His visitor had also an opportunity of noting the efficiency of Whitman’s defences against the globe-trotting interview-hunting type of American woman. His silence became aggressive, and her words rebounded from it; he had disappeared into his rock-faced solitude where nothing could reach him. And a very few moments of this treatment sufficed, even for the brazen-armoured amazon.
During Mr. Carpenter’s visit, Mrs. George Whitman, whom Dr. Bucke has described as an attractive, sweet woman, was out of health, and her brother-in-law made a daily excursion down town and across the ferry to see her, and to transact his own affairs. In the heat of the following July she first opened the door to Dr. Bucke.[585]
He, too, had long been a student of Leaves of Grass, a student at first against his own judgment, and with little result beyond an annoying bewilderment to his sense of fitness, and of exasperation to his intelligence. But from the first, he felt a singular interior compulsion to read the book, which he could not at all understand. Its lack of all definite statement was the head and front of its offending to a keen scientific mind. But now after many years, he had come to recognise the extraordinary power of suggestion which was embodied in every page.
Dr. R. Maurice Bucke’s personality was strongly marked and striking; he had as much determination as had Whitman himself, and his whole face is full of resolute purpose.
Born in Norfolk, in 1837, but immediately transplanted to Canada, he was thoroughly educated by his father, who was a man of considerable scholarship and a minister in the Church of England.
In 1857, he crowned an adventurous youth passed in the mining regions of the Western States, by a daring winter expedition over the Sierras, in which he was so badly frozen that he afterwards lost both feet, but his tall and vigorous figure showed hardly a trace of this misfortune.
Returning to Canada, he studied medicine; and eventually, in 1877, became the head of a large insane asylum at London, Ontario. Here he introduced several notable reforms in the treatment of the patients, which were widely imitated throughout America.
He was a keen student of mental pathology, and for some time before his death was reckoned among the leading alienists of the continent. Certain interesting and suggestive studies of the relation which appears to exist between the so-called sympathetic nervous system and the moral and emotional nature, but especially his magnum opus, Cosmic Consciousness, published the year before his death (1901), reveal the direction of his dominant interest. From 1877, he was one of Whitman’s closest friends, and became subsequently his principal biographer.[586]
In the printed recollections of his first interview with Whitman,[587] Dr. Bucke recalls the exaltation of his mind produced by it; describing it as a “sort of spiritual intoxication,” which remained with him for months, transfiguring his new friend into more than mortal stature. It is another instance of the almost incredible power of the invalid’s personality.