortress in the public
burying-ground, his soldiers employing the gravestones for fire-places
and ovens.[6] They seem to have occupied another meeting-house as a
stable. Such are the everyday incidents of a military occupation;
arising out of them, claims to the amount of £7,000 were preferred
against the colonel by the township; but he withdrew to England, where,
as Count Rumford, he afterwards became famous upon more peaceful fields.
In Whitman's childhood, Huntington was, as it still remains, a quiet
country town of one long straggling street. It counted about 5,000
inhabitants, many of them substantial folk, and in this was not far
behind Brooklyn. In those days the whole island could not boast 60,000
people. But if they were few, they were stalwart. The old sea-going
Paumànackers were a rough and hardy folk, and travellers remarked the
frank friendliness of the island youth.[7]
Inter-racial relations seem upon the whole to have been good; the
Indians being treated with comparative justice, and the negro slaves
well cared for. Between the Dutch and the English there was friction in
the early years. Long Island, or Paumanok--to give it the most familiar
of its several Indian names[8]--had been settled by both races; the
Dutch commencing on the west, opposite to their fortress and trading
station of New Amsterdam (afterwards New York), and the English, at
about the same time, upon the east. They met near West Hills, and
Whitman had the full benefit of his birth upon this border-line, Dutch
blood and English being almost equally mingled in his veins.
As to the Dutch of Long Island, they were marked here as elsewhere by
sterling and stubborn qualities. There is a reserve in the Dutch nature
which, while it tends to arouse suspicion in others, makes it the best
of stocks upon which to graft a more emotional people. Slow, cautious,
conservative, domestic, practical, they have formed a bed-rock of
sound sense and phlegmatic temper, not for Long Island only, but for
the whole of New York State, where, till the middle of the eighteenth
century,[9] they were predominant. Perhaps no other foundation could
have adequately supported the superstructure of fluctuating and
emotional elements which has since been raised upon it.
The Dutch homesteads of the island were famous for their simple, severe
but solid comfort, their clean white sanded floors, their pewter and
their punches. From such a home came Whitman's mother. She was a van
Velsor of Cold Spring, which lies only two or three miles west of the
Whitman farm. Her father, Major Cornelius van Velsor, was a typical,
burly, jovial, red-faced Hollander.
But Louisa, his daughter, was not wholly Dutch, for the major's wife
was Naomi Williams, of a line of sailors, one of that great Welsh clan
which counted Roger Williams among its first American representatives.
Naomi was of Quaker stock.[10]
* * * * *
The Quakers appear early in the story of the island, whose settlement
was taking place during the first years of their world-wide activity.
Within a quarter of a century of the first purchase of land from the
Indians, an English Quaker, Robert Hodgson,[11] was arrested in a Long
Island orchard for the holding of a conventicle. He was carried to New
Amsterdam, cruelly handled, and imprisoned there.
In 1663, John Bowne,[12] an islander of some standing who had joined
the Friends, was arrested and transported to Holland, there to undergo
his trial for heresy. This was in the period when the district was
under Dutch control. A year later this came to an end, and when, in
1672, George Fox preached under the oaks which stood opposite to
Bowne's house[13] at Flushing, and again from the granite rock in the
Oyster Bay cemetery, he seems to have been met by no opposition more
serious than that which was offered by certain members of his own
Society.
We read[14] of the settlement of a group of substantial Quaker families
near the village of Jericho, where they built themselves a place of
worship in 1689; and here, a century later, lived Elias Hicks, perhaps
the ablest character, as he was the most tragic figure, in the story of
American Quakerism. He was a friend of Whitman's paternal grandfather,
and thus from both parents the boy inherited something either of the
blood or the tradition of that Society which, directly or indirectly,
gave some of the noblest of its leaders to the nation. Such men, for
instance, as William Penn, Thomas Paine, and, indirectly, Abraham
Lincoln.
* * * * *
The earliest of the Whitmans of whom there appears to be any record
is Abijah, apparently an English yeoman farmer in the days of
Elizabeth.[15] His two sons sailed west in 1640 on the _True-Love_.
One of these, Zechariah, became a minister in the town of Milford,
Connecticut, and sometime before Charles II. was crowned in the old
country,[16] Joseph, Zechariah's son, had crossed the Sound and settled
in the neighbourhood of Huntington. Either he or his successor seems
to have purchased the farm at West Hills, where Walt Whitman was
afterwards born; and in 1675 "Whitman's hollow" is mentioned as a
boundary of the township.
The garrulous histories of Long Island have little to tell us of the
family. One of Joseph's great-grandsons was killed in the battle of
Brooklyn,[17] that first great fight between the forces of England
and her rebellious colonies, when in 1776 Howe and his Hessians drove
Putnam's recruits back upon the little town. Lieutenant Whitman was one
of those who fell on that day before Washington could carry the remnant
of his troops across the East River under the friendly shelter of the
fog.
Another great-grandson, Jesse, married the orphan niece of Major Brush,
also a "dangerous rebel" who suffered in the British prison of "the
Provost".[18] Brushes, Williamses and Whitmans all seem to have served
in the armies of Independence, and one at least of their women would
have cut a figure in the field. For Jesse's mother was large-built,
dark-complexioned, and of such masculine manners and speech that she
seemed to have been born to horses, oaths and tobacco. As a widow she
readily ruled her slaves, surviving to a great age. In contrast with
her, Jesse's wife, who also displayed remarkable ability, was a natural
lady.[19] She had been a teacher, and was a woman of judgment. Perhaps
Jesse himself was of gentler character than his terrible old mother; he
had leanings towards Quakerism, and was a friend and admirer of Elias
Hicks.[20] So too was Walter, the father of Walt, and one of Jesse's
many sons.
Born in 1789--the year in which the amended Constitution of the
United States actually came into force--Walter grew up into a silent
giant,[21] a serious solid man, reserved and slow of speech, kindly but
shrewd and obstinate; capable too, when he was roused, of passion. He
was a wood-cutter and carpenter, a builder of frame-houses and barns,
solid as himself. He learnt his trade in New York, and afterwards
wandered from place to place in its pursuit. For a time after his
marriage in 1816, he appears to have lived at West Hills, probably
farming a part, at least, of the lands of his fathers. Their old house
had recently been replaced by another at a little distance. This is
still standing, and here, three years later, his second son was born.
The child was called after his father, but the name was promptly
clipped, and to this day he remains "Walt."
* * * * *
[Illustration: LOUISA (VAN VELSOR) WHITMAN AT SIXTY]
His mother,[22] Louisa van Velsor, was a well-made, handsome young
woman, now in her twenty-fourth year. Fearless, practical and
affectionate, hers was a strong and happy presence, magnetic with
the potency of a profound nature, as large and attractive as it was
without taint of selfishness. She seemed to unite in herself the
gentle sweetness and restraint of her Quaker[23] mother, with the
more heroic, full-blooded qualities of the old jolly major. She
had a natural gift of description and was a graphic story-teller, but
of book-learning she had next to none, and letter-writing was always
difficult to her. She lacked little, however, of that higher education
which comes of life-long true and fine relations with persons and with
things. She had been an excellent horsewoman, and in later years her
visitors were impressed by her vitality and reserve power. Her words
fell with weight; she had a grave dignity; but withal her oval face,
framed in its dark hair and snowy cap, was full of kindness; and about
the corners of her mouth, and under her high-set brows, there always
lurked a quaint and quiet humour. Little as we know of Louisa Whitman,
we know enough to regard her as in every respect the equal in character
of her son, whom she endowed with a natural happiness of heart. She
became the mother of eight children, and lived to be nearly eighty
years old, somewhat crippled by rheumatism, but industrious, charming
and beloved to the last.
* * * * *
The first four years of his life, little Walt spent at West Hills. He
is not the only worthy of the place, for here, half a century earlier,
was born the Honourable Silas Wood,[24] who now and for ten years to
come, represented the district in Congress. Already, doubtless, he was
collecting materials for his _Sketch of the First Settlement of Long
Island_, soon to appear.[25] But neither he nor his history greatly
concerns us.
Some two or three miles of sandy lane separate the old Whitman farm
from the present railway station. On an autumn day one finds the way
bordered by huckleberries and tall evening primroses, yellow toad-flax,
blue chickory and corn-flowers, and sturdy forests of golden-rod
among the briars and bushes. In the rough hedgerows are red sumachs,
oaks, chestnuts and tall cedars, locusts and hickories; the gateways
open on to broad fields full of picturesque cabbages, or the plumed
regiments of the tall green Indian corn. It is a farming country, and
a country rich in game--foxes and quails and partridges--and populous
now with all kinds of chirping insects, with frogs and with mosquitoes.
The wooded hills themselves are full of birds; beyond them there are
vineyards.
The road winds to the hills which give the place its name. To be
precise, the Whitman farm, as my driver assured me, belongs to the
hamlet of Millwell, but the title of West Hills is better known. The
other name may, however, serve to recall those cold sweet springs which
rise along the foot of the hills and keep the country green, and whose
waters are highly esteemed in New York.
The lane passes by the end of an old grey shingled farmhouse, boasting
a new brick chimney. A delicate, ash-like locust tree stands by the big
gate.
Here, if you turn into the farm road under the boughs of the orchard,
and then, through the wicket in the palings, cross the weedy garden
square, you may enter under the timber-propped porch into the
low-ceiled house where Walt was born. It is small but comfortable,
of two stories and a half. The morning sun streams through the open
door, blinks in at the sun-shutters, and filters through the mosquito
netting. On the left of the hall[26] are a bedroom and parlour, and the
dining-room is on the right, where a wing of one story has been added.
Beyond this there is a lower extension; and beyond again, extend the
chocolate-coloured barns and sheds and byres and stables of the farm.
At one corner of the garden palings stands the little well-house with
its four neat pillars, and a big bell swings in its forked post by the
side gate to summon the men from the fields into which one sees the
farm road wandering. The fields run up to the wood. Across the road
from the garden is an apple orchard, where the pigs root, and the hens
scratch and cluck and scuffle. It was planted by Walt's uncle Jesse.
[Illustration: WHITMAN'S BIRTHPLACE AT WEST HILLS, FROM THE LANE, 1904]
This is not the first ancestral cabin of the Whitmans; that lies
at a little distance, nearer to the woods. It belongs now to another
farm--the former holding having been divided--and the old cabin has
become a waggon-shed. Both farms have long since passed out of the
family; but near the first house, on a little woody knoll,[27] you may
still see the picturesque group of unlettered stones which cluster on
the Whitman burying hill.
Neither Walt himself nor his father and mother are buried here among
their relatives and ancestors; but the boy, so early pre-occupied with
the mysteries of life, must have often stolen to this strange solitude
to commune with its silence and to hear the wind among the branches,
whispering of death. There is a big old oak near by, old perhaps as the
first Whitman settlement, and a grove of beautiful black walnuts, and
this, too, was one of the children's haunts.
* * * * *
Such was the old Whitman home and country, to which the boy's earliest
memories belonged, where he spent some of the years and nearly all
the holidays of his youth and early manhood, and in which his later
thoughts found their natural background, his deepest consciousness its
native soil. It is, as we have seen, no tame or narrow country, but
wide and generous, and it is within sound of the sea. In the still
night that succeeds a storm, you may hear the strange low murmur of
the Atlantic surf beating upon the coast.[28] The boy was born in the
hills, with that sea-murmur about him.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] See _inter alia_ Furman's _Antiquities of Long Island_; and his
_Notes Relating to the Town of Brooklyn_; Silas Wood's _Sketch of
First Settlement of L. I._; B. F. Thompson's _History of L. I._; N.
S. Prime's _History of L. I._; _A Brief Description of New York_, by
Daniel Denton (1690), ed. by G. Furman.
[5] Wood, 73 n.
[6] See Wood's, Thomson's, and Prime's _History of L. I._
[7] _Comp. Prose_, 7; _cf._ Furman's _Antiquities_, 249; Denton, 14.
[8] Wood, 65; _cf._ _Comp. Prose_.
[9] _In re_, 197.
[10] See Appendix A.
[11] S. M. Janney's _History of Friends_, vol. i.
[12] Furman's _Antiq._, 97; Janney, vol. ii.
[13] Furman's _Antiq._, 229.
[14] Thompson, _op. cit._
[15] Symonds, xii.; _Savage Genealog. Dict._
[16] _Comp. Prose_, 3; Bucke, 13.
[17] Camden Introd.
[18] _Ibid._
[19] _Comp. Prose_, 6; Camden, xix.
[20] _In re_, 202.
[21] Burroughs, 79; Bucke, 15; _Whit. Fellowship_, '94 (Brinton and
Traubel); _Wound Dresser_, 115, etc.
[22] Bucke, 16; _Comp. Prose_, 274; Camden, xvii.; _In re_, 195, etc.
[23] See Appendix A.
[24] Wood, 5 (ed. by A. J. Spooner).
[25] 1828.
[26] _Whit. Fellowship_, _op. cit._
[27] _Comp. Prose_, 4.
[28] _Ibid._, 6.