My edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass is dated 1867, the third,
if I am not mistaken, the first appearing in 1855. Inside is pasted a
card upon which is written in large, clumsy letters: "Walt Whitman,
Camden, New Jersey, July, 1877." I value this autograph, because Walt
gave it to me; rather I paid him for it, the proceeds, two dollars (I
think that was the amount), going to some asylum in Camden. In
addition, the "good grey poet" was kind enough to add a woodcut of
himself as he appeared in the 1855 volume, "hankering, gross,
mystical, nude," and another of his old mother, with her shrewd,
kindly face. Walt is in his shirt-sleeves, a hand on his hip, the
other in his pocket, his neck bare, the pose that of a nonchalant
workman--though in actual practice he was always opposed to work of
any sort; on his head is a slouch-hat, and you recall his line: "I
wear my hat as I please, indoors or out." The picture is
characteristic, even to the sensual mouth and Bowery-boy pose. You
almost hear him say: "I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own
bones." Altogether a different man from the later bard, the heroic
apparition of Broadway, Pennsylvania Avenue, and Chestnut Street. I
had convalesced from a severe attack of Edgar Allan Poe only to fall
desperately ill with Whitmania. Youth is ever in revolt, age alone
brings resignation. My favourite reading was Shelley, my composer
among composers, Wagner. Chopin came later. This was in 1876, when the
Bayreuth apotheosis made Wagner's name familiar to us, especially in
Philadelphia, where his empty, sonorous Centennial March was first
played by Theodore Thomas at the Exposition. The reading of a magazine
article by Moncure D. Conway caused me to buy a copy, at an
extravagant price for my purse, of The Leaves of Grass, and so
uncritical was I that I wrote a parallel between Wagner and Whitman;
between the most consciously artistic of men and the wildest among
improvisators. But then it seemed to me that both had thrown off the
"shackles of convention." (What prison-like similes we are given to in
the heady, generous impulses of green adolescence.) I was a boy, and
seeing Walt on Market Street, as he came from the Camden Ferry, I
resolved to visit him. It was some time after the Fourth of July,
1877, and I soon found his little house on Mickle Street. A policeman
at the ferry-house directed me. I confess I was scared after I had
given the bell one of those pulls that we tremblingly essay at a
dentist's door. To my amazement the old man soon stood before me, and
cordially bade me enter.
"Walt," I said, for I had heard that he disliked a more ceremonious
prefix, "I've come to tell you how much the Leaves have meant to me."
"Ah!" he simply replied, and asked me to take a chair. To this hour I
can see the humble room, but when I try to recall our conversation I
fail. That it was on general literary subjects I know, but the main
theme was myself. In five minutes Walt had pumped me dry. He did it in
his quiet, sympathetic way, and, with the egoism of my age, I was not
averse from relating to him the adventures of my soul. That Walt was a
fluent talker one need but read his memoirs by Horace Traubel. Witness
his tart allusion to Swinburne's criticism of himself: "Isn't he the
damnedest simulacrum?" But he was a sphinx the first time I met him. I
do recall that he said Poe wrote too much in a dark cellar, and that
music was his chief recreation--of which art he knew nothing; it
served him as a sounding background for his pencilled improvisations.
I begged for an autograph. He told me of his interest in a certain
asylum or hospital, whose name has gone clean out of my mind, and I
paid my few dollars for the treasured signature. It is now one of my
literary treasures.
If I forget the tenor of our discourse I have not forgotten the
immense impression made upon me by the man. As vain as a peacock,
Walt looked like a Greek rhapsodist. Tall, imposing in bulk, his
regular features, mild, light-blue or grey eyes, clear ruddy skin,
plentiful white hair and beard, evoked an image of the magnificently
fierce old men he chants in his book. But he wasn't fierce, his voice
was a tenor of agreeable timbre, and he was gentle, even to
womanliness. Indeed, he was like a receptive, lovable old woman, the
kind he celebrates so often. He never smoked, his only drink was
water. I doubt if he ever drank spirits. His old friends say "No,"
although he is a terrible rake in print. Without suggesting
effeminacy, he gave me the impression of a feminine soul in a
masculine envelope. When President Lincoln first saw him he said:
"Well, he _looks_ like a man!" Perhaps Lincoln knew, for his remark
has other connotations than the speech of Napoleon when he met Goethe:
"Voila un homme!" Hasn't Whitman asked in Calamus, the most revealing
section of Leaves: "Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground
toward a real heroic man?" He also wrote of Calamus: "Here the
frailest leaves of me.... Here I shade down and hide my thoughts. I do
not express them. And yet they expose me more than all my other
poems." Mr. Harlan, Secretary of the Interior, when he dismissed Walt
from his department because of Leaves, did not know about the Calamus
section--I believe they were not incorporated till later--but
Washington was acquainted with Walt and his idiosyncrasies, and,
despite W. D. Connor's spirited vindication, certain rumours would not
be stifled. Walt was thirty-six when Leaves appeared; forty-one when
Calamus was written.
I left the old man after a hearty hand-shake, a So long! just as in
his book, and returned to Philadelphia. Full of the day, I told my
policeman at the ferry that I had seen Walt. "That old gas-bag comes
here every afternoon. He gets free rides across the Delaware," and I
rejoiced to think that a soulless corporation had some appreciation of
a great poet, though the irreverence of this "powerful uneducated
person" shocked me. When I reached home I also told my mother of my
visit. She was plainly disturbed. She said that the writings of the
man were immoral, but she was pleased at my report of Walt's sanity,
sweetness, mellow optimism, and his magnetism, like some natural
force. I forgot, in my enthusiasm, that it was Walt who listened, I
who gabbled. My father, who had never read Leaves, had sterner
criticism to offer: "If I ever hear of you going to see that fellow
you'll be sorry!" This coming from the most amiable of parents,
surprised me. Later I discovered the root of his objection, for, to be
quite frank, Walt did not bear a good reputation in Philadelphia, and
I have heard him spoken of so contemptuously that it would bring a
blush to the shining brow of a Whitmaniac. Yet dogs followed him and
children loved him. I saw Walt accidentally at intervals, though never
again in Camden. I met him on the streets, and several times took him
from the Carl Gaertner String Quartet Concerts in the foyer of the
Broad Street Academy of Music to the Market Street cars. He lumbered
majestically, his hairy breast exposed, but was a feeble old man,
older than his years; paralysis had maimed him. He is said to have
incurred it from his unselfish labours as nurse in the camp hospitals
at Washington during the Civil War; however, it was in his family on
the paternal side, and at thirty he was quite grey. The truth is, Walt
was not the healthy hero he celebrates in his book. That he never
dissipated we know; but his husky masculinity, his posing as the Great
God Priapus in the garb of a Bowery boy is discounted by the facts.
Parsiphallic, he was, but not of Pan's breed. In the Children of Adam,
the part most unfavourably criticised of Leaves, he is the Great
Bridegroom, and in no literature, ancient or modern, have been the
"mysteries" of the temple of love so brutally exposed. With all his
genius in naming certain unmentionable matters, I don't believe in the
virility of these pieces, scintillating with sexual images. They leave
one cold despite their erotic vehemence; the abuse of the vocative is
not persuasive, their raptures are largely rhetorical. This
exaltation, this ecstasy, seen at its best in William Blake, is sexual
ecstasy, but only when the mood is married to the mot lumiere is
there authentic conflagration. Then his "barbaric yawp is heard across
the roofs of the world"; but in the underhumming harmonics of Calamus,
where Walt really loafs and invites his soul, we get the real man, not
the inflated hum-buggery of These States, Camerados, or My Message,
which fills Leaves with their patriotic frounces. His philosophy is
fudge. It was an artistic misfortune for Walt that he had a "mission,"
it is a worse one that his disciples endeavour to ape him. He was an
unintellectual man who wrote conventionally when he was plain Walter
Whitman, living in Brooklyn. But he imitated Ossian and Blake, and
their singing robes ill-befitted his burly frame. If, in Poe, there is
much "rant and rococo," Whitman is mostly yawping and yodling. He is
destitute of humour, like the majority of "prophets" and uplifters,
else he might have realised that a Democracy based on the "manly love
of comrades" is an absurdity. Not alone in Calamus, but scattered
throughout Leaves, there are passages that fully warrant unprejudiced
psychiatrists in styling this book the bible of the third sex.
But there is rude red music in the versicles of Leaves. They
stimulate, and, for some young hearts, they are as a call to battle.
The book is a capital hunting-ground for quotations. Such massive
head-lines--that soon sink into platitudinous prose; such robust
swinging rhythms, Emerson told Walt that he must have had a "long
foreground." It is true. Notwithstanding his catalogues of foreign
countries, he was hardly a cosmopolitan. Whitman's so-called
"mysticism" is a muddled echo of New England Transcendentalism; itself
a pale dilution of an outworn German idealism--what Coleridge called
"the holy jungle of Transcendental metaphysics." His concrete
imagination automatically rejected metaphysics. His chief asset is an
extraordinary sensitiveness to the sense of touch; it is his
distinguishing passion, and tactile images flood his work; this, and
an eye that records appearances, the surface of things, and registers
in phrases of splendour the picturesque, yet seldom fuses matter and
manner into a poetical synthesis. The community of interest between
his ideas and images is rather affiliated than cognate. He has a
tremendous, though ill-assorted vocabulary. His prose is jolting,
rambling, tumid, invertebrate. An "arrant artist," as Mr. Brownell
calls him, he lacks formal sense and the diffuseness and vagueness of
his supreme effort--the Lincoln burial hymn--serves as a nebulous
buffer between sheer over-praise and serious criticism. He contrives
atmosphere with facility, and can achieve magical pictures of the sea
and the "mad naked summer night." His early poem, Walt Whitman, is for
me his most spontaneous offering. He has at times the primal gift of
the poet--ecstasy; but to attain it he often wades through shallow,
ill-smelling sewers, scales arid hills, traverses dull drab levels
where the slag covers rich ore, or plunges into subterrene pools of
nocturnal abominations--veritable regions of the "mother of dead
dogs." Probably the sexlessness of Emerson's, Poe's, and Hawthorne's
writings sent Whitman to an orgiastic extreme, and the morbid,
nasty-nice puritanism that then tainted English and American letters
received its first challenge to come out into the open and face
natural facts. Despite his fearlessness, one must subscribe to Edmund
Clarence Stedman's epigram: "There are other lights in which a dear
one may be regarded than as the future mother of men." Walt let in a
lot of fresh air on the stuffy sex question of his day, but, in
demanding equal sexual rights for women, he meant it in the reverse
sense as propounded by our old grannies' purity leagues. Continence is
not the sole virtue or charm in womanhood; nor, by the same token, is
unchastity a brevet of feminine originality. But women, as a rule,
have not rallied to his doctrines, instinctively feeling that he is
indifferent to them, notwithstanding the heated homage he pays to
their physical attractions. Good old Walt sang of his camerados,
capons, Americanos, deck-hands, stagecoach-drivers, machinists,
brakemen, firemen, sailors, butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers,
and he associated with them; but they never read him or understood
him. They prefer Longfellow. It is the cultured class he so despises
that discovered, lauded him, believing that he makes vocal the
underground world; above all, believing that he truly represents
America and the dwellers thereof--which he decidedly does not. We are,
if you will, a commonplace people, but normal, and not enamoured of
"athletic love of comrades." I remember a dinner given by the Whitman
Society about twenty years ago, at the St. Denis Hotel, which was both
grotesque and pitiable. The guest of honour was "Pete" Doyle, the
former car-conductor and "young rebel friend of Walt's," then a
middle-aged person. John Swinton, who presided, described Whitman as a
troglodyte, but a cave-dweller he never was; rather the avatar of the
hobo. As John Jay Chapman wittily wrote: "He patiently lived on cold
pie, and tramped the earth in triumph." Instead of essaying the
varied, expressive, harmonious music of blank verse, he chose the
easier, more clamorous, and disorderly way; but if he had not so
chosen we should have missed the salty tang of the true Walt Whitman.
Toward the last there was too much Camden in his Cosmos. Quite
appropriately his dying word was le mot de Cambronne. It was the last
victory of an organ over an organism. And he was a gay old pagan who
never called a sin a sin when it was a pleasure.