to say that nothing but the horrible inanity of prudery, to which
civilization has become subject, and which affects even many good
persons, could cloud and distort their palpable innocence and nobleness.
What chance has an author to a reasonable interpretation of such
utterances in an age when squeamishness, the Siamese twin-brother of
indelicacy, is throned as the censor of all life? Look at the nearest,
the commonest and homeliest evidences of the abysm into which we have
fallen! Here in my knowledge is an estimable family which, when the baby
playing on the floor kicked up its skirts, I have repeatedly seen rush
_en masse_ to pull down the immodest petticoat. Here is a lady whose
shame of her body is such, that she will not disrobe in the presence of
one of her own sex, and thinks it horrible to sleep at night without
being swaddled in half her garments. Everywhere you see women
perpetually glancing to be sure their skirts are quite down; twisting
their heads over their shoulders, like some of the damned in Dante, to
get a rear view; drawing in their feet if so much as the toe happens to
protrude beyond the hem of the gown, and in various ways betraying a
morbid consciousness which is more offensive than positive immodesty.
When I went to the hospital, I saw one of those pretty and good girls,
who in muslin and ribbons ornament the wards, and are called nurses,
pick up her skirts and skurry away, flushing hectic, with averted face,
because as she passed a cot the poor fellow who lay there happened, in
his uneasy turnings, to thrust part of a manly leg from beneath the
coverlid. I once heard Emerson severely censured in a private company,
five or six persons present, and I the only dissenting voice, because in
one of his essays he had used the word “spermatic.” When Tennyson
published the _Idyls of the King_, some of the journals in both America
and England, and several persons in my own hearing, censured the weird
and magnificent _Vivien_, one of his finest poems, as “immoral” and
“vulgar.” When Charles Sumner, in the debate on Louisiana, characterized
the new-formed State as “a seven months’ child begotten by the bayonet,
in criminal conjunction with the spirit of caste”—a stroke of absolute
genius—he was censured by the public prints, and reminded that there
were ladies in the gallery! Lately the London _Observer_, one of the
most eminent of the British journals, in a long and labored editorial on
the bathing at Margate, denounced the British wives and matrons in the
severest terms for sitting on the beach when men were bathing in “slight
bathing-dresses” (it was not even pretended that the men were nude)—and
even went the length of demanding of the civil authorities that they
should invoke the interference of Parliament to stop this scandal! These
are fair minor specimens of the prudery, worse than vice, but also the
concomitant of the most shocking vice, which prevails everywhere. Its
travesty is the dressing in pantalettes the “limbs” of the piano; its
insolent tragi-comedy is the expulsion of Shakespeare from office
because he writes “indecent passages;” its tragedy is the myriad results
of wrong and crime and ruin, carried into all the details of every
relation of life.
A civilization in which such things as I have mentioned can be thought
or done, is guilty to the core. It is not purity, it is impurity, and of
the shallowest kind, which calls clothes more decent than the naked
body—thus inanely conferring upon the work of the tailor or milliner a
modesty denied to the work of God. It is not innocent but guilty thought
which attaches shame, secrecy, baseness, and horror to great and august
parts and functions of humanity. The tacit admission everywhere
prevalent that portions of the human physiology are base; that the
amative feelings and acts of the sexes, even when hallowed by marriage,
are connected with a low sensuality; and that these, with such subjects
or occurrences as the conception and birth of children, are to be
absconded from, blushed at, concealed, ignored, withheld from education,
and in every way treated as if they belonged to the category of sins
against Nature, is not only in itself a contemptible insanity, but a
main source of unspeakable personal and social evil. From the morbid
state of mind which such a theory and practice must induce, are spawned
a thousand guilty actions of every description and degree. There is no
occurrence in the whole vast and diversified range of sexual evil, from
the first lewd thought in the mind of the budding child, the very
suspicion of which makes the parent tremble, down to the last ghastly
and bloody spasm of lust which rends its hapless victim in some rusurban
woodland, that is not fed mainly from this mystery and mother of
abominations to whose care civilization has remitted the entire subject.
The poet who, in the spirit of that divine utility which marked the
first great bards and will mark the last, seeks to make literature
remediate to an estate like this, works in the best interests of his
country and his fellow-beings, and deserves their gratitude. This is
what Walt Whitman has done. Directly and indirectly, in forms as various
as the minds he seeks to influence; in frank opposition to the great
sexual falsehood by which we are ruled and ruined, he has thrown into
civilization a conception intended to be slowly and insensibly absorbed,
and to ultimately appear in results of good—the conception of the
individual as a divine democracy of essences, powers, attributes,
functions, organs—all equal, all sacred, all consecrate to noble use;
the sexual part, the same as the rest; no more a subject for mystery or
shame or secrecy than the intellectual or the manual or the alimentary
or the locomotive part—divinely common-place as head, or hand, or
stomach, or foot; and, though sacred, to be regarded as so ordinary that
it shall be employed, the same as any other part, for the purposes of
literature—an idea which he exemplifies in his poetry by a metaphorical
use which it is a deep disgrace to any intellect to misunderstand. This
is his lesson. This is one of the central ideas which rule the myriad
teeming play of his volume, and interpret it as a law of Nature
interprets the complex play of facts which proceeds from it. This, then,
is not license, but thought. It may be erroneous, it may be chimerical,
it may be ineffectual; but it is thought, serious and solemn thought, on
a most difficult and deeply immersed question—thought emanating from
the deep source of a great love and care for men, and seeking nothing
but a pure human welfare. When, therefore, any persons undertake to
outrage and injure its author for having given it to the world, it is
not merely as the pigmy incarnations of the depraved modesty, the
surface morality, the filthy and libidinous decency of the age, but it
is as the persecutors of thought that they stand before us. It is no
excuse for them to say, that such treatment of Walt Whitman is
justifiable, because his book appears to them bad. Waiving every other
consideration, I have to inform them that on this subject they should
not permit themselves the immodesty of a judgment. It is not for such as
they to attempt to prison in the poor cell of their opinion the vast
journey and illumination of the human mind. No matter what the book
seems to them, they should remember that an author deserves to be tried
by his peers, and that a book may easily seem to some persons quite
another thing from what it really is to others. Here is Rabelais, a
writer who wears all the crowns; but even Mr. Harlan would consider Walt
Whitman white as purity beside him. “Filth,” “zanyism,” “grossness,”
“profligacy,” “licentiousness,” “sensuality,” “beastliness”—these are
samples of the epithets which have fallen, like a rain of excrement, on
Rabelais for three hundred years. And yet it is of him that the
holy-hearted Coleridge—an authority of the first order on all purely
literary or ethical questions—it is of him that Coleridge says, and
says justly: “I could write a treatise in praise of _the moral
elevation_ of Rabelais’ work which would make the Church stare, and the
Conventicle groan, and yet would be the truth, and nothing but the
truth.” The moral elevation of Rabelais! A great criticism, a needed
word. It is just. No matter for seeming—Rabelais is good to the very
core. Rabelais’ book, viewed with reference to ensemble, viewed in
relation, viewed in its own proper quality by other than cockney
standards, is righteous to the uttermost extreme. So is the work of Walt
Whitman, far other in character, and far less obnoxious to criticism
than that of Rabelais, but which demands at least as liberal a judgment,
and which it is not for any deputy, however high in office, to assign to
shame. I know not what further vicissitude of insult and outrage is in
store for this great man. It may be that the devotees of a castrated
literature, the earthworms that call themselves authors, the
confectioners that pass for poets, the flies that are recognized as
critics, the bigots, the dilettanti, the prudes and the fools, are more
potent than I dream to mar the fortunes of his earthly hours; but above
and beyond them uprises a more majestic civilization in the immense and
sane serenities of futurity; and the man who has achieved that sublime
thing, a genuine book; who has written to make his land greater, her
citizens better, his race nobler; who has striven to serve men by
communicating to them that which they least know—their own experience;
who has thrown into living verse a philosophy designed to exalt life to
a higher level of sincerity, reality, religion; who has torn away
disguises and illusions, and restored to commonest things, and the
simplest and roughest people, their divine significance and natural,
antique dignity; and who has wrapped his country and all created things
as with splendors of sunrise, in the beams of a powerful and gorgeous
poetry—that man, whatever be the clouds that close around his fame, is
assured illustrious; and when every face lowers, when every hand is
raised against him, turning his back upon his day and generation, he may
write upon his book, with all the pride and grief of the calumniated
Æschylus, the haughty dedication that poet graved upon his hundred
dramas: TO TIME!
And Time will remember him. He holds upon the future this supreme claim
of all high poets—behind the book, a life loyal to humanity! Never, if
I can help it, shall be forgotten those immense and divine labors in the
hospitals of Washington, among the wounded of the war, to which he
voluntarily devoted himself, as the best service he could render to his
struggling country, and which illustrate that boundless love which is at
once the dominant element of his character, and the central source of
his genius. How can I tell the nature and extent of that sublime
ministration! During those years, Washington was a city in whose unbuilt
places and around whose borders were thickly planted dense white
clusters of barracks. These were the hospitals—neat, orderly,
rectangular, strange towns, whose every citizen lay drained with
sickness or wrung with pain. There, in those long wards, in rows of cots
on either side, were stretched, in all attitudes and aspects of
mutilation, of pale repose, of contorted anguish, of death, the martyrs
of the war; and among them, with a soul that tenderly remembered the
little children in many a dwelling mournful for those fathers, the worn
and anxious wives, haggard with thinking of those husbands, the girls
weeping their spirits from their eyes for those lovers, the mothers who
from afar yearned to the bedsides of those sons, walked Walt Whitman in
the spirit of Christ, soothing, healing, consoling, restoring, night and
day, for years; never failing, never tiring, constant, vigilant,
faithful; performing, without fee or reward, his self-imposed duty;
giving to the task all his time and means, and doing every thing that it
is possible for one unaided human being to do. Others fail, others flag;
good souls that came often and did their best, yield and drop away; he
remains. Winter and summer, night and day, every day in the week, every
day in the year, all the time, till the winter of ’65, when for a few
hours daily, during six months, his duties to the Government detain him;
after that, all the time he can spare, he visits the hospitals. What
does he do? See! At the red aceldama of Fredericksburg, in ’62, he is in
a hospital on the banks of the Rappahannock; it is a large brick house,
full of wounded and dying; in the yard, at the foot of a tree, is a
cart-load of amputated legs, arms, hands, feet, fingers; dead bodies
shrouded in brown woollen blankets are near; there are fresh graves in
the yard: he is at work in the house among the officers and men, lying,
unclean and bloody, in their old clothes; he is up stairs and down; he
is poor, he has nothing to give this time, but he writes letters for the
wounded; he cheers up the desponding; he gives love. Some of the men,
war-sad, passionately cling to him; they weep; he will sit for hours
with them if it will give them comfort. Here he is in Washington, after
Chancellorsville, at night, on the wharf: two boat-loads of wounded (and
oh, such wounded!) have been landed; they lie scattered about on the
landing, in the rain, drenched, livid, lying on the ground, on old
quilts, on blankets; their heads, their limbs bound in bloody rags; a
few torches light the scene; the ambulances, the callous drivers are
here; groans, sometimes a scream, resound through the flickering light
and the darkness. He is there, moving around; he soothes, he comforts,
he consoles; he assists to lift the wounded into the ambulances; he
helps to place the worst cases on the stretchers; his kiss is warm upon
the pallid lips of those who yearn to him, often mere children; his
tears drop upon the faces of the dying. Here he is in the hospitals of
Washington—the Campbell, the Patent Office, the Eighth street, the
Judiciary, the Carver, the Douglas, the Armory Square. He writes
letters; he writes to fathers, mothers, brothers, wives, sweethearts;
some of the soldiers are poor penmen; some cannot get paper and
envelopes; some fear to write lest they should worry the folks at home:
he writes for them all; he uses that genius which shall endure to the
latest generation, to say the felicitous, the consoling, the cheering,
the prudent, the best word. He goes through the wards; he talks
cheerfully, he distributes amusing reading-matter; at night or by day,
when the horrible monotony of the hospital weighs like lead on every
soul, he reads to the men; he is careful to sit away from the cot of any
poor fellow so sick or wounded as to be easily disturbed, but he gathers
into a large group as many as he can, and amuses them with some story or
enlivening game, like that of Twenty Questions, or starts some
discussion, or with some device dispels the gloom. For his daily
occupation, he goes from ward to ward, doing all he can to hearten and
revive the spirits of the sufferers, and keep the balance in favor of
their recovery. Usually, his plan is to pass, with haversack strapped
across his shoulder, from cot to cot, distributing small gifts; his
theory is that these men, far from home, lonely, sick at heart, need
more than any thing some practical token that they are not forsaken,
that some one feels a fatherly or brotherly interest in them; hence, he
gives them what he can; to particular cases, entirely penniless, he
distributes small sums of money, fifteen cents, twenty cents, thirty
cents, fifty cents, not much to each, for there are many, but under the
circumstances these little sums are and mean a great deal. He also
distributes and directs envelopes, gives letter-paper, postage-stamps,
tobacco, apples, figs, sweet biscuit, preserves, blackberries; gets
delicate food for special cases; sometimes a dish of oysters or a dainty
piece of meat, or some savory morsel for some poor creature who loathes
the hospital fare, but whose appetite may be tempted. In the hot weather
he buys boxes of oranges and distributes them, grateful to lips baked
with fever; he buys boxes of lemons, he buys sugar, to make lemonade for
those parched throats of sick soldiers; he buys canned peaches,
strawberries, pears; he buys in the market fresh fruit; he buys
ice-cream and treats the whole hospital; he buys whatever delicacies and
luxuries his limited resources will allow, and he makes them go as far
as he can. Where does he get the means for this expenditure? For Walt
Whitman is poor;—he is poor, and has a right to be proud of his
poverty, for it is the sacred, the ancient, the immemorial poverty of
goodness and genius. He gets the means by writing for newspapers; he
expends all he gets upon his boys, his darlings, the sick and maimed
soldiers—the young heroes of the land who saved their country, the
laborers of America who fought for the hopes of the world. He adds to
his own earnings the contributions of noble souls, often strangers, who,
in Boston, in New York, in Providence, in Brooklyn, in Salem, in
Washington and elsewhere, have heard that such a man walks the wards,
and who volunteer to send him this assistance; when at last, he gets a
place under Government, and till Mr. Harlan turns him out, he has a
salary which he spends in the same way; sometimes his wrung heart gets
the better of his prudence, and he spends till he himself is in
difficulties. He gives all his money, he gives all his time, he gives
all his love. To every inmate of the hospital something, if only a vital
word, a cheering touch, a caress, a trifling gift; but always in his
rounds he selects the special cases, the sorely wounded, the deeply
despondent, the homesick, the dying: to these he devotes himself; he
buoys them up with fond words, with caresses, with personal affection;
he bends over them, strong, clean, cheerful, perfumed, loving, and his
magnetic touch and love sustain them. He does not shrink from the smell
of their sickening gangrene; he does not flinch from their bloody and
rotten mutilations; he draws nigher for all that; he sticks closer; he
dresses those wounds; he fans those burning temples; he moistens those
parched lips; he washes those wasted bodies; he watches often and often
in the dim ward by the sufferer’s cot all night long; he reads, from the
New Testament, the words sweeter than music to the sinking soul; he
soothes with prayer the bedside of the dying; he sits, mournful and
loving, by the wasted dead. How can I tell the story of his labors! How
can I describe the scenes among which he moved with such endurance and
devotion, watched by me, for years! Few know the spectacle presented by
those grim wards. It was hideous. I have been there at night when it
seemed that I should die with sympathy if I stayed;—when the horrible
attitudes of anguish, the horizontal shapes of cadaver on the white
cots, the quiet sleepers, the excruciated emaciations of men, the bloody
bandages, the smell of plastered sores, the dim lamp-light, the long
white ward, the shallow girl-nurse flirting with the wardmaster or
surgeon, the tinkle of the ward piano mixed with the groans of some
grisly wretch, half hidden behind a screen, naked, shorn of both arms,
held by the assistant upon a stool, made up a scene whose
well-compounded horror is unspeakable. Now realize a man without worldly
inducement, without reward, without the mandate of official duty,
voluntarily, from love and compassion only, giving up his life to scenes
like these; foregoing pleasure and rest for vigils, as in chambers of
torture, among the despairing, the mangled, the dying, the forms upon
which shell and rifle and sabre had wrought every bizarre atrocity of
mutilation; immuring himself in the air of their sighs, their moans, the
mutter and scream of their delirium; breathing the stench of their
putrid wounds; taking up his part and lot with them, living a life of
privation and denial, and hoarding his scanty means for the relief and
mitigation of their anguish. That man is Walt Whitman! I said his labors
have been immense. The word is well chosen. I speak within bounds when I
say that, during those years, he has been in contact with, and, in one
form or another, either in hospital or on the field, personally
ministered to, upward of one hundred thousand sick and wounded men. You
mothers of America, these were your sons! Faithfully and with a mother’s
love, he tended them for you! Many and many a life has he saved—many a
time has he felt his heart grow great with that delicious triumph—many
a home owes its best beloved to him. Sick and wounded, officers and
privates, the black soldiers the same as the white, the teamsters, the
poor creatures in the contraband camps, the rebel the same as the
loyal—he did his best for them all; they were all sufferers, they were
all men.—Let him pass. I note Thoreau’s saying, that he suggests
something more than human. It is true. I see it in his book and in his
life. To that something more than human which is also in all men—to the
hour of judgment, to the hour of sanity—let me resign him. Not for such
as I to vindicate such as he. Not for him, perhaps, the recognition of
his day and generation. But a life and deeds like his, lightly esteemed
by men, sink deep into the memory of Man. Great is the stormy fight of
Zutphen; it is the young lion of English Protestantism springing in
haughty fury for the defence of the Netherlands from the bloody ravin of
Spain; but Philip Sidney passing the flask of water from his own lips to
the dying soldier looms gigantic, and makes all the foreground of its
noble purpose and martial rage; and whatever be the verdict of the
present, sure am I that hereafter and to the latest ages, when Bull Run
and Shiloh and Port Hudson, when Vicksburg and Stone River and Fort
Donelson, when Pea Ridge and Chancellorsville and Gettysburg and the
Wilderness, and the great march from Atlanta to Savannah, and Richmond
rolled in flame, and all the battles for the life of the Republic
against her last internal foe, are gathered up in accumulated terraces
of struggle upon the mountain of history, well relieved against those
bright and bloody tumultuous giant tableaux, and all the dust and
thunder of a noble war, the men and women of America will love to gaze
upon the stalwart form of the good gray poet, bending to heal the hurts
of their wounded and soothe the souls of their dying, and the deep and
simple words of the last great martyr will be theirs—“Well, he looks
like A MAN!”