All seems beautiful to me.
I can repeat over to men and women, You have done
such good to me I would do the same to you,
I will recruit for myself and you as I go.
I will scatter myself among men and women as I go,
I will toss a new gladness and roughness among them.
--_Song of the Open Road_
[Illustration: WALT WHITMAN]
Max Nordau wrote a book--wrote it with his tongue in his
cheek, a dash of vitriol in the ink, and with a pen that scratched.
And the first critic who seemed to place a just estimate on the work was
Mr. Zangwill (he who has no Christian name). Mr. Zangwill made an attempt
to swear out a "writ de lunatico inquirendo" against his Jewish brother,
on the ground that the first symptom of insanity is often the delusion
that others are insane; and this being so, Doctor Nordau was not a safe
subject to be at large. But the Assize of Public Opinion denied the
petition, and the dear people bought the book at from three to five
dollars a copy. Printed in several languages, its sales have mounted to a
hundred thousand volumes, and the author's net profit is full forty
thousand dollars. No wonder is it that, with pockets full to bursting,
Doctor Nordau goes out behind the house and laughs uproariously whenever
he thinks of how he has worked the world!
If Doctor Talmage is the Barnum of Theology, surely we may call Doctor
Nordau the Barnum of Science. His agility in manipulating facts is equal
to Hermann's now-you-see-it and now-you-don't, with pocket-handkerchiefs.
Yet Hermann's exhibition is worth the admittance fee, and Nordau's book
(seemingly written in collaboration with Jules Verne and Mark Twain)
would be cheap for a dollar. But what I object to is Professor Hermann's
disciples posing as Sure-Enough Materializing Mediums, and Professor
Lombroso's followers calling themselves Scientists, when each goes forth
without scrip or purse with no other purpose than to supply themselves
with both.
Yet it was Barnum himself who said that the public delights in being
humbugged, and strange it is that we will not allow ourselves to be
thimblerigged without paying for the privilege.
Nordau's success hinged on his audacious assumption that the public knew
nothing of the Law of Antithesis. Yet Plato explained that the opposites
of things look alike, and sometimes are alike--and that was quite a while
ago.
The multitude answered, "Thou hast a devil." Many of them said, "He hath
a devil and is mad." Festus said with a loud voice, "Paul, thou art
beside thyself." And Nordau shouts in a voice more heady than that of
Pilate, more throaty than that of Festus, "Mad--Whitman was--mad beyond
the cavil of a doubt!"
In Eighteen Hundred Sixty-two, Lincoln, looking out of a window (before
lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed) on one of the streets of Washington,
saw a workingman in shirt-sleeves go by. Turning to a friend, the
President said, "There goes a MAN!" The exclamation sounds singularly
like that of Napoleon on meeting Goethe. But the Corsican's remark was
intended for the poet's ear, while Lincoln did not know who his man was,
although he came to know him afterward.
Lincoln in his early days was a workingman and an athlete, and he never
quite got the idea out of his head (and I am glad) that he was still a
hewer of wood. He once told George William Curtis that he more than half
expected yet to go back to the farm and earn his daily bread by the work
that his hands found to do; he dreamed of it nights, and whenever he saw
a splendid toiler, he felt like hailing the man as brother and striking
hands with him. When Lincoln saw Whitman strolling majestically past, he
took him for a stevedore or possibly the foreman of a construction gang.
Whitman was fifty-one years old then. His long, flowing beard was
snow-white, and the shock that covered his Jove-like head was iron-gray.
His form was that of an Apollo who had arrived at years of discretion. He
weighed an even two hundred pounds and was just six feet high. His plain,
check, cotton shirt was open at the throat to the breast; and he had an
independence, a self-sufficiency, and withal a cleanliness, a sweetness
and a gentleness, that told that, although he had a giant's strength, he
did not use it like a giant. Whitman used no tobacco, neither did he
apply hot and rebellious liquors to his blood and with unblushing
forehead woo the means of debility and disease. Up to his fifty-third
year he had never known a sick day, although at thirty his hair had
begun to whiten. He had the look of age in his youth and the look of
youth in his age that often marks the exceptional man.
But at fifty-three his splendid health was crowded to the breaking
strain. How? Through caring for wounded, sick and dying men, hour after
hour, day after day, through the long, silent watches of the night. From
Eighteen Hundred Sixty-four to the day of his death in Eighteen Hundred
Ninety-two, he was, physically, a man in ruins. But he did not wither at
the top. Through it all he held the healthy optimism of boyhood, carrying
with him the perfume of the morning and the lavish heart of youth.
Doctor Bucke, who was superintendent of a hospital for the insane for
fifteen years, and the intimate friend of Whitman all the time, has said:
"His build, his stature, his exceptional health of mind and body, the
size and form of his features, his cleanliness of mind and body, the
grace of his movements and gestures, the grandeur, and especially the
magnetism, of his presence; the charm of his voice, his genial, kindly
humor; the simplicity of his habits and tastes, his freedom from
convention, the largeness and the beauty of his manner; his calmness and
majesty; his charity and forbearance--his entire unresentfulness under
whatever provocation; his liberality, his universal sympathy with
humanity in all ages and lands, his broad tolerance, his catholic
friendliness, and his unexampled faculty of attracting affection, all
prove his perfectly proportioned manliness."
But Whitman differed from the disciple of Lombroso in two notable
particulars: He had no quarrel with the world, and he did not wax rich.
"One thing thou lackest, O Walt Whitman!" we might have said to the poet;
"you are not a financier." He died poor. But this is no proof of
degeneracy, save on 'Change. When the children of Count Tolstoy
endeavored to have him adjudged insane, the Court denied the application
and voiced the wisest decision that ever came out of Russia: A man who
gives away his money is not necessarily more foolish than he who saves
it.
And with Horace L. Traubel I assert that Whitman was the sanest man I
ever saw.
* * * * *
Some men make themselves homes; and others there be who
rent rooms. Walt Whitman was essentially a citizen of the world: the
world was his home and mankind were his friends. There was a quality in
the man peculiarly universal: a strong, virile poise that asked for
nothing, but took what it needed.
He loved men as brothers, yet his brothers after the flesh understood him
not; he loved children--they turned to him instinctively--but he had no
children of his own; he loved women, and yet this strongly sexed and
manly man never loved a woman. And I might here say as Philip Gilbert
Hamerton said of Turner, "He was lamentably unfortunate in this:
throughout his whole life he never came under the ennobling and refining
influence of a good woman."
It requires two to make a home. The first home was made when a woman,
cradling in her loving arms a baby, crooned a lullaby. All the tender
sentimentality we throw around a place is the result of the sacred
thought that we live there with some one else. It is "our" home. The home
is a tryst--the place where we retire and shut the world out. Lovers make
a home, just as birds make a nest, and unless a man knows the spell of
the divine passion I hardly see how he can have a home at all. He only
rents a room.
Camden is separated from the city of Philadelphia by the Delaware River.
Camden lies low and flat--a great, sandy, monotonous waste of straggling
buildings. Here and there are straight rows of cheap houses, evidently
erected by staid, broad-brimmed speculators from across the river, with
eyes on the main chance. But they reckoned ill, for the town did not
boom. Some of these houses have marble steps and white, barn-like
shutters, that might withstand a siege. When a funeral takes place in one
of these houses, the shutters are tied with strips of mournful, black
alpaca for a year and a day. Engineers, dockmen, express-drivers and
mechanics largely make up the citizens of Camden. Of course, Camden has
its smug corner where prosperous merchants most do congregate: where they
play croquet in the front yards, and have window-boxes, and a piano and
veranda-chairs and terra-cotta statuary; but for the most part the houses
of Camden are rented, and rented cheap.
Many of the domiciles are frame and have the happy tumbledown look of the
back streets in Charleston or Richmond--those streets where the white
trash merges off into prosperous colored aristocracy. Old hats do duty in
keeping out the fresh air where Providence has interfered and broken out
a pane; blinds hang by a single hinge; bricks on the chimney-tops
threaten the passersby; stringers and posts mark the place where proud
picket fences once stood--the pickets having gone for kindling long ago.
In the warm, Summer evenings, men in shirt-sleeves sit on the front steps
and stolidly smoke, while children pile up sand in the streets and play
in the gutters.
Parallel with Mickle Street, a block away, are railway-tracks. There
noisy switch-engines that never keep Sabbath, puff back and forth, day
and night, sending showers of soot and smoke when the wind is right (and
it usually is) straight over Number 328, where, according to John
Addington Symonds and William Michael Rossetti, lived the mightiest seer
of the century--the man whom they rank with Socrates, Epictetus, Saint
Paul, Michelangelo and Dante.
It was in August of Eighteen Hundred Eighty-three that I first walked up
that little street--a hot, sultry Summer evening. There had been a shower
that turned the dust of the unpaved roadway to mud. The air was close and
muggy. The houses, built right up to the sidewalks, over which, in little
gutters, the steaming sewage ran, seemed to have discharged their
occupants into the street to enjoy the cool of the day. Barefooted
children by the score paddled in the mud. All the steps were filled with
loungers; some of the men had discarded not only coats but shirts as
well, and now sat in flaming red underwear, holding babies.
They say that "woman's work is never done," but to the women of Mickle
Street this does not apply--but stay! perhaps their work IS never done.
Anyway, I remember that women sat on the curbs in calico dresses or
leaned out of the windows, and all seemed supremely free from care.
"Can you tell me where Mr. Whitman lives?" I asked a portly dame who was
resting her elbows on a windowsill.
"Who?"
"Mr. Whitman!"
"You mean Walt Whitman?"
"Yes."
"Show the gentleman, Molly; he'll give you a nickel, I'm sure!"
I had not seen Molly. She stood behind me, but as her mother spoke she
seized tight hold of one of my fingers, claiming me as her lawful prey,
and all the other children looked on with envious eyes as little Molly
threw at them glances of scorn and marched me off. Molly was five, going
on six, she told me. She had bright-red hair, a grimy face and little
chapped feet that made not a sound as we walked. She got her nickel and
carried it in her mouth, and this made conversation difficult. After
going one block she suddenly stopped, squared me around and pointing
said, "Them is he!" and disappeared.
In a wheeled rattan chair, in the hallway, a little back from the door of
a plain, weather-beaten house, sat the coatless philosopher, his face and
head wreathed in a tumult of snow-white hair.
I had a little speech, all prepared weeks before and committed to memory,
that I intended to repeat, telling him how I had read his poems and
admired them. And further I had stored away in my mind a few blades from
"Leaves of Grass" that I purposed to bring out at the right time as a
sort of certificate of character. But when that little girl jerked me
right-about-face and heartlessly deserted me, I stared dumbly at the man
whom I had come a hundred miles to see. I began angling for my little
speech, but could not fetch it.
"Hello!" called the philosopher, out of the white aureole. "Hello! come
here, boy!"
He held out his hand and as I took it there was a grasp with meaning in
it.
"Don't go yet, Joe," he said to a man seated on the step smoking a
cob-pipe.
"The old woman's calling me," said the swarthy Joe.