The Project Gutenberg eBook of Days with Walt Whitman
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: Days with Walt Whitman
With some notes on his life and work
Author: Edward Carpenter
Release date: September 8, 2026 [eBook #79537]
Language: English
Original publication: London: George Allen, Ruskin House, 1906
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79537
Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DAYS WITH WALT WHITMAN ***
Days with
Walt Whitman
[Illustration: colophon]
[Illustration:
Allen & Co. S.
_Walt Whitman at the age of 35_]
Days with [Illustration: two decorative leaves]
Walt Whitman
_With some Notes on his
Life and Work_ [Illustration: three decorative leaves]
_By_ Edward Carpenter
London: George Allen, _Ruskin House_
156 Charing Cross Road Mdccccvi
_All rights reserved_
PREFACE
My first acquaintance with Whitman’s writings (William Rossetti’s
edition of the Poems) was made at Cambridge during the Long Vacation in
the summer of 1868--or it may have been ’69. But it was not till 1877
that I crossed the Atlantic and paid my first visit to him. In 1884 I
was again in the States, and saw Whitman several times. The notes made
on the occasions of these visits were written out at a later period, and
finally published in the _Progressive Review_ (February and April 1897)
in the same form as they now stand. The other papers in the present
book belong to a still later date, and, with one exception, have not
been published before.
E. C.
_April 1906._
CONTENTS
PREFACE _Page_ v
A VISIT TO WALT WHITMAN IN 1877 1
WALT WHITMAN IN 1884 33
NOTES AND APPRECIATIONS--
WHITMAN AS PROPHET 71
APPENDIX TO WHITMAN AS PROPHET 94
THE POETIC FORM OF “LEAVES OF
GRASS” 103
WALT WHITMAN’S CHILDREN 137
WHITMAN AND EMERSON 153
PORTRAITS
WALT WHITMAN AT THE AGE OF 35 _Frontispiece_
From a Daguerrotype taken in 1854
(_Photogravure_)
WALT WHITMAN AT THE AGE OF 53 _To face p._ 71
From a Photograph taken in 1872
(_Photogravure_)
R. W. EMERSON (AT THE AGE OF 52) “ 153
From a Photograph taken in 1855
(_Photogravure_)
A VISIT TO WALT WHITMAN
IN 1877
A VISIT TO WALT WHITMAN IN 1877
It was on the 2nd of May 1877, that--crossing the water from
Philadelphia--I knocked at the door of 431 Stevens Street, Camden. The
house, a narrow three-storied one, stood in one of those broad
tree-planted streets which are common in the States; and Whitman was
staying there, boarding with his brother Colonel George Whitman and
wife--making the establishment at any rate his headquarters, though
frequently absent from it. I waited a few minutes in a sitting-room of
the usual type--one or two ornamental tables, with photograph books,
things under glass shades, &c.--while “Walt” was called upstairs. He
soon came down, slowly, leaning heavily on the banisters, always
dragging somewhat his paralysed leg--at first sight quite an old man
with long grey, almost white, beard, and shaggy head and neck, grey
dress too; but tall, erect, and at closer sight not so old--a florid
fresh complexion, pure grey-blue eye (no sign of age there), and full,
strong, well-formed hands.
At the foot of the staircase he took me by the hand and said, “I was
afraid we should miss after all”--this in reference to a previous
unsuccessful call I had made. There was no hurry in his manner; having
found me a seat, and then only leaving hold of my hand, he sat down
himself and asked me “what news I brought from Britain.” War had just
been declared between Russia and Turkey. Like other Americans, his
sympathies lay with Russia. His idea was that Russia stood _in need_ of
a southern outlet (Constantinople) for her people and growing energies,
that Turkey was falling in pieces, and that England was beginning to
pursue “the wise policy of absolute non-intervention.” Conversation then
turned on England. He asked about friends there; also about myself some
questions.
Meanwhile in that first ten minutes I was becoming conscious of an
impression which subsequently grew even more marked--the impression,
namely, of immense vista or background in his personality. If I had
thought before (and I do not know that I had) that Whitman was
eccentric, unbalanced, violent, my first interview certainly produced
quite a contrary effect. No one could be more considerate, I may almost
say courteous; no one could have more simplicity of manner and freedom
from egotistic wrigglings; and I never met any one who gave me more the
impression of _knowing what he was doing_ than he did. Yet away and
beyond all this I was aware of a certain radiant power in him, a large
benign effluence and inclusiveness, as of the sun, which filled out the
place where he was--yet with something of reserve and sadness in it too,
and a sense of remoteness and inaccessibility.
Some such impressions, at any rate, I gathered in the first interview. I
remember how I was most struck, in his face, by the high arch of the
eyebrows, giving a touch of child-like wonder and contemplation to his
expression; yet his eyes, though full of a kind of wistful tenderness,
were essentially not contemplative but perceptive--active rather than
receptive--lying far back, steady, clear, with small definite pupils and
heavy lids of passion and experience. A face of majestic simple
proportion, like a Greek temple as some one has said; the nose Greek in
outline, straight (but not at all thin or narrow, rather the contrary),
broad between the brows, and meeting the line of the forehead without
any great change of direction; the forehead high, with horizontal
furrows, but not excessively high; the head domed, and rising to a great
height in the middle, above the ears--not projecting behind; ears large
and finely formed; mouth full, but almost quite concealed by hair. A
head altogether impressing one by its height, and by a certain untamed
“wild hawk” look, not uncommon among the Americans.
After some conversation Whitman proposed a walk across to Philadelphia.
Putting on his grey slouch hat he sallied forth with evident pleasure,
and taking my arm as a support walked slowly the best part of a mile to
the ferry. Crossing the ferry was always a great pleasure to him. His
“Brooklyn Ferry” and the section entitled “Delaware River--Days and
Nights” in “Specimen Days,” sufficiently prove this. The life of the
streets and of the people was so near, so dear. The men on the ferry
steamer were evidently old friends; and when we landed on the
Philadelphia side we were before long quite besieged. The man or woman
selling fish at the corner of the street, the tramway conductor, the
loafers on the pavement--a word of recognition from Walt, or as often
from the other first. Presently a cheery shout from the top of a dray;
and before we had gone many yards farther the driver was down and
standing in front of us--his horses given to the care of some bystander.
He was an old Broadway “stager,” “had not seen Walt for three or four
years”; and tears were in his eyes as he held his hand. We were now
brought to a standstill, and others gathered round; “George” was ill,
and Walt must go and see him. There was a message for the children, and
in his pocket the poet discovered one or two packets of sweetmeats for
absent little ones. But for the most part his words were few. It was the
others who spoke, and apparently without reserve.
Thus we rambled through Philadelphia--mostly using the tramcars. The
Yankees do not walk; the trams in their large towns are very complete,
and are universally used for all but short distances. Whitman _could_
not walk far. I was content being with him anyhow. He certainly was
restfulness itself. When we reached the Ferry on our return, the last
bell was ringing--we might have caught the boat, but Whitman seemed not
to think of hurrying. The boat went, and he sat down to enjoy life
waiting for the next.
A few days later, Walt having gone into the country to stay with his
“dear and valued friends,” the Staffords, I paid him a visit there.
“White Horse,” or Kirkwood, was the third or fourth station from Camden
on the Camden and Atlantic line; and consisted at that time of only some
half-dozen houses and stores, forming a centre to the scattered and
outlying farmsteads of that part. The Staffords’ little farm lay a mile
and a half or so from the station--a five or six-roomed wooden house, a
barn, one or two fruit trees, and a few fields running down 300 or 400
yards to a little stream. The country level, very slightly undulating,
wooded here and there, not unlike some parts of Cambridgeshire that I
have seen--neither particularly attractive or unattractive. Here on this
farm, and working it himself, lived Mr. Stafford with his family; he a
loyal Methodist, sometimes acting as local preacher, silent-mannered,
dark-skinned, of bilious temperament, subject to illness, hard-working,
and faithful; his wife a fine woman of cultured expression and spiritual
mind, pretty well absorbed in domestic work; two sons, young fellows,
one of whom, Harry, at this time working in a printer’s office in
Camden, was a great ally and favourite of Walt’s; a grown-up daughter,
and one or two children. Here Whitman would often stay, weeks or months
at a time, boarding and living with the family, and attracting the
members of it to him, and himself to them, with the ties of enduring
friendship. Mrs. Stafford once said to me: “He _is_ a good man; I think
he is the best man I ever knew.”
It was his delight, and doubtless one of the chief attractions of this
favourite resort, to go down and spend a large part of the day by the
“creek” which I have spoken of--and which figures so largely in
“Specimen Days.” At a point not a quarter of a mile distant from the
house it widened into a kind of little lake surrounded by trees, the
haunt of innumerable birds; and here Whitman would sit for hours in an
old chair; silent, enjoying the scene, becoming a part of it, almost,
himself; or would undress and bathe in the still, deep pool. At this
time he was nearly sixty years old, and for some eight years on and off
had been stricken with paralysis. As is well known, he attributed his
partial recovery very largely to the beneficence of this creek, with its
water-baths and sun-baths and open-air influences generally.
That day being Sunday I found the family all at home, and Whitman in
the midst of them. When the opportunity occurred I told him something
of the appreciation of his writings that had grown up in England during
those years. After a pause he asked if the Rossetti edition was out of
print. I said I thought so. W.: “I hope it is; I approved of Rossetti’s
plan for the time being, but now would rather appear without
alteration.” [I am here simply transcribing my notes made a day or two
after; these are not his exact words, but as good as I could remember.]
“I had hardly realised that there was so much interest in me in England.
I confess I am surprised that America, to whom I have especially
addressed myself, is so utterly silent. Lowell, and indeed almost all
the critics, say that I am crude, inartistic--do you think that?” I said
I had heard such criticisms, but I did not myself think his work crude
and hasty; on the contrary, much of it seemed to me to have been
written very deliberately and carefully; and as to the question of art,
I thought he had laid an altogether broader basis of style (instancing
some of his poems)--a great foundation; others would build here and
there upon it, but he had struck the main lines. W.: “I did, in fact,
re-write and destroy much before I published; I cannot think that I have
altogether attained, but I have planted the seed; it is for others to
continue the work. My original idea was that if I could bring men
together by putting before them the heart of man, with all its joys and
sorrows and experiences and surroundings, it would be a great thing; up
to this time I have had America chiefly in view, but this appreciation
of me in England makes me think I might perhaps do the same for the old
world also. I have endeavoured from the first to get free as much as
possible from all literary attitudinising--to strip off integuments,
coverings, bridges--and to speak straight from and to the heart.” [In
reference to this, he said at another time that it had been a “whim” of
his when writing “to discard all conventional poetic phrases, and every
touch of or reference to ancient or mediæval images, metaphors,
subjects, styles, &c., and to write _de novo_ with words and phrases
appropriate to his own days.”]
When we went in to dinner Mr. Stafford was already seated; I think he
was about to say grace. Walt, with greater grace, stood for a moment
bending over him from behind, and clasped Stafford’s head in his great
hands; then passed on in silence. What a large sweet presence--so
benign, yet so determined! The children loved him, and the little boy
would lie coiled, lost, on his knees, half-asleep, half-awake, Walt’s
hand covering and compressing his entire face.
In Philadelphia, the day before, Whitman had introduced me to his
English friends, the Gilchrists. Mrs. Gilchrist, widow of Alexander
Gilchrist, the biographer of Blake, was a capable and large-minded
woman. A year earlier she, with two daughters and a son, had come from
England for a two or three years’ visit to the States, and had settled
in Philadelphia. As is well known, she was the first of Englishwomen to
fully and publicly recognise (as she did in some printed letters) the
splendid genius of the poet, and that at a time (1868 or ’69) when
“Leaves of Grass” to most of the literary world was little better than
the incoherent ramblings of a maniac. More than once did she relate to
me how, on first opening the volume, when her eye fell upon the fine
nearly full-length engraving (taken from a daguerrotype) of the author,
she exclaimed: “Here at last is the face of Christ, which the painters
have so long sought for”; and she always maintained that the reading of
the book itself did but confirm and deepen that first impression.
At the Gilchrists’ house Whitman would not unfrequently stay. Indeed
there was a kind of prophet’s chamber for him there, always ready. And
as it happened that he was about to pay a visit there, it was arranged
that I also should come. They lived at No. 1929, North 22nd Street. If
the American method of numbering streets and houses is prosaic, it
certainly has the advantage of being practical. Philadelphia is like a
chessboard; you find your way by co-ordinate geometry. The streets are
straight, parallel, and not far from infinite in length. The address
being put in your hands, you know at once the exact spot to which you
are destined.
I remember very well arriving, bag in hand, and finding the whole family
(a general custom in Philadelphia on those warm evenings) sitting out on
the door-steps--Whitman in the midst, in an arm-chair, his white beard
and hair glistening in the young moonlight, looking like some old
god--the others grouped around him or at his feet. After this for a week
of evenings I made one of the party. How pleasant it was! Whitman had a
knack of making ordinary life enjoyable, redeeming it from
commonplaceness. Instead of making you feel (as so many do) that the
Present is a kind of squalid necessity to be got over as best may be, in
view of something always in the future, he gave you that good sense of
_nowness_, that faith that the present is enjoyable, which imparts
colour and life to the thousand and one dry details of existence. As I
have hinted before, he was no great talker, and would generally let the
conversation ebb and flow at its own will, without effort, ready
apparently for grave or gay alike.
Unlike many highly important people who seem to enjoy holding forth to a
general audience, Whitman, as I thought, preferred to let conversation
turn on the pivot of personal relationship. Often as not he would have
his listener by the hand; and his words too had an attractive force,
from their very simplicity and purity from affectation or display. I
think he did not really care to have conversational dealings with people
except on such a basis of personal affection. To such as he did not
like--to all mere gabblers, bores, spying and prying persons--he became
as a precipice, instantly and utterly inaccessible. Certainly it was
one of the pleasures of his society that you always felt he was there
in person, _bonâ fide_, not by deputy; and no current notion of
politeness could make him do a thing he did not enjoy doing. One evening
we were looking over some fine engravings, mostly portraits,
Gainsboroughs, Reynolds, Lelys, and others, from Mrs. Gilchrist’s
collection. He enjoyed them greatly, and very deliberately, dwelling
long and long over some of them, criticising style, workmanship,
composition, character, &c. But when he had had enough of it all--well,
he said so! I have seldom known any one who, though so cordial and near
to others, detached and withdrew himself at times more decisively than
he did, or who on the whole spent more time in solitude. Also no rough
draft of his character would be complete which did not take into account
the strong Quaker element of obstinacy which existed in him--but this
might require a separate chapter!
To return to our evenings. I have said something about Walt Whitman’s
manner in conversation; I cannot attempt to reproduce its effect, but I
will just transcribe such notes of some of his remarks as I have by me.
One evening conversation turned upon the Chinese. W.: “I fancy they are
like the Germans, only more refined. My notion is that the Germans are
simple, true, affectionate folk, but there is a kind of roughness, one
may almost say brutishness, about them; the Chinese have the same good
qualities, with a certain alertness and grace which the Germans lack.” I
quoted some accounts of Japan by a man who had lived there for a long
time, and who told me that the manners of the old Japanese aristocracy
were so elaborately perfect that he himself would go any distance to
get _out of their way_, feeling such a boor compared with them! This
amused Whitman; seemed to “tally with his own idea.” Mrs. Gilchrist
wondered, with regard to the natives of India and Orientals generally,
that the degradation of the women did not bring about a gradual
deterioration of the whole race. W.: “I suppose that among the _masses_
of the people the women (and men too) live, after all, much as they do
in the West, and as they must do in all times and climes; and that the
special treatment of women in the East only applies to the upper
classes. The masses in every part of the globe are dominated by the
necessities of Nature. Thus also among the Greeks and Romans the
peasant-life must have had its races of fine women.” And here he cited
Juvenal, and his comparison of the effeminate lady of his time with the
“stern magnificent mothers” of the early days of Rome.
Going on to Oriental literature, Whitman spoke of “Sakúntala,” the
Indian drama, its “modernness”--the comic scenes especially being as of
the times of Shakespeare; and of the great Hindu epic, the “Ramáyana”;
and told the story of Yudísthura, which occurs as an episode in the
latter. Conversation got round presently--I think in reference to the
cramped life of “high-born” women in the East--to the shoddiness and
vulgarity of modern well-to-do life. W.: “It seems a strange thing to
me, this love of gilt and upholstery among the Americans--that people
leading a free natural open-air life should, directly they make a little
money, want to go in for sofas, expensively furnished rooms, dress, and
the like; yet it seems to be a law, a kind of necessity, that they
should do so. I suppose it is partly that each man wishes to feel
himself as good as others, to feel that he can have of the ‘best’ too;
democracy showing itself for a time in that way, reducing the borrowed
old-world standard of superiority to an absurdity; and I guess it will
not last for ever.”
We did not generally sit up later than eleven. Breakfast was at 7.30 or
8. Walt’s arrival in the morning was as exhilarating as a fine sunrise.
After breakfast and a chat we would separate to our respective
occupations. In the afternoon, almost every day I was there, the poet
went off to Camden to visit his sister-in-law, who was at that time
confined to the house, and to whom, I believe, he was much attached. As
I have said, Walt was very simple and domestic in his ways; and would
quite enjoy, on a rainy afternoon, having a game of twenty questions
such as he had “often played in camp with the soldiers during the war,”
or would take pleasure in preparing some little dish of his own devising
for the evening meal. One evening we pressed him to read. He would not
recite anything of his own; but he read out Tennyson’s “Ulysses”--in a
clear, strong, and rugged tone. The subtle harmonies of the Tennysonian
verse effloresced under the treatment, but the sterner qualities of the
poem stood out finely. We expressed admiration. He said: “I guess it is
about the best Tennysonian poem.” Another evening, I remember, he told
us how, when living at New York, he had had a “fancy” to visit Sing-sing
prison, the great penal establishment up the Hudson river. He obtained
permission to do so, got to know one or two of the warders, and for some
time went there pretty frequently. He wrote letters for the prisoners,
&c. “It was a whim.”
We had a long talk on manual labour. Most of us agreed it would be a
good thing for all classes to take part in--not to be left to one class
only. Walt maintained with regard to reforms and the like, that it was
no good trying to _benefit_ people (labouring people for instance) who
did not feel the need of any change. “Many people came to me at one time
about slavery, and ‘wondered’ that I was so quiet about it; but, in
truth, I felt that abolitionists were making quite noise enough, and
that there were other things just as important which had to be attended
to.” We got talking of Abraham Lincoln--I suppose in reference to
slavery--and I mentioned the story that Lincoln went out of his mind and
nearly committed suicide over a love affair. Walt, who always was a
great admirer of Lincoln, and who knew a good deal about him and his
history, gave this a most emphatic denial, saying that Lincoln was
“never even near being crazy.”
One of the most amusing incidents of my stay occurred one morning
shortly after breakfast, when a visiting card was handed in bearing the
ominous inscription “Madame Dorbiney D’Aubigné,” and was quickly
followed by the appearance of an elderly and loquacious little lady. She
was one of those detached women with a reticule who travel about the
world in quest of anything “interesting.” She had been, she told us, all
over the States and seen many celebrities, but could not return to
Europe without visiting Whitman--and it was only by a piece of luck that
she had found out where he was staying. However, it soon began to appear
that her interest in Walt was not so great, naturally, as in herself;
for after a few preliminary compliments she settled down to tell us all
about the wonderful D’Aubigné family to which she belonged. It ramified
all over the civilised world, she said; and the name was spelt in ever
so many different ways, but they were all branches of the same family,
they were all related to each other--as her own name indeed showed. Walt
listened in an amused manner, and for about ten minutes was quite
decently courteous and patient. Then I suddenly perceived that his face
was becoming ‘precipitous’; the little woman of course was addressing
him, no one else being of any importance; but he seemed to be becoming
deaf, there was no speculation in his eyes; it _was_ rather awful; for a
minute or two she tried vainly to effect a lodgment for her words, to
get any kind of handhold on the sheer surface, and then gathering up her
tackle, she made the best of a bad job, bade a hasty good-bye, and
disappeared.
I told Walt about a visit I paid to Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the
criticisms of “Leaves of Grass” which I heard on that occasion. I saw
the “Autocrat of the Breakfast Table” at his house in Boston. He was
then about 70 years of age--a dapper active little man, full of life and
go, rather enjoying the visits of strangers--“Oh yes, I have a large
‘parish’--people write to me and come and call from all parts of the
world--we authors are rather vain, you know, and quite enjoy a little
homage; but _my_ parish is not as big as Longfellow’s--not as big as
Longfellow’s. But this is not a good time for you to see Boston. Boston
is very empty now--(getting up and glancing through the window) very
empty; you might almost see a fox run down the street; &c., &c.” I said
something about American literature and “Leaves of Grass.” “Oh!
Whitman,” he said, “well--well--well--Whitman is all very well--he has
capacity, but it won’t do--it won’t do. I tell you what, it’s something
like this: you know, skilful cooks say that the faintest odour, the
merest whiff, of _assafœtida_, will give a piquant flavour to a
dish--and I can believe that; but to _drench_ it in _assafœtida_, no,
that won’t do. The poets _coquette_ with Nature and weave garlands of
roses for her; but Whitman _goes at her_ like a great hirsute man--no,
it won’t do. Now,” he continued, “the other day Lowell and Longfellow
and I were chatting together, and the subject of Whitman turned up. Said
Lowell, ‘I can’t think why there is all this stir about Whitman; I have
read a good deal of his poetry, but I can’t see anything in it--_I can’t
see anything in it_.’ ‘Well,’ said Longfellow, ‘I believe the man might
have done something if he had only had a decent training and education.’
As to my own opinion, why,” said Holmes, “I have already given you that.
So you see what we think of him in America.” Whitman was a good deal
amused, and took it all in good part, saying he knew pretty well already
what they thought.
As the days went by I began to see more clearly the depths which lay
behind the poet’s simple and unconcerned exterior. Literary persons, as
a rule, write over their own heads; they talk a little bigger than
themselves. But Whitman seemed to fill out “Leaves of Grass,” and form
an interpretation of it. I began to see that all he had written there
was matter of absolute personal experience--that you might be sure that
what was said was meant. There was the same deliberate suggestiveness
about his actions and manners that you find in his writings--only, of
course, with the added force of bodily presence; and far down too there
were clearly enough visible the same strong and contrary moods, the same
strange omnivorous egotism, controlled and restrained by that wonderful
genius of his for human affection and love. “Who has the most enamoured
body?” were words which somehow his presence often suggested. It was
with real reluctance that, a week after my arrival, I bade adieu to all
that friendly household; and the next morning but one, from the stern of
the _Siberia_, watched the flat shores of New England, and the
lighthouse that marks the entrance to Boston Harbour, recede and dip
below the broadening waters of the Atlantic.
WALT WHITMAN IN 1884
WALT WHITMAN IN 1884
The next time I saw Walt Whitman was the 17th June 1884. He had then
left Stevens Street, owing to the removal of his brother, but was still
living in Camden, in a small house which he had himself
part-purchased--328 Mickle Street. He had at that time, for
housekeepers, an elderly workman and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Lay, with
whom he was on easy terms, and with whom he had his meals. In appearance
I thought him much the same as in 1877--a trifle thinner perhaps, and
certainly more infirm. Some expression of weariness too I thought I saw,
which would likely arise from the increased confinement of his life. “I
keep going,” he said, “much the same. Visits from English friends are
perhaps my chief diversion.” Then, after tender inquiries, especially
for Mrs. Gilchrist (who was now in London), “have just had a visit from
Oscar Wilde--who told me about England; I made him do the
talking--rather liked him. I have occasional letters from Dowden--a
steady friend--and others. Bucke’s book[1] is going off slowly--not much
cared for by my friends--but I like it. I opposed the book all along,
till Bucke, getting fairly out of patience, came one day and said, ‘Now
I am just as obstinate as you, and I _intend_ to bring it out whether
you like it or no--so you had better make the best of the matter and
help to make it authentic as far as you can’; whereupon I caved in,
laughing heartily, and wrote the account of my birthplace and
antecedents which occupies the first twenty-four pages of the book.”
“I thought that there was a germinal idea in Bucke’s book--the idea that
‘Leaves of Grass’ was above all an expression of the Moral Nature. As to
O’Connor’s letters--I must say I like them. They are comforting. Just as
any woman likes a man to fall in love with her--whether she returns it
or not--so to have once aroused so eloquent and passionate a declaration
is reassuring and a help to me.” We then spoke of the money-making and
gentility business at New York--I remarking that I thought it had all
increased considerably since I was there in ’77, and he corroborating,
though holding that it probably _had_ to be gone through “for reasons.”
Here I find the following passage among my notes: “I am impressed more
than ever with W.’s contradictory, self-willed, tenacious, obstinate
character, strong and even extreme moods, united with infinite
tenderness, wistful love, and studied tolerance; also great caution [he
says: ‘the phrenologists always say that caution is my chief
characteristic--did you know that?’] and a certain artfulness, combined
with keen, penetrating and determined candour; the wild-hawk look still
there, ‘untamable, untranslatable,’ yet with that wonderful tenderness
at bottom.”
The next day Walt came over, at noon, to Crowell’s hotel, where I was
staying; we dined and went to Fairmount Park in the afternoon. Talked a
little about social questions. W.: “I believe, like Carlyle, in _men_; I
think that notwithstanding all set-offs the great capitalists and
masters of private enterprise have, in America at least, been useful. I
have myself had all along a tender feeling for Co-operation, but for
that doubt whether a committee or an elected person could or would do
the work.” As to England, he seemed to think that emigration would
relieve it, and he looked upon the law and custom of _entail_ as the
“hard-pan underlying your social institutions.” “I like and welcome all
agitation, even the fiercest, but like Carlyle have little belief in
reform talk. Society, like a person in middle life, is _set_, and you
have to make the best of it. I am, I hope, a bit of a reformer myself.
Yes, we must _grow_ generous, ungrasping masters of industry; absurd as
the idea would seem to most now-a-days, I believe that is the upshot of
what is going on. The creation of a large, independent, democratic class
of small owners is the main thing--though it is never once mentioned by
our economists and politicians. I am satisfied that for America Free
Trade and open admission of all foreigners is an integral part of its
theory; the future of the world is one of open communication and
solidarity of all races; and if that problem cannot be solved in America
it cannot be solved anywhere.”
We drove to Fairmount Park in a ’bus, walked a little, sat at the
refreshment tables, and listened to the band--Walt absorbed and quiet
for the most part, recognised by a few among the well-dressed crowd, but
seeming to hold himself aloof with almost an air of _hauteur_--looking
fine withal in his grey suit and with grey uncovered head, tho’ perhaps
a little weary. He asked me somewhat about my life and doings at home.
The following evening I stayed to supper with Whitman in the little
kitchen of his home, in company with Mr. and Mrs. Lay. They seemed
homely decent people, rather dull and quiet. Walt, who was dressed just
in shirt and trousers--for the weather was hot--kept things going.
Afterwards we sat in the front room with Folger McKinsey, a young
Philadelphian of literary leanings, who had come in. Walt talked about
Shakespeare, the Bacon theory, the greatness of the historical plays,
the “dragon-rancours” of the barons, King Lear, &c. “I will not be
positive about Bacon’s connection with the plays, but I am satisfied
that behind the historical Shakespeare there is another mind, guiding,
and far, far reaching, giving weight and permanent value to what would
otherwise have been only two plays a year written for a witty, alert,
jocose audience--chiefly of young gallants.”
The conversation turned somehow on death. W.: “It is in reality a very
different affair from the romantic stage view of it; deathbed speeches
and ‘scenes’ are of the rarest occurrence. I have witnessed hundreds of
deaths, and as a rule it seems just a matter of course--like having your
breakfast, or any other event of the day, and met with indifference at
the last, and with apathy, or unconsciousness.”
After an hour or two we went out and walked a little through the Camden
streets--Walt, as usual, with plentiful greetings to passers-by. He
would insist on our coming into a shop and having some refreshment, and
then a few minutes later at the corner of a street, left us, I remember,
with that queer brusque manner of his which so often offended his
friends--just coldly saying “Ta-ta,” and going off as if he didn’t care
if he never saw us again!
The next morning (June 30) was my last visit to Whitman; we had a long
and intimate conversation. He was very friendly and affectionate, and
sat by the open window downstairs enjoying the wafts of fragrant air,
while he talked about “Leaves of Grass.” “What lies behind ‘Leaves of
Grass’ is something that few, very few, only one here and there, perhaps
oftenest women, are at all in a position to seize. It lies behind almost
every line; but concealed, studiedly concealed; some passages left
purposely obscure. There is something in my nature _furtive_ like an old
hen! You see a hen wandering up and down a hedgerow, looking apparently
quite unconcerned, but presently she finds a concealed spot, and
furtively lays an egg, and comes away as though nothing had happened!
That is how I felt in writing ‘Leaves of Grass.’ Sloane Kennedy calls me
‘artful’--which about hits the mark. I think there are truths which it
is necessary to envelop or wrap up.” I replied that all through history
the old mysteries, or whatever they may have been called, had been held
back; and added that probably we had something yet to learn from India
in these matters. W.: “I do not myself think there is anything more to
come from that source; we must rather look to modern science to open the
way. Time alone can absolutely test my poems or any one’s. Personally, I
think that the ‘something’ is more present in some of my small later
poems than in the ‘Song of Myself.’”
This was the last I saw of Whitman. I left him sitting there by the
window in his downstairs room, close to the street and the
passers-by--his clear eye undimmed by age, his rugged, loving nature
unaltered; though there was a certain grave weariness in his otherwise
majestic presence, which gives one a touch of sadness when one thinks
that he had still nearly eight years to pass of increasing physical
disablement and of continually diminishing vitality, culminating at last
in serious bodily misery and wretchedness, before death might relieve
him of the burden of the flesh.
It seems strange at first that Whitman’s death should have been of such
a lingering character--three months, from Christmas 1891, to near the
end of the following March, in a dying state nearly all the time, with
much restlessness, sleeplessness, misery, and even pain at times. But in
some ways this was in consonance with his physical temperament--his
extraordinarily voluminous hold on life, all phases of it, his extreme
tenacity, his strong implication in the life of the body and the senses,
his affectionate and unceasing love towards his friends, and his marked
and obdurate egoism--all things which held him to life, and needed a
long process of disentanglement, fibre by fibre as it were, before he
could be released.
Volume--voluminousness--was one of Walt’s most notable features.
Physically it was so--as witness his ample proportions, his keen and
well-furnished senses; mentally the same--a mind well stocked,
interested in every subject, balancing, weighing, comparing,
slow-moving, but never retracing its steps; emotionally and by
temperament the same, with an immense range of emotion, and volume of
feeling when roused, but slow, deliberate, cautious, lethargic, and at
times even lumpishly immovable. This voluminousness is the key to his
literary style, which at its best is magnificent--thought after thought
culled from every side and department of life, ranged in successive line
and phrase, marshalled and held in suspense as it were in huge array,
till at last they are hurled upon the reader in one mass and with
overwhelming power; but which style at its worst is cumbersome and
disjointed. It is this voluminousness which goes with the whole florid
full emotional nature of the man, fond of materials and plenty of
materials, not especially careful of order or arrangement, not too
studiedly clear or concise in thought and expression, but always ample
and inclusive.
Another main point in Whitman’s character is, I think, best expressed by
the word “cussedness.” I have touched on it once or twice: the contrary
moods, the spirit of refusal, the wilfulness, which by their at times
necessary opposition and antagonism to his ample and loving humanity
formed, I believe, a great tragic element in his nature--and possibly
prevented him ever being quite what is called “happy in love affairs.”
He celebrates in his poems the fluid, all-solvent disposition, but often
was himself less the river than the rock. In these moods, fixed, silent,
and unquestionable, he was a thing you might try your strength upon, but
which you were not likely to move! In the slow downward slope of his
head from back to front, and in the lines of his eye and brow, tenacity
was written; it looked out upon you from the small, well-defined pupil
set under its long, curtain-like lid; and there was at times in his
face, as I have said, the look as of a precipice, sheer, with breakneck
ledges. One can imagine how this portion of his character, at any rate
in his younger days, must have conflicted with his equally innate and
imperious craving for human love and fellowship, and what suffering the
conflict must have brought to him at times. R. W. Emerson said to me
once (1877) of Whitman that when he came to know him he found him “a
wayward, fanciful man.”[2] This was not probably meant to be a complete
account of the man, yet it indicates Emerson’s perception of certain
characteristics in him. In later years the large, equable human heart
asserted itself more and more, and nothing could be more beautiful than
the tolerance towards old and young of all sorts which he exhibited;
while the waywardness became refined into something majestic. I remember
old Mr. Pearsall Smith, of Philadelphia, who knew Whitman very well,
saying that one of the things which impressed him most about Walt was
his “magnificent No!”--how sometimes when invited out, or asked
to do anything which he did not care to do, there would roll
forth--unqualified by any thanks, or explanation, or excuse--the simple
negative, with a great round O, and yet, as a rule, with a large sunny
amiability which made offence impossible.
I have two portraits--photographs--which I am fond of comparing with
each other. One is of Whitman, taken in 1890; the other, taken at about
the same time and at the same age (seventy years), is of an Indian
Gnani or seer. Both are faces of the highest interest and import; but
how different! That of Whitman deeply lined, bearing the marks of
life-long passion and emotion, aggressive and determined, yet wistful
and tender, full of suffering and full of love, indicating serenity, yet
markedly turbid and clouded, ample in brow and frame and flowing hair,
as of one touching and mingling with humanity at all points--withal of a
wonderful majesty and grandeur, as of the great rocks (to return always
to that simile) whose summits pierce at last the highest domain.
The other portrait, of a man equally aged, shows scarcely a line on the
face; you might think for that and for the lithe, active form that he
was not more than forty years old; a brow absolutely calm and unruffled,
gracious, expressive lips, well-formed features, and eyes--the dominant
characteristic of his countenance--dark and intense, and illuminated by
the vision of the seer. In this face you discern command, control,
gentleness, and the most absolute inward unity, serenity, and peace; no
wandering emotions or passions flit across the crystal mirror of the
soul; self-hood in any but the highest sense has vanished--the self has,
as it were, returned to its birthplace--leaving behind the most
childlike, single-hearted, uncensorious, fearless character imaginable.
Yet just here one seems to miss something in the last character--the
touch of human and earthly entanglement. Here is not exactly the great
loving heart which goes a few steps on the way with every child of man;
here is not the ample-domed brow which tackles each new problem of life
and science. Notwithstanding evident signs of culture and experience in
the past, notwithstanding vast power of concentration in any given
matter or affair when necessary, the face shows that heart and intellect
have become quiescent, that interest in the actual has passed or is
passing away.
Whitman’s immense moody and emotional temperament--he calls it
“turbulent” himself--forms a factor of his character and writings, which
has perhaps not been sufficiently considered--especially by some of his
admirers, who, as so often happens, are more concerned to present an
ideal personality than a real portrait. There are indeed some of his
biographers who are at pains to explain that many of his expressions of
sympathy and participation in the weaknesses and sins of humanity are to
be taken as theoretical or allegorical expressions, having by no means a
personal interpretation. Yet surely this is to take the clay out of the
brick, the marble out of the statue. While it is obvious that no man
could have in one lifetime run through _all_ the experiences mentioned
in “Leaves of Grass,” the whole point of the matter is that the author
actually finds in himself the capability of these experiences, and quite
personally identifies himself with them. It is, in fact, just these
earth-entanglements, in a character so cosmic in its range as his, which
are of special import as giving direction and effect to his
individuality and to his work. Not only is it clear that without his
voluminous enfoldment in the earth-life--the Nessus-shirt of
Hercules--he could not well have performed the mighty works that he did;
but it is difficult to see how, without some of that obduracy and
egotism of his, he could have held his own against the great surge of
obloquy and ridicule which covered his first appearance on the field of
literature. Whitman saw (somewhere within himself) the typical man of a
new era; and he gave himself to the utterance of what he saw. It stood
in the most glaring and irremediable contrast to the genteel ideal of
the civilisation around him. Alone, he had to confront the whole of
modern society. Now then, if ever, strength was needed. Now then
tenacity, obstinacy, wilfulness; they had to be made the most of. If
they were faults they were such as could ill be spared. His was perhaps
the most deliberately daring advance ever made in literature; and it is
difficult to believe that it could have been made except by one in whom
the rocky elements of character were abundantly present. “Leaves of
Grass” itself has this quality of undeniable “thereness”; and when the
critics have had their say and expended all their shafts upon it, it
still remains solid and untouched--like the earth, which survives all
the theories of the geologists and surrenders itself to none.
There is a third point. In many ways Whitman marks a stage of human
evolution not yet reached, and hardly suspected, by humanity at large;
but in no respect is this more true than in respect of his capacity of
Love. If you consider Whitman’s life you will see that Love ruled it,
that he gave his life for love. There were other motives no doubt, but
this one ultimately dominated them all. It permeates like a flame his
entire writings; it took him to the battlefield and the hospitals in
succour of the wounded soldiers; it led him (before the war) deep into
the life and comradeship of the people--all phases; after the war it
united him in bonds of tender and life-long friendship with many,[3]
both men and women; it surrounded his death-bed with devotion, and
brought thousands to his funeral. For it he gave away his possessions
and the material means of life, he gave his prospects of professional
success, he gave health, fame--all that a man can give--and accepted
illness and obscurity, and oftentimes long and painful loneliness and
betrayal even of love itself.[4]
He was a man in whom the power of love was developed to an
extraordinary degree. Yet (thanks to him) this was no attenuated or
merely spiritual love, but was a large and generous passion, spiritual
and emotional of course, but well rooted in the physical and sexual
also. In him the various sides and manifestations of the passion were so
blent, that instead of weakening they recognised and reinforced each
other; and, coming into touch with humanity, as he did with a kind of
careless equalness from all these sides; piercing through the layers and
folds of caste, through differences of race, climate, character,
occupation; despising distances of space and time; he drew men and women
of the most varied nature and habits to himself, saved them from their
own little selves--from their own little virtues and vices--and united
them in the solidarity of humanity, by their common attachment to him.
“Leaves of Grass” is the meeting-ground of the human race. There every
nationality, every creed, every trade, every atom of humanity is
represented, and all are fused in the great loving soul that overbroods
them.
If it seems difficult to reconcile this great and abounding charity of
Whitman with his strong egotism, it is perhaps not needful to reconcile
them. They may have been two necessarily opposite poles of his nature.
At any rate to assert this love--physical, sexual, emotional,
spiritual--extending to all races, castes, to the most despised and
degraded, to the near home and far off, to the virtuous and to the
criminal, to men as well as to women, to the animals even--in all its
phases and utterances; and to assert this egoism, plainly, unblushingly,
in all its forms--confidence, pride, self-esteem, desire, and delight in
all the natural powers and appetites--Whitman deliberately set himself.
In doing so he (necessarily) upset all former and formal moralities, and
exposed himself to the fiercest opposition; but some day--when it has
come to be recognised that the medium in which the true _ego_, the soul,
lives and moves is neither gain nor fame, nor duty nor denial, but
indeed love and love alone--it will be seen that “Leaves of Grass” is,
perhaps of all books ever written, the most natural and nobly
inevitable.
A fourth point which I will venture to touch on in this estimate of
Whitman--perhaps the most vital of all, but impossible to be adequately
seized or expressed--is what may be called his ‘illumination.’ “Leaves
of Grass,” of course, would not have been written without it; it runs
behind every page--“the vision and the faculty divine.” This perception
in the universal, this power of seeing things apart from the mundane
self, and independent of their relation to that self, appears to be a
kind of transcendent faculty in man; which occasionally manifests
itself, and which brings him--it may perhaps be said--into relation with
another order of existence. Indeed the strangeness of the sensation, and
the intoxication of this vision, appears sometimes to be so great
that--as in the case of the blinding glare at the mouth of Plato’s
cavern (“Republic,” bk. vii.)--the beholder after witnessing it is
unhinged for ordinary life, and can neither see the things of the world
in their accustomed light, nor describe clearly what else it is that he
has seen. This it is, no doubt, that constitutes the partial ‘mania’ of
the poet (Plato’s “Phædrus”), and which accounts also for the fact that
many people of mystical tendency, after a momentary illumination of the
kind, relapse into a sort of drivel for the rest of their natural
lives--circling always round something which they have neither clearly
apprehended nor can conclusively forget--but out of the memory of which
they hatch systems and ‘revelations’ and dogmas without end. And indeed,
if we suppose, with Dr. Bucke, that the faculty is one that is gradually
evolving in human nature, there can be nothing more likely than that
its first exercise should be accompanied by much doubt and illusion and
disturbance of the intelligence generally, and even of the moral nature.
In the case of Whitman, however, the immense sanity of his intelligence
and his immense grasp of the actual world prevented any serious
dislocation of the kind; and, though the mania and intoxication are at
times almost terrific (as in the ‘Song of Myself’), he never loses his
hold on actual facts, but manages at last to draw them in a great web
over himself, and to show the whole world transparent with the
illumination within.
This faculty of perception in the universal must not be looked upon as a
mere intellectual discrimination of certain facts or objects; it is
rather, I take it, a conscious _identity_ with the object (“I _am_ the
mash’d fireman with breastbone broken”); in which consciousness the
emotional and sensational elements are fused with the intellectual, just
as they are in the consciousness of one’s own existence and actions. It
is a universal light which falls as it were on the interior side of all
objects, enabling the person that moves along it to penetrate to their
very essence and to perceive their abiding relation to each other. And
the faculty begins to develop itself normally in those (as one would
expect) whose emotional and intellectual nature is becoming universal.
When sympathy and intelligence on the ordinary plane have grown so far
as to bring the man into free and unprejudiced relation with almost
every phase of existence, then this new perception dawns upon him; the
scales fall from the eyes which have always before seen by the light of
self, and he sees by the light “which never was on sea or land.”
“Willst du ins Unendliche schreiten, geh’ nur im Endlichen nach allen
Seiten,” says Goethe; not that the mere travelling through the finite of
itself brings one to the ‘infinite,’ but that it prepares the human
being as it were for his translation into it, when the time comes.
With Whitman it would seem that he had travelled along the finite in
pretty well every direction, when, about the age of thirty-five or
thirty-six, or near that time, this new order of consciousness, and of
being, opened out upon him. Instead of upsetting his broadly-based
voluminous nature, it immediately established that nature, forming the
nucleus to its endless ramifications, and the key and reconcilement of
its contrary moods. His luxuriant turbulent emotional passional self
acknowledged instantly its Lord in the universal (“swiftly arose and
spread around me the peace and the knowledge that pass all the argument
of the earth”); and became dedicated to that service thenceforward; and
all the conflicting elements of his own nature and of general nature
were seen--as they must be in such a case--to have their justification
and their use. “The moth and the fish-eggs are in place.”
With Whitman the new perception was eminently sane and undistorted. It
is probable indeed that never in historical times has the cosmic
intuition found a fuller and more complete utterance; for it was not
dwindled away into any mere thin and other-worldly ecstasy, denying in a
kind of spiritual excess the claims of the body and the intellect, but
was blent and harmonised, in fiery union, with the very widest practical
experiences and the inferences of a singularly rich nature. For the
first time in history do we hear the voice of a prophet who really
_knows_ and really _accepts_ the whole range of human life.
The last twenty-five of Whitman’s years were overshadowed by the clouds
of partial and intermittent paralysis. From the miracle of health and
strength which he had been before the war, it was his destiny to come
near to being a chronic invalid. Unfitted for active life, unfitted even
for much literary work, he quietly accepted his lot; and being unable to
express his message in any more resounding way, was content to fashion
the commonplaces of his daily life to its utterance; and no one, I
think, could witness the dignity and simple beauty of this later life
without feeling that here, in its way, was a poem as pregnant as “Leaves
of Grass.” Gentle and humane in manners, the rocky bases of his
nature--if such had been conspicuous before--now covered with tender
herbage and flowers, making the most of small details, fond of children,
and with a pleasant cheery word for all, letting life come and go with
large equanimity, he was a man whom the simplest could approach without
effort, and who was loved by hundreds who never read a word of his
writing. If he had a preference, it was for the “common people.” The
unconscious, uncultured, natural types pleased him best, and he would
make an effort to approach them. The others he allowed to approach
him.
NOTES AND APPRECIATIONS
[Illustration:
Walt
Whitman
1872
]
WHITMAN AS PROPHET
Dr. R. Maurice Bucke, in his “Memories of Walt Whitman,”[5] speaking of
the years 1853-55, and of the inception of “Leaves of Grass,” says, “A
very few years before these dates we find Walt Whitman writing tales,
essays, sketches, and even poems, which are in no way distinguishable
from that ‘mighty tide of ditch water’ which Carlyle tells us flows day
by day from the power-presses of civilisation. All at once he writes the
greatest book of a great century. Where did he get the stuff to put in
it? How did he get it all in a minute, as it were? Or, if it was in him
before, why did it not show itself? My memories of Walt Whitman include
many talks, in which I did my best to obtain light upon these and
related problems. Generally, he would pass over the subject with a
half-answer or a return question; at other times he would be more
explicit, as he was one day in the summer of 1886, when he
said--‘_Leaves of Grass_ was there, though unformed, all the time, in
whatever answers as the laboratory of the mind. I was more or less
conscious of it, and thought often of taking action in that direction.
But, you can understand, there was much to deter--that until the impulse
to move had become very strong, nothing would be done. I could clearly
see that such an enterprise would meet with little favor--at all events
at first--that it would be hooted at (as it was) and perhaps hooted
down. The _Democratic Review_ essays and tales came from the surface of
the mind, and had no connection with what lay below--a great deal of
which indeed was below consciousness. At last came the time when the
concealed growth had to come to light, and the first edition of _Leaves
of Grass_ was written and published.’”
This phrase, “the concealed growth had to come to light,” thus preserved
for us by Dr. Bucke, helps much towards the appreciation of the
prophetic and unexpected character of “Leaves of Grass.” We do not of
course understand why out of green foliage and branches a sudden and
unexpected blossom--yet evidently long prepared in the heart of the
plant--should appear; nor do we understand why, often amid quite
unpromising foliage of the human mind, a great work of art or prophecy
arises; yet we seem to see that the processes are very similar. A centre
of growth, hitherto unnoticed, long hidden, has come to light.
Prophecy at all times has this inevitable spontaneous character, as of
something arising from below the ordinary consciousness, which just for
the very reason that it so arises cannot be deliberately quenched or
stopped--something almost inarticulate, hardly gaining the sphere of
definition; irrational, and out of joint with accepted things;
subversive, inconvenient, contrary; annunciative of a new order. The
prophets are stoned; for they are obviously liars and iconoclasts. They
are charged with inconsistency, and, poor things! they cannot deny the
charge. They cannot help themselves. The flower unfolding out of its own
roots cannot unfold other than it does.
By many such marks Whitman’s work shows a prophetic character. And
while he does not claim to deliver a new Gospel, he seems to claim to
take his place in the line of those who have handed down a world-old
treasure of redemption for mankind. In his poem, “To Him that was
Crucified,”[6] he says:--
“My spirit to yours, dear brother,
Do not mind because many sounding your name do not understand you,
I do not sound your name, but I understand you,
I specify you with joy, O my comrade, to salute you, and
to salute those that are with you, before and since,
and those to come also,
That we all labor together transmitting _the same charge
and succession_,
We few equals, indifferent of lands, indifferent of times,
We, enclosers of all continents, all castes, allowers
of all theologies,
Compassionaters, perceivers, rapport of men,
We walk silent among disputes and assertions, but
reject not the disputers nor anything that is asserted,
We hear the bawling and the din, we are reach’d at by
divisions, jealousies, recriminations on every side,
They close peremptorily on us to surround us, my comrade,
Yet we walk unheld, free, the whole earth over, journeying
up and down till we make our ineffaceable mark upon
time and the diverse eras,
Till we saturate time and eras, that the men and women
of races, ages to come, may prove brethren and
lovers as we are.”
It will be noticed that in this great poem he speaks not merely as a
successor of him that was crucified, but as a continuer of some
world-wide and agelong tradition. And in truth we cannot doubt that the
root of it all _has_ been known and realised since the farthest history;
the charge and succession have certainly descended out of dim obscurity
from the earliest times. How much exactly Walt Whitman may have known of
the Vedic and other early writings is doubtful; but that he had read
here and there among them, quite enough to gain an insight into the
heart of them, and to know that his message was continuous with theirs,
is quite certain. “These are really the thoughts of men in all ages and
lands, they are not original with me.” In the Vedic scriptures, and, in
lineal succession from these, in the Buddhist and Platonist and
Christian writings, in the Taoists of China, the Mystics of Egypt, the
Sufis of Persia, the root is to be found--and is clearly
distinguishable--the very same from which “Leaves of Grass” has sprung.
[It would be too long at present, by quotations from all these writings,
to attempt to prove this; but in an Appendix to this paper I have, in
very imperfect fashion, dotted in a number of parallel passages from
them and from “Leaves of Grass,” and these may serve to illustrate what
I mean.] A glance at these ancient and modern utterances assures us
that all down history the same loving universal spirit has looked out,
making its voice heard from time to time, harmonising the diverse eras,
enclosing continents, castes, and theologies. The same charge and
succession has passed on, and Whitman voices and transmits it in his
turn.
Yet of course there are differences. We cannot say that Whitman is more
subtle, more penetrating, more profound than many of those who have gone
before. It would be hard to imagine anything more subtle and profound
than passages in the Upanishads. But in one respect he is certainly
unique among the prophets, and that is in the universality and breadth
of his appeal. He seems to _liberate_ the good tidings and give it a
democratic scope and world-wide application unknown in the elder
prophets, even in the sayings of Buddha.
The difficulty with the earlier prophets no doubt was that around them
limitations existed on every hand. Races, peoples, religions, were
sharply divided from each other. In the early world exclusiveness was
indispensable. The peoples and nations could not have grown up if each
had not believed that its own customs, morals, religion, race, &c., were
infinitely superior to those of the others. Exclusiveness and war were
the nurses of growing humanity’s powers--of comradeship, organised life,
community of sentiment, courage, self-sacrifice, and all the early
virtues. Problems of social life and character, which could never have
been solved in a general ocean of mankind, were easy to define and
determine in small communities. Ignorance and prejudice were necessary
fences between one state or system of society and another. And however
great certain individual teachers may have been in the past--however
generous and wide their real outlook on life, they still could only act
and speak subject to the very definite limitations prevailing around
them.[7] The Joels, Jeremiahs, Mohammeds, Carlyles,--stung no doubt by
incontrollable impulse to blaze forth that which was in them--have
delivered their special messages: have called the people of their time
to gather themselves round some new centre of life and inspiration,
moral or religious or racial; and in doing so have anathematised every
other code of morals or form of religion, called all outside people
Gentiles or Barbarians, and put them to the sword. They have done work
priceless in their time and locality, insisting on and compelling each
some certain and necessary step in human progress; and having done so,
they have gone their way and been superseded, because their message was
only a part-message. Only a few have not been superseded. Teachers like
the Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth, St. Francis, and the Syrian Bâb,[8]
belong to no race or nationality; if they press the claims of religion
or morality, it is with so little insistence on any particular scheme or
code, that their net may be said to be spread to catch all humanity.
They are accepters rather than deniers; they represent the prophetic
gift in its deepest and most inclusive utterance; and it is difficult to
think of them as becoming antiquated or out of date.
Yet--though it would not be acceptable or desirable to make comparisons
of greatness--we may say that even among these Whitman was (with the
exception perhaps of the Bâb) unique in the realisation of the
world-wide and universal character of his message. The others had
messages of world-wide import to deliver, though perhaps they hardly
knew this at the time; but Whitman realised from the first that this
universality was the very key and centre of his utterance, and set
himself deliberately to emphasise it. Many things conspired, with him,
to this result--the girdling of the earth in his time, and the
extraordinary developments of locomotion and intercommunication which
were bringing together East and West, and all races and classes, creeds
and customs, into close touch and acknowledgment of each other. The
peoples were being compelled to see that none of them has a monopoly of
excellence or defect, but that all illustrate, in their various ways,
forms of necessary life. The Press, the Locomotive, the Wire, were
pushing more and more insistently to this conclusion. The fences were
breaking down; a new Era was shaping; and Whitman himself, by a nature
and temperament of extraordinary balance and fulness, physical, mental,
and moral (“I can resist anything better than my own diversity”), was
fitted to respond to it all--to swim in this ocean of humanity as in a
sea.
[Yet even so, and allowing for the occasioning causes, it must be said
that his utterance, in its dæmonic reach and sweep, is somewhat
staggering! Through “Leaves of Grass” pours a torrent of trades,
classes, characters, occupations, races, nations, morals, manners,
incidents, opinions--things generally accounted beautiful, and things
unbeautiful, things good or evil, proper or improper--in huge
indifference, all apparently accepted on an equality, dismissed on an
equality. It is, to certain folk, most confusing, and at times even
revolting and terrifying.]
Of this new Era, with all its splendours and terrors, Walt Whitman may
be said to be the prophet. Through the “barbaric yawp” and
seeming-random medley of his verse--inarticulate enough at times in its
very endeavour to include and accept every phase and feature of human
life--break out the deep-rolling organ-tones of Creation’s primal music.
We hear the same agelong theme and symphony of all historic time,
gaining, through whatever imperfections, a larger freer expression by
virtue of its so much more extended key-board and orchestra, by virtue
of its discords and sequences more daring than ever used in literature
before.
And the Theme? Whitman has defined it very directly at the first outset
of his poems:--
“One’s Self I sing, a simple separate person,
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.”
The Self, individual and separate, yet conjoined and continuous
throughout Creation’s mass--that is the theme which undoubtedly runs
through the whole of his poems and prophetic utterances. And it is the
theme of the eldest Upanishads of the Vedic sages. It is the theme which
has come down through the ages--variously balanced, with now somewhat
more insistence on one aspect, now somewhat more on another; variously
expressed and illustrated, in poetical, religious, or philosophical
form; variously coloured, confined, or conventionalised by race
and tradition; but inevitably gaining in the long-run in
freedom and fulness of utterance. In Whitman it breaks out almost
unconsciously--certainly less as the result of any intellectual process
or argument than by force of an irresistible impulse--into a strange
torrential pæan of identity. Everything, the whole earth, all its shows,
men and women, sinners and saints, the stars, insects, solar
systems--all beings are envisaged in order to be identified with the
One; they are accorded each their unique unapproachable character and
perfection, only to be embraced:--
“We make our ineffaceable mark upon time and the diverse eras,
Till we saturate time and eras, that the men and women of
races, ages to come, may prove brethren and lovers as we are.”
So in Whitman all the purblind morals and moonlight ideals of the past
are, whether directly or by implication, broken up (hence storm and
terror to many) and led back to their most central motive, the world-old
revelation of the Self, eternal and inseparate.
“I ascend from the moon, I ascend from the night,
I perceive that the ghastly glimmer is noonday sunbeams reflected,
And debouch to the steady and central from the
offspring great or small.”
Always the inward, the enduring, the central, the vital, is acknowledged
and honoured; the external, the temporary, the unessential thrown off.
Underneath all morals, manners, races, titles, classes, the original
human soul and its affections, greater than all. Underneath clothing,
costume, ranks, trades, and occupations, the bodily form, its needs and
physiology. Underneath all art and social life, sex and fraternity.
Greater than all houses, temples, galleries, and museums, the life of
the open air and its lessons. In such simple elementary things as
these--in the universal human soul, rediscovering itself in all forms,
in the healthy and beautiful human body, in sex and fraternity, in the
life with the earth and the open air, Whitman sees the root out of which
future humanity will spring (as it has sprung in the past): out of which
a society of proud, strong, free individuals, who shall also be brethren
and lovers, may easily and naturally arise:--
“Now if a thousand perfect men were to appear it would not amaze me,
Now if a thousand beautiful forms of women appear’d
it would not astonish me.”
We may indeed say that, with the signal appearance of “Leaves of Grass,”
the hour has struck for mankind of liberation, of emancipation, from
mere outer rules and limitations; the hour for the reference of all
life, irrespective of colour, creeds, and principles, to its central
essence. It may be, for reasons already hinted, an hour of danger. Not
a few, accustomed only to walk by well-worn paths and formulæ, will lose
their way. “Take warning! He traveling with me needs the best blood,
thews, endurance.” But it is an hour which must needs come; and it opens
for humanity on an era of unexampled glory.
And here a word about Individuals. It will be recognised by all readers
of Whitman that his insistence on the permanence, the immortality, the
supreme life of the Individual, is a most marked feature of his
teaching. “The sum of all known reverence I add up in you whoever you
are.” “Yourself! yourself! yourself for ever and ever!” “I sing the
songs of the glory of none, not God, sooner than I sing the songs of the
glory of you.” For Whitman every Self in its essence is individual,
eternal, perfect, accruing to itself alone: “I swear I think now that
everything without exception has an eternal soul!”
“Each man to himself and each woman to herself is the word of the
past and present, and the true word of immortality;
No one can acquire for another--not one;
No one can grow for another--not one.”
And yet (strange paradox!) all are One.
“Have you thought there could be but a single Supreme?
There can be any number of Supremes--one does not countervail
another any more than one eyesight countervails another, or one
life countervails another.”
Each is a simple separate person, and yet _en-masse_ with the rest. I
think we may say that no former teacher has quite dared to give this
side of the truth as Whitman has done, nor given it with so free and so
splendid an expression.
Thus it may seem that if in the matter of pure philosophical statement
Whitman does not stand out in the great charge and succession so
strongly as some of his predecessors, yet in two respects at least his
work is unique: namely, in the universality and determination of his
appeal to, and brotherhood with, all creation, and in his insistence on
the root-existence of every Individual from everlasting to
everlasting--his protest, in fact (though quite indirect), against a
mere doctrine of absorption in the Universal.
One other point I should like to note--and it goes with the preceding
remarks--namely, Whitman’s extraordinary _concreteness_, and his
consistent and set avoidance of abstract doctrine in the highest regions
of thought. “I swear I see what is better than to tell the best, it is
always to leave the best untold.” This avoidance is so subtle and
determined that many readers are deceived by it into not perceiving
“beautiful things well envelop’d,” and into thinking Whitman himself
did not perceive them. The reason of it is clear. Whitman refused to
address himself to the Brain alone. He saw that with regard to the
highest truths it is useless to try to seize or impart them that way.
They must be _felt_ as well as thought. To try to _think_ them alone, as
one would prove a syllogism, is a kind of blasphemy. And to create the
feeling, the direct awareness and consciousness of the highest facts,
one must proceed in another way; one must use the method of
Indirection--the method of Life and Time and the Earth, as well as of
all great Art and Literature--the appeal through sense and all concrete
experience, penetrating, far-reaching, cumulative in its power, till it
wake the profoundest deeps of the soul. Through Whitman’s pages all the
shows of the Earth, and myriads of concrete images, surge and break
upon the sensitive mind-surface of the reader--who in many cases as
little understands or suspects what their meaning and intention is, as
every child of Man suspects the meaning of the winds and waters that
play around him as he walks. Nevertheless they convince by their
presence. They wake and build up new ranges of feeling in him. They
filter and fibre his blood. And it is this concreteness, this power of
indirect appeal, which constitute Whitman great among the Poets--even as
his unrivalled knowledge of the actual world and of actual life, and his
absolute _acceptance_ of the same, give him so high a distinction among
the Prophets.
APPENDIX TO WHITMAN AS PROPHET
(_See page 77_)
Passages from early prophetic writings[9]:--
“He, the Highest Person, who is awake in us while we are asleep,
shaping one lovely sight after another; that indeed is the Bright,
that is Brahman, that alone is called the Immortal.”--_Katha
Upanishad._
“He is the one God, hidden in all beings, all
pervading, the Self within all beings, watching
“Allons! whoever you are come travel with me!
Traveling with me you find what never tires.” (p. 125.)
“This is the meal equally set, this the meat for natural hunger,
It is for the wicked just the same as the righteous;
I make appointments with all.” (p. 43.)
over all works, dwelling in all beings, the witness, the Perceiver, the
only one, free from qualities.”--_Svetasvatara Upanishad._
“The sun does not shine [show] there, nor the moon and the stars, nor
these lightnings, and much less this fire. When he shines,
everything shines after him; by his light all this [world] is
lightened.”--_Svetasvatara Upanishad._
“As rain water that has fallen on a mountain ridge runs down on all
sides, thus does he who sees a difference between qualities run after
them on all sides.
“As pure water poured into pure water remains the same, thus, O Gautama,
is the Self of a thinker who knows.”--_Katha Upanishad._
“By the serenity of his thoughts a man blots out all actions, whether
good or bad. Dwelling within the Self with serene thoughts he obtains
imperishable happiness.”--_Maitrayana-Brahmana Upanishad._
“And he who beholds all beings in the Self, and the Self in all beings,
he never turns away from it.
“When to a man who understands, the Self has become all things, what
sorrow, what trouble, can there be to him who once beheld that
unity?”--_Vagasaneyi-Samhita Upanishad._
The Blessed one [Buddha] said to Ananda: “Both the ocean and my doctrine
become gradually deeper. Both preserve their identity under all
changes. Both cast out dead bodies upon the dry land. As the great
rivers, when falling into the main, lose their name and are thenceforth
reckoned as the great ocean, so all the castes, having renounced their
lineage and entered the Sangha [brotherhood], become brethren and are
reckoned the sons of Shâkyamuni. The ocean is the goal of all streams
and of the rain from the clouds, yet is it never overflowing and never
emptied; so the dharma is embraced by many millions of people, yet it
neither increases nor decreases. As the great ocean has only one taste,
the taste of salt, so my doctrine has only one flavour, the flavour of
emancipation. Both the ocean and the dharma are full of gems and pearls
and jewels, and both afford a dwelling-place for mighty beings.
“My doctrine is pure, and it makes no discrimination between noble and
ignoble, rich and poor. My doctrine is like unto water which cleanses
all without distinction. My doctrine is like unto fire which consumes
all things that exist between heaven and earth, great and small. My
doctrine is like unto the heavens, for there is room in it, ample room,
for the reception of all, for men and women, boys and girls, the
powerful and the lowly.”--_Mahâparinibbâna Suttanta_, iii. 22.
“He who believes that this spirit can kill,” says Krishna to Arjuna,
“and he who thinks that it can be killed, both of these are wrong in
judgment. It neither kills, nor is killed. It is not born, nor dies at
any time. It has had no origin, nor will it ever have an origin.
“As a man abandons worn-out clothes and takes other new ones, so does
the soul quit worn-out bodies, and enter other new ones. Weapons cannot
cleave it. Fire cannot burn it, nor can water wet it, nor can wind dry
it.”--_Bhagavad Gita._
“I am the same to all beings. I have neither foe nor friend. But those
who worship me with devotion dwell in me and I also in them.
“He who discovers inaction in action, and action in inaction, is wise
among mortals.
“The practiser of Yoga, whose spirit is purified, who has subdued
himself and vanquished his senses, whose Self is the Self of all
creatures, is not polluted even by action.”--_Ibid._
“Tao as it exists in the world is like the great rivers and seas which
receive the streams from the valleys.
“All pervading is the great Tao. It can be at once on the right hand and
on the left. All things depend on it for life, and it rejects them not.
Its task accomplished, it takes no credit. It loves and nourishes all
things, but does not act as master. It is ever free from desire.
“We may call it small. All things return to it, yet it does not act as
master. We may call it great.
“The whole world will flock to him who holds the mighty form of Tao.
They will come and receive no hurt, but find rest, peace, and
tranquillity.”--_Sayings of Lao-tzu._
“By non-action there is nothing which cannot be done. Failure is the
foundation of success, and the means by which it is achieved. Success is
the lurking-place of failure; and who can tell when the turning-point
will come?
“He who acts, destroys; he who grasps, loses. Therefore the sage does
not act, and so does not destroy; he does not grasp, and so he does not
lose.
“Only he who does nothing for his life’s sake can truly be said to value
his life.
“When the great Tao falls into disuse, benevolence and righteousness
come into vogue. Cast off your holiness, rid yourself of your
cleverness, and the people will benefit an hundredfold.”--_Ibid._
“I am the Way [Tao, the open Road], the Truth, and the Life.
“Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the
kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither
suffer ye them that are entering to go in. Woe unto you, Scribes and
Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows’ houses, and for a pretence
make long prayers: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.
“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give
you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and
lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.
“For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall
lose his life for my sake and the good tidings, the same shall save it.
“And lo! I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.”--_Jesus
in the Gospels._
THE POETIC FORM OF “LEAVES OF GRASS”
Of all the tribes of specially _literary_ people (one sometimes thinks),
of the Popes, Drydens, Swinburnes, Paters, the Brownings or Tennysons
even, not to mention hosts of lesser names--which of them, after all, as
time goes on, and except for certain antiquarian interests and a few
passages which represent the real unloading of the writers’ hearts, will
really be affectionately remembered or persistently read? A few pithy
passages, of verse or tale, enshrining some vivid sharp experience--and
for the rest what a deluge of words! The touch on actual life so thin,
so poor, so ignorant. The society, yes, which animates itself round a
Rape of a Lock, or discusses Broad Church questions over the walnuts and
the wine, is there--but of the great world, what? A shade of sentiment
or of thought, interesting enough, no doubt, and which may happen to be
in vogue among a certain class--but of the great reaches of human
passion and experience how much--or how little? Words, words, and
fine-spun forms out of the thinnest basis of material! At every turn of
the page gross misapprehensions and ignorance of the actual lives and
conditions of life and heart of the thousands and millions and
thousand-millions of the earth! How can these things hold any readers
except those whose outlook is equally blinkered? The purely literary
work has its interest, has its place; but its appeal is so limited.
With Whitman, the workman, the normal (or “average”) man--for of course
the man who deals with materials and wins his living from them _is_ the
normal man--comes, for the first time, in a deliberate and
representative way, into literature. He comes, not as a man who abandons
his former mode of life in order to seek a literary ideal, but as the
master-workman who _stays where he is_ and uses literary form for his
own expression--and with the same directness and mastery that he uses
towards life. Hence a new era of literature--a literature appealing to
all who deal with life directly, and know what it is, a literature which
will be read and lovingly absorbed by the millions as time goes on.
We may perhaps say that in every great artist there is something of the
manner of the workman. In Michel Angelo, in Beethoven, in Velasquez, in
Pheidias, in Dante--a certain clearing for action, economy, directness,
decisiveness. The good workman wants to make his work absolutely
effective. That is his first thought. The great artist will not stop
short of the most clear and perfect expression. He will do nothing to
cloud it. In a note of Whitman’s, for his own use, we find recommended
as a rule for composition “the most translucid clearness without
variation.”[10] And every one must feel that the first and
root-criterion of form is Expression. If the work conveys the meaning
perfectly, then obviously any _change_ of form (which necessarily must
bring some change of meaning with it) will be a loss. Therefore, the
expression being perfect, the form is also perfect. The two cannot be
separated. We may analyse or examine the form in such a case--but to
propose to alter it is mere foolishness. Read again the poem “To Him
that was Crucified,” quoted in the preceding paper, and realise the
wonderful burden of thought and emotion conveyed, and then also realise
that a single word displaced or altered anywhere in the poem would blur
or diminish its total message and expression.
Is it possible indeed in these cases of perfect excellence, to stop and
examine the form as a thing apart? I do not say that it is impossible;
but it is surely very difficult. Are there not some pieces of music so
beautiful, that though we try again and again while hearing them to
analyse their form, we simply fail to do so? And are there not poems of
which the mind refuses to count the syllables. Read, for example, the
following from “Leaves of Grass”:--
RECONCILIATION
Word over all, beautiful as the sky!
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must
in time be utterly lost;
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly
softly wash again, and ever again, this soil’d world.
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead.
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the
coffin--I draw near;
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white
face in the coffin.
Here underneath, all the time, one feels a subtle impalpable metre
pulsing. Some one possibly may be able to disentangle and define that
metre; but I confess that I can’t--simply because, each time I read, the
_meaning_ holds and fills my mind too full. Let a thing be said with
such animation and directness that you try in vain to _think_ of the
form, then surely that form is perfect, whatever it is! The form
vanishes in the meaning; and that is what our bodies will one day
do--not disappear from sight, but so glow and be suffused in what they
convey, as to cease to have any separate existence.[11]
There is no need, to-day, to justify Whitman’s forms and rhythms, any
more than there is need to justify those of Beethoven or Brahms or
Wagner. There are good country folk who delight to sit and beat time
with hand or foot to the village band; and there are folk who only
recognise a ballad metre in poetry; but they need not detain us. Ballad
metres have an excellent and charming use and quality, but they do not
cover the whole ground.
There are two things in literature which demand expression--roughly,
brain and heart. On the one hand, mere fact, description, argument; on
the other, mood, emotion, mental colouring. As the extreme type of the
one, we have books of law, science, mathematics; as the extreme type of
the other, and lying beyond literature, music. In literature proper,
there is always of course a blend or admixture of the two elements; but
those works which express a predominance of the mental and scientific
element come under the head of prose, and those which express
predominant emotion come under the head of poetry and approach the
musical in form. Just as in music every mood has its rhythm--light
jingles of dances, lulling, swaying cradle-songs, ballad-refrains,
swelling love-songs, strong marches, or great symphonic metres
including these--so in poetry. “Wherever there is emotion concerned in
the thought there will be emotional effects in the language--that is,
there will be rhythm; and the wave-like rhythms and rhymes and
recurrences will take on the simplest and briefest, or the most complex
and far-reaching forms, according to the character of the emotion
concerned.”[12]
The underlying and dominant mood of Whitman’s poems, corresponding to
his theme, is extraordinarily vast and inclusive--and it requires for
its expression a rhythm of similarly broad and flexible character. It is
obvious that such emotions as he deals with could never be caged in a
symmetrical verse or stanza.
“I have not so much emulated the birds that musically sing,
I have abandoned myself to flights, broad circles,
The hawk, the sea-gull, have far more possess’d
me than the canary or mocking-bird.
I have not felt to warble and trill, however sweetly,
I have felt to soar in freedom and in the fulness
of power, joy, volition.”
But in thus soaring in freedom and the fulness of power and joy he finds
a rhythm and a music of his own. “I see,” says Anne Gilchrist, “that no
counting of syllables will reveal the mechanism of the music; and that
this rushing spontaneity could not stay to bind itself with the fetters
of [formal] metre. But I know that the music is there, and that I would
not for something change ears with those who cannot hear it.”[13]
Whitman needed for his expression a poetical form of the utmost
flexibility--capable of adaptation to the widest ranges of his immense
personality. It is, in fact, his personality which forms the organic
centre of “Leaves of Grass.” He calls the latter (see “A Backward Glance
o’er Travel’d Roads”) “an attempt from first to last, to put _a Person_,
a human being (myself, in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century, in
America) freely, fully, and truly on record.” As a work of art,
therefore, “Leaves of Grass” ought to stand whole, unbroken, undivided,
and grouped round the central presence of the author. “Who touches this,
touches a man.”--“In regard to the unity and construction of the poems,”
says John Burroughs in “The Flight of the Eagle,”[14] “the reader sooner
or later discovers the true solution to be, that the dependence,
cohesion, and final reconciliation of the whole are in the personality
of the poet himself.... When Tennyson sends out a poem, it is perfect,
like an apple or a peach; slowly wrought out and dismissed, it drops
from his boughs holding a conception or an idea that spheres it and
makes it whole. It is completed, distinct, and separate--might be his,
or might be any man’s. It carries his quality, but it is a thing of
itself, and centres and depends upon itself. Whether or not the world
will hereafter consent, as in the past, to call only beautiful creations
of this sort _Poems_, remains to be seen. But this is certainly not what
Walt Whitman does, or aims to do, except in a few cases. He completes no
poems, apart and separate from himself, and his pages abound in hints to
that effect:--
“‘Let others finish specimens--I never finish specimens;
I shower them by exhaustless laws, as Nature does,
fresh and modern continually.’
His lines are pulsations, thrills, waves of force, indefinite dynamics,
formless, constantly emanating from the living centre, and they carry
the quality of the author’s personal presence with them in a way that is
unprecedented in literature.”
And again Whitman says (I am quoting from the edition of 1860):--
“I will not make poems with reference to parts,
But I will make leaves, poems, poemets, songs, says
, thoughts, with reference to ensemble;
And I will not sing with reference to a day, but with
reference to all days,
And I will not make a poem, nor the least part of a
poem, but has reference to the Soul,
Because, having looked at the objects of the universe,
I find there is no one, nor any particle of
one, but has reference to the Soul.”
The ultimate form therefore of Whitman’s poems is the form of himself,
of the Soul as individualised and uttered in him. As looking at the
ocean, boundless and reaching far beyond our ken, we yet recognise in
each wave the form of the sea which gives it birth; so in reading
“Leaves of Grass” we recognise in each poem or poemet the form and
unifying law of the author. Indeed there is a singular resemblance in
the great measured yet irregular roll of Whitman’s lines to the onset of
waves along a shore--now creeping white and low in long successive
array, now madly surging and towering in spray, now lipping sunlit and
blue upon the land. Every mood, at one time or another, is there and to
be recognised--yet underneath, and greater than all, and illustrated by
them all, the law and life of the ocean itself.
While all Whitman’s poems are thus parts of a whole, and must gain their
deepest meanings and interpretations through a study of the whole, there
are some which are almost unintelligible _except_ in this relation--mere
ejaculations, single sentences, or not even so much as single sentences
(see Kosmos, “Leaves of Grass,” p. 303, also pp. 217, 218). Of these,
Burroughs’ remarks about their non-completion, except in relation to the
poet’s personality, are true in the most literal way. Of others, there
is a decided sense of artistic completion in themselves, though still
subsidiary to the total work. And it is interesting, with regard to this
subject of form, to see how Whitman gains in these latter cases his
artistic unity.
One of the most frequent and characteristic devices of his writing is
the use of a very long sentence. By the phrasing of his lines the
construction of a very lengthy sentence can be kept clear and effective,
while the meaning and burden of it can be piled up and elaborated, till
at last the total can be discharged upon the reader with overwhelming
effect. Many of his poems (_e.g._ “When I heard the learn’d astronomer,”
p. 214; or, “I sit and look out,” p. 215; or those two from _Children
of Adam_, “Ages and ages returning,” and “We too, how long we were
fool’d,” pp. 92 and 93), are constructed on this plan. They are just one
single sentence, and convey one unitary effect. Others, though
consisting of more than one sentence, are still the same in principle.
Often by repeating the _form_ of the sentence (“I see, I see;” “I hear,
I hear”), he gains a like result. What a wonderful poem is that _Salut
au Monde_, in which these sights and sounds, of the whole world, these
lists and processions of earth-dwellers, these appeals to you, you, you,
“whoever you are,” pile up, in strange surging and swelling
reiteration--till at last they break out and break down in the final
four lines:--
“Toward you all, in America’s name,
I raise high the perpendicular hand, I make the signal,
To remain after me in sight for ever,
For all the haunts and homes of men.”
Here the picture of the immense earth, and the poet’s relation to it, is
the central motive. In another, the open road is the figure which holds
all together. In another, the Brooklyn Ferry. In another, the broad axe.
And in all, as I have said before, a deep pulsating music, easy to
catch, though difficult to define.
Often the music is that of “recitative”--sonorous, bold, free, not
returning into itself like a melody, but moving forward with suggestions
of things to follow. This is perhaps the most general and characteristic
of Whitman’s musical effects. See, for instance, that strange poem:--
“As Adam early in the morning,
Walking forth from the bower refresh’d with sleep,
Behold me where I pass, hear my voice, approach,
Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass,
Be not afraid of my body.”
How finely that might be set to music--solemn, mystic, appealing,
oracular! Or read “Old Ireland” (p. 284) in the same connection, and
countless other poems or portions of poems. In the “Ox-tamer” (p. 307)
there is much the same recitative effect, with more metrical return and
melody. More rhythmical and melodic still is that beautiful “Vigil
Strange,” on p. 238, or the “Sight in Camp,” p. 240; and more so still
perhaps, the well-known “Come up from the fields, father,” p. 236. In
many of these we notice distinct refrains and recurrences, not only of
lines, but of metres--often a return at the end to the refrain of the
beginning, as in the “Ox-tamer” or the “March in the ranks hard prest,”
or “The bivouac’s fitful flame”; often a recurrence throughout of a
certain type of line--as of anapests (six-foot) in “Come up from the
fields”:--
“But now from the fields come, father, come at the daughter’s call,
And come to the entry, mother, to the front door come right away,”
or some other sort of refrain, as in “Beat, Beat, Drums!” (p. 222), or
in “Gods” (p. 213).
“Lover divine and perfect comrade,
Waiting content, invisible yet, but certain,
Be thou my God.”
Finally we have a few in distinct stanzas and set metre (or nearly so)
like “O Captain” (p. 262), or “Pioneers” (p. 183), or the “Dirge for Two
Veterans” (p. 246); but on the whole these are not the most
characteristic or satisfactory of his pieces.
For short poems held together by a distinct mood and music of their own
(even if the latter be hard to define), turn to “To Him that was
Crucified,” already quoted, or to “To a Common Prostitute,” or to those
wonderful lyric ejaculations “Tears” (p. 204), or “Darest thou now, O
soul” (p. 338), or “The Last Invocation” (p. 346), with their solemn
organ-tones.
In two of his long poems, namely, “Out of the Cradle” (p. 196), and
“When lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed,” Whitman has by a
combination of some of the devices above mentioned produced an artistic
effect and unity which is very remarkable, and which has made these
poems general favourites. The unitary scene and landscape in both cases,
the recurrence of certain emblems, lilac and star and grey-brown bird or
sagging moon and sea, the rhythmic songs introduced of love and death,
and the sobbing melody of the surge throughout the first mentioned poem,
and the repeated music of the Lincoln Hymn:--
“O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved?
And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone?
And what shall my perfume be for the grave of him I love?
* * * * *
Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,”
--all these things give to these two great poems an artistic unity and
distinction which single them somewhat out from the rest, and grant them
(unlike some others of Whitman’s) to stand alone as it were, and on
their own merits.
Nevertheless it must be said, and somewhat in defence of John Burroughs’
position, that these two poems, beautiful as they are, are not so
characteristic, so deeply fascinating and impressive, so central in the
whole scheme and cosmos of “Leaves of Grass,” as those other great
poems, which, though not so obviously metrical or artistically balanced
and complete, are governed more directly by the presence and direct
utterance of the personality behind them: I mean, of course, first and
foremost, the “Song of Myself,” and afterwards the two series, _Children
of Adam_ and _Calamus_, and such poems as “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,”
“The Answerer” (p. 134), “The Sleepers” (p. 325), “To Think of Time” (p.
333), “Sunset” (p. 374), “Vocalism” (p. 297), “So Long” (p. 380), and
many others. There is in these poems an extraordinary oracular prophetic
utterance which lifts them right through the sphere of art, and out of
it, into something above. “No one will get at my verses,” he says,[15]
“who insists upon viewing them as a literary performance, or attempt at
such performance, or as aiming mainly towards art or aestheticism.” It
is in this quality in Whitman’s work, transcending art, yet indeed only
possible through the patient study, through the perfection and final
surrender of art, that the secret of his power lies. In his poems of
this order a technical unity is not demanded (though it may be found in
some of them) because they speak in the name of that Self which is and
remains the unity of all things--the wind which bloweth where it listeth
over the world. They have no need to _seek_ for unity and beauty,
because in uttering the Self these things are already given and found.
Here is a great mystery, difficult to express. No wonder that in that
truly oracular poem, “Vocalism” (p. 297), Whitman announces so great, so
almost terrifying and impossible an apprenticeship before “the divine
power to speak words” can come and be loosened in man or woman--nothing
less than the circling of all experience, and the final surrender:
“For only at last after many years, after chastity,
friendship, procreation, prudence and nakedness,
After treading ground and breasting river and lake,
After a loosen’d throat, after absorbing eras,
temperaments, races, after knowledge, freedom, crimes,
After complete faith, after clarifyings, elevations,
and removing obstructions,
After these and more, it is just possible there comes
to a man, a woman, the divine power to speak words....
Surely, whoever speaks to me in the right voice, him
or her I shall follow,
As the water follows the moon, silently, with fluid
steps, anywhere around the globe.”
It is here no case of neglecting art; but technical art and all its
devices are only a very very small part of the apprenticeship. Before
the deep music and beauty of these greatest poems we can only stand
silent, absorbing indeed, but in no mood to analyse. Something greater
than mortal speaks to us in them, some voice blended of ages and ages
and vistas of human experience. Something more even than human; for
Nature, the prairies and the lakes, the ocean and the forest by some
hidden magic become vocal in them:
“I hear you whispering there, O stars of heaven,
O suns--O grass of graves--O perpetual transfers and promotions,
If you do not say anything how can I say anything?”
* * * * *
“The woodman that takes his axe and jug with him
shall take me with him all day,
The farm-boy, ploughing in the field, feels good
at the sound of my voice,
In vessels that sail my words sail, I go with
fishermen and seamen and love them.
The soldier camp’d or upon the march is mine,
On the night ere the pending battle many seek me,
and I do not fail them,
On that solemn night (it may be their last) those
that know me seek me.”
Whitman, by his vast command of and sympathy with the things of the
actual world, by his strange interpenetration and identity with the
elemental whole, has in these great poems revealed a presence which, as
long as the waters glisten and the leaves rustle, can never pass or
cease to speak to us; and as in ancient days, from some cavern on a
mountain side, a voice in divine frenzy issuing was taken to be that of
the Earth-god before whose eyes past and future are one, so from these
writings the music arising seems to be the inspiration and
part-utterance even of ageless Nature herself.
For the rest there are, of course, deficiences and weaknesses. As hinted
earlier in this book, the voluminous power which marshals and holds in
leash whole battalions of phrases, to hurl them finally on the reader
with irresistible effect, sometimes fails; and then we get a lumbering,
disjointed, efforted movement which is the reverse of admirable.
Whitman’s later poems, though interesting in many ways, do often show
this deficiency of inspiration and some consequent lapse into
mannerisms; and his prose perhaps shows the same more frequently.
To the reader coming to these works for the first time, the disregard of
conventions in every direction is so great, that it sometimes attracts
all his attention, rendering him insensible to the interior message, and
annoying him with a suspicion of mere affectation. “If he only were not
obscene,” says such a reader, “or slangy, or prosaic, or contradictory;
if he only would not put in lists of trades, or of seaport towns, or
lines that ramble at large across all the proprieties of metre and
grammar--we could endure him! But thus and thus he is intolerable.” It
is only after some familiarity and a gradual change of the point of view
and perspective, that the reader begins to see that much which he
thought affected is perfectly natural and in place. “To speak with the
perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movements of animals, and the
unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees in the woods, and grass by
the roadside,” is Whitman’s own standard, and the more one reads the
more I think one is compelled to acknowledge his near approach to it.
That he uses the parlance of common folk instead of the set phrases of
the learned is not an affectation, but simply what Dante, and Chaucer,
and Pushkin, and many another pioneer of a national literature has done;
that he speaks freely of physiological things is not obscenity, but a
deliverance from it; that his handling of facts appears prosaic or
unemotional may easily arise from the reader’s own want of association
with the facts that are handled.
In all these cases of a new or unfamiliar style (as in painting or
music) the interpretations do not yield themselves till the new point
of view has been seized. Whitman has often been accused of want of
humour--and it is notorious that nothing is more elusive and variable as
between people and people--English, Scotch, French, German,
American--than just this sense of humour. But no one who knows “Leaves
of Grass” well can fail to detect the fund of quiet humour constantly
flowing there beneath the surface. It has been said, No one with any
sense of the comic could have written the lines:--
“Now I absorb immortality and peace,
I admire death, and _test propositions_.”
But does it follow that because a minor poet might fear to use such an
expression, lest it should excite a smile, Whitman would also have been
afraid, and have refused it, even though the expression exactly conveyed
his meaning? And again, a phrase like “test propositions” may well
appear comic at Oxford or Cambridge, and yet perfectly serene and
sensible on an American prairie. These things are a little difficult to
locate.
All the same it must be said that the poet does, in this way and at
times, put a considerable strain upon his admirers! as when he writes:--
“O setting sun! though the time has come,
I still warble under you, if none else does, unmitigated adoration,”
or again--
“I will report all heroism from an American point of view.”
And there are affectations--or rather I think I should say, cases in
which he has of set purpose adopted forms and attitudes not perfectly
natural and spontaneous. For the most part his work is marvellously
spontaneous, and, in its prophetic way, deriving at once from
instinctive and subconscious regions; but there is no doubt (he says so
himself) that in parts he “set himself” very deliberately to do certain
things. And it is in these parts that I think he is least successful.
Thus he set himself to vaunt and magnify “these States” in season and
out of season (a good purpose in moderation, but rather overdone); to
ignore all stock-poetic and classic forms and allusions whatever (a
practice which cripples him at times), even to the extent of proscribing
May and June in favour of Fifth-month and Sixth-month; and to coin and
introduce if possible various hybrid and denationalised words, like
Camerado, Santa Spirita, I exposé, and so forth (a matter in which he
has often been anything but successful). These set efforts, which also
appear sometimes in the _construction_ of his poems, detract at such
times from the winging singing quality of his work, and give a sense as
of chains dragged along the ground.
Of these weaknesses and deficiencies, however, I must say that in the
long-run they do not seem to me to bulk very largely. Though they may do
so at first, and may seem serious, yet it is surprising how with
continued reading they wane and lose their importance in the general
splendour and adequacy of expression. And personally--with regard to the
many quaint and outlandish things in Whitman--though they may cause a
ripple in the mind, I find that they do not for me spoil the general
effect, any more than for one sailing into New York harbour the splendid
vista of shipping and shores is spoiled by the sight of a bottle or
other such object borne on the blue and sunlit tide.
And when on the other hand one regards the extraordinary and admitted
felicity and perfection of a vast number of his phrases, the
absoluteness of the rendering and expression of some of the most
difficult and subtle things, one sees that these quaintnesses, whatever
may be their cause, certainly do not arise from lack of literary
ability. The man who could write “the large unconscious scenery of my
land with its lakes and forests,” or “the gentle soft-born measureless
light,” or “dark mother always gliding near with soft feet,” or “the
yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun, burning, expanding
the air,” was without doubt a master of expression. And I may conclude
this paper with the words of Addington Symonds (“A Study of Walt
Whitman,” p. 150): “The countless clear and perfect phrases he invented,
to match most delicate and evanescent moods of sensibility, to picture
exquisite and broad effects of natural beauty, to call up poignant or
elusive feelings, attest to his artistic faculty of using language as a
vehicle for thought. They are hung, like golden medals of consummate
workmanship and incised form, in rich clusters over every poem he
produced. And, what he aimed at above all, these phrases are redolent of
the very spirit of the emotions they suggest, communicate the breadth
and largeness of the natural things they indicate, embody the essence of
realities in living words which palpitate and burn for ever.”
WALT WHITMAN’S CHILDREN
Henry B. Binns, in his “Life of Walt Whitman,” lately published,
discusses at some length the question of Whitman’s paternity; and seems
to arrive at the conclusion that the poet formed at least one
relationship (this one probably at New Orleans in 1848) which led to the
birth of a child or children.
Mr. Binns founds his discussion on an article of mine originally
published in the _Reformer_ (Feb. 1902); and, premising that in his book
(pp. 51-3 and 349-50) he has added not a little to the evidence, I
reprint the main portions of my article below, as follows:--
“In regard to Whitman’s most personal and intimate relations there is
curiously little known. Every one is aware that he was never
married--that is, in any formal and acknowledged way. His life after the
Civil War was clouded by intermittent paralysis, bringing with it
invalidism and infirmity; and of his history before his arrival in
Washington, _i.e._, prior to the age of forty-four or so--the period
when he would be most likely to knit up such relations--only the barest
outline is known.
“‘Leaves of Grass,’ that extraordinary piece of self-revelation, gives
us the mental attitude of the author. And perhaps (it may be said) we
ought to be content with that; because if we know the mental and
emotional attitude of a man we know the main thing. His external life
and actions depend largely on accidental circumstances and conditions,
his inner attitude is the expression of himself alone. ‘Leaves of Grass’
reveals to us a man, to whom the most intimate relations with his fellow
men and women were familiar (at any rate in thought), and beautiful (at
least in their proper time and place). The urge to closest contact
appears everywhere through his poems: ‘I sing the body electric’--‘the
body of my love, the body of the woman I love, the body of the man, the
body of the earth.’ He is not satisfied with communication through words
and printed pages, or by the mere looking at photographic portraits:--
“‘Not words of routine this song of mine,
But abruptly to question, to leap beyond yet
nearer bring:
This printed and bound book--but the printer
and the printing-office boy?
The well-taken photographs--but your wife or
friend close and solid in your arms?’
“And in the poet’s announcement and summary of his own work, written by
Whitman close after the issue of the first edition of ‘Leaves of Grass,’
he says of himself: ‘Right and left he flings his arms, drawing men and
women with undeniable love to his close embrace, loving the clasp of
their hands, the touch of their necks and breasts, and the sound of
their voices. All else seems to burn up under his fierce affection for
persons.’
“It would not of course be reasonable to suppose that all the personal
utterances, of acts done, of passions expressed, of experiences lived
through, or of individuals loved--which are to be found in ‘Leaves of
Grass’--are to be taken as literal records of things which actually
happened to the author himself. They could hardly be gathered into a
single lifetime. Yet one can see that they are to be taken as
experiences, _either_ actual or potential, for which his inner spirit
was prepared--and as a record of things which he could freely accept,
understand, and find place for. ‘Through the period from 1837 to 1848,’
says John Burroughs, ‘without entering into particulars, it is enough to
say that he sounded all experiences of life, with all their passions,
pleasures, and abandonments. He was young, in perfect bodily condition,
and had the city of New York and its ample opportunities around him. I
trace this period in some of the poems in the _Children of Adam_, and
occasionally in other parts of his book, including _Calamus_.[16]
Certainly at times in these poems one can hardly avoid the conclusion
that he is describing an actual bit of his own history--as in that
poem:--
‘“Once I passed through a populous city imprinting
my brain for future use with its shows, architecture,
customs, traditions,
Yet now of all that city I remember only a woman I
casually met there, who detained me for love of me,
Day by day and night by night we were together--all
else has long been forgotten by me.
I remember I say only that woman who passionately
clung to me.
Again we wander, we love, we separate again;
Again she holds me by the hand, I must not go,
I see her close beside me with silent lips sad
and tremulous.”’
“In a life so full and rich as Whitman’s there must have been many such
personal experiences, of which the world knows nothing, and will know
nothing. He has himself told his friends that he had children--and in a
letter to J. Addington Symonds (dated 19th August 1890), he mentioned
that he had had six. Symonds writing to me in 1893 quoted the passage in
question from this letter of Whitman’s, and it runs as follows:--
“‘My life, young manhood, mid-age, times South, &c., have been jolly
bodily, and doubtless open to criticism. Though unmarried I have had
six children--two are dead--one living Southern grandchild, fine boy,
writes to me occasionally--circumstances (connected with their fortune
and benefit) have separated me from intimate relations.’
“This is all, apparently, that the letter contained with reference to
the fact of Whitman’s paternity; but it is sufficient to establish the
fact. Concerning the said children, and their mother, or mothers, there
may be other evidence or information in existence; and if so, it would
be interesting and important to elicit it.[17]
“I have heard people affirm their ‘moral certainty’ that Whitman never
had any intimate relations with women, and that all the expressions in
‘Leaves of Grass’ which seem to point that way, are merely Platonic, or
fanciful, or allegorical--but it is not very easy to see on what such
‘moral certainty’ could in any case be founded; and in the face of the
above extract from Whitman’s own letter, it would certainly have to be
abandoned.
“On the other hand it would be a rash, and I think a wrong conclusion to
suppose that because Whitman had several children (out of the bounds of
formal marriage) he was therefore a dissolute and uncontrolled person,
much given to casual _liaisons_ with the opposite sex. We know nothing,
as I have said, of the circumstances which led to these connections, nor
have we the material for passing any judgment of the kind referred
to--even if we were so disposed. We know at any rate that in his later
life Walt was singularly discreet, almost reserved, in his relations
with women; and in that very interesting interview with Pete Doyle,
which is given by Dr. Bucke in his edition of Whitman’s letters to
Pete[18]--one of the best running accounts of Walt which we have, though
of course quite _extempore_--Pete says in one passage:--‘I never knew a
case of Walt’s being bothered up by a woman. In fact, he had nothing
special to do with any woman, except Mrs. O’Connor and Mrs. Burroughs.
His disposition was different. Woman in that sense never came into his
head.’
“Though there are points in the interpretation of this passage which are
not quite clear, it at any rate conveys the impression of Whitman’s
reserve towards the other sex; and seems in one part to suggest that
his ‘disposition’ was unfavorable to close relations with women.[19]
“Pete’s view in either case may appear a little difficult to reconcile
with the six children; but then we must remember that the inception of
the latter and the ‘times South’ of Whitman’s letter would belong to an
early date--including probably his visit to New Orleans in
1848-49--before he was thirty years of age. And the Whitman of that time
might well differ somewhat in disposition from the Whitman of twenty
years later when Pete knew him.
“That Whitman was not by any means insensible to the charms of the fair
sex, even in this later period, is indicated by the following extract
(dated October 1868), from one of his own letters to Pete--though it
will be seen that there is a certain histrionic air about the passage
which suggests that it should not be taken _too_ seriously:--‘I also
made love to the women, and flatter myself that I created at least one
impression--wretch and gay deceiver that I am. The truth is, Peter, that
I am here at the present time mainly in the midst of female women, some
of them young and jolly, and meet them most every evening in company;
and the way in which this aged party comes up to the scratch and cuts
out the youthful parties and fills their hearts with envy is absolutely
a caution.’
“Pete Doyle was one of Walt’s dearest friends--perhaps his dearest; and
Walt’s letters to Pete are veritable love-letters. The story of their
meeting, as given by Pete in his ‘interview’ is quite romantic: ‘It is a
curious story. We felt to each other at once. I was a conductor (on a
tram). The night was very stormy--he had been over to see Burroughs
before he came down to take the car--the storm was awful. Walt had his
blanket--it was thrown round his shoulders--he seemed like an old
sea-captain. He was the only passenger, it was a lonely night, so I
thought I would go in and talk with him. Something in me made me do it,
and something in him drew me that way. He used to say there was
something in me had the same effect on him. Anyway I went into the car.
We were familiar at once--I put my hand on his knee--we understood. He
did not get out at the end of the trip--in fact went all the way back
with me. I think the year of this was 1866. From that time on we were
the biggest sort of friends.’
“Their intimacy, as shown by the correspondence, lasted on undiminished
for over ten years. Through the letters peep in and out the forms and
names of other friends, mostly young fellows, tram-conductors,
fire-engine men, &c., to whom Walt sends his love and messages. His
devotion to his friends of this kind, the ’bus-drivers in early days in
New York, the ferry-men, the soldiers in the war, and others, is of
course well known; and it appears to have been in many cases ardently
returned. ‘Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips.’ In fact,
in his poems we find his expressions of love towards men and towards
women put practically on an equality--if anything indeed the references
to the former are the more frequent and the more passionate. In actual
life, too, during that later period after the war, there can be no
doubt that his intimacies with men were much more numerous and close
than with women. We have no record, I think, during that time, of any
very close intimacy with a woman, though of warm friendships with women
we have several instances.
“Summing up then all that has been said, I gather that in his early
years Walt had some _liaisons_ with the fair sex; certainly one such
relation, which may have lasted several years, and which may (see the
already quoted poem) have been chiefly initiated and pressed from the
lady’s side; but that in his later period (after the age of forty-five
or so)--whether from a change of temperament or any other cause--these
ceased to play a part in his life; at any rate there is no indication of
them. It is clear also that throughout his life his intimacies with men
were very close and ardent; and it seems possible that these, in the
later period, to some extent supplied the deficiency on the other side.
“Walt’s attitude in ‘Leaves of Grass’ towards men or women is, as I have
already remarked, singularly uniform. Both sexes seem to come equally
within the scope of his love. And there is a passage in Pete Doyle’s
already quoted interview which curiously corroborates this. Pete
probably never read ‘Leaves of Grass,’ or took much account of it; but
he gives the following from his own observation: ‘Towards women
generally Walt had a good way--he very easily attracted them. But he did
that with men, too. And it was an irresistible attraction. I’ve had many
tell me--men and women. He had an easy gentle way--the same for all, no
matter who they were, or what their sex.’
“Whether this large attitude towards sex, this embrace which seems to
reach equally to the male and the female, indicates a higher development
of humanity than we are accustomed to--a type super-virile, and so far
above the ordinary man and woman that it looks upon both with equal
eyes; or whether it merely indicates a personal peculiarity; this and
many other questions collateral to the subject I have not touched upon.
It has not been my object in making these remarks to enter into any
vague speculations, but rather to limit myself to a few conclusions
which seemed clear and obvious and fairly demonstrable.”
[Illustration: _R. W. Emerson_
_about the year 1855 (Age 52)_]
WHITMAN AND EMERSON
The relations between Whitman and Emerson form an interesting subject.
There is little doubt that the two men had a deep mutual respect and
admiration for each other; and however any chance expression dropped at
any time, on either side, might seem to belie this, I believe it lasted
to the end. It is quite likely that Whitman owed something in the
inception of “Leaves of Grass” to Emerson’s writings. This does not mean
of course that, without Emerson, Whitman would have failed of his work;
but, as so often happens in such cases, when a mass of material is
forming somewhat undefinedly, and seeking outlet, the work of the
predecessor comes to give it a decisive touch, and bring it to birth.
In his very interesting “Reminiscences of Walt Whitman” (originally
printed in the _Atlantic Monthly_, February 1902[20]), John Townsend
Trowbridge touches on this subject; and without endorsing his remarks in
every particular, it may be interesting to quote them. Relating a
conversation he had with Whitman one Sunday at Boston, in the spring of
1860, when Whitman had come over to Boston to see his third edition
through the press, Trowbridge says:--
“I was extremely interested to know how far the influence of our
greatest writer (Emerson) had been felt in the making of a book which,
without being at all imitative, was pitched in the very highest key of
self-reliance. In his letter to Emerson, printed in the second edition
of ‘Leaves of Grass,’ speaking of ‘Individuality, that new moral
American continent,’ Whitman had averred: ‘Those shores you found; I
say, you led the States there--have led me there.’ And it seemed hardly
possible that the first determined attempt to cast into literature a
complete man, with all his pride and passions, should have been made by
one whose feet were not already firmly planted on ‘those shores.’ Then
there was the significant fact of his having mailed a copy of his first
edition to Emerson.
“Whitman talked frankly on the subject, that day on Prospect Hill, and
told how he became acquainted with Emerson’s writings. He was at work as
a carpenter (his father’s trade before him) in Brooklyn, building with
his own hands and on his own account small and very plain houses for
laboring men; as soon as one was finished and sold, beginning
another,--houses of two or three rooms. This was in 1854; he was then
thirty-five years old. He lived at home with his mother; going off to
his work in the morning and returning at night, carrying his dinner-pail
like any common laborer. Along with his pail he usually carried a book,
between which and his solitary meal he would divide his nooning. Once
the book chanced to be a volume of Emerson; and from that time he took
with him no other writer. His half-formed purpose, his vague
aspirations, all that had lain smouldering so long within him, waiting
to be fired, rushed into flame at the touch of those electric
words,--the words that burn in the prose-poem ‘Nature,’ and in the
essays on ‘Spiritual Laws,’ the ‘Oversoul,’ ‘Self-reliance.’ The sturdy
carpenter in his working-day garb, seated on his pile of boards; a poet
in that rude disguise, as yet but dimly conscious of his powers; in one
hand the sandwich put up for him by his good mother, his other hand
holding open the volume that revealed to him his greatness and his
destiny--this is the picture which his simple narrative called up, that
Sunday so long ago, and which has never faded from my memory.
“He freely admitted that he could never have written his poems if he had
not first ‘come to himself,’ and that Emerson helped him to ‘find
himself.’ I asked if he thought that he would have come to himself
without that help. He said, ‘Yes, but it would have taken longer.’ And
he used this characteristic expression: ‘I was simmering, simmering,
simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil.’
“It was in that summer of 1854, while he was still at work upon his
houses, that he began the ‘Leaves of Grass,’ which he wrote, and
rewrote, and re-rewrote (to quote again his own words), and afterwards
set in type with his own hand.
“I make this statement thus explicit because a question of profound
personal and literary interest is involved, and because it is claimed by
some of the later friends of Whitman that he wrote his first ‘Leaves of
Grass’ before he had read Emerson. When they urge his own authority for
their contention, I can only reply that he told me distinctly the
contrary, when his memory was fresher.
“The Emersonian influence is often clearly traceable in Whitman’s early
poems; seldom in the later. It is in the first line of the very first
poem in which he struck the keynote of his defiant chant: ‘I celebrate
myself.’ Yet the form Whitman chose for his message was as independent
of Emerson’s as of all other literary forms whatsoever.”
One of the “later friends” to whom Trowbridge refers is no doubt John
Burroughs, who on page 16 of his “Walt Whitman as Poet and Person” (New
York, 1867) says, speaking of the first edition of “Leaves of Grass”:--
“I take occasion to say that Whitman, up to the time he published the
quarto edition, here mentioned, had never read the ‘Essays’ or ‘Poems’
of Mr. Emerson at all. This is positively true. In the summer following
that publication, he first became acquainted with the ‘Essays’ in this
wise: He was frequently in the habit of going down to the sea-shore at
Coney Island, and spending the day bathing in the surf and rambling
along the shore, or lounging on the sand; and on one of these excursions
he put a volume of Emerson into the little basket containing his dinner
and his towel. There, for the first, he read ‘Nature,’ &c. Soon, on
similar excursions, the two other volumes followed. Two years still
elapsed, however, and after his second edition was issued, before he
read Mr. Emerson’s poems.”
It is interesting, in these two quotations, to find the incident of the
Emerson volume in the dinner-basket repeated, yet placed by one writer
in the year 1854, and by the other, equally decisively in 1856! The
matter is not extremely important; but it illustrates the extreme and
eternal difficulty of getting reliable historical evidence. In this case
there are three memories, either of which may be at fault, and one of
which _must_ be--Whitman’s, Trowbridge’s, and Burroughs’. Did Whitman,
in forgetfulness, give to Burroughs, sometime between ’63 and ’67, a
different account from what he gave to Trowbridge in ’60? or did either
Burroughs or Trowbridge only imperfectly remember the account he heard?
It is difficult to say. Whitman in his quite late years seems to have
adopted the Burroughs views; but Whitman’s memory in his later years
became very unreliable. In his “Backward Glance o’er Travel’d Roads”
(published in 1888) he says, speaking of the importance of the Secession
War in his own life and thought, that “ Without those three or four
years and the experiences they gave, ‘Leaves of Grass’ would not now be
existing”; and that although he had “made a start before,” the
beginnings of “Leaves of Grass” might--except for this--have come to
naught,” almost positively would have come to naught.” This, considering
that far the larger and more important part of “Leaves of Grass” was
already printed and _published_ in the 1860 edition, a year or more
before the war broke out, is rather disconcerting; and suggests that his
memory may have been equally at fault with regard to Emerson’s part in
“Leaves of Grass,” as it was with regard to the part played by the war.
I say the matter is not very important; because it is obvious that
whatever part Emerson’s teaching played it was only a small part and of
brief duration. It may very possibly only have come in after a start of
some kind had already been made on “Leaves of Grass” (see letter quoted,
_infra_, p. 186); it certainly had nothing to do with the long
“foreground” of Whitman’s early life on farms, in cities, and by the
sea-shore, where the book was really prepared; nor anything to do with
the special developments of the poems, as in _Children of Adam_, or
their literary style--things which Emerson distinctly disapproved of.
At the same time it seems to me quite likely that at some moment the
magnificent intellectual intuitive outlook of Emerson, as of an eagle in
high-soaring vision of seas and continents, sweeping the whole world
into the compass of his thought, did give to Whitman just what he might
have been waiting for (though probably in any case it would have come to
him some time), the magic touch and inspiration which set his kosmos in
order. No doubt an outside push of some kind is often required for the
launching of a big ship. On the whole the evidence brought forward by
Trowbridge seems to me to favour his case--the fact of Whitman’s sending
a copy of his _first_ edition to Emerson (showing that he already
thought something of Emerson’s opinion), his printed letter to Emerson
in the second edition, “those shores you found ... have led me there,”
his addressing Emerson as “Master” in the same letter, and so on. In the
“Notes left over” of “Specimen Days” (p. 321) Whitman himself says: “The
reminiscence that years ago I began like most youngsters to have a touch
(though it came late, and was only on the surface) of Emerson on the
brain--that I read his writings, and addressed him in print as ‘Master,’
and for a month or so thought of him as such--I retain not only with
composure, but positive satisfaction. I have noticed that most young
people of eager minds pass through this stage of exercise.”
With regard to Emerson’s opinion about the new poems at this period, it
is clear from his letter of July 21, 1855, to Whitman: “Dear Sir,--I am
not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of ‘Leaves of Grass.’ I
find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has
yet contributed,” &c.,--it is very clear, I say, that Emerson was
greatly impressed, and indeed delighted, with the volume. With his clear
and piercing vision he seems to have at once (or in a wonderfully brief
time) reached through the odd rough husk to the sweet and precious
kernel of the book; and for this as well as for his hearty expressions
of appreciation the world must ever be grateful to him. Nevertheless the
book, as was inevitable, roused in him queer doubts and
heart-searchings. Either in 1855 or in the early part of 1856 Emerson
called twice upon Whitman; and though in these visits the foundation of
a personal friendship was laid, it is clear that they revealed also
great gulfs of difference. Emerson could not quite stomach Walt Whitman,
the rough, with his invasively democratic ways, nor see anything
particularly interesting in his working-folk chums and pals; while
Whitman, on the other hand, found his visitor too literary and
intellectual. On the occasion of my own visit to the States in 1877, I
stayed a night at Emerson’s house at Concord--most pleasantly and
hospitably received--and enjoyed greatly his talk as we walked up and
down the old-fashioned garden, or sat in his book-lined study. When I
spoke of Whitman, and asked what he thought of him, he laughed (a little
nervously, I thought) and said, “Well, I thought he had some merit at
one time: there was a good deal of promise in his first edition--but he
is a wayward, fanciful man.[21] I saw him in New York, and asked him to
dine at my hotel. He shouted for a ‘tin mug’ for his beer. Then he had
a noisy fire-engine society. And he took me there, and was like a boy
over it, as if there had never been such a thing before!” He went on, in
words which I do not recall, to object to the absence of metre in
“Leaves of Grass”; and ended, I remember, by taking down a volume of
Tennyson from the shelf--handling it affectionately and showing me the
author’s autograph on the fly-leaf--and dwelling on the beauty of the
Tennysonian diction and metre.[22]
These few words about Whitman, spoken by Emerson to a casual visitor,
must of course not be given too much weight, or supposed to represent
his total and final estimate. But I insert them here, as they probably
represent pretty fairly certain points of difference and even
disagreement which he discovered on personal acquaintance. On further
reading, too, doubtless Emerson felt that he could not corroborate or
justify a great deal of the matter, as well as the metre, of “Leaves of
Grass.” He was probably swayed to and fro by various currents of feeling
with regard to it, and could not settle clearly in his mind what he did
think. This is illustrated by a letter he wrote to Thomas Carlyle in
1856, to accompany a copy of the book, which he was sending:--
“One book, last summer, came out in New York, a nondescript monster,
which yet had terrible eyes and buffalo strength, and was indisputably
American--which I thought to send you; but the book throve so badly with
the few to whom I showed it, and wanted good morals so much, that I
never did. Yet I believe now again, I shall. It is called ‘Leaves of
Grass,’--was written and printed by a journeyman printer in Brooklyn,
New York, named Walter Whitman; and after you have looked into it, if
you think, as you may, that it is only an auctioneer’s inventory of a
warehouse, you can light your pipe with it.”
It could only have been a few weeks after the above letter had been
written to Carlyle about the first “Leaves of Grass,” that--quite
unexpectedly to Emerson--a second edition of the book appeared, with
Emerson’s complete letter of 21st July 1855, printed in an Appendix, and
an extract from the same letter, “I greet you at the beginning of a
great career,” in gold upon the cover! Besides this, there was a long
reply-letter from Whitman to Emerson, addressing the latter as “Master,”
and containing the above-quoted passages about “those shores you found,”
&c.
Whitman has been often blamed for this quite unauthorised use of
Emerson’s letter--and certainly according to our Cis-Atlantic literary
codes it was a cool thing to do: very cool--considering of course that
in this second edition were many pieces that Emerson had never even
seen! But though the act may be difficult to defend, it must be
remembered that public opinion and practice on the other side of the
water was and is decidedly more lax and easy-going in such matters than
on this side. Whitman probably failed to realise (it was hardly his
nature to do so), the reaction this advertisement might have upon
Emerson and _his_ interests. He was thinking of his own bantling first
edition, flouted, scorned, neglected, and like to perish, and of the
splendid testimony from one of the greatest of living names in letters,
which would suddenly lift it into fields of life and light. “I supposed
the letter was meant to be blazoned,”--he said one day to Trowbridge--“I
regarded it as the chart of an emperor.” It did not occur to him that
its blazoning might possibly cost the emperor his throne!
But indeed the matter was serious, comically serious. Here was Emerson,
the imperial one, whose finger laid on a book was like a lighthouse beam
to all the coteries of Boston, actually recommending some new poems to
the whole world in terms of unstinted praise. The whole world, of
course, went to buy them. A hundred parlors of mildly literary folk or
primly polite Unitarian and Congregational circles beheld scenes over
which kind history has drawn a veil!--the good husband or head of the
house, after tea or supper, settling down in his chair, “Now for the new
book, so warmly spoken of!” The ladies taking their knitting and sewing,
their dresses rustling slightly as they arrange themselves to listen,
the general atmosphere of propriety and selectness; and then the
reading! Oh, the reading! The odd words, the unusual phrases, the
jumbled sequences, the stumbling uncertainty of the reader, the
wonderment on the faces of the listeners, and finally--confusion and the
pit! the book closed, and hasty flight and dispersion of the meeting.
Then, later, timid glances again at the dreadful volume, only to find,
amid quagmires and swamps, the reptilian author addressing the belovèd
Emerson as “Master,” and saying, “these shores _you_ found!” Was it a
nightmare? Had the emperor gone mad? or was his printed letter merely a
fraud and a forgery?
One can imagine the annoyance all this caused to Emerson himself--the
deluge of letters and inquiries, the whirlpools of controversy among his
myriad followers, the would-be champions who gaged their word and
everlasting destiny on his entire innocence, &c. Truly the throne rocked
for a season. But it was too well based to be upset. Indeed I cannot but
think that Emerson, with his sterling good sense and mental solidity,
rather enjoyed it all at bottom--the uproar, the searchings of heart,
and the confusion of his congregations and coteries (whose narrowness
and provincialism were often a trial to him). In his heart of
hearts--though doubtless he thought Whitman had played him unfair, and
though certainly he did not think Whitman’s manner of speech on sexual
questions either wise or gracious--still I believe he must have
recognised and did at that time recognise that the book, “Leaves of
Grass,” was a tremendous gain to the world, and that it was even going
to do pioneer work for him, Emerson, along his own line.
I think I am right in saying that there was no public retaliation by
Emerson against the author of the offending book. I have, at any rate,
not heard of any. There was, however, considerable public stir against
it. It was savagely criticised, and “so extreme was the feeling excited
by it, that some good people in New York seriously contemplated having
the author indicted and tried for publishing an obscene book.”[23] The
publishers, Fowler & Wells, fearing injury to their business, threw the
book up; and so after a brief career its publication ceased, and for the
next four years it remained as a thing dead.
It was in 1860 that Emerson and Whitman met again. Whitman had come to
Boston to superintend the printing of a third edition, to be issued by
Thayer and Eldridge. Heroic, calm, and undaunted, unresentful even of
neglect, he simply went on his way. If the first and second editions of
“Leaves of Grass” had aroused opposition, the third was still more
likely to do so. It gathered together many of the most offending poems,
with new ones of the same character, in two groups, _Children of Adam_,
and _Calamus_, which were certain to attract attention. It was bold
indeed of Thayer and Eldridge to undertake the publication. Whether by
any chance one of the firm may have persuaded Emerson to intervene with
the author, in favour of a general toning down of the book, I know not.
But it is certain that Emerson came to see him, and taking him out onto
Boston Common, walked with him for two hours discussing this very
subject. Of that memorable conversation Whitman must speak for himself.
In “Specimen Days,” p. 191, under date 10-13 Oct. 1881, he says: “Up and
down this breadth by Beacon Street, between these same old elms, I
walked for two hours, of a bright sharp February midday twenty-one years
ago, with Emerson, then in his prime, keen, physically and morally
magnetic, arm’d at every point, and when he chose wielding the emotional
just as well as the intellectual. During those two hours he was the
talker and I the listener. It was an argument, statement, reconnoitring,
review, attack, and pressing home (like an army corps in order,
artillery, cavalry, infantry), of all that could be said against that
part (and a main part) in the construction of my poems, _Children of
Adam_. More precious than gold to me that dissertation. It afforded me,
ever after, this strange and paradoxical lesson; each point of Emerson’s
statement was unanswerable, no judge’s charge ever more complete or
convincing, I could never hear the points better put--and then I felt
down in my soul the clear and unmistakable conviction to disobey all,
and pursue my own way. ‘What have you to say then to such things?’ said
Emerson, pausing in conclusion. ‘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,’ was my candid response. Whereupon we went and had a good
dinner at the American House. And thenceforward I never wavered or was
touched with qualms (as I confess I had been two or three times
before).”
Very fine is this scene between the two men. Emerson bearing no grudge
against the buffalo poet, candidly doing his best to give “Leaves of
Grass” its proper scope, and save it (as he thought) from its own
indiscretions--Whitman, loyal to himself and to Emerson, equally
candidly refusing to budge. A hearty dinner afterwards, and separation
with mutual respect.[24]
It is probable that for the next twenty years the two friends did not
see each other. I find no evidence of their meeting. The war broke out;
Whitman went south and remained at Washington, and afterwards at
Camden, New Jersey, with only occasional and brief visits to New York.
There was not much chance or likelihood of their meeting. Nevertheless
their communications were not broken, and the elder man had not ceased
to be interested in the younger; for we find, according to Trowbridge,
that in November 1863, Whitman (who was then looking about for some
official work or post at Washington) had by him two letters of
recommendation written by Emerson--the one to Senator Sumner, and the
other to Secretary Chase. Of what other correspondence or meetings there
may have been between them for the next twenty years, we do not hear
much.[25] Emerson’s respect for “Leaves of Grass” as a feasible
contribution to literature seems to have waned. He respected of course
much of the matter of it, but could not stomach the manner. He told his
friend Sanborn once that the book read like “a mixture of the
_Bhagvat-Gita_ and the _New York Herald_.”[26] He included no specimen
of it in his collection “Parnassus” (1874); and detested its metre or
want of metre.[27] [Whitman says somewhere--“Specimen Days,” p. 321--“I
see he covertly or plainly likes best superb verbal polish, or something
old or odd--Waller’s ‘Go, lovely rose,’ or Lovelace’s lines ‘To
Lucasta’--and the like.”] Yet for the Man, as well as I think for his
Message in its real essence, Emerson had a great and enduring respect.
In 1881 Walt came once more to Boston to superintend a new edition of
his poems. Since 1860 much had happened. The first two editions (1855
and 1856) had been scouted by the public and hastily dropped by the
publishers; the 1860 edition fell almost dead through the War. Walt
Whitman went to Washington. It was not till 1867 that he printed a
fourth edition (New York), including “Drum Taps.” The fifth came in 1871
(Washington). The sixth in 1876 (centennial and author’s edition,
Camden) in two volumes, including prose. And the seventh is the one of
which we are speaking (Osgood & Co. Boston, 1881-2). Hardly was the book
out, and selling well, when the Society for the Suppression of Vice in
Boston pounced. The Attorney-general for Massachusetts, through the
District Attorney, served a notice on Osgoods (early in ’82). Osgoods
appealed to Whitman to withdraw some of the poems. Whitman absolutely
refused; and once more the publishers threw the book up and left the
edition on his hands!
But to return to our subject. Emerson of course was not ignorant of the
stir that was being made. Indeed there can be little doubt that both by
his own family and from outside he was urged to dissociate himself from
the book and its author. But he was not going to do anything of the
kind.[28] In September 1881, Whitman came over from Boston (from his
proof-reading) to stay a night with Sanborn at Concord. Emerson (now
quite an old man, seventy-eight) and other friends came in for the
evening--“a long and blessed evening” Walt calls it (“Specimen Days,” p.
189). He describes in fact how, without being rude, he was able to take
a good look at Emerson most of the time, and speaks of “the well-known
expression of sweetness in his face, and the old clear-peering aspect
quite the same.” Then the next day, Sunday, the Emersons asked _him_ to
dinner. “Several hours at Emerson’s house, and dinner there. An old
familiar house (he has been in it thirty-five years), with surroundings,
furnishments, roominess, and plain elegance and fulness, signifying
democratic ease, sufficient opulence, and an admirable old-fashioned
simplicity: modern luxury, with its mere sumptuousness and affectation,
either touched lightly upon or ignored altogether. Dinner the same. Of
course the best of the occasion (Sunday, Sept. 18, ’81) was the sight
of Emerson himself.”
This dinner and hearty reception by Emerson Whitman looked back upon
with something like pride, as a “victor-event” in his life. (See letter
of 1887 to W. S. Kennedy, p. 76 of his book.) The next year, May 6,
1882, he stood by Emerson’s grave. “How shall I henceforth dwell on the
blessed hours when, not long since, I saw that benignant face, the clear
eyes, the silently smiling mouth, the form yet upright in its great
age--to the very last, with so much spring and cheeriness, and such an
absence of decrepitude that even the term _venerable_ hardly seemed
fitting.... We can say, as Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, It is not we
who come to consecrate the dead--we reverently come to receive, if so it
may be, some consecration to ourselves and daily work from him.”
(“Specimen Days,” p. 197.)
With these words we may leave the personal relation between the two men.
The nobility of them both, the grandeur, sincerity, and simplicity of
their relation, the hearty accord, affection, and admiration, beneath
grave and acknowledged differences of habit and opinion--all make up a
picture of deep and lasting significance, and one which future ages can
hardly fail to cherish. On the purely literary side, however, it was
perhaps only natural that, as time went on, they should distinctly drift
apart. Emerson was less and less able to adapt himself to Whitman’s
strange new departures. Whitman more and more avowedly separated his
respect for the man from his respect for the writer. In latest years he
seemed almost anxious that he should _not_ be thought to have learnt
anything from Emerson’s books. In the letter already alluded to, of
1887, to W. S. Kennedy, he says: “It is of no importance whether I had
read Emerson before starting ‘Leaves of Grass’ or not. The fact happens
to be positively that I had _not_;”[29] and later in the same letter:
“If I were to unbosom to you in the matter I should say that I never
cared so very much for Emerson’s writings, prose or poems, but from his
first personal visit and two hours with me ... I had a strange
attachment and love for _him_ and his contact, talk, company,
magnetism.” In Whitman’s “Specimen Days,” also (pp. 321-2) he has some
keen criticisms of the “bloodless intellectuality” and other defects of
Emerson’s style--criticisms which, though decidedly good on the whole,
seem to me needlessly stringent, and even a bit captious in parts.
THE END
Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
Edinburgh & London
_Also by EDWARD CARPENTER_
The Art of Creation
Essays on the Self and its Powers
Crown 8vo, Cloth, gilt top, 266 pp. 5s. net.
The Book is an attempt to explain the Creative process in the light of
modern (and ancient) thought. It suggests--as the title would
indicate--that the Creation of the World, like a work of Art, proceeds
by perfectly definite laws from inner states of being and feeling to
outer manifestation; and that Man himself, as soon as he understands,
can take part in this art of creation. The book is both theoretical and
practical. In its pages there is a reconcilement of Spirit and Matter,
of Plato and Darwin, of Religion and Physiology, of the Gods and
Evolution; and the chapters on Creation and Transformation lead on to
the development of the highest orders of knowledge and power in mankind.
=Manchester Guardian.=--“Written with great simplicity and charm, and
no thoughtful reader who takes it up will fail to find interest and
profit in it.”
LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN
_Other Works by the same Author_
TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: Complete Poems. Library Edition, 1905, cloth,
gilt edge, 506 pages, 3s. 6d. net.
THE SAME, Pocket Edition, India paper, with limp binding and gilt
edge, 3s. 6d. net.
ENGLAND’S IDEAL and other Papers on Social Subjects. Fourth Edition,
1902, 176 pages, cloth, 2s. 6d.; paper, 1s.
CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE, essays on Modern Science, &c. Eighth
Edition, 1906, 176 pages, cloth, 2s. 6d.; paper, 1s.
LOVE’S COMING OF AGE: a series of papers on the Relations of the Sexes.
Fourth Edition, 1903, 168 pages, cloth, 3s. 6d. net.
ANGELS’ WINGS: Essays on Art and Life, with nine full-page plates, cloth
gilt, 248 pages, 6s.
ADAM’S PEAK TO ELEPHANTA: sketches in Ceylon and India. New Edition,
1903, cloth gilt, 4s. 6d.
THE STORY OF EROS AND PSYCHE, with first book of Homer’s Iliad done into
English, and frontispiece, cloth gilt, 2s. 6d.
IOLÄUS: An Anthology of Friendship. Printed in red and black inks, with
ornamental initials and side notes; cloth, gilt edge, 2s. 6d. net.
CHANTS OF LABOUR: a Songbook for the People, edited by EDWARD CARPENTER.
With frontispiece and cover by WALTER CRANE. Paper, 1s.
AN UNKNOWN PEOPLE: pamphlet on intermediate types of men and women,
price 6d. net.
PRISONS, POLICE, AND PUNISHMENT: an Inquiry into the Causes and
Treatment of Crime and Criminals. Crown 8vo, cloth, 2s. net.
* * * * *
EDWARD CARPENTER: THE MAN AND HIS MESSAGE. Pamphlet by TOM SWAN, with
two portraits and copious extracts from the above works, price 6d. net.
* * * * *
FOOTNOTES:
[1] “Walt Whitman,” by R. Maurice Bucke, M.D. Philadelphia, 1883.
[2] See _infra_, p. 166.
[3] See his Letters to Pete Doyle, published under the title “Calamus,”
by Small, Maynard & Co., Boston, U.S.A.
[4] See that remarkable poem printed in the 1860 edition of “Leaves
of Grass” (p. 355), but afterwards omitted, perhaps as being too
personal:--
“Hours continuing long, sore and heavy-hearted,
Hours of the dusk, when I withdraw to a lonesome
and unfrequented spot, seating myself, leaning
my face in my hands;
Hours sleepless, deep in the night, when I go
forth, speeding swiftly the country roads, or
through the city streets, or pacing miles and
miles, stifling plaintive cries;
Hours discouraged, distracted--for the one I
cannot content myself without, soon I saw
him content himself without me;
Hours when I am forgotten, (O weeks and months are
passing, but I believe I am never to forget!)
Sullen and suffering hours! (I am ashamed--but
it is useless--I am what I am;)
Hours of my torment--I wonder if other men ever
have the like, out of the like feelings?
Is there even one like me--distracted--his friend,
his lover, lost to him?
Is he too as I am now? Does he still rise in the
morning, dejected, thinking who is lost to
him? and at night, awaking, think who is lost?
Does he too harbor his friendship silent and
endless? harbor his anguish and passion?
Does some stray reminder, or the casual mention
of a name, bring the fit back upon him,
taciturn and deprest?
Does he see himself reflected in me? In these
hours does he see the face of his hours
reflected?”
[5] “Walt Whitman Fellowship Papers” (Philadelphia, 1894), p. 42.
[6] “Leaves of Grass,” p. 298.
[7] We have to remember, too, that their sayings have come down to us
only through priestly, local, racial media. There is not a sacred book
that has not been tampered with, and its teaching distorted in the
direction of narrowing and exclusiveness.
[8] See “Abbas Effendi,” a study of the religion of the Babis, by M. H.
Phelps (Putnams, 1903).
[9] Compare the following from “Leaves of Grass”:--
“O Thou transcendent,
Nameless, the fibre and the breath,
Light of the light, shedding forth universes ...
Swiftly I shrivel at the thought of God,
At Nature and its wonders, Time and Space and Death,
But that I, turning, call to thee O soul, thou actual Me,
And lo! thou gently masterest the orbs,
Thou matest Time, smilest content at Death,
And fillest, swellest full the vastnesses of Space.”
(p. 321.)
“Light rare untellable, lighting the very light,
Beyond all signs, descriptions, languages.” (p. 324.)
“Whoever you are! you are he or she for whom the earth
is solid and liquid;
You are he or she for whom the sun and moon hang in
the sky.” (p. 178.)
“I celebrate Myself,
And what I assume, you shall also assume.” (p. 29.)
“Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Both in and out of the game, and watching and
wondering at it.” (p. 32.)
“Evil propels me, and reform of evil propels me,
I stand indifferent.” (p. 46.)
“What is called good is perfect, and what is called
bad is just as perfect.” (p. 337.)
“Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and
knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth.” (p. 32.)
“No array of terms can say how much I am at peace
about God and about death.” (p 76.)
“My spirit has pass’d in compassion and determination
around the whole earth.
I have look’d for equals and lovers, and found them
ready for me in all lands.” (p. 120.)
“Agonies are one of my changes of garments. I do not
ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself
become the wounded person.” (p. 60.)
“I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him
or her who shall be complete.” (p. 179.)
“All parts away for the progress of souls,
All religion, all solid things, arts, governments--all
that was or is apparent upon this globe, or any globe,
falls into niches and corners before the procession
of souls along the grand roads of the universe.” (p. 127.)
“I swear I think now that everything has an immortal soul!
I swear I think there is nothing but immortality.” (p. 337.)
“Who, constructing the house of himself or herself, not
for a day but for all time, sees races, eras, dates, generations,
The past, the future, dwelling there, like space,
inseparable together.” (p. 304.)
“I doubt not I have myself died ten thousand times before.
I receive now again of my many translations, from my
avataras ascending, while others doubtless await me.” (p. 382.)
“You can do nothing and be nothing but what I will
infold you.” (p. 66.)
“All truths wait in all things, They neither hasten
their own delivery nor resist it, ...
The insignificant is as big to me as any.” (p. 53.)
“I am possess’d!
Embody all presences outlaw’d or suffering.” (p. 64.)
“I will toss a new gladness and roughness among them,
Whoever denies me it shall not trouble me,
Whoever accepts me he or she shall be blessed and shall
bless me.” (p. 123.)
“Vivas to those who have fail’d!” (p. 43.)
“What is providence is indivisible,
Declines to separate one part of life from every part, ...
Knows that the young man who composedly peril’d his life
and lost it has done exceedingly well for himself
without doubt.” (p. 291.)
“Sleep--I and they keep guard all night;
Not doubt, not decease shall dare to lay finger upon you.
I have embraced you, and henceforth possess you to myself,
And when you rise in the morning you will find what
I tell you is so.” (p. 66.)
“Camerado, I give you my hand,
I give you my love more precious than money.” (p. 129.)
“Toward you all, in America’s name,
I raise high the perpendicular hand, I make the signal,
To remain after me in sight forever,
For all the haunts and homes of men.” (p. 120.)
[10] “Notes and Fragments,” left by Walt Whitman, and edited by R. M.
Bucke (1899), p. 70.
[11] “I had not dreamed,” says Mrs. Gilchrist in _A Woman’s Estimate of
Walt Whitman_, “that words could cease to be words, and become electric
streams like these. I do assure you that, strong as I am, I sometimes
feel as if I had not bodily strength to read many of these poems.
In the series headed ‘Calamus,’ for instance, in some of the ‘Songs
of Parting,’ the ‘Voice out of the Sea,’ the poem beginning ‘Tears,
Tears,’ &c., there is such a weight of emotion, such a tension of the
heart, that mine refuses to beat under it--stands quite still--and I am
obliged to lay the book down for a while.”
[12] “Angels’ Wings,” by E. Carpenter (1898), p. 73.
[13] “A Woman’s Estimate,” now republished among the papers in “In _re_
Walt Whitman” (McKay. Philadelphia, 1893).
[14] “Birds and Poets” (New York, 1877), p. 234.
[15] See “A Backward Glance o’er Travel’d Roads,” the prose Appendix to
“Leaves of Grass” (Small, Maynard & Co., Boston, 1897).
[16] John Burroughs, in “Walt Whitman: as Poet and Person.” (New York,
1867.)
[17] For some evidence that Whitman in his later years not unfrequently
alluded to the fact of his fatherhood, see Binns’ “Life of Whitman,”
p. 349. It is also supposed that, the lady at New Orleans being of
aristocratic connection, her family would only recognise the children
on condition of their fatherhood being concealed; and that these were
the circumstances which separated Whitman “from intimate relations”
with them.
[18] “Calamus: A Series of Letters,” &c. (Small, Maynard & Co. Boston,
1897.)
[19] In a conversation reported by Horace Traubel (“In _re_ Walt
Whitman,” p. 34), George Whitman, the poet’s brother, seems to take
much the same general view as Pete. He says: “Although I am asked that
question, I am confident I never knew Walt to fall in love with young
girls, or even to show them marked attention. He did not seem to affect
the girls.”
[20] Now substantially reproduced in his book, “My Own Story.”
[21] I am here simply transcribing notes made a few days after the
interview. He used a third epithet beside wayward and fanciful,
something like “violent,” but I hardly think it was so strong as that.
(See _supra_, p. 48.)
[22] I may as well here transcribe my further notes of Emerson’s
personal appearance at the time, as follows: “Emerson’s failure of
memory for names is quite painful [his age was then 74], and there is
the fixed look of age in his eye, yet he is active in body and full of
fun and enjoyment of intellectual life. His eyes are greyish blue, the
corners of his lips are often drawn upward, and there is a wonderful
bird-like look about the face, enhanced by his way of jerking his
head forward as he speaks. His eyes sometimes look very straight and
intense: and then comes a moonlight smile over the face, very charming.
His domestic life seems admirable.”
[23] See Bucke’s “Walt Whitman,” p. 141.
[24] In a letter to W. D. O’Connor (see New York _Tribune_, 18th
June 1882) Whitman wrote, “What made and ever makes the argument
of Emerson in that walk on the Common dear and holy to me was its
personal affectionateness, as of an elder brother to a younger. It was
a vehement and even passionate well-wishing, which I felt then, and
feel to this hour, the gratitude and reverence of my life could never
repay.” (W. S. Kennedy’s “Reminiscences of Walt Whitman,” p. 77.)
[25] Emerson seems to have helped Whitman in the matter of hospital
funds; and the two appear to have just seen each other at the re-burial
of Poe at Baltimore in 1875. (See Binns’ “Life of Whitman,” pp. 198 and
258.)
[26] “Reminiscences of Walt Whitman,” by W. S. Kennedy (1896), p. 78.
[27] Nevertheless Emerson himself at an earlier age had made
experiments in the same direction.
[28] “The true fact is, R. W. Emerson had a firm and deep attachment
to Whitman from first to last, as person and poet, which Emerson’s
family and several of his conventional literary friends tried their
best in vain to dislodge.” (See W. S. Kennedy’s “Reminiscences of Walt
Whitman,” p. 77.)
[29] This letter is odd and jumbley and a little confusing in style,
and I must say (considering also its date) does not carry entire
conviction to me.
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
across to Philadephia=> across to Philadelphia {pg 7}
on obscene book=> an obscene book {pg 174}
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DAYS WITH WALT WHITMAN ***
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.
Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™
concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may
do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
license, especially commercial redistribution.
START: FULL LICENSE
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person
or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
of Project Gutenberg electronic works. Nearly all the individual
works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
that you will support the Project Gutenberg mission of promoting
free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg
works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
Project Gutenberg name associated with the work. You can easily
comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg License when
you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
other Project Gutenberg work. The Foundation makes no
representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
country other than the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg License must appear
prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg work (any work
on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed,
performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg™ License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws
of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg electronic work is
derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg
trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg License for all works
posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg work in a format
other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official
version posted on the official Project Gutenberg website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg electronic works
provided that:
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
to the owner of the Project Gutenberg trademark, but he has
agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™
works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than
are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
without further opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in
accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
or any Project Gutenberg work, (b) alteration, modification, or
additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg work, and (c) any
Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
from people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
The Foundation’s business office is located at 41 Watchung Plaza #516,
Montclair NJ 07042, USA, +1 (862) 621-9288. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespread
public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state
visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.
This website includes information about Project Gutenberg,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
