During the first years of his sojourn among them, some of the young men of Camden had founded a Walt Whitman Club;[705] and year by year a group of intimate friends was springing up about his own door.

Chief of these was Mr. Horace Traubel, whose life became so inextricably interwoven with Whitman’s last years that he has rightly been called the old poet’s spiritual son. He was one of the first of Walt’s Camden acquaintances. How or when they met, neither could remember; looking back to the summer evenings when the lame, white-haired man and the fair lad sat together on the steps of the Stevens Street house, it seemed as though they had always been friends.[706]

Another of the group was Mr. T. B. Harned,[707] Traubel’s brother-in-law, an able lawyer and lover of books, whose house became a second home for Whitman after the removal from Philadelphia of his friends the Pearsall Smiths. These two gentlemen, with Dr. Bucke, eventually became Whitman’s executors; better than anything else, this shows the confidence which their old friend reposed in them.

On his sixty-ninth birthday—Friday, 31st May, 1888—his Camden friends and others met him at dinner at Mr. Harned’s.[708] Two days later he was there again, and Dr. Bucke, arriving unexpectedly, was of the party.

[Pg 326]

Walt had come in his carriage, and afterwards drove the doctor to the ferry. Thence he made his way to a point where, urging his horse into the river, he had nothing but water and sky before him, all filled with the sunset glory. He sat for an hour absorbing it in a sort of ecstasy.[709]

Returning home, he felt that he had been chilled, and recognised intimations of a paralytic attack—the seventh—[710] as he went to bed. He quietly resisted this alone. In the morning he had two more slight strokes, and for the first time temporarily lost the power of speech.

This was Monday, and all through the week he lay close to death. Dr. Bucke had returned, his friends entertaining no hopes of his recovery. But the end was not yet.

Even in the midst of the uncertainty he was determined to complete the work he had in hand. Every day he contrived to get downstairs, and every evening he turned over the proof-sheets of a new volume, which Horace Traubel brought with him from the printer’s on his way back from the city. From this time on, Traubel was his daily visitor, his faithful and assiduous aid.[711]

Slowly the old man began again to improve, but he never regained the lost ground. His friends found him paler than of old, with new lines on his face, and a heavier expression of weariness.[712] The horse and carriage were no longer of service, and had to be sold; in the autumn a nurse and wheel-chair took their place. The increased confinement troubled him most of all, so that he became jealous of the tramp with his outdoor life.
Hand written text from two postcards which Whitman sent to Mrs. Berenson, 1887-1888.

FAC-SIMILES OF POST-CARDS FROM WHITMAN TO MRS. BERENSON, 1887-8

Altogether, as he wrote to his friends, though holding the fort—“sort o’”—he was “a pretty complete physical wreck”.[713] O’Connor, too, was now paralysed[Pg 327] and near his end; the two old friends, similarly stricken, were once again exchanging greetings, though separated now by a whole continent. In O’Connor’s case, however, the brain itself was also giving way. Walt followed all the illness of him who had been in some respects his best comrade with pathetic interest, until, returning from California to Washington, the broken flesh gave freedom at last to the man’s fiery spirit.[714]

Whitman grew somewhat more querulous in these later days, with the increase of pain and discomfort;[715] for from this time on one may almost say that he was slowly dying. Not that he complained or was inconsiderate, but little things caused him greater irritation, though only for a moment.

Nothing is more notable in Whitman’s nature than the short duration of his fits of quick-flaming wrath.[716] They flashed out from him in a sudden word, and passed, leaving no trace of bitterness or resentment behind.

An example of this is afforded by his behaviour toward the unexpected and vehement assault upon him by a former admirer, Mr. Swinburne. Having once acclaimed Whitman as the cor cordium of the singers of freedom,[717] he now consigned him to the category of the Tuppers; opining that, with a better education, he might perhaps have attained to a rank above Elliott the Corn-Law rhymer, but below the laureate Southey. According to Mr. Swinburne’s revised estimate, Whitman was in short no true poet; and as for his ideal of beauty, it was not only vulgar but immoral. The attack roused Whitman to snap out, “Isn’t he the damnedest simulacrum?” but that was all.[718] The affair was dismissed, and he only regretted that, for his own sake, Swinburne had not risen higher.

[Pg 328]

The rather contemptuous reference to Whitman’s deficient education recalls the first criticism passed upon the Leaves. Their author was gravely commended to the study of Addison,[719] and to tell the truth, this has been about the last word of a large number of academic persons from that day to this. Their advice, when acted upon, nearly ruined Robert Burns; it had little effect upon Whitman, though it was not neglected.

But Mr. Swinburne’s attack reminds one also of something more important even than “Addison”; the antithesis and opposition which exists between two great orders of poets, of which his friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Whitman himself may be taken as the types. The Blessed Damozel is in another world from any page of the Leaves; and there is almost nothing which the two poets seem to share. Mr. Swinburne did good service, in so far as he pointed the contrast; but he confused it by declaiming against the prophet, and extolling the sonneteer.

The field may not so be limited; the exile of Byron, Emerson and Carlyle from the brotherhood of poets, though proclaimed by Mr. Swinburne, can hardly be enforced. For as Whitman has suggested,[720] there are, inevitably, two kinds of great poetry: one corresponding, as it were, to the song of the Nightingale, and another to the flight of the Eagle. He himself has nothing of the infinitely allusive grace of the former, the sonnet-twining interpreters of the romantic past, the painters of subtle dream-beauties and fair women whose faces are the faces of unearthly flowers wrought purely of the passions of dead men.

But they again have nothing of his appeal to the heroic and kingly spirit that confronts the equally romantic future, grappling with world-tragedies and creating the new beauty of passions hitherto unborn. Doubtless the greatest poets unite these two orders, reconciling them in their own persons; but such are the very greatest of all time. I do not think that Whitman[Pg 329] himself would have admitted a claim on his behalf to be counted among them.[721]

The sheets he had been correcting with Traubel’s aid, in the crisis of his illness, were those of November Boughs, a volume composed, like Two Rivulets, of prose and verse. It appeared in November, 1888. Among its prose papers are sympathetic studies of Burns and of Elias Hicks, with an appreciation of George Fox.[722] There are also many reminiscences, notably of the Old Bowery Theatre, and of New Orleans; and most interesting of all, a biographical study of the origins and purpose of the Leaves themselves.

This Backward Glance o’er Travel’d Roads[723] has far more of modesty in it than his earlier writings, which were necessarily occupied with self-assertion. In his old age he shows himself a little alarmed at his more youthful readiness to take up the challenge which he had seen Democracy and Science throwing down to Poetry. He recognises with clearer vision than many of his friends, his own weakness in poetic technique, and the experimental nature of his work in poetry. But he does not pretend to doubt its importance; for, as he avers, it is the projection of a new and American attitude of mind.[Pg 330] He is not without confidence also, that his book will prove a comfort to others, since it has been the main comfort of his own solitary life—and he believes it will be found a stimulus to the American nation of his love.

The poems of the new collection are all brief and many of them are descriptive. For the rest, they are mainly the assertions of a jocund heart defying the ice-cold, frost-bound winter of old-age, and waiting for the sure-following spring. Meanwhile, he enjoys the inner mysteries, and the enforced quiet of these later days, these starry nights; living, as he quaintly says, in “the early candlelight of old-age”.[724] To him they sometimes seem to be the best, the halcyon days of all.
Not from successful love alone,
Nor wealth, nor honor’d middle age, nor victories of politics or war;
But as life wanes, and all the turbulent passions calm,
As gorgeous, vapory, silent hues cover the evening sky,
As softness, fulness, rest, suffuse the frame, like freshier, balmier air,
As the days take on a mellower light, and the apple at last hangs really finish’d and indolent-ripe on the tree,
Then for the teeming quietest, happiest days of all!
The brooding and blissful halcyon days![725]

He often reviews his past, so seemingly purposeless and incoherent, and yet so profoundly urged from its source within toward the unseen goal. Still before him, he sees endless vistas of the eternal purpose. The secret souls of things speak to him; the restless sea betrays the unsatisfied passion of the Earth’s great heart;[726] the rain bears love back with it to the mountains whence it came.[727] Everything instructs him, for he remains eager to learn—criticism and rejection at least as much as acceptance.

Sometimes the long process of dying—the painfully prolonged separating of a Body and Soul which were more intimately wedded than are others—leaves its mark upon the page; as in a brief note where he states simply that his solemn experiences at this period are unlikely to occur in any other human life.[728] He felt[Pg 331] himself solitary even in his pain. But this was a solitude hallowed and supported by the Everlasting Arms.

Though often sleepless and suffering, he kept, upon the whole, a cheery business about him, working to the end. But silence now predominated in his days, and his craving for it increased. In the evening, Traubel would come in and sit beside him, watching his face profiled against the evening light. He had grown to feel the old man’s mood, and had learnt to say nothing. After an hour or two he had his reward; Walt would bid him good-bye with a smile, saying, “What a good talk we’ve had”. For neither of them wanted words.

Through the winter and spring of 1888 to 1889 he remained house-tied, anchored in his big chair by the fire; “every month letting the pegs lower,” he wrote to his friends.[729] But in June he got out and about in his wheel-chair, and in August crossed the ferry to be photographed, immensely delighted at the evidences of gaiety and prosperity which met him everywhere. America, he would say, is laying great material foundations; the sky-climbing towers will arise in good time.
Picture of Whitman at seventy.

WHITMAN AT SEVENTY

The birthday dinner, which he did not altogether approve,[730] became this year a public function, and was held in the largest of the Camden halls.[731] He was seventy, and the day was but doubtfully propitious. However, he would not disappoint his friends, and arrived when the meal was over.

He looked weary, as well he might, but the human contact and the atmosphere of love and fellowship warmed and refreshed him. The messages of congratulation came from far and from many, from William Morris among the rest. Walt wore a black coat, which was almost unprecedented, and hid himself behind a great bowl of flowers, enjoying their colour and scent, sipping at his champagne, and tapping applause with the bottle whenever he approved a sentiment. One[Pg 332] remembers how he used to detest and escape from all lionising, and to-night, after the praises and the enthusiasm were concluded, he said laughingly to his nurse that it was very well, but there was too much “gush and taffy”.[732]

That spring he had been too ill to celebrate the Lincoln anniversary, but in the following, after a struggle with influenza, he delivered it for the last—the thirteenth—time.

Hoarse and half-blind, he crossed the river,[733] assisted everywhere by willing hands, and with great difficulty climbed the long stairs to the room on South Broad Street, where Horace Traubel’s Contemporary Club held its meetings. Refusing introduction, he took his seat on the platform, put on his glasses, and got immediately to business, reading with a melodious voice and easy manner.

He was over in the city again for his next birthday celebration, and after the dinner, Colonel Ingersoll made a long, impassioned tribute to his friend.[734] The comradeship between them was strong and satisfying to both; Whitman was always in better spirits after a call from the colonel. “He is full of faults and mistakes,” he said once to an English friend, “but he is an example in literature of natural growth as a tree”; adding, “he gives out always from himself.”[735]

Their attitude toward questions of religion was often antagonistic, and on this occasion, after the speech, Whitman made a sort of rejoinder. While gratefully acknowledging his friend’s appreciation of Leaves of Grass, he pointed out that Ingersoll had stopped short of the main matter, for the book was crammed with allusions to immortality, and was bound together by the idea of purpose, resident in the heart of all and realising itself in the material universe. He turned to Ingersoll, demanding, “Unless there is a definite object for it all, what, in God’s name, is it all for?” And Ingersoll, shaking[Pg 333] his head, replied, “I can’t tell. And if there is a purpose, and if there is a God, what is it all for? I can’t tell. It looks like nonsense to me, either way.”

From this intellectual agnosticism no argument could dislodge a mind like Ingersoll’s, for noble as it was, it was limited by its own logic, and to logic alone, working with the material of merely intellectual knowledge, the universe must inevitably remain a riddle. Whitman, recognising a more perfect faculty of reason, and cognisant of a field of transcendent knowledge which Ingersoll had never known, was able to realise a purpose in this, which to Ingersoll seemed only nonsense.

For the divinely creative imagination, when it is awakened, discovers in all things the meanings of creative thought. And personality, when in its supreme hours it transcends the limitations of human knowledge, and enters the consciousness of the Whole, discovers the meaning of immortality, and the indestructibility of the soul. Such flights are naturally impossible to the pedestrian faculties of the mind.

Ingersoll spoke again in Philadelphia, in the same vein and on the same subject, in October.[736] He had a large audience of perhaps two thousand persons in the Horticultural Hall, and Whitman was present on the platform.

Taking up his subject somewhat in the manner of O’Connor in the Good Gray Poet, the orator denounced the hypocrisy and parochialism of American opinion, and proclaimed the Divine right of the liberator, genius. He justified “Children of Adam,” and gave in his adherence to the theory of free rhythm which is exemplified in the Leaves.

Alluding to the subject of their discussion after the recent dinner at Reisser’s, he declared it impossible for him to make any assertion of immortality; but admitted that Hope, replying to the question of Love over the grave, might proclaim that “before all life is death, and after death is life”.

[Pg 334]

After the fine, but, in cold type at least, the over-florid peroration descriptive of the atmosphere of Whitman’s work, the applause was dying away, and the people rising to go, when the old poet signalled for them to be detained, and saying that he was there himself to offer the final testimony to and explanation of his writings, if they would look at him and understand, he gave thanks to them and to the orator, and bade them all farewell.
Picture of Robert G. Ingersoll.

ROBERT G. INGERSOLL, FROM A PRINT

The whole scene presents a curiously suggestive picture. And Whitman’s situation was a most singular one. His friends had arranged a benefit lecture on the Leaves by the most eloquent eulogist in America. It is true the book is not identical with Whitman, but it would be difficult to separate the Leaves from the man. And here was the man, apparently of his own free will, receiving the eulogy and applause in person and the gate-money by deputy.

The pious Philadelphians had expressed their disapproval of the lecturer,[737] his iconoclastic fervour and agnosticism, by refusing him the use of the most commodious hall, and their opposition had encouraged Walt to stand at his friend’s side. But apart from this, his presence illustrates some of the characteristics of his nature, his child-like and sometimes terrible love of directness in the relations of life, and his frank eagerness for appreciation.

We have seen already that he could learn from criticism, and there is a story of Dr. Bucke’s which is too good to omit, though it entails a slight digression. It was against the awkwardness, not the severity, of his literary surgeons that he would protest with a quiet humour. After one of their operations, more painful than usual, in his slow, slightly nasal drawl, he related how a Quaker was once set on by a robber in a wood. The fellow knocked his passive victim to the ground, rifled him thoroughly, and “pulling out a long knife proceeded to cut his throat. The knife was dull, the[Pg 335] patience of the poor Quaker almost exhausted. ‘Friend,’ said he to the robber, ‘I do not object to thee cutting my throat, but thee haggles.’”[738]

But while accepting blame with serenity, he yet preferred praise; understanding praise above all, though even ignorant praise was hardly unwelcome. Praise not directly of himself, be it understood—that often made him uncomfortable;[739] but of the book, his alter ego, his child. For the book was, besides, a Cause, and that the noblest; and even vain applauding of it sounded, in the old man’s ears, like the tramp of the hosts of progress; in whose ranks there must needs follow, let us admit, a number of enthusiastic fools.

Of such, certainly, Ingersoll was not one. He saw in the book much of what Whitman had put there; and especially he understood how it had been written under the stress of an emotion which finds its symbol in that banner of the blue and stars, which he so happily described as “the flag of Nature”.[740]

Other men have given themselves out to be a Christ, or a John the Baptist, or an Elijah; Whitman, without their fanaticism, but with a profound knowledge of himself, recognised in a peasant-born son of Mannahatta, an average American artisan, the incarnation of America herself. “He is Democracy,” quoth Thoreau;[741] and when he sat with a pleased indifference under the eloquent stream of Ingersoll’s panegyric, he was only testifying anew to his whole-hearted, glad willingness to give himself, body and mind, for the interpretation of America to her children. But none the less, it was a singular situation; and, doubtless, Whitman, who was not by any means obtuse, felt it to be such.

His last birthday dinner was held in the lower room at Mickle Street after a winter of illness—“the main abutments and dykes shattered and threatening to give out”[742]—broken by an occasional saunter in his wheel[Pg 336]chair with the welcome sight of some four-masted schooner on the river, and by the visits of his friends.

He was still himself, however. An English admir............