IN things counted dear to a minstrel's heart, and which can make him patiently endure the common ills of life, Mr. Whitman is fortunate among modern poets. No one more conspicuously shines by difference. Others are more widely read, but who else has been so widely talked of, and who has held even a few readers with so absolute a sway? Whatever we may think of his chantings, the time has gone by when it was possible to ignore him; whatever his ground may be, he has set his feet squarely and audaciously upon it, and is no light weight. Endeavor, then, to judge him on his merits, for he will and must be judged. He stands in the roadway, with his Salut au Monde :

"Toward all

As

been forced to take little part himself; in an aptitude for making disciples of men able to gain the general ear, and vying with one another to stay up his hands; in his unencumbered, easy way of life; finally, in a bodily and mental equipment, and a tact or artistic instinct to make the most of it, that have established a vigorous ideal of himself as a bard and seer. These incidental successes, which of course do not confirm nor conflict with an estimate of his genius, are brought to mind as the features of a singular

career.

To remain after me in sight forever,
For all the haunts and homes of men."

There are not wanting those who return his salutation. He is in very good society, and has been so this long while. At the outset he was favored with the hand of Emerson, and, once acknowledged at court, allies quickly flocked around him. Let us be candid: no writer holds, in some respects, a more enviable place than burly Walt Whitman. As for public opinion of the professional kind, no American poet, save Longfellow, has attracted so much notice as he in England, France, Germany, and I know not what other lands. Here and abroad there has been more printed concerning him than concerning any other, living or dead, Poe only excepted. Personal items of his doings, sayings and appearance constantly have found their way to the public. In a collection of sketches, articles, debates, which have appeared during the last ten years, relating to American poets, the Whitman and Poe packages are each much larger than all the rest combined. Curiously enough, three-fourths of the articles upon Mr. Whitman assert that he is totally neglected by the press. Not only in that publicity which is akin to fame, and stimulating to the poet, has he been thus fortunate; but also in the faculty of exciting and sustaining a discussion in which he has

questions in philology or medicine, seem to provoke contention in which men act very much like children, but also dreading to become a party to such contention, little to the advantage of all concerned. Doubtless I shall make errors, and write things subject to alteration. For these errors, not of the will but of the judgment, I might ask pardon in advance, were I not aware of the uselessness of such a prayer to either of two classes to which it should be addressed, and between which it is hardly possible that a criticism could be written upon Mr. Whitman, and the writer not be accused of both favoritism and injustice, or of trimming. The disputants who arise when an innovator comes along never were divided more sharply,-not even in that classico-romantic conflict which would have made the fortune of a lesser poet than the author of " Hernani." Perhaps it would be found, upon examination, that the class which declines to regard Whitman as a hero and poet has been content with saying very little about him. If his disciples are in a minority, it is they who chiefly have written the contents of the package mentioned, who never lose a point, who have filled the air with his name. Our acceptance of their estimate almost has seemed the condition,-not, I trust, of their good-will, since among them are several of my long-time friends,—but of their intellectual respect. At times we are

constrained to infer that this poet is to be eulogized, not criticised,-that he, they and others may say to Emerson, Lowell, Tennyson, "Thou ailest here, and here"; but woe unto them that lay hands on the Ark of the Covenant. More than one offender has been punished in an effective, if not in a just and generous way. I mention this only with a feeling that honest criticism should not be restricted by those who deprecate restriction. Two points belong to my own mode of inquiry: How far does the effort of a workman relate to what is fine and enduring? and, how far does he succeed in his effort? Nor can I pay Mr. Whitman any worthier tribute than to examine fairly his credentials, and to test his work by the canons, so far as we discover them, that underlie the best results of every progressive art. If his poetry is

founded in the simplicity and universality which are claimed for it, and which distinguish great works, the average man, who reads Shakspere and the English Bible, ought to catch glimpses of its scope and meaning, and therefore I am guilty of no strange temerity, in my forming some opinion of these matters.

On the other hand, if there be any so impatient of his assumptions, or so tired of the manifestoes of his friends, as to refuse him the consideration they would extend to any man alive, against such also I would protest, and deem them neither just nor wise. Their course would give weight to the charge that in America Whitman has been subjected to a kind of outlawry. And those most doubtful of his methods, beliefs, inspiration, should understand that here is an uncommon and

somewhat heroic figure, which they will do well to observe; one whose words have taken hold in various quarters, and whose works should be studied as a whole before they are condemned. Not only a poet, but a personage, of a bearing conformed to his ideal. Whether this bearing comes by nature only, or through skillful intent, its possessor certainly carries it bravely, and, as the phrase is, fills the bill,-a task in which some who have tried to emulate him have disastrously failed. Not only a poet and personage, but one whose views and declarations are also worth attention. True, our main business is not so much to test the soundness of his theories as to ask how poetically he has announced them. We are examining the poets, not the sages and heroes, except in so far as wisdom and heroism must belong to poetry, and as the philosopher and poet fulfill Wordsworth's prediction and have become one. But Whitman is the most subjective poet on record, and it would be folly to review him wholly in the mood of those whose watchword is Art for Art's sake. The many who look upon art solely as a means of expression justly will not be content unless the man is included in the problem. I, who believe that he who uses song as his means of expression is on one side an artist, wish to consider him both as an artist and a man. What I desire to say, also, must be taken as a whole. Questions involving the nature of verse, of expression, of the poetic life, could not be adequately discussed in a single chapter; but a paragraph, at least, may be devoted to each point, and should be given its full weight of meaning. It is the fashion for many who reject Mr. Whitman's canticles to say: "His poetry is good for nothing; but we like him as a man," etc. To me, it seems that his song is more noteworthy than his life, in spite of his services in the hospitals during our civil war. His life, so noble at its best periods, was an emblem of the nobleness of a multitude of his countrymen and country-women; at other times, doubtless, and as his poem of "Brooklyn Ferry" fearlessly permits us to surmise, it has been no more self-forgetting than the lives of countless obscure toilers who do their best from day to day. If, then, I do not think his heroism so important as his art, nor admire him chiefly as an annunciator, but as an imaginative poet, it is because I know more than one village where each workman is a philosopher in his way, and something of a priest, and because poets VOL. XXI.-4.

are rarer among us than preachers and heroes, and I wish to take him at his rarest. If this essay should pay just honor to his prophetic gift of song, those who minister to him should feel that I have given him, without reserve, such poor laurels as a mere reviewer can bestow. That there may be no doubt, from page to page (amid the seeming inconsistencies that must characterize a study of Whitman), as to my conclusion on this point, I may as well say now that both instinct and judgment, with our Greek choruses in mind, and Pindar, and the Hebrew bards, long since led me to count him, as a lyric and idyllic poet, and when at his best, among the first of his time. If any fail to perceive what I mean by this, let him take a single poem, composed in his finer mood,-"Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," and read it with some Had he not sung like this, the exorbitant world would hear little of his philosophy and consecration, and care for them still less.

care.

II.

THE first edition of "Leaves of Grass," now so valued by collectors, is a long, thin volume, curious to behold, with wide pages. that give the author's peculiar lines their full effect. Here was a man with measureless bounce and ambition, but with a coequal range of demands for his country, and professedly for all mankind. At that time (1855) the sale of most books of poetry or abstract thought was small enough; critical authorities were few, and of little weight. "Putnam's Magazine" certainly had influence, and was the periodical to which our favorite writers contributed some of their choicest work. Its reviewer gave the strange book the best reception possible, by filling three columns with extracts from its pages. He could not have selected any passages more original than those beginning with the lines, "I play not a march for victors only," and "A child said, What is the grass?"-than the death-scene of the mashed fireman, for whose sake is the pervading hush among the kneeling crowd,the ringing story of the old-fashioned frigate and the little captain who won by the light of the moon and stars,-the proud humility, the righteous irony and wrath of "A Slave at Auction" and "A Woman at Auction,”the Hebraic picture of the Quakeress with face clearer and more beautiful than the sky," the justified mother of men." These,

and a few masterly bits of description and apostrophe, were given in a manner just to the poet, while rude and coarser parts, that might displease even a progressive reader, were kindly overlooked. The study of Emerson and Carlyle had bred a tolerance of whatever was true to nature and opposed to sham. "Leaves of Grass" was a legitimate offspring of the new movement. Howsoever differing from the latter, or going beyond it, the book would not have found life had not the Concord school already made for it an atmosphere. Whitman-a man of the people-applied the down-east philosophy to the daily walks of life, and sang the blare and brawn that he found in the streets about him. In his opening lines:

he simply took Alcott and Emerson at their word. His radical demonstration, extended in later years even to rebuke of their own failure to go farther, has brought them, perchance, like Frankenstein, to regard with little complacence the strides of their prodigy. The difference between Emerson and Whitman illustrated that between certain modes of advanced thought in Massachusetts and New York. If the philosophy of the former professed to include the people, in its genesis and application it often was somewhat provincial and aristocratic; the other also was theoretically broad, professing to include the scholarly and refined, but in spirit was no less provincial,-suspicious of all save the masses. A true universalism yet may come from them both. It was in no unfriendly humor, but with perfect justice, that the" Putnam" critic declared the new poems to be a "mixture of Yankee transcendentalism and New York rowdyism," which here were "seen to combine in harmony." For their author prophesied in New York with a selfhood that observed but kept aloof from the West side; insensibly the East-sider was set above the man of training or affairs whose teams he drove, whose fires he subdued, whose boats he piloted, and whose manhood perchance was as sturdy and virile as his own. Hence, there was a just reason in the pleasantry of the reviewer, who, after acknowledging that the poet was one of the roughs," said:

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"That he is a kosmos is a piece of news we were hardly prepared for. Precisely what a kosmos is, we trust Mr. Whitman will take an early occasion to inform the impatient world." Nothing worse than this sally befell our poet in the leading magazine, and it was added that there were to be found "an original perception of nature, a manly brawn, and an epic directness in the new poet, which belong to no other adept of the transcendental school." Here, at all events, the book was not treated after any Philistine mode.

Doubtless many young readers of those quotations felt as if they came with a fresh breeze from old Paumanok and the outer bay. I remember my own impression that here, whether his forms were old or new, was a real poet, one who stirred my pulses; and of whom-in spite of his conceit, familiarity, assumption that few could understand him and that all needed his ministrations-I wished to know more. I would not surrender that first impression of his genius for any later critical feeling. Nor since that time, having closely read him, have I found reason to disavow it. And I could fully sympathize with him, now that his old age really is nigh at hand, in the serene approval of his own work, read twenty years afterward, under some auspicious conjunction of Saturn and Mars:

"After an interval, reading, here in the midnight, With the great stars looking on-all the stars of Orion looking,

And the silent Pleiades-and the duo looking of Saturn and ruddy Mars;

Pondering, reading my own songs, after a long interval (sorrow and death familiar now), Ere closing the book, what pride! what joy! to find

them

Standing so well the test of death and night,

And the duo of Saturn and Mars!"

The picture of Whitman in trowsers and open shirt, with slouched hat, hand in pocket, and a defiant cast of manner, resolute as it was, had an air not wholly of one who protests against authority, but rather of him who opposes the gonfalon of a

rough" conventionalism to the conventionalism of culture. Not that of the man "too proud to care from whence " he came, but of one very proud of whence he came and what he wore. Seeing him now, with his gracious and silvery beard, it is hardly possible that the sensual and unpromising mouth of the early portrait was at any time his own. But the picture has become historical, and properly is included with others in his recent collective edition.