Dr. Bucke made some interesting reference to the elements of evil passion which he detected in his old friend’s make-up; “the elements of a Cenci or an Attila”. And Whitman quite simply admitted that he was not sure that he understood himself.
A touch of humour was never long absent where Whitman was found. Some audacious devotee asked him why he had never married; and Walt rambled off into an explanation, which, after alluding to the “Nibelungen—or somebody—’s cat with an immensely long, long, long tail to it,” and again to the obscurities that confront the biographer of Burns, concluded that the matter in question was probably by no means discreditable, though inexplicable enough, except in the light of his whole life.
The questioner remained standing—he was very enthusiastic—and had more to follow. But as he began to recite “Captain! my Captain!” a stray dog which had entered at the open door provided a melancholy and irresistible accompaniment, convulsing those present in their own despite until the tears ran down their cheeks.[746]
Finally, Whitman made an interesting political statement. He condemned as false the protectionist idea of “America for the Americans”; and asserted as the basic political principle, the interdependence of all peoples, and their openness to one another for purposes of exchange. The common people of all races are embarked together like fellows on a ship, he said; what wrecks one, wrecks all. The ultimate truth about the human race is its solidarity of interest. Then he was tired, and calling for his stick and his nurse, he blessed them all and went slowly upstairs.
It was the last of his birthday dinners. He was seventy-two, very old in body, and very weary. But he was still bright and affectionate toward the friends who continued to come great distances to greet him. A group at Bolton sent two representatives in the years 1890 and 1891, whose records of their visits are suffused with wonder at the old poet’s courtesy and loving consideration and comradely demonstrations of personal feeling.[747] He was a little anxious lest his English friends should misapprehend his character: “Don’t let them think of me as a saint or a finished anything,” was the burden of his messages to them, always accompanied by his love.
He spoke warmly of the English, comparing them favourably at times with their cousins across the sea, and saying that they represented the deeper and more lasting qualities of the Anglo-Saxon race; they were like the artillery of its army.[748] The welcome from English readers had astonished and delighted him. In 1887 he contemplated a visit to Great Britain;[749] and he sometimes seems even to have toyed with the idea of an English home. One can be more Democratic there than in America, he had once declared.[750]
Of his own later years, he said to Mr. J. W. Wallace, who called frequently during the late autumn of 1891, “I used to feel ... that I was to irradiate or emanate buoyancy and health. But it came to me in time, that I was not to attempt to live to the reputation I had, or to my own idea of what my programme should be; but to give out and express what I really was; and, if I felt like the devil, to say so; and I have become more and more confirmed in this.”[751] Whitman has so often been accused of a self-conscious pose, that this partial acknowledgment that such a pose had existed is full of interest; an interest accentuated by the statement that he deliberately abandoned it in his later years.
Talking was at this time often an effort; the heavy feeling in his head, which had become more and more frequent since his first illness, increased till he compared his brain to “sad dough,” or “an apple dumpling”. At times, when he was really prostrated, his head was “like ten devils”.[752]