E-text prepared by Emmanuel Ackerman and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org)
Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 56536-h.htm or 56536-h.zip: (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/56536/pg56536-images.html) or (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/56536/56536-h.zip)
Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/lifeofwaltwhitma00binnuoft
Transcriber's note:
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (italics).
Text enclosed by equal signs is in bold face (=bold=).
A LIFE OF WALT WHITMAN
BY THE SAME WRITER
MOODS AND OUTDOOR VERSES
("RICHARD ASKHAM")
FOR THE FELLOWSHIP
Walt Whitman at thirty-five
A LIFE OF WALT WHITMAN
by
HENRY BRYAN BINNS
With Thirty-three Illustrations
METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
First Published in 1905
TO
MY MOTHER
AND
HER MOTHER
THE REPUBLIC
PREFACE
To the reader, and especially to the critical reader, it would seem but courteous to give at the beginning of my book some indication of its purpose. It makes no attempt to fill the place either of a critical study or a definitive biography. Though Whitman died thirteen years ago, the time has not yet come for a final and complete life to be written; and when the hour shall arrive we must, I think, look to some American interpreter for the volume. For Whitman's life is of a strongly American flavour. Instead of such a book I offer a biographical study from the point of view of an Englishman, yet of an Englishman who loves the Republic. I have not attempted, except parenthetically here and there, to make literary decisions on the value of Whitman's work, partly because he still remains an innovator upon whose case the jury of the years must decide--a jury which is not yet complete; and partly because I am not myself a literary critic. It is as a man that I see and have sought to describe Whitman. But as a man of special and exceptional character, a new type of mystic or seer. And the conviction that he belongs to the order of initiates has dragged me on to confessedly difficult ground.
Again, while seeking to avoid excursions into literary criticism, it has seemed to me to be impossible to draw a real portrait of the man without attempting some interpretation of his books and the quotation from them of characteristic passages, for they are the record of his personal attitude towards the problems most intimately affecting his life. I trust that this part of my work may at any rate offer some suggestions to the serious student of Whitman. Since he touched life at many points, it has been full of pitfalls; and if among them I should prove but a blind leader, I can only hope that those who follow will keep open eyes.
Whitman has made his biography the more difficult to write by demanding that he should be studied in relation to his time; to fulfil this requirement was beyond my scope, but I have here and there suggested the more notable outlines, within which the reader will supply details from his own memory. As I have written especially for my own countrymen, I have ventured to remind the reader of some of those elementary facts of American history of which we English are too easily forgetful.
The most important chapters of Whitman's life have been written by himself, and will be found scattered over his complete works. To these the following pages are intended as a modest supplement and commentary. Already the Whitman literature has become extensive, but, save in brief sketches, no picture of his whole life in which one may trace with any detail the process of its development seems as yet to exist. In this country the only competent studies which have appeared are that of the late Mr. Symonds, which devotes some twenty pages to biographical matters, and the admirable and suggestive little manual of the late Mr. William Clarke. Both books are some twelve years old, and in those years not a little new material has become available, notably that which is collected in the ten-volume edition of Whitman's works, and in the book known as In re Walt Whitman. On these and on essays printed in the Conservator and in the Whitman Fellowship Papers I have freely drawn for the following pages.
Of American studies the late Dr. Bucke's still, after twenty years, easily holds the first place. Beside it stand those of Mr. John Burroughs, and Mr. W. S. Kennedy. To these, and to the kind offices of the authors of the two last named, my book owes much of any value it may possess. I have also been assisted by the published reminiscences of Mr. J. T. Trowbridge, Mr. Moncure Conway, and Mr. Thomas Donaldson, and by the recently published Diary in Canada (edited by Mr. Kennedy), and Dr. I. H. Platt's Beacon Biography of the poet.
Since I never met Walt Whitman I am especially indebted to his friends for the personal details with which they have so generously furnished me: beside those already named, to Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Johnston, Mr. J. Hubley Ashton, Mrs. W. S. Kennedy, Mrs. E. M. Calder, Mr. and Mrs. (Stafford) Browning of Haddonfield (Glendale), Mr. John Fleet of Huntington, Captain Lindell of the Camden Ferry, and to Mr. Peter G. Doyle; but especially to Whitman's surviving executors and my kind friends, Mr. T. B. Harned and Mr. Horace Traubel. To these last, and to Mr. Laurens Maynard, of the firm of Messrs. Small, Maynard & Co., the publishers of the final edition of Whitman's works, I am indebted for generous permission to use and reproduce photographs in their possession. I also beg to make my acknowledgments to Mr. David McKay and Mr. Gutekunst, both of Philadelphia.
Helpful suggestions and information have been most kindly given by my American friends, Mr. Edwin Markham, Professor E. H. Griggs, Mr. Ernest Crosby, Dr. George Herron, Professor Rufus M. Jones of Haverford, Mr. C. F. Jenkins of Germantown, and Mr. and Mrs. David Thompson of Washington. Mr. Benjamin D. Hicks of Long Island has repeatedly replied to my various and troublesome inquiries as to the Quaker ancestry of Walt Whitman, and Dr. E. Pardee Bucke has furnished me with an admirable sketch of his father Dr. R. M. Bucke's life and the photograph which I have reproduced. In England also there are many to whom I would here offer my most grateful thanks. And first, to Mr. Edward Carpenter, whose own work has always been my best of guides in the study of Whitman's, and whose records of his interviews with the old poet in Camden have given me more insight into his character than any other words but Whitman's own. He has also read the MS., and aided me by numberless suggestions. Mrs. Bernard Berenson, who for some years enjoyed the old man's friendship, has supplied me with an invaluable picture of his relations with her father, the late Mr. Pearsall Smith, and his family, and has generously lent me various letters in her possession, and permitted me to make reproductions from them. Mr. J. W. Wallace, of the "Bolton group," has allowed me to read and use his manuscript description of a visit to Camden in 1891; and another of the same brotherhood, Dr. J. Johnston, whose admirable account of a similar series of interviews in the preceding year is well known by Whitman students, has supplied me with a photograph of the little Mickle Street house as it then was.
To Mr. William M. Rossetti and to Mr. Ernest Rhys I am indebted for valuable suggestions; and for similar help to my friends, Professor W. H. Hudson and Messrs. Arthur Sherwell, B. Kirkman Gray and C. F. Mott. Finally, the book owes much more than I can say to my wife.
While gratefully acknowledging the assistance of all these and others unnamed, I confess that I am alone responsible for the general accuracy of my statements, and the book's point of view, and I wish especially to relieve the personal friends of Whitman from any responsibility for the hypothesis relating to his sojourn in the South, beyond what is stated in the Appendix. To all actual sins of commission and omission I plead guilty, trusting that for the sympathetic reader they may eventually be blotted out in the light which, obscured though it be, still shines upon my pages from the personality of Walt Whitman.
H. B. B.
LONDON, January, 1905.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE vii
TABLE OF CONTENTS xiii
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xv
ABBREVIATIONS EMPLOYED IN THE NOTES xvii
INTRODUCTION: WHITMAN'S AMERICA xix
CHAP.
I. THE WHITMAN'S OF WEST HILLS 1
II. BOYHOOD IN BROOKLYN 10
III. TEACHER AND JOURNALIST 28
IV. ROMANCE (1848) 46
V. ILLUMINATION 56
VI. THE CARPENTER 79
VII. WHITMAN'S MANIFESTO 95
VIII. THE MYSTIC 110
IX. "YEAR OF METEORS" 134
X. THE TESTAMENT OF A COMRADE 148
XI. AMERICA AT WAR 171
XII. THE PROOF OF COMRADESHIP 190
XIII. A WASHINGTON CLERK 205
XIV. FRIENDS AND FAME 221
XV. ILLNESS 247
XVI. CONVALESCENCE 258
XVII. THE SECOND BOSTON EDITION 278
XVIII. AMONG THE PROPHETS 289
XIX. HE BECOMES A HOUSEHOLDER 301
XX. AT MICKLE STREET 314
XXI. "GOOD-BYE, MY FANCY" 325
APPENDIX A 347
APPENDIX B 349
INDEX 351
METHUEN'S CATALOGUE OF BOOKS
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
WALT WHITMAN AT 35, from a daguerrotype Frontispiece in possession of Mr. J. H. Johnston
HIS MOTHER, from a daguerrotype in possession of Mr. Traubel 6
WEST HILLS: THE WHITMAN HOUSE FROM THE LANE (1904) 8
W. W.'S FATHER 14
WEST HILLS: HOUSE FROM YARD 28
NEW ORLEANS ABOUT 1850 48
R. W. EMERSON 92
W. W. AT 40, from a photo, in the possession of Mr. D. McKay 140
W. W. AT 44, from photo, in possession of Mr. Traubel 179
WILLIAM DOUGLAS O'CONNOR 190
JOHN BURROUGHS IN 1900 201
ANNE GILCHRIST, from an amateur photograph 225
W. W. AT ABOUT 50 227
PETE DOYLE AND W. W., by permission of Messrs. Small, Maynard 231 & Co., from a photo, by Rice, Washington, 1869
PETER G. DOYLE AT 57, from a photo, by Kuebler, Philadelphia 233
NO. 431, STEVENS STREET, CAMDEN (1904) 240
FACSIMILE OF MS. OF PORTION OF PREFACE TO 1876 EDITION, 243 L. of G.
TIMBER CREEK, THE POOL 259
TIMBER CREEK, BELOW CRYSTAL SPRING 261
EDWARD CARPENTER AT 43 267
DR. R. M. BUCKE 270
W. W. AT 61 276
MR. STAFFORD'S STORE, GLENDALE (1904) 286
MART WHITALL SMITH (MRS. BERENSON) IN 1884 302
W. W. AND THE BUTTERFLY; AGED 62; from photo, 304 by Phillips & Taylor, Philadelphia
FACSIMILE OF AUTOGRAPH LETTER TO MR. R. P. SMITH, 315 in possession of Mrs. Berenson
MICKLE STREET, CAMDEN, from a photo, by Dr. J. Johnston 317
FACSIMILE OF AUTOGRAPH POST CARDS (1887-88), 326 in possession of Mrs. Berenson
W. W. AT 70, by permission of Mr. Gutekunst, Philadelphia 331
ROBERT G. INGERSOLL 334
W. W. AT 72, from a photo, of Mr. T. Eakins, 338 by permission of Messrs. Small, Maynard & Co.
HORACE TRAUBEL 342
THE TOMB, HARLEIGH CEMETERY (1904) 346
ABBREVIATIONS
The following abbreviations are used in the Notes.
Bucke = R. M. Bucke's Walt Whitman, 1883.
Burroughs = John Burroughs' Note on Walt Whitman, 1867.
Burroughs (2) = John Burroughs' Note on Walt Whitman. Second Edition.
Burroughs (a) = John Burroughs' Whitman: A Study, 1896.
Carpenter = E. Carpenter's "Notes of Visits to W. W." in Progressive Review: (a) February, 1897; (b) April, 1897.
Camden's Compliment = Camden's Compliment to W. W., 1889.
Cam. Mod. Hist. = Cambridge Modern History: United States.
Comp. Prose = W. W.'s Complete Prose, 1898.
Calamus = Calamus, Letters of W. W. to Pete Doyle, 1897.
Camden = Camden Edition (10 vols.) of W. W.'s Works, 1902.
Donaldson = T. Donaldson's W. W.: The Man, 1897.
En. Brit. Suppt. = Encyclopaedia Britannica: Supplement, United States.
Good-bye and Hail = Good-bye and Hail, W. W., 1892.
In re = In re W. W., 1893.
Johnston = Dr. J. Johnston's Notes of a Visit to W. W., 1890.
Kennedy = W. S. Kennedy's Reminiscences of W. W., 1896.
L. of G. = Leaves of Grass, complete edition of 1897: followed by numerals in brackets, edition of that year.
Mem. Hist. N.Y. = J. G. Wilson's Memorial History of New York.
Roosevelt = T. Roosevelt's New York, 1891.
Symonds = J. A. Symonds's W. W.: A Study, 1893.
Wound-Dresser = The W. D., Letters of W. W. to his Mother, 1898.
Whit. Fellowship = Whitman Fellowship Papers, Philadelphia, 1894.
MANUSCRIPTS.
MSS. Berenson = Letters in possession of Mrs. Bernard Berenson.
MSS. Berenson (a) = Reminiscences contributed to this volume.
MSS. Carpenter = Letters in possession of E. Carpenter.
MSS. Diary = A Diary (1876-1887) in possession of H. Traubel.
MSS. Harned = Papers in possession of T. B. Harned.
MSS. Johnston = Papers in possession of J. H. Johnston, New York.
MSS. Traubel = Papers in possession of H. Traubel.
MSS. Wallace = J. W. Wallace's Diary of a Visit to W. W. in 1891.
INTRODUCTION
WHITMAN'S AMERICA
The men of old declared that the lands of adventure lay in the West, for they were bold to follow the course of the sun; and to this day the bold do not look back to seek romance behind them in the East.
Whether this be the whole truth or no, such is the notion that comes upon the wind when, journeying westward in mid-Atlantic, you begin to know the faces on ship-board, and to understand what it is that is in their eyes. Strange eyes and foreign faces have these voyagers--dwellers upon Mediterranean shores, peasants from the borders of the Baltic, or dumb inhabitants of the vast eastern plains, huddled now together in the ship. But in them is a hope which triumphs over the misery of the present as it has survived the misery of the past, and to-day that hope has a name, and is America. For America is indeed the hope of the forlorn and disinherited in every land to whom a hope remains. From the ends of the earth they set out, and separated from one another by every barrier of race and language, meet here upon the ocean, having nothing in common but this hope, this dream which will yet weld them together into a new people. For the comfortable dreamer there is Italy and the Past, but for many millions of the common people of Europe and of Italy herself--and the common people too have their dream--America, the land of the Future, is the Kingdom of Romance.
Nor to these only, but, as I think, to every traveller not unresponsive to the genius of the land. For it is the genius of youth--youth with its awkward power, its incompleteness, its promise. And the home of this genius must be the land not only of progress and material achievement, but also of those visions which haunt the heart of youth. America is more than the golden-appled earthly paradise of the poor, it is a land of spiritual promise. And more perhaps than that of any nation the American flag is to-day the symbol of a Cause, and of a Cause which claims all hearts because ultimately it is that of all Peoples.
And America has another claim to be regarded as truly romantic. Hers is the charm of novelty. It is not the glamour of the old but of the new, and the perennially new. Some four centuries have passed since the days of Columbus, centuries which have dimmed the lustre of many another adventurous voyage into dull antiquity, but America is still the New World, and the exhilarating air of discovery still breathes as fresh in the West as on the first morning.
With that discovery there dawned a new historic day whose sun is not yet set. We instinctively put back the beginning of our own era to the time of Elizabeth, that Virgin Queen in whose colony of Virginia the American people was first born, to grow up into maturity under its statesmen.
And if we see but vaguely in the greyest hours of our dawn the figure of the Discoverer, while beyond him all seem strange as the men of yesterday--if we behold our own sun rising on the broad Elizabethan hours--how fitting it is that the New World should be peopled by those who still retain most of the temper of that generous morning! The American of to-day with his thirst for knowledge, his versatility, his quick sense of the practicable, his delight in the doing of things, his directness and frankness of purpose, his comradeship and hospitality, his lack of self-consciousness--with all the naive inconsistencies, the amiable braggings, the mouthings of phrases, and the love of praise which belong to such unconsciousness of self--with his glowing optimism, his belief in human nature, his faith and devotion to his ideals--the American of to-day is in all these things the Elizabethan of our story. America is the supreme creation of Elizabethan genius--its New World, to which even that world which we call "Shakespeare" must give place.[1]
The Romance of America is not only new, it is like a tale that is being told for the first time into our own ears. And like some consummate story whose chapters, appearing month by month, hold us continually in expectant suspense, its plot is still evolving and its characters revealing themselves, so that as yet we can only guess at its denouement.
I call it a Romance, for it is indeed a tale of wonder; but unlike the old romances its bold realism is not always beautiful. The style of its telling is often loud, its words blunt, its rhythm strange and full of changes. But it has a large Elizabethan movement which cannot be denied. Denounce and deprecate as we will, all that is young in us responds to it. The story carries us along, at times by violence and in our own despite, but so a story should. It may be the end will justify and explain passages that to-day are but obscure: no story is complete until the end, and America has not yet been told. It is still morning there: and the heart of it is still the heart of youth.
* * * * *
The unprejudiced and candid visitor will be provoked to criticism by much that he sees in the United States; but even his criticism will be prompted by the possibilities of the country. It is this sense of its possibilities which captures the imagination, and fills the mind with the desire to do--to correct, it may be--but in any case to do.
The incentive to action is felt by everyone, American or immigrant, and dominates all. Here for the first time one seems to be, as it were, in a live country, among a live people whose work is actually under its hand and must occupy it for years to come. In England things are different; the country does not so audibly challenge the labourer to till and tame it. It does not say so plainly to every man--I want you: here is range and scope for all your manhood. Only the seer can read that word written pathetically across all this English countryside whose smooth air of completion conceals so blank a poverty. In America the very stones cry out, and all who run must read. And thus the whole American atmosphere is that of action.
* * * * *
The Chinese, that most practical of peoples, have an old saying that the purpose of the true worship of heaven is to spiritualise the earth. It is a reminder that materialism and mysticism should go hand in hand.
Now the American is often, and not unjustly, accused of sheer materialism. But by temper he is really an idealist. The very Constitution of the United States, not to mention the famous Declaration, is no less transcendental than the Essays of Emerson, nor less weighty with deep purpose than the speeches of Lincoln. All these are characteristic utterances of the American genius; they have been attested by events, and sealed in the blood of a million citizen soldiers.
And how, one may ask, could the citizens of a State which more than any other manifestly depends for its life upon communion in an ideal be other than idealists? Gathered from every section of the human race, this people has become a nation through its consciousness of a Cause; its members being possessed not of a common blood, tradition or literature, but of a purpose and idea sacred to all. If then the national life depends upon the living idealism of the people, the actual unquestionable vigour of this national life may be taken as evidence of the strength of that idealism. But, on the other hand, the nation's present pre-occupation with its merely material success conceals the gravest of all its perils, because it threatens the very principle of the national life.
Thus held together by its future, and not as seem most others, by their past, the American nation has been slow in coming to self-consciousness, slow therefore in producing an original or national art. Hitherto it has been occupied with its own Becoming; and to-day, to virile Americans, America remains the most engrossing of occupations, the noblest of all practicable dreams.
The spirit of the Renaissance has here attempted a task far graver than in Medician Florence or Elizabethan London: to create, namely, not so much a new art as a new race. It has here to achieve its incarnation not in line and colour, not in marble nor in imperishable verse, but in the flesh and blood of a nation gathered from every family of Man. And for that, it is forever assimilating into itself scions of every European people, and transforming them out of Europeans into Americans.
Vast as such a process is, the assimilation of all their surging aspirations and ideals into one has been hardly less vast. It is little wonder then that America has been slow in coming to self-consciousness. What is wonderful is her organic power of assimilation. And now there begin to be evidences in American thought of a spiritual synthesis, the widest known. As yet they are but vague suggestions. But they seem to indicate that when an American philosophy takes the field it will be pragmatical in the best sense; too earnestly concerned with conduct and with life to be careful of symmetry or tradition; directed towards the future, not the past. It will be a philosophy of possibilities founded upon the study of an adolescent race.
It seemed natural to preface this study of Whitman with a sketch of the American genius. Doubtless that genius has other aspects than those here presented, and to some of these, later pages will bear witness; but the impression I have attempted to reproduce is at least taken from life. It is, moreover, not unlike that of Whitman himself as presented in his first Preface, and is even more suggestive of the America of his youth than that of his old age.
Every thinker owes much to his time and race, and Whitman more than most. He always averred that the story of his life was bound up with that of his country, and took significance from it. To be understood, the man must be seen as an American. As a Modern, we might add, for the story of his land is so brief.
Dead now some thirteen years, and barely an old man when he died, his personal memory seemed to embrace nearly the whole romance. His grandfather was acquainted with old Tom Paine, whose Common Sense had popularised the Republican idea in the very hour of American Independence: he himself had talked with the soldiers of Washington, and as a lad[2] he had met Aaron Burr who killed the glorious Hamilton, sponsor for that Constitution which when Whitman died was but a century old.
In the seven decades of his life the American population had multiplied near seven-fold, and had been compacted together into an imperial nation. It seemed almost as though he could remember the thirteen poor and jealous States, with their conflicting interests and traditions, their widely differing climates, industries and inhabitants, separated from one another by vast distances--and how they yielded themselves reluctantly under the hand of Fate to grow together in Union into the greatest of civilised peoples; while central in the story of his life was that Titanic conflict whose solemn bass accompaniment toned and deepened loose phrases and popular enthusiasms into a national hymn.
Himself something of a poet--how much we need not attempt to estimate--he did continual homage to that greater Poet, whose works were at once his education and his library--the genius of America. None other, ancient or mediaeval, discoursed to his ear or penned in immortal characters for him to read, rhythms so large and pregnant. It was the prayer and purpose of his life that he might contribute his verse to that great poem; and his life is like a verse which it is impossible to separate from its context. That he understood, and even in a sense re-discovered America, can scarcely be denied by serious students of his work. I believe that the genius of America will in time discover some essential elements of herself in him, and will understand herself the better for his pages.
* * * * *
Belonging thus to America as a nation, the earlier scenes of Walt Whitman's story are fitly laid in and about metropolitan New York. It was not till middle life and after the completion and publication of what may be regarded as the first version of his Leaves of Grass--the edition that is to say of 1860--that he removed for a while to the Federal capital where, throughout the War, the interest of America was centred. Afterwards he withdrew to Camden, into a sort of hermitage, midway between New York and Washington.
Though his heart belonged to the West, the Far West never knew him. Both north and south, he wandered near as widely as the limits of his States. He knew the Mississippi, the Great Lakes, and the Rocky Mountains; but all that vast and wonderful country which reaches west from Colorado towards Balboa's sea was untrodden by his feet. A circle broadly struck from the actual centre of population, and taking in Denver, New Orleans, Boston and Quebec, includes the whole field of his wanderings within a radius of a thousand miles. He was not a traveller according to our modern use of the word; he had never lost sight for many hours of the shores of America; even Cuba and Hawaii were beyond his range.
But he had studied nearly all the phases of life included in the Republic. His birth and breeding in the "middle States" gave him a metropolitan quality which neither New England nor the South could have contributed. Of peasant stock, himself an artizan and always and properly a man of the people, he was of the average stuff of the American nation; and his everyday life--apart from the central and exceptional fact of his individuality--was that of millions of unremembered citizens. Whitman was not only an American type, he was also a type of America.
The typical American is not city born. Rapidly as that sinister fate is overtaking the Englishman, the native American is still of rural birth.[3] And, as we have said, Whitman was of the average; he was born in Long Island of farming folk.
But he was a modern, and the modern movement throughout the world is citywards. Everywhere the Industrial Revolution is destroying the economy of our ancestors and creating another; diverting all the scattered energy which springs out of the countryside into the great reservoirs of city life, there to be employed upon new tasks.
Modern life is the life of the town, and for many years it was Whitman's life. But again every town depends for its vitality and wealth upon the countryside. The city is a mere centre, factory and exchange. It cannot live upon itself. It handles everything but produces none of all that raw material from which everything that it handles is made. Especially is this true of the human stuff of civilisation. Men are only shaped and employed in cities--they are not produced there. The city uses and consumes the humanity that is made in the fields. And Whitman, who was drawn into the outskirts of the metropolis as a child, and as a young man entered into its heart, was born among wide prospects and shared the sane life of things that root in the earth. He was the better fitted to bear and to correlate all the fierce stimuli of metropolitan life.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Cf. Camb. Mod. Hist., 736; Burroughs (a), 240; Bryce's American Commonwealth, i., 10, 11, etc.; L. of G., 436 n.
[2] MSS. Harned.
[3] Cf. En. Brit. Suppt.
WALT WHITMAN
CHAPTER I
THE WHITMANS OF WEST HILLS
The old writers[4] tell how Long Island was once the happy hunting ground of wolves and Indians, the playing place of deer and wild turkeys; and how the seals, the turtles, grampuses and pelicans loved its long, quiet beaches. Seals and whales are still occasional visitors, and its coasts are rich in lore of wrecks, of pirates and of buried treasure.
A hundred years ago it could boast of hamlets only less remote from civilisation than are to-day the villages of that other "Long Island"--the group of the Outer Hebrides--which, for an equal distance, extends along the Scottish coast from Butt of Lewis to Barra Head. The desultory stage then occupied a week on the double journey between Brooklyn and Sag Harbour. Beyond the latter, Montauk Point thrusts its lighthouse some fifteen miles out into the Atlantic breakers. Here the last Indians of the island lingered on their reservation, and here the whalers watched for the spouting of their prey in the offing.
A ridge of hills runs along the island near the northern shore, rising here and there into heights of three or four hundred feet which command the long gradual slope of woods and meadows to the south, with the distant sea beyond them; to the north, across the narrow Sound, rises the blue coast line of Connecticut.
* * * * *
It is on the slopes below the highest of these points of wide vision that the Whitman homestead lies, one of the pleasant farms of a land which has always been mainly agricultural. Large areas of the island are poor and barren, covered still with scrub and "kill-calf" or picturesque pine forest, as in the Indian days. But the land here is productive.
From the wooded head of Jayne's Hill behind the farm, the township of Huntington stretches to the coast where it possesses a harbour. It was all purchased from the Indians in 1653, for six coats, six bottles, six hatchets, six shovels, ten knives, six fathom of wampum, thirty muxes, and thirty needles.[5] The Indians themselves do not seem to have caused much anxiety to the settlers; but a generation later, it is recorded that in a single year no fewer than fifteen of the wolves, which they had formerly kept half-tamed, were killed by the citizens of Huntington.
The next troublers of the peace were the British troops. For here, a century later, during the last years of the War of Independence, Colonel Thompson of His Majesty's forces pulled down the Presbyterian Church, and with its timbers erected a fortress in the public burying-ground, his soldiers employing the gravestones for fire-places and ovens.[6] They seem to have occupied another meeting-house as a stable. Such are the everyday incidents of a military occupation; arising out of them, claims to the amount of L7,000 were preferred against the colonel by the township; but he withdrew to England, where, as Count Rumford, he afterwards became famous upon more peaceful fields.
In Whitman's childhood, Huntington was, as it still remains, a quiet country town of one long straggling street. It counted about 5,000 inhabitants, many of them substantial folk, and in this was not far behind Brooklyn. In those days the whole island could not boast 60,000 people. But if they were few, they were stalwart. The old sea-going Paumanackers were a rough and hardy folk, and travellers remarked the frank friendliness of the island youth.[7]
Inter-racial relations seem upon the whole to have been good; the Indians being treated with comparative justice, and the negro slaves well cared for. Between the Dutch and the English there was friction in the early years. Long Island, or Paumanok--to give it the most familiar of its several Indian names[8]--had been settled by both races; the Dutch commencing on the west, opposite to their fortress and trading station of New Amsterdam (afterwards New York), and the English, at about the same time, upon the east. They met near West Hills, and Whitman had the full benefit of his birth upon this border-line, Dutch blood and English being almost equally mingled in his veins.
As to the Dutch of Long Island, they were marked here as elsewhere by sterling and stubborn qualities. There is a reserve in the Dutch nature which, while it tends to arouse suspicion in others, makes it the best of stocks upon which to graft a more emotional people. Slow, cautious, conservative, domestic, practical, they have formed a bed-rock of sound sense and phlegmatic temper, not for Long Island only, but for the whole of New York State, where, till the middle of the eighteenth century,[9] they were predominant. Perhaps no other foundation could have adequately supported the superstructure of fluctuating and emotional elements which has since been raised upon it.
The Dutch homesteads of the island were famous for their simple, severe but solid comfort, their clean white sanded floors, their pewter and their punches. From such a home came Whitman's mother. She was a van Velsor of Cold Spring, which lies only two or three miles west of the Whitman farm. Her father, Major Cornelius van Velsor, was a typical, burly, jovial, red-faced Hollander.
But Louisa, his daughter, was not wholly Dutch, for the major's wife was Naomi Williams, of a line of sailors, one of that great Welsh clan which counted Roger Williams among its first American representatives. Naomi was of Quaker stock.[10]
* * * * *
The Quakers appear early in the story of the island, whose settlement was taking place during the first years of their world-wide activity. Within a quarter of a century of the first purchase of land from the Indians, an English Quaker, Robert Hodgson,[11] was arrested in a Long Island orchard for the holding of a conventicle. He was carried to New Amsterdam, cruelly handled, and imprisoned there.
In 1663, John Bowne,[12] an islander of some standing who had joined the Friends, was arrested and transported to Holland, there to undergo his trial for heresy. This was in the period when the district was under Dutch control. A year later this came to an end, and when, in 1672, George Fox preached under the oaks which stood opposite to Bowne's house[13] at Flushing, and again from the granite rock in the Oyster Bay cemetery, he seems to have been met by no opposition more serious than that which was offered by certain members of his own Society.
We read[14] of the settlement of a group of substantial Quaker families near the village of Jericho, where they built themselves a place of worship in 1689; and here, a century later, lived Elias Hicks, perhaps the ablest character, as he was the most tragic figure, in the story of American Quakerism. He was a friend of Whitman's paternal grandfather, and thus from both parents the boy inherited something either of the blood or the tradition of that Society which, directly or indirectly, gave some of the noblest of its leaders to the nation. Such men, for instance, as William Penn, Thomas Paine, and, indirectly, Abraham Lincoln.
* * * * *
The earliest of the Whitmans of whom there appears to be any record is Abijah, apparently an English yeoman farmer in the days of Elizabeth.[15] His two sons sailed west in 1640 on the True-Love. One of these, Zechariah, became a minister in the town of Milford, Connecticut, and sometime before Charles II. was crowned in the old country,[16] Joseph, Zechariah's son, had crossed the Sound and settled in the neighbourhood of Huntington. Either he or his successor seems to have purchased the farm at West Hills, where Walt Whitman was afterwards born; and in 1675 "Whitman's hollow" is mentioned as a boundary of the township.
The garrulous histories of Long Island have little to tell us of the family. One of Joseph's great-grandsons was killed in the battle of Brooklyn,[17] that first great fight between the forces of England and her rebellious colonies, when in 1776 Howe and his Hessians drove Putnam's recruits back upon the little town. Lieutenant Whitman was one of those who fell on that day before Washington could carry the remnant of his troops across the East River under the friendly shelter of the fog.
Another great-grandson, Jesse, married the orphan niece of Major Brush, also a "dangerous rebel" who suffered in the British prison of "the Provost".[18] Brushes, Williamses and Whitmans all seem to have served in the armies of Independence, and one at least of their women would have cut a figure in the field. For Jesse's mother was large-built, dark-complexioned, and of such masculine manners and speech that she seemed to have been born to horses, oaths and tobacco. As a widow she readily ruled her slaves, surviving to a great age. In contrast with her, Jesse's wife, who also displayed remarkable ability, was a natural lady.[19] She had been a teacher, and was a woman of judgment. Perhaps Jesse himself was of gentler character than his terrible old mother; he had leanings towards Quakerism, and was a friend and admirer of Elias Hicks.[20] So too was Walter, the father of Walt, and one of Jesse's many sons.
Born in 1789--the year in which the amended Constitution of the United States actually came into force--Walter grew up into a silent giant,[21] a serious solid man, reserved and slow of speech, kindly but shrewd and obstinate; capable too, when he was roused, of passion. He was a wood-cutter and carpenter, a builder of frame-houses and barns, solid as himself. He learnt his trade in New York, and afterwards wandered from place to place in its pursuit. For a time after his marriage in 1816, he appears to have lived at West Hills, probably farming a part, at least, of the lands of his fathers. Their old house had recently been replaced by another at a little distance. This is still standing, and here, three years later, his second son was born. The child was called after his father, but the name was promptly clipped, and to this day he remains "Walt."
* * * * *
LOUISA (VAN VELSOR) WHITMAN AT SIXTY
His mother,[22] Louisa van Velsor, was a well-made, handsome young woman, now in her twenty-fourth year. Fearless, practical and affectionate, hers was a strong and happy presence, magnetic with the potency of a profound nature, as large and attractive as it was without taint of selfishness. She seemed to unite in herself the gentle sweetness and restraint of her Quaker[23] mother, with the more heroic, full-blooded qualities of the old jolly major. She had a natural gift of description and was a graphic story-teller, but of book-learning she had next to none, and letter-writing was always difficult to her. She lacked little, however, of that higher education which comes of life-long true and fine relations with persons and with things. She had been an excellent horsewoman, and in later years her visitors were impressed by her vitality and reserve power. Her words fell with weight; she had a grave dignity; but withal her oval face, framed in its dark hair and snowy cap, was full of kindness; and about the corners of her mouth, and under her high-set brows, there always lurked a quaint and quiet humour. Little as we know of Louisa Whitman, we know enough to regard her as in every respect the equal in character of her son, whom she endowed with a natural happiness of heart. She became the mother of eight children, and lived to be nearly eighty years old, somewhat crippled by rheumatism, but industrious, charming and beloved to the last.
* * * * *
The first four years of his life, little Walt spent at West Hills. He is not the only worthy of the place, for here, half a century earlier, was born the Honourable Silas Wood,[24] who now and for ten years to come, represented the district in Congress. Already, doubtless, he was collecting materials for his Sketch of the First Settlement of Long Island, soon to appear.[25] But neither he nor his history greatly concerns us.
Some two or three miles of sandy lane separate the old Whitman farm from the present railway station. On an autumn day one finds the way bordered by huckleberries and tall evening primroses, yellow toad-flax, blue chickory and corn-flowers, and sturdy forests of golden-rod among the briars and bushes. In the rough hedgerows are red sumachs, oaks, chestnuts and tall cedars, locusts and hickories; the gateways open on to broad fields full of picturesque cabbages, or the plumed regiments of the tall green Indian corn. It is a farming country, and a country rich in game--foxes and quails and partridges--and populous now with all kinds of chirping insects, with frogs and with mosquitoes. The wooded hills themselves are full of birds; beyond them there are vineyards.
The road winds to the hills which give the place its name. To be precise, the Whitman farm, as my driver assured me, belongs to the hamlet of Millwell, but the title of West Hills is better known. The other name may, however, serve to recall those cold sweet springs which rise along the foot of the hills and keep the country green, and whose waters are highly esteemed in New York.
The lane passes by the end of an old grey shingled farmhouse, boasting a new brick chimney. A delicate, ash-like locust tree stands by the big gate.
Here, if you turn into the farm road under the boughs of the orchard, and then, through the wicket in the palings, cross the weedy garden square, you may enter under the timber-propped porch into the low-ceiled house where Walt was born. It is small but comfortable, of two stories and a half. The morning sun streams through the open door, blinks in at the sun-shutters, and filters through the mosquito netting. On the left of the hall[26] are a bedroom and parlour, and the dining-room is on the right, where a wing of one story has been added. Beyond this there is a lower extension; and beyond again, extend the chocolate-coloured barns and sheds and byres and stables of the farm. At one corner of the garden palings stands the little well-house with its four neat pillars, and a big bell swings in its forked post by the side gate to summon the men from the fields into which one sees the farm road wandering. The fields run up to the wood. Across the road from the garden is an apple orchard, where the pigs root, and the hens scratch and cluck and scuffle. It was planted by Walt's uncle Jesse.
WHITMAN'S BIRTHPLACE AT WEST HILLS, FROM THE LANE, 1904
This is not the first ancestral cabin of the Whitmans; that lies at a little distance, nearer to the woods. It belongs now to another farm--the former holding having been divided--and the old cabin has become a waggon-shed. Both farms have long since passed out of the family; but near the first house, on a little woody knoll,[27] you may still see the picturesque group of unlettered stones which cluster on the Whitman burying hill.
Neither Walt himself nor his father and mother are buried here among their relatives and ancestors; but the boy, so early pre-occupied with the mysteries of life, must have often stolen to this strange solitude to commune with its silence and to hear the wind among the branches, whispering of death. There is a big old oak near by, old perhaps as the first Whitman settlement, and a grove of beautiful black walnuts, and this, too, was one of the children's haunts.
* * * * *
Such was the old Whitman home and country, to which the boy's earliest memories belonged, where he spent some of the years and nearly all the holidays of his youth and early manhood, and in which his later thoughts found their natural background, his deepest consciousness its native soil. It is, as we have seen, no tame or narrow country, but wide and generous, and it is within sound of the sea. In the still night that succeeds a storm, you may hear the strange low murmur of the Atlantic surf beating upon the coast.[28] The boy was born in the hills, with that sea-murmur about him.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] See inter alia Furman's Antiquities of Long Island; and his Notes Relating to the Town of Brooklyn; Silas Wood's Sketch of First Settlement of L. I.; B. F. Thompson's History of L. I.; N. S. Prime's History of L. I.; A Brief Description of New York, by Daniel Denton (1690), ed. by G. Furman.
[5] Wood, 73 n.
[6] See Wood's, Thomson's, and Prime's History of L. I.
[7] Comp. Prose, 7; cf. Furman's Antiquities, 249; Denton, 14.
[8] Wood, 65; cf. Comp. Prose.
[9] In re, 197.
[10] See Appendix A.
[11] S. M. Janney's History of Friends, vol. i.
[12] Furman's Antiq., 97; Janney, vol. ii.
[13] Furman's Antiq., 229.
[14] Thompson, op. cit.
[15] Symonds, xii.; Savage Genealog. Dict.
[16] Comp. Prose, 3; Bucke, 13.
[17] Camden Introd.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Comp. Prose, 6; Camden, xix.
[20] In re, 202.
[21] Burroughs, 79; Bucke, 15; Whit. Fellowship, '94 (Brinton and Traubel); Wound Dresser, 115, etc.
[22] Bucke, 16; Comp. Prose, 274; Camden, xvii.; In re, 195, etc.
[23] See Appendix A.
[24] Wood, 5 (ed. by A. J. Spooner).
[25] 1828.
[26] Whit. Fellowship, op. cit.
[27] Comp. Prose, 4.
[28] Ibid., 6.
CHAPTER II
BOYHOOD IN BROOKLYN
The hill-range which forms the back-bone of Long Island, and upon whose slopes Walt Whitman was born, terminates on the west in Brooklyn Heights, which overlook the busy bay and crowded city of New York.
The heights recall Washington's masterly retreat; and the hint is enough to remind the shame-faced English visitor that the American is not without cause for a certain coolness in the very genuine affection which he manifests for the mother country. 'Seventy-six and the six years that followed, with all their legacy of bitter thoughts, was succeeded by 1814 and the burning of the Capitol. In this later war it was Virginia, not New England, that took the initiative; Massachusetts and Connecticut even opposed it, and it may have been none too popular in adjacent Long Island.
It is doubtful whether Major van Velsor or his sons actually took the field against the British. But this second and last of the Anglo-American wars was still a bitter and vivid memory when in May, 1823,[29] towards Walt's fourth birthday, his father, the old major's son-in-law, left the farm, removing with his family to Front Street, Brooklyn, near the wharves and water-side.
Though but a country town with great elm-trees still shading its main thoroughfare,[30] Brooklyn was growing, and its trade was brisk. It is likely that the carpenter, Whitman, framed more than one of the hundred and fifty houses which were added to it during the year.
In the meantime, Walt took advantage of his improved situation to study men and manners in a sea-port town. He watched the ferry-boats that for the last ninety years had plied to and fro, binding Brooklyn to its big neighbour opposite upon Manhattan Island. For another sixty years their decks provided the only roadway across the East River, and they still go back and forward loaded heavily, in spite of the two huge but graceful bridges which now span the grey waters. The boy gazed wondering at the patient horse in the round house on deck, which, turning like a mule at a wheel-pump, provided the propelling power for the ferry-boat till Fulton replaced him by steam.
The boy in frocks must have wondered, too, at the great shows and pageants of 1824 and 1825 which filled New York with holiday-making crowds. For in August of the former year, came the old hero of two Republics, General Lafayette, to be received with every demonstration of admiring gratitude by the people of America. Some scintilla of the glory of those days--pale reflection, as it was, of the far-away tragic radiance that lighted up the world at the awakening of Justice and of Liberty on both sides of the sea--fell upon the child. For when the old soldier visited Brooklyn to lay the corner-stone of a library there, he found the youngster in harm's way and lifted him, with a hearty kiss, on to a coign of vantage.[31] Thus, at six years old, Walt felt himself already famous.
Again, a few months later, the city was all ablaze with lights and colour and congratulations on the opening of the Erie Canal, which connected New York with Ohio and promised to break the monopoly of Western commerce held hitherto by the queen city of the Mississippi.
* * * * *
By this time, the family counted four children; two brothers, Jesse and Walt, and two little girls, Mary and Hannah, all born within six years. Of the children, Walt and Hannah appear to have been special friends, but we have little record of this period. As they grew old enough, they attended the Brooklyn public school and went duly to Sunday school as well.[32] In the summers they spent many a long holiday in the fields and lanes about West Hills.
A reminiscence of those times is enshrined in one of the best known of the Leaves of Grass,[33] written more than a quarter of a century later, a memory of the May days when the boy discovered a mocking-birds' nest containing four pale green eggs, among the briars by the beach, and watched over them there from day to day till presently the mother-bird disappeared; and then of those September nights when, escaping from his bed, he ran barefoot down on to the shore through the windy moonlight, flung himself upon the sand, and listened to the desolate singing of the widowed he-bird close beside the surf. There, in the night, with the sea and the wind, he lay utterly absorbed in the sweet, sad singing of that passion, some mystic response awakening in his soul; till in an ecstasy of tears which flooded his young cheeks, he felt, rather than understood, the world-meaning hidden in the thought of death.[34]
This self-revealing reminiscence, even if it should prove to diverge from historic incident and to take some colour from later thought, illumines the obscurity which covers the inner life of his childhood. Elsewhere we can dimly see him as his mother's favourite; towards her he was always affectionate. But with his father he showed himself wayward, idle, self-willed and independent, altogether a difficult lad for that kindly but taciturn and determined man to manage. Walt retained these qualities, and they caused endless trouble to every ill-advised person who afterwards attempted the task in which worthy Walter Whitman failed.
Among his young companions, though he was not exactly imperious, Walt seems to have played the part of a born leader; he was a clever boy; he always had ideas, and he always had a following. And as a rule he was delightful to be with, for he had an unflagging capacity for enjoyment and adventure.
But there must have been times when he was moody and reserved. The passionate element in his nature which the song of the mocking-bird aroused belongs rather to night solitudes than to perpetual society and sunshine. As he grew older, and, perhaps, somewhat overgrew his physical strength,[35] he was often unhappy in himself. There was something tempestuous in him which no one understood, he himself least of any. Probably his wise and very human mother came nearest to understanding; and her heart was with him as he fought out his lonely battles with that strange enemy of Youth's peace, the soul.
* * * * *
Little brothers were added from time to time to the family group; Andrew, George and Jeff, and last of all poor under-witted Ted, born when Walt was a lad of sixteen, to be the life-long object of his mother's affectionate care. The names of Andrew and Jeff reflect their father's political sentiments; the latter recalling the founder of the old Jeffersonian Republicanism; and the former being called after Andrew Jackson, the popular and successful candidate for the presidency, in the year of the boy's birth, who afterwards reorganised his party, creating the "Democratic" machine to take the place of what had hitherto been the "Republican" caucus. Thus Republicanism changed its name, and the title did not reappear in party politics for a generation.
As Walter Whitman built, mortgaged and eventually sold his frame-houses, the family would often move from one into another: we can trace at least five migrations[36] during the ten years that they remained in Brooklyn. He was a busy, but never a prosperous man; with his large family, the fluctuations of trade must have affected him seriously; and scattered through his son's story, there are fast-days and seasons of privation. Walter Whitman was, in short, a working man upon the borders of the middle-class: thrifty, shrewd, industrious, but dependent upon his earnings; mixing at times with people of good education, but of little himself; a master-workman, the son of a well-read and thoughtful mother, living in the free and natural social order which at that time prevailed in Brooklyn and New York.
He was not outwardly religious; he was never a church-goer; even his wife, who called herself a Baptist, only went irregularly,[37] and then, with an easy tolerance, to various places of worship--the working mother of eight children has her hands full on Sundays. In the household there was no form of family prayers. But when old Elias Hicks[38] preached in the neighbourhood, they went to hear him, tending more towards a sort of liberal Quakerism than to anything else.
WALTER WHITMAN, SENIOR
The Whitmans were not an irreligious family--Walt was, for instance, fairly well-grounded in the Scriptures--but they thought for themselves, they disliked anything that savoured of exclusion, and their religion consisted principally in right living and in kindliness. Their devotion to the old Quaker minister is interesting. Hicks was a remarkable man and a most powerful and moving preacher. He was large and liberal-minded; too liberal, it would seem, for some of his hearers. His utterances had however passed unchallenged till an evangelical movement, fostered by some English Friends among their American brethren, made further acquiescence seem impossible.
That which complacently calls itself orthodoxy is naturally intolerant, it can, indeed, hardly even admit tolerance to a place among the virtues; and the evangelical propaganda must be very pure if it is to be unaccompanied by the spirit of exclusion. It may seem strange that such a spirit should enter into a Society which gathers its members under the name of "Friends," a name which seems to indicate some basis broader than the creeds, some spiritual unity which could dare to welcome the greatest diversity of view because it would cultivate mutual understanding. But the broader the basis and the more spiritual the bond of fellowship, the more disastrous is the advent of the spirit of schism masking itself under some title of expediency, and here this spirit had forced an entrance.
Between Hicks--who himself appears to have been somewhat intolerant of opposition, a strong-willed man, frankly hostile to the evangelical dogmatics--and the narrower sort of evangelicals, relations became more and more strained, until, in 1828, the octogenarian minister was disowned by the official body of Quakers, after some painful scenes. He was however followed into his exile by a multitude of his hearers and others who foresaw and dreaded the crystallisation of Quakerism under some creed.
Soon after the crisis, and only three months before his death, Elias Hicks preached in the ball-room of Morrison's Hotel on Brooklyn Heights. Among the mixed company who listened on that November evening to the old man's mystical and prophetic utterance, was the ten-year old boy, accompanying his parents.
Hicks sprang from the peasant-farming class to which the Whitmans belonged; and, as a lad, had been intimate with Walt's great-grandfather, and with his son after him. It was then, with a sort of hereditary reverence, that the boy beheld that intense face, with its high-seamed forehead, the smooth hair parted in the middle and curling quaintly over the collar behind; the hawk nose, the high cheek bones, the repression of the mouth, and the curiously Indian aspect of the tall commanding figure, clad in the high vest and coat of Quaker cut. The scene was one he never forgot. The finely-fitted and fashionable place of dancing, the officers and gay ladies in that mixed and crowded assembly, the lights, the colours and all the associations, both of the faces and of the place, presenting so singular a contrast with the plain, ancient Friends seated upon the platform, their broad-brims on their heads, their eyes closed; with the silence, long continued and becoming oppressive; and most of all, with the tall, prophetic figure that rose at length to break it.
With grave emphasis he pronounced his text: "What is the chief end of man?" and with fiery and eloquent eyes, in a strong, vibrating, and still musical voice, he commenced to deliver his soul-awakening message. The fire of his fervour kindled as he spoke of the purpose of human life; his broad-brim was dashed from his forehead on to one of the seats behind him. With the power of intense conviction his whole presence became an overwhelming persuasion, melting those who sat before him into tears and into one heart of wonder and humility under his high and simple words.