The year 1850 itself is memorable for Clay’s opportunist resolutions in Congress, which were intended to settle nothing; and for the fierce debates upon them and upon the Fugitive Slave Bill, in which Webster and Seward, Calhoun and Jefferson Davis participated.[141] Clay and Webster died soon after, and their party being utterly routed at the polls in 1852, finally went to pieces. The vote of the liberty party had declined, and compromise still held up its foolish head. But the victorious Democrats brought all hope of its continuance to an end by reviving the principle of “squatter sovereignty,” and proceeding to apply it in the newly settled lands. It was their policy to snatch the question of slavery out of the hands of Congress; for which, as the organ of the[Pg 80] Federal power, they nursed an increasing enmity. The bloody scenes which drew all eyes to Kansas made it plain that compromise was done; the South had thrown it over, and was now half-consciously driving the country into war.
When the leaders of 1850 died there was no one to take their places, though the crisis called for men of counsel and of spirit. President Pierce, of New Hampshire, the tool of the party machine, merely represented the political weakness of the nation. It was not till after the next elections that their new leaders were discovered by the American people. Judge Douglas, the champion of “squatter sovereignty,” rose indeed into prominence in 1854, but his greater antagonist still remained comparatively unknown in the country, though famous in his State and among his neighbours for keen logic and humorous common-sense.
There was no leadership. Compromise was yielding not to principle but to the spirit of the mob. Immigration and the increase of the towns favoured organised political corruption; and the tyranny of interests and privileges was beginning to make itself felt on every hand. When parties are separated by motives of personal gain rather than by principle, party-feeling finds expression not in devotion and enthusiasm, but in violence. It was not only in such newly settled lands as Kansas, nor alone in such chaotic aggregations of humanity as were being piled together in New York, that constitutional methods were abandoned and private violence was condoned. The spirit of anarchy was abroad, and members of Congress went armed to the Capitol itself.
The violence was a natural reaction from the compromise, and like the compromise was a birth of the materialistic spirit. America’s idealism, so triumphant at the close of the eighteenth century, had fallen upon too confident a slumber, and heavily must the Republic pay for that sleep. A young nation of idealists is doubtless more subject than any other to these outbreaks of materialism and its offspring. It is optimistic, and[Pg 81] when it sleeps it leaves no dogs on guard. The nation becomes engrossed in material tasks, and is presently surprised by the enemy. But being so surprised, and fighting thus at disadvantage, it accomplishes more than the wary old pessimists whose energy is absorbed in prudence.
American idealism was asleep, but its slumbers were by no means sound. The voices of Garrison, Emerson and others mingled troublously with its dreams. And the pursuit and capture of fugitive slaves like Anthony Burns, in Boston itself; and the extraordinary sale, both in America and Europe, of Uncle Tom’s Cabin,[142] did much to quicken that Abolitionist sentiment which in the end won the day. For the present, however, and until the third year of the war, abolition remained outside the region of practical politics. The question which was dividing the nation was whether slavery should become a national institution—whether it should take its place, as the South intended, as one of the essential postulates in the theory of American liberty—or should be restrained within its old limits as a State institution, an evil which the Federal Government would never recognise as necessary to the welfare of America, but which it was too proud and too generous to compel its constituent States to abolish. The situation was one of unstable equilibrium, and the illogical position could not much longer be maintained. It was the logic of ideas that first drove the South into secession, and afterwards the nation into abolition.
Immigration was now beginning to create a difficult problem in the metropolis,[143] and was in part accountable for the corruption which from this time forward disfigured its politics. By 1855 New York counted more than six hundred thousand inhabitants; a number which in itself must inevitably have created many a delicate situation in a new country, but which was rendered tenfold more difficult to manage by its rapid growth and[Pg 82] heterogeneous character. It had doubled in fifteen years, and a continuously increasing stream of immigration had poured through it.
The first great wave had brought nearly two millions of Europeans, principally Germans and Irish, across the Atlantic during the later forties. The failure of the Irish potato crop in 1846, the crisis of 1848, when Europe was swept by revolution and afterwards by reaction, sent hundreds of thousands of homeless men across the sea. Many of the Germans afterwards took their share in another struggle for freedom in their new home; but on the other hand, the more helpless of the immigrants, and a large proportion of the Irish, swelled the population of New York; and proved themselves quicker to learn the advantages of party subserviency than the ethics of citizenship. Many of them had been trained in the school of tyranny at home. Thus the city government became almost hopelessly corrupt, falling into the hands of the genteel and unprincipled Mayor Fernando Wood,[144] and Isaiah Rynders, captain of his bodyguard of blackguards. Men of this stamp began to control not only the government of New York city, but the national party which had its headquarters at Tammany Hall. Whitman was intimate with the condition of things there,[145] and knew the men who manipulated the machine, and pulled the strings at the nominating conventions. He has described those of this period in the most scathing words, and has made it clear that they were among the worst of a bad class. They did not favour slavery so much as inaction; they longed only for a continuance of their own good fortune, desiring to fatten peacefully at the troughs of corruption. To men like these, ideals seem to constitute a public danger. And the war which broke over America in 1861 was due as much to the northern menials of Mammon as to the real followers of Calhoun. It was not only against the South that America fought—or rather it was not against the South itself at all—but against the hosts[Pg 83] of those who used her freedom for the accomplishment of an end antagonistic to hers.
Evidences of the demoralising influence always present in the life of a great city were thus painfully patent in New York, especially in the lowest strata, becoming hourly more debased and numerous. The plutocracy also began to imitate the showy splendours of Paris under the second Empire.[146] But it would be wrong to assume that corruption and display characterised the metropolis of the fifties. For in spite of the foreign influx, and the venality of a considerable class both of native and of foreign birth, and in spite too of the snobs, in spite that is to say of the appearance of two dangerous elements, the very poor and the very rich, there was still predominant in New York a frank and hearty democratic feeling. The mass of the people still embodied much of the true American genius; they were marked by the friendly, independent and unconventional carriage which is still upon the whole typical of the West.
New York was full of large democratic types of manhood. Notable, even among these, was Walt Whitman. Even here, he was unlike other men: the fulness of his spirits, his robust individuality, the generosity of his whole nature, was so exceptional as to make itself felt. His figure began to grow familiar to all kinds of New Yorkers during these years. He was frequently to be seen on Broadway,[147] in his favourite coign of vantage, on the stage-top by the driver’s side, a great, red-faced fellow, in a soft beaver, with clothes of his own choosing, an open collar like that of Byron or Jean Paul, and a grey beard. The dress suited him, he was plainly at home in it, and in those days it was not specially remarkable or odd; it was the man himself who compelled attention.
On many a holiday through 1853 he might also have been seen at the International Exhibition or World’s Fair,[148] which was held in the Crystal Palace on Sixth[Pg 84] Avenue and Fortieth Street, and offered a remarkable object lesson to the people of New York on the development of American resources and the value of that national unity which railroads and machinery were yearly making more actual. Here America was seen in all her own natural promise, and also in her relation to the Transatlantic world.
It was one of those sights which Whitman dearly loved. The Exhibition taught him far more than books about the country in which he lived; for his mind was like a child’s in its responsiveness to concrete illustrations—a quality which may explain the long strings of nouns which figure so oddly on many a page which he afterwards wrote. He loved a medley of things, each one significant and delightful in itself. A catalogue was for him a sort of elemental poem; and being elemental, he sought to introduce the catalogue into literature. We who live in another and more ordered world, rarely respond to this kind of emotional stimulus, which was doubtless very powerful for Whitman, and cannot but laugh at his attempts to move us by a chatter of names. It may be we are wrong, and that another age will smile at us in our turn, though at present we remain incredulous.
Here, too, he studied such examples as he found of statuary and painting, arts of which he must hitherto have been largely ignorant. It is only very old or very wealthy cities that become treasuries of the plastic arts, and at this time New York was not yet sufficiently rich, or perhaps sufficiently travelled, to have accumulated this kind of wealth. Whitman was not blind to painting, like Carlyle, for in later years he so appreciated the genius of J. F. Millet that he used to say, “the man that knows his Millet needs no creed”.[149]
After a varied experience as teacher, printer, journalist and editor, Whitman had settled into the life of an American artisan. He had inherited much of the Dutch realism,[Pg 85] the love of things and of the making of things, from his mother’s side; while on his father’s, the associations with mallet and chisel had been strong from his childhood; and thus his trade helped him to gather together the fragments of his identity and weld them into one. As he was never in any sense its slave, it also provided him with the means for that constant leisurely study of life which was now his real occupation. When a house was off his hands and the money for it assured, he would take a holiday, extending sometimes over weeks together, in the remote parts of Long Island.[150] The open spaces helped his mood, and the quietness furthered the slow processes of self-realisation.
While at Brooklyn, he was every day on the ferry, and almost every evening he was in New York. He read during his dinner hour, and thought and meditated while he worked. The physical exercise quieted his brain. Taken earlier, it might have deadened it; but he was now a mature man full of thoughts, and well furnished with experience. What he needed was to assimilate all this material and make it his own. And while he built houses, the co-ordinating principle of his personality was building up for him a harmonious self-consciousness, which gradually filled out the large and wholesome body of the man. This gestating process required precisely the deliberation and open-air accompaniments which were afforded by his present life—a life so different from the confinement and incessant strain and stress which check all processes of conscious development in most men and women before they reach maturity. His nature was emotional, and music played a considerable part in its development. Always an assiduous opera-goer, Whitman took full advantage of the musical opportunities which New York offered him at this time. In 1850, Barnum had brought Jenny Lind to the Castle Gardens—now the Aquarium—a fashionable resort on the Battery, and Maretzek of the Astor Opera House, had replied with Parodi, and Bettini the great tenor.[151]
[Pg 86]
Best of all, in 1853, Marietta Alboni visited the city, and Whitman heard her every night of her engagement.[152] This great singer, whose voice was then in the plenitude of its power, had been some twelve years before the public and was already beginning to attain those physical proportions suggested in the cruel but witty saying that she resembled an elephant which had swallowed a nightingale. She was low-browed and of a somewhat heavy face, though Whitman thought her handsome; but it was by her voice, not her face, that she triumphed. Critics found her talent exceptionally impersonal and even cold, though they confessed that never voice was more enchanting.[153] This coldness is rather difficult to understand, for Whitman, who was a judge in such matters, felt it to be full of passion, and a passion which swept him away in the Titanic whirlwind of its power.[154] He had found Jenny Lind somewhat immature and her voice unrewarding, but Alboni awakened and illumined his very soul, and became, as it were, the incarnation of music.
The same summer[155] Walt took his father, whose health was failing, on a visit to Huntington, to see the old home for a last time. Two years later, Walter Whitman died and was buried in Brooklyn.
The family seems to have been living in Ryerton Street,[156] in a house which was the last building on that side of the town. Beside Walt, there were three unmarried brothers at home, George and Jeff as well as Edward; and Hannah, Walt’s favourite sister. We hear little of Jesse, the oldest brother, who appears to have been a labourer, of Andrew, or of the remaining sister Mary. Probably they were all married by this time and living away.
The three at home were the ablest of the brothers, and doubtless they shared the financial responsibility between them. The Portland Avenue house, into which they presently moved, bears witness to their comfort[Pg 87]able circumstances. Walt contributed his share with his brothers; beyond that he seemed indifferent about money; he hardly ever spoke of it, and perhaps by way of contrast with the others, evidently regarded the subject as of minor importance. Indeed, just as his own work had really grown profitable and he was on the way to become rich, he gave up carpentering for good. This was early in 1855.
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CHAPTER VII WHITMAN’S MANIFESTO
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