Travels in Philadelphia/The Whitman Centennial
THE WHITMAN CENTENNIAL
Yesterday—Memorial Day—was a true Walt Whitman day. The ferries thronged with cheerful people, the laughing, eager throng at the Camden terminal, piling aboard trolley cars for a holiday outing—the clang and thud of marching bands, the flags and flowers and genial human bustle, pervaded now and then by that note of tribute to the final mystery—surely all this was just such a scene as Walt loved to watch and ponder. And going on pilgrimage with two English editors to Mickle street and Harleigh Cemetery, it was not strange that our thoughts were largely with the man whose hundredth birthday we bear in mind today.
By just so far (it seems to me) as we find it painful to read Walt Whitman, by just so far we may reckon our divergence from the right path of human happiness. If it perturbs us to read his jottings of "specimen days" along Timber creek, wrestling with his twelve-foot oak sapling to gain strength, sluicing in clear water and scouring his naked limbs with his favorite flesh-brush, ruminating in blest solitude among the tints of sunset, the odor of mint-leaves and the moving airs of the summer meadow—if this gives us a twinge, then it is probably because we have divorced ourselves from the primitive joyfulness of the open air. If we find his trumpetings of physical candor shameful or unsavory, perhaps it is because we have not schooled our thoughts to honest cleanliness. (Though Anne Gilchrist's gentle comment must not be forgotten: "Perhaps Walt Whitman has forgotten the truth that our instincts are beautiful facts of nature, as well as our bodies; and that we have a strong instinct of silence about some things.") If we find him lacking in humor or think some of his catalogues tedious—there are catalogues and shortage of humor even in some books considered sacred. And Whitman, if not a humorist himself, has been (as Mr. Chesterton would say) the cause of humor in others. How adorably he has lent himself to parody! But this by the way. The point is, Whitman is a true teacher: first the thrashing, then the tenderness. No one ever found him exhilarating on the first reading. But he is a hound of heaven. He will hunt you down and find you out. Expurgate him for yourself, if you wish. He cannot be inclosed in a formula. He asks you to draw up your own formula as you read him. Rest assured, William Blake would not have found him obscure. "If you want me again, look for me under your bootsoles." Is not that the very accent of Blake?
There is marvelous drama in Camden for the seeing eye. The first scene is Mickle street, that dingy, smoke-swept lane of mean houses. The visitors from oversea stood almost aghast when they saw the pathetic vista. For years they had dwelt on Whitman's magnificent messages of pride and confidence:
See, projected through time,
For me an audience interminable.
Perhaps they had conjured to mind a clean little cottage such as an English suburb might offer: a dainty patch of wallflowers under the front door, a shining brass knocker, a sideboard of mahogany with an etching of Walt on the wall. No wonder, then, that the deathplace of the poet with "audience interminable" came as a shock.
And yet, one wonders, is not that faded box, with its flag hanging from the second story and little Louis Skymer's boyish sign in the window—Rabbits for sale cheap—and the backyard littered with hutches and the old nose-broken carved bust of Walt chucked away in a corner—is it not in a way strangely appropriate? Would not Walt almost have preferred it to be so, with its humble homeliness, so instinct with humanity, rather than a neatly tidied mausoleum? If Walt had believed that a man must live in a colonial cot in a fashionable suburb in order to write great poetry he would not have been Walt.
The great matter is to reveal and outpour the Godlike suggestions pressing for birth in the soul.
And then it must be remembered that Walt didn't live much on Mickle street until he became a confirmed invalid, and his pack of listeners kept him talking so hard he didn't know where he was. He lived on the ferries, up and down Chestnut street, or (for that matter) in the constellation Orion.
The second scene of the Camden drama is at Harleigh Cemetery. Here, among that sweet city of the dead, in a little dell where the rhododendrons yield their fragrance to the sun-heavy air, the massive stone door stands ajar. A great mass of flowers, laid there by the English-Speaking Union, was heaped at the sill. More instinctively than in many a church, the passer lifts his hat.
Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?
I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die,
and I know it.
I thought of what a little girl who was standing on the pavement of Mickle street had said to me as we halted in front of the Whitman house. "My father was sick, and he died."
Yesterday—Memorial Day—was a day of pognant thoughts. Walt wrote once in "Specimen Days":
Somehow I got thinking today of young men's deaths—not at all sadly or sentimentally, but gravely, realistically, perhaps a little artistically.
What a curious note of apology there is in the last admission! He who was so rarely "artistic"! He who began his career as a writer of incredibly mawkish short stories and doggerels, and rigidly trained himself to omit the "stock" touches! Let us not try to speak of Walt, or of death, in any "artistic" vein.
"Stop this day and night with me" (Walt said) "and you shall possess the origin of all poems." By which he meant, of course, you shall possess your own soul. You shall grasp with sureness and ecstasy the only fact you can cling to in this baffling merry-go-round—the dignity and worth of your own life. In reading Whitman one seems to burst through the crust of perversity, artificial complexity and needless timidity that afflicts us all, to meet a strong river of sanity and courage that sweeps away the petty rubbish. Because it is so far from the course of our meaningless gestures, we know instinctively it is right and true. There is no heart so bruised, there is no life so needlessly perplexed, but it can find its message in this man. "I have the best of time and space," he said. So have we all, for our little moment. Read his defiant words, great and scornful as any ever penned:
What place is besieged, and vainly tries to raise the siege?
Lo, I send to that place a commander, swift, brave, immortal,
And with him horse and foot, and parks of artillery,
And artillerymen, the deadliest that ever fired gun.
He sends you your own soul.
As we rode back to Camden on the trolley one of my companions spied the Washington statue in front of the courthouse (which I had been hoping he would miss). He smiled at the General grotesquely kneeling in stone. "Only giving one knee to his Maker," was his droll comment.
It was so with Walt. He wanted to be quite sure what he was kneeling to before he gave both knees.
Perhaps the most curious (and gruesome) story in connection with Whitman comes to me from James Shields. He has showed me a monograph by the late Dr. E. A. Spitzka, professor of anatomy at the Jefferson Medical College, which gives a brief review of scientific post-mortem measurements made of the brains of 130 notable men and four women. In this monograph, reprinted by the American Philosophical Society in 1907, occurs the following paragraph:
87. WHITMAN, WALT, American poet. The weight of Walt Whitman's brain is variously given as 45.2 ounces (1282 grams) and 43.3 ounces (1228 grams). His stature was six feet and in health he weighed about 200 pounds. The brain had been preserved, but some careless attendant in the laboratory let the jar fall to the ground; it is not stated whether the brain was totally destroyed by the fall, but it is a great pity that not even the fragments of the brain were rescued.