For thirty years the youth set himself to learn the nature of the world. There could be no better education; he has described its elementary stages, by barnyard and roadside, in “There was a child went forth.” The same large receptiveness still went with him, as he was by turn teacher, printer, journalist, government clerk, and always, and above all, loafer. He loafed year after year in Broadway, on Fulton Ferry, on the omnibuses talking to the drivers, in the workshops talking to the artisans. His physical health was perfect; he earned enough to live on; he felt himself the equal of highest or lowest; he drank of the great variegated stream of life before him from every cup. His culture was, in its own way, as large and as sincere as Goethe’s. Of books, indeed, he knew little; he was equally ignorant of science, of philosophy, of the fine arts; he appears to have been content—for his own ends wisely content—with elemental and mostly ancient utterances of the race, as the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare, the Nibelungenlied. And by-and-by, in 1855, when this new personality, with its wide and deep roots, had become organized, Walt Whitman, at the age of thirty-six, himself printed and published a little book called “Leaves of Grass.”
After this there was but one fresh formative influence in Whitman’s life, but without it his life and his work would both have suffered an immense lack. What had chiefly characterized him so far had been his audacious nonchalance, the frank and absolute egotism of a healthy Olympian schoolboy. In 1860 the Civil War began; from 1862 to 1865 Whitman nursed the sick and wounded at Washington. During that period of three years (broken by an attack of hospital malaria, the first illness of his life, contracted in the discharge of these self-imposed duties) he visited and tended nearly 100,000 men, and the personal presence of the man, his inexhaustible love and sympathy, were of even more worth than the manifold small but precious services that he was enabled to render. He has himself given a simple and noble record of his work in the “Memoranda” included in “Specimen Days and Collect,” and in “Drum Taps,” a still more precious and intimate record of his experiences. From this period a deep tenderness, a divine compassion for all things human, is never absent from Whitman’s work; it becomes more predominant than even his superb egotism. It is this element in his large emotional nature, brought to full maturity by these war experiences, which so many persons have felt thrilling through the man’s whole personality, and which probably explains in some measure the devotion he has inspired. Whitman went to Washington young, in the perfection of virile physical energy (“He is a Man,” said the shrewd Lincoln, to whom Whitman was unknown, as he chanced to see him through a window once); he came away old and enfeebled, having touched the height of life, to walk henceforth a downward path. Physically impressive, however, at that time and always, he remained. He is described, after this time (chiefly by Dr. Bucke), as six feet in height, weighing nearly two hundred pounds; with eyebrows highly arched; eyes light blue, rather small, dull and heavy (this point is of some interest, bearing in mind that with exceptional creative imagination large bright eyes are associated); full-sized mouth, with full lips; large handsome ears, and senses exceptionally acute. The peculiar complexion of his face, Bucke described as a bright maroon tint; that of his body “a delicate but well-marked rose colour,” unlike the English or Teutonic stock; his gait an elephantine roll. “No description,” his Boswellian biographer, Dr. Bucke, again speaks (and Mr. Kennedy, a later and equally Boswellian biographer, supplies confirmatory details), “can give any idea of the extraordinary physical attractiveness of the man,” even upon those who came in contact with him for a moment. In 1873 he had a stroke of paralysis (left hemiplegia), and for three years there seemed little promise of recovery. The return to health was slow and incomplete. In those years he spent much time bathing, or naked in the open air—“hanging clothes on a rail near by, keeping old broad-brim straw on head and easy shoes on feet”—and considered that that counted for much in his restoration to health. “Perhaps,” he adds, “he or she to whom the free exhilarating ecstasy of nakedness in nature has never been eligible, has not really known what purity is—nor what faith or art or health really is.”
It is not possible to apprehend this man’s work unless the man’s personality is apprehended. Every great book contains the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, and no book throbs with a more vivid personal life than “Leaves of Grass.” It is the whole outcome of a whole man, audacious and unrepentant, who has here set down the emotional reverberations of a manifold life. “For only,” according to his own large saying,
“For only at last, after many years, after chastity, friendship, procreation, prudence and nakedness,
After treading ground and breasting river and lake,
After a loosened throat, after absorbing eras, temperaments, races, after knowledge, freedom, crimes,
After complete faith, after clarifyings, elevations, and removing obstructions,
After these and more, it is just possible there comes to a man, a woman, the divine power to speak words.”
III.
Of art, in the conventional sense of the word, there is not much in Whitman. If we wish to approach him as an artist, J. F. Millet probably helps us to understand him, more than any other artist in foreign fields and lands. Millet has a deep and close relationship to Whitman. At first sight, their work is curiously unlike: Whitman, in a great new country, delighting in every manifestation of joy and youth and hope; Millet, the child of an older and colder country, in love with age and suffering and toil. Yet in essentials it is identical. Even personally, it is said, Millet recalled Whitman.[6] Judging from the representations of him, Millet, in his prime, was a colossal image of manly beauty—deep-chested, muscular, erect, the quiet, penetrating blue eyes, the delicately expressive eyelids, the large nose and dilating sensitive nostrils, the firm mouth and jaw, the thick and dark brown beard. The consumptive artist—a Keats or a Thoreau—craves for health and loveliness; he turns shuddering from all that is not pleasant. It is only these men, heroic incarnations of health, who are strong enough to look sanely upon age and toil and suffering, and equal to the prodigious expense of spirit of writing “Leaves of Grass” with a heart laden with memories of Washington hospitals.