Hardly anything about it is as yet distinct. There is, however, one exception. The Middle States, and to a great degree the city of New York itself, produced one eccentric literary figure, who has emerged into an isolation sometimes believed eminent. This is Walt Whitman.

I

WALT WHITMAN

REFERENCES

WORKS: Leaves of Grass, Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1898, Complete Prose Works, Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1898; Complete Writings, Camden Edition, 10 vols., New York: Putnam, 1902.

BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM: John Burroughs, Whitman (Vol. X of Burroughs's Works, Riverside Edition, Boston: Houghton, 1896); Stedman, Poets of America, chap. x; *R. L. Stevenson, Familiar Studies of Men and Books; *William Clarke, Walt Whitman, New York: Macmillan, 1892; *H. L. Traubel and others, In re Walt Whitman, Philadelphia: McKay, 1893.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Foley, 307-310.

SELECTIONS: *Carpenter, 389-402; Griswold, Poets, 626-627; Stedman, 221–232; *Stedman and Hutchinson, VII, 501–513.

WALT WHITMAN (1819-1892) was almost exactly contemporary with Lowell. No two lives could have been much more different. Lowell, the son of a minister, closely related to the best people of New England, lived amid the Life. gentlest academic and social influences in America. Whitman was the son of a carpenter and builder on the outskirts of Brooklyn; the only New England man of letters equally humble in origin was Whittier.

The contrast between Whitman and Whittier, however, is almost as marked as that between Whitman and Lowell. Whittier, the child of a Quaker farmer in the Yankee country, grew up and lived almost all his life amid guileless influences Whitman, born of the artisan class in a region close to the largest and most corrupt centre of popula

Writings.

tion on his native continent, had a rather vagrant youth and manhood. At times he was a printer, at times a school-master, at times editor of stray country newspapers, and by and by he took up his father's trade of carpenter and builder. Meanwhile he had rambled about the country and into Canada; but in general until past thirty years old, he was apt to be near the East River. The New York thus familiar to him was passing, in the last days of the Knickerbocker School, into its metropolitan existence. The first edition of Whitman's Leaves of Grass appeared in 1855, the year which produced the Knickerbocker Gallery.

During the Civil War he served devotedly as an army nurse. After the war, until 1873, he held some small Government clerkships at Washington. In 1873 a paralytic stroke brought his active life to an end; for his last twenty years he lived an invalid at Camden, New Jersey.

Until 1855, when the first edition of Leaves of Grass appeared in a thin folio, some of which he set up with his own hands, Whitman had not declared himself as a man of letters. From that time to the end he was constantly publishing verse, which from time to time he collected in increasing bulk under the old title. He published, too, some stray volumes of prose,-Democratic Vistas (1871), Specimen Days and Collect (1882-83), and the like. Prose and poetry alike seem full of a conviction that he had a mission to express and to extend the spirit of democracy, which he believed characteristic of his country. Few men have ever cherished a purpose more literally popular. Yet it is doubtful whether any man of letters in this country ever appealed less to the masses.

Beyond question Whitman had remarkable individuality

and power. Equally beyond question he was among the most eccentric individuals who ever put pen to paper. The natural result of this has been that his admirers have admired him intensely; while whoever has found his work repellent has found it irritating. Particularly abroad, however, he has attracted much critical attention; and many critics have been disposed

to maintain that his formless prophecies of democracy are deeply characteristic of America. The United States, they point out, are professedly the most democratic country in the world; Whitman is professedly the most democratic of American writers; consequently he must be the most typical.

The abstract ideal of democracy has never been better summed up than in the well-known watch

Wall-Whitman

racy.

words of republican France: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. In the progress of American democracy, however, one of Democthese ideals has been more strenuously kept in mind than the other two. Practical democracy in America has been chiefly inspired by the ideal of liberty. The theoretical democracy prevalent in Europe, on the other hand, has tended rather to emphasize the ideal of fraternity, and, still more, the principle of human equality. And this ideal of equality, carried to logical extreme, asserts all superiority, all excellence, to be a phase of evil.

Now, Walt Whitman's gospel of democracy certainly included liberty and laid strong emphasis on fraternity.

Confusion

of Values.

The ideal which most appealed to him, however, was that of equality. Though he would hardly have assented to such orthodox terms, his creed seems to have been that, as God made everything, one thing is just as good as another. This dogma of equality clearly involves a trait which has not yet been generally characteristic of American thought or letters,-a complete confusion of values. In the early days of Renaissance in New England, to be sure, Emerson and the rest, dazzled by the splendors of a new world of art and literature, made small distinction between those aspects of it which are excellent and those which are only stimulating. At the same time they adhered as firmly as the Puritans themselves to the ideal of excellence; and among the things with which they were really familiar they pretty shrewdly distinguished those which were most valuable, either on earth or in heaven. With Walt Whitman, on the other hand, everything is confused.

Take, for example, a passage from his "Song of Myself," which contains some of his best-known phrases:

"A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

"I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

"Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,

A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,

Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?

"Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of vegetation.