She is distinctly a realist of Howells's school, presenting the daily rounds of the life which she knew intimately, and making complete stories of such meager material as the subterfuges which two poor but proud sisters practiced in order to make one black silk dress, owned in partnership, appear as if each really possessed "a gala dress." She takes stolid, practical characters, who have seemingly nothing attractive in their composition, and by her sympathetic treatment causes them to appeal strongly to human hearts. She discovers heroic qualities in apparently commonplace homes and families, and finds humorous or pathetic possibilities in men and women whom most writers would consider very unpromising. Miss Wilkins knows that in rural New England romantic things do happen, tragedies do occur, and heroes and heroines do appear in unexpected quarters to meet emergencies, and she occasionally transfers such events to her pages, thereby enlivening them without sacrificing the reality of her pictures. But the triumph of her art consists in her facile handling of simple incidents and everyday men and women and her power to carry them without a hint of sentimentality to a natural, artistic, effective climax, heightened usually by a touch of either humor or pathos.
WALT WHITMAN, 1819-1892
[Illustration: WALT. WHITMAN]
Life.—Suffolk County, Long Island, in which is situated the village of West Hills, where Walt Whitman was born in 1819, was in some ways the most remarkable eastern county in the United States. Hemmed in on a narrow strip of land by the ocean on one side and Long Island Sound on the other, the inhabitants saw little of the world unless they led a seafaring life. Many of the well-to-do farmers, as late as the middle of the nineteenth century, never took a land journey of more than twenty miles from home. Because of such restricted environment, the people of Suffolk County were rather insular in early days, yet the average grade of intelligence was high, for some of England's most progressive blood had settled there in the first half of the seventeenth century.
Nowhere else in this country, not even at the West, was there a greater feeling of independence and a more complete exercise of individuality. There was a certainty about life and opinions, a feeling of relationship with everybody, a defiance of convention, that made Suffolk County the fit birthplace of a man who was destined to trample poetic conventions under his feet and to sing the song of democracy. In Walt Whitman's young days, all sorts and conditions of men on Long Island met familiarly on equal terms. The farmer, the blacksmith, the carpenter, the mason, the woodchopper, the sailor, the clergyman, the teacher, the young college student home on his vacation,—all mingled as naturally as members of a family. No human being felt himself inferior to any one else, so long as the moral proprieties were observed. Nowhere else did there exist a more perfect democracy of conscious equals. Although Whitman's family moved to Brooklyn before he was five years old, he returned to visit relatives, and later taught school at various places on Long Island and edited a paper at Huntington, near his birthplace. In various ways Suffolk County was responsible for the most vital part of his early training. In his poem, There Was a Child Went Forth, he tells how nature educated him in his island home. In his prose work, Specimen Days and Collect, which all who are interested in his autobiography should read, he says, "The successive growth stages of my infancy, childhood, youth, and manhood were all pass'd on Long Island, which I sometimes feel as if I had incorporated."
Like Mark Twain, Walt Whitman received from the schools only a common education but from life he had an uncommon training. His chief education came from associating with all sorts and conditions of people. In Brooklyn he worked as a printer, carpenter, and editor. His closest friends were the pilots and deck hands of ferry boats, the drivers of New York City omnibuses, factory hands, and sailors. After he had become well known, he was unconventional enough to sit with a street car driver in front of a grocery store in a crowded city and eat a watermelon. When people smiled, he said, "They can have the laugh—we have the melon."
[Illustration: WHITMAN AT THE AGE OF THIRTY-SIX]
His Suffolk County life might have left him democratic but insular; but he traveled widely and gained cosmopolitan experience. In 1848 he went leisurely to New Orleans, where he edited a newspaper, but in a short time he journeyed north along the Mississippi, traveled in Canada, and finally returned to New York, having completed a trip of eight thousand miles.
After his return, he seems to have worked with his father in Brooklyn for about three years, building and selling houses. He was then also engaged on a collection of poems, which, in 1855, he published under the title of Leaves of Grass. From this time he was known as an author.
In 1862 he went South to nurse his brother, who was wounded in the Civil War. For nearly three years, the poet served as a volunteer nurse in the army hospitals in Washington and its vicinity. Few good Samaritans have performed better service. He estimated that he attended on the field and in the hospital eighty thousand of the sick and wounded. In after days many a soldier testified that his recovery was aided by Whitman's kindly ministrations. Finally, however, his own iron constitution gave way under this strain.