CHAPTER XII WHITMAN THE most unconventional personality in American literature is Walt Whitman, the good gray poet of Camden town. In many ways he is unique both as man and writer. The very fact that he is universally addressed as Walt (rather than as Walter, his full Christian name), is symbolic of the comradery suggested by his life and work, and carried out in his appearance: the slouch hat, the flannel shirt open at the neck, and general swagger of the man of the road, and spokesman for the Commonalty. His career, picturesque in itself, exhibits strange contrasts; for he has been in his time at once a literary cult, and the most despised and rejected of all makers of American literature; regarded by many as a fraud or a freak, yet hailed by those in authority both here and abroad as the master of a new message, the apostle of the creed of the commonplace, and still looked up to by a lusty band of disciples led by John Burroughs, as a literary god and a great original force in modern American life. Any estimate of Whitman is upon a less solid basis than that of the leaders already studied; there is more room for difference of opinion. No one in his senses can question the place of Poe or Hawthorne or Emerson. But in the case of Whitman, his art- or lack of art-offers fair prey for literary societies to discuss, pro and con, and his theory of Americanism is naturally an object of violent attack and as violent defense-with something to say on either side. But it is coming to be generally conceded that Whitman, for good or bad, is a force of real significance in our national development, and the study of our democratic ideals. There is nothing eccentric in grouping him with our literary leaders. He was born the same year as Lowell and died a year later, in 1892; but what a contrast in other respects! We turn from the quiet culture of Cambridge to a Long Island farm, where Whitman's folk were hard-working descendants of English and Dutch stock, with a dash of Quaker to gentle it withal. Whitman's father was a carpenter, his mother a Dutch-American girl, Van Velsor by name, a healthy outdoor body much loved of her son, as many references show. She was a "daily and daring" horseback rider, in her younger days. The Whitmans had been Long Island people for some generations; the poet's grandfather had carried on his farming with the help of a dozen slaves. This particular branch of the family came from Massachusetts, "the mother hive of the New Englanders of the name," hailing from a seventeenth-century Englishman who had settled in Weymouth. The boy Walt was given only a common-school education, but he seems to have assimilated good literature through the very pores of his skin, and the difficulty in the way of getting hold of good books only made him the more eager for them. He was an out-of-door sort of fellow from the first, and as he himself tells it, along Long Island's seashores "in the presence of outdoor influences, I went over thoroughly the Old and New Testaments, and absorbed... Shakespeare, Ossian, the best translated versions I could get of Homer, Eschylus, Sophocles, the old German Nibelungen, the Ancient Hindoo poems, and one or two other masterpieces, Dante's among them. As it happened, I read the latter mostly in an old wood." This is a sort of cross-lots cut to culture. But let it be said here that to read world literature like this outdoors at the most impressionable time of life, is an experience likely never to be matched in its effect. It is only the great writers who can stand the test of outdoor reading; truth mates with truth there, and the second-class folk shrink to their true dimensions, and have a feeble and hollow sound. One enjoys thinking of the young Walt thus roaming his beloved Paumanok (the Indian name for Long Island) hobnobbing with fishermen and farmers, learning country ways, looking at country sights, and always within reach of the huge old sea he was to chant in more than one strain of power. The "growth stages" of Whitman from infancy to manhood were so identified with Long Island that he declared himself he felt as if he had incorporated it. "I roamed, as boy and man, and have lived in nearly all parts, from Brooklyn to Montauk." He was "in the atmosphere of many wrecks." He speared eels through the ice, gathered sea gulls' eggs, dug clams in barefoot freedom, hayed in the sedge meadows. He footed down to Coney Island (when the sound of the name meant segregation) for a sea bath, and then raced over the hard beach, and, naked as he was, declaimed Homer and Shakespeare to the surf and the sea gulls. An unconventional sort of education this, but very likely to produce results once in a while. Then he received the impression of a city early, for the family lived in Brooklyn from his fifth to his ninth years; and Walt was a boy in a lawyer's office, where he got some instruction in handwriting and composition, and had access to a big circulating library, and plunged into the "Arabian Nights," Walter Scott, and "the fair fields of old romance" in general. Next came an apprenticeship to a printer in a newspaper office, The Long Island Patriot. His family moved back to the Paumanok country when he was along in the teens, and Walt went between town and farm, active in debating societies, fond of the theater, and of the city panoramas as one sees them on ferryboats, from omnibus tops, or in below-ground resorts; but quite as fond of his home, his mother, and the lusty old sea. Then at eighteen he did some school-teaching in Long Island, "boarding around" the while, and he says this last was one of his best experiences for its revelations of human nature, its glimpses behind the scenes of common humanity. The remark is very typical of Whitman, for all his days (until crippled and unable to wander and watch the human passion play), he was a wonderful observer of life, faring, afoot and free, untrammeled by any of the usual restrictions of society, over the native land he loved, as a kind of inspired reporter and tramp, whose notebook jottings turned out to be poems. He had a passion for life in the mass, in the rough; the obscure dramas of humanity, as of literature, attracted him most. He has told of the way he haunted ferryboats, knowing all the pilots and loving the bustle, the sight and smell of it, "inimitable, streaming, never-failing, living poems." In the same fashion on the top of a Broadway bus he would chum with the drivers, who spun yarns for him, "the most vivid," he declares; and watch the human tide go by, riding the whole length of the street by day and night. The comradery of Whitman's verse is honest; it is but the reflection of his life for many years. He tells us too of his theater going and opera going, for music became a passion with him as well as the histrionic art. Whitman, in a characteristic passage of the prose book "Specimen Days" (in which much of his early life is vividly chronicled) sums up three main influences which were formative of his character: the Dutch mother stock along with the English-derived willfulness; "the combination of my Long Island birth spot, seashores, childhood scenes, absorptions, with teeming Brooklyn and New York"; and his experiences in the outbreak of the Civil War. From teaching, Whitman turned to newspaper work; by the time he was twenty-one he was publishing a newspaper at Huntington, Long Island, and from this up to the war his life was that of a roving printer, writer, and editor; among his newspaper connections were the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and the New Orleans Daily Crescent. So early as 1849, when he was thirty, we see him journeying leisurely through the West and South, and returning by the Great Lakes and Canada; this trip of eight thousand miles, much of it on foot, added to his studies of human nature already made nearer home. No man in the history of American literature entered so vitally and broadly into democratic relations with his fellow Americans as did Walt Whitman; he mingled with plain men and women everywhere, folk earning their living in many a hand-soiling indoor craft, or getting their bread under the sun and in the rain with the sweat of their brow. He was hail-fellow-well-met with them, and always he jotted down his impressions to be printed eventually in |