"YEAR OF METEORS"
Abraham Lincoln, the man for whom the hour cried out, was not quite
unknown to fame.[239] Ten years older than Whitman, and like Whitman
owning to a strain of Quaker blood in his veins, he belonged by origin
to the South and by adoption to the West. After six years' service in
the Illinois Legislature, and a term in the Lower House at Washington,
he settled down at the age of forty to his profession as a country
lawyer.
In 1854 the repeal of the Missouri compromise in favour of "squatter
sovereignty" recalled him to political life, and he became the champion
of Free-soil principles in his State, against the chief sponsor of
the opposing doctrine, the "little giant of Illinois," Judge Stephen
Douglas. His reply to Douglas in October of that year was read and
applauded by his party throughout America.
Hitherto he had been a Whig, and during Clay's lifetime, his devoted
follower, but the repeal of the compromise was followed in 1856 by
the formation of a new party, and Lincoln and Whitman both became
"black republicans". "Barnburners," Abolitionists and "Anti-Nebraska"
men--those that is to say who opposed the application of the doctrine
of "squatter sovereignty" to Nebraska and Kansas--had united to form
a new Free-soil party. They nominated J. C. Frémont, the gallant
Californian "Path-finder" for the Presidency; but, owing to the
presence of a third candidate put forward by the Know-nothing
Whigs--whose only policy seems to have been a "patriotic" hatred of all
Catholics and foreigners--the Democratic nominee was elected for the
last time in a generation. After his four years were out, a succession
of Republican Presidents occupied the White House for twenty-four years.
James Buchanan, who defeated Frémont--becoming like Lincoln, his
successor, a minority President--seems to have been an honourable and
well-intentioned Pennsylvanian, but he was a man whose character was
quite insufficient for his new office. As an injudicious, short-sighted
diplomatist, he had already, when minister at St. James's in the days
of President Pierce, commended his intrigues for the annexation of Cuba.
Earlier in 1856 Chief Justice Taney, of the Supreme Court, had
delivered his notorious decision in the Dred Scott case; laying it down
that Congress could not forbid a citizen to carry his property into the
public domain--that is to say, it could not prohibit slavery in the
territories--and that, in the political sense of the word, a negro was
not a "man," but only property. This decision and the bloody scenes
enacted in Kansas, where settlers from the North and South were met to
struggle for the constitution which should make the new State either
slave or free, greatly exasperated public opinion, and called forth,
among others, the protests of Abraham Lincoln.
In 1858, while Whitman was studying oratory, Lincoln was stumping
Illinois, in those ever-memorable debates which laid bare all the
plots and purposes of the Southern politicians. When the votes in that
contest were counted, Lincoln held an actual majority; but Douglas was
returned as Senator by a majority of the electoral votes. Though thus
defeated, Lincoln was no longer hidden in a Western obscurity. He was a
man with a future; and America had half-unconsciously recognised him.
* * * * *
Towards the close of 1859, the fire which had been kindled in Kansas
flashed out suddenly in Virginia. America was startled by the news of
John Brown's raid, and the capture of the arsenal at Harper's Ferry.
Brown was among the most remarkable personalities of the time; and
while some saw in him a religious fanatic of the Roundhead type, who
compelled his enemies to pray at the muzzle of his musket, and who
for the Abolition cause would shatter the Union; others counted him
a martyr for the cause of freedom. Emerson had been one of his most
earnest backers when first he went to Kansas; and now his deed fired
the enthusiasm of New England. Thoreau wrote: "No man in America has
ever stood up so persistently and effectively for the dignity of human
nature, knowing himself for a man, and the equal of any Government";
and when he was hung, it was Thoreau who vehemently declared that
John Brown seemed to him to be the only man in America who had not
died.[240] His high spirit quickened the conscience of the North, and
two years later its sons marched into Virginia singing the song of his
apotheosis.
Whitman was present at the trial of certain of Brown's abettors in
the State House at Boston;[241] one of a group prepared to effect
their rescue in the event of a miscarriage of justice. Lincoln, on
the other hand, was of those who, in spite of their intense hatred
of slavery, wholly disapproved the Raid. For him, John Brown was a
maddened enthusiast, a mere assassin like Orsini.[242] His attempt to
raise the slaves of Virginia in revolt against the whites was abhorrent
to the Republican statesman whose knowledge of the South showed him
the horrors of a negro rising. Regarding slavery as the irreconcilable
and only dangerous foe of the Republic, Lincoln held that the Federal
Government must restrain it within its actual bounds; and that the
sentiment in favour of gradual emancipation advocated by Jefferson, the
father of the Democratic party, should be encouraged in the States of
the South. But it was the States themselves that held and must hold the
fatal right of choice; it was for them, not for America, to liberate
their slaves.
* * * * *
While the figure of Lincoln was thus becoming more and more visible to
the nation, Whitman was fulfilling his own destiny in New York. He was
born to be a leader of men; but a poet, a path-finder, a pioneer, not a
politician or president. Whatever his noble ambition might urge, or his
quick imagination prompt, he kept his feet to the path of his proper
destiny.
He had a prodigiously wide circle of friends, gathered from every
walk of life: journalists and literary men of all kinds; actors and
actresses; doctors and an occasional minister of religion; political
and public characters; the stage-drivers and the hands on the
river-boats; farmers from the country; pilots and captains of the port;
labourers, mechanics and artisans of every trade; loungers too, and
many a member of that class which society has failed to assimilate
and which it hunts from prison to asylum and poor-house; and he had
acquaintances among another class of outcasts whose numbers were
already an open menace to the life of the Western metropolis, the girls
who sell themselves upon the streets.[243]
Many anecdotes are told of him during these years: how for instance
he would steer the ferry-boats, till once he brought his vessel into
imminent peril, and never thereafter would consent to handle the wheel;
or how, during the illness of a comrade, he held his post, driving his
stage in the winter weather while he lay in the wards of the hospital;
or again, how he took Emerson to a favourite rendezvous of firemen and
teamsters, his good friends, and to the astonishment of the kindly
sage, proved himself manifestly one of them.
A doctor at the old New York Hospital,[244] a dark stone building
surmounted by a cupola, and looking out over a grassy square through
iron gates upon Pearl Street, often met him in the wards, where he
came to visit one or other of his driver friends, and enjoyed the
restful influence of his presence there or in the little house-doctor's
room. In those days, when Broadway was crammed with vehicles and with
stages of all colours, much as is the Strand to-day, the proverbial
American daring and recklessness gave ample opportunity for accidents.
As to the drivers, they were generally country-bred farmers' sons, fine
fellows, wide-awake and thoroughly conversant with all that passed in
the city from the earliest grey of dawn till midnight: and Whitman
found some of his closest comrades in their ranks.
Sometimes a member of the hospital staff would go over with him to
Pfaff's German restaurant or Rathskeller on Broadway; a large dingy
basement to which one descended from the street. Here, half under the
pavement, were the tables, bar and oyster stall, whereat the Bohemians
of New York were wont to gather, and in a yellow fog of tobacco-smoke
denounce all things Bostonian. John Swinton, a friend of Alcott and of
Whitman, belonged to the group,[245] and among those who drank Herr
Pfaff's lager-beer, and demolished his schwartz brod, Swiss cheese, and
Frankfurter wurst, were many of the brilliant little band which at this
time was making the _New York Saturday Press_ a challenge to everything
academic and respectable.
It was here that a young Bostonian, paying his first visit to the city
in 1860,[246] found Whitman installed at the head of a long table,
already a hero in that revolutionary young world. The _Press_ was his
champion, and his voice was not to be silenced. Mr. Howells, for it was
he, had been amused and amazed at the ferociously profane Bohemianism
of the worthy editor, who had lived in Paris, and now worshipped it in
the person of Victor Hugo as much as he detested Longfellow and Boston.
Mr. Howells was astonished and deeply impressed by the extraordinary
charm, gentleness and benignity of the man whom the _Press_ was
extolling as arch-anarch and rebel. Whitman's eyes and voice made a
frank and irresistible proffer of friendship, and he gave you his hand
as though it were yours to keep. An atmosphere of unmistakable purity
emanated from him in the midst of that thickness of smoke, that reek of
beer and oysters and German cooking. He was clean as the sea is clean.
He passed along the ordinary levels of life as one who lives among the
mountains, and finds his home on Helicon or Olympus.
Ada Clare[247] (Mrs. Julia Macelhinney), by all accounts a charming
and brilliant woman, was queen of this rebel circle, and especially a
friend of Whitman's. News of her tragic death from hydrophobia, caused
by the bite of her pet dog, came as a terrible shock to all who had
known her. He had other women friends, notably Mrs. "Abby" Price, of
Brooklyn, and her two daughters.[248] The mother was an incurable lover
of her kind, whose hospitality to the outcast survived all the frauds
practised upon it.
The haunted faces of the needy were becoming only too familiar both in
New York and Brooklyn. The winter of 1857-58 had been a black one:[249]
banks had broken, and work had come to a standstill; and there had been
in consequence the direst need among the ever-increasing class of men
who were wholly dependent upon their weekly earnings. The rise of this
class in a new country marks the advent of the social problem in its
more acute form: and from this date on there was a rapid development of
the usual palliative agencies, missions, rescue-homes and what-not. The
permanent problem of poverty had made its appearance in America.
It need hardly be added that at the same time there were many evidences
of the growing wealth of another class of the citizens, those
whose profits were derived from land-values and the employment of
wage-labour. The brown-stone characteristic of the modern city was now
replacing the wood and brick which had hitherto lined Broadway,[250]
as private houses gave way to shops and offices, hotels and theatres.
Residences were built farther and farther up-town; and the Quarantine
Station on Staten Island, which stood in the way of a similar expansion
in that desirable quarter, was burnt out by aspiring citizens. And
meanwhile the pressure of life in the East-side rookeries was growing
more and more tyrannous.
The foundering of a slave-ship off Montauk Point was one of the more
striking reminders of the menace of vested interests to all that
the fathers of the Republic had held dear.[251] For even the slave
trade was now being revived, and the hands of Northern merchants
were anything but clean from the gold of conspiracy. Sympathy for
the "institution" and its corollaries was strong in New York, and
was not unrepresented at Pfaff's. It must have been about the close
of 1861,[252] or a little later, that one of the Bohemians proposed
a toast to the success of the Southern arms. Whitman retorted with
indignant and passionate words: an altercation ensued across the table,
with some show of ill-mannered violence by the Southern enthusiast; and
Whitman left his old haunt, never to return till the great storm of the
war had become a far-away echo.
* * * * *
[Illustration: WHITMAN AT FORTY]
There are two portraits which belong to the Pfaffian days. In either
he might be the stage-driver of Broadway, and his dress presents a
striking contrast with the stiff gentility of the orthodox costume,
the silk hat and broadcloth, of the correct citizen. He is a great
nonchalant fellow, with rough clothes fit for manual toil; a coat
whose collar, by the way, has a rebellious upward turn; a waistcoat,
all unbuttoned save at a point about half-way down, exposing the
loose-collared shirt surrounded by a big knotted tie. The trousers
are of the same striped stuff as the vest; one hand is thrust into a
pocket, the other holds his broad brim.
In the photograph, which alone is of full length, the face is strong
and kindly, as Mr. Howells saw it; but in the painting, which dates
from 1859,[253] and is valuable as showing the florid colouring of
the man at this time--the growth of hair and beard, though touched
with grey, very vigorous and still dark, the eyebrows almost black,
the face handsome, red and full as of an old-time sea-captain--the
aspect is heavy and even a little sinister. Probably this is a clumsy
rendering of that lethargic and brooding condition which the occupation
of sitting for a portrait would be likely to induce; and in this it is
curiously unlike that of the photograph.
The pose in the latter is unstudied and a little awkward; one cannot
help feeling that the man ought to loaf a little less. The head is
magnificent, but the knees are loose. There was something in Whitman's
character which this full-length portrait indicates better than any
other; something indefinite and complacent, which matched with his
deliberate and swaggery gait. It is a quality which exasperates the
formalists, and all the people who feel positively indecent in anything
but a starched shirt.
Whitman wore the garb and fell naturally into the attitudes of the
manual worker. When he was not at work he was relaxed, and stood at
ease in a way that no one could mistake. And when he went out to enjoy
himself he never donned a tail-coat and patent shoes. Something in this
very capacity for relaxation and looseness at the knees made him more
companionable to the average man, as it made him more exasperating to
the superior person. The gentility of the clerical mannikin of the
office was utterly abominable to him; so much one can read in the
portrait, and in the fact that he persisted in calling himself Walt,
the name which was familiar to the men on the ferry and the road.[254]
* * * * *
Early in 1860 Whitman made arrangements with a firm of young and
enterprising Boston publishers for the issue of a third edition of
his book. It had now been out of print for nearly three years, and
new material had all that time been accumulating, amounting to about
two-thirds of what had already been published.
He went over to Boston and installed himself in a little room at the
printing office, where he spent his days carefully correcting and
revising the proofs. A friend who found him there speaks of his very
quiet manners.[255] He rarely laughed, and never loudly. He seemed to
be provokingly indifferent to the impression he was creating, and made
no effort to talk brilliantly. He was indeed quite bare of the small
change of conversation, and gave no impression of self-consciousness.
At the time of this interview he was accompanied by a sickly listless
lad whom he had found at the boarding-house where he stayed. Whitman
had compassion on him and carried him along, in order that he might
communicate something of his own superabundant vitality to him.
During his stay in Boston, Walt frequently attended the services then
conducted at the Seamen's Bethel by Father Taylor.[256] As a rule, he
avoided churches of every sort, feeling acutely the ineffectiveness of
what is grimly called "Divine Service," feeling also that worship was
for the soul in its solitude.[257] Not that he was ignorant of that
social passion which finds its altar in communion of spirit, or was
blind to the deepest mysteries of fellowship. To these, as we shall
see, he was particularly sensitive. But the formalities of a church
must have seemed foolish and irksome to one for whom all fellowship was
a kind of worship, and all desire was a prayer. In the preaching of
Father Taylor there was nothing formal or ineffective. In it Walt felt
anew the passionate sense of reality which had thrilled him as a child
in the preaching of old Elias Hicks.
Father Taylor was now nearly seventy;[258] a southerner by birth, he
had been a sailor, and became upon conversion a "shouting Methodist".
The earnestness of his first devotion remained with him to the last;
and his prayers were especially marked by the power which flowed from
him continually. Behind the high pulpit in the quaint heavily-timbered,
wood-scented chapel was painted a ship in distress, in vivid
illustration of his words which were ever returning to the sea. All his
ways were eloquent, unconventional, picturesque and homely like his
face, so that he won the hearts of all conditions of men, and became
one of the idols of Boston.
The old man's power of fascination seemed almost terrible to his
hearers; one young sailor opined that he must be the actual Holy Ghost.
Walt himself was always moved to tears by the marvellous intimacy of
his passionate pleading in prayer.[259] He spoke straight to the Soul,
and not at all, as do common preachers, to the intelligence or the
superficial emotions; and the Soul of his hearers answered, with the
awful promptitude of an unknown living presence within. His passion of
love was at once tender and remorseless; Whitman compares him with a
surgeon operating upon a beloved patient.
In this man, before whom all the elocution of the platform was mere
trickery, Walt recognised the one "essentially perfect orator" whom
he had ever heard, the only one who fulfilled the demands of his own
ideal. And be it remembered, Theodore Parker was in his power in those
days, while Father Taylor was an evangelical of the old school. It is,
after all, not mysticism but orthodoxy which is exclusive; and though
he was wholly a heretic, Whitman was able fully to love and appreciate
those who were farthest removed from his own point of view.
* * * * *
Upon this visit Emerson and Whitman saw much of one another. They were
both men in middle life--Emerson had passed his fiftieth year--and each
entertained for the other a feeling of warm and affectionate regard.
Whitman felt toward the older man almost as to an elder brother,[260]
and the sweet and wise and kindly spirit of Emerson frequently sought
out the younger in brotherly solicitude for his welfare.
Their intimacy had sprung from Emerson's letter, and it was always
Emerson who pressed it. Something in the mental atmosphere in which the
Concord philosopher moved was very repellant to Whitman: he positively
disliked "a literary circle," and blamed it for all the real or
imagined shortcomings of his friend. He himself would not go to Concord
from his horror of any sort of lionizing.
So when Emerson wanted to talk, they would walk together on the
Common;[261] as on one memorable, bright, keen February day, when
under the bare branches of the American elms, they paced to and fro
discoursing earnestly.
Emerson's name had been somewhat too conspicuously displayed on the
back of the second edition, of which he had been caused to appear
almost as a sponsor; and some of the lines thus introduced had put his
Puritan friends completely out of countenance, while giving his many
enemies an admirable opportunity to blaspheme. The frank celebration of
acts to which modern society only alludes by indirection, revealed to
the observant eye of orthodoxy that cloven hoof of immorality which it
always suspects concealed about the person of the philosophic heretic.
And we can well imagine the consternation of the blameless householder
of Boston as, in the bosom of his astonished family, he read aloud the
pages commended to him by the words of the master.
It was thus upon Emerson, who did not quite approve the offending
poems, that much of the storm of indignation wreaked itself; and
whatever Emerson himself might think of the situation, his family was
indignant. One can almost hear them arguing that a man has heresies
enough of his own to close the ears of men to his message, without
gratuitous implication in heresies which are not his; if he value his
charge, let him keep clear of other men's eccentricities; he really has
no right to allow himself to be represented as the sponsor for such
sentiments as Whitman printed in the _Body Electric_.[262]
But whatever his friends might counsel, Emerson spoke from his own
heart and wisdom that February day. He was pleading not for himself,
but for the truth as he saw it, and for his offending friend. It was
not because the book was being published as it were in his own diocese,
his own beloved Boston; but because the new edition would be the first
to be issued by a responsible house, and destined, probably, to enjoy a
wide and permanent circulation, remaining for years the final utterance
of Whitman upon these matters, that Emerson was so urgent and so
eloquent.
His position was a strong one; his arguments, and the spirit which
prompted them, were, as Whitman admitted, overwhelming, and his
companion was in a sense convinced. It is much to be regretted that
neither of the friends kept any detailed record of this discussion, but
I think we can guess what the older man's position would be.
Your message of the soul, we can imagine Emerson saying, is of the
utmost importance to America: it is what America needs, and it is what
you, and you alone, can make her hear. But you can only make her hear
it, if you state it in the most convincing and simple way.
Now these poems of yours upon sex complicate and confuse the real
message, not because they are necessarily wrong in themselves--I
do not say they are--but because they do and must give rise to
misunderstanding, and in consequence, obscure or even cancel the rest.
They give the book an evil notoriety, and will create for it a _succès
de scandale_. It will be bought and read by the prurient, to whom its
worth will be wholly sealed.
And not only do you destroy the value of the book by printing such
poems as these, you render it actually dangerous. Personally you and
I are agreed--he would say--with Boehme where he writes that "the new
spirit cometh to Divine vision in himself, and heareth God's word, and
hath Divine understanding and inclination ... and ... _the earthly
flesh_ ... _hurteth him not at all_".[263] We know the flesh to be
beautiful and sacred; we turn with loathing from the blasphemies of
Saint Bernard and of Luther, who saw in it nothing but a maggot-sack, a
sack of dung. On these things we are at one; but how are we most wisely
and surely to direct others on the road to self-realisation?
To feed the monster of a crude passion is surely not the way to bring
the individual toward the Divine vision. To be frank about these
matters is necessary; but in order to be honest is it necessary to
fling abroad this wildfire, against which we are all contending, lest
it destroy the labours of ages? Must we nourish this giant, whose
unruly strength is for ever threatening to tear in pieces the unity of
the self?
By these poems you are deliberately consigning your book to the class
which every wise parent must label "dangerous to young people," and
which the very spirits you most desire to kindle for America will be
compelled, by the law of their being, to handle at their peril, and to
turn from with distress.
* * * * *
Arguments not unlike these were doubtless used by Emerson, for we
know that he discussed this problem; and Whitman listened attentively
to them, explaining himself at times, but generally weighing them in
silence. Perhaps they were not new to him, but they were rendered
the more powerful and well-nigh irresistible by the persuasive and
beautiful spirit, the whole magnetic personality of his friend.
Walt was deeply moved, and when, after a couple of hours, Emerson
concluded the statement of his case with the challenge, "What have you
to say to such things?" could but reply, "Only that while I can't
answer them at all, I feel more settled than ever to adhere to my own
theory and exemplify it". "Very well," responded Emerson cheerfully,
"then let us go to dinner."[264]
They had been pacing up and down the Long Walk by Beacon Street, from
which one looks across the broad, park-like stretch of the Common--that
Common whose grey, bright-eyed squirrels are so confiding, and whose
air is so good from the sea. To-day the oldest of the elms, that kept
record of the past as wisely as any archives, have yielded to the winds
and to the tooth of time. The growth of these trees is very different
from that of our English species, and their long, curving branches
rib the vault of sky overhead. The two men went over the historic
hill--where now the gilded dome of the State House glows richly against
the sky--descending through picturesquely narrow streets, full of
memories and echoes of old days, to their destination at the American
House.
FOOTNOTES:
[239] _Cf._ useful ed. of his speeches recently added to "Unit Library".
[240] Thoreau's _A Plea for Captain J. B._, and _The Last Days of J. B._
[241] Kennedy, 49.
[242] Address at Cooper Inst., 27th February, 1860.
[243] Among the MSS. Traubel is a first draft for a novel (?) dealing
with a woman of this class.
[244] Dr. D. B. St. J. Roosa in _N.Y. Mail and Express_.
[245] Donaldson, 208.
[246] W. D. Howells, _Lity. Friends and Acq._, 74.
[247] Kennedy, 70.
[248] Bucke, 26, 38.
[249] _Mem. Hist. N.Y._, iii., 458-60.
[250] _Cf._ _Mem. Hist. N.Y._, iii., 464, etc.
[251] _Ib._, iii., 468.
[252] Kennedy, 69.
[253] In possession of Mr. J. H. Johnston, of New York. Reproduced as
frontispiece to _Comp. Prose_.
[254] Kennedy, 44; Bucke, 33; Burroughs, 20, 21.
[255] Mr. Trowbridge.
[256] _Comp. Prose_, 385-87.
[257] _Ib._, 226, 227.
[258] _Father Taylor, the Sailor Preacher_, by G. Haven and T. Russell,
1877.
[259] _Comp. Prose_, 386.
[260] Kennedy, 76, 77; _cf._ _Comp. Prose_, 315-17; Burroughs (_a_),
67, etc.
[261] Burroughs, 144.
[262] _L. of G._, 81.
[263] _Two Theosophical Letters_, ii., 11.
[264] Bucke, 144, 145; _Comp. Prose_, 184.