HENRY:--Whatever is, and is not ashamed to be, is good.
WALT:--I am enamour’d of growing outdoors ...
HENRY:--When I look at the stars, nothing which the astronomers have
said attaches to them, they are so simple and remote.
WALT:--When I heard the learn’d astronomer ...
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself ...
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
HENRY:--A name pronounced is the recognition of the individual to
whom it belongs. He who can pronounce my name aright, he can
call me, and is entitled to my love and service.
WALT:--What am I after all but a child, pleas’d with the sound of my
own name? repeating it over and over ...
HENRY:--You may have the extraordinary for your province, if you
will; let me have the ordinary.
WALT:--The Commonplace I sing ...
And the rest of the dialogue is lost in the distance like the path
on which the two drinkers of space have walked a little of the way
together, before taking their separate roads, one in this direction,
the other in that.
Yes, there are these lost paths that both have trodden, paths where
they have only never met because one has followed them a few hours,
a few seasons before the other. It is a thousand pities, my friends.
If you had encountered each other once, not under the roof of a house
in Brooklyn, during a call, but in the fields, while you, Henry, were
surveying, or on a beach after the two of you had been bathing in
the sea, how much the sand and the tufts of grass would have helped
you to the beautiful understanding that is impossible for you now,
Henry, withdrawn as you are in your shell, and for you, Walt, great
unconscious animal that you are.
But after all, these dreams do not cover an atom of the reality that is
in you. How much better it is that the future should close again, that
you, Walt, should be there in the house on Portland Avenue with your
mother and your family (cherish them, they are so dear to you), ruddy
and strong, and that the roar of Broadway should murmur in your ears!
How much better it is that you should be there, good soul that you
are, the youngest of the three, with your thirty-seven years and your
perfect health, your intransigence, your youthful, inordinate faith,
and that this little creature should not interest you too much. These
are not imaginary beings here but four very ordinary persons of solid
flesh and blood, and how much better it is that they are!)
* * * * *
In the course of the conversation, Walt, speaking of his friends, the
young fellows of the capital, to whom he owes even more than he owes
to Emerson, and of the place they hold in his poems, expresses his
conviction that they are America, Democracy, the key of the politics
of the New World. At this the tight-lipped Henry discharges a cutting
remark. They are the mob, and the mob is like peat. It may give out
any amount of heat, but it smokes, it reeks, it goes to your head. A
fellow who can make a fire of stumps in a clearing doesn’t care to
warm himself at any such blaze as that. The mob, universal suffrage,
the rabble marching in procession over the pavements of a big city or
wallowing like pigs to keep warm in the litter of a stable.... Can you
see that clamorous rout of human insects crowding into the porch of
those great W’s that rise at the threshold of your name, Walt Whitman?
Don’t you want to close the portal?
And the son of Manhattan says to himself: “That fellow certainly comes
from the land of mummies. Those New England people have plenty of
brains--if only the gods had given them a little more guts. That clever
little devil will never be bowled over by the music of the bugles that
grips your very vitals, or the pride of belonging to such a brawny
country. He’s too skinny, the poor little chap.”
Walt, though he conceals it, has been wounded to the quick in his
affections. The America of his poems is not looking for the homage of
apostles like this: it is a lively, warm-blooded America that responds
to the passion of males. Walt calmly faces the cold disdain expressed
by this little shrimp for a Person whom he loves with a terrible love,
not separating the good from the evil. “You don’t understand me,” he
says simply. From that moment he is enlightened. They can go on talking
amicably enough. Henry can say anything he likes, black or white; Walt
has taken his measure. The “no” has worked. A thunderbolt has suddenly
dissipated the fog that veiled a gulf between them immensely wider
than the East River which the visitors have crossed.
Would you imagine that such a chasm could yawn between two beings who
are talking quietly there in a house on Portland Avenue--an apparently
impassable chasm, in spite of all the foot-bridges that reach from
one to the other?... Between two poets who are united in a sovereign
contempt for the literature of the literati--two plebeians, each in
his own way--two children who go forth every day, one of whom could
no more do without his daily walk on the populous pavements where,
from their glances, he gathers in the affection of men and women, than
the other could do without his ramble among the people of the trees,
the plants and the waters of Concord, with the track of the railroad
for his Broadway between trains--two loafers who have remained free
and unmarried for “reasons”--both of them drawing as it were from a
spring of elemental joy--both passionate idealists who, with equal
cheerfulness, might so easily “go and live with animals”--both mystics,
with a great appetite for the concrete--both affirming to the point
of arrogance their quality as individuals--both equally secretive and
reticent--both great friends of the Indian--both poor in money and
refusing to earn the bread of galley-slaves--both having to record the
practical failure of their first books, printed at their own expense
(lucky Henry has disposed of more than two hundred copies of his, while
as for that big fellow, his sales can be counted on his ten fingers
...)? Yet there they are, looking at each other, from opposite banks,
while the tumultuous tide rushes down between them, scouting the frail
bridges they have attempted to fling across its violence. And what
an uproar fills the Narrows, as if to affirm that for all time the
continent and the island shall remain as they are, two separate worlds!
On the continent there are men with whom you feast on friendship,
crowds of comrades, day and night, never too numerous for a hearty
fellow who is hungry for the presence of other hearty fellows like
yourself. There are those who call you by your first name as you pass
or with whom you walk with your arm about their shoulders; they are
as thick as the trees along the rivers and the Great Lakes. They are
the mass to which you give of yourself with immense confidence, well
knowing what will be the return from this investment. Here reigns
the “beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh” that absorbs the
radiance of your own strong, sensual, loving masculinity and sends it
back to you in the flash of the eyes that turn towards you. Where can
one find such delights, richer food for the soul? What should I do in
your blessed retreat, where the golden days pass with one companion?
I should be devoured by homesickness in a moment--for the streets and
faces of Manhattan, their sounds and their vibrating movement.
Frown as much as you like at these delights, little man on your island
who hold men and women at a distance as if you were afraid of touching
pitch. You, brother of the live-oak that joyously spreads its branches,
alone in the fields, with no companion near it. You to whom the company
of your own dear thoughts suffices. You who crouch in the midst of your
own distrust, with your fists clenched, bitter, satisfied, sarcastic,
devoid of magnetism, without any indulgence for your neighbour. You
whom no one would ever think of calling by a nickname. You who have no
more friendship for your own body than for those of others. You for
whom no woman waits.
Make your wry face, Henry, but throw out your narrow chest, just
the same! For you have no particular reason to feel humiliated. The
contrast with that great animal may overwhelm your puny frame. Your
head barely reaches to his shoulder, but in that head, little Henry,
burns the flame of a spirit that assures you at least this superiority:
you have felt his grandeur, while he has not been able to see anything
in you. He is not very discerning, the great animal. Go back to Concord
with your head high.
They parted indeed after two hours of conversation, with a promise
to see each other again the next morning. Matters could not rest
there. Walt was going to return the visit of the two Yankees at
their hotel. But at the appointed hour, the loafer, the dawdler, had
either forgotten the meeting or thought it best to be somewhere else:
there was no big ruddy fellow to be seen. They could not resume the
conversation.
And on November 24th, Amos and Henry returned to the fold, the one to
Concord, the other to northern Connecticut where he was living at the
moment, full of memories of their call in Brooklyn--still under the
charm of a presence that was vastly more impressive even than the voice
of Beecher at Plymouth Church.
* * * * *
Friendship! This had been the torment of Henry’s life also, a torment
revealed to one confidant alone, the Journal, as the great lover
confided it to his Leaves to be spread abroad.... Always with this vast
difference between their two aches: Walt was tormented because he could
never be sufficiently intoxicated with it, while Henry suffered from a
virtual powerlessness to express it at all.
A sad, sad story and so secret. To whom could this shy soul confide
what was concealed behind the mask of his fierce reserve? The trees
could not understand it, and they were his closest friends. So there
remained only a white page that would receive the confession without
blanching.
That the mean interests and commonplace cares of ordinary people should
disgust and bore him was natural enough. Should he fall on his knees,
beat his breast and bewail the demands of a stomach that cannot endure
smugness and vulgarity? He is a mighty walker, he can roll off an
infinite number of miles, splash about in a swamp or shovel snow for
hours, weed in the blazing sun for a whole morning, split stumps as
hard as iron: but your accursed society is utterly beyond him. Protest
as you like. He is a lucky chap when he can afford to digest anything
or anybody.
But with the few who are dear to him why is there so little real
intimacy? As a rule, he finds nothing but disappointment in their
company. He does not get into touch with them. He feels this too keenly
not to suffer from it. Complete friendship, the only sort worthy of the
name, is not the commonplace gossip of good neighbours; it asks to be
able to go freely at all hours into your friend’s house, without even
the need of knocking. Give me the freedom of your friendship if you do
not wish to make me unhappy.
With those whom, in spite of all, he calls his friends, Henry always
has this feeling of painful dissatisfaction. His constraint paralyses
him. He leaves their company still hungry for what he came to seek;
so great is his discomfiture that he carries home with their strings
untied the packages he had meant to open before them. They were things
before which it would have been such a pleasure to marvel together. Is
there any disenchantment equal to this? Instead of communing together
and admiring one another, it is as if they had put each other out or
wounded each other. It is a collision where it ought to have been a
jubilee.
So he cares more for his friends at a distance where their image
recovers its shape and petty things are forgotten. He is an
over-exacting man: he refuses to have the most beautiful thing in the
world profaned by being decked out in false ornaments. He insists that
it must be absolutely naked, and thus he has only fleeting glimpses of
it.
Why is this? Why this lack of sympathetic understanding between true
friends? Is it their fault? Do they lack naturalness or sincerity? Do
they encumber friendship with compliments, manners or shallow words? Or
is it his fault, this fault he imputes to others? Would his friends, by
any chance, like him to be a little different?
They have often complained that he is stiff, abrupt, that he remains
silent when they expect him to say something. They are not over-fond
of his rather crabbed way of speaking the truth and demanding it in
return. Perhaps they are not entirely in the wrong. But does all the
trouble, all his pain, come from these differences? They have known
him for a long time, they know what a firm friend he is, and they are
as willing to pardon his singularities as he is to forgive their habit
of excessive sociability. Is he asking too much of them--a nobility
that is impossible to human clay? Possibly; but even so there must be
something else that he has forgotten in scrutinizing his conscience.
Come, my friend, what is it you complain of to your confidant in the
evening? That your friends are this or that instead of being their own
natural selves, that they answer so incompletely to what you expect of
them? You are wounded, you are hurt because they seem to turn up their
noses at the good things you were bringing them, and it is not a wound
to your pride, it is not just a question of wretched vanity. It is
much more serious than that--you are wounded in your affections, poor
Henry....
Well, but how about yourself? Are you so sure that you respond to their
expectations? Suppose, instead of withdrawing into your shell, at the
least discord, you were simply to accept what they have to offer you?
Suppose you were to show them a little indulgence? Instead, you roughly
pull away. Must it always necessarily be they who take the first step?
You insist that they should come and seek you out in the depths of your
den, after opening as many locks as if it were an enchanted palace.
And suppose they haven’t the key, suppose they don’t know the open
sesame? You expect your friends to be magicians, seers who can divine
the warmth hidden far down beneath that icy exterior. All very well, no
doubt; but tell us, you who left the door of your cabin at Walden open
to all comers, why you lock yourself up in this fashion. What robbers
do you fear? You can see for yourself that this is no philistine who
stands before you, that his face is the face of a friend. You can be
frank, you can speak out that desire you have in you--which is going to
cause you pain later just because you have obliged it to remain silent
and it has its own way of protesting. To no indifferent person, rest
assured, will you be showing your gifts.
There you are, so unhappy, with your affectionate impulses shattered,
leaving your friend with the feeling that you have been simply an
intruder. Are you so sure he would have disappointed you so if you had
taken out your specimens, mystery-maker--if you had merely offered him
what you brought, offered it simply, directly? You refuse to explain
yourself because it is humiliating. Friends don’t explain, they
understand. No doubt; but suppose your attitude took the place of an
explanation, made it unnecessary, dissipated the cloud? Instead of
looking for reasons and fining them down like a casuist, suppose you
tried to give a little of yourself? Just a little, why not?
You stand there, frozen, waiting--waiting for what?--with that
bashfulness, that infernal bashfulness that makes you shrink back from
your chin to your fingers instead of making the gesture the other may
be waiting for--whatever it may be, a touch on the shoulder, a glance
from those eyes that you keep lowered as if you were planning some
dreadful deed, a handclasp long enough to establish the contact, long
enough for the current to begin to flow.... Don’t you realize, subtle
as you are, fool that you have suddenly become, the importance of a
little familiar gesture that will set you both free? Come, you who are
so brave, so resolute in attack, you who profess to be liberating men
who are prisoners of their own sordid existence, confess that you lack
the courage....
You should live your friendship a little, you should put into practice
the principles of that exalted affection which you say cannot be
satisfied among men, live it instead of singing its praises, you
infernal New England prude! Your hands are skilful enough for anything,
except when it comes to friendship--hands that are so delicate when
they pick a frail little flower and so clumsy when they lift this plant
that thrusts its pale roots into you. You can’t stick this in the
lining of your hat where you carry your most fragile discoveries....
Yes, they may have their faults, your friends. They may be too
intelligent to understand. They have a gift for whetting your spirit
of contradiction, which is so destructive of friendship. But don’t you
see that you, with your antagonism, are most to blame? You who do not
lay aside at the outset, like an objectless accessory in a friendly
house, the mask of that provoking, that insupportable chilliness? If
you are not “incapable of expansion and generosity,” why do you keep
all these treasures hidden for your own morose delectation, why are you
so absurdly timorous, so savagely bashful? When you have given your
hand, why do you withdraw it so quickly, as if your precious ego were
in danger of dissolving in the warmth of another palm? Suspicious!
Distrustful! Infernal idiot! Barbarian, barbarian, barbarian, who
suffer and triumph in being what you are!... Don’t accuse others till
you have accused yourself.
Whether the fault is his or theirs, it is very sad in any case. At
times this man who is so rich feels very poor indeed, and all the joy
of the river, all the friendship of the woods does not suffice to fill
the void in this imploring heart.
What a tragedy, for instance, in his relations with his oldest, his
greatest friend, lies behind the appearance of the most harmonious
understanding.... The one man in all the world to whom he is bound by
the brightest hours of his life ... the light of his youth ... not to
be able to love him as he would like to love him, completely, because
... because.... Waldo and Henry cannot quite mingle, as the names of
Eden and Waldo mingle in Walden.
Because Waldo--the flower of a long line of ministers, so rich a
flower in the garland which the established order wears on its
brow--is offended by inelegances that clash with his philosophical
decorum, a decorum full of grace and suave respect for the venerable
conventions. Because a dry, unalterable “no,” rebellion carried even
into the smallest details, the frank assumption of the character of a
bad citizen, revolutionary language ruffle his serenity. And because
Henry, on his side, is irritated, cannot approve of that timidity, that
spirit of compromise, and will never believe that instead of showing
your disgust for what is disgusting you should cover it up with cream
sauce and ask people to taste it.
Because, as an illustrious Sage, the elder, with his delightful smile,
slightly--oh! so slightly--patronizes his junior, this dear, crabbed,
odd, aggressive Henry, this cool iconoclast in whom he recognizes a
force superior to his own that he would like to mollify, bring into
line, civilize. This dear Henry who does not want to have the smile
that would comfort his friend Waldo and, like the latter’s, electrify
an audience instead of petrifying it. This dear Henry who is galled
by any touch of protectiveness, faint as it may be, and conceives of
friendship as the region of equals. This dear Henry who had not waited
till a great Sage came to illuminate Concord in order to exist himself,
who is not the sort to allow himself to be worked up like all those
visionaries whom the dazzling star attracts. Make no mistake, dear
Waldo. Yet there is nothing to prevent us from being very fond of each
other, even if we do wound each other.
Because almost insensibly Henry feels each day a little further from
Waldo, further from his tastes, his habits and the people who surround
him, the more pronounced his own personality becomes, the more it
reacts and frees itself from the influences of his twentieth year ...
till he refuses to write an article on his great friend which Greeley
has been asking him to write for years and has accepted in advance ...
till he at last realizes the uselessness of those conversations from
which each comes away disappointed with the other ... till there are
longer and longer intervals between those visits to the little white
house that merely waste his time and cause him pain ... till the day
comes when the distance is so great that Henry confesses it is dead,
the beautiful friendship, that it lies there, motionless as a corpse,
on a bed of twenty years....
For years he had seen this moment coming, but when it was there, in
all the harshness of the confession, what a rent it made! The face of
the dead on that couch spoke of happy hours passed by the fireside,
of those trees and that garden he had cared for ... spoke of those
walks together, that confidence, that life side by side. Henry felt
an intense pain in his head, in his chest, which prevented him from
working and grew worse towards evening. In the confusion, the infinite
desolation of that black hour, all the friendship of all men seemed to
crumble. And yet at the very moment when this affection was vanishing
and he was bidding it farewell, why did he feel so strangely _near_ the
dead friend, yes, in spite of everything, so near, with that pain in
his chest, that it was as if the friendship contained a touch of the
love that eludes death?
But all should not be lost for a man disappointed in relations
that intellectual tastes shared in common cannot save from ruin.
There remain his friends the simple folk, whom he relishes with a
natural sympathy, without any philosophical seasoning. With them, at
least, Henry feels at ease. No more than himself do they enjoy the
consideration of the world. They are untainted by manners. With them
he can visit freely back and forth. Here he can go straight ahead.
And look at him.... He watches them, in silent satisfaction--from a
distance. What a good sort that fellow is, how close akin to him you
feel.... At a distance Henry admires them, they go straight to his
heart; but does he take a step towards them? Never. And why? What is it
that restrains him from following his inclination and seeing whither
it leads? Among these people are familiar and friendly faces to whom
he has never addressed a word in his whole life, whose very names are
unknown to him. The rover who respects neither wall nor hedge but
walks directly to his goal remains obstinately on the borders of a
land--beautiful, as it seems to him--where he does not dare to venture.
Strange reserve! Why deprive yourself of the offered feast, epicure
of huckleberries, epicure of a humanity that you are content to eat
with your eyes? One might think you were afraid of all contact, afraid
that everything would be spoiled if you rubbed shoulders with anyone
else. Where are those senses of yours that are so fine, so alert, so
eager to possess things? Do they hold prisoner among them the sense
of attachment? Well, there are so many beautiful things that your
intellect grasps but that you do not know how to untie, strange man who
watch men and women whom you would like go by, and remain apart, with
your tenderness under lock and key.
Strange or not, it is so, and when you are a Stoic, you stifle your
secret and your grief and go on your way as if everything in the world
were just right. If there are no friends to visit, give them up. You
can visit them in thought, and they will come in the same way and join
you in your walks: only so can you feel really close to them. If they
do not understand that for some people friendship is as serious a
passion as love, if they find you cold, nature at least will welcome
you without vain words. With her you do not feel an intruder; you and
she do not irritate each other; she never disappoints you or provokes
a “no”; she never sends you away with your enthusiasms crushed. And so
you exaggerate your stiffness, you swagger, you carry your head high,
even when you are alone with yourself. You are a happy mortal who has
rid yourself of men; you feast on solitude; it has a taste of nuts
and sour apples; you laud it to the skies. It is a heroic remedy. You
may not always succeed in deceiving yourself. You are not always the
dupe of these pathetic boasts. But this makes no difference. You are a
savage who leaves these idiots of civilized people to eat the dust of
the highway. It is beautiful, this wild life, and you are proud of it,
even if it sometimes makes a shy, silent fellow suffer. You are that
happy man, made in the image of Walden Pond, self-sufficient, having no
communication with the impure waters about it, smooth and serene--yet
dreaming perhaps, now and again in the evening, dreaming in its depths
of the running, singing waters with which it would be so good to run
and sing, thinking how sad it is to be unable to mingle its life with
that of the neighbouring ponds, its brothers. You are as rigid and as
pure as the ice that encloses it in winter.
And so, because of that impotence from which you suffer, you are
regarded as a misanthrope--just as a deaf man is thought to be
unsociable. Hear that without laughing, enemy of the human race, you
who can laugh, at your own times, so heartily.
To carry every day, over all the paths of the waste lands, like a
burden you could not do without, your anxious care for men. To return
from your ramble, with the thought sticking to you like a bur. To
cherish Nature in your heart and consecrate to her your best hours
because there is no friend in the world who, like this companion, gives
you the savour of your own humanity, yours and that of all your kind.
Not to despair of others or of this world, even in the moments when you
are bitterest in your scorn--though it would be so easy to send it to
the devil and go your way whistling, with your hands in your pockets.
To feel yourself strong enough to build a tower on a little fragment
of love, ever so precarious and disillusioned but so hardy. To carry
with you that longing for a land where these people who irritate you
would have become a society after your own heart. (Does not a mere
bonfire of dead leaves in the country bring you the news from that
land?) To try your very best to find new words to make your neighbour
understand that he should open his window and let in a breath of the
out-of-doors while he is working. To have planned for the title-page
of your book a cock waking up the neighbours before dawn and dragging
them out of the slumber they call their existence. Yes, and then to
find yourself described as a cynical egoist, to figure among your kind
as the perfect skulker.... Henry, the echo of your laugh sounds at last
on the shore of the encircled pond--sounds and salutes this disguise in
which you see yourself decked!
And this is your portrait. What can you expect? So it is, so you have
willed it. It is a beautiful portrait. The only objection is that it
is so unlike you. Perhaps they are going to use it as the frontispiece
of your book. You are the enemy of men when you have much to give and
do not know how to give it--when you seek your brothers and do not
find them, or find them so rarely, on such false terms. The enemy of
men, with these yearnings repressed (oh, so stoically repressed!),
this secret hunger which you would not confess for the whole empire of
the Indies--with that need of love crowded into your meagre chest, and
finding vent at times in spite of you.