WALT WHITMAN

[Walt (Walter) Whitman was born at West Hills, Long Island, May 31, 1819, and died at Camden, N.J., March 25, 1892. His father was of English, his mother of Dutch descent, and on his mother's side there was also Quaker blood. His formal education did not go beyond that furnished by the public schools, but he read much, and had a rare gift for assimilating the essence of what he read. His youth was spent in varied pursuits. He was at different times a teacher, a compositor, and an editor. In 1847-48 he edited the Brooklyn Eagle. In 1849 he started on a long tour, largely performed on foot, to the chief cities of the country. He journeyed through Pennsylvania and Virginia, down the Ohio and the Mississippi to New Orleans, and returned by way of St. Louis, Chicago, and the lake cities, finding means for his travels by work on various journals. In 1851-52 he owned and managed a Brooklyn paper. For some years he was a carpenter and builder. During the war he was a volunteer nurse in the Washington hospitals, supporting himself by writing for the newspapers. The nervous strain of his experiences as a nurse and an attack of hospital fever made severe inroads on his robust constitution, but he held a government clerkship from 1865 until 1874, when he was stricken with partial paralysis, from the effect of which he never wholly recovered. The remainder of his life he spent mainly in Camden, N.J., visiting New York frequently, and occasionally making longer journeys. No American writer has known the rank and file of his countrymen as Whitman did. In "Manhattan," the city he knew best and loved best, as well as in other cities and in the country, he "became thoroughly conversant," as his biographer attests, "with the shops, houses, sidewalks, ferries, factories, tavern gatherings, political meetings, carousings, etc. He knew the hospitals, poorhouses, prisons, and their inmates," and honest laborers of all kinds and descriptions, with people of greater education. And to this wide knowledge he added a sympathy equally penetrating and all-embracing.

Whitman's principal prose writings are: Democratic Vistas (1871), Memoranda during the War (1875), Specimen Days and Collect (1882–83), November Boughs (1888).]

THE reputation of Walt Whitman rests upon the poetical portion of his writings; but while that part of his works remains in the public eye, as it long must on account of its singularity of form and its inspiration, the lesser part which appears in the garb of prose will also be of interest, as containing the history of the

man and the abstract ideas of the writer. In Specimen Days, Whitman describes his parentage and early surroundings, the sights and occupations that filled his youth, his wanderings, his activity during the Civil War as a visitor and comforter of wounded soldiers in the hospitals at Washington, and finally his rambles and meditations in the woods of New Jersey. In Democratic Vistas, he explains his theory of his own poetry and the relation of the literature of the past and of the future to American society. Taking the two books together, we are able to learn what was Whitman's inspiration and ambition, what he thought of his country, of himself, and of his function.

Much of this, indeed, might have been gathered from the poems by an attentive reader; yet it is an advantage to have it all set down by the author in an autobiographical fashion with eloquence, clearness, and evident sincerity. The conditions that made possible so remarkable a writer, his personal character, and his ideal of the society he meant to describe and to serve, are thus brought vividly before us. And these confessions are not only interesting to one who wishes to understand the author of the Leaves of Grass, but they are in themselves of considerable imaginative and historical value.

His parents were farmers in central Long Island, and his early years were spent in that district. The family seems to have been not too prosperous and somewhat nomadic; Whitman himself drifted through boyhood without much guidance. We find him now at school, now helping the laborers at the farms, now wandering along the beaches of Long Island, finally at Brooklyn, working in an apparently desultory way as a printer, and sometimes as a writer for a local newspaper. He must have read or heard something, during this early period, of the English classics; his style often betrays the deep effect made upon him by the grandiloquence of the Bible, of Shakespeare, and of Milton. But his chief interest, if we may trust his account, was already in his own sensations. The aspects of nature, the forms and habits of animals, the sights of cities, the movement and talk of common people, were his constant delight. His mind was flooded with these images, keenly felt and often vividly rendered with bold strokes of realism and imagination. Many poets have had this

faculty to seize the elementary aspects of things, but none has had it so exclusively; with Whitman the surface is absolutely all and the underlying structure is without interest and almost without existence. He had had no education, and his natural delight in imbibing sensations had not been trained to the uses of practical or theoretical intelligence. He basked in the sunshine of perception and wallowed in the stream of his own sensibility, as later at Camden in the shallows of his favorite brook. Even during the war, when he heard the "drum-taps" so clearly, he could only gaze at the picturesque and terrible aspects of the struggle, and linger among the wounded from day to day with a canine devotion; he could not be aroused either to clear thought or positive action. So also in his poems; a multiplicity of images pass before him and he yields himself to each in turn with absolute passivity. But the world has no inside: it is a phantasmagoria of continuous visions, vivid, impressive, but monotonous and hard to remember, like the waves of the sea or the decorations of some barbarous⚫ temple, sublime only by the infinite aggregation of parts. This abundance of detail without organization; this wealth of perception without intelligence, and of imagination without taste, makes the singularity of Whitman's genius. Full of sympathy and receptivity, with a wonderful gift of graphic characterization and an occasional rare grandeur of diction, he fills us with a sense of the individuality and the universality of what he describes — it is a drop in itself, yet a drop in the ocean. The absence of any principle of selection, or of a sustained style, enables him to render aspects of things and of emotions which would have eluded a trained writer. He is, therefore, interesting even where he is grotesque or perverse. He is important in that he has accomplished, by the sacrifice of almost every other good quality, something never so well done before. He has approached common life without bringing in his mind any higher standard by which to criticise it; he has seen it, not in contrast to an ideal, but as the expression of forces more indeterminate and elementary than itself; and the vulgar, in this cosmic setting, has appeared to him sublime.

There is clearly some analogy between a mass of images without structure, and the notion of an absolute democracy. Whit

man, inclined by his genius and habits to see life without relief or organization, believed that his inclination in this respect corresponded to the spirit of his age and country, and that nature and society, at least in America, were constituted after the fashion of his own mind. Being the poet of the average man, he wished all men to be specimens of that average, and being the poet of a fluid nature, he believed that nature was or should be a formless flux. This personal bias of Whitman's was further encouraged by the actual absence of notable distinction in his immediate environment. Surrounded by ugly things and common people, he felt himself happy, ecstatic, overflowing with a kind of patriarchal love. He accordingly came to think there was a spirit of the New World which he embodied and which was in complete opposition to that of the Old, that a literature upon novel principles was needed to express and strengthen this American spirit. Democracy was not to be merely a constitutional device for the better government of given nations, not merely a movement for the material improvement of the lot of the lower classes. It was to be a social and a moral democracy, and to involve an actual equality among all men. Whatever kept them apart and made it impossible for them to be messmates together was to be discarded. The literature of democracy was to ignore all extraordinary gifts of genius or virtue, all distinction drawn even from great passions or romantic adventures. In Whitman's works, in which this new literature is foreshadowed, there is accordingly not a single character or a single story. His only hero is Myself, the "single, separate person," endowed with the primary impulses, with health, and with sensitiveness to the elementary aspects of nature. The perfect man of the future is to work with his hands, chanting the poems of some democratic bard. Women are to have as nearly as possible the same character as men: the emphasis is to pass from family life and local ties to the friendship of comrades and the general brotherhood of man. Men are to be vigorous, comfortable, sentimental, and irresponsible.

This dream is, of course, unrealized and unrealizable in America as elsewhere. Undeniably there are in America many suggestions of such a society and such a national character. But the growing complexity and fixity of institutions tends to obscure these traits

of a primitive and crude democracy. What Whitman seized upon as the promise of the future was in reality the survival of the past. He sings the song of pioneers, but it is in the nature of the pioneer that the greater his success the quicker must be his transformation into something different. When Whitman made the initial phase of society his ideal, he became the prophet of a lost cause. That cause was lost not merely when wealth and intelligence began to take shape in this country, but it was lost at the very foundation of the world, when those laws of evolution were established which Whitman, like Rousseau, failed to understand. If we may trust Mr. Herbert Spencer, these laws involve a passage from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, and a constant progress at once in differentiation and in organization — all, in a word, that Whitman systematically deprecated or ignored. He is surely not the spokesman of the tendencies of his country, although he describes some aspects of its present condition; nor does he appeal to those he describes, but rather to the dilettanti he despises. He is regarded as representative chiefly by foreigners, who look for some grotesque expression of the genius of so young and prodigious a people.

Fortunately, the political theory that makes Whitman's principle of literary prophecy and criticism is not presented, even in his prose works, bare and unadorned. In Democratic Vistas we find it clothed with something of the same poetic passion, and lighted up with the same flashes of intuition, that we admire in the poems. Even here the temperament is finer than the ideas and the poet wiser than the thinker. His ultimate appeal is really to something more general than a national ideal. He speaks to those minds and to those moods in which sensuality is touched with mysticism. When the intellect is in abeyance, when we would "turn and live with animals, they are so placid and selfcontained," when we are weary of conscience and of ambition, and would yield ourselves for a while to the dream of sense, Walt Whitman is a welcome companion. The images he arouses in us, fresh, full of light and health and of a kind of frankness and beauty, are prized all the more at such a time because they are not choice, but drawn perhaps from a hideous and sordid environment. For this circumstance makes them a bet