It is the work of a power-
ful spirit that seeks to grasp life and the universe as a whole, and
to charge the conception with religious and poetic emotion; perhaps
I should say religious emotion alone, as Whitman clearly identifies
the two.
ful spirit that seeks to grasp life and the universe as a whole, and
to charge the conception with religious and poetic emotion; perhaps
I should say religious emotion alone, as Whitman clearly identifies
the two.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v27 - Wat to Zor
15877 (#209) ##########################################
RICHARD GRANT WHITE
15877
hasty in generalization, but as a whole both sound and stimulating.
'Studies in Shakespeare,' made up of papers collected by his wife
after his death (1885), gives in an attractive way his views on the
English master-poet. For twenty-five years Mr. White worked at
Shakespearean criticism; and his final Riverside Edition of Shake-
speare, which appeared in 1884, proved one of the most popular pre-
pared by an American.
Mr. White was for many years the chief clerk of the United States
Revenue Marine Bureau for the District of New York,- a post he
resigned in 1878. His life was a busy one, calling on his time and
strength in many ways. Looking at his work as a whole, and dis-
regarding what was necessarily temporary in it, a residue of valuable
and enjoyable literary work remains to give him his place among
American essayists and scholars. He died on April 8th, 1885, at his
birthplace, New York city.
THE BACON-SHAKESPEARE CRAZE
Re-
From (Studies in Shakespeare. Copyright 1885, by Alexina B. White.
printed by permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , publishers
ND now we to
A inherent absurdity (as distinguished from evidence and ex-
ternal conditions) of this fantastical notion,- the unlikeness
of Bacon's mind and of his style to those of the writer of the
plays. Among all the men of that brilliant period who stand
forth in all the blaze of its light with sufficient distinction for us
at this time to know anything of them, no two were so element-
ally unlike in their mental and moral traits and in their literary
habits as Francis Bacon and William Shakespeare; and each of
them stamped his individuality unmistakably upon his work.
Both were thinkers of the highest order; both, what we some-
what loosely call philosophers: but how different their philosophy,
how divergent their ways of thought, and how notably unlike
their modes of expression! Bacon, a cautious observer and inves-
tigator, ever looking at men and things through the dry light of
cool reason; Shakespeare, glowing with instant inspiration, seeing
by intuition the thing before him, outside and inside, body and
spirit, as it was, yet molding it as it was to his immediate need,
– finding in it merely an occasion of present thought, and re-
gardless of it except as a stimulus to his fancy and his imagina-
tion: Bacon, a logician; Shakespeare, one who set logic at naught,
## p. 15878 (#210) ##########################################
15878
RICHARD GRANT WHITE
and soared upon wings compared with which syllogisms are
crutches: Bacon, who sought, in the phrase of Saul of Tarsus, –
that Shakespeare of Christianity,- to prove all things, and to hold
fast that which is good; Shakespeare, one who, like Saul, loosed
upon the world winged phrases, but who recked not his own
rede, proved nothing, and held fast both to good and evil, de-
lighting in his Falstaff as much as he delighted in his Imogen:
Bacon, in his writing the most self-asserting of men; Shake-
speare, one who when he wrote his plays did not seem to have a
self: Bacon, the most cautious and painstaking, the most consist-
ent and exact, of writers; Shakespeare, the most heedless, the
most inconsistent, the most inexact, of all writers who have risen
to fame: Bacon, sweet sometimes, sound always, but dry, stiff,
and formal; Shakespeare, unsavory sometimes, but oftenest breath-
ing perfume from Paradise, -grand, large, free, flowing, flexi- .
ble, unconscious, and incapable of formality: Bacon, precise and
reserved in expression; Shakespeare, a player and quibbler with
words, often swept away by his own verbal conceits into intel-
lectual paradox, and almost into moral obliquity: Bacon, without
humor; Shakespeare's smiling lips the mouthpiece of humor for
all human kind: Bacon, looking at the world before him, and at
the teaching of past ages, with a single eye to his theories and
his individual purposes; Shakespeare, finding in the wisdom and
the folly, the woes and the pleasures of the past and the present,
merely the means of giving pleasure to others and getting money
for himself, and rising to his height as a poet and a moral
teacher only by his sensitive intellectual sympathy with all the
needs and joys and sorrows of humanity: Bacon, shrinking from
a generalization even in morals; Shakespeare, ever moralizing,
and dealing even with individual men and particular things in
their general relations: both worldly-wise, both men of the world,
— for both these master intellects of the Christian era
worldly-minded men in the thorough Bunyan sense of the term,
but the one using his knowledge of men and things critically
in philosophy and in affairs; the other, his synthetically, as a cre-
ative artist: Bacon, a highly trained mind, and showing his train-
ing at every step of his cautious, steady march; Shakespeare,
wholly untrained, and showing his want of training even in the
highest reach of his soaring flight: Bacon, utterly without the
poetic even in a secondary degree, as is most apparent when he
desires to show the contrary; Shakespeare, rising with unconscious
were
## p. 15879 (#211) ##########################################
RICHARD GRANT WHITE
15879
-
effort to the highest heaven of poetry ever reached by the human
mind. To suppose that one of these men did his own work and
also the work of the other, is to assume two miracles for the
sake of proving one absurdity, and to shrink from accepting in
the untaught son of the Stratford yeoman a miraculous miracle,
one that does not defy or suspend the laws of nature.
Many readers of these pages probably know that this notion
that our Shakespeare - the Shakespeare of As You Like It' and
'
' Hamlet' and 'King Lear' – was Francis Bacon masking in the
guise of a player at the Globe Theatre, is not of very recent
origin. It was first brought before the public by Miss Delia
Bacon (who afterwards deployed her theory in a ponderous vol-
ume, with an introduction by Nathaniel Hawthorne — who did
not advocate it) in an article in Putnam's Magazine for January
1856. Some time before that article was published, and shortly
after the publication of (Shakespeare's Scholar,' it was sent to
me in proof by the late Mr. George P. Putnam, with a letter
calling my attention to its importance, and a request that I
would write an introduction to it. After reading it carefully
and without prejudice (for I knew nothing of the theory or of
its author, and as I have already said, I am perfectly indifferent
as to the name and the personality of the writer of the plays,
and had as lief it should have been Francis Bacon as William
Shakespeare), I returned the article to Mr. Putnam, declining the
proposed honor of introducing it to the public, and adding that
as the writer was plainly neither a fool nor an ignoramus, she
must be insane; not a maniac, but what boys call “loony. ” So
it proved: she died a lunatic, and I believe in a lunatic asylum.
I record this incident for the first time on this occasion, not
at all in the spirit of l-told-you-so, but merely as a fitting pre-
liminary to the declaration that this Bacon-Shakespeare notion is
an infatuation,-a literary bee in the bonnets of certain ladies of
both sexes, which should make them the objects of tender care
and sympathy. It will not be extinguished at once; on the con-
trary, it may become a mental epidemic. For there is no notion,
no fancy or folly, which may not be developed into a move-
ment,” or even into a “school,” by iteration and agitation. I do
I
not despair of seeing a Bacon-Shakespeare Society, with an array
of vice-presidents of both sexes, that may make the New Shake-
speare Society look to its laurels. None the less, however, is it a
lunacy, which should be treated with all the skill and tenderness
((
>
## p. 15880 (#212) ##########################################
15880
RICHARD GRANT WHITE
which modern medical science and humanity have developed.
Proper retreats should be provided, and ambulances kept ready,
with horses harnessed; and when symptoms of the Bacon-Shake-
speare craze manifest themselves, the patient should be imme.
diately carried off to the asylum, furnished with pens, ink, and
paper, a copy of Bacon's works, one of the Shakespeare plays,
and one of Mrs. Cowden-Clarke's Concordance and that good
lady is largely responsible for the development of this harmless
mental disease, and other fads” called Shakespearean); and the
literary results, which would be copious, should be received for
publication with deferential respect, and then — committed to the
flames. In this way the innocent victims of the malady might
be soothed and tranquillized, and the world protected against the
debilitating influence of tomes of tedious twaddle.
As to treating the question seriously, that is not to be done
by men of common-sense and moderate knowledge of the sub-
ject. Even the present not very serious, or I fear, sufficiently
considerate, examination of it (to which I was not very ready,
but much the contrary) provokes me to say almost with Henry
Percy's words, that I could divide myself and go to buffets for
being moved by such a dish of skimmed milk to so honorable an
action. It is as certain that William Shakespeare wrote (after
the theatrical fashion and under the theatrical conditions of his
day) the plays which bear his name, as it is that Francis Bacon
wrote the Novum Organum,' the Advancement of Learning,'
and the “Essays. ' We know this as well as we know any fact
in history. The notion that Bacon also wrote (Titus Androni-
cus,' The Comedy of Errors,' 'Hamlet,' 'King Lear,' and
Othello,' is not worth five minutes' serious consideration by any
reasonable creature.
BIG WORDS FOR SMALL THOUGHTS
S
From Words and Their Uses. Copyright 1870, by Richard Grant White
IMPLE and unpretending ignorance is always respectable, and
sometimes charming; but there is little that more deserves
contempt than the pretense of ignorance to knowledge. The
curse and the peril of language in this day, and particularly in
this country, is, that it is at the mercy of men who, instead of
being content to use it well according to their honest ignorance,
## p. 15881 (#213) ##########################################
RICHARD GRANT WHITE
15881
use it ill according to their affected knowledge; who being
vulgar, would seem elegant; who being empty, would seem
full; who make up in pretense what they lack in reality; and
whose little thoughts, let off in enormous phrases, sound like fire-
crackers in an empty barrel.
How I detest the vain parade
Of big-mouthed words of large pretense!
And shall they thus thy soul degrade,
. O tongue so dear to common-sense?
Shouldst thou accept the pompous laws
By which our blustering tyros prate,
Soon Shakespeare's songs and Bunyan's saws
Some tumid trickster must translate.
Our language, like our daily life,
Accords the homely and sublime,
And jars with phrases that are rife
With pedantry of every clime.
For eloquence it clangs like arms,
For love it touches tender chords;
But he to whom the world's heart warms
Must speak in wholesome, home-bred words.
To the reader who is familiar with Béranger's ‘Derniers Chan-
sons, these lines will bring to mind two stanzas in the poet's
"Tambour Major,' in which he compares pretentious phrases to
a big, bedizened drum-major, and simple language to the little
gray-coated Napoleon at Austerlitz,-a comparison which has
been brought to my mind very frequently during the writing of
this book.
It will be well for us to examine some examples of this vice
of language in its various kinds; and for them we must go to
the newspaper press, which reflects so truly the surface of modern
life, although its surface only.
There is, first, the style which has rightly come to be called
" newspaper English ”; and in which we are told, for instance,
of an attack upon a fortified position on the Potomac, that the
thousand-toned artillery duel progresses magnificently at this
hour, the howling shell bursting in wild profusion in camp and
battery, and among the trembling pines. I quote this from
the columns of a first-rate New York newspaper, because the real
thing is so much more characteristic than any imitation could be,
»
## p. 15882 (#214) ##########################################
15882
RICHARD GRANT WHITE
it was.
and is quite as ridiculous. This style has been in use so long,
.
and has, day after day, been impressed upon the minds of so
many persons to whom newspapers are authority, as to language
no less than as to facts, that it is actually coming into vogue in
daily life with some of our people. Not long ago my attention
was attracted by a building which I had not noticed before; and
stepping up to a policeman who stood hard by, I asked him what
He promptly replied (I wrote down his answer within
the minute), “That is an institootion inaugurated under the
auspices of the Sisters of Mercy, for the reformation of them
young females what has deviated from the paths of rectitood. ”
It was in fact an asylum for women of the town; but my in-
formant would surely have regarded such a description of it as
inelegant, and perhaps as indelicate. True, there was a glaring
incongruity between the pompousness of his phraseology and his
use of those simple and common parts of speech, the pronouns;
but I confess that in his dispensation of language, “them” and
what were the only crumbs from which I received any com-
fort. But could I find fault with my civil and obliging inform-
ant, when I knew that every day he might read in the leading
articles of our best newspapers such sentences, for instance, as the
following ? -
(
« There is, without doubt, some subtle essence permeating the ele-
mentary constitution of crime which so operates that men and women
become its involuntary followers by sheer force of attraction, as it
were. »
I am sure, at least, that the policeman knew better what he
meant when he spoke than the journalist did what he meant
when he wrote. Policeman and journalist both wished not merely
to tell what they knew and thought in the simplest, clearest way;
they wished to say something elegant, and to use fine language:
and both made themselves ridiculous. Neither this fault nor this
complaint is new; but the censure seems not to have diminished
the fault, either in frequency or in degree. Our every day writ-
ing is infested with this silly bombast, this stilted nonsense. One
journalist reflecting upon the increase of violence, and wishing to
say that ruffians should not be allowed to go armed, writes, “We
cannot, however, allow the opportunity to pass without expressing
our surprise that the law should allow such abandoned and desper-
ate characters to remain in possession of lethal weapons. ” Lethal
»
## p. 15883 (#215) ##########################################
RICHARD GRANT WHITE
15883
(
means deadly, neither more nor less; but it would be very tame
and unsatisfying to use an expression so common and so easily
understood. Another journalist, in the course of an article upon
a murder, says of the murderer that “a policeman went to his
residence, and there secured the clothes that he wore when he
committed the murderous deed”; and that being found in a tub
of water, “they were so smeared by blood as to incarnadine the
water of the tub in which they were deposited. ” To say that “the
policeman went to the house or room of the murderer, and there
found the clothes he wore when he did the murder, which were
so bloody that they reddened the water into which they had been
thrown,” would have been far too homely.
But not only are our journals and our speeches to Buncombe
infested with this big-worded style, — the very preambles to our
acts of legislature, and the official reports upon the dryest and
most matter-of-fact subjects, are bloated with it. It appears in
the full flower of absurdity in the following sentence, which I
find in the report of a committee of the Legislature of New York
on street railways. The committee wished to say that the public
looked upon all plans for the running of fast trains at a height
of fifteen or twenty feet as fraught with needless danger; and
the committeeman who wrote for them made them say it in this
amazing fashion:-
“It is not to be denied that any system which demands the pro-
pulsion of cars at a rapid rate, at an elevation of fifteen or twenty
feet, is not entirely consistent, in public estimation, with the greatest
attainable immunity from the dangers of transportation. ”
Such a use of words as this, only indicates the lack as well
of mental vigor as of good taste and education on the part of the
user. “Oh,” said a charming, highly cultivated, and thorough-bred
woman, speaking in my hearing of one of her own sex of infe-
rior breeding and position, but who was making literary preten-
sions, and with some success as far as notoriety and money were
concerned, - “Oh, save me from talking with that woman! If you
ask her to come and see you, she never says she's sorry she
can't come, but that she regrets that the multiplicity of her en-
gagements precludes her from accepting your polite invitation. ”
The foregoing instances are examples merely of a pretentious
and ridiculous use of words which is now very common. They are
not remarkable for incorrectness. But the freedom with which
## p. 15884 (#216) ##########################################
15884
RICHARD GRANT WHITE
((
persons who have neither the knowledge of language which
comes of culture, nor that which springs spontaneously from an
inborn perception and mastery, are allowed to address the public
and to speak for it, produces a class of writers who fill, as it is
unavoidable that they should fill, our newspapers and public
documents with words which are ridiculous, not only from their
pretentiousness, but from their preposterous unfitness for the uses
to which they are put. These persons not only write abominably
in point of style, but they do not say what they mean. When,
for instance, a member of Congress is spoken of in a lead-
ing journal as "a sturdy republican of progressive integrity," no
very great acquaintance with language is necessary to the discov-
ery that the writer is ignorant of the meaning either of progress
or of integrity. When in the same columns another man is
described as being "endowed with an impassionable nature," peo-
ple of common sense and education see that here is a man not
only writing for the public, but actually attempting to coin words,
who, as far as his knowledge of language goes, needs the instruc-
tion to be had in a good common school. So again, when another
journal of position, discoursing upon convent discipline, tells us
that a young woman is not fitted for “the stern amenities of
religious life," and we see it laid down in a report to an import-
ant public body that under certain circumstances, “the criminality
of an act is heightened, and reflects a very turgid morality indeed,”
it is according to our knowledge whether we find in the phrases
stern amenities” and “turgid morality” occasion for study or
food for laughter.
Writing like this is a fruit of a pitiful desire to seem ele-
gant when one is not so, which troubles many people, and which
manifests itself in the use of words as well as in the wearing of
clothes, the buying of furniture, and the giving of entertainments;
and which in language takes form in words which sound large,
and seem to the person who uses them to give him the air of
a cultivated man, because he does not know exactly what they
mean. Such words sometimes become a fashion among
such
people, who are numerous enough to set and keep up a fashion;
and they go on using them to each other, each afraid to admit to
the other that he does not know what the new word means, and
equally afraid to avoid its use, as a British snob is said never to
admit that he is entirely unacquainted with a duke.
(
1
1
!
1
## p. 15884 (#217) ##########################################
## p. 15884 (#218) ##########################################
WALT. WHITMAN
## p. 15884 (#219) ##########################################
יזו
.
. . !
;
*
## p. 15884 (#220) ##########################################
## p. 15885 (#221) ##########################################
15885
WALT WHITMAN
(1819–1892)
BY JOHN BURROUGHS
-
Ho goes there ? hankering, gross, mystical, nude; » –
hankering like the great elk in the forest in springtime;
gross as unhoused Nature is gross; mystical as Boehme or
Swedenborg; and so far as the concealments and disguises of the
conventional man, and the usual adornments of polite verse, are con-
cerned, as nude as Adam in Paradise. Indeed, it was the nudity of
Walt Whitman's verse, both in respect to its subject-matter and his
mode of treatment of it, that so astonished, when it did not repel,
his readers. He boldly stripped away everything conventional and
artificial from man,- clothes, customs, institutions, etc. ,—and treated
him as he is, primarily, in and of himself and in his relation to the
universe; and with equal boldness he stripped away what were to
him the artificial adjuncts of poetry,— rhyme, measure, and all the
stock language and forms of the schools,- and planted himself upon
a spontaneous rhythm of language and the inherently poetic in the
common and universal.
The result is the most audacious and debatable contribution yet
made to American literature, and one the merits of which will doubt-
less long divide the reading public. It gave a rude shock to most
readers of current poetry; but it was probably a wholesome shock,
like the rude douse of the sea to the victim of the warmed and per-
fumed bath. The suggestion of the sea is not inapt; because there
is, so to speak, a briny, chafing, elemental, or cosmic quality about
Whitman's work that brings up the comparison,-a something in
it bitter and forbidding, that the reader must conquer and become
familiar with before he can appreciate the tonic and stimulating
quality which it really holds. To Whitman may be applied, more
truly than to any other modern poet, Wordsworth's lines -
« You must love him ere to you
He will seem worthy of your love. "
As the new generations are less timid and conforming than their
fathers, and take more and more to the open air and its exhilara-
tions, so they are coming more and more into relation with the spirit
## p. 15886 (#222) ##########################################
15886
WALT WHITMAN
1
!
1
of this poet of democracy. If Whitman means anything, he means
the open air, and a life fuller and fuller of the sanity, the poise, and
the health of nature; freer and freer of everything that hampers,
enervates, enslaves, and makes morbid and sickly the body and the
soul of man.
Whitman was the first American poet of any considerable renown
born outside of New England, and the first to show a larger, freer,
bolder spirit than that of the New England poets. He was a native
of Long Island, where at West Hills he was born on the 31st of May,
1819, and where his youth was passed. On his mother's side he was
Holland Dutch, on his father's English. There was a large family of
boys and girls who grew to be men and women of a marked type,
- large in stature, rather silent and slow in movement, and of great
tenacity of purpose. All the children showed Dutch traits, which were
especially marked in Walt, the eldest. Mr. William Sloan Kennedy,
who has given a good deal of attention to the subject, attributes
Whitman's stubbornness, his endurance, his practicality, his sanity, his
excessive neatness and purity of person, and the preponderance in
him of the simple and serious over the humorous and refined, largely
to his Dutch ancestry. His phlegm, his absorption, his repose, and
especially his peculiar pink-tinged skin, also suggested the country-
men of Rubens. The Quaker element also entered into his composi-
tion, through his maternal grandmother. Mr. Kennedy recognizes this
in his silence, his sincerity and plainness, his self-respect and respect
for every other human being, his free speech, his unconventionality,
his placidity, his benevolence and friendship, and his deep religious-
Whitman faithfully followed the inward light, the inward voice,
and gave little or no heed to the dissenting or remonstrating voices
of the world about him. The more determined the opposition, the
more intently he seems to have listened to the inward promptings.
The events of his life were few and ordinary. While yet a child
the family moved to Brooklyn, where the father worked at his trade
of carpentering, and where young Whitman attended the common
school till his thirteenth year. About this time he found employment
in a printing-office and learned to set type, and formed there tastes
and associations with printers and newspaper work that were strong
with him ever after. At the age of seventeen he became a country
school-teacher on Long Island, and began writing for newspapers and
magazines. We next hear of him about 1838-40 as editor and pub-
lisher of a weekly newspaper at Huntington, Long Island. After this
enterprise was abandoned, he found employment for five or six years
mainly in printing-offices as compositor, with occasional contributions
to the periodical literature of the day. He also wrote novels; only
.
the title of one of them — Frank Evans, a temperance tale — being
1
ness,
1
## p. 15887 (#223) ##########################################
WALT WHITMAN
15887
preserved. In 1846–7 he was editor of the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper.
It was during this decade, or from his twentieth to his thirtieth
year, that he seems to have entered so heartily and lovingly into
the larger, open-air life of New York: familiarizing himself with all
classes of workingmen and all trades and occupations; fraternizing
with drivers, pilots, mechanics; going, as he says in his poems, with
“powerful uneducated persons,” — letting his democratic proclivities
have full swing, and absorbing much that came to the surface later
in his 'Leaves of Grass. He was especially fond of omnibus drivers,
a unique class of men who have now disappeared. It is reported
of him that he once took the place of a disabled driver and drove
for him all winter, that the man's family might not suffer while he'
was recovering in the hospital. During this period he occasionally
appeared as a stump speaker at political mass-meetings in New York
and on Long Island, and was much liked.
When about thirty years of age, he set out on an extended and
very leisurely tour through the Middle, Western, and Southern States,
again absorbing material for his future work, and fetching up finally
in New Orleans, where he tarried a year or more, and where he
found employment on the editorial staff of the Crescent newspaper.
In 1850 we find him again in Brooklyn, where he started the Free-
man, an organ of the Free-Soilers. But the paper was short-lived.
Whitman had little business capacity, and was ill suited to any task
that required punctuality, promptness, or strict business methods.
He was a man, as he says in his “Leaves,' “preoccupied of his own
soul”; and money-getting and ordinary worldly success attracted him
but little. From 1851 to 1854 he turned his hand to his father's trade
of carpentering, building, and selling small houses to workingmen.
It is said that he might have prospered in this business had he con-
tinued in it. But other schemes filled his head.
He was already big with the conception of Leaves of Grass,' for
which consciously and unconsciously he had been many years get-
ting ready. He often dropped his carpentering to write away at his
Leaves. Finally, after many rewritings, in the spring of 1855 he
went to press with his book, setting up most of the type himself.
It came out as a thin quarto of ninety-four pages, presenting a
curious appearance to the eye and making a still more curious im-
pression upon the reader's mind. It attracted little attention save
ridicule, till Emerson wrote the author a letter containing a magnifi-
cent eulogium of the book, which Dana of the Tribune persuaded
Whitman to publish,- to Emerson's subsequent annoyance, since the
letter was made to cover a later edition of the Leaves) in which
was much more objectionable matter than in the first. This letter
brought the volume into notice, and helped to launch it and subsequent
## p. 15888 (#224) ##########################################
15888
WALT WHITMAN
enlarged editions of it upon its famous career, in both hemispheres.
So utterly out of keeping with the current taste in poetry was Whit-
man's work, that the first impression of it was, and in many minds
still is, to excite mirth and ridicule. This was partly because it took
no heed of the conventionalities of poetry or of human life, and partly
because of the naive simplicity of the author's mind.
In his poetry
he seems as untouched by our modern sophistications, and the over-
refinements of modern culture, as any of the Biblical writers.
In the second year of the Civil War, Whitman left Brooklyn and
became a volunteer nurse in the army hospitals in Washington. To
this occupation he gave much of his time and most of his substance
till after the close of the war. It is claimed for him that he person-
ally visited and ministered to over one hundred thousand sick and
wounded Union and Confederate soldiers. Out of this experience
grew his Drum Taps,' a thin volume of poems published in 1866.
It was subsequently incorporated with his 'Leaves. These were not
battle-pieces, or songs of triumph over a fallen foe,
“But a little book containing night's darkness, and blood-dripping wounds,
And psalms of the dead. ”
During these hospital years Whitman supported himself mainly by
writing letters to the New York Times. His Hospital Memoranda'
include most of this material. He wrote copious letters to his mother
at the same time, which were issued in book form during the fall of
1897 by his new Boston publishers, and named “The Wound-Dresser. ?
From 1865 to 1873 Whitman occupied the desk of a government clerk
in the Treasury Department. Previous to that time he had been dis-
missed from a position in the Interior Department, by its head, James
Harlan, because he was the author of Leaves of Grass. '
His services in the army hospitals impaired his health, and early
in 1873 he had a light stroke of paralysis. In the spring of that
year he moved to Camden, New Jersey, where his brother, Colonel
George Whitman, was living. Camden now became his permanent
home. His health was much impaired, his means very limited, but his
serenity and cheerfulness never deserted him. Many foreign trav-
elers made pilgrimages to Camden to visit him. He was generally
regarded by Europeans as the one distinctive American poet, the true
outcome in literature of modern democracy. He died March 26th,
1892, and his body is buried in a Camden cemetery, in an imposing
granite tomb of his own designing. Whitman never married. He was
always poor, but he was a man much beloved by young and old of
both sexes, while in a small band of men and women he inspired
an enthusiasm and a depth of personal attachment rare in any age.
In person he was a man of large and fine physical proportions, and
## p. 15889 (#225) ##########################################
WALT WHITMAN
15889
striking appearance. His tastes were simple, his wants few. He was
a man singularly clean in both speech and person. He loved primi-
tive things; and his strongest attachments were probably for simple,
natural, uneducated, but powerful persons. The common, the univer-
sal, that which all may have on equal terms, was as the breath of
his nostrils. In his "Leaves) he identifies himself fully with these
elements, declaring that -
«What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me. "
He aimed to put himself into a book, not after the manner of the
gossiping essayist like Montaigne, but after the manner of poetic
revelation; and sought to make his pages give an impression analo-
gous to that made by the living, breathing man. The Leaves' are
not beautiful like a statue, or any delicate and elaborate piece of carv-
ing; but beautiful, and ugly too if you like, as the living man or wo-
man is beautiful or ugly. The appeal is less to our abstract æsthetic
sense, and more to our concrete every-day sense of real things. This
is not to say that our æsthetic perceptions are not stimulated; but
only that they are appealed to in a different way, a less direct and
premeditated way, than they are in the popular poetry. Without the
emotion of the beautiful there can be no poetry; but beauty may
be the chief aim and gathered like flowers into nosegays, as in most
of the current poetry, or it may be subordinated, and left as it were
abroad in the air and landscape, as was Whitman's aim.
His con-
viction was that beauty should follow the poet — never lead him.
Whitman aimed at a complete human synthesis, and left the
reader to make of it what he could; and he is not at all disturbed if
he finds the bad there as well as the good, as in life itself. A good
deal of mental pressure must be brought to bear upon him before
his full meaning and significance comes out.
Readers who idly dip into him for poetic tidbits or literary mor-
ceaux, or who open his 'Leaves) expecting to be regaled with flowers
and perfumes, will surely be disappointed, if not shocked. His work
does not belong to the class of literary luxuries or delicacies. It
is primary and fundamental, and is only indirectly poetic; that is, it
does not seek beauty so much as it seeks that which makes beauty.
Its method is not exclusive, but inclusive.
It is the work of a power-
ful spirit that seeks to grasp life and the universe as a whole, and
to charge the conception with religious and poetic emotion; perhaps
I should say religious emotion alone, as Whitman clearly identifies
the two. Light readers only find now and then a trace of the poetic
in his work: they fail to see the essentially poetic character of the
whole; and they fail to see that there is a larger poetry than that
of gems and flowers. The poetry of pretty words and fancies is one
XXVII-994
-
## p. 15890 (#226) ##########################################
15890
WALT WHITMAN
thing; the poetry of vast conceptions and enthusiasm, and of religious
and humanitarian emotion, is quite another.
Our pleasure in the rhymed, measured, highly wrought verse of
the popular poets is doubtless more acute and instant than it is in
the irregular dithyrambic periods of Whitman: the current poetry
is more in keeping with the thousand and one artificial things with
which the civilized man surrounds himself, — perfumes, colors, music;
the distilled, the highly seasoned, the elaborately carved, — wine,
sweetmeats, cosmetics, etc. , etc. Whitman, in respect to his art and
poetic quality, is more like simple natural products, or the every-day
family staples meat, bread, milk, or the free unhoused elements frost,
| rain, spray. There is little in him that suggests the artificial in life,
or that takes note of or is the outcome of the refinements of our
civilization. Though a man of deep culture, yet culture cannot claim
him as her own, and in many of her devotees repudiates him en-
tirely. He let nature speak, but in a way that the uncultured man
never could. In its tone and spirit his 'Leaves of Grass' is as primi-
tive as the antique bards, while it yet implies and necessitates mod-
ern civilization.
It is urged that his work is formless, chaotic. On the other hand,
it may be claimed that a work that makes a distinct and continuous
impression, that gives a sense of unity, that holds steadily to an
,
ideal, that is never in doubt about its own method and aims, and
that really grips the reader's mind or thought, is not in any deep
sense formless. Leaves of Grass' is obviously destitute of the arbi-
trary and artificial form of regular verse; it makes no account of the
prosodical system: but its admirers claim for it the essential, innate
form of all vital organic things. There are imitations of Whitman
that are formless: one feels no will or purpose in them; they make
no more impact upon the reader's mind than vapor upon his hand.
A work is formless that has no motives, no ideas, no vertebra, no
central purpose controlling and subordinating all the parts. In his
plan, as I have said, Whitman aimed to outline a human life, his
own life, here in democratic America in the middle of the nineteenth
century; giving not merely its æsthetic and spiritual side, but its car-
nal and materialistic side as well, and imbuing the whole with poetic
passion. In working out this purpose we are not to hold him to a
mechanical definiteness and accuracy: he may build freely and range
far and wide; a man is made up of many and contradictory ele-
ments, and his life is a compound of evil and of good. The forces
that shape him are dynamic and not mechanic. If Whitman has
confused his purpose, if all the parts of his work are not related
more or less directly to this central plan, then is he in the true
sense formless. The trouble with Whitman is, his method is that of
## p. 15891 (#227) ##########################################
WALT WHITMAN
15891
the poet and not that of the essayist or philosopher. He is not the
least bit didactic; he never explains or apologizes. The reader must
take him on the wing, or not at all. He does not state his argu-
ment so much as he speaks out of it and effuses its atmosphere.
Then he is avowedly the poet of vista: to open doors and win-
dows, to let down bars rather than to put them up, to dissolve forms,
to escape boundaries, to plant the reader on a hill rather than in a
corner, — this fact is the explanation of the general character of his
work in respect to form.
Readers who have a keen sense of what is called artistic form in
poetry, meaning the sense of the deftly carved or shaped, are apt to
be repelled by the absence of all verse architecture in the poems.
A hostile critic might say they are not builded up, but heaped up.
But this would give a wrong impression, inasmuch as a piece of true
literature bears no necessary analogy to a house or the work of the
cabinet-maker. It may find its type or suggestion in a tree, a river,
or in any growing or expanding thing. Verse perfectly fluid, and
without any palpable, resisting extrinsic form whatever, or anything to
take his readers' attention away from himself and the content of his
page, was Whitman's aim.
Opinion will doubtless long be divided about the value of his
work. He said he was willing to wait to be understood by the
growth of the taste of himself. That this taste is growing, that the
new generations are coming more and more into his spirit and atmo-
sphere, that the mountain is less and less forbidding, and looms up
more and more as we get farther from it, is obvious enough. That
he will ever be in any sense a popular poet is in the highest degree
improbable: but that he will kindle enthusiasm in successive minds;
that he will be an enormous feeder to the coming poetic genius of
his country; that he will enlarge criticism, and make it easy for every
succeeding poet to be himself and to be American; and finally that
he will take his place among the few major poets of the race, I have
not the least doubt.
Josu
Aurroughs
## p. 15892 (#228) ##########################################
15892
WALT WHITMAN
[The following selections are used by permission of the legal representatives
of the estate of Walt Whitman. ]
I HEARD YOU SOLEMN-SWEET PIPES OF THE ORGAN
I
HEARD you solemn-sweet pipes of the organ as last Sunday morn
I passed the church,
Winds of autumn, as I walked the woods at dusk I heard your
long-stretched sighs up above so mournful,
I heard the perfect Italian tenor singing at the opera, I heard the
soprano in the midst of the quartet singing;
Heart of my love! you too I heard murmuring low through one of
the wrists around my head,
Heard the pulse of you when all was still ringing little bells last
night under my ear.
SONG OF THE OPEN ROAD
I
Foot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
AF
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.
The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.
(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,
I am filled with them, and I will fill them in return. )
2
You road I enter upon and look around, I believe you are not all
that is here,
I believe that much unseen is also here.
## p. 15893 (#229) ##########################################
WALT WHITMAN
15893
Here the profound lesson of reception, nor preference nor denial,
The black with his woolly head, the felon, the diseased, the illiterate
person, are not denied;
The birth, the hasting after the physician, the beggar's tramp, the
drunkard's stagger, the laughing party of mechanics,
The escaped youth, the rich person's carriage, the fop, the eloping
couple,
The early marketman, the hearse, the moving of furniture into the
town, the return back from the town,
They pass, I also pass, anything passes, none can be interdicted,
None but are accepted, none but shall be dear to me.
3
You air that serves me with breath to speak!
You objects that call from diffusion my meanings and give them
shape!
You light that wraps me and all things in delicate equable showers!
You paths worn in the irregular hollows by the roadsides!
I believe you are latent with unseen existences, you are so dear to
me.
You flagged walks of the cities! you strong curbs at the edges !
You ferries! you planks and posts of wharves! you tirnber-lined
sides! you distant ships !
You rows of houses! you window-pierced façades! you roofs !
You porches and entrances! you copings and iron guards!
You windows whose transparent shells might expose so much!
You doors and ascending steps! you arches!
You gray stones of interminable pavements! you trodden crossings!
From all that has touched you I believe you have imparted to
yourselves, and now would impart the same secretly to
me,
From the living and the dead you have peopled your impassive sur-
faces, and the spirits thereof would be evident and ami-
cable with me.
4
The earth expanding right hand and left hand,
The picture alive, every part in its best light,
The music falling in where it is wanted, and stopping where it is
not wanted,
The cheerful voice of the public road, the gay fresh sentiment of the
road.
## p. 15894 (#230) ##########################################
15894
WALT WHITMAN
O highway I travel, do you say to me Do not leave me?
Do you say Venture not — if you leave me you are lost?
Do you say I am already prepared, I am well-beaten and undenied,
adhere to me?
O public road, I say back I am not afraid to leave you, yet I love
you,
You express me better than I can express myself,
You shall be more to me than my poem.
I think heroic deeds were all conceived in the open air, and all free
poems also,
I think I could stop here myself and do miracles,
I think whatever I shall meet on the road I shall like, and whoever
beholds me shall like me,
I think whoever I see must be happy.
5
From this hour I ordain myself loosed of limits and imaginary lines,
Going where I list, my own master total and absolute,
Listening to others, considering well what they say, .
Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,
Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that
would hold me.
I inhale great draughts of space,
[mine.
The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are
I am larger, better than I thought,
I did not know I held so much goodness.
All seems beautiful to me,
I can repeat over to men and women, You have done such good to
me I would do the same to you,
I will recruit for myself and you as I go,
I will scatter myself among men and women as I
go,
I will toss a new gladness and roughness among them,
Whoever denies me it shall not trouble me,
Whoever accepts me he or she shall be blessed and shall bless me.
6
Now if a thousand perfect men were to appear it would not amaze
me,
Now if a thousand beautiful forms of women appeared it would not
astonish me.
## p. 15895 (#231) ##########################################
WALT WHITMAN
15895
Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons,
It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.
Here a great personal deed has room.
(Such a deed seizes upon the hearts of the whole race of men,
Its effusion of strength and will overwhelms law and mocks all
authority and all argument against it. )
Here is the test of wisdom,
Wisdom is not finally tested in schools,
Wisdom cannot be passed from one having it to another not having it,
Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof,
Applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content,
Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the
excellence of things;
Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes
it out of the soul.
Now I re-examine philosophies and religions,
They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under
the spacious clouds and along the landscape and flowing
currents.
Here is realization,
Here is a man tallied — he realizes here what he has in him,
The past, the future, majesty, love if they are vacant of you, you
are vacant of them.
Only the kernel of every object nourishes;
Where is he who tears off the husks for you and me?
Where is he that undoes stratagems and envelopes for you and me?
Here is adhesiveness, it is not previously fashioned, it is apropos;
Do you know what it is as you pass to be loved by strangers ?
Do you know the talk of those turning eyeballs ?
7
Here is the efflux of the soul,
The efflux of the soul comes from within through embowered gates
ever provoking questions,
These yearnings why are they? these thoughts in the darkness why
are they?
Why are there men and women that while they are nigh me the
sunlight expands my blood ?
Why when they leave me do my pennants of joy sink flat and lank?
## p. 15896 (#232) ##########################################
15896
WALT WHITMAN
Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious
thoughts descend upon me?
(I think they hang there winter and summer on those trees and
always drop fruit as I pass :)
What is it I interchange so suddenly with strangers ?
What with some driver as I ride on the seat by his side ?
What with some fisherman drawing his seine by the shore as I walk
by and pause ?
What gives me to be free to a woman's and man's good-will? what
gives me to be free to mine ?
8
The efflux of the Soul is happiness, here is happiness,
I think it pervades the open air, waiting at all times,
Now it flows unto us, we are rightly charged.
Here rises the fluid and attaching character,
The Auid and attaching character is the freshness and sweetness of
man and woman,
(The herbs of the morning sprout no fresher and sweeter every day
out of the roots of themselves, than it sprouts fresh and
sweet continually out of itself. )
Toward the fluid and attaching character exudes the sweat of the
love of young and old,
From it falls distilled the charm that mocks beauty and attainments,
Toward it heaves the shuddering longing ache of contact.
9
Allons! whoever you are come travel with me!
Traveling with me you find what never tires.
The earth never tires,
The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first, Nature is rude
and incomprehensible at first,
Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well enveloped,
I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can
tell.
Allons! we must not stop here,
However sweet these laid-up stores, however convenient this dwelling
we cannot remain here,
However sheltered this port and however calm these waters we must
not anchor here,
However welcome the hospitality that surrounds us we are permitted
to receive it but a little while.
## p. 15897 (#233) ##########################################
WALT WHITMAN
15897
IO
Allons! the inducements shall be greater,
We will sail pathless and wild seas,
We will go where winds blow, waves dash, and the Yankee clipper
speeds by under full sail.
Allons! with power, liberty, the earth, the elements,
Health, defiance, gayety, self-esteem, curiosity;
Allons! from all formules!
From your formules, O bat-eyed and materialistic priests.
The stale cadaver blocks up the passage
the burial waits no longer.
Allons! yet take warning!
He traveling with me needs the best blood, thews, endurance,
None may come to the trial till he or she bring courage and health,
Come not here if you have already spent the best of yourself,
Only those may come who come in sweet and determined bodies,
No diseased person, no rum-drinker or venereal taint is permitted
here.
(I and mine do not convince by arguments, similes, rhymes,
We convince by our presence. )
II
Listen! I will be honest with you,
I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough 'new prizes,
These are the days that must happen to you:
You shall not heap up what is called riches,
You shall scatter with lavish hand all that you earn or achieve,
You but arrive at the city to which you were destined, you hardly
settle yourself to satisfaction before you are called by an
irresistible call to depart,
You shall be treated to the ironical smiles and mockings of those
who remain behind you,
What beckonings of love you receive you shall only answer with
passionate kisses of parting,
You shall not allow the hold of those who spread their reached hands
toward you.
I 2
Allons! after the great Companions, and to belong to them!
They too are on the road — they are the swift and majestic men-
they are the greatest women,
## p. 15898 (#234) ##########################################
15898
WALT WHITMAN
Enjoyers of calms of seas and storms of seas,
Sailors of many a ship, walkers of many a mile of land,
Habituès of many distant countries, habitués of far-distant dwellings,
Trusters of men and women, observers of cities, solitary toilers,
Pausers and contemplators of tufts, blossoms, shells of the shore,
Dancers at wedding-dances, kissers of brides, tender helpers of child-
ren, bearers of children,
Soldiers of revolts, standers by gaping graves, lowerers-down of
coffins,
Journeyers over consecutive seasons, over the years, the curious
years each emerging from that which preceded it,
Journeyers as with companions, namely their own diverse phases,
Forth-steppers from the latent unrealized baby-days,
Journeyers gayly with their own youth, journeyers with their bearded
and well-grained manhood,
Journeyers with their womanhood, ample, unsurpassed, content,
Journeyers with their own sublime old age of manhood or woman-
hood.
Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the
universe,
Old age, flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.
13
Allons! to that which is endless as it was beginningless,
To undergo much, tramps of days, rests of nights,
To merge all in the travel they tend to, and the days and nights
they tend to,
Again to merge them in the start of superior journeys,
To see nothing anywhere but what you may reach it and pass it,
To conceive no time, however distant, but what you may reach it
and pass it,
To look up or down no road but it stretches and waits for you, how-
ever long but it stretches and waits for you,
To see no being, not God's or any, but you also go thither,
To see no possession but you may possess it, enjoying all without
låbor or purchase, abstracting the feast yet not abstract-
ing one particle of it,
To take the best of the farmer's farm and the rich man's elegant
villa, and the chaste blessings of the well-married couple,
and the fruits of orchards and flowers of gardens,
To take to your use out of the compact cities as you pass through,
To carry buildings and streets with you afterward wherever you
go,
## p. 15899 (#235) ##########################################
WALT WHITMAN
15899
To gather the minds of men out of their brains as you encounter
them, to gather the love out of their hearts,
To take your lovers on the road with you, for all that you leave
them behind you,
To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for
traveling souls.
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.
Of the progress of the souls of men and women along the grand
roads of the universe, all other progress is the needed
emblem and sustenance.
Forever alive, forever forward,
Stately, solemn, sad, withdrawn, baffled, mad, turbulent, feeble, dis-
satisfied,
Desperate, proud, fond, sick, accepted by men, rejected by men,
They go! they go! I know that they go, but I know not where they
go,
But I know that they go toward the best — toward something great.
Whoever you are, come forth! or man or woman come forth!
You must not stay sleeping and dallying there in the house, though
you built it, or though it has been built for you.
Out of the dark confinement! out from behind the screen!
It is useless to protest, I know all and expose it.
Behold through you as bad as the rest,
Through the laughter, dancing, dining, supping, of people,
Inside of dresses and ornaments, inside of those washed and trimmed
faces,
Behold a secret silent loathing and despair.
No husband, no wife, no friend, trusted to hear the confession,
Another self, a duplicate of every one, skulking and hiding it goes,
Formless and worldless through the streets of the cities, polite and
bland in the parlors,
In the cars of railroads, in steamboats, in the public assembly,
Home to the houses of men and women, at the table, in the bed-
room, everywhere,
## p. 15900 (#236) ##########################################
15900
WALT WHITMAN
Smartly attired, countenance smiling, form upright, death under the
breast-bones, hell under the skull-bones,
Under the broadcloth and gloves, under the ribbons and artificial
flowers,
Keeping fair with the customs, speaking not a syllable of itself,
Speaking of anything else but never of itself.
14
Allons! through struggles and wars !
The goal that was named cannot be countermanded.
Have the past struggles succeeded ?
What has succeeded ? yourself? your nation ? Nature ?
Now understand me well — it is provided in the essence of things
that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall
come forth something to make a greater struggle neces-
sary.
My call is the call of battle, I nourish active rebellion,
He going with me must go well armed,
He going with me goes often with spare diet, poverty, angry en-
emies, desertions.
15
Allons! the road is before us!
It is safe I have tried it — my own feet have tried it well — be not
detained!
Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the
shelf unopened!
Let the tools remain in the workshop! let the money remain un-
earned!
Let the school stand! mind not the cry of the teacher!
Let the preacher preach in his pulpit! let the lawyer plead in the
court, and the judge expound the law.
Camerado, I give you my hand!
I give you my love more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law:
Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live ?
## p. 15901 (#237) ##########################################
WALT WHITMAN
15901
DIRGE FOR TWO VETERANS
T"
"He last sunbeam
Lightly falls from the finished Sabbath,
On the pavement here, and there beyond it is looking,
Down a new-made double grave.
Lo, the moon ascending,
Up from the east the silvery round moon,
Beautiful over the housetops, ghastly, phantom moon,
Immense and silent moon.
I see a sad procession,
And I hear the sound of coming full-keyed bugles,
All the channels of the city streets they're flooding,
As with voices and with tears.
I hear the great drums pounding,
And the small drums steady whirring,
And every blow of the great convulsive drums
Strikes me through and through.
For the son is brought with the father,
(In the foremost ranks of the fierce assault they fell,
Two veterans son and father drop together,
And the double grave awaits them. )
Now nearer blow the bugles,
And the drums strike more convulsive,
And the daylight o'er the pavement quite has faded,
And the strong dead-march enwraps me.
In the eastern sky up-buoying,
The sorrowful vast phantom moves illumined.
('Tis some mother's large transparent face,
In heaven brighter growing. )
O strong dead-march you please me!
O moon immense with your silvery face you soothe me!
O my soldiers twain! O my veterans passing to burial!
What I have I also give you.
The moon gives you light,
And the bugles and the drums give you music,
And my heart, O my soldiers, my veterans,
My heart gives you love.
## p. 15902 (#238) ##########################################
15902
WALT WHITMAN
WHEN LILACS LAST IN THE DOOR-YARD BLOOMED
I
HEN lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed,
And the great star early drooped in the western sky in the
night,
I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
WF
Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.
2
O powerful western fallen star!
O shades of night -0 moody, tearful night!
O great star disappeared -0 the black murk that hides the star!
O cruel hands that hold me powerless - O helpless soul of me!
O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul!
-
3
In the door-yard fronting an old farm-house, near the whitewashed
palings,
Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich
green,
With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong
I love,
With every leaf a miracle; — and from this bush in the door-yard,
With delicate-colored blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
A sprig with its flower I break.
4
In the swamp in secluded recesses,
A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.
Solitary the thrush,
The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
Sings by himself a song. -
Song of the bleeding throat,
Death's outlet song of life (for well, dear brother, I know,
If thou wast not granted to sing thou wouldst surely die).
## p. 15903 (#239) ##########################################
WALT WHITMAN
15903
5
Over the breast of the spring, the land, amid cities,
Amid lanes and through old woods, where lately the violets peeped
from the ground, spotting the gray débris,
Amid the grass in the fields each side of the lanes, passing the end-
less grass,
Passing the yellow-speared wheat, every grain from its shroud in the
dark-brown fields uprisen,
Passing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchards,
Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave,
Night and day journeys a coffin.
RICHARD GRANT WHITE
15877
hasty in generalization, but as a whole both sound and stimulating.
'Studies in Shakespeare,' made up of papers collected by his wife
after his death (1885), gives in an attractive way his views on the
English master-poet. For twenty-five years Mr. White worked at
Shakespearean criticism; and his final Riverside Edition of Shake-
speare, which appeared in 1884, proved one of the most popular pre-
pared by an American.
Mr. White was for many years the chief clerk of the United States
Revenue Marine Bureau for the District of New York,- a post he
resigned in 1878. His life was a busy one, calling on his time and
strength in many ways. Looking at his work as a whole, and dis-
regarding what was necessarily temporary in it, a residue of valuable
and enjoyable literary work remains to give him his place among
American essayists and scholars. He died on April 8th, 1885, at his
birthplace, New York city.
THE BACON-SHAKESPEARE CRAZE
Re-
From (Studies in Shakespeare. Copyright 1885, by Alexina B. White.
printed by permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , publishers
ND now we to
A inherent absurdity (as distinguished from evidence and ex-
ternal conditions) of this fantastical notion,- the unlikeness
of Bacon's mind and of his style to those of the writer of the
plays. Among all the men of that brilliant period who stand
forth in all the blaze of its light with sufficient distinction for us
at this time to know anything of them, no two were so element-
ally unlike in their mental and moral traits and in their literary
habits as Francis Bacon and William Shakespeare; and each of
them stamped his individuality unmistakably upon his work.
Both were thinkers of the highest order; both, what we some-
what loosely call philosophers: but how different their philosophy,
how divergent their ways of thought, and how notably unlike
their modes of expression! Bacon, a cautious observer and inves-
tigator, ever looking at men and things through the dry light of
cool reason; Shakespeare, glowing with instant inspiration, seeing
by intuition the thing before him, outside and inside, body and
spirit, as it was, yet molding it as it was to his immediate need,
– finding in it merely an occasion of present thought, and re-
gardless of it except as a stimulus to his fancy and his imagina-
tion: Bacon, a logician; Shakespeare, one who set logic at naught,
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RICHARD GRANT WHITE
and soared upon wings compared with which syllogisms are
crutches: Bacon, who sought, in the phrase of Saul of Tarsus, –
that Shakespeare of Christianity,- to prove all things, and to hold
fast that which is good; Shakespeare, one who, like Saul, loosed
upon the world winged phrases, but who recked not his own
rede, proved nothing, and held fast both to good and evil, de-
lighting in his Falstaff as much as he delighted in his Imogen:
Bacon, in his writing the most self-asserting of men; Shake-
speare, one who when he wrote his plays did not seem to have a
self: Bacon, the most cautious and painstaking, the most consist-
ent and exact, of writers; Shakespeare, the most heedless, the
most inconsistent, the most inexact, of all writers who have risen
to fame: Bacon, sweet sometimes, sound always, but dry, stiff,
and formal; Shakespeare, unsavory sometimes, but oftenest breath-
ing perfume from Paradise, -grand, large, free, flowing, flexi- .
ble, unconscious, and incapable of formality: Bacon, precise and
reserved in expression; Shakespeare, a player and quibbler with
words, often swept away by his own verbal conceits into intel-
lectual paradox, and almost into moral obliquity: Bacon, without
humor; Shakespeare's smiling lips the mouthpiece of humor for
all human kind: Bacon, looking at the world before him, and at
the teaching of past ages, with a single eye to his theories and
his individual purposes; Shakespeare, finding in the wisdom and
the folly, the woes and the pleasures of the past and the present,
merely the means of giving pleasure to others and getting money
for himself, and rising to his height as a poet and a moral
teacher only by his sensitive intellectual sympathy with all the
needs and joys and sorrows of humanity: Bacon, shrinking from
a generalization even in morals; Shakespeare, ever moralizing,
and dealing even with individual men and particular things in
their general relations: both worldly-wise, both men of the world,
— for both these master intellects of the Christian era
worldly-minded men in the thorough Bunyan sense of the term,
but the one using his knowledge of men and things critically
in philosophy and in affairs; the other, his synthetically, as a cre-
ative artist: Bacon, a highly trained mind, and showing his train-
ing at every step of his cautious, steady march; Shakespeare,
wholly untrained, and showing his want of training even in the
highest reach of his soaring flight: Bacon, utterly without the
poetic even in a secondary degree, as is most apparent when he
desires to show the contrary; Shakespeare, rising with unconscious
were
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RICHARD GRANT WHITE
15879
-
effort to the highest heaven of poetry ever reached by the human
mind. To suppose that one of these men did his own work and
also the work of the other, is to assume two miracles for the
sake of proving one absurdity, and to shrink from accepting in
the untaught son of the Stratford yeoman a miraculous miracle,
one that does not defy or suspend the laws of nature.
Many readers of these pages probably know that this notion
that our Shakespeare - the Shakespeare of As You Like It' and
'
' Hamlet' and 'King Lear' – was Francis Bacon masking in the
guise of a player at the Globe Theatre, is not of very recent
origin. It was first brought before the public by Miss Delia
Bacon (who afterwards deployed her theory in a ponderous vol-
ume, with an introduction by Nathaniel Hawthorne — who did
not advocate it) in an article in Putnam's Magazine for January
1856. Some time before that article was published, and shortly
after the publication of (Shakespeare's Scholar,' it was sent to
me in proof by the late Mr. George P. Putnam, with a letter
calling my attention to its importance, and a request that I
would write an introduction to it. After reading it carefully
and without prejudice (for I knew nothing of the theory or of
its author, and as I have already said, I am perfectly indifferent
as to the name and the personality of the writer of the plays,
and had as lief it should have been Francis Bacon as William
Shakespeare), I returned the article to Mr. Putnam, declining the
proposed honor of introducing it to the public, and adding that
as the writer was plainly neither a fool nor an ignoramus, she
must be insane; not a maniac, but what boys call “loony. ” So
it proved: she died a lunatic, and I believe in a lunatic asylum.
I record this incident for the first time on this occasion, not
at all in the spirit of l-told-you-so, but merely as a fitting pre-
liminary to the declaration that this Bacon-Shakespeare notion is
an infatuation,-a literary bee in the bonnets of certain ladies of
both sexes, which should make them the objects of tender care
and sympathy. It will not be extinguished at once; on the con-
trary, it may become a mental epidemic. For there is no notion,
no fancy or folly, which may not be developed into a move-
ment,” or even into a “school,” by iteration and agitation. I do
I
not despair of seeing a Bacon-Shakespeare Society, with an array
of vice-presidents of both sexes, that may make the New Shake-
speare Society look to its laurels. None the less, however, is it a
lunacy, which should be treated with all the skill and tenderness
((
>
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RICHARD GRANT WHITE
which modern medical science and humanity have developed.
Proper retreats should be provided, and ambulances kept ready,
with horses harnessed; and when symptoms of the Bacon-Shake-
speare craze manifest themselves, the patient should be imme.
diately carried off to the asylum, furnished with pens, ink, and
paper, a copy of Bacon's works, one of the Shakespeare plays,
and one of Mrs. Cowden-Clarke's Concordance and that good
lady is largely responsible for the development of this harmless
mental disease, and other fads” called Shakespearean); and the
literary results, which would be copious, should be received for
publication with deferential respect, and then — committed to the
flames. In this way the innocent victims of the malady might
be soothed and tranquillized, and the world protected against the
debilitating influence of tomes of tedious twaddle.
As to treating the question seriously, that is not to be done
by men of common-sense and moderate knowledge of the sub-
ject. Even the present not very serious, or I fear, sufficiently
considerate, examination of it (to which I was not very ready,
but much the contrary) provokes me to say almost with Henry
Percy's words, that I could divide myself and go to buffets for
being moved by such a dish of skimmed milk to so honorable an
action. It is as certain that William Shakespeare wrote (after
the theatrical fashion and under the theatrical conditions of his
day) the plays which bear his name, as it is that Francis Bacon
wrote the Novum Organum,' the Advancement of Learning,'
and the “Essays. ' We know this as well as we know any fact
in history. The notion that Bacon also wrote (Titus Androni-
cus,' The Comedy of Errors,' 'Hamlet,' 'King Lear,' and
Othello,' is not worth five minutes' serious consideration by any
reasonable creature.
BIG WORDS FOR SMALL THOUGHTS
S
From Words and Their Uses. Copyright 1870, by Richard Grant White
IMPLE and unpretending ignorance is always respectable, and
sometimes charming; but there is little that more deserves
contempt than the pretense of ignorance to knowledge. The
curse and the peril of language in this day, and particularly in
this country, is, that it is at the mercy of men who, instead of
being content to use it well according to their honest ignorance,
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RICHARD GRANT WHITE
15881
use it ill according to their affected knowledge; who being
vulgar, would seem elegant; who being empty, would seem
full; who make up in pretense what they lack in reality; and
whose little thoughts, let off in enormous phrases, sound like fire-
crackers in an empty barrel.
How I detest the vain parade
Of big-mouthed words of large pretense!
And shall they thus thy soul degrade,
. O tongue so dear to common-sense?
Shouldst thou accept the pompous laws
By which our blustering tyros prate,
Soon Shakespeare's songs and Bunyan's saws
Some tumid trickster must translate.
Our language, like our daily life,
Accords the homely and sublime,
And jars with phrases that are rife
With pedantry of every clime.
For eloquence it clangs like arms,
For love it touches tender chords;
But he to whom the world's heart warms
Must speak in wholesome, home-bred words.
To the reader who is familiar with Béranger's ‘Derniers Chan-
sons, these lines will bring to mind two stanzas in the poet's
"Tambour Major,' in which he compares pretentious phrases to
a big, bedizened drum-major, and simple language to the little
gray-coated Napoleon at Austerlitz,-a comparison which has
been brought to my mind very frequently during the writing of
this book.
It will be well for us to examine some examples of this vice
of language in its various kinds; and for them we must go to
the newspaper press, which reflects so truly the surface of modern
life, although its surface only.
There is, first, the style which has rightly come to be called
" newspaper English ”; and in which we are told, for instance,
of an attack upon a fortified position on the Potomac, that the
thousand-toned artillery duel progresses magnificently at this
hour, the howling shell bursting in wild profusion in camp and
battery, and among the trembling pines. I quote this from
the columns of a first-rate New York newspaper, because the real
thing is so much more characteristic than any imitation could be,
»
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RICHARD GRANT WHITE
it was.
and is quite as ridiculous. This style has been in use so long,
.
and has, day after day, been impressed upon the minds of so
many persons to whom newspapers are authority, as to language
no less than as to facts, that it is actually coming into vogue in
daily life with some of our people. Not long ago my attention
was attracted by a building which I had not noticed before; and
stepping up to a policeman who stood hard by, I asked him what
He promptly replied (I wrote down his answer within
the minute), “That is an institootion inaugurated under the
auspices of the Sisters of Mercy, for the reformation of them
young females what has deviated from the paths of rectitood. ”
It was in fact an asylum for women of the town; but my in-
formant would surely have regarded such a description of it as
inelegant, and perhaps as indelicate. True, there was a glaring
incongruity between the pompousness of his phraseology and his
use of those simple and common parts of speech, the pronouns;
but I confess that in his dispensation of language, “them” and
what were the only crumbs from which I received any com-
fort. But could I find fault with my civil and obliging inform-
ant, when I knew that every day he might read in the leading
articles of our best newspapers such sentences, for instance, as the
following ? -
(
« There is, without doubt, some subtle essence permeating the ele-
mentary constitution of crime which so operates that men and women
become its involuntary followers by sheer force of attraction, as it
were. »
I am sure, at least, that the policeman knew better what he
meant when he spoke than the journalist did what he meant
when he wrote. Policeman and journalist both wished not merely
to tell what they knew and thought in the simplest, clearest way;
they wished to say something elegant, and to use fine language:
and both made themselves ridiculous. Neither this fault nor this
complaint is new; but the censure seems not to have diminished
the fault, either in frequency or in degree. Our every day writ-
ing is infested with this silly bombast, this stilted nonsense. One
journalist reflecting upon the increase of violence, and wishing to
say that ruffians should not be allowed to go armed, writes, “We
cannot, however, allow the opportunity to pass without expressing
our surprise that the law should allow such abandoned and desper-
ate characters to remain in possession of lethal weapons. ” Lethal
»
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RICHARD GRANT WHITE
15883
(
means deadly, neither more nor less; but it would be very tame
and unsatisfying to use an expression so common and so easily
understood. Another journalist, in the course of an article upon
a murder, says of the murderer that “a policeman went to his
residence, and there secured the clothes that he wore when he
committed the murderous deed”; and that being found in a tub
of water, “they were so smeared by blood as to incarnadine the
water of the tub in which they were deposited. ” To say that “the
policeman went to the house or room of the murderer, and there
found the clothes he wore when he did the murder, which were
so bloody that they reddened the water into which they had been
thrown,” would have been far too homely.
But not only are our journals and our speeches to Buncombe
infested with this big-worded style, — the very preambles to our
acts of legislature, and the official reports upon the dryest and
most matter-of-fact subjects, are bloated with it. It appears in
the full flower of absurdity in the following sentence, which I
find in the report of a committee of the Legislature of New York
on street railways. The committee wished to say that the public
looked upon all plans for the running of fast trains at a height
of fifteen or twenty feet as fraught with needless danger; and
the committeeman who wrote for them made them say it in this
amazing fashion:-
“It is not to be denied that any system which demands the pro-
pulsion of cars at a rapid rate, at an elevation of fifteen or twenty
feet, is not entirely consistent, in public estimation, with the greatest
attainable immunity from the dangers of transportation. ”
Such a use of words as this, only indicates the lack as well
of mental vigor as of good taste and education on the part of the
user. “Oh,” said a charming, highly cultivated, and thorough-bred
woman, speaking in my hearing of one of her own sex of infe-
rior breeding and position, but who was making literary preten-
sions, and with some success as far as notoriety and money were
concerned, - “Oh, save me from talking with that woman! If you
ask her to come and see you, she never says she's sorry she
can't come, but that she regrets that the multiplicity of her en-
gagements precludes her from accepting your polite invitation. ”
The foregoing instances are examples merely of a pretentious
and ridiculous use of words which is now very common. They are
not remarkable for incorrectness. But the freedom with which
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RICHARD GRANT WHITE
((
persons who have neither the knowledge of language which
comes of culture, nor that which springs spontaneously from an
inborn perception and mastery, are allowed to address the public
and to speak for it, produces a class of writers who fill, as it is
unavoidable that they should fill, our newspapers and public
documents with words which are ridiculous, not only from their
pretentiousness, but from their preposterous unfitness for the uses
to which they are put. These persons not only write abominably
in point of style, but they do not say what they mean. When,
for instance, a member of Congress is spoken of in a lead-
ing journal as "a sturdy republican of progressive integrity," no
very great acquaintance with language is necessary to the discov-
ery that the writer is ignorant of the meaning either of progress
or of integrity. When in the same columns another man is
described as being "endowed with an impassionable nature," peo-
ple of common sense and education see that here is a man not
only writing for the public, but actually attempting to coin words,
who, as far as his knowledge of language goes, needs the instruc-
tion to be had in a good common school. So again, when another
journal of position, discoursing upon convent discipline, tells us
that a young woman is not fitted for “the stern amenities of
religious life," and we see it laid down in a report to an import-
ant public body that under certain circumstances, “the criminality
of an act is heightened, and reflects a very turgid morality indeed,”
it is according to our knowledge whether we find in the phrases
stern amenities” and “turgid morality” occasion for study or
food for laughter.
Writing like this is a fruit of a pitiful desire to seem ele-
gant when one is not so, which troubles many people, and which
manifests itself in the use of words as well as in the wearing of
clothes, the buying of furniture, and the giving of entertainments;
and which in language takes form in words which sound large,
and seem to the person who uses them to give him the air of
a cultivated man, because he does not know exactly what they
mean. Such words sometimes become a fashion among
such
people, who are numerous enough to set and keep up a fashion;
and they go on using them to each other, each afraid to admit to
the other that he does not know what the new word means, and
equally afraid to avoid its use, as a British snob is said never to
admit that he is entirely unacquainted with a duke.
(
1
1
!
1
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WALT. WHITMAN
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יזו
.
. . !
;
*
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15885
WALT WHITMAN
(1819–1892)
BY JOHN BURROUGHS
-
Ho goes there ? hankering, gross, mystical, nude; » –
hankering like the great elk in the forest in springtime;
gross as unhoused Nature is gross; mystical as Boehme or
Swedenborg; and so far as the concealments and disguises of the
conventional man, and the usual adornments of polite verse, are con-
cerned, as nude as Adam in Paradise. Indeed, it was the nudity of
Walt Whitman's verse, both in respect to its subject-matter and his
mode of treatment of it, that so astonished, when it did not repel,
his readers. He boldly stripped away everything conventional and
artificial from man,- clothes, customs, institutions, etc. ,—and treated
him as he is, primarily, in and of himself and in his relation to the
universe; and with equal boldness he stripped away what were to
him the artificial adjuncts of poetry,— rhyme, measure, and all the
stock language and forms of the schools,- and planted himself upon
a spontaneous rhythm of language and the inherently poetic in the
common and universal.
The result is the most audacious and debatable contribution yet
made to American literature, and one the merits of which will doubt-
less long divide the reading public. It gave a rude shock to most
readers of current poetry; but it was probably a wholesome shock,
like the rude douse of the sea to the victim of the warmed and per-
fumed bath. The suggestion of the sea is not inapt; because there
is, so to speak, a briny, chafing, elemental, or cosmic quality about
Whitman's work that brings up the comparison,-a something in
it bitter and forbidding, that the reader must conquer and become
familiar with before he can appreciate the tonic and stimulating
quality which it really holds. To Whitman may be applied, more
truly than to any other modern poet, Wordsworth's lines -
« You must love him ere to you
He will seem worthy of your love. "
As the new generations are less timid and conforming than their
fathers, and take more and more to the open air and its exhilara-
tions, so they are coming more and more into relation with the spirit
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WALT WHITMAN
1
!
1
of this poet of democracy. If Whitman means anything, he means
the open air, and a life fuller and fuller of the sanity, the poise, and
the health of nature; freer and freer of everything that hampers,
enervates, enslaves, and makes morbid and sickly the body and the
soul of man.
Whitman was the first American poet of any considerable renown
born outside of New England, and the first to show a larger, freer,
bolder spirit than that of the New England poets. He was a native
of Long Island, where at West Hills he was born on the 31st of May,
1819, and where his youth was passed. On his mother's side he was
Holland Dutch, on his father's English. There was a large family of
boys and girls who grew to be men and women of a marked type,
- large in stature, rather silent and slow in movement, and of great
tenacity of purpose. All the children showed Dutch traits, which were
especially marked in Walt, the eldest. Mr. William Sloan Kennedy,
who has given a good deal of attention to the subject, attributes
Whitman's stubbornness, his endurance, his practicality, his sanity, his
excessive neatness and purity of person, and the preponderance in
him of the simple and serious over the humorous and refined, largely
to his Dutch ancestry. His phlegm, his absorption, his repose, and
especially his peculiar pink-tinged skin, also suggested the country-
men of Rubens. The Quaker element also entered into his composi-
tion, through his maternal grandmother. Mr. Kennedy recognizes this
in his silence, his sincerity and plainness, his self-respect and respect
for every other human being, his free speech, his unconventionality,
his placidity, his benevolence and friendship, and his deep religious-
Whitman faithfully followed the inward light, the inward voice,
and gave little or no heed to the dissenting or remonstrating voices
of the world about him. The more determined the opposition, the
more intently he seems to have listened to the inward promptings.
The events of his life were few and ordinary. While yet a child
the family moved to Brooklyn, where the father worked at his trade
of carpentering, and where young Whitman attended the common
school till his thirteenth year. About this time he found employment
in a printing-office and learned to set type, and formed there tastes
and associations with printers and newspaper work that were strong
with him ever after. At the age of seventeen he became a country
school-teacher on Long Island, and began writing for newspapers and
magazines. We next hear of him about 1838-40 as editor and pub-
lisher of a weekly newspaper at Huntington, Long Island. After this
enterprise was abandoned, he found employment for five or six years
mainly in printing-offices as compositor, with occasional contributions
to the periodical literature of the day. He also wrote novels; only
.
the title of one of them — Frank Evans, a temperance tale — being
1
ness,
1
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WALT WHITMAN
15887
preserved. In 1846–7 he was editor of the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper.
It was during this decade, or from his twentieth to his thirtieth
year, that he seems to have entered so heartily and lovingly into
the larger, open-air life of New York: familiarizing himself with all
classes of workingmen and all trades and occupations; fraternizing
with drivers, pilots, mechanics; going, as he says in his poems, with
“powerful uneducated persons,” — letting his democratic proclivities
have full swing, and absorbing much that came to the surface later
in his 'Leaves of Grass. He was especially fond of omnibus drivers,
a unique class of men who have now disappeared. It is reported
of him that he once took the place of a disabled driver and drove
for him all winter, that the man's family might not suffer while he'
was recovering in the hospital. During this period he occasionally
appeared as a stump speaker at political mass-meetings in New York
and on Long Island, and was much liked.
When about thirty years of age, he set out on an extended and
very leisurely tour through the Middle, Western, and Southern States,
again absorbing material for his future work, and fetching up finally
in New Orleans, where he tarried a year or more, and where he
found employment on the editorial staff of the Crescent newspaper.
In 1850 we find him again in Brooklyn, where he started the Free-
man, an organ of the Free-Soilers. But the paper was short-lived.
Whitman had little business capacity, and was ill suited to any task
that required punctuality, promptness, or strict business methods.
He was a man, as he says in his “Leaves,' “preoccupied of his own
soul”; and money-getting and ordinary worldly success attracted him
but little. From 1851 to 1854 he turned his hand to his father's trade
of carpentering, building, and selling small houses to workingmen.
It is said that he might have prospered in this business had he con-
tinued in it. But other schemes filled his head.
He was already big with the conception of Leaves of Grass,' for
which consciously and unconsciously he had been many years get-
ting ready. He often dropped his carpentering to write away at his
Leaves. Finally, after many rewritings, in the spring of 1855 he
went to press with his book, setting up most of the type himself.
It came out as a thin quarto of ninety-four pages, presenting a
curious appearance to the eye and making a still more curious im-
pression upon the reader's mind. It attracted little attention save
ridicule, till Emerson wrote the author a letter containing a magnifi-
cent eulogium of the book, which Dana of the Tribune persuaded
Whitman to publish,- to Emerson's subsequent annoyance, since the
letter was made to cover a later edition of the Leaves) in which
was much more objectionable matter than in the first. This letter
brought the volume into notice, and helped to launch it and subsequent
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15888
WALT WHITMAN
enlarged editions of it upon its famous career, in both hemispheres.
So utterly out of keeping with the current taste in poetry was Whit-
man's work, that the first impression of it was, and in many minds
still is, to excite mirth and ridicule. This was partly because it took
no heed of the conventionalities of poetry or of human life, and partly
because of the naive simplicity of the author's mind.
In his poetry
he seems as untouched by our modern sophistications, and the over-
refinements of modern culture, as any of the Biblical writers.
In the second year of the Civil War, Whitman left Brooklyn and
became a volunteer nurse in the army hospitals in Washington. To
this occupation he gave much of his time and most of his substance
till after the close of the war. It is claimed for him that he person-
ally visited and ministered to over one hundred thousand sick and
wounded Union and Confederate soldiers. Out of this experience
grew his Drum Taps,' a thin volume of poems published in 1866.
It was subsequently incorporated with his 'Leaves. These were not
battle-pieces, or songs of triumph over a fallen foe,
“But a little book containing night's darkness, and blood-dripping wounds,
And psalms of the dead. ”
During these hospital years Whitman supported himself mainly by
writing letters to the New York Times. His Hospital Memoranda'
include most of this material. He wrote copious letters to his mother
at the same time, which were issued in book form during the fall of
1897 by his new Boston publishers, and named “The Wound-Dresser. ?
From 1865 to 1873 Whitman occupied the desk of a government clerk
in the Treasury Department. Previous to that time he had been dis-
missed from a position in the Interior Department, by its head, James
Harlan, because he was the author of Leaves of Grass. '
His services in the army hospitals impaired his health, and early
in 1873 he had a light stroke of paralysis. In the spring of that
year he moved to Camden, New Jersey, where his brother, Colonel
George Whitman, was living. Camden now became his permanent
home. His health was much impaired, his means very limited, but his
serenity and cheerfulness never deserted him. Many foreign trav-
elers made pilgrimages to Camden to visit him. He was generally
regarded by Europeans as the one distinctive American poet, the true
outcome in literature of modern democracy. He died March 26th,
1892, and his body is buried in a Camden cemetery, in an imposing
granite tomb of his own designing. Whitman never married. He was
always poor, but he was a man much beloved by young and old of
both sexes, while in a small band of men and women he inspired
an enthusiasm and a depth of personal attachment rare in any age.
In person he was a man of large and fine physical proportions, and
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15889
striking appearance. His tastes were simple, his wants few. He was
a man singularly clean in both speech and person. He loved primi-
tive things; and his strongest attachments were probably for simple,
natural, uneducated, but powerful persons. The common, the univer-
sal, that which all may have on equal terms, was as the breath of
his nostrils. In his "Leaves) he identifies himself fully with these
elements, declaring that -
«What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me. "
He aimed to put himself into a book, not after the manner of the
gossiping essayist like Montaigne, but after the manner of poetic
revelation; and sought to make his pages give an impression analo-
gous to that made by the living, breathing man. The Leaves' are
not beautiful like a statue, or any delicate and elaborate piece of carv-
ing; but beautiful, and ugly too if you like, as the living man or wo-
man is beautiful or ugly. The appeal is less to our abstract æsthetic
sense, and more to our concrete every-day sense of real things. This
is not to say that our æsthetic perceptions are not stimulated; but
only that they are appealed to in a different way, a less direct and
premeditated way, than they are in the popular poetry. Without the
emotion of the beautiful there can be no poetry; but beauty may
be the chief aim and gathered like flowers into nosegays, as in most
of the current poetry, or it may be subordinated, and left as it were
abroad in the air and landscape, as was Whitman's aim.
His con-
viction was that beauty should follow the poet — never lead him.
Whitman aimed at a complete human synthesis, and left the
reader to make of it what he could; and he is not at all disturbed if
he finds the bad there as well as the good, as in life itself. A good
deal of mental pressure must be brought to bear upon him before
his full meaning and significance comes out.
Readers who idly dip into him for poetic tidbits or literary mor-
ceaux, or who open his 'Leaves) expecting to be regaled with flowers
and perfumes, will surely be disappointed, if not shocked. His work
does not belong to the class of literary luxuries or delicacies. It
is primary and fundamental, and is only indirectly poetic; that is, it
does not seek beauty so much as it seeks that which makes beauty.
Its method is not exclusive, but inclusive.
It is the work of a power-
ful spirit that seeks to grasp life and the universe as a whole, and
to charge the conception with religious and poetic emotion; perhaps
I should say religious emotion alone, as Whitman clearly identifies
the two. Light readers only find now and then a trace of the poetic
in his work: they fail to see the essentially poetic character of the
whole; and they fail to see that there is a larger poetry than that
of gems and flowers. The poetry of pretty words and fancies is one
XXVII-994
-
## p. 15890 (#226) ##########################################
15890
WALT WHITMAN
thing; the poetry of vast conceptions and enthusiasm, and of religious
and humanitarian emotion, is quite another.
Our pleasure in the rhymed, measured, highly wrought verse of
the popular poets is doubtless more acute and instant than it is in
the irregular dithyrambic periods of Whitman: the current poetry
is more in keeping with the thousand and one artificial things with
which the civilized man surrounds himself, — perfumes, colors, music;
the distilled, the highly seasoned, the elaborately carved, — wine,
sweetmeats, cosmetics, etc. , etc. Whitman, in respect to his art and
poetic quality, is more like simple natural products, or the every-day
family staples meat, bread, milk, or the free unhoused elements frost,
| rain, spray. There is little in him that suggests the artificial in life,
or that takes note of or is the outcome of the refinements of our
civilization. Though a man of deep culture, yet culture cannot claim
him as her own, and in many of her devotees repudiates him en-
tirely. He let nature speak, but in a way that the uncultured man
never could. In its tone and spirit his 'Leaves of Grass' is as primi-
tive as the antique bards, while it yet implies and necessitates mod-
ern civilization.
It is urged that his work is formless, chaotic. On the other hand,
it may be claimed that a work that makes a distinct and continuous
impression, that gives a sense of unity, that holds steadily to an
,
ideal, that is never in doubt about its own method and aims, and
that really grips the reader's mind or thought, is not in any deep
sense formless. Leaves of Grass' is obviously destitute of the arbi-
trary and artificial form of regular verse; it makes no account of the
prosodical system: but its admirers claim for it the essential, innate
form of all vital organic things. There are imitations of Whitman
that are formless: one feels no will or purpose in them; they make
no more impact upon the reader's mind than vapor upon his hand.
A work is formless that has no motives, no ideas, no vertebra, no
central purpose controlling and subordinating all the parts. In his
plan, as I have said, Whitman aimed to outline a human life, his
own life, here in democratic America in the middle of the nineteenth
century; giving not merely its æsthetic and spiritual side, but its car-
nal and materialistic side as well, and imbuing the whole with poetic
passion. In working out this purpose we are not to hold him to a
mechanical definiteness and accuracy: he may build freely and range
far and wide; a man is made up of many and contradictory ele-
ments, and his life is a compound of evil and of good. The forces
that shape him are dynamic and not mechanic. If Whitman has
confused his purpose, if all the parts of his work are not related
more or less directly to this central plan, then is he in the true
sense formless. The trouble with Whitman is, his method is that of
## p. 15891 (#227) ##########################################
WALT WHITMAN
15891
the poet and not that of the essayist or philosopher. He is not the
least bit didactic; he never explains or apologizes. The reader must
take him on the wing, or not at all. He does not state his argu-
ment so much as he speaks out of it and effuses its atmosphere.
Then he is avowedly the poet of vista: to open doors and win-
dows, to let down bars rather than to put them up, to dissolve forms,
to escape boundaries, to plant the reader on a hill rather than in a
corner, — this fact is the explanation of the general character of his
work in respect to form.
Readers who have a keen sense of what is called artistic form in
poetry, meaning the sense of the deftly carved or shaped, are apt to
be repelled by the absence of all verse architecture in the poems.
A hostile critic might say they are not builded up, but heaped up.
But this would give a wrong impression, inasmuch as a piece of true
literature bears no necessary analogy to a house or the work of the
cabinet-maker. It may find its type or suggestion in a tree, a river,
or in any growing or expanding thing. Verse perfectly fluid, and
without any palpable, resisting extrinsic form whatever, or anything to
take his readers' attention away from himself and the content of his
page, was Whitman's aim.
Opinion will doubtless long be divided about the value of his
work. He said he was willing to wait to be understood by the
growth of the taste of himself. That this taste is growing, that the
new generations are coming more and more into his spirit and atmo-
sphere, that the mountain is less and less forbidding, and looms up
more and more as we get farther from it, is obvious enough. That
he will ever be in any sense a popular poet is in the highest degree
improbable: but that he will kindle enthusiasm in successive minds;
that he will be an enormous feeder to the coming poetic genius of
his country; that he will enlarge criticism, and make it easy for every
succeeding poet to be himself and to be American; and finally that
he will take his place among the few major poets of the race, I have
not the least doubt.
Josu
Aurroughs
## p. 15892 (#228) ##########################################
15892
WALT WHITMAN
[The following selections are used by permission of the legal representatives
of the estate of Walt Whitman. ]
I HEARD YOU SOLEMN-SWEET PIPES OF THE ORGAN
I
HEARD you solemn-sweet pipes of the organ as last Sunday morn
I passed the church,
Winds of autumn, as I walked the woods at dusk I heard your
long-stretched sighs up above so mournful,
I heard the perfect Italian tenor singing at the opera, I heard the
soprano in the midst of the quartet singing;
Heart of my love! you too I heard murmuring low through one of
the wrists around my head,
Heard the pulse of you when all was still ringing little bells last
night under my ear.
SONG OF THE OPEN ROAD
I
Foot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
AF
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.
The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.
(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,
I am filled with them, and I will fill them in return. )
2
You road I enter upon and look around, I believe you are not all
that is here,
I believe that much unseen is also here.
## p. 15893 (#229) ##########################################
WALT WHITMAN
15893
Here the profound lesson of reception, nor preference nor denial,
The black with his woolly head, the felon, the diseased, the illiterate
person, are not denied;
The birth, the hasting after the physician, the beggar's tramp, the
drunkard's stagger, the laughing party of mechanics,
The escaped youth, the rich person's carriage, the fop, the eloping
couple,
The early marketman, the hearse, the moving of furniture into the
town, the return back from the town,
They pass, I also pass, anything passes, none can be interdicted,
None but are accepted, none but shall be dear to me.
3
You air that serves me with breath to speak!
You objects that call from diffusion my meanings and give them
shape!
You light that wraps me and all things in delicate equable showers!
You paths worn in the irregular hollows by the roadsides!
I believe you are latent with unseen existences, you are so dear to
me.
You flagged walks of the cities! you strong curbs at the edges !
You ferries! you planks and posts of wharves! you tirnber-lined
sides! you distant ships !
You rows of houses! you window-pierced façades! you roofs !
You porches and entrances! you copings and iron guards!
You windows whose transparent shells might expose so much!
You doors and ascending steps! you arches!
You gray stones of interminable pavements! you trodden crossings!
From all that has touched you I believe you have imparted to
yourselves, and now would impart the same secretly to
me,
From the living and the dead you have peopled your impassive sur-
faces, and the spirits thereof would be evident and ami-
cable with me.
4
The earth expanding right hand and left hand,
The picture alive, every part in its best light,
The music falling in where it is wanted, and stopping where it is
not wanted,
The cheerful voice of the public road, the gay fresh sentiment of the
road.
## p. 15894 (#230) ##########################################
15894
WALT WHITMAN
O highway I travel, do you say to me Do not leave me?
Do you say Venture not — if you leave me you are lost?
Do you say I am already prepared, I am well-beaten and undenied,
adhere to me?
O public road, I say back I am not afraid to leave you, yet I love
you,
You express me better than I can express myself,
You shall be more to me than my poem.
I think heroic deeds were all conceived in the open air, and all free
poems also,
I think I could stop here myself and do miracles,
I think whatever I shall meet on the road I shall like, and whoever
beholds me shall like me,
I think whoever I see must be happy.
5
From this hour I ordain myself loosed of limits and imaginary lines,
Going where I list, my own master total and absolute,
Listening to others, considering well what they say, .
Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,
Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that
would hold me.
I inhale great draughts of space,
[mine.
The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are
I am larger, better than I thought,
I did not know I held so much goodness.
All seems beautiful to me,
I can repeat over to men and women, You have done such good to
me I would do the same to you,
I will recruit for myself and you as I go,
I will scatter myself among men and women as I
go,
I will toss a new gladness and roughness among them,
Whoever denies me it shall not trouble me,
Whoever accepts me he or she shall be blessed and shall bless me.
6
Now if a thousand perfect men were to appear it would not amaze
me,
Now if a thousand beautiful forms of women appeared it would not
astonish me.
## p. 15895 (#231) ##########################################
WALT WHITMAN
15895
Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons,
It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.
Here a great personal deed has room.
(Such a deed seizes upon the hearts of the whole race of men,
Its effusion of strength and will overwhelms law and mocks all
authority and all argument against it. )
Here is the test of wisdom,
Wisdom is not finally tested in schools,
Wisdom cannot be passed from one having it to another not having it,
Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof,
Applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content,
Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the
excellence of things;
Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes
it out of the soul.
Now I re-examine philosophies and religions,
They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under
the spacious clouds and along the landscape and flowing
currents.
Here is realization,
Here is a man tallied — he realizes here what he has in him,
The past, the future, majesty, love if they are vacant of you, you
are vacant of them.
Only the kernel of every object nourishes;
Where is he who tears off the husks for you and me?
Where is he that undoes stratagems and envelopes for you and me?
Here is adhesiveness, it is not previously fashioned, it is apropos;
Do you know what it is as you pass to be loved by strangers ?
Do you know the talk of those turning eyeballs ?
7
Here is the efflux of the soul,
The efflux of the soul comes from within through embowered gates
ever provoking questions,
These yearnings why are they? these thoughts in the darkness why
are they?
Why are there men and women that while they are nigh me the
sunlight expands my blood ?
Why when they leave me do my pennants of joy sink flat and lank?
## p. 15896 (#232) ##########################################
15896
WALT WHITMAN
Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious
thoughts descend upon me?
(I think they hang there winter and summer on those trees and
always drop fruit as I pass :)
What is it I interchange so suddenly with strangers ?
What with some driver as I ride on the seat by his side ?
What with some fisherman drawing his seine by the shore as I walk
by and pause ?
What gives me to be free to a woman's and man's good-will? what
gives me to be free to mine ?
8
The efflux of the Soul is happiness, here is happiness,
I think it pervades the open air, waiting at all times,
Now it flows unto us, we are rightly charged.
Here rises the fluid and attaching character,
The Auid and attaching character is the freshness and sweetness of
man and woman,
(The herbs of the morning sprout no fresher and sweeter every day
out of the roots of themselves, than it sprouts fresh and
sweet continually out of itself. )
Toward the fluid and attaching character exudes the sweat of the
love of young and old,
From it falls distilled the charm that mocks beauty and attainments,
Toward it heaves the shuddering longing ache of contact.
9
Allons! whoever you are come travel with me!
Traveling with me you find what never tires.
The earth never tires,
The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first, Nature is rude
and incomprehensible at first,
Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well enveloped,
I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can
tell.
Allons! we must not stop here,
However sweet these laid-up stores, however convenient this dwelling
we cannot remain here,
However sheltered this port and however calm these waters we must
not anchor here,
However welcome the hospitality that surrounds us we are permitted
to receive it but a little while.
## p. 15897 (#233) ##########################################
WALT WHITMAN
15897
IO
Allons! the inducements shall be greater,
We will sail pathless and wild seas,
We will go where winds blow, waves dash, and the Yankee clipper
speeds by under full sail.
Allons! with power, liberty, the earth, the elements,
Health, defiance, gayety, self-esteem, curiosity;
Allons! from all formules!
From your formules, O bat-eyed and materialistic priests.
The stale cadaver blocks up the passage
the burial waits no longer.
Allons! yet take warning!
He traveling with me needs the best blood, thews, endurance,
None may come to the trial till he or she bring courage and health,
Come not here if you have already spent the best of yourself,
Only those may come who come in sweet and determined bodies,
No diseased person, no rum-drinker or venereal taint is permitted
here.
(I and mine do not convince by arguments, similes, rhymes,
We convince by our presence. )
II
Listen! I will be honest with you,
I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough 'new prizes,
These are the days that must happen to you:
You shall not heap up what is called riches,
You shall scatter with lavish hand all that you earn or achieve,
You but arrive at the city to which you were destined, you hardly
settle yourself to satisfaction before you are called by an
irresistible call to depart,
You shall be treated to the ironical smiles and mockings of those
who remain behind you,
What beckonings of love you receive you shall only answer with
passionate kisses of parting,
You shall not allow the hold of those who spread their reached hands
toward you.
I 2
Allons! after the great Companions, and to belong to them!
They too are on the road — they are the swift and majestic men-
they are the greatest women,
## p. 15898 (#234) ##########################################
15898
WALT WHITMAN
Enjoyers of calms of seas and storms of seas,
Sailors of many a ship, walkers of many a mile of land,
Habituès of many distant countries, habitués of far-distant dwellings,
Trusters of men and women, observers of cities, solitary toilers,
Pausers and contemplators of tufts, blossoms, shells of the shore,
Dancers at wedding-dances, kissers of brides, tender helpers of child-
ren, bearers of children,
Soldiers of revolts, standers by gaping graves, lowerers-down of
coffins,
Journeyers over consecutive seasons, over the years, the curious
years each emerging from that which preceded it,
Journeyers as with companions, namely their own diverse phases,
Forth-steppers from the latent unrealized baby-days,
Journeyers gayly with their own youth, journeyers with their bearded
and well-grained manhood,
Journeyers with their womanhood, ample, unsurpassed, content,
Journeyers with their own sublime old age of manhood or woman-
hood.
Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the
universe,
Old age, flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.
13
Allons! to that which is endless as it was beginningless,
To undergo much, tramps of days, rests of nights,
To merge all in the travel they tend to, and the days and nights
they tend to,
Again to merge them in the start of superior journeys,
To see nothing anywhere but what you may reach it and pass it,
To conceive no time, however distant, but what you may reach it
and pass it,
To look up or down no road but it stretches and waits for you, how-
ever long but it stretches and waits for you,
To see no being, not God's or any, but you also go thither,
To see no possession but you may possess it, enjoying all without
låbor or purchase, abstracting the feast yet not abstract-
ing one particle of it,
To take the best of the farmer's farm and the rich man's elegant
villa, and the chaste blessings of the well-married couple,
and the fruits of orchards and flowers of gardens,
To take to your use out of the compact cities as you pass through,
To carry buildings and streets with you afterward wherever you
go,
## p. 15899 (#235) ##########################################
WALT WHITMAN
15899
To gather the minds of men out of their brains as you encounter
them, to gather the love out of their hearts,
To take your lovers on the road with you, for all that you leave
them behind you,
To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for
traveling souls.
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.
Of the progress of the souls of men and women along the grand
roads of the universe, all other progress is the needed
emblem and sustenance.
Forever alive, forever forward,
Stately, solemn, sad, withdrawn, baffled, mad, turbulent, feeble, dis-
satisfied,
Desperate, proud, fond, sick, accepted by men, rejected by men,
They go! they go! I know that they go, but I know not where they
go,
But I know that they go toward the best — toward something great.
Whoever you are, come forth! or man or woman come forth!
You must not stay sleeping and dallying there in the house, though
you built it, or though it has been built for you.
Out of the dark confinement! out from behind the screen!
It is useless to protest, I know all and expose it.
Behold through you as bad as the rest,
Through the laughter, dancing, dining, supping, of people,
Inside of dresses and ornaments, inside of those washed and trimmed
faces,
Behold a secret silent loathing and despair.
No husband, no wife, no friend, trusted to hear the confession,
Another self, a duplicate of every one, skulking and hiding it goes,
Formless and worldless through the streets of the cities, polite and
bland in the parlors,
In the cars of railroads, in steamboats, in the public assembly,
Home to the houses of men and women, at the table, in the bed-
room, everywhere,
## p. 15900 (#236) ##########################################
15900
WALT WHITMAN
Smartly attired, countenance smiling, form upright, death under the
breast-bones, hell under the skull-bones,
Under the broadcloth and gloves, under the ribbons and artificial
flowers,
Keeping fair with the customs, speaking not a syllable of itself,
Speaking of anything else but never of itself.
14
Allons! through struggles and wars !
The goal that was named cannot be countermanded.
Have the past struggles succeeded ?
What has succeeded ? yourself? your nation ? Nature ?
Now understand me well — it is provided in the essence of things
that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall
come forth something to make a greater struggle neces-
sary.
My call is the call of battle, I nourish active rebellion,
He going with me must go well armed,
He going with me goes often with spare diet, poverty, angry en-
emies, desertions.
15
Allons! the road is before us!
It is safe I have tried it — my own feet have tried it well — be not
detained!
Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the
shelf unopened!
Let the tools remain in the workshop! let the money remain un-
earned!
Let the school stand! mind not the cry of the teacher!
Let the preacher preach in his pulpit! let the lawyer plead in the
court, and the judge expound the law.
Camerado, I give you my hand!
I give you my love more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law:
Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live ?
## p. 15901 (#237) ##########################################
WALT WHITMAN
15901
DIRGE FOR TWO VETERANS
T"
"He last sunbeam
Lightly falls from the finished Sabbath,
On the pavement here, and there beyond it is looking,
Down a new-made double grave.
Lo, the moon ascending,
Up from the east the silvery round moon,
Beautiful over the housetops, ghastly, phantom moon,
Immense and silent moon.
I see a sad procession,
And I hear the sound of coming full-keyed bugles,
All the channels of the city streets they're flooding,
As with voices and with tears.
I hear the great drums pounding,
And the small drums steady whirring,
And every blow of the great convulsive drums
Strikes me through and through.
For the son is brought with the father,
(In the foremost ranks of the fierce assault they fell,
Two veterans son and father drop together,
And the double grave awaits them. )
Now nearer blow the bugles,
And the drums strike more convulsive,
And the daylight o'er the pavement quite has faded,
And the strong dead-march enwraps me.
In the eastern sky up-buoying,
The sorrowful vast phantom moves illumined.
('Tis some mother's large transparent face,
In heaven brighter growing. )
O strong dead-march you please me!
O moon immense with your silvery face you soothe me!
O my soldiers twain! O my veterans passing to burial!
What I have I also give you.
The moon gives you light,
And the bugles and the drums give you music,
And my heart, O my soldiers, my veterans,
My heart gives you love.
## p. 15902 (#238) ##########################################
15902
WALT WHITMAN
WHEN LILACS LAST IN THE DOOR-YARD BLOOMED
I
HEN lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed,
And the great star early drooped in the western sky in the
night,
I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
WF
Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.
2
O powerful western fallen star!
O shades of night -0 moody, tearful night!
O great star disappeared -0 the black murk that hides the star!
O cruel hands that hold me powerless - O helpless soul of me!
O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul!
-
3
In the door-yard fronting an old farm-house, near the whitewashed
palings,
Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich
green,
With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong
I love,
With every leaf a miracle; — and from this bush in the door-yard,
With delicate-colored blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
A sprig with its flower I break.
4
In the swamp in secluded recesses,
A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.
Solitary the thrush,
The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
Sings by himself a song. -
Song of the bleeding throat,
Death's outlet song of life (for well, dear brother, I know,
If thou wast not granted to sing thou wouldst surely die).
## p. 15903 (#239) ##########################################
WALT WHITMAN
15903
5
Over the breast of the spring, the land, amid cities,
Amid lanes and through old woods, where lately the violets peeped
from the ground, spotting the gray débris,
Amid the grass in the fields each side of the lanes, passing the end-
less grass,
Passing the yellow-speared wheat, every grain from its shroud in the
dark-brown fields uprisen,
Passing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchards,
Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave,
Night and day journeys a coffin.
