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His Death on Saturday Evening--His
Walt Whitman, the poet, died at a quarter before
seven o’clock last Saturday evening, at his home in Camden, N.J. He began
to sink at 4:30 o’clock, and grew gradually weaker until the end, which
was peaceful. Mr. Whitman’s death came unexpectedly at last, although he
had been very low for several months. His funeral will take place on Wednesday
at two o’clock.
Walt, or Walter, Whitman was born in West Hills, Long Island, on the 31st of May, 1819, and was educated in the public schools of Brooklyn and New York city. He afterwards learned printing, and worked at that trade in summer, teaching in winter. Later on he acquired a good deal of skill as a carpenter. For brief periods of his career he edited newspapers in New Orleans and on Long Island, and in 1847-’48 he made long pedestrian tours through the United States, generally following the courses of the great Western rivers. He also made pedestrian explorations in Canada. His ‘Leaves of Grass’ was published first in 1855. During the war his brother was wounded on the battlefield, and he hastened to visit him in camp, becoming a volunteer army nurse, in which capacity he served for three years in Washington and in Virginia. His experiences are recorded in ‘Drum-Taps’ and other poems. Want of rest and nervous strain brought on a severe illness in 1864, from the effects of which he never fully recovered. In 1870 he published his ‘Democratic Vistas.’ From 1865 to 1874 he held a Government clerkship in Washington. In the latter year he was stricken by paralysis and retired to Camden, where he was gradually recovering when the sudden death of his mother in his presence caused a relapse, and he has remained in a crippled condition ever since, although until lately his general health was fair. His intellectual powers remained unaffected. In his prime Mr. Whitman had a magnificent physique, and to the last his presence was imposing, his white hair giving him a most venerable appearance in his later years. At times he felt the pinch of poverty, but his wants were few and simple, and he had friends who were always ready to contribute to the relief of his necessities. Among his published works may be mentioned ‘Leaves of Grass,’ ‘Passage to India,’ ‘After All, Not to Create Only,’ ‘Two Rivulets,’ ‘Specimen Days and Collect,’ ‘November Boughs,’ and ‘Sands at Seventy.’ It has been the curious experience of Walt Whitman to find his inspiration almost wholly in his own country, and his admirers almost wholly in another. The rhythmic apostle of democracy, he has had, in the word[s] of one of his stanch admirers, "absolutely no popular following" at home; and the gradual increase of his circle of special readers, even here, has been largely recruited from the class he least approves--those who desire to be English, even in their fads. The same thing was true, years ago, of "Joaquin" Miller; but while he has gradually faded from view, the robuster personality of Whitman has held its own, aided greatly by his superb and now blighted physique, by the persistent and somewhat exaggerated panegyrics on his services as an army nurse, and by that rise in pecuniary value which awaits all books classed by the book venders as "facetiae" or "curiosa." All this constitutes a combination quite unique. To many the mere fact of foreign admiration is sufficient proof of the greatness of an American; they have never outgrown that pithy proverb, the result of the ripe experience of a young Philadelphian of twenty-one, that "a foreign country is a kind contemporaneous posterity." But when we remember that the scene of this particular fame was England, and that it was divided with authors now practically forgotten--with "Artemus Ward" and "Josh Billings" and the author of "Sam Slick"; when we remember how readily the same recognition is still given in England to any American who misspells or makes fritters of English, or who enters literature as Lady Morgan’s Irish hero entered a drawing room, by throwing a back somersault in at the door, the judicious American will by no means regard this experience as final. It must be remembered, too, that all the malodorous portions of Whitman’s earlier poems were avowedly omitted from the first English edition of his works; he was expurgated and fumigated in a way that might have excited the utmost contempt from M. Guy de Maupassant, or indeed from himself; and so the first presentation of this poet to his English admirers was, as it were, clothed and in his right mind. Again, it is to be remembered that much of the vague sentiment of democracy in his works, while wholly picturesque and novel to an Englishman--provided he can tolerate it at all--is to us comparatively trite and almost conventional; it is the rhythmic or semi-rhythmic reproduction of a thousand Fourth of July orations, and as we are less and less inclined to hear this oft-told tale in plain prose, we are least of all tempted to read it in what is not even plain verse. There is, therefore, nothing remarkable in the sort of parallax which exhibits the light of Whitman’s fame at so different an angle in his own country and in England. But while an English fame does not of itself prove an American to be great--else we were all suing for Buffalo Bill’s social favor as if we were members of the British aristocracy--it certainly does not prove that he is not great; and it is for us to view Whitman as dispassionately as if he were an author all our own, like Whittier or Parkman, of whom an English visitor will tell you, with labored politeness, that he has a vague impression of having heard of him. The most distinct canonization ever afforded to Whitman on our own shores was when Mr. Stedman placed him among the Dei majores of our literature by giving him a separate chapter in his ‘Poets of America’; and though it is true that this critic had already cheapened that honor by extending it to Bayard Taylor, yet this was obviously explained in part by their personal friendship and partly by the wish not to give New England too plainly the lion’s share of fame. Possibly this last consideration may have had influence in the case of Whitman also; but it is impossible not to see in this chapter a slightly defensive and apologetic tone, such as appears nowhere else in the book. Mr. Stedman’s own sense of form is so strong, his instinct of taste so trustworthy, and his love-poetry in particular of so high and refined a quality, that he could not possibly approach Whitman with the sort of predetermined sympathy that we might expect, for instance, from Ella Wheeler Wilcox or Amélie Rives. There seems to be a provision in nature for a class of poets who appear at long intervals, and who resolutely confine themselves to a few very simple stage properties, and substitute mere cadence for form. There is, or was, an Ossian period, when simple enthusiasts sat up at night and read until they were sleepy about the waving of the long grass on the blasted heath, and passing of the armed warrior and the white-bosomed maiden. Ossian is not much read now, but Napoleon Bonaparte admired him and Goethe studied him. Neither is Tupper now much cultivated, but men not very old assure us that his long, rambling lines were once copied by the page into extract books, and that he was welcomed as relieving mankind from the tiresome restraints of verse. It would be a great mistake, doubtless, to class Whitman with Ossian on the one side, or Tupper on the other; but it would be a still greater error to overlook the fact that the mere revolt against the tyranny of form has been made again and again, before him, and that without securing immortal fame to the author of the experiment. It is no uncommon thing, moreover, for the fiercest innovating poets to revert to the ranks of order before they die; as Wordsworth gradually became conventional and Swinburne decent. Whitman has abstained, through all his later publications, from those proclamations of utter nudity which Emerson called "priapism," in connection with "Leaves of Grass"; and is far more compressed and less simply enumerative than when he began. True poetry is not merely the putting of thoughts into words, but the putting of the best thoughts into the best words; it gives us, as in painting, the o [sic] of Giotto; it secures for us what Ruskin calls "the perfection and precision of the instantaneous line." It fires a rifle-bullet instead of a shower of bird shot; it culls the very best phrase out of language, instead of throwing a dozen epithets to see if one may chance to stick. For example, Emerson centres his "Problem" in "a cowled churchman"; Browning singles out an individual bishop or rabbi, as the case may be; but Whitman enumerates "priests on the earth, oracles, sacrificers, brahmins, sabians, llamas, monks, muftis, exhorters." In "The Song of the Broad-Axe" there are nineteen successive lines beginning with the word "Where"; in "Salut Au Monde!" eighteen beginning with "I see." In I sing the body electric" he specifies in detail "Wrists and wrist-joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, forefinger, finger-joints, finger-nails," with thirteen more lines of such minutiae. In the same poem he explains that he wishes his verses to be regarded as "Man’s, woman’s child’s, youth’s, wife’s, husband’s, mother’s, father’s, young man’s, young woman’s poems." It is like bringing home a sackful of pebbles from the beach and asking you to admire the collected heap as a fine sea view. But it is to be noticed that these follies diminish in his later works; the lines grow shorter; and though he does not acquiesce in rhyme, he occasionally accepts a rhythm so well defined that it may be called conventional, as in the fine verses entitled "Darest thou now, O Soul?" And it is a fact which absolutely overthrows the whole theory of poetic structure or structurelessness implied in Whitman’s volumes that his warmest admirers usually place first among his works the poem on Lincoln’s death, "My Captain" which comes so near to recognised poetic methods that it actually falls into rhyme. Whitman can never be classed, like the German Schleiermacher, among "God-intoxicated" men; but he was early intoxicated with two potent draughts--himself and his country: One’s self I sing, a simple separate personWith these words his collected poems open, and to these he has always been true. They have brought with them a certain access of power, and they have also implied weakness; on the personal side leading to pruriency and on the national side to rant. For some reason or other our sexual nature is so ordained that it is hard for a person to dwell much upon it, even for noble and generous purposes, without developing a tendency to morbidness; the lives of philanthropists and reformers have sometimes shown this, and when one insists on it for purposes of self-glorification, the danger is greater. Whitman has not escaped the danger; it is something that he has outgrown it; and it is possible that if let entirely alone, which could hardly be expected, he might ere now have dropped "Children of Adam" and some of the more nauseous passages in other effusions from his published works. One thing which has always accentuated the seeming grossness of the sensual side of his works has been the entire absence of that personal and ideal side of passion which can alone elevate and dignify it. Probably no poet of equal pretensions was ever so entirely wanting in the sentiment of individual love; he not only has given us no love-poem, in the ordinary use of that term, but it is as difficult to conceive of his writing one as of his chanting a serenade beneath the window of his mistress. His love is the blunt undisguised love of sex to sex, the physical appetite that Fielding attributes to Tom Jones for the requisite quantity of white flesh; and whether this flesh belongs to a goddess or a streetwalker, a Queensberry or a handmaid, is to him absolutely unimportant. This not only separates him from the poets of thoroughly ideal emotion, like Poe, but from those, like Rossetti, whose passion, though it may incarnate itself in the body, is inseparable from the very profoundest and most subtle yearnings of the spirit. In preaching this gospel of unbounded self-indulgence--or,
as his admirers would prefer to call it, self-expression--he has constantly
made his own personality, and especially his own fine physical manhood,
a factor. It is therefore fair to introduce this factor into criticism,
in a way that would be wholly unfair if we were dealing with an objective
poet like Browning. Thus, in his poem of "Native Moments," Whitman says:
Give me now libidinous joys only,Much more has Whitman written to the same purpose, and with a bad influence--we speak from personal observation--on the lives of many young men; an influence that can scarcely be estimated. This passage is probably not among those extracts from Whitman which are now read for charitable purposes at Congregational rooms or in the parlors of Episcopal churches; but it represents what the poet would once have recognised as the vital principle of his muse. And he constantly represents himself as the living example of what he sings: I now thirty-seven years old in perfect health beginThis is his theory, this his invited test. No matter, for the present, what the moralist would say of the theory; what the psychologist would say of it is that a man who undertakes to act upon it will end in bankruptcy, will not live out his life; that those who thus claim to be Nature’s darlings end as Nature’s warnings; that paralysis, insanity, premature old age are the retribution for "the drench of the passions" in youth. Was there ever a sadder personal commentary on all this than when we find this same poet, who at thirty-seven exulted in his manly strength, addressing school-children at fifty-five from the point of view of extreme age ("An Old Man’s Thoughts of School"); and having constant appeals made for him, when hardly past the prime of life, as for one broken down by years and infirmities. Compare this premature senility of the poet of "life coarse and rank," with the old age of the chaster poets--with Bryant’s eighty-four clean and wholesome years, with Whittier’s, almost a life-long invalid and yet busy and useful when eighty-four years are told. It is the easy device of admirers to attribute this want of physical staying power to Whitman’s army services, but the land is full of men who encountered during the civil war, and without boasting, an ordeal of bodily exposures to which those of Whitman were as nothing, in that comparatively sheltered position which he chose for himself; and who are still in health and vigor. We have no wish to dwell on the bodily calamities of any one, but where a man deliberately invites the personal test, and where the application of that test points a moral for coming generations, it would be cowardly to shrink from its recognition. On purely poetic grounds it must be said of Whitman that he has in a high degree that measure of the ideal faculty which Emerson conceded to Margaret Fuller; he has "lyric glimpses." Rarely constructing anything, he is yet gifted in phrases, in single cadences, in single wayward strains as from an Aeolian harp. It constantly happens that the titles or catch-words of his poems are better than the poems themselves: as we sometimes hear it said in praise of a clergyman that he has beautiful texts. "Proud Music of the Storm," "When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed," and others, will readily occur; and if they were sometimes borrowed or duplicated as "The Sobbing of the Bells" from Poe, it is no matter. Often, on the other hand, they are inflated, as "Chanting the Square Deific," or affected and feeble, as "Eidolons." One of the most curiously un-American traits in a poet professedly so national is his curious way of interlarding foreign, and especially French phrases, to a degree that recalls the fashionable novels of the last generation, and gives an incongruous effect comparable only to Theodore Parker’s description of an African chief seen by some one at Sierra Leone-- "With the exception of a dress-coat, his Majesty was as naked as a pestle. In the opening lines, already quoted from his collected volume (ed. 1881), Whitman defines "the word Democratic, the word En-Masse"; and everywhere French phrases present themselves. The vast sublimity of night on the prairies only suggests to him "how plenteuous! how spiritual! how résumé," whatever that might mean; he talks of "Mélange mine own, the seen and the unseen"; writes poems "with reference to ensemble"; says "the future of the States I harbinge glad and sublime," and elsewhere, "I blow through my embouchures my loudest and gayest for them." He is "the extolled of amies," meaning apparently mistresses; and says that neither youth pertains to him "nor delicatesse." Phrases like these might be multiplied indefinitely, and when he says, "No dainty dolce affettuoso I," he seems vainly to disclaim being exactly what he is. He cannot even introduce himself to the audience without borrowing a foreign word-- "I, Walt Whitman, one of the roughs, a kosmos"--and really stands in this aspect on a plane no higher than that of those young girls at boarding-school who commit French phrases to memory in order to use them in conversation and give a fancied tone of good society. But after all, the offence, which is a trivial affectation in a young girl, has a deeper foundation in a man who begins his literary career at thirty-seven. The essential fault of Whitman’s poetry was well pointed out by a man of more heroic nature and higher genius, Lanier, who defined hm as a dandy. Of all our poets, he is really the least simple, the most meretricious; and this is the reason why the honest consciousness of the classes whom he most celebrates, the drover, the teamster, the soldier, has never been reached by his songs. He talks of labor as one who has never really labored: his ‘Drum-Taps’ proceed from one who has never personally responded to the tap of the drum. This is his fatal and insurmountable defect; and it is because his own countrymen instinctively recognise this, and foreigners do not, that his following is mainly abroad, not at home. But it is also true that he has, in a fragmentary and disappointing way, some of the high ingredients of a poet’s nature: a keen eye, a ready sympathy, a strong touch, a vivid but not shaping imagination. In his cyclopaedia of epithets, in his accumulated directory of details, in his sandy wastes of iteration, there are many scattered particles of gold; never sifted out by him, never abundant enough to pay for the sifting, yet unmistakable gold. He has something of the turgid wealth, the self-conscious and mouthing amplitude of Victor Hugo, and much of his broad, vague, indolent desire for the welfare of the whole human race; but he has none of Hugo’s structural power, his dramatic or melodramatic instinct, and his occasionally terse and brilliant condensation. It is not likely that he will ever have that place in the future which is claimed for him by his English admirers or even by the more cautious endorsement of Mr. Stedman, for setting aside all other grounds of criticism, he has phrase, but not form, and without form there is no immortality.
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