Perry's Life of Walt Whitman*

BY BENJAMIN Sledd,

Professor of English in Wake Forest College

A good biography, says Carlyle, is as rare as a well spent life. Whether Walt Whitman's life was well spent is a question; but certain it is that Mr. Perry has given us the good biography. Here we have at last a biographer of Whitman who is neither the over-zealous advocate nor the half-hearted apologist. The truth about the most enigmatical of our American writers-next after Poe-is told without extenuation and without malice; disputed points have been investigated with painstaking care; and certain popular misconceptions have been removed. Mr. Perry's style, too, is delightful, with a directness and simplicity which not only place the volume among our best brief English biographies, but which must also eventually win many new readers for the poet himself. The biographer of Whitman must needs have a keen sense of humor, and Mr. Perry's unobtrusive humor is present on almost every page, often saving a situation which in less skillful hands, would have become either ludicrous or disgusting. Moreover, Whitman's poetry is weighed and measured with a sureness of judgment which must make Mr. Perry's verdict largely the verdict of posterity. In the meantime Mr. Perry should not be disturbed if his book gives satisfaction neither to the poet's extreme friends nor to his extreme foes.

"A remarkably strong though coarse nature," was Thoreau's first impression of Whitman the man. Coarseness and strength were indeed his birthrights. His great-grandmother, Mr. Perry tells us, “made a vigorous overseer, swearing at her slaves from horseback, using tobacco freely, and living to be ninety;" and his maternal grandfather "was a loud-voiced, ruddy-faced horsebreeder." The poet has himself described his father:

. . strong, self-sufficient, manly, mean, angered, unjust." To this strain of coarseness was added "an excess of emotional

Walt Whitman: His Life and Work. By Bliss Perry. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1906,-318 pp.

endowment," doubtless inherited from his mother, which, in his eldest and his youngest brother, ended in imbecility and lunacy. From these beginnings came the wonderful being whose portrait Mr. Perry has drawn with so much candor and faithfulness and yet with so much charity,-the restless, dreamy, do-nothing boyhood; the early manhood dominated by "a spirit of blissful vagrancy;" by turns school teacher, printer, editor, would-be man of letters; in dress a curious blending of the dandy and the Bohemian; writing a story in behalf of the Temperance Reformation in a questionable resort and indulging, by his own confession, freely in gin cocktails while writing it; the boon companion of stage drivers, boatmen and vagrants; borrowing money of friends and chance acquaintances alike, and blissfully forgetting to return it; demanding all the pleasures of life and assuming none of its responsibilities; the father, as he himself unblushingly tells us, of six children, and yet without any of the ties and cares of fatherhood,-such was the man who gave to the world "Leaves of Grass" in 1855.

Mr. Perry tells at length the story of this puzzling, wonderful book, in which "the conventions, and occasionally the decencies, are clean forgotten." For the most part, it brought forth from the public press a chorus of resentment and condemnation, the New York Criterion calling it "muck" and "obscenity," and a London journal going so far as to say that one page "deserves nothing so richly as the public executioner's whip." Only here and there could be heard the voice of commendation. The most laudatory notices were written by the poet himself and published anonymously in certain indulgent journals. Indeed Whitman all through life was only too willing to tread what Mr. Perry wittily calls "the primrose path of self-exploitation." Emerson greeted the new poet with a hearty word of encouragement and God-speed, and Whitman shamelessly printed an extract from Emerson's private communication in gilt letters upon the back of a new edition of "Leaves of Grass!"

The opening poem of the volume was that which in latter editions, is called "Song of Myself." Puzzling and repellent as this poem must have been to the chance reader of that time, it is hardly less puzzling and repellent to the reader of today. We can remember with what disgust we threw aside the volume when,

twenty years ago, we made our first acquaintance with Whitman in this very poem. And even today, when Whitman has become a companion of our middle years, we read this poem but rarely. Mr. Perry's exposition of it is so good that we should like to quote it entire, but space permits us to give only a part of it:

"It was about the man Walt Whitman,-his body and his soul, his ecstasies in the remembered presence of beauty, his passionate sympathies for men and women, his curiosity and transport with the eternal human spectacle. He identifies himself with this spectacle, now in one aspect of it, now in another: becoming in imagination the hounded slave, the fireman, the soldier and sailor, the priest. Everywhere he beholds God: out of death he sees life arising; he loses for the moment personal identity to become one with the cloud and the grass. He is at once self-intoxicated and world-intoxicated. . . . The common grass of the field is to him the hieroglyphic symbol of the unutterable mystery that lies close about us. The human body is stripped bare."

But the world of Whitman's day was slow to see aught of this save the shamelessness of the human body, which the poet had laid bare in his emotional frenzy and it made known its resentment in unmistakable signs and tones. Whitman, however, went sturdily on his way, putting forth edition after edition of his work with many additions in the same vein and with but few changes in the passages which had given offense.

On the rhythmical structure of "Leaves of Grass," Mr. Perry turns much light, showing how the so-called "Whitman measure" is by no means sui generis, but is rather evolved out of such sources as the English Bible, Ossian, Blake and Tupper. A curious parallel is drawn between Whitman's verse and that of a poem by Samuel Warren, once well known as the author of "Ten Thousand a Year." Warren's poem was called "The Lily and the Bee," and describes a day and a night spent in the Crystal Palace. "It uses almost every stylistic device now identified with Walt Whitman,-catalogue, ejaculation, apostrophe, epithet, and high astounding term." Whether Whitman had ever seen Warren's poem is not known, but a more curious parallel can hardly be found in literature.

One of Mr. Perry's many admirable suggestions is that in reading "Leaves of Grass" we should remember that we have to do

not with pure poetry, such as that of Shelley, but with declamation, rhapsody. "Not to apprehend 'Leaves of Grass' as a man speaking is to miss its purport."

With the coming on of the Civil War, Whitman goes to Washington and gives himself up to nursing the sick and wounded in the hospitals. Mr. Perry feels called upon to apologize for Whitman's failure to go to the front. It might be added that the same apology is necessary for almost every Northern writer and orator who had done so much to bring on the war. But Whitman did his part, the only part perhaps he was capable of doing, like a man, and his reward was paralysis and, later, dismissal from a beggarly government clerkship. But Whitman found his own reward in the splendid chance it gave him for selfexploitation, a chance which he was not slow to use.

During the course of the war, Whitman wrote his "Drum Taps," which was, however, not published until the struggle was ended, in 1865. Of these poems, Mr. Perry says they "embody the very spirit of the civil conflict, picturing war with a poignant realism, a terrible and tender beauty, such as only the great masters of literature might have been able to compass." This is high praise and is abundantly deserved. Of all the literature inspired directly or indirectly by the Civil War, the poems of Whitman, at their best, and of our own Southern poet, Henry Timrod, alone seem to us worthy of the causes which they champion. Even Lowell's "Commemoration Ode" strikes us as sheer pumping from beginning to end.

President Lincoln had been assassinated while "Drum Taps" was printing, and Whitman's genius at once took fire and flamed out in poetry which deserves no higher praise than to say that it was worthy of the man whose greatness and goodness it commemorated. "Memories of President Lincoln" may some day prove Whitman's claim to immortality. The threnody, “When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloomed" is not overpraised by Swinburne when he calls it "the most sonorous nocturne ever chanted in the church of the world." One can only wonder why the poem has been so little taken to the nation's heart.

Over Whitman's later years one wishes to draw the veil of charity and pity. His easy acquiescence in semi-helplessness and the alms of the world certainly does not increase our admiration

for the man. One can but compare Sidney Lanier's heroic, unyielding struggle with even greater odds.

Poetry Whitman continued to write and publish almost to the day of his death, but his great work was done. Only fitfully does the old divine fire flare out in these later poems. Once only does the aging poet give us again a really great poem, in those memorable lines, "Darest Thou Now, O Soul." The poem, so characteristic of the author, is worthy of a place beside Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar" and Browning's "Prospice." Surely we may be pardoned for quoting it as a whole:

"Darest thou now, O Soul,

Walk out with me toward the unknown region,

Where neither ground is for the feet nor any path to follow?

"No map there, nor guide,

Nor voice sounding, nor touch of human hands,

Nor face with blooming flesh, nor lips, nor eyes, are in that land.

"I know it not, O Soul,

Nor dost thou; all is a blank before us,

All waits undreamed of in that region, that inaccesible land.

"Till when the ties loosen,

All but the ties eternal, Time and Space,

Nor darkness, gravitation, sense, nor any bounds bounding us.
"Then we burst forth, we float,

In Time and Space, O Soul, prepared for them,

Equal, equipped at last, (O joy! O fruit of all!) them to fulfil, O Soul.'

Whitman's final place in the literature of the world, even in the literature of America, is wisely left by Mr. Perry to the judgment of Time. "A longer interval than fifty years must elapse before the permanence of this new rhapsodic verse can be adequately tested. But it seems already obvious that page after page of Whitman is doomed to transiency. . . . But Whitman, in spite of the alloy which lessens the purely poetic quality and hence the permanence of his verse, is sure, it seems to me, to be somewhere among the immortals. He will survive, not so much by the absolute perfection of single lyrical passages, as by the amplitude of his imagination, his magical though intermittent power of phrase, and the majesty with which he confronts the eternal realities."

With these wise, eloquent words we take leave of Mr. Perry's book, which has not only given us genuine pleasure in the read. ing, but has also taught us to love better, and to admire more, one of our great national poets.