Popularity with his Neighbors
He proposes a walk,—"a hobble" it must be for him,—which may afford opportunity to change the note; and as we saunter toward the river, he leaning heavily upon his cane, it is a pleasure to observe the evident feeling of liking and camaraderie which people have for him. They go out of their way to meet him and to receive merely a friendly nod, for he stops to speak with none save the children who leave their play to run to him. He seems mightily amused when one wee toddler calls him "Mister Socrates," and he tells us this is the first time he has been so addressed, although he understands that some of his friends speak of him among themselves by the name of that philosopher. So far as he knows, the name was first applied to him in Buchanan's lines "To Socrates in Camden."
Everywhere we go, on the ferry, at the hotel where we lunch, he receives affectionate greeting from people of every rank, yet he is not loquacious, certainly not effusive. He shakes hands but once while we are out, and that is with an unknown man, and because he is unknown, as Whitman afterward tells us.
During luncheon we speak of a recent visit to Mrs. Howarth (the poetess "Clementine"). Whitman is at once interested, and questions until he has drawn out the pathetic story of her struggles with poverty, disease, and impeding environment, and then declares he will go to see her as soon as he is able. He declines to receive a copy of her poems, saying he is far more interested in her than he could possibly be in her books, and that he "nowadays religiously abstains from reading poetry." Confirmation of this latter statement occurs in our subsequent conversation. A friend of ours had met Swinburne, and had been assured by that erratic (please don't print it erotic) bard that he thinks Whitman, next to Hugo, the best of recent poets. When we tell our poet of this, and endeavor to ascertain if the admiration be reciprocal, we find him unfamiliar with Swinburne's recent works. Reference to the latter's retraction of his first praise elicits the pertinent observation, "The trouble with Swinburne seems to be he don't know his own mind," but this is followed by warm encomiums upon "Atalanta" and its gifted author.
Whitman had seen Emerson for the last time when the philosopher's memory had failed and all his powers were weakening: instead of being shocked by this condition, Whitman thinks it fit and natural, "nature gradually reclaiming the elements she had lent, work all nobly done, soul and senses preparing for rest." Mentioning George Arnold,—
"Doubly dead because he died so young,"—
we find that Whitman loved and mourned him tenderly. He expresses an especial pleasure and pride in the successes of the poet Richard Watson Gilder,—"young Gilder," as he familiarly calls him. He loves Browning, and laments that "Browning never took to" him. He thinks our own country is fortunate in having felt the clean and healthful influences of four such natures as Emerson, Bryant, Whittier, and Longfellow.
His Good Word for Everybody
Indeed, he has a good word for everybody, and discerns laudable qualities in some whom the world has agreed to contemn and cast out. He has glowing expressions of affection for his devoted friends in all lands, and only words of excuse for his enemies. Of the pharisaic Harlan, who dismissed him from a government clerkship solely because he had, ten years before, published the poems of "Enfans d'Adam," he charitably says, "No doubt the man thought he was doing right." Concerning his harshest critics, including the author of the choice epithet "swan of the sewers," he speaks only in justification: from their stand-point, their denunciations of him and his book were deserved; "he never dreamt of blaming them for not seeing as he sees."
After our return to his "shanty" we read to him a laudatory notice from the current number of one of our great magazines, in which one of his poems is mentioned with especial favor; whereupon he produces from his trunk a note written some years before from the same magazine, contemptuously refusing to publish that very poem. Evidences like this of a change in popular opinion are not needed to confirm Whitman's faith in his own future, nor in that of the great humanity of which he is the prophet and exponent.