Part 25

‘Under the Old Elm’ is a magnificent tribute to a man so great that there is need of odes like this to help us comprehend his greatness. After calling up the scene when Washington, ‘a stranger among strangers,’ stood beneath that legendary tree to take command of his army, ‘all of captains,’ a motley rout, valorous deacons, selectmen, and village heroes among others, more skilled in debating their orders than obeying them, good fighters all, but ‘serious drill’s despair,’--the poet chants those beautiful lines in which is drawn the distinction between ‘Nation’ and ‘Country.’ The one is fashioned of computable things, good each in its kind and important in its place:--

But Country is a shape of each man’s mind Sacred from definition, unconfined By the cramped walls where daily drudgeries grind; An inward vision, yet an outward birth Of sweet familiar heaven and earth; A brooding Presence that stirs motions blind Of wings within our embryo being’s shell That wait but her completer spell To make us eagle-natured, fit to dare Life’s nobler spaces and untarnished air.

You who hold dear this self-conceived ideal, Whose faith and works alone can make it real, Bring all your fairest gifts to deck her shrine Who lifts our lives away from Thine and Mine And feeds the lamp of manhood more divine With fragrant oils of quenchless constancy. When all have done their utmost, surely he Hath given the best who gives a character Erect and constant, which nor any shock Of loosened elements, nor the forceful sea Of flowing or of ebbing fates, can stir From its deep bases in the living rock Of ancient manhood’s sweet security....

And the poet longs for skill to praise him fitly whom he does fitly praise in the stanzas that follow. It is a thoughtful, nobly eloquent, and poetically beautiful characterization of the great Virginian, and appropriately closes with a fine apostrophe to the historic Commonwealth from which Washington sprang.

The ‘Ode for the Fourth of July, 1876,’ though not lacking in forceful lines and fine imagery, is the least happy of the three poems. The questioning and critical mood is prominent. But the spirit of confidence prevails and is voiced in the invocation with which the ode concludes.

Various notes are touched in the collection of eighty-eight poems to which its author gave the title of _Heartsease and Rue_. Here are verses new and old, grave and gay, satirical, humorous, sentimental, and elegiac, epigrams, inscriptions, lyrics, poems of occasion, sonnets, epistles, and, chief among them, the ode written on hearing the news of the death of Agassiz. Whether, as has been asserted, ‘this poem takes its place with the few great elegies in our language, gives a hand to “Lycidas” and to “Thyrsis,”’ is a question to be decided by the suffrages of many good critics, rather than by the dictum of one. There is no doubt, however, that by virtue of its human quality, depth of personal feeling, sincerity in the accent of bereavement, and felicity of phrase, the ‘Agassiz’ will always stand in the first rank of Lowell’s greater verse.

VI

_FIRESIDE TRAVELS_, _MY STUDY WINDOWS_, _AMONG MY BOOKS_, _LATEST LITERARY ESSAYS_

_Fireside Travels_ is so entertaining a book as to make one wish that Lowell had chronicled more of his journeyings at home and abroad in the same amusing style. Two of the six essays--‘Cambridge Thirty Years Ago’ and ‘A Moosehead Journal’--take the form of letters addressed to the author’s friend, ‘the Edelmann Storg’ (W. W. Story). The others are grouped under the general title of ‘Leaves from my Journal in Italy and Elsewhere.’

One spirit animates the pages of this book,--a love of plain people, homely adventures, everyday sights and sounds. In a half-serious way (as if to show that he knows how to ‘do’ a tempest in the mountains or an illumination of St. Peter’s) Lowell throws in a number of unconventional passages on entirely conventional themes. But the strength of the book lies in the sympathetic and humorous accounts of that protean animal Man, who, whether he showed himself in the guise of a denizen of Old Cambridge, or of Uncle Zeb, who had been ‘to the ‘Roostick war,’ or of the Chief Mate of the packet ship, or of Leopoldo, the Italian guide, was more interesting to Lowell than any other object of his study.

Together with _Fireside Travels_ may be read ‘My Garden Acquaintance’ and ‘A Good Word for Winter,’ from _My Study Windows_, gossipy papers on Nature by one who looked on ‘a great deal of the modern sentimentalism about Nature as a mark of disease ... one more symptom of the general liver complaint.’ The sincerity of Lowell’s love of birds, beasts, flowers, trees, the sky and the landscape, admits of no question. Yet he approached Nature more or less through literature, as was becoming in a man brought up on White’s _Selborne_; and he seems his characteristic self when, having pulled a chair out under a tree, he sits there with a volume of Chaucer in his hands, looking up from the page now and then to watch his feathered neighbors, and make wise and humorous comments on their doings.

_Among My Books_ is a volume of literary and historical studies, six in number, entitled respectively, ‘Dryden,’ ‘Witchcraft,’ ‘Shakespeare Once More,’ ‘New England Two Centuries Ago,’ ‘Lessing,’ ‘Rousseau and the Sentimentalists.’ All are in Lowell’s best manner, and the ‘Dryden’ and ‘Shakespeare’ are particularly fine examples of those leisurely, stimulating, and always brilliant literary studies which this scholar knew so well how to write.

Of the thirteen papers in _My Study Windows_ that on ‘Abraham Lincoln’[67] and the one ‘On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners’ have a political bearing; those on ‘A Great Public Character’ (Josiah Quincy) and ‘Emerson the Lecturer’ are studies in personality; the ‘Library of Old Authors’ is an exercise in textual criticism, a merciless arraignment of certain unfortunate editors; the ‘Carlyle,’ ‘James Gates Percival,’ ‘Thoreau,’ ‘Swinburne’s Tragedies,’ ‘Chaucer,’ and ‘Pope’ are studies in literary history and interpretation.

_Among My Books_, ‘second series,’ contains five essays. More than a third of the volume is devoted to a study of ‘Dante,’ elaborate and exhaustive--as the word ‘exhaustive’ might be used in speaking of an essay not of a book. Then follows a most sympathetic essay on ‘Spenser,’ together with papers on ‘Milton,’ ‘Wordsworth,’ and ‘Keats.’

Of Lowell’s critical writings as a whole it may be said that better reading does not exist; and among the virtues of these essays is their length. Lowell would have been ill at ease in the limits of three or four thousand words too often imposed by the editors of our current magazines. He might even have been scornful of a public taste which dictated to editors to dictate to their contributors limits so narrow. Writing from the fulness of a well-stored mind, he liked room in which to display his thought. Having much to say, he did not scruple to take time to say it; but the time always goes quickly. He understood perfectly the art of beguiling one into forgetting the hours as they pass.

These essays, so rich in critical suggestiveness, abound in matter-of-fact knowledge. We read for information and get it. Lowell shares with us the wealth of his acquaintance with books. His manner is unostentatious. Macaulay staggers us with his array of facts and his range of allusion. We are overwhelmed, intellectually cowed by the display of knowledge. Lowell too astonishes, but only after a while. Macaulay declaims at his reader, Lowell converses with him. All is so easy, good-humored, and witty, that the reader for a moment labors under the mistake of supposing that he is being instructed less than he would like. Later he begins to count up his mental gains, and is surprised at the display they make.

Another obvious source of pleasure is the felicity of expression. Lowell had the courage of his cleverness. Brilliancy was natural to him. He defended the practice of piquant phrasing, maintaining that a thought is not wanting in depth because it is strikingly put. Doubtless he loved an ingenious turn for its own sake, but it would be difficult to find an instance of his making a display of verbal vivacity to conceal poverty of thought.

These pages bear constant witness to Lowell’s passion for books, a passion too genuine and deep-seated to admit of any doubt on his part of the worth of literature. He had none of Emerson’s scepticism, who held that if people would only think, they might do without books. The dullest proser and most leaden-winged poet could not make Lowell despair.

A number of essays display no little of the severity which we have learned to associate with reviewing after the manner of Jeffrey and Lockhart. Yet these caustic passages were written by a man who said of himself that he had ‘to fight the temptation to be too good-natured.’ Priggishness was as absurd to him in scholarship and letters as elsewhere, and he never lost a chance to give it a touch of the whip. Happily there is little of this. Lowell was almost uniformly urbane, gracious, reasonable.

If his subject was a great one Lowell treated it in a great way; if circumscribed and provincial he enlarged its boundaries--as in the essay on ‘James Gates Percival,’ where a subject of small intrinsic worth becomes a study of the American literary mind at one of its periods of acute self-consciousness, useful historically and tending to present-day edification. Needless to say, Lowell enjoyed handling this topic. He liked to satirize the early American authors and critics, solemn and important over their great work of inaugurating a New-World literature and quite convinced that, since ‘that little driblet of the Avon had succeeded in producing William Shakespeare,’ something unusual was to be expected of the Mississippi River.

Although Lowell’s standing as a critic rests on such writings as his ‘Dryden,’ ‘Shakespeare,’ ‘Chaucer,’ ‘Spenser,’ ‘Pope,’ and ‘Dante,’ the amateur of good literature cannot afford to neglect anything to which this fine scholar put his hand.

The later volumes contain some of his most illuminating criticism (notably in the ‘Fielding,’ ‘Don Quixote,’ ‘Gray,’ ‘Walton,’ and ‘Landor’), and his style seems the perfection of ease and suppleness. Doubtless it is negligent now and then, but always with the winning negligence of a master in the difficult art of expression.

VII

_POLITICAL ADDRESSES AND PAPERS_

_The Anti-Slavery Papers_ consists of editorial articles reprinted from ‘The Pennsylvania Freeman,’ and ‘The Anti-Slavery Standard.’[68] Witty, ironical, and pungent, these fugitive leaves are of value for the light they throw on the history of the struggle maintained by the Abolitionists against their powerful enemies both in the North and in the South, as well as for the idea they give of the militant Lowell at a time when to conviction of the justness of the cause for which he fought was added a measure of joyousness in the mere act of fighting.

Of greater significance is the volume of _Political Essays_, twelve papers written at intervals between 1858 and 1866. Designed for the most part to serve an immediate purpose, and betraying in every page the writer’s depth of feeling, intensity of patriotism, and strong but not bigoted Northern convictions, these essays, by their acuteness of insight, balanced judgment, admirable temper, and wealth of allusion, as well as by their literary flavor and their occasional eloquence, hold a permanent place not only among Lowell’s best writings but among the best of the innumerable political papers called out by the Civil War.

Of Lowell’s later political utterances none is more notable than the address on ‘Democracy,’ delivered at Birmingham in 1884, a cleverly phrased and thoughtful speech in which the American minister defended the democratic idea with logic as adroit as it was sound. That the source of American democracy was the English constitution must have been news to a part at least of his English audience. It was a happy thought of Lowell’s to show how stable democracy might be as a system of government. He made the argument from expediency, that ‘it is cheaper in the long run to lift men up than to hold them down, and that a ballot in their hands is less dangerous to society than a sense of wrong in their heads.’ He would not have been Lowell had he not also shown that a democracy has its finer instincts, or failed to recognize the fact that as an experiment in the art of government it must stand or fall by its own merits. And the whole address is strongly optimistic, in its insistence that ‘those who have the divine right to govern will be found to govern in the end.’

The address on ‘The Place of the Independent in Politics’ supplements the Birmingham address. As Lowell before an English audience had dwelt on ‘the good points and favorable aspect of democracy,’ so before a home audience he discussed its weak points and its dangers. He thought the system would bear investigation. At no time did he labor under the mistake of supposing that democracy was a contrivance which ran of its own accord. Parties there must be and politicians to look after them, but it is no less essential that there should be somebody to look after the politicians. The address is a plea for unselfishness in political

## action.

* * * * *

Admirers of Lowell find it easy to believe that of all American makers of verse he had the most of what is called inspiration. With less catholic tastes he might have become a greater poet and would undoubtedly have been a finer artist. But granting that it was a matter of choice, and that Lowell had elected to make mastery in verse (with all the sacrifices involved) the object of his life, how serious then would have been the loss to criticism and to politics. The Lowell we know, with his extraordinary mental vivacity, his grasp of a multitude of interests that make for culture, is surely a more engaging figure than the hypothetical Lowell of purely poetical achievement.

FOOTNOTES:

[63] Keith Spence was born at Kirkwall, Orkney. Mrs. Lowell had Orcadian ancestors on both sides of the house, her maternal grandfather, Robert Traill, having also come from Orkney.

[64] January, February, and March, 1843.

[65] Scudder.

[66] H. R. Haweis: _American Humorists_.

[67] The remarkable paper on Lincoln was afterwards transferred to the volume of _Political Essays_.

[68] January, 1845, to November, 1850.

XIX

_WALT WHITMAN_

REFERENCES:

=John Burroughs=: _Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person_, second edition, 1871.

=R. M. Bucke=: _Walt Whitman_, 1883.

=W. S. Kennedy=: _Reminiscences of Walt Whitman_, 1896.

=I. H. Platt=: _Walt Whitman_, ‘Beacon Biographies,’ 1904.

I

HIS LIFE

Walter Whitman (commonly known as Walt) was born at West Hills, a village in Huntington Township, Long Island, on May 31, 1819. He was a son of Walter Whitman, a carpenter and house-builder, who followed his trade chiefly in New York and Brooklyn. The Long Island Whitmans claim descent from the Reverend Zechariah Whitman, who came to America in 1635, and settled at Milford, Connecticut. Zechariah’s son Joseph crossed the Sound ‘sometime before 1660,’ and may have been the original purchaser of the farm where successive generations of his descendants lived, and where the poet was born.

Blended with this English blood was that of a line of Dutch ancestors. Whitman’s mother, Louisa Van Velsor, daughter of Cornelius Van Velsor of Cold Spring Harbor, was of ‘the old race of the Netherlands, so deeply grafted on Manhattan Island and in Kings and Queens counties.’ The Van Velsors were noted for their horses, and in her youth Louisa was a daring rider.

Whitman’s education was such as a Brooklyn public school of the early Thirties afforded. After a little experience as an office-boy he learned to set type. To vary the monotony of life at the composing-case he taught in country schools or worked at farming. Occasionally he dabbled in literature, publishing tales and essays in the ‘Democratic Review.’ In 1839 he started at Huntington a ‘weekly’ paper, the ‘Long Islander,’ publishing it at such intervals as pleased him best. For a time he edited the ‘Brooklyn Eagle’ (1848), diverting himself in the intervals of journalistic work with ‘an occasional shy at “poetry.”’

Nomadic by instinct and of a curious and inquiring turn of mind, Whitman, accompanied by his brother Jeff, made ‘a leisurely journey and working expedition’ through the Middle States, down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans, returning in the same deliberate manner by the Great Lakes, Lower Canada, and the Hudson. During his stay in New Orleans (1849–50) he was an editorial writer on the’ Crescent.’ In Brooklyn (1850–51) he edited and published a paper called ‘The Freeman,’ then for three or four years he built and sold small houses.

The first edition of the extraordinary and notorious _Leaves of Grass_ (for which Whitman himself helped to set the type) appeared in 1855, and was described by Emerson to Carlyle as ‘a nondescript monster, which yet had terrible eyes and buffalo strength, and was indisputably American.’ An enlarged edition appeared in 1856, to be followed by yet a third in 1860. The sales were slow and the reviews for the most part hostile and often abusive.

There was some discussion in the Whitman family over the merits of the book. The poet’s brother, George Whitman, said in after years: ‘I remember mother comparing Hiawatha to Walt’s, and the one seemed to us pretty much the same muddle as the other. Mother said if Hiawatha was poetry, perhaps Walt’s was.’[69]

In 1862 George Whitman was wounded at the first battle of Fredericksburg. Walt went immediately to the front to care for him. His sympathies were enlisted by the sight of the misery on every hand and he became a volunteer army nurse, serving for three years in the hospitals in Washington. ‘He saved many lives’ was the testimony of a surgeon who had observed Whitman at his work. But his powerful physique broke under the strain, and a severe illness followed.

When he recovered, a clerkship was given him in the Department of the Interior; he was presently removed on the charge (it is said) of having written an indecent book.[70] A place was immediately found for him in the Attorney General’s office, and this place he held until he was stricken by partial paralysis early in 1873.

From 1873 until his death Whitman lived in Camden, New Jersey, at first making his home with his soldier brother, George, later setting up an establishment of his own at 328 Mickle Street. He never married, having an ‘overmastering passion for entire freedom, unconstraint; I had an instinct against forming ties that would bind me.’

The following list of Whitman’s writings conveys no idea of the interest attaching to them as bibliographical curiosities, but will perhaps answer the needs of the student.

_Leaves of Grass_, 1855 (second edition, 1856; third, 1860–61; fourth, 1867; fifth, 1871); _Walt Whitman’s Drum-Taps_ and its _Sequel_, 1865–66; _Democratic Vistas_, 1871; _After All not to Create Only_, 1871; _Passage to India_, 1871; _As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free_, 1872; _Memoranda during the War_, 1875–76; _Two Rivulets_ (prose and verse), 1876; _Specimen Days and Collect_, 1882–83; _November Boughs_ (prose and verse), 1888; _Good-Bye My Fancy_, 1891; _Calamus: A Series of Letters ... to a young friend (Peter Doyle)_, 1897; _The Wound Dresser_, 1898.

The storm of opposition which greeted Whitman’s earlier work gradually subsided, and he became a notable figure among contemporary men of letters. He was invited to read original poems on public occasions, such as the opening of the American Institute (1871), the Commencement at Dartmouth College (1872), and the Commencement at Tufts College (1874). In later years he enjoyed literary canonization in a small way. Many pilgrims visited the bard in his unpoetical house in Camden. Worshippers came from England to pay him homage and incidentally to rail at Americans for neglecting one of their few geniuses, stolidly ignoring the fact that they themselves had neglected not a few of their many geniuses. And before Walt Whitman died (March 26, 1892) he had tasted some of the delights of fame.

II

THE GROWTH OF A REPUTATION

Being prejudiced in favor of metre and rhyme, probably from long experience of verse written in the conservative way, an old-fashioned world did not welcome _Leaves of Grass_ with enthusiasm. A few discerning spirits saw in Whitman the promise of mighty things. Emerson greeted him ‘at the beginning of a great career;’ but when the poet had these words from a private letter stamped in gilt capitals on the cover of his next volume, Emerson (it is thought) was a little dismayed.

Not only did the form of the poems offend, but the content as well. There were lines calculated to disconcert even such people as were not, in their own opinion, prudish. The lines were comparatively few in number, but they were there in unabashed nakedness, and _Leaves of Grass_, it may be assumed, often went on a top shelf instead of on the sitting-room table along with innocuous poets like Tennyson and Longfellow.

Neglect and abuse raised up for Whitman in time a small battalion of champions, fierce, determined, uncompromising, militant. Among them were men whose attitude towards literature was catholic and liberal. For the most part they were Whitmanites, hot as lovers, quarrelsome as bullies, biting their thumbs at every passer-by.

Literary championship has one good effect: it keeps the public, gorged with novels of the day, from quite going to sleep. There is always a chance that some open-minded reader will be stirred by the clash of critical arms to look into the affair that is causing so great a pother. Better to be advertised by the crowd of swashbucklers who clattered about wearing Whitman’s colors than not to be advertised at all. The public concluded that a man who could inspire loyalty like this must be worth while. Whitman’s audience and influence grew. The bodyguard pretty much lost the power to see virtue in any poet save its own, but it had succeeded in arresting public attention.

In 1876 a number of English admirers subscribed freely to the new edition of Whitman’s writings and garnished their guineas with comfortable words. The poet was sick, poor, discouraged, and by his own grateful testimony this show of interest put new heart into him--‘saved my life,’ he said. It might well have had that effect, since no less names than those of Tennyson, Ruskin, Rossetti, and Lord Houghton were to be found in the list of subscribers. Even Robert Buchanan, who assailed with virulence the author of ‘Jenny,’ had no scruple in bidding God speed to the author of the ‘Song of Myself’ and ‘Children of Adam.’

A momentary set-back occurred in 1882, when Whitman’s Boston publisher was threatened with prosecution. ‘The official mind’ declared that it would be content if two poems were suppressed, the poems in question resembling in some particulars the stories an English editor omitted from the _Thousand-and-One Nights_, on the ground that they were ‘interesting only to Arabs and old gentlemen.’ Whitman refused to omit so much as a word, and the book was transferred to a Philadelphia publishing house.

After 1882 Whitman found himself able to publish freely and without the fear of the district attorney before his eyes. Since his death he has been accorded a niche in the American literary pantheon, if we may believe the critics, who now treat his work with the confidence which marks their attitude towards Lowell or Longfellow.

III

THE WRITER