Humorous as they appeared at the time, there was another side to interviews of this character; for it began to be noised about that Whitman was quite spoilt by his rich friends, and had lost his interest in and sympathy with the American working-man. This was due, of course, to a complete misunderstanding. The old fellow who lived in his “little shack” on Mickle Street, and dined in Germantown in his cardigan jacket, might have a world-reputation, but he was not forgetful of the people from among whom he sprang and to whom he always belonged.
At the same time it is true, as we saw, that he did not himself profess to understand or to approve the party organisation of labour. He was rather inclined to sit in his corner and have faith, and to listen to what the younger men had to say. In any case, he saw no remedy for present troubles in the exploitation of class feeling; he could see no help in urging the battle between two forms of selfishness.
Generosity and manhood were his constant watchwords, whether for labour or for the nation. No circumstances, he would say, sitting in his room broken by the suffering of years, can deprive a hero of his manhood. But he would add his conviction that the Republic must be in peril as long as any of her sons were being forced to the wall, and his wish that each “should have all that is just and best for him”.
The sculptor and his sitter had many a long evening chat together, the shadows of the passers-by cast by the street light and moving across the blind. The old man’s mellow and musical, but somewhat uncertain, voice filled at these times with a confidential charm.
One night he wrote out a tentative statement of his general views, declaring for Free-trade, and for the acknowledgment of the full human and political equality of women with men. He regarded the world as being too much governed, but he was not against institutions in the present stage of evolution, for he said that he looked on the family and upon marriage as the basis of all permanent social order. He seems to have disliked and even condemned the practices of the American Fourierist “Free-lovers,”[702] though Love’s real freedom is always cardinal in his teachings. Anything like a laxity in fulfilling obligations, but especially the ultimate obligations of the soul, was abhorrent to him.
He was not a critic of institutions; and he accepted the work of the churches and of rationalism as alike valuable to humanity. He added to his statement various personal details; saying, half-interrogatively, that he thought if he was to be reported at all, it was right that he should be reported truthfully. This feeling was undoubtedly very strong with him from the day when he wrote anonymous appreciations of the Leaves in the New York press.[703]
Talk turned sometimes to the Washington days, to Lincoln’s yearning passion for the South, to the affectionate admiration felt by the Union veterans for the men and boys who fought under Lee, and to the terrible rigidity of the Southern pride. Such talk would often end in reminiscences of the hospitals; and Whitman told his friend that he would like him to cut a bas-relief showing Walt seated by a soldier’s cot in the wards. It had been his most characteristic pose, if one may use the word; and such a study would have shown him at his own work, the work in which he was most at home, surrounded by the boys who were his flesh and blood.[704]
FOOTNOTES:
[676] Camb. Mod. Hist., 651.