With Walt Whitman in Camden vol. 4 (1953)

     

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION

     The conversations recorded in this volume took place sixty-five years ago, yet they have an immediate interest and value, both for the general reader and the literary scholar. In 1906, when Horace Traubel published the first volume of these discourses, With Walt Whitman in Camden , only a few enthusiasts and far-sighted librarians recognized its value, and preserved it for readers of future generations. It now seems impossible that a book reporting Whitman warmly and truly should have experienced neglect even later, in 1914, when the third volume was published. When Horace Traubel died in 1919, he had been unable to secure a publisher for his fourth volume, and it appears here for the first time.

     With the passing years, there has been a mounting recognition of Whitman. Today he towers among the unquestioned great interpreters of America. A new generation of poets found that he had been their pioneer, enlarging their horizons, and giving a new freedom to their craft. Readers in many lands, during these troubled decades, have taken comfort from Whitman's faith in democracy, his serene individualism, his vision of "inseparable cities with their arms about each other's necks" in a universe whose "kelson" is love. The postponed approval of Whitman caused scholars and critics, somewhat belatedly, to discover the values in Traubel's volumes, so that today they are widely sought by literary specialists and libraries. Except for the writings of the poet himself, there has been no source so clearly indispensable as the three volumes of With Walt Whitman in Camden . Every good biographer and critic of Whitman has used this work as a source, and many serious readers have enjoyed it.

     Each of Traubel's volumes may stand alone, the present no less than the three that preceded it. You may open it anywhere and begin reading, for this work needs no such logical or chronological sequence as is customary in a work of formal interpretation or biographical narrative. Its logic is the delightful and limber illogic

     All this Traubel transferred quickly to his notes, almost with the fidelity of a modern wire recorder. Like a good reporter he made no effort to "improve" Whitman; he impartially recorded both the old invalid, peevish with constipation, and the lofty thinker; both the angry partisan and the magnanimous forgiver of trespasses; he reproduced the trite, the common, even the vulgar remark as cheerfully as the sublime idea. Without the reporter's formal training, Traubel apparently had the reporter's instinct, and the eyes and ears of a television camera. The present writer is indebted to Mrs. Traubel for the following account of her husband's method of work: "The notes of the visits to Whitman were written on small bits of paper to fit into the pocket of his jacket, and were written in what he called 'condensed longhand,' in the dim light of Whitman's room. Within the hour of the words spoken, the material was put into the complete form with which you are familiar in the three published volumes. There was no vacuum of time or emotion, thus preserving the vitality of the original conversation." The idea, one gathers, was to transcribe not only the words, but the very inflection of the poet's voice. The young scribe often read it back to his future bride to check the sound of it.

     Does Whitman know that young Traubel, making notes as they talk, will soon be back in his room, transcribing his "story", as it were, before the midnight deadline? In any case, the old poet knows, by journalistic experience, that eventually it will serve a good purpose. John Burroughs and Dr. Bucke have already published their accounts, authorized and supervised, in part, by the poet himself, but Whitman seems here to be making an effort not to define the book that Traubel might write, not indeed to imply that he is obligated to write any book at all. Yet the two continue endlessly to recall the moments of life, homely or lofty, dark or luminous, that

     Horace Logo Traubel (1858-1919) was well suited for the mission which came to him unsought. Mrs. Traubel believes that her husband had no particular plan to write a book on Whitman when he began to record his conversations. He had known Whitman from his boyhood; he found the poet an exhaustless source of interest and life, and responded naturally to the impulse to set down his conversation. The rest followed as a matter of course. Actually, Traubel had known Whitman for fifteen years or more before the first recorded conversations. In 1873, when Traubel was a boy of fifteen, and Whitman fifty-four, the poet, stricken with paralysis, secured a deputy for his small clerkship in Washington and took lodging with his brother, George, in Camden, New Jersey. The Traubels lived nearby, and were already acquainted with the Whitmans. A couple of years earlier, they had heard that Whitman's mother, on a visit with his brother George, had been stricken with illness, and like good neighbors of an earlier time, they had gone to see her. From that time young Traubel was a familiar at the Whitmans'. The father, Maurice Henry Traubel, a German by birth, came at twenty-one to Philadelphia from Frankfurt-am-Main, where he had received a liberal education in the arts. A lithographer by occupation, he provided for his son the environment of books, music, and ideas. In time, Whitman's young admirer became the mature friend.

     During the earlier years of their association the poet wrote his last great poems, although he recovered somewhat from the paralysis that at first threatened his life. He prepared the Centennial Edition of his works for the celebration of 1876. Still later, he brought Leaves of Grass into its final organization for the edition of 1881, suppressed in Boston and transferred to a publisher in Philadelphia,

     In these later publications, Traubel became truly the poet's literary adviser and critic, as well as his agent with the publisher, the printers, and the bookbinders; for Whitman, to the end, arranged for the printing and binding of his books, for which McKay was sales agent. These events, as contemporary with the present conversations, are vividly portrayed in their daily occurrence, in this scrupulous account of Traubel's regular visits to Whitman in 1888 and 1889. References to present visitors jostle with the memories of old friends. In this house, during the years to come, Horace Traubel was to assist the poet with his very last books, Good-Bye My Fancy (1891), and the last Leaves of Grass (1892), dubbed the "deathbed edition" because Traubel brought one of the first copies, in its brown paper cover, to the dying poet's bedside.

     To the little house in Camden came many literary admirers—American and foreign visitors, great and small—while correspondence poured in from every quarter. Through the years, Traubel became one of the band of somewhat older men—the "Whitman circle"—who came and went continuously in thought and often in person: such as Burroughs, from his farm in New York; or Dr. Bucke from Canada, where he was Superintendent of a mental hospital; or William Douglas O'Connor (superintendent, in Washington, of the United States Life Saving Service), the author, in 1866, of The Good Gray Poet ; and William Sloane Kennedy, man of letters, who, like all these others, wrote authoritative books about Whitman. In addition, there were the Philadelphia friends—Harned, the Smiths, Harrison

     The body with its ills will intrude, of course, from time to time. Whitman is immensely human, an old man beset by infirmities, sometimes goaded by Traubel's sharp questions into momentary vehemence, even anger; but quickly subsiding into a sense of humor much richer than that revealed in his writings. The afflictions of his body, like the foibles of friends, are inevitable conditions of life, both alike to be accepted with a grim amusement that makes the best of all things. He can laugh at the impending frustration that Bucke is predictably destined to experience with his money-making invention, while loving the man dearly; he can recall the tempestuous earlier associations with the Irish O'Connor while being daily concerned by ominous reports of his present illness; he can reflect upon the growing eccentricities of John Burroughs, yet cherish undiminished the tenderness of an undying comradeship. It may after all prove that Traubel, in setting down the facts so faithfully for scholarship, has also accomplished the more difficult literary creation by which the living reality of a man is preserved for posterity.

Sculley Bradley

University of Pennsylvania
November 12, 1952

TO READERS

     My story is left as it was originally written. I have made no attempt to improve it. I have taken nothing off and put nothing on. I know that it has defects. I am not ashamed of defects. I know that it has virtues. I am not proud of virtues. Here is the record as it virginally came from my hands in the quick of the struggle it describes. It might have been made more literary. It might have been made more precise. Its loose joints might have been tightened. Some commas might have been put where colons are. Phrases might have been swung about. The formal grace of the recital might have been improved. I have preferred to respect its integrity. To let it remain untouched by a censorship. To let it continue, for good or bad, in its then native atmosphere. I do not want to reshape those years. I want them left as they were. I keep them forever contemporary. I trust in the spontaneity of their first inspirations.

     Did Whitman know I was keeping such a record? No. Yet he knew I would write of our experiences together. Every now and then he charged me with immortal commissions. He would say: "I want you to speak for me when I am dead." On several occasions I read him my reports. They were very satisfactory. "You do the thing just as I should wish it to be done." He always imposed it upon me to tell the truth about him. The worst truth no less than the best truth. He did not ask to have his failings paraded but he did ask that they should not be hid. He knew that imperfection is a part of perfection. He knew that our blood runs black as well as red. He did not like evil talked about as if it was fatal. But he knew that a place must be provided for it in any portrait of a person or in any portrayal of an event. So I have let Whitman alone. I have let him remain the chief figure in his own story. This book is more his book than my book. It talks his words. It reflects his manner. It is the utterance of his faith. That is why I have not fooled with its text. Why I have chosen to leave it in its unpremeditated arrangement of light and shade. Why I have not attempted to make it conform to any arbitrary

     A number of the collateral documents quoted are from Whitman himself. These are printed without repair. They are kept to his own text without elision and without change. The same thing may be said of the letters from others to Whitman. Nothing has been done to sophisticate the text. It occurs here in the rude dress natural to the incidents that produced it. I had no time then to polish. I have had no disposition since to do what I had no time to do then. The record begs no questions. Never makes worse of better or better of worse. Tries to explain away no sin. Tries to lug in no virtue. Whitman was not afraid of the man who would make too little of him. He was afraid of the man who would make too much of him. He knew that it was easier to survive some kinds of enemies than to survive some kinds of friends. Whitman did not insist upon his faults. But he wanted them all counted in. The last fault with the first fault. He would rather have been thought too little of than too much of. I have never lost sight of his command of commands: "Whatever you do do not prettify me."

HORACE TRAUBEL

Camden, February, 1906

EDITORIAL NOTE

     Three previous volumes of these conversations were published by Horace Traubel:
With Walt Whitman in Camden
Vol. I: Conversations, March 28 to July 14, 1888 (Boston: Small, Maynard and Company, 1906)
Vol. II: Conversations, July 16 to October 31, 1888 (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1908)
Vol. III: Conversations, November 1, 1888, to January 20, 1889 (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914)

     At the time of his death in 1919, Horace Traubel had transcribed and arranged the material for a fourth volume, represented in the present text. This was a typescript, which Traubel corrected in ink. Although the manuscript was then considered by a publisher who declined the venture, there is no final indication as to whether Traubel regarded it as fully ready for the printer.

     Therefore, certain editorial decisions had to be made in the present edition. We have here reproduced Horace Traubel's typescript unaltered, except for the silent correction of obvious errors or inconsistencies. Wherever error is suspected but not obvious the text has been allowed to stand, followed by [ sic ]. The copied of documents and letters quoted in the text bear Traubel's corrections, attesting to his scrupulous attention to accuracy. The present editor has not altered any document or letter for any reason. Letters of foreign correspondents, sometimes in crabbed idiom, have of course been left as Traubel reproduced them. "I'll not doctor," he wrote, "Schmidt's English."

     In the previous volumes Traubel established certain practices and conventions which he also followed in the present typescript. These we have retained, except for the placing of quotation marks, where for clarity we have followed modern practice in placing commas and periods inside quotes. In the taste of the day, Traubel

     The editor expresses his deep gratitude to Mrs. Anne Montgomerie Traubel for her constant faith that her husband's record would finally be published in its entirety; for her agency in preserving the manuscript and valuable illustrative materials; and for conversations, through the years, which furnished a first-hand insight into Whitman's Camden period, beyond the scope of the printed records. Gertrude Traubel has also proved a patient and most valuable friend and adviser. I am grateful also to my friend, Charles E. Feinberg of Detroit, whose faith in the value of this publication, and whose practical generosity, provided the conditions necessary to bring this book to press. Mr. Feinberg also enthusiastically put at the editor's disposal a number of illustrative items from his own Whitman collection, and made his time and his special knowledge available for the consideration of a number of problems presented by the text. To the staff of the Rare Book Room of the University of Pennsylvania Library, and its Whitman Collection, I am very much indebted for the use of supporting documents, manuscripts, and rare volumes; and to Neda M. Westlake, of the Rare Book Room Staff, for assistance with difficult identifications, and in making a comprehensive topical index. Finally, the editorial staff of the University of Pennsylvania Press, especially Mary M. Wildermuth, furnished unusual and painstaking editorial assistance, which I acknowledge with appreciation.

     S.B.

WITH WALT WHITMAN IN CAMDEN

Monday, January 21, 1889

     W. picked up a newspaper piece on November Boughs. "Some one sent this to me: it has the usual echoey character." Then he added: "These newspaper things while not weighty still say as much as could be expected from such casual sources. The newspaper is so fleeting: is so like a thing gone as quick as come: has no life, so to speak: its birth and death are almost coterminous." He thought "on the whole" he was being "far more generously treated as a penman by newspapers and magazines than formerly." "Why," he added: "if it keeps on like this, some day they may even forgive me for having written Leaves of Grass." He went on: "The gentle Emerson said to me in Boston that time when we had the long walk together: 'We must always remember, Mr. Whitman, that the world will make amends for all this some day.' I asked him: 'For all what?' He looked at me placidly and said: 'I know why you ask, For all what? and I will answer by saying: For everything.'"

     Morse had sent me a copy of the Chicago Mail containing a full text of the decision in the Anarchist case. W. looked it over. "Sidney felt that I didn't quite realize the exceptionalness of that incident. Maybe he was right. I seem to be weak on the protagonist side." And he added: "Leave the paper: it may be more important to me than to you: it may remove my prejudices." I asked: "What prejudices have you?" "Prejudices against bombs, for one thing." "It seems to me you have some prejudices against courts and jails and policemen and soldiers too." He took this up sharply: "So I have: prejudices: not against persons: no: against the institutions that require them—that are built on, are perpetuated by, are shamed by, them."

     W. called my attention to a copy of a French review containing a Whitman essay by Gabriel Sarrazin. "I suppose it will eventually go to Bucke: I thought I might send it to him by way of Kennedy: perhaps I shall: they can tell me what it comes to. I can't read a word of it. I see Dr. Bucke and John Burroughs referred to but just how,

     

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God knows: French or Greek, they are one to me. If I only had my old French friend here—if he was living now—the job could easily be done: he would sit down right here, casually—give it to us viva voce." I said: "Perhaps my father can do it: I'll ask him." "Evidently it went through without being proof-read by Sarrazin," W. remarked quietly: "it is full of emendations—changes: besides, he says in his letter—did I tell you he sent a letter along with it?—that this is not the whole matter—that he will use it in full in some volume he is to bring out." W. handed me the letter. It was written in English. S. speaks of former W.W. translations into the French: alludes to Griffin's work. W. said: "I have seen Laforgue's work: I am told it is brilliant—sparkles. These odds and ends of attention so to speak all get to me sometime or other from somebody: some of them, most of them, are about the house somewhere—or should be: it's my intention to turn them over to you when they show up." Sarrazin has addressed the letter to "Middle" Street. W. enjoyed this. "I suppose he had never been told where he was taught that 'many a mickle makes a muckle' as we were: so he would never have guessed either a mickle or a muckle street. But letters come to me all ways: even the letters addressed by some people more daring than others to 'Walt Whitman, America.'" I put in: "Some day they'll know where to find you if a letter is just addressed to 'Walt Whitman, World'!" He didn't take this up but pointed towards my coat. "What's that you've got in your pocket? Something to show me?" It was a copy of the Bazar. I handed it to him. "Yes! something for you to see: look at this picture: it's by Julien Dupré: it's your sort of a picture: what you call a Leaves of Grass picture." He put on his glasses and held the paper away from him as he looked. The picture was called The Haymaker. "You are sure I'll like it? I do like it: more and more: the more I see of it: Oh! it sinks into me deep. It is Millet: he has studied Millet: subject, treatment, atmosphere: but Millet would not have done that"—pointing to the face—"he would not have made her beautiful, a Maud Muller: no: he would rather have made her heavy, commonplace, almost sullen." But this was "only a minor drawback." "The picture as a whole is certainly vital—stirring, generic." He reached forward picking up the French review again. "See this"—opening it after some search at a sketch of a man at a table eating: "Don't you think it's superb?—quick, natural, good,

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conclusive?" Then he got back to the Dupré. "But this is more spacious—is rather more amply conceived." And he added: "I care nothing at all for some of the brazen art: the mere exhibitions of skilful painting: they rather horrify than attract me—are something like treason. I think of art as something to serve the people—the mass: when it fails to do that it's false to its promises: just as if a man would issue a note which from the first he has no intention of paying."

     James West, who edits The New Ideal in Boston, wrote me this in a letter I received today:

     "I am glad you know Whitman. When next you call on him say, perhaps, if he cares to hear, that for years I have desired to make a pilgrimage to his building. In his writings I have found as much strength, hope, inspiration for my work of teaching, as in any others I know. In the West I quoted him so often in my sermons that some shallow ones began to look on me too as 'bad.' O saving badness! O glorious weakness!"

     I read this to W. who was moved. "That men, women, we never meet, have not even heard of, except in the accidental way, should respond to our work—that is a thing to be pondered. It's a waft of something, a scent, a flavor, some indefinable entity, that must not be carelessly regarded or passed by." And he said further: "This is the precious return: personal love: the precious return." Also: "John Hay in one of our talks said: 'Whitman, no man who has been so successful with the prophetic few should lament his failure with the respectable many.' And I must bear that in mind. I don't think I ever felt sore on my enemies: I rather included them as of the first importance. I was surprised to find in Emerson an occasional asperity from which I think I have been exempt: in fact the dear Emerson said to me himself there in the Astor House: 'I find you agreeably gentle with those who have been cruel to you.' And he called it—thought it—my 'policy': which I disavowed with the statement that if it was true it was rather for temperamental than conscious reasons."

     Oldach takes his own time with the cover. W. ordinarily says: "I don't care: I'm in no hurry." But tonight he expressed some impatience: "I get to want to see it: Oldach is very elephantine." I said:

     W. produced a letter from England which he spoke of to me. "Read it to me," he said: "it is from a woman: a Mary Ashley: the name has a Quakerish sound: I don't know that she's famous for anything: but that's all the better: I shrink from the celebrated and the famous: read it." So I read:

16 New King Street,
Bath, England, January 7, 1889.

Dear Sir:

     I have very often felt that I should like to write to you and tell you how much pleasure and instruction your books have given me, and now I have determined that I will do so, because I have just read November Boughs and am so much pleased with it.

     I have been watching for it to be published for some time, ever since I saw in The Pall Mall Gazette that you were engaged on it. Some of the poetical pieces in it please me greatly.

     I have long cared for Leaves of Grass and Specimen Days. I love nature so much myself that there is much in Specimen Days that appeals to me. I have often experienced the feeling of absorbing into myself, physically and spiritually, the very life and spirit of nature. It is a thing that must be felt to be understood. The other papers in that book are interesting to me too. The broad and deep views you take of the future of democracy in America—everything connected with America—is a most interesting study to me. Your poems touch me very deeply as all true poetry that comes from the heart must do.

     Please accept my best wishes that the year we have entered upon may bring to you much calm peacefulness, and that you may experience

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much comfort and sympathy in return for that which you have so generously given to others during your life.

     I hope you will not think that I shall expect any reply to this, for I know how weak you are, and that you are not able to reply to all the letters that you receive.

I am, my dear sir, yours very truly and gratefully,

Mary Ashley.

     W. said: "I wonder who she is? I haven't the least idea. Take it along. I get many curious things: some adulation—a little (a little's enough): some cussing: now and then somebody goes for me—gives me hell. If I had made a collection of such documents I'd have had some queer stuff for you to preserve. Look at this for instance." He handed me the annual message of the Mayor of Brooklyn. Laughed. "Now ain't that real literature for you? I want to be generous: I'll share my possessions with you." Also gave me Bucke's letter of the 18th: "Take that too: but I don't think you'll find anything in it to excite you. Bucke's almost ready to come: that's the best news." Then: "You'll never thoroughly know, comprehend, Bucke, till you have spent a summer with him at the Asylum—on the farm: till you meet the doctors, the patients, the nurses, there: till you see Bucke at his work." Referred to Mary Ashley again. "What is there in her note to move me so? I confess it moved me. Was it something in the letter or something in me? I find myself emotionally much more readily stirred some times than others. These days I seem to need something: seem to be looking for something—feeling towards it: something my illness makes me crave: God knows what it is: something there seemed to be a hint of in the gentle Mary's letter."

     I wrote Burroughs today. W. has heard from Rolleston. "He's my Irish friend," W. explained: "the real thing, I may say: well favored intellectually: fervent with native faith. There's black round the paper and envelope: I wonder who's dead? What a funny custom that is—to publish such a fact: a death in the family: insist on it: but it's going out: gone out, in fact, except with the old families—except, too, with the new families who want to cut a dash. Over there in England they take their forms seriously—observe them: all of them: from king down, from the slums up: observe them all: forms we on this side for the most part never knew or have dismissed."

     What had Rolleston written? "It's not a long letter: it's about his German edition: Rolleston is anxious to have me pushed in Germany: he says I'm a German requisite—that they'll 'adopt' me. I don't flatter myself: I don't believe in requisites—in chosen people, in chosen peoples, all that—it seems quite like nonsense to me. But I acquiesce in Rolleston as a beautiful friend: yes, I do that: wonderful he is, surely: but as to the 'requisite'—well, I have no opinion on that: though as for Rolleston in the end, it's not me but the idea we stand for that he's really after: the idea: the immortal idea."

     As I was leaving W. said: "I had one of the curios here for you: a letter: but it seems to have got hid away again." He rammed his fingers into several piles of stuff on the table and then dropped tiredly back in his chair. "No: I don't see it: it'll maybe show up tomorrow again: I'll not let it get away if it does: they sort of take to cover when you come"—laughing—"knowing your ruthless appetite." And he admonished me: "Keep both your eyes on the book: I'm absolutely in your keeping."

Tuesday, January 22, 1889

     7.45 P.M. W. reading paper. Appeared exhausted. Yet was willing to talk. Had had trouble with his eyes the past week or so, too. Has to shade his eyes as he reads. Stops often. He said: "I sent the New Revue—Revue Nouvelle—off today. I am altogether in the dark: don't know what the fellow says." Was Kennedy a French scholar? "I don't know: that's what I want to find out: he'll translate it for me if he is: if he can't do it Bucke can—Doctor: either Kennedy or Doctor will do it: at any rate give me the purport of it so I may at least understand what it's all about." I noticed the rocker of his chair had caught up the strings of a couple of bundles of his manuscript: advised him of it. First he said: "Well—never mind: I'm tired"—but when I suggested that if he'd move his chair forward I'd straighten the stuff out he acquiesced, saying: "They are all disturbed: I got them in that shape looking up some scraps today." These "scraps," he informed me, were "Whitmanesque bits of which" he "made up a little package and sent off to the French fellow." He wanted to know if I remembered the man's name: asked: What is it? and when I said, "Sarrazin," repeated it, adding: "That's it: and by and by we'll know what it's all about."

     Says he's feeling "fairly." No signs, outwardly, of any change. Suffers some from indigestion for which he is taking Friedrichsthal Waters again. "There are always devils lurking in the darkness to destroy us: we have to fight for our lives." Talked of a Rhys letter. I quoted a passage. W. exclaimed: "That's it! and splendid it is, too! It ought to be printed broadcast: we should have it printed." And he added: "Did you notice in these phlegmatic people—Rhys is one of them—that when stirred they are the fieriest of all? that when they let go all hell's in it: hell and damnation: the horriblest flames of perdition? Haven't you noticed it? Take me for example. You don't often see me mad: I don't dare get mad: I get so damned mad when I get mad that it shakes me up too much—leaves ugly results: so I hold myself in sternly: have to: yes, must."

     I sent today for copy of San Francisco Chronicle of 13th for Bucke. Received Boston Traveller. Criticism adverse. W. read it while I looked over his shoulder. "Well—that's all right: I'm entitled to it: only, I wish they would print me correctly—use the right marks—not misrepresent: I hate commas in wrong places: I want my i's dotted, my t's crossed." He had a couple of deaf and dumb visitors today. He was "considerably interested and amused to have them come." "We got along pretty well together—though silently!"

     W. talked about Garland. "He's greatly interested in the George movement: is strongly impulsive: is maybe a little one-idea'd—though as to that I don't feel quite sure: is wonderfully human: gets at the simple truths—the everyday truths: is not professional." I said: "You speak of one-idea'd men as though you rather discredited them." "Do I? I don't mean to: they certainly have a place—a vast big vital place: they can't be skipped—escaped." I said again: "You may think you're not, but you're a little one-idea'd yourself—and every man is." He nodded. "No doubt: I have never heard it put quite in that way: Jesus was one-idea'd, I admit, for instance."

     I asked him: "Well—have you some objections to Jesus?" "Yes: why not? Emerson had too: the dear Emerson: he felt that Jesus lacked humor, for one thing: a man who lacks humor is likely to concentrate on one idea." I parried him again. "Why, that's a familiar charge against you, Walt: didn't even Ruskin say that? and I hear it every now and then from somebody or other." He retorted a little hotly: "Well—you've rather got me: I'm not that much good in an

     W. gave me Bucke's letter of day before yesterday. Also a postcard from Garland. "Here's a slip too: Democracy in Literature: my own: it's yours if you want it: file it away: I have a few copies left." He had me read an old Conway letter to him. "It has to do with the publishing end of things: it should go among your documents: but let me hear it again."

     W. asked me to get him from McKay a copy of Bucke's book "simply stitched—not bound." Oldach again disappointed us. W. impatient. "But he's German," W. said: "and so we must wait upon his pleasure: he's the immovable rock." He said: "Give my love to your mother." And he picked up a big apple from the table. "Ain't it a beauty? Give her this." And he spoke of Sam Loag, my friend and his: a printer: "Drop this in on him tomorrow as you go by"—handing me a paper with a string round it: "Sam was here: asked me for it."

Wednesday, January 23, 1889

     I said: "We had to go slow—proceed with deliberation." W. nodded to me. "That's just it: deliberation. Some of my best friends—my own people—accuse me (have always accused me) of procrastination—the most provoking in all private annals!" He threw up his hands: "I couldn't reply to that: I am slow: I could only say with Sidney Morse's nigger, who would go off on fearful sprees, have a high old time of it: 'I am so because I was meant to be so!' But after a pause, while indulging a half-audible laugh, W. said further: "But while that is a good story they would probably meet it with another, perhaps a better, story: the story told by one of the Greek writers: the story of a master beating a slave: the slave protesting: 'I was ordained to do this thing: therefore, why whip me?' the reply being 'And I was ordained to give you a hell of a thrashing!' That might apply wonderfully well to my case."

     He was silent. I waited till he began to talk again, saying nothing myself: "Despite everything the book is here: we have finished the journey: that is our answer: procrastination or no procrastination, the perfect result is in our hands: the book: our book: your book, my book: beautifully done except with one except." He pointed to the lettering: "That's not Leaves of Grass: that's a bit feeble: but I have no doubt it's about as good as the case will allow. If we could control everything—do everything we please: get a first class man here from New York, Paris, London, anywhere: pay five dollars for that: pay men for winking and bowing and scraping: we might have our way absolutely. But—well, we have had no such choice: we should be glad we've done decently well: you, indefatigable as you are: I, loafing round: Oldach, with his man or two. Oh! I'm satisfied: say so for me."

     I said to W.: "Mary intimated that you've not had such a good day." He exclaimed: "How dared she! But as a fact I have spent a dull leaden time of it since I got up this morning: up to four or half-past four it was very bad: then Mary brought me in a big mug of hot coffee: it was very nice: I drank it all. Whether from

     McKay wants to know what W. will sell him the complete W. W. for. He says he'll be sure to be applied to for copies—especially abroad. I asked W. He said: "I'll think it over: I'll tell you tomorrow." I put in: "Always tomorrow—always tomorrow: you're a tomorrow sort of a man!" "I suppose I am: I want to be: even if at the cost of some procrastination." McKay didn't have sheets of Bucke's W. W. handy today. He'll get me a set for W. Oldach will charge us a dollar and twenty-four per copy for big book bound in leather. W. for an instant seemed staggered by the price. Then he recovered himself. "I guess it's worth that much," he quietly said. No letter from Bucke. "In fact no letter from anybody." How about O'Connor? "Oh! did I tell you I had a postcard from Nellie a day or two ago? She said she was fagged out—was too tired to enter into particulars: William a week or ten days ago took to his bed: he has not been about since. The outlook is dismal if not dangerous: it's hard on Nellie: she's frail though resolute: O'Connor himself has great courage—besides, is very optimistic: Nellie being rather the contrary of all that: is a bit pessimistic—sees the bad side." But determined? "Yes! I did not mean to question her force: I only wanted to say she was inclined to take the gloomy view." And yet wasn't she full of faith about things in general? "Yes: this strain is temperamental in her: she can't escape it."

     We talked of Bradley's conviction in the Philadelphia courts yesterday. "Yes, I have read the story: Bradley was monstrous—monstrous: but would you not think him abnormal: I see no other way to account for it: certainly he can't be explained by the ordinary process of reasoning. In the present condition of our criminal laws—of crime—as in affairs like this—these extra sex developments—abnormality is the only word that will cover the case. Then we must remember that such individual abnormality comes from the abnormality of society at large. I think any judge would admit that—perhaps express it almost in my words: it seems to me to arise—so much of it, who knows but all of it?—in an absence of simplicity—

     "I know that in regard to these Anarchists there are contending impulses drawing us two ways, but for liberty, abstract, concrete—the broad question of liberty—there is no doubt at all. I look ahead seeing for America a bad day—a dark if not stormy day—in which this policy, this restriction, this attempt to draw a line against free speech, free printing, free assembly, will become a weapon of menace to our future." He thought this decision not only "good as legal decisions go" but "good practically, as a workable hypothesis." "I like that the judge—Sully, or whatever (Tuley)—faces the question objectively: that he's not theoretic merely but makes his statement to meet other possible cases: like a surgeon—one of the genuine surgeons—who takes a fever for what it is, not what it might be, as developed in everyday John or somebody." I asked him: "You speak of liberty: do you mean every and any liberty? or do you too set limits?" He said: "I can't set limits even if there should be limits: of course we can't do as we please—every man can't do as he pleases: but short of that why shouldn't liberty prevail?" Read W. portions of a letter I have from Bucke.

London, Ontario, January 21, 1889.

My dear Horace:

     Yours of 18th just to hand. I agree with all you say and with all you have done about the will. I have no doubt W. understands perfectly well what has become of it and is satisfied that it should be taken care of. All quiet here and all sound with meter and everything else. Thanks for the German paper though it is a stupid little piece. What he means is that W. "though a living writer belongs to

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an elder race (Hebrew prophets, authors of Eddas, &c.) of humanitarianism, poetical, inspired eccentrics. The contents of his work is poetic (an art rhapsody) but (as regards execution) he is innocent of rhyme, rhythm or form. Freiligrath's translations of him (W. W.) are better than the original." Evidently a critic of heavy caliber (Herr Siller)—heavy in the sense of dumm!

R.M. Bucke.

     W. laughed over the reference to Freiligrath. "I'll bet that made the Doctor mad: he'd fire up at such a comparison: but then—who knows? A translation is often enough worse but it may well be better than the original." I quoted another of Bucke's notes in which Doctor speaks of probably being here early in February. W. said of the meter: "Doctor sets such store by it: he's hot for it: somehow I have my doubts: wouldn't wonder if the whole scheme went to smash. I don't know but it would be better for Doctor if it did: yes, better: I shudder when I think of him, of anyone, you, anyone I love, making money—getting on what they call easy street: easy street has killed many a man who was worth keeping alive." W. said as I left: "You are doing everything for me now: I know it: you are more to me than my right hand: but you'll do more for me after I'm dead—way into the future. I'll haunt you after you've buried me: you'll feel me taking part with you in many a great undertaking. Take my word for it—and wait: you'll find that I'm not mistaken."

Thursday, January 24, 1889

     W. was reading Laurence Hutton's Literary Notes in Harper's when I entered. "Some one sent me the magazine: who could it have been?" Then he handed me the envelope. "Was it Howells?" he asked: adding: "Probably Howells' suggestion." It had come addressed to "Mr. Walter Whitman." In the Editor's Study this issue H. starts off with a section about November Boughs. W. called it "so-so" and "friendly" but didn't in the least warm up over it. "Take it along," he said: "see what you can make of it yourself." He had read some other things in the magazine. "You will find the first article very interesting in spite of its title—The Hôtel Drouot: Theodore Child." Had also read and "found very good" Verestchagin's A Russian Village: but The Work of John Ruskin by Charles Waldstein "I tried to read but found so dull I had to drop it." Frontispiece portrait of Ruskin "very vital": indeed, W. felt that "all the illustrations" were "fine, convincing, conclusive." Still, he was not "a wholesale Ruskin man": rather "take my Ruskin with some qualifications": though insisting still that Ruskin "is not to be made little of: is of unquestionable genius and nobility." He wanted to know about Waldstein, he listening to what I said as if he really wished to know. "My first feeling about Howells' piece," he said, "is wholly indifference." Then he asked: "Don't you find Howells tame? I think tame is the word: yes, tame." And he added: "He's not exactly colorless: only, he rather seems to be afraid of color."

     "You know Thorndike Rice?" W. asked. "I had a note from him here today saying that he proposes having another symposium in the Review: the influence of novels on life—of English novels on American life: then he goes on to invite me to take a hand in it." "Will you do it?" "That depends: I am not at all settled in my own notions on the subject as yet." But "take the letter," he said, handing it over: "take it home: I shall not want it at once—can wait till you bring it back."

     Bucke (22d) wrote me as to The Critic review: "The piece is (as you say) 'astonishingly enthusiastic,' but its enthusiasm somehow offends me, as if it were not genuine. How is it? What is the matter with it?" I referred this to W., who said: "Yes: he wrote to the same effect to me: made the same remark about The Critic: said he liked Sanborn's column better." Gave me letter in which Bucke says: "It has a smack of unrealness, want of sincerity (but perhaps I do the writer injustice)." Had he felt such a thing himself? "Not at all: not anything that could be called even a tinge, suspicion, of it." Then he didn't agree with Bucke? "Oh no! no! I consider the objection gratuitous: have not experienced the slightest reason for such a criticism of the piece: I am even inclined to rate it above all the other things so far said of the book." W. again said: "Doctor is inclined to make impossible claims for me: he is too much disposed to wipe out the other fellows in my interest: which, of course, is an injustice to me as well as to them."

     Harrison Morris writes me about W.'s "fierce" piece in The Critic. "Fierce" is Bucke's word, too. W. repeated the word "fierce—fierce," then said: "Well, what of it? If Morris was to ask me I should have to ask: Sure enough, what does it mean?" I said: "That's one way to get rid of a question, Walt: but sometimes there's another way—a better way." "Sometimes: that's so: but not this time." Then he went on half jesting, half mad: "God Almighty how I hate to be catechized!" He does, you bet. Again, upon a reference to Rice: "Not Rice—Jim Redpath was my very good friend in the Review. Redpath has been sick: is now better: has gone to Ireland: visiting, I think, somebody or other. He is a vehement Home Ruler: fiery, flaming: is an Irish sympathizer of the intensest sort." I asked W. how he stood on Home Rule. "Home Rule? I want home rule for everybody—every section: home rule: for races, persons: liberty, freedom: as little politics as possible: as little: as much goodwill, as much fraternity, as possible: that's how it presents itself to me."

     W. discussed the big book. "I have turned it into all sorts of disadvantageous positions today: it always turned up well: I'll have

     I told W. that Frothingham (Octavius Brooks) would speak at the Ethical Convention tomorrow evening. "He has been very cordially my friend first and last," W. said: "I suppose he is so still: though as for that he may have shifted his point of view: they do it sometimes. I met Frothingham several years ago: talked with him: we got along together famously: he was expansive, sympathetic: he was of latitudinal longitudinal dimensions." It was curious after this that W. should have given me an old O'Connor letter in which Frothingham was alluded to. He had me read it to him.

Washington, Sept. 20, 1882.

Dear Walt:

     I have your postals of the 3d and the 17th.

     Comstock takes the dare! He cowers, like a kicked spaniel, and does not venture to carry out his threat. I thought my letter would have the effect of making him cautious.

     Now for Tobey. Look out for the Tribune—I have sent (last Saturday) an elaborate vivisection of the Boston postmaster and Oliver

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Stevens together, which, if the Tribune publishes, will certainly make a big row. I think you will like it as well as my first letter. It is gay and stinging until near the close, when it rises and darkens into righteous anger. The Boston Journal will surely respond to it, and Tobey will rue the day. Old orthodox rascal!

     Glad to hear your other book is near the launch. I got the programme—very attractive and picturesque. I only regretted that you had included your paper on Poe, which I think all mistaken. Everyone flings a stone at poor Edgar—Stedman's the worst of all. No such man as you fancy ever got and held the love of such a woman as Helen Whitman. I know so much about him through her, and through much reading of what he wrote, that I cannot help deploring all adverse criticisms upon him.

     Frothingham's article is fair, but unworthy of him. The arrière pensée is evident. He thinks better of your book than he dares to write. But such cowardice is simply shameful. A scholar ought to be a soldier, and face the batteries proudly.

     I will send the Modern Thought to Bucke soon. Hurrah for Molloy! I read his article with gratification. Apropos, I wish you would tell me just what Ruskin said about L. of G., for I discover that it was to you, or some near friend of yours, that he wrote. I want to know very much.

     Is there any chance of Rees Welsh printing Bucke's book? I wish it might be done. It would help, and now is the time, while public interest is alive.

     I will try to get the American Queen ("spell it with an A," as I once heard Horace Mann say sarcastically) and peruse the fury.

     I am glad you liked the way I cooked Comstock.

     The weather here is very oppressive, and "the weight of the superincumbent hour is hard to bear, together with the load of office work and the lassitude and illness that afflict the subscriber. But October will soon be here, with healing in its wings.

     My Jeannie has been very ill this summer, but is getting better, and will go to Providence on Friday. She can scarcely walk with weakness, but is on the mend. It has made life heavy for me.

     Good bye. Faithfully,

William D. O'Connor.

     W. quoted the line: "A scholar ought to be a soldier, and face the batteries proudly." "That sounds like a call to battle: no one could do that more wonderfully than William." And he added: "In spite of what may in that incident have looked like timidity in Frothingham he has steadfastly been my friend." I said: "You and William evidently run afoul of each other over Poe." He smiled: "Yes—some: William takes a polemic interest in Poe: won't have any heresy at all with regard to him: has always made the whole demand, which I am by no means convinced of. William is a vehement expounder, propounder: won't let a fellow off with compromises, half measures." W. spoke of Comstock as "the anomaly of the age." I said: "The age supports him—allows him: how is he an anomaly?" W. assented to this. "That may be said, too: I rather suspect that we have Anthony in spite of, not because of, the age." Left at 9:30.

Friday, January 25, 1889

     Then W. said: "Look at Dick Stoddard: he's not only weak but malignant." I said: "Not only afraid to love but given to hate." W. smiled. "Exactly: look at that Poe thing: it's a fair sample: it was a cowardly attack: it was dirty, indeed: but that's the man—the certain size, style, shape of the man: a false note in it all—though true for Stoddard I suppose: more a picture of Dick himself than of poor Poe: an awful self-exposure, too: worthy of Billy Winter in his palmiest days: which is about as low as you can get." After continued general talk of Poe, W. said: "I have seen Poe—met him: he impressed me very favorably: was dark, quiet, handsome—Southern from top to toe: languid, tired out, it is true, but altogether ingratiating." Was that in New York? "Oh yes: there: we had only a brief visit: he was frankly conciliatory: I left him with no doubts left, if I ever had any." Poe was "curiously a victim of history—like Paine." "The disposition to parade, to magnify, his defects has grown into a habit: every literary, every moralistic, jackanapes who comes along has to give him an additional kick. His weaknesses were obvious enough to anybody: but what do they amount to after all? Paine is defamed in the same way: poor Paine: rich Paine: they spare him nothing."

     I said: "You should write about Paine." He nodded. "So I should: I don't think there's anybody living—anybody at all—(I don't think there ever was anybody, living or dead)—more able than I am to depict, to picture, Paine, in the right way. I have told you of my old friend Colonel Fellows: he was an uncommon man both in what he looked like and in what he was: nobly formed, with thick white hair—white as milk: beard: striking characteristics everyhow."

     W. asked: "Does this interest you?" I said: "You bet: don't stop." He proceeded: "We had many talks together in the back room of the City Hall. The instant he saw I was interested in Paine he became communicative—frankly unbosomed himself. His Paine story amounted to a resurrection of Paine out of the horrible calumnies, infamies, under which orthodox hatred had buried him. Paine was old, alone, poor: it's that, it's what accrues from that, that his slanderers have made the most of: anything lower, meaner, more contemptible, I cannot imagine: to take an aged man—a man tired to

     I gave W. Rice's letter. He said: "I have been thinking over it today: I am seriously minded to attempt something." I chuckled a trifle over this. He caught my idea. "After all it's in your line," I said. He showed no fight today. Only said: "Yes: after." I said: "I'm curious to see what you will say about the bad influence of English ideals on American life." W. said: "I am curious myself to see what I will say: I don't know myself: haven't the least idea." The "two thousand words, however," he said, "don't either inspire me or scare me"—laughing—"I will say my say irrespective of limits big or little: but I am not all agreed upon it yet: we shall see."

     I picked up a pen card from the floor. There were still four mammoth falcons in it. W. said: "That's a present from Jim Redpath: I have made good use of it." And he added: "I find I get to like the vast pens: they give me something to take real hold of: they encourage me to write spacious things." He laughed. "There's a spiritual side of the simplest physical phenomena: not only a spiritual side: more than that: a spiritual outcome."

     Walsh, in Notes of a Philistine, classes W. W. with "famous past

     Met Adler in Philadelphia after yesterday's session in the Ethical Convention. He sent W. a bunch of flowers. W. undid the box, held the flowers up in his fist, shoved his nose into them, and said delightedly: "They're beautiful: they bring me a whole garden right into this room: beautiful." Handing them to Ed: "Take them down to Mary: tell her to put them in a pitcher: I will let her have them the rest of the evening: they'll be mine tomorrow: I'll have them here tomorrow." After Ed had gone: "Tell the Professor they are a joy to me: give him my love: tell him I will have them here with me for days—tomorrow, next day, next, next"—then in a lower key: "Tell him, too, that I am still in my room: still cribbed here: still as I have been now for months, months: not absolutely laid up: yet almost: never in any way free any more: only tantalized with memories of liberty." Then asked me: "You Ethicals are having a convention? What is it about?" I cited something Adler said yesterday in a speech about the soundness of the body. W. said: "That sounds good: how far do you suppose he means that? Is he with us? or does he only go part way? I find that there are very few who are out and out: very few: they talk what looks like sense but don't back it up." W.'s talk very clear. Deliberate. He never seems mixed. Steadies himself in his own effective style. No matter how sick he gets, he holds on to himself. Bucke wrote me this a few days ago:

London, Ontario, January 16, 1889.

My dear Horace:

     I have yours of the 14th this morning. All quiet. Meter jogging along towards a state of readiness. We shall certainly be ready to go east 4 Feb. unless our N. Y. lawyer delays us, and we don't think he will. It is wonderful how W. keeps on week after week and month after month. But, my dear fellow, the end has got to come—we must keep that steadily before us else we shall be knocked useless when it does come. I look for a sudden breakdown some day when least expected. Of course you will repeat this to no one. We

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must make up our minds to lose W. What I pray for is that his mind may remain clear as at present to the end. If this be granted us we may bear what comes as we can. But it seems as if I could not bear it if his mind failed. It is too terrible to think about. It is wonderful how clear and serene his mental vision is at present. All well here.

Affectionately,

R. M. Bucke.

     W. said coincidently tonight: "I am always confident that whatever happens to me nothing will happen to my head: that my head will stand by me to the last." It seemed almost uncanny. I had Bucke's letter in my pocket. "How do you come to that conclusion?" I asked. He answered: "I don't know how: I'm there: that's all I know: but the conviction is firm within me: gives me a certain measure of comfort: I'll die head up: I say that to myself many times every day: I never question the idea: it's fixed: it fortifies me."

     W. said: "See what I've found for you." He reached out a roll of paper. "It's a Rossetti letter: my letter to Rossetti: very old: 1867: you have all those other Rossetti documents: I want you to have this: stick it in your pocket; take it along." And he added: "Read it at your leisure: if there's anything to ask about bring it up tomorrow: I'm a bit tired now." After a pause: "You can never make too much of Rossetti: of the fellows over there in England: when the time comes for it don't be afraid to put the paint on."

     In Philadelphia. Met a Johns Hopkins student. I didn't get his name. He said: "I hear that you know Walt Whitman. I should like to talk with you about him. Some of the fellows over there have long wanted to see him—wanted him to come down and lecture, or something of that sort"—adding as he left me: "We'll see each other again: then we can talk about it; you might tentatively submit it to Whitman."

     W. said to me tonight: "Always tell me the bad things people say of me." I asked: "Why?" He laughed. "If you do not someone will. It's astonishing how much more anxious most people are that I should hear the bad than that I should hear the good things." "What induced you to say that, Walt?" "I got two anonymous letters in my mail today." "Where are they now?" He smiled. Pointed to the stove. "Gone up in smoke."

Saturday, January 26, 1889

     7.30 P.M. W. reading Harper's! "Rather—looking at the pictures," he said. Said he had spent one of his "usual days." Very cheerful. Talked freely. "I've been speechifying nearly all day to anybody who would listen to me." Adler's flowers on the table. "And more than Adler's too: somebody else sent me in an addition." Then: "My room is like out-of-doors today: these flowers civilize it: almost make me content to stay here." Asked his usual questions: "How is the weather? tell me. Is it foggy? can you see the stars? what does it look like on the river? They say the fog of the other day was for two or three hours the thickest ever known: they had it in New York harbor, too: I know what fogs are there: mariners dread fogs: nothing else so gets their nerve, as we say: they have superstitions about fogs, too." W. suddenly asked: "What about that letter of mine to Rossetti? Did you read it?" "Rather." "Have you got it with you?" "Yes." "Read it to me before you take it away for good." Funny notion he has of having me do this with letters. He does everything equably, cautiously, as well as with decision. I read. W. had marginaled the letter: "Went in steamer Dec. 4—ought to arrive Dec. 16 or 17." "to Mr. Rossetti—sent Dec. 3 1867 (Dec. 7 from N.Y.)"

December 3, 1867.

My dear Mr. Rossetti.

     I have just received and have considered your letter of Nov. 17.

     In order that there be the frankest understanding with respect to my position, I hasten to write you that the authorization, in my letter of Nov. 1st to Mr. Conway for you to make verbal alterations, substitute words, &c. was meant to be construed as an answer to the case presented in Mr. Conway's letter of Oct. 12. Mr. Conway stated the case of a volume of selections, in which it had been decided that the poems reprinted in London should appear verbatim, and asking my authority to change certain words in the Preface to first edition of poems, &c.

     I will be candid with you, and say I had not the slightest idea of applying my authorization to a reprint of the full volume of my poems. As such a volume was not proposed, and as your courteous

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and honorable course and attitude called and call for no niggardly or hesitating response from me, I penned that authorization and did not feel to set limits to it. But abstractly, and standing alone, and not read in connection with Mr. C.'s letter of Oct. 12 I see now it is far too loose and needs distinct guarding. I cannot and will not consent of my own volition to countenance an expurgated edition of my pieces. I have steadily refused to do so here in my own country, even under seductive offers; and must not do so in another country.

     I feel it due to myself to write you explicitly thus, my dear Mr. Rossetti, though it may seem harsh and perhaps ungenerous. Yet I rely upon you to absolve me sooner or later. Could you see Mr. Conway's letter Oct. 12 you would I think more fully comprehend the integrity of my explanation.

     I have to add that the points made in that letter in relation to the proposed reprint, as originally designed, exactly correspond with those on the same subject in your own late letter—that the kind and appreciative tone of both letters is in the highest degree gratifying and is most cordially and affectionately responded to by me; and that the fault of sending the loose authorization has surely been to a large degree my own.

     And now, my friend, having set myself right on that matter I proceed to say on the other hand, for you and Mr. Hotten, that if, before the arrival of this letter, you have practically invested in, and accomplished or partially accomplished, any plan, even contrary to this letter, I do not expect you to abandon it at loss of outlay, but shall bona fide consider you blameless if [you] let it go on and be carried out as you may have arranged. It is the question of the authorization of an expurgated edition proceeding from me that deepest engages me. The facts of the different ways, one way or another way, in which the Book may appear in England out of influences not under the shelter of my umbrage are of much less importance to me.

     After making the foregoing explanation I shall, I think, accept kindly whatever happens. For I feel, indeed know, I am in the hands of a friend, that my pieces will receive that truest brightest of light and perception coming from love. In that, all other and lesser requisites become pale.

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     It would be better, in any introduction, to make no allusion to me as authorizing, or not prohibiting, &c.

     The whole affair is somewhat mixed, and I write offhand, to catch tomorrow's New York steamer,—but I guess you will pick out my meaning. Probably, indeed, Mr. Hotten has preferred to go on after the original plan, which, if so, saves all trouble.

     I have to add that I only wish you could know how deeply the beautiful tones and passages of your letter of Nov. 17, have penetrated and touched me. It is such things that go to our hearts and reward us and make up for all else for years. Permit me to offer you my friendship.

     I sent you hence Nov. 23d a letter, through Mr. Conway. Also a copy of Mr. Burroughs' Notes, Mr. O'Connor's pamphlet and some papers containing criticisms of Leaves of Grass. Also, later, a prose article of mine named Democracy, in a magazine.

     Let me know how the work goes on, what shape it takes, &c. Finally, I charge you to construe all I have written through my declared and fervid realization of your goodness toward me, nobleness of intention, and, I am prone to hope, personal, as, surely, literary and moral sympathy and attachment. And so, for the present,

Farewell

Walt Whitman.

     I met the Johns Hopkins man again today. We had a talk. He spoke of some W. W. dispute that had occurred in the University a few years ago: "a quarrel between some students and a professor." I asked W. if he knew of that incident? "Yes—in a dim way: yes: someone wrote me at the time saying I had become a bone of contention for some reason or other." They seemed to be still suggesting that W. should go to Baltimore and lecture. "I received an intimation: someone wanted me to come: I had to decline: it was a long trip: I was not in condition. But it did—it does—me good to hear the kind words: they are from the young men: the young: they are the future America." I quoted Adler. "We must not count: we must weigh." W. said: "That's so: when we do that, we have some reason to feel that we have moved on a bit: by that test Leaves of Grass gains a little in plausibility."

     W. said again: "You circulate among the boys and girls, the radicals, the adventurers, the all-alive people: you are next to, in, the deepest currents, the strong-flowing tides: you can sense the world: you know its surfaces, its underpinnings: you are abreast the newest life." He said youth was "prone to fly off the handle" but "just as likely to take, justify, the most preposterous, magnificent, chances." I asked W.: "You always seem to be equable. Don't you ever get mad?" This warmed him up. "Mad? I boil: burn up: but often I keep my mouth shut: I am a slow mover: I don't hurry even in my tantrums: my passions are all ready for action but—well, there are many buts." He referred to Lincoln's "Noble control" which was "induced greatly by the times—by his recognition of their gravity."

     Going to Lincoln got him also to Hay and Nicolay. "I never really knew Nicolay: I saw him: he was secretary there contemporaneously with Hay, but was more sedentary—an indoors man: less frank: more reticent. Hay I knew well: we met often: Hay at that time was younger I think than Nicolay: he was a very handsome fellow: good body, open face, easy manners. Hay was made a colonel at a time Lincoln wished him to make advance negotiations South—needed to invest him with a show of authority, with credentials. Hay married a millionairess: a girl whose father was worth several

     W. has a peculiar way of sitting with his glasses stuck on the thumb of his left hand while he uses his right hand for playing with his paper knife, resting both elbows on the arms of his big chair as he does so and talking straight on in the best of humors. This he did all this evening. In other moods, when not feeling well, when depressed, he never drops into this playful physical demonstration but is curiously impassive.

     Had he written the N. A. Review piece yet? "Not a word: I don't know what to write—how to start." Did he read much current or any fiction anyhow? I knew he did not. Scarcely any of it outside of Scott and Cooper and George Sand (and then only her Consuelo): none at all, in fact. "No—not much: but I get a look in on it now and then, here, there: a taste of it in the magazines: sometimes even a whole book. I can say this: that I am not worried by tendencies: I accept the situation: let all the forces have their way: all of them: in art, science, writing: the eyes that look back as well as the eyes that look ahead: Presbyterians, Mormons, Anarchists: the point with us in this country is the removal of impedimenta, the throwing

     I said to W.: "I've got a long letter from Bucke about the meter. Shall I read it to you?" W. said at once: "For God's sake, spare me! That infernal damned meter's getting on my nerves. It'll never mean a damned thing to Doctor but trouble: it'll never come to anything." [1913. It never did.] I asked: "How can you know?" He laughed. Tapped his nose and his instep with his paper knife. "My head and my heels tell me so." In an envelope which he had endorsed "printer's proofs short poems Walt Whitman 1888 (autographic)" he had laid aside for me a printed sheet containing Old Age's Lambent Peaks, A Carol Closing Sixty-nine, To Get the Final Lilt of Songs—the Curtz slips. Gave me a letter he endorsed with red ink: "from Miss A. T. Smith Washington intr. by John Swinton Sept: 77." Said: "You can throw the stuff away if it's a nuisance." Laughed. Knew I wouldn't. Had cut a picture of Madame Récamier from a paper: called my attention to it with some remark about her beauty. "I have also sent some scraps and portraits to Sarrazin." "Very few visitors for a week," he said. I was to hear Thomas Davidson recite Scotch poems tonight at the Ethical Society. W. asked me to tell him about Davidson. "I seem to know of him vaguely: we have never met." Then: "I like the idea of his Scotch ancestry: it is good stock: none better anywhere." Also: "Well—listen for me as well as yourself." After a pause: "See how you are getting to be my representative as well as your own: how you go about these days with doubled responsibilities. Don't be discouraged: don't resent it: you'll come to your reward some day: in the future, far in the future, after I am gone, will come to your doubled reward."

Sunday, January 27, 1889

     This talk led on to talk of drink in general. W. said: "I have no doubt Bucke is right in his theory against drink: it justifies itself, in fact: but in certain cases of fevers—in some critical cases—a resort to stimulants, to almost anything, is not only advisable but necessary: I have seen many, many such cases in the hospitals in Washington: my punches alone sustained many who otherwise seemed doomed: nothing else was possible: they would go a week without food, perhaps: the patient could not, would not, eat: what else could be done?" Was abstinence advisable? "Never start, I say," said W. "It's nonsense to say it's necessary: it's not vital: it's a habit: like using tobacco, which is filthy enough. I am living now without any spur in food or drink: not venturing off my very conservative plane." W. said finally: "We're a sober tribe: not one of us was ever seen drunk: that seems like a fearful reputation which we'll find it hard to live down." Laughing over his little joke. W. gave me a Burroughs letter, which he asked me to read aloud to him, and then said I might take away with me.

Sunday, Nov. 18, 1883.

Dear Walt:

     Dr. Bucke says you talk of going home with him: if you do be sure you stop and see me on the way. We have a girl now and are well fixed for the winter. Why not come on and stay here till Dr. Bucke is ready to go back?

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     I was in New York a couple of weeks ago and saw Arnold at Gilder's house—liked him better than I expected, looks coarse and strong and healthy, has a sort of husky voice like a sea captain, looked as if he came from a bigger stronger race than the other persons in the room, no pride, or "manners," or "culture" visible in him. I found he knew of me and was very cordial in meeting me. Liked him much better than the other Englishmen I have seen. Wish you could see him and have a good setdown talk with him. I think he is honest and sincere and not too sure about things in this country. The idea of his lecture on numbers, namely, that the majority is unsound, is to be taken with many qualifications and I wish some one would answer it in a mild friendly way. From some points of view the majority may appear in the wrong, but from other very important ones they are in the right, especially modern majorities. The mass of men are no longer capable of being gulled and duped and victimized as they were once. A shrewd common sense that extends to big things as well as to little is characteristic of the people in this age. If the masses were essentially unsound the prophet and the wise man would have only a barren soil to work on. I wish you would feel moved to write a short essay in The Critic on the subject. I enjoyed much your paper in this week's number. I think that both Arnold and Carlyle detach and see out of its due relations this idea of the unsoundness of the masses. I have written a short sketch as the result of my sea-shore sojourn for the Boston Wheelman—a new magazine of outdoor literature. I will send you the proof for suggestion and revision, especially the part that relates to you.

     Eldridge writes me that O'Connor is ill and at the Sulphur Springs of Va. What do you know about him? Eldridge thinks that my publishers are dealing honestly with me. I have asked to see their accounts, and they are willing, but probably I shall not go over these. When one of my books was published they sold the first six months 733 copies. When the next book came out they sold in the same time 733 copies. Of another volume they sold 131 copies in six months: the next six months they sold 131 copies of the vol. published next. These coincidences seem almost incredible. I called their attention to them, and they reply that they are merely coincidences. Osgood would gladly undertake my books; so would Dodd, Mead & Co., of N.Y.

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     Fine day here today, but have had a cold windy week. Out home in Roxbury I tramped over the mountains in blinding snow and cold. I hope you keep well. Send me the Scottish Review article if you have it and I will return it. With much love

John Burroughs.

     W. listened with great attention as I read. He was particularly interested in the passage concerning Arnold. "John will have it that I don't do Arnold justice; he thinks there's a place for Arnold—that I don't acknowledge it: that if we could in some way be brought together or if I could somehow read Arnold right, the impossible might be achieved. I'm afraid I'm hopelessly heretical: there seems to be a temperamental reason why I can't know Matthew, why he can't know me: I'm not disposed to exaggerate it: I don't force myself to or not to: it's simply there: I have to recognize it. Arnold is as inveterately one thing as I am another: we can't be remade: no doubt we both belong in the world: there's no use trying to make oil and water mix." And W. also said: "Arnold was weak on the democratic side: he had some intellectual perception of democracy but he didn't have the feel of the thing: all his antecedents, training, the schools he went to, were against it: he was first of all the superior, the leader, the teacher: he has a theory about the saving remnant: he is that salvation, that remnant. John describes Arnold in a way to make you wonder whether his life as he lived it was not inconsistent with his life as he wrote of it. The long and short of it is that Arnold happens to be one sort of a man while I am another sort of a man: that we are opposites (though John may deny it): that a reconciliation would be out of the question."

     Adler talks today on the teaching of morals to children. W. said: "It's a profound problem: teaching morals: they should be taught—yet also not taught: sometimes I say one shouldn't teach morals to anybody: when I see the harm that morals do I almost hate seeing people good: then there's another side to it: then I see how necessary it is that we should have a code, live with it, die for it."

     The floor stuff about W. was extra upset. "What have you been up to, Walt?" I asked. He said: "I've been looking for something—God knows what." I asked again: "Why do you say, God knows what? I guess you know what." He shook his head: "I mean that I was not looking for anything in particular: was looking for half a

     W. said: "I want to send a little keepsake to Adler: what shall it be?" I stood before him hat in hand. He commenced to poke about among the papers at his feet. Fished up Song of the Universal: newspaper clipping: yellow, old: 1874. "I was hoping I'd put my hand on something more significant. This—oh, this is only a small affair, I was invited by some of 'em up there to write a poem: was sick at the time—could not go: thought I would say something: now you see what the agitation came to. I sent it up: guess it amounted to nothing: guess they wondered what it was. At any rate it was read and paid for." W. addressed an envelope to Adler and enclosed the slip. "I don't want to send this: it's not what I was looking for: but it'll serve to show our feeling." Took the Curtz copy of To the Year 1889. "Take that too," he said. I asked: "The fierce poem?" he, laughing roundly: "Yes, that: the fierce poem: the haughty humble poem."

     Adler told me today that a sister of Emma Lazarus had offered to assist with the W. fund. I told W. of her offer without specifying the fund. He was touched. "Tell Adler that my love, affection, responds to his own: that I need no help, but, needing to be helped, would find it a joy to be helped by him." And again: "Tell him I meet him in the same spirit."

Monday, January 28, 1889

     7.50 P.M. W. reading. Cheerful. "I am still just as I was." Further: "That report may sound monotonous but I have about given up all notion of improving: it seems settled that I am to be as I am or worse." Spoke of Boulanger. "He went through: astonishing, wasn't it? It seems to have been a surprise to everybody. How do you account for it? I am puzzled: I notice all the aristocrats pulled together for him: but I suppose it is as you say: we must wait if we want to learn what it signifies: there is no other resource: we must give it time to settle down into a definition. What can be the elements in such a phenomenon heaven only knows: why such a cheap jack can be elevated into eminence, given political power, by the vote of the people—why the people do not see through him—beats hell. I may know some things but I do not know that: I give it up." W. said further: "I wonder when the people will get past the tomfoolery of having masters, rulers, bosses, guides, superiors? It's more than time: it makes me sick when I think of it: how they are outraged, robbed, tyrannized over, without suspecting it themselves, or, even if suspecting it, without knowing how to get rid of the slimy load."

     W. had a letter from Bucke. "It looks as if he might be here by the middle of the month: then anyhow, if not before: Doctor seems to be in an anxious frame of mind: why do you suppose that is? Is the Doctor beginning to be fussy? He seems lately to be lacking in patience: seems to be getting in the mood of the folks who feel that the world will go to smash if they are not on hand to take care of it. I had a friend in New York years ago, a member of a firm, a big firm, one of four, who got sick, had to take a furlough. He was one of the sort who think nothing can be done unless they are on the spot: that things would fall to pieces, go to pot, if they let go a single second. He stuck to his job as long as he could: at last he had to go anyhow: was away three or four weeks: came back: yes, came back, and found everything taken care of, the world jogging serenely on at the usual pace. He said to me: 'Walt, that taught me a lesson: I saw that I might miss the world if I lost it but that the world wouldn't miss me if it lost me.'" I said: "But Bucke: you don't set him down at that sort of a fellow, do you?" "Not exactly: not

     W. had a letter from Carpenter today. Gave me proof sheets of C.'s review of N. Boughs for Scottish Art Review to read. I asked: "Is it good?" He replied: "Oh, well—read it: take it home, read it—then you tell me." I picked up a John Russell Young letter. W. described Young as "lymphatic—of course not thin: rather stout, brisk, compact—it might be said, a strong man." W. said further of Young: "I knew him pretty well: did you never meet him? He came often to see me in Washington: not during the War: after: I can fix the date: he was not a youth then: must now be a man pretty well along." "Was he friendly to Leaves of Grass?" "Yes, I think heartily: he seemed to find a good deal in it—seemed to gather something from it, but in his own way, probably not enthusiastically. Young was of the Gosse type—is still, I suppose: combed, cleaned, polished, brushed, exact." Did W. mean that Young lacked in finish, finesse? "Hardly: I had reference to the outer man—the social man. Gosse is eminently scholar—all scholar: the university man: all refined, bookish, made up. Young was not so developed: not in that direction: had more native grit."

     Saw Oldach. Took him some sheets. Promises books next week. Also saw McKay. Oldach said: "I'm getting quite a liking for your old man." W. laughed: "Tell Oldach I'm getting quite a liking for him, too." Last night Mann again spoke to me of the Johns Hopkins students who are interested in W. One of them "clean gone" on W. Talk of literary criticism, student life, &c. W. asked: "Did I ever tell you?—oh yes! I must have told you—the story of the Georgetown student? No? It was always curious, always illustrative: O'Connor always greatly enjoyed it: told it with great unction—great éclat ." "What is your story, Walt?" "I'll tell you. There was a young boy, seventeen or eighteen, who went over to the Georgetown University—studied there: the University is Catholic—is run by priests, men of learning, of great learning, oh! very great: by men who esteem themselves great punkins. The boy attended a class in English literature—a class of a hundred and fifty, perhaps two hundred—with a very wise professor. The professor was one day lecturing on the

     W. repeated this with great vehemence. "There was a rule in the class, a recognized procedure, that students might ask questions, even express doubts: a sort of talking back process. The boy heard what was said of Walt Whitman: sort of lifted his head in protest as it was uttered: whereat the professor went at him without gloves. 'Well, my young smithkin, you don't believe that? you dissent from that?' 'Yes, I do.' 'Ah! and why and how and what do you know about it anyhow.' The young man stoutly persisted: the professor was up in arms: the scholar all on qui vive . 'If you doubt why do you doubt? Give us examples: show us line for line what you mean.' The boy was not abashed: said he did not know that he could give the lines: but he had pretty clear and emphatic impressions that they existed: but the professor could not yield: he must have, say, at least a few examples, one example. Driven that way the boy gave an instance"—here W. stopped, trying to think of the words—"ah! this: 'the crunching cow, with head depressed'"—then seemed in doubt—"something of that sort, anyhow: at any rate the line answered the requisites: then there came others: another, another: the boy ready every time: the professor confused." W. concluded: "In the end it was the complete knock-down of the Englishman—the professor: the triumph of the boy. I am told the class greatly enjoyed it: I had the story from a woman who got it from a student who was present but did not share in the discussion."

     W. said: "The great function of the critic is to say bright things—sparkle, effervesce: probably three-quarters, perhaps even more, of them do not take the trouble to examine what they start out to criticize—to judge a man from his own standpoint, to even find out what that standpoint is. I sometimes ask myself: 'Am I not too one of the worst of those offenders? have not I too said this, that, where silence would have been better, honester?' I have asked myself in the face of criticism of my own work: 'Should I reply—should I expose, denounce, explain?' But my final conviction has always been that there is no better reply than silence. Besides, I am conscious that I have peculiarly laid myself open to ridicule—to the shafts of critics,

     W. handed me a stained letter which he wished me to read back to him. Up in the corner of the note he had written in red ink: "No hurry about sending them to Dr. Bucke—your postal of Oct. 5 rec'd." I asked: "Who was that memorandum for?" He said: "Probably William: I have passed many of my letters around, as you know—from one to the other: sometimes starting with Bucke, sometimes with William: now and then with Kennedy." I read.

Oakenholt Hall
near Flint, North Wales, Eng.
Nov. 19, 1880.

Dear Walt Whitman:

     I had a nice letter the other day from Mr. Ruskin and among other things he says he is very much absorbed in your volumes just now, and is receiving good inspiring thoughts from them. You will I am sure be glad to hear this—that the "smut-charged muzzle" is doing such good work with such a good and pure man, the most Christlike in his daily life—not to speak of his thought (printed)—of his age. In minor matters he says good things of the binding, pronouncing it "most satisfactory."

     A very pleasing thing happened to me the other week. A workingman—a jointer—to whom I had lent your books, called upon me and thanked me, as I have never been thanked before, for the loan. "I never read such wonderful live words. I am regularly possessed with them. While I am working in my shop the very wood seems written all over with them. How he knows the life of us working men! And what a love for us!" These were as nearly as I remember his words: and on my promising to tell you of them, he was very

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pleased, and added that he only hoped you would not think it presuming. I told him no, that these were the things that best repaid you—if such a thought ever indeed occurs to you.

     Your friends here are all talking about Stedman's generous words about you in Scribner's. Will you let me tell you that I think he hits you well and directly in that passage about the Underside of Nature? It is the first time in literature that such a view has been made a concrete thought, and at present the general verdict is that it is just. Will it be out of order if I ask what you think of it?—for myself alone and not with any ulterior designs of printing what you say.

     I have been wondering how your health is progressing. I heartily hope your stay with Doctor Bucke in London has been a thoroughly good time for you. He seems to be very genuine.

     I send you my last essay—on Ouida. Have you read her Tricotrin? It is a grand book.

     With love to yourself and hoping for a line or two ere long I remain

Yours affectionately

Herbert J. Bathgate.

     W.'s running comments as I read were shrewd. "I get many asides from Ruskin but nothing direct." "No doubt he's a good and pure man, but why make so much of it? I'm afraid of too much goodness, too much purity: ain't you?" "Yes: I hope they're live words: if anybody knows it the workingman should: live words: the workingman is the average man: if Leaves of Grass is not for the average man it is for nobody: not the average bad man or average good man: no: the average bad good man: if I have failed to make that clear then I've missed my mission for certain." "So he thought he might be 'presuming.' How English that is! As if his idea passed to me by another might be resented by me! Don't you suppose that may illustrate one of the distinctions between the English and American psychology?" "Stedman is fine: I say so too: but why say 'generous'? If what he said is true then it is not generous: if it is only generous and not true, then what do we want with it?" "Bathgate writes genuinely, considerately: he has no affectations: I answer him in his own spirit."

     As I left, W. said: "I'm doing all I can from day to day to put you

Tuesday, January 29, 1889

     7.30 P.M. W. reading the paper. Was cheerful. Ready to talk. "The good spell," he said, "still persists." A little indigestion. Some coughing from a slight cold. As usual first asked me about myself. Then: I had a letter today from Bucke—Doctor: we may look for him to be here about the close of next week, though he does not fix a definite date. He writes that they had a fire in one of the cottages the day before yesterday—perhaps the day before that: no one was hurt: they have a number of cottages there: you know, that is Doctor's favorite method of treating some of the lunatics: sort of domesticating them: trying out his peculiar theories of freedom: Doctor believes in liberty even for the insane."

     Laid his hand on a pile of letters on the table. "I have had more letters: one from Nellie O'Connor: she does not write very hopeful news: William is still mainly as he was: she says towards the close of her letter that he is up—is reading—but that he is silent, very silent, saying little: says nothing of any account: which she regards as a bad sign—very bad. Nellie says also that for the first time William is himself despondent—thinks the outlook a poor, a hopeless, one indeed." W. was quite silent for a few minutes. Then he started again without any prompting from me. "I have no reason myself for feeling hopeful: he is no doubt near the jumping-off place: the prospect is gloomy for him, for us—more for us than for him." He thought the O'Connor of old "had a wonderfully evolved body." "He was not as tall as I am: was short, perhaps even chunky: there seemed to be nothing the matter with him—not the least: too little, in fact. I am a little sorry for Nellie: she is physically of the delicate intellectual type: William is heavy—now helpless: she must have a hard time of it: but she is true blue—has a heroic temperament, grit: will not yield, is full of fight." After all it looks as if Walt and O'C. were nipping and tucking it towards the grave. I asked about O'C.'s eyes. Were they still bothering him? "Oh! I had forgotten all about that: till just this minute it had not struck me that Nellie said nothing in her letter with regard to it: that may be a good sign. He

     W. wrote to O'Connor today. "Just a short message." Also: "I have written quite a long message to Maurice, besides sending him some papers." Just here Ed came in. W. handed him a letter, a postal and a bundle of papers. After he had gone W. said: "Ed does everything nicely: he is very faithful—is always about: in fact, too much about: stays too much at home. I often tell him he should go off and take long walks: in the streets: see the people: off into the country: long, long walks, hours at a time." After a pause: "He is a splendid lad—that Ed boy: I'm afraid he feels isolated here: I wonder sometimes if he's not a bit unhappy: we all love him: I'm glad knowing too that you and Ed get on so famously together."

     W. talked of his Washington life. "William was truly a temperance man: in the real sense so: he used to enjoy wine—an occasional glass, as I do, but no more." Did O'C. smoke? "No: nor do I—nor did I ever: and John the same: we were a no-smoking crowd." I said: "You don't object when the smokers who come here commiserate with you over what you have lost by not smoking. You keep still. You don't have any regrets in the matter, do you?" "Not one regret: only satisfaction: sometime there will be a change: now most men smoke—then most men will not smoke: the tobacco habit may have its joys but it also has other integers that are neither glad nor beautiful: it's one of the avenues through which people today get rid of some of their nerve surplus: it goes with things as they are: but it is so filthy a practice taken for all in all that I can't see but people must inevitably grow away from it."

     W. went on talking about Burroughs. "In those early Washington days John had such a poor squeamish stomach, he had to be physically on his guard all the time. He is hearty now compared with what he was twenty or thirty years ago: he was then a poor stick: no belly—sort of gutless: why, my God, Horace, he seemed to have no grit at all." W. first met B. in the early years of the War in Washington. Was B. then already a Whitmanite? "I think he had read Leaves of Grass: it had been out some years then: yes, I guess he must have been friendly at the start." Stopped talking. Closed his eyes. Seemed to be trying to recall something. "I cannot fix the details all

     I said to W.: "Bucke says he doubts if Kennedy wrote that Critic piece. He says Kennedy 'would have done better.'" W. said: "I am not prepared to say Maurice is wrong, but if he thinks the piece was badly written I do not agree with him." Then he added: "Doctor is not a stylist: he is more noteworthy for his vigor, his insight, his pure and simple intellect, than for any special esthetic sensitiveness: indeed, I feel that he is quite decisively lacking in that direction." W. reached forward and picked up what proved to be two Rhys letters without envelopes pinned together. "Take them," he said, shoving them to me: "They may have some biographical value: do what you think best with them." "Which means—what?" I asked. "Which means that if you consider them at all significant, file them away: that if they seem to you to be useless put them in the fire." I started to read them to myself. W. broke in. "Let me hear them, too: you might just as well."

St. Botolph Club,
Boston, Mar. 7, 1888.

Dear Walt Whitman:

     I believe you told me sometime ago that you had a friend at Los Angeles, Cal. If you have, I wish you would give me a line of introduction to him for my brother Bertie (Albert) who has just left hospital after a month's illness with typhoid fever, and who at such a distance from home and friends feels (I'm afraid) homesick and possibly despondent. If I had known earlier I would have gone on to Los Angeles myself, to nurse the lad; but this seems unnecessary now that he is able to get about again. You will easily understand, however, that I feel pretty anxious, and if you can let me have a line as I suggest, it will be a great help.

     Down here I've been talking again about the New Poetry—on Monday in Boston, and last night before the Harvard students who

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gave me a very hearty reception—the best I've had so far. I find there is quite an earnest feeling for Leaves of Grass among a great many of them. You have no doubt got their invitation to lecture by this time—which I told you sometime ago they were preparing to send.

     Next week (as you will see by my enclosed circular) I am to speak in Chickering Hall on Literary London—rather a rash adventure, I'm afraid.

     Has Dr. Bucke returned yet? I must write and ask him whether he can arrange a talk at London, Ontario, or not.

     With remembrances to Mrs. Davis. Yours affectionately

Ernest Rhys.

     "No," said W., "Harvard never wanted me: that was one of Rhys' little illusions: I am not quite the sort: I need toning down or up or something to get me in presentable form for the ceremonials of seats of learning. You must understand that I never blame anybody or any organization or any university for discovering my cloven hoof. I am like the diplomatists who are non grata : I can't be tolerated by the kings, lords, lackeys, of culture: in the verbal courts of the mighty. I am mostly outlawed—and no wonder." W. thought Rhys "a precisionist." "He writes a forceful more or less inductile letter: is up to his ears in things—literary things (most of it, I'm afraid, ephemera of the usual character)—but underneath all of that to which I object in Rhys is a man whose qualities I respect." He added: "You will of course take these documents: use them if you think to: exclude them if they are worthless." He also said: "When a man goes on that way about Wagner I am again consumed with regret for knowing I have never had a chance to hear the wonderful operas. I say 'wonderful' because I feel that they are constructed on my lines—attach themselves to the same theories of art that have been responsible for Leaves of Grass."

     Asked me if I had a copy of the Ethical Record containing the Adler article in which he is quoted. Looked it over (I pointing it out)

Wednesday, January 30, 1889

     7.45 P.M. Harned there. He and W. animately talking. W. said to me instantly as we shook hands: "Ah! you came in to verify the saying about a man whose name we dare not mention: we have just been talking about you and you step in on us." Harned said: "Walt, you're not exactly a jolly joker but you're not as solemn as your critics say you are." W.: "Do you say that, Tom? Why, I pride myself on being a real humorist underneath everything else. There are some people who look upon Leaves of Grass as a funny book: my brother George has often asked me with a wink in his eye: 'I say, Walt, what's the game you're up to, anyway?' So I may go down into history, if I go at all, as a merrymaker wearing the cap and bells rather than as a prophet or what the Germans call a philosoph." He seemed to get a lot of comfort out of this sally. Harned said: "I didn't know you could do that trick so well, Walt: after all you may end up as a comedian." "I might easily end up worse," said W. Then he added: "I have heard from Bucke again: he says that he has a Whitman lecture for anyone here who wants it: that he considers it very good—thought he ought to be the last man to say so." W. then turned to Harned and asked: "I wonder who'll want it? Perhaps nobody"—ending in a laugh. W. gave me two Bucke letters of 25th and 26th, saying: "Take them both: then you'll be sure you have it." Bucke's sentence was: "If those friends of yours down there want a lecture on W.W. from me I trust to be prepared to give them a good one 'though I say it as shouldn't.'" In the letter of the 26th Bucke said:

     "I am glad that the binding is settled, and I think from your description that it will do very well, though nothing to become especially

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enthusiastic about. I shall be glad to see it. Will not the price of binding cut into the price of the book a good deal? One dollar twenty-four is a big slice off six dollars. The price of the book should have been more than six dollars. I would not have put it a cent below ten dollars if I had had my way. I predict that a copy of that book will be worth fifty dollars in ten years and one hundred dollars in twenty-five years. But I suppose you will say 'we are living in '89 not '99 or '14.'

     "So Rice wants you to write for his review. I wouldn't mind if he would print some pieces written by your friends and leave out such miserable trash as that written by Kennedy a few years ago. Do remember when Pearsall Smith brought it home and read extracts from it at the tea table?"

     I read this passage aloud as I sat there. W. and Harned both broke in on my reading vigorously. W. said: "No doubt everything would have been different, Maurice, if you had had your way: but thank God you didn't have your way. We're not making this book for faddists, collectors, curio hunters: no: we're making it for people, readers: nor are we making it for nineteen hundred and twenty-five: nineteen hundred and twenty-five will take care of itself: we're making it for eighteen eighty-nine: that's as far as we've got—maybe as far as we'll ever get." W. said again: "Yes: I remember that day at Pearsall's: they were the days when Pearsall had other notions about me: Pearsall has been gradually receding ever since then." Harned said: "Walt: ain't Bucke a trifle extreme?" W. said at once: "No doubt: so was everybody I ever liked: why, you're extreme yourself, Tom—and sometimes more than a trifle." W. shook his hand over towards me. "And as for Horace: well, he's the extreme of extremes: he's the craziest of the whole lot of us." Harned said: "If I'm extreme, Walt, I never saw it." W. replied: "No doubt: no man ever does discover it in himself." W. asked me: "Have you got the Scottish Art Review along?" We both got copies last night. "I should have sent it to Doctor." He asked me how it hit me. I said: "Not at all." He nodded approval. "So say I: it is not profound: has not depth: never mind, it'll do." Dr. Furness (William Henry) spoke at Unity Church Sunday. W. said: "The brave good old man: he still holds out to burn."

     W. showed Harned the model of the big book. T. had asked for a set of sheets to bind in his own way. Turning this book over in his hands he said: "I don't think I could do better than that." W. broke in: "I doubt if you'd do as well: that is a handsome book: it was a discovery"—adding: "I mean to give you one to take home with you when they are finished." Was suspicious of a couple things in the cover that looked like "finesse," but still he said: "Let it go: on the whole it's about right." Asked Harned about the baby. "I am quite curious about it: you should have it photographed: it's a good-luck baby: with you and its mother and then with Herbert Spencer to boot: if he does not come to a good end it'll not be because he didn't have a good start." "When I get out again my first visit will be to that baby."

     Inscribed for me the copy of Specimen Days which he gave me in the summer and was too sick to write in. Showed him Scribner's containing Professor Woodruff's article on Walter Scott at Work. Commented on frontispiece W. S. "It's very good but I have a better." Then after a pause: "Probably I say that because I have become accustomed to mine." Looking further and minutely: "This is fine, though, I admit: beautifully conceived: engraved: printed. The truth is, it takes many whacks at a fellow to get him all: each portrait contributes to the result." As to the article he said: "I am sure it will interest me: I know it: and tomorrow—no, next day—I shall have something here for you that will interest you." I don't know what he means.

     W. needs a mammoth pen holder. He showed me the big pen squeezed into a little holder. "Get me a holder: I've lost mine in the mess here: I like the mammoth pens: they are easy to write with." He acknowledged that "it makes a great difference what sort of a pen" he has. "I am sensitive—I especially hate the little bits of pens—the dwarf ladylike pens: I don't seem to be able to do anything fullsized with them: they interfere with my ideas—break my spirit." Harned said he wrote with a stub. W. said no. "I don't seem to take to the stub: I like my vast pen with its sharp point better: you see I'm like everybody a creature of prejudice."

     I picked up his yellowed copy of Richard II from under my feet. Handed it to him. He looked at it. "That's the copy I used to take to the play with me—in my pocket: carried along in my walks: kept

     Then Shakespeare was to palm the plays off as his own? Was that the idea? "In the rough—yes: and I know how that would be described by the orthodox: how it was that Shakespeare was a plagiarist, a thief—all that: but I should hesitate to pronounce judgment so cavalierly. Shakespeare took it all as grist to his mill: accepted all: kept his counsel—and his contract." He did not think Shakespeare was the chucklehead O'Connor had called him? "Oh no, no: I never believed that: besides that's not O'Connor's to start with: he repeated it jocularly: it didn't originate with him. It was Delia Bacon who was most severe on that point: handed out the most contemptuous terms: rarely referred to Shakespeare except lightly: called him 'the butcher of Stratford': always applied phrases of that character to him."

     W.'s own skepticism had "preceded Donnelly's book"—even preceded his O'Connor experiences—"though William is easily the greatest, while the most vehement, of living men, of any who have lived I may say—certainly of any Baconian we know of." But as to Shakespeare: "Instead of being a chucklehead I should say he was one of the sweetest, wisest men who ever lived. Hume says of Queen Elizabeth that she is charged with being a trivial creature, though surrounded with wisest counsellors, but he insists that it must have been greatness of a sort which summoned such counsellors—which recognized, made use of, accepted such personalities as the aids and abettors of her policies." So with Shakespeare. "He was no fool, no butcher: his, too, was no contemptible greatness: he chose well: he was circumspect: he knew what he was about." W. said he had no idea that the Plays all came from the same source: "There are evidences that various influences were at work there: a group, a cluster of the Plays seem to show signs of the same craftsmanship." But "it's not necessary to infer that all the Plays came from the same hand."

     Harned said: "The Plays are so great won't they stand alone for all time?" W. objected: "I know that is the orthodox view but I don't accept it. Wilson Barrett here—here in this house—has said the same thing: has said an actor dares not question it: but I question it: question it fundamentally. It has come to be with Shakespeare as with the Bible: we are born to it: we have sucked it in with our mother's milk: the schools, colleges, writers, drive it at you: one can't get away from it: the man who denies the claim is queered." W. threw himself forward in his chair, pointed upward as if to the heavens, and said with intense earnestness: "It is wrong! wrong! wrong! It is as if we should fix our eyes on one of the stars there: should say: Let that be the only star: let that stand alone in glory, purpose, sacredness: let all the rest be wiped out: let that alone be declared legitimate: let that alone be our guide. Yet there are millions of other stars in the heavens: millions: some as great, some greater: perhaps some we do not see surpassing the best we see: so there are writers—countless writers: some swept away, lost forever: some neglected: some yet to be recognized for what they are."

     Harned said: "Walt, you're hitting a lot of nails on the head today: you almost weaken my faith in Shakespeare." W. said: "Shakespeare stood for the glory of feudalism: Shakespeare, whoever he was, whoever they were: he had his place: I have never doubted his vastness, space: in fact, Homer and Shakespeare are good enough for me—if I can by saying that be understood as not closing out any others. Look at Emerson: he was not only possibly the greatest of our land, our time, but great with the greatness of any land, any time, all worlds: so I could name galaxy after galaxy." Harned asked: "You have decided feelings about the defects of Shakespeare?" "Yes: it is not well for us to forget what Shakespeare stands for: we are overawed, overfed: it may seem extreme, ungracious, to say so, but Shakespeare appears to me to do much towards effeminacy: towards taking the fiber, the blood, out of our civilization: his gospel was of the medieval—the gospel of the grand, the luxurious: great lords, ladies: plate, hangings, glitter, ostentation, hypocritical chivalry,

Thursday, January 31, 1889

     7.20 P.M. W. reading the Press. Greeted me heartily. Laid paper down. No visitors today. "I've discouraged the visitors so they don't come now: except the far-off ones: they don't know." Feeling "serenely composed," he said. "I can call this one of my most peaceful days—one of the very best: I have indeed been in luck so far this year—especially the last three or four weeks: yet there seems to have been no access of strength. Sometimes the long confinement involves me in a restlessness that is absolutely painful: still I must laugh that down: I ought to thank God it's no worse, as well it might be." He again said: "You must be sick having me talk sickness every day: yet you must also know I hate myself for doing so." I said: "Carlyle said in substance that though Schiller was always a sick man he was never a sick writer." W. nodded: "That's beautiful, whether Carlyle's or yours—though I suspect it's yours." "Didn't someone in the Chinese say the man's belly was the man?" W. laughed: "I don't know who said it: anyway, it's mostly true: there's some sort of intimate association between a man's belly and his soul that no amount of spirituality can get rid of."

     W. very wide awake. Talked with real swing: with great comfort of manner. "I wrote a postal to O'Connor today: just sent it off with Ed: there was nothing on it: there was nothing to say, in fact: I only felt it well to write if for nothing else than to break the dreadful sameness of his days—the harrowing routine of his sickroom. Think

     W. gave me his draft of a letter to Rossetti. "Went on a steamer N. Y. 31st Jan. '72," was his pencilled memorandum. W. said: "You put away the letter I gave you the other day: here's a note for it: keep them together: but before you go, read it to me: I may have something to say to you about it."

Washington, January 30, 1872.

     I send you my piece in a magazine, lately started away off in Kansas, fifteen or eighteen hundred miles inland—and also improve the occasion to write you a too long delayed letter. Your letters of July 9 last, and Oct. 8 were welcomed. Since which last nothing from you has reached me.

     John Burroughs returned with glowing accounts of England, and heartiest satisfaction from his visit to you and talks &c. I saw him day before yesterday. He is well and flourishing. [W. broke in as I read: "God knows, John's first visit threatened to be a mess but something better happened next time!"]

     I still remain living here as clerk in a Government Department—find it not unpleasant—find it allows a free margin—working hours from 9 to 3—work at present easy—my pay $1600 a year (paper). Washington is a broad, magnificent place naturally—avenues, spaces, vistas, environing hills, rivers, &c. all so ample, stretching out with plenty of room, plenty of distance,—and then as you get towards the lines, fine, hard, wide roads (made by military engineers in the war), leading far away, through dale and over hill, many and many a mile. Often of full moonlight nights, I go on long walks with some companion, six, eight miles away, into Virginia or Maryland, over these

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roads. It is wonderfully inspiring, novel, with such new.... We have spells here, night or day, of surely the finest weather and atmosphere in the world. The nights especially are sometimes miracles of clearness and purity—the air dry and exhilarating. In fact, night or day, the whole District affords an inexhaustible mine for explorations—soothing sane hours. It is indeed to these mostly my habits are adjusted. I have good health. Am fortunate enough to almost always get out of bed in the morning with a light heart and good appetite—read and study very little—spend two or three hours every day on the streets or in the frequented public places—come in passing contact with all sorts of persons, sufficiently—go little, almost not at all, into "society"—have, however, the blessing of some first-rate women friends—life upon the whole dim, flowing calm, democratic, sufficiently cheerful, on a cheap scale, suitable and occupied, enjoying a good deal, flecked of course with some clouds and shadows. I still keep in good flesh and weight.

     The photos I sent you last fall are faithful physiological likenesses. I still have yours, carte, among a little special cluster before me on my desk door.

     My poetry remains yet in substance quite unrecognized here in the land for which it was written—the best established magazines, and literary personages, quite ignore me and it. It has to this day failed to find an American publisher (as you perhaps know, I have myself printed the successive editions). And though there is a small minority of approval, the result to the great majority continues to bring me sneers, contempt, and official coolness. My dismissal from employment in 1865, by the Secretary of the Interior, Mr. Harlan, for the sole reason of my being the author of Leaves of Grass, only affords too true a specimen of the high conventional feeling about it still. The journals are many of them inveterately spiteful. For example, in a letter in the correspondence of one of the principal New York papers lately (the N.Y. Tribune) from a lady tourist, an authoress of repute, an allusion in the letter to mountain scenery was illustrated by an innocent quotation from and passing complimentary allusion to me. The letter was all and conspicuously published, except that the editor carefully cut out the lines quoting from and alluding to me, mutilating the text, and stultifying the authoress to her great vexation. This to give you a clearer notion of the state of

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the case here. I desire my friends in England writing about me to not be afraid of publishing this state of the case.

     Of general matters here, I can only say that the country seems to have entirely recuperated from the war. Everything is teeming and busy—more so than ever. Productiveness, wealth, population, material activity and results, here, far beyond all measure, all precedent—and then over such an area, three to four millions of square miles!—Great debits and offsets, of course—but such oceanic floods and masses of common domestic plenty and comfort, universal supplies of eating and drinking, houses to live in, farms, clothes, plenty of money, copious travelling, intense activity, &c. &c. There is something meteoric about it, I know very well—but altogether it is Kosmic—and real enough.

     It is not without glow and enjoyment to me, living and moving in the midst of the national whirl, din—intensity of material success—(as I am myself naturally sufficiently sluggish and ballasted to stand it) I find myself enjoying it all thoroughly, but in the best with reference to its foundations for and bearing on the future (as you doubtless see in my book).

     But I will turn to more special personal topics.

     Prof. Dowden's Westminster Review article last fall made us all pleased and proud. He and I have since had some correspondence and I have come to consider him, like yourself, fully as near to me in personal as literary relations. I have just written to him.

     I have received word direct from Mrs. Gilchrist. Nothing in my life, or my literary fortunes, has brought me more comfort and support every way—nothing has more spiritually soothed me—than the warm appreciation and friendship of that true full woman (I still use the broad, grand, grown Saxon word, our highest need).

     I have twice received letters from Tennyson—and very cordial and hearty letters. He sends me an invitation to visit him.

     I deeply appreciate Swinburne's kindness and approbation. I ought to have written him to acknowledge the very great compliment of his poem addressed to me in Songs before Sunrise, but am just the most wretched and procrastinating letter writer alive. If I should indeed come to England, I will call upon him among the first, and personally thank him.

     I received some three months since a generous, impulsive, affectionate

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letter from Joaquin Miller. I hear he is now in faroff Oregon, amid the grand scenery there, studying and writing. I saw in the papers that he was writing a play.

     Wm. O'Connor, wife and daughter, have just gone on a pleasure trip of a month to Cuba.

     I received some time since a most frank and kind letter and brief printed poem from John Addington Symonds, of Bristol, England. The Love and Death I read and reread with admiration. I have just written to Mr. Symonds.

     I received Roden Noel's Study, in Dark Blue for October, and November last, and appreciate it—and also a letter from himself. I have sent him a copy of my last edition, and intend to write him.

     I proposed by letter not long since to Ellis and Green, of London, to publish my poems complete and verbatim. Mr. Ellis wrote me a good friendly letter, but declined the proposition.

     I shall be thankful to receive a copy of your Vol. of selections from American poets when ready—and always, always, glad my friend, to hear from you—hope, indeed, you will not punish me for my own delay, but write me fully and freely, soon as convenient.

Walt Whitman.

     Read Scribner's today. "Also a bit of Cooper: Fenimore: about Natty Bumppo." Somehow he thought "Natty peculiarly a Leaves of Grass man." Cooper didn't live to know W., but W. said: "There were reasons why he and I should have fraternized: I look upon Cooper as new rather than old—as belonging to our era, as cultivating our graces."

     Reference to something W. wrote about freedom in his Collect. W. said it was "a fruitful subject," asking me: "Is it clear to you? perfectly clear?" "Freedom under law: there's no fact deeper, more engrossing, than that." I called it freedom "except to jump out of your skin"—he laughing gently: "Yes." He spoke of "metaphysical debates": also of the "free will and necessity asininities": "how little" they "contained, amounted to." Then referred to "preachers and their capacity for stirring up a fight about nothing." He also

     I happened to refer to W.'s Specimen Days piece called A New York Soldier. W. said: "As I read over even my own story, it all vividly comes back to me: I see all that over again: I often read the Bible: read anything: my point was to please the boys: to do for them just what they most wished done: if I had any rule at all that I observed it was just this: satisfy the boys themselves, at whatever sacrifice: always: except in rare cases humoring them. There were cases in which good reasons obliged me to run counter to them: I hated to do it: I did it with some pain. The doctors would most times leave the boys absolutely in my hands: sometimes, however, their mandates especially concerning diet were imperative." He took all sorts of "useless and useful tidbits" into the hospitals. "Many Bibles: oh! many of them: fruit, tobacco: heaven only knows what not. I read to them: from the Bible if they wished it: from anything else if they preferred: always seriously, always happily." Had he given them his own books? "No: I don't think so: I can't recall a single case in which I gave away Leaves of Grass. Now and then some individuals would ask for something from my pen—something wholly mine; then I would hunt up a magazine or newspaper article somewhere; some slip: give them that." Was he the only one of his bunch who went into the hospitals? He made a leisurely reply. "Yes: I think there was no other: they were all busy: all at work: had their occupations: did not feel called." I said: "Higginson's got your measure, Walt: he says if you hadn't been a coward you'd gone to the front instead of sneaking back into the hospitals." W. exclaimed: "Good for the Colonel! And he has a companion in that: my dear enemy Dick: Richard Henry Stoddard. I know the work I did was commonly considered more fit for preachers, cadets, women: that was the average notion of it: but the boys themselves didn't look at it that way: they saw it in other aspects: related it to other emotionalistic backgrounds.

Friday, February 1, 1889

     Bill then came, with W. voting against it. "But Mary respected the death-wish: the situation grew worse and worse: I had my carriage then: Bill rode about with me: drove sometimes." Did he formally engage Bill? "Never: neither formally nor informally: he went as much because he wanted to go as because I wanted him: he was often with me: we went to Gloucester together: one trip was to New York: went up on a Thursday, came back Saturday: then to Sea Isle City once: I stayed there at the hotel two or three days—so on: we were quite thick then: thick: when I had money it was as freely Bill's as my own: I paid him well for all he did for me." Here W. paused a moment. Then continued warmly: "And now let me tell you, Horace, that makes it all the worse: this young jackanapes has an income: one of the big trusts in the city—the Fidelity—has an estate which his father left him: he draws a sort of quarterly dividend: think of it: and then to victimize Mary so damnably: make her wait, then only pay her half! Horace, it's sad, sad: I say it: I ought to know: poor boy! poor boy! I pity him: I would receive him today if he needed me: would help him: I am sure I would be the first to help him. I liked Bill: he had good points: is bright—very bright." Time wore on. "Bill showed no signs of improving: on the contrary took every advantage of us: of Mary, of me: he paid probably fifty dollars in all: then stopped: not another cent."

     It got so before long that W. "did not like to have Bill around": W. in fact "told Mary so." "A number of things happened here: not directly traced to Bill but attached to him without a doubt: serious offences: very serious. I argued with Mary: more than that, argued with Bill: told him he must not stay. Bill would swear by all that was holy that he would by and by make all this right: would almost literally get down on his knees: then I would weaken." W. asked: "Does it interest you? I want you to know about it." Proceeded: "It

     W. was always breaking in upon his own narrative with "poor boy! poor boy!" The picture of Bill standing in court and perjuring himself was what "most nettled" W. "I asked Mary how it happened that my name was brought into the case: she said, 'only as Bill brought it in': the counsel were very respectful: very little was said." W. said Bucke had always declared that Duckett was "a moral imbecile." W. was not willing to "repeat the Doctor's classification." But: "It is wonderful how keen the Doctor is on all that: no one would suspect, seeing him—quiet, lowtoned, modest, seemingly crude, almost rustic—that he had one of the sharpest, most penetrating, minds in the world for touching the keynote of character. I have in fact found Doctor to be of all the men I know the most marked in that respect."

     W. got on a new track. "Do you know much about the transportation men?—the railroad men, the boatmen? It seems to me that of all modern men the transportation men most nearly parallel the ancients in ease, poise, simplicity, average nature, robust instinct, firsthandedness: are next the very a b c of real life." Pointed out the letter carriers. "Those we find in the cities: New York, Washington, Philadelphia, here: simple, honest, bright, satisfying." They had "so many of the positive virtues." "I am," he continued, " au fait always with wharfmen, deckhands, train workers." I said it wasn't one section of it but the whole working class which could come under this head: W. acquiesced. "I suppose that's true: no one has more respect for them than I do: I wish them all the luck: freedom: all that: but somehow I've come closer to the transportation men."

     W. spoke of Freiligrath. "A noble man indeed: you know, I suppose, that he wrote about me, criticized me, translated me?" Was Leaves of Grass likely to take any hold on Germany? W. doubtful. "It is like predicting the weather fifty years hence: one knows there

     No letter from Bucke today. Century for February received. W. read Walter Scott piece in Scribner's. "It will please you," he said: "I read it with zest: everything about Scott attracts me: he was one man among many men: Scott, Cooper: I go back to them, some things in Homer, Aeschylus: then the Bible: Byron: Epictetus: they are my daily food: a few others, maybe, added."

     W. said: "I have found you another of William's rare letters." He asked me to read it. I looked it over. "It's pretty long," I said. He repeated the phrase after me: "It's pretty long: so it is." Then asked me: "It's not too long for me to listen to: is it too long for you to read?" I said no. Then I went at it.

Washington, D.C.,
July 25, 1885.

Dear Walt:

     I hope your stroke of exhaustion from the heat was not as serious as the newspaper made it seem. I always make allowance for the reporter. The weather here for ten days past has been as bad as the Soudan. Torrid. At this moment (Sunday afternoon) the clouds have gathered heavily and the thunder is rumbling—so I suppose relief is coming.

     I have had a strange illness lately, but hope I am getting better. It took the form of utter weakness, and for a fortnight I barely had the use of my legs, and tumbled down on the slightest provocation.["Poor William, poor all of us: this was the beginning of your end!" W. exclaimed.] I began to wonder whether I was going to match you. The doctor, however, says it will pass if I take great care of myself, requiring me to keep as quiet as possible. I suppose it comes from my being much run down.

     I am glad you liked the photo. It is a good likeness, and quite

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powerful as a picture. That Bacon is a great success. If I could only get a steel engraving! This is only a wood cut, and probably does small justice to Vandyke's portrait. The resemblance to the ideal portraits of Shakespeare is remarkable—I think prophetic. Donnelly writes me that the cipher is coming out gloriously. It is a complete narrative of Bacon's life and times, regularly underlying the text of the plays, and settles the Bacon-Shakespeare question conclusively. ["I wish it did, William," interrupted W., "but I'm afraid it does not."] William will have to step down and out for good. ["Good-bye, William!" W. cried with a laugh: "Now don't let me see you again!"] I laugh when I think of the chagrin of the Shakespeareans, who have been so insolent and intolerant, and suppressed evidence with a high hand. ["A very low hand, William, if we tell the truth: a damned low hand!"] Donnelly, when he was here, got quite intimate with me, explained the law of the cipher, and read me a good deal of the translation. The cipher is by regular rule, which will stop the mouth of any caviller. ["The cavillers we have with us always: they're not so readily gagged."] It is as simple and indisputable as twice two are four, but terribly laborious to decipher, the process being one continual counting of words. I am amazed at the revolutionary daring of the device on the part of Bacon. ["Here's where I get dizzy and leave you, William: figgers is no doubt figgers: but so is Walt Walt: I'm no good trying to make sense out of ciphers"] You will be surprised to see how the corruption of the text is accounted for. In every case, so far, where the sense is in doubt, it is explained by the sacrifice of some word to the exigencies of the cipher. Doubtless the cipher will end by telling us where the original true manuscripts are hidden, which I will bet are in the Shakespeare monument (not grave) at Stratford. The scene in the cipher where Bacon to save the life of his servant, Henry Percy, acknowledges to Queen Elizabeth his own authorship of Richard Second and the other plays up to that date, is tremendously striking. She calls him, "Thou damned beast," clutches him by the beard and beats him with her crutch. No wonder that Essex meant to stab the old termagant (as Bacon calls her in the cipher) with his own hand—habitually inflicting such indignities on the great men around her. Essex himself got a blow in the face from her. All the account of Shakespeare's raid on Sir Thomas

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Lucy's park; his flight to London; his appearance, ragged and bare-footed, in front of the Red Bull theatre, bawling for horses to hold, where Bacon first saw him is quite rich. "A good-tempered ragged wretch," is Bacon's description of him. ["It all sounds good enough to be true: can it be true? William handles that better than anyone else. Yet I confess these multiplied evidences confuse me: I don't seem to need so many proofs: in a multitude of testimonies there may be chaos."]

     The bit from the Journal of Commerce which young Johann sent you, shows that we still live. There was quite a blast for me lately in the Berlin Advertiser—very friendly, but full of the oddest errors, as, for example, where he makes me very finicky about spelling my name with only one n (!!) and has me as librarian of the Department, &c. C. W. E. sent the Journal of Commerce a list of the poems written about you, requested by its correspondent.

     I got the papers you sent, including the Tribune with Smalley's letter about Victor Hugo, written with his usual admirable talent and deformed, as usual, by his meanness. He is the meanest man living. I always used to say he could be parsed—positive Small, comparative Smaller, superlative Smalley! ["I enjoy William's epithets without always agreeing with him. Still, I think he's put Smalley about where he belongs."]

     Victor Hugo's death much weakened my appetite for life. ["Queer, that sort of reaction: I always reach towards rather than away from life, no matter what happens."] I read with interest what he said about Shakespeare, but the criticism about his indifference to the lower classes does not touch me as true. [W. broke in: "I'm sorry, William, but it's true: Hugo's surer than you are at that point."] It never appears to be remarked that of all the wise, compassionate, sympathetic men of that age, not one spoke up for the poor and downtrodden. Why? Because they could not! Victor Hugo in that age would have had to be silent. One single line in a scene expressing even latent sympathy with the Jack Cades or Wat Tylers, would have sent its author at once to the block, and the play itself would have been suppressed even before it had appeared, so watchful and relentless was the censorship. To realize the bloody, brassy, wanton vigor of the military despotism then in power, one has only to note the treatment Raleigh got. The government was simply infernal—

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almost inconceivable. The only thing the illuminati of that day could do was to set about the slow sap of the monarchy. This was the only way they could rehabilitate the commons. To alter your sense a little—"the indirect is as great and real as the direct"—and the indirect was their only weapon or implement. ["Very fine, William: every word of it: but I still believe Shakespeare was essentially an aristocrat: they all were: the scholars, then: the lords dallying with the court: they were all distrusters of the people."]

     I too heard lately from Dr. Bucke, urging me to visit him. I wish you could go up there but have no doubt you are prudent to stay near home.

     Mrs. Gilchrist sent me a copy of the To-day. I have really not had the strength of mind to read what she has written—I have been so ill and feeble—but intend to soon. I have no doubt her article is good, and when I have read it, I mean to write her my thanks. I have an awful pile of unanswered letters.

     Decapitation, of which you ask, seems impending, and I am anxiously thinking what field will be open to me when I am shoved out of here. There have been several people after my position already.

     I wish you could get stronger in your legs. It would be such a comfort to be able to move about freely.

     I wrote an article defending Mrs. Pott's book from Richard Grant White, and bringing out several vital points in the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy. It was rejected by several magazines, but finally accepted by the Manhattan, the editor, Forman, being immensely taken with it. He held it a long time, hoping the magazine would resume, and surrendered it with evident reluctance and regret. Now I propose to bring it out in a book or brochure, and have written to McKay offering it to him. If you are in the way of seeing him, give me a boost. I think, considering the general interest just now in the question, it might really have some sale.

     Since I began the change has come. Last night we had a tremendous rain, and today it continues, though moderately. It is a blessed relief. (Today means Monday the 27th.) Goodbye. With best wishes and hopes,

Yours always faithfully,

W. D. O'Connor.

Saturday, February 2, 1889

     8 P.M W. sitting ruminatively in his chair by the window. Cordial. Disposed to talk. Asked me about the weather. Had it changed? "I thought that either the weather had grown mild or I had." Then he said: "I have been resenting the fact that I am denied seeing the new moon: have been reading an account of it: and of Mars and Jupiter and Venus: I never used to miss them: often spend my evenings on the river here: the beautiful evenings: the great stars: the little stars: the calmness, the silence. I would sometimes try my eyes on the most distant visible stars—the familiar stars." He shook his head: "Nothing is more indicative of the closet existence I lead than my isolation from outdoors: that's the worst aspect of my confinement." And he added: "I don't seem to be a hospital person: I rebel against the idea of being nursed, cared for: but it's of no avail: here I am, tied up to the wharf, rotting in the sun." I said: "Walt, you should be ashamed to talk such stuff: you say, By God you shall not go down, to other people: why don't you say it to yourself?" He laughed gently. "Licked again," he said.

     Referred to Bucke. "I had two letters from him today." First he said, "there was nothing in them"—then, after a pause: "yes there was, too"—reaching for them among some papers on the table. "He writes about the French magazine: he has it: he has read the article: thinks it grand: listen"—reading from one of the letters. "He will send me some sort of abstract: I shall be glad to have it." W. said again: "Doctor at last speaks almost positively of the meter

     As we talked Ed entered with a large flat package from the p.o. Proved to be a picture from Bucke. W. asked: "Another picture?" Ed retired. Harned entered. W. greeted H. with his "howdy, howdy"—then turned his attention to the package. W. held the picture up to survey it. "Here he is again, better than ever." The picture was cracked. W. said laughingly: "Which same can't be said of Maurice save by his enemies." And he said further: "What can't, what don't a man's enemies say about a man?" Regarded the picture affectionately. "I'd like to have pictures of William, John, you fellows, as good as this: it would make quite a gallery: I'd like to hang you all up here before my eyes so I could enjoy you."

     W. asked:"Well, Horace, what have you heard in town today?" Saw Oldach. Was sure he could give us books next week. He is having trouble getting leather of the right shade and quality. W. said: "He's a great slow-coach, isn't he?" I said: "Slow-coaches are often the best coaches: you're something of a slow-coach yourself." He seemed to be a trifle irritated. "You don't mind saying impertinent things, do you, if they occur to you?" He made me smile, I said: "No: I don't." This restored his good nature. "I suppose I am a snaily creature, take me for all in all." I said: "And maybe that's why you hate the snail in Oldach." "Yes: yes." Told him I saw Dave. He gave me three W.W. lines for W. to transcribe with signature for a facsimile page in Elizabeth P.G.'s book. These: "Of life immense in passion, pulse, and power, cheerful, for freest action form'd under the laws divine, the Modern Man I sing." I said: "Dave once said he wished you had sat down on the Gems at the start." W. aroused at once. "God knows I wished to! Consent? How did I consent? I let it be known to all of them that I was not favorable to it. I was only not vehemently against it. The only thing I really promised was that I would not raise a hell of an objection to it. When a man gets old he is more pliant on that side: is more ready to be affirmative, lenient: is not so likely to be a damned hog. That is about all my assent amounted to: I didn't want to continue to be the hog I had been: If I would not applaud, neither would I sneer.

     McKay told me he had sold five hundred copies of November Boughs: that he was shortly to take a trip to New York and Boston and would carry a sample big book along. W. said: "I don't expect the book to be a go in the bookstores." Further: "I don't regard Dave as just the man to do anything with special editions et cetera: he's more at home with the everyday thing: he's built for the usual not the unusual." W. added anent Dave: "He's the type that gets rich if it has the slightest chance: Dave would leave no stone unturned if he thought there was a per cent anywhere under it." I asked him: "Do you think Dave circuitous? He shook his head. "Not at all: only canny: only Scotch—very Scotch. I have no reason for saying anything sharp about Dave." I quoted something Emerson or Longfellow is reported as having said to Clough: "That was built of the blood of authors"—pointing out the Ticknor and Fields house in Boston. W. said: "That's striking: moreover, it's about the truth: still, a fellow hardly feels like pushing the accusation too far: there may be, must be, exceptions: I always am tenderly disposed towards the exceptions." Would he say of the McKay house what was said of T. and F.? "No: Dave is not worse or better: he's one like the rest; fair to middling of his kind: I like him. Of course his house is built of the blood of authors: how could it be otherwise?" I said: "Walt, you must see that all properties are built upon the blood of somebody: there would be no sense in particularizing with publishers." W. nodded. "Exactly: that's what I meant in what I said of Dave: I say you are right: all the vast fortunes, all fortunes, all accumulation, is built upon an injustice somewhere: I don't see just where it is: you have looked into it more profoundly than I have: but I acquiesce in your general supposition." I said: "Do you call it a supposition, Walt?" "I do: what do you call it?" "I call it an axiom." W. hesitated an instant before responding. "Have it an axiom, then, if you will: I say axiom, too."

     Had he heard anything from Kennedy lately? "Oh yes! but not newsily: about nothing of great consequence. I have in fact had a letter this very week." K. spoke of the French piece. "He puts it very high: up, up: thinks it the best ever." But W. was "not so sure of it." W. said: "We should have a full translation by somebody." W. said: "William's the one I want most to hear from but he is as still as the grave." Then he asked: "Have you seen the afternoon papers? In the afternoon papers there's an item about Dick Stoddard: he has undergone an operation for cataract: it was successful." I asked W. if S. wasn't suffering from some sort of cataract when he wrote about Poe. W. laughed heartily: "Probably: I think Dick must have had a dozen cataracts to interrupt the equitable exercise of his emotional, his intellectual, nature." And he added, after some little colloquy with Harned: "Stoddard is not all bad: he has done some good work: has qualities that are almost lofty: but he is soured: he has grown gray: his sight is nearly gone: he stands in his high place, waves his hand superciliously across the multitude of literary fellows: 'God damn you all: what right have you, with your fripperies, poems, proses, to catch the public eye, to play for applause: while I, Dick Stoddard, am disdained, forgotten!'" How did he account for Stoddard's vitriolic nature? "I don't account for it: I only see it: he has toiled, moiled, these forty years on a great variety of things: the result has been small: he has made no impression on his time: maybe he's conscious of it: this may serve to explain him."

     Harned spoke of Lowell's visit to Philadelphia: dinners are to be given him: Weir Mitchell is to give one, Doctor Pepper another. W. said: "Lowell is one kind: I'm another: he'll not come here: Lowell is one of my real enemies: he has never relaxed in his opposition: Lowell never even tolerated me as a man: he not only objected to my book: he objected to me." This seemed to remind him of something: "I have a friend here—Mrs. Garrison"—the preacher's wife? "yes": then: "She comes in sometimes: was in the other day: took four copies of November Boughs: said she wanted a dozen more: I didn't see her: Ed attended to her." I asked: "but what's that got to do with Lowell." He answered: "Nothing: but I thought it was about time to drop Lowell." This made me laugh. "Now what's the matter?" he inquired. I said: "You always think it's about time to

     W. then said: "It looks to me as if November Boughs would be the best read, accepted, of all my books: it seems to offend least." Harned dissented vigorously. W. asked mockingly: "What have I done to deserve this applause?" Then: "I begin to doubt myself when others flatter me." He said people who come here often buy L. of G. "There's quite a sale of it from this house." He said he was not entirely satisfied with November Boughs. "If I had it to do over again I should change its form somewhat: I should cut off the margin at least half. It should be more in the form of Rolleston's book." I asked him why he always resented margins in books. The question puzzled him. "Do I?" And he asked me: "Don't you?" I said no. I liked open-spaced leaded liberal margined books. "Why?" he inquired. "For the same reason maybe that I like lots of windows in a house: they let the air in and the light. So they let the air and light into a book." W. said: "It's a picturesque argument even if it fails to convince me." I told him I didn't present it as an argument but as an impression. I couldn't prove it. I could only feel it. To this he said: "I admit that feeling goes way beyond proving most of the time."

     Harned wants to bring his wife in. "Are you open to the ladies nowadays?" he asked W. "Oh yes! and glad to have 'em!—especially Mrs. Harned." H. said they "might be down tomorrow." W. asked him to "give my love" to Mrs. H "and give it to the baby, too—Herbert Spencer—though it'll do him no good." H. said: "It'll do him good twenty years from now when he is told that Walt Whitman remembered him in that way." W. shook his forefinger at H. "Tom, you're a flatterer: I would not have believed it of you."

     Returned me the Holmes Emerson. "I read it all: the whole thing: it's more like a picture of Oliver Wendell than of Ralph Waldo." I said: "Walt: that's exactly what Sidney Morse said when he read the book." W.: "Is it so? then I've a good man on my side, haven't

     W. handed me an old Carpenter letter. "Carpenter was never a voluminous correspondent: he has never written me merely letters: he writes when he has something to say: for the rest he holds off. I don't know but that's the best system: I would get along quite as well if some of my other correspondents held off occasionally." Harned had gone. W. said: "It's a short note: read it before you leave."

Millthorpe near Chesterfield,
March 2, 1884.

Dear Walt:

     Just a line to give you my changed address. I have been here since October last—very busy all last summer getting a little homestead built, and this winter digging and planting—have about seven acres altogether—we are gardening about two acres; fruit, flowers and vegetables; have about two and a half acres grass and about the same quantity part wheat for ourselves and part oats for the horse. My friends the Fearnehoughs have come with me, and we are employing one or two extra hands beside, just now. It is a beautiful valley right up against the Derbyshire moors, but warm; we are about eight miles from Sheffield and five and a half from Chesterfield—three and a half from the nearest station.

     I got your bit about the American aborigines. Thanks.

     There is a quite old flour mill here, from which the place no doubt takes its name; very quaint old wooden wheels and cogs—the stream which feeds it runs at the bottom of my three fields—lots of wood and water all about the valley. Millthorpe itself is a small hamlet of a dozen houses or so.

     Have not seen the Gilchrists for some time, but I heard from Grace the other day.

     I was reading Rolleston's translation into German of your Answerer this morning. It is as far as I can judge very exact and natural.

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     I hope you are well and enjoying yourself. I often think about you. Best remembrances to the Staffords when you see them.

Your affectionate

Edward Carpenter.

     W. said: "I don't spend much of my time with regrets for anything: yet sometimes I regret that I never went to Europe: other times I regret that I never learned to read German and French. No doubt it's all just as well as it is: it all came about according to what they used to describe as 'the ordinances of God': there's no chance in it: maybe I'd have been modified if I had ever broken loose from my accustomed ways—become a traveller, become a linguist: that might have meant harm to the Leaves: my destiny seems to have been to live my whole life here in America without any untoward interruption." That word "exact" describing the translation of The Answerer stuck in W.'s craw. "It's like saying he was loyal to the one two three of the poem: yet a poem in ones twos threes is no poem at all."

     W. gave me what he called "a publisherial memorandum" to add to my records.

Office of The Atlantic Monthly
Boston, March 6, 1860.

Mr. Walt Whitman,

     Sir.

     We enclose our check for thirty dollars finding your note to be quite correct.

Yours truly,

Ticknor & Fields

     I asked W.: "What poem does that refer to?" He said: "I can't just say now." He paused. "I thought I could say: it does not come to me." The letter was addressed to W. in Brooklyn. I said: "Walt: you made your point every now and then with the editors. Why do you say they all rejected you?" He asked: "Did I say 'all'?" I said: "You certainly do in some moods: you remember that question I raised the other night." He acknowledged it. "I do: it has given me considerable concern, too: I don't want to give out any distorted conclusions: I am giving you the data: you will have to balance them up for yourself."

Sunday, February 3, 1889

     1.40 P.M. W. reading. Looked well. First time in several weeks that I've seen him by daylight. "Tom was in—came an hour or so ago—and your sister, too: Mrs. Harned. I was so glad she came up. It has been nine months since I have seen her: a long spell for her as well as for me." Then he paused a minute. "Yes: there were other visitors, too: Billings, or somebody: he came with a couple of young fellows." I asked: "You mean Bilstein?" he responding: "Yes, yes: Bilstein—the printer: that's the man. He did not stay long: paid simply one of the in and out visits: we talked a little bit about printing: he appeared to be an adept—know his business. I liked him: like 'em all: he was very quiet: I get on so well with plain people."

     W. said: "I'm feeling mostly well these days: but I chafe with being kept indoors." I said: "Why don't you let us take you out?" He shook his head. "I don't have any ambitions that way: I want the air, the stars: yet I don't want to go to get them. If I could bring the Delaware River into this room I'd be wholly satisfied. I'm in a strange perplexity of impulse: I am drawn God knows where: both outdoors and indoors: a certain element of irresponsibility is mixed with my routine these days." W. handed me a letter in a blue envelope. "It's from Garland: read it: then take it along." "Do you mean, read it to you?" "Yes."

Boston, January 10, 1889.

Dear Mr. Whitman:

     I have word occasionally from you and it gives me great pleasure to know you are so comfortable. I get a card from Kennedy semi-occasionally. He seems to be very busy. I passed a pleasant evening with Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton the present week, and we had some considerable talk of you. She is an appreciative admirer of your work and prizes the chat she had with you last year. She writes a literary letter to the Herald each Sunday and gets in a telling touch once in a while on your work. She is a very charming and able woman. Your stalwart supporter. Judge Chamberlain, of the Public Library, I see frequently: a very thoughtful and fearlessly

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outspoken man. He does some valuable historical lecturing and often says some inspiringly good things about our artificiality in poetry and the drama. I wonder if it ever occurred to you that our novel and drama is now slowly changing base, coming round to the "realization of the real." The whole outlook to me is full of hope. I think I see in what our aristocratic friends are pleased to call "vulgarity in fiction and the drama" the sure sign of the native indigenous literature we have waited for. If I should ever get to see you I should take pleasure in enlarging upon this. It forms the staple for a number of my lectures on the literature of Democracy.

     Our friend Baxter had an extended notice of the Complete Works in the Herald. You saw it, of course. Fillially yours,

Hamlin Garland

     W. said further: "I'd like to have Hamlin come here: I'd like to hear what he has to say about the drama—about the novel: he's probably about right: the old theories hardly comport with the new spirit: we're coming nearer the divine facts all the time: the Arabella Sir John stuff is gone forever from our art: even our symbolisms have to be based more or less on palpable foundations." W. said to me: "You write a lot, don't you? That's right: keep it up: I don't say publish: that's not so essential: you will be our historian some day." He had read "that some nincompoop preacher has challenged the Colonel to a public debate." Had the Colonel accepted? W. laughed. "Why should he? Bob's worth at least a cardinal, a pope: he's entitled to the biggest champion, not the littlest: a victory over a nobody wouldn't help our or hurt their cause." I said: "You still seem to tie fast to the Colonel." He added: "As long as the Colonel's the Colonel I'll continue to be what I am: we look to him to do certain things: we are never fooled in him: he's always at least what we expect him to be—then something over: the Lord gave us good measure when he made Bob."

     W. had been reading the Tribune. "Tom brought it." The Press was on the floor under his feet. I asked him: "Have you read the Why Are You a Bachelor symposium?" "No, not a word of it—have not seen it. I suppose the time has come for some of 'em to go on record on that, so here it is and they talk like a congregation of sillyheads. It's like the Blue Glass craze that whirled about us seven or eight years ago—took everybody in. I myself went under blue glass at that time." I laughed and W. joined me. "It was at Esopus, John Burroughs' place: there they tried it on me." Did B. assent to the theory? "I don't know: I could not say: but he had some of the glass there—some panes. I sat there—the sun shone through." Was the result good or bad? He smiled again: "I am sure I couldn't say: I forget: the theory was that it must be good. The thing started with the idea that the sun's rays were in themselves beneficial: all that: that much I could assent to myself. Haven't I always gone into the sun myself: didn't I do it through that long dreary period after seventy-three? One of the worst features of my confinement here is that fact that I am in the north room, obliged to stay here, away from

     W. wrote Bucke today. Sent a bundle of papers to O'Connor. Had he written anything on the N.A. Review fiction piece? "Not a word: I seem to be almost afraid to start it: I have some things to say, yet fear to try to say them. That's characteristic of me these days in anything that involves the expenditure of physical energy: my thinking apparatus seems to be O.K.: it's the rest of me that gets tired. If I could talk into a machine—if I didn't have to use a pen—my troubles would be over." "No doubt we will speak into machines some day and out of them too." W. asked: "Do you mean the telephone? We have that already." I said: "No: I mean a machine with a voice." W. looked at me quizically: "Well—who knows: having gone as far as we have with these wonders why shouldn't other wonders follow?"

     McKay is about to go on the road. He asks W. two questions. 1st: will the six-dollar books be numbered? 2d: will the six-hundred edition be the limit—no more being issued under any circumstances? I said to W.: "You must answer the questions: I'll have to say something to Dave one way or the other." W. said: "I shall do whatever you fellows think best on that point: I want to please you—to please Dave, too—to act fairly, so that you may both be satisfied. You lay more stress on the importance of that numbering business than I do: whether the buyer buying a book bearing my signature would think

Monday, February 4, 1889

     7.45 P.M. W. reading Century. "It's a strong weak diet," he said. "How do you make that out?" "I mean that it is strong of its kind but a damn weak kind." He laughed. "It belongs in the category of the non-virile beautiful." Said he had "spent one of" his "common uninteresting days." Then he said half amusedly, half grave: "I spend all my life now trying to dawdle life away—to kill time, to have the days pass: and they do pass, somehow, one after another." Just then Ed came in with a big armload of wood. W. said: "Thank God we won't freeze to death tonight: Ed there will save my body whatever becomes of my soul." Then he jokingly added: "Ed, they tell me it's always summer in that Canada country you came from." Ed turned a laughing face to W. "Always summer? they ought to try it: this weather you have here ain't a circumstance to it." W. said: "You mean to say it's colder there?" Ed in a fiery way: "Mean to say? I know : our zero days would scare the life out of the tender-feet down here." W. enjoyed this hugely. "Ed says they have better winters, better summers, better all seasons, up there than we do in New Jersey, for instance: poor New Jersey." Ed banged the door of the stove shut and stood up. "I didn't quite say that," he protested, "though I do say the weather up home has its points." W. exclaimed: "That's delicious, Ed: so it has: I say as one having a right to: I've been there."

     No visitors today. Letter from Bucke? "No—not a word, not a word." But he thought B. was "about ready to start south." "I expect him certainly within ten days." "Had no idea" how long Bucke intended to stay. "But while down here he may take a run to Washington: I want him to do it: indeed, Nellie herself desires it. He should see William: see what he makes of it all: report to us. We may come to know many things then that it's impossible for us to

     I then asked: "You've said nothing about the parsons: where do you put them?" He put on a mock air of gravity. "I wish it was different: I have to say it: I think they come in at the tail of the procession: they bring up the rear." And he didn't stop there. "And the ministers are practically done for," he said: "the stars in their courses are against them: however they struggle, whatever front they maintain, the universe is against their impossible explications: their methods have passed out for good." Here he laughed gaily. "I have a couple of friends, old men, who don't think so, don't think them harmless—who argue that we are all in danger of being gobbled up by Catholicism—that the Catholic church is the great menace against our civilization." W. couldn't "stomach this bosh." "I remember one of them: it was a year ago and more, while I was still down stairs: he asked me if I was not afraid, if I didn't see the danger—shrink from it. I replied: 'No, not in the least: I am not in the least afraid of it.' But he still believes it: he says I'm criminally optimistic—that the time is near at hand when our neglect to appreciate this crisis may destroy us. Don't think he's a fool: he's not: he's gone on this subject but sane enough on the whole. W. added: "For the church as an institution, I have the profoundest contempt: I know what the church as an institution, Catholic or Protestant, would do with us if it possessed the power: my point is that it hasn't, will never again have, the power."

     Moulton's Magazine of Poetry has turned up at last. While W. was looking for it I found it. "Oh!" he said: "you have it." Two Whitman cuts. The first, Frank Fowler's—the second, the November Boughs frontispiece. I dissented from the Fowler picture. W. said: "Never mind: if it isn't a likeness it is a good picture: it was that he was after: the magazines always go for that." How was Bucke's biographical summary? "Oh! very good indeed: very good—even fine: I liked it very much." The magazine contained a number of portraits. W. said: "They are not celebrities: it's a great mixture, to be sure: he gives me a whole string of selections." I pointed out a portrait of Boyle O'Reilly. Said W.: "That is very poor of Boyle: it gives no sort of suggestion as to what he looked like." I remarked the "bullet bead." W. assented: "Yes—that part of it is accurate

     He asked me if I had gone much into Irish history? "Years ago I fell in with early Irish poetry: Ferguson collected, brought it out: did you ever read him? Dead now, I think." Pausing. "No—I won't be sure about the death: I can't say surely that he's dead." I said: "Well." He started again. "The poetry was deeply fascinating: there was something even wild, even barbaric, in it: it attracted me, fascinated me, like the border minstrelsy—Scott's—seeming to contain the same elements of virile emotionalism. You will find traces of this influence everywhere in the Irish character—especially in the strong fellows like Boyle." Why do we revert and get such joy out of the archaic poetry of a race? Was it because that poetry was closest to nature? "I do not explain it in that way. Take this border minstrelsy we have been talking about—or any other." Had I read in any life of Jefferson about his collection of aboriginal poetry? "It may have been neglected in the emphasis put on other things but to me it is rarely significant. Jefferson was capacious: he had many inlets, outlets: this was one of them. Get a Jefferson: maybe you can hit one at Dave's: it'll cost you fifteen or twenty cents: look that up. In that poetry, as in the Irish poetry, you'll find the snack of something—the flavor, odor, tone, vision of something—not perhaps to be stated, elusive, yet undeniably magnetizing you."

     Here W. suddenly got back to an earlier track. "Oh! I talked

     I saw McKay today. Said I should say to W. for him that he was strongly in favor of having the edition strictly limited. But W. is inexorable. "I want to please Dave, but I say to hell with all strictly limited editions: my final decision must be against making any such pledge. I do not regard anything in the universe as more morally certain than that I shall not add to the edition we now have out: but to make the kind of promise Dave wants to exact—that is impossible." He did "wish to sell the books." Said: "I would close out the edition today if I could find a purchaser." But still, "while desiring to make" himself "whole" he was "willing not to sell a book" if "conditions hampering" his "freedom" were "laid down to" him. Then he asked me: "You tired of this everlasting subject?" "No: go on." "Very well: I was only going to say the book is there, has its shape, is autographed, is illustrated with four engravings, is for sale: that is the whole story." He spoke of the price of the book. "I am wondering if it's not too dear: Bucke says it should be dearer." Said yes as to numbering book.

     W. said: "What about Weir Mitchell? He seems to be home again: he gives a swell dinner tonight to Lowell: I did not know he was back: his son came here a number of times in the summer." I asked: "Were you invited to that dinner?" He laughed outright. "What! to a dinner to James Russell? I guess not. My presence would spoil

     W. was saying something to me about "the days when you may have to write about me." He said: "Whatever you do don't make a saint out of me." I replied: "No danger, Walt: I don't like saints well enough." This made him laugh. "You know," he said, "that I always want you to remember what people say against me even if you must forget the things they say for me. If you write about me observe that rule." I said: "I swear!" He smiled: "Yes, swear! swear!" I said my good night and left.

Tuesday, February 5, 1889

     7.15 P.M. W. reading the papers. Sat in his usual place. "I am like a sentinel on the watch," he said: "nailed to a spot, tethered to an obligation." Says he "naps it" every morning before I come. "I want to be ready for you: you are the oasis in my desert." I asked him: "Do you really feel that way about my coming? I never flattered myself that I am vital to you. I have felt that maybe I was rather the desert in your oasis." He laughed. "That's witty but there's not a damn bit of truth in it." Then he added: "Let us not talk of that: we must not quibble over such a thing: we must take each other for granted." Later he also said: "I was in dead earnest when I said I prepared for your coming: I do: I would not like to miss our talks: they are the one thing I look forward to all day."

     W.'s ways are regular. He says: "I keep myself down: I don't worry the strength out of my body: my one word is conservation." After I go in the evening, after our talk, he reads some: "often an hour": then he is helped to bed. Through the day he simply, as he

     "I had a letter from Bucke today," W. said, swinging his arm towards the table: "he says there are so many things to do he has had to set his date further off again—now to the 18th: he seems to be confident about the 18th." W. said he was "disappointed." Yet he laughed. "The good Doctor has been coming every week since September," he said. W. held Bucke's letter in his hand. "Doctor speaks of sleighing: sleighing is one of his fads—one of his few fads (he only has a few): he likes to get off in a sleigh, daily, if possible. His gauge of the weather is like this: is it cold? has it snowed? does the snow lay? are the roads hard? is the sleighing first class? If all that is so, then the weather's good: if it's not so, then the weather's bad. Doctor takes to sleighing like some men take to rum: he gets drunk with it—he goes on sleighing orgies."

     W. picked up a dust-stained letter from the table in front of him. "See this," he said. I took it from him. "It's O'Connor almost at his best," he added. "Do you mean it for me?" I asked. He said "yes" at once. But he also said: "Read it before you take it away: I'd like to hear it once again." I spoke up: "Stedman said to me in a letter that William was the most brilliant letterwriter in the English language today." W. was pleased. "I do not see how he could know that but I am willing to believe it to be true." I asked him: "And ain't you more than willing?" He wasn't slow in saying: "I suppose I am:

     W. said: "I'm glad I don't deserve the lambasting William gives Saint Anthony. The psychology of that man would baffle devils: he haunts the purlieus of heaven with his crude philosophy: he makes the worse the better reason: he never yet has discovered the difference between virtues and vice: he's not so much knave as ass: he goes stumbling about like a bull in a china shop. They say sometimes that he's incompetent for his job: I go farther than that: I say there should be no such job: no one is competent to fill such a job: we want no censors, monitors, inquisitors." "A man has to be pretty mean to take such a job," I said, "and the longer he keeps it the meaner he gets." "That's the state of the case," said W., in a rollicking spirit: "with that, if you please." I said, "William calls him skunk, but I don't see why the skunk's one amiable fault should subject him to such a classification." W. laughed till the tears rolled down his cheeks. "That's the best yet: we must repeat that to William."

     I read a Cornhill paper today on slang. A writer calls it the great American language." I took it to W. "I am glad you brought it: it will interest me, I know. Every now and then the doctor alludes in his letters to my piece on Slang: he thinks it great guns." Did W. himself care so much for it? "I can hardly say I do. I did it: I stand by it: that's all. Doctor, however, regards it as having extreme importance. Brinton's the man who should best appreciate it—best realize its ramifications: it's right in his line." Brinton is abroad again. W. asked: "How can he afford to go?" I said: "By having the

     W. asked me: "What's the speech about tonight?" I was to speak in Philadelphia. "Idealism," I said. "That's almost too much of a mouthful for one speech," he said: "I tackle big themes myself but I'm always afraid of them." I quoted one of my sentences: "There are linear and atmospheric philosophers." W. said: "There are indeed: that's a fair way to express it. A splendid somebody—who was it? I don't remember—went to see Carlyle, or Carlyle went to see him. Carlyle asked: 'What is your system?' The man replied sharply at once: 'System? I have no systems: I just live.' That always seemed to me very deep—unplummeted. Carlyle was delighted with it. But I think Mrs. Gilchrist would have disagreed with it: she would have said: 'You can have it best by knowing it: in fact you can truly apprehend it in no other way?'" Huxley said he hoped his children would have such good bodies that they would never know they had bodies. I spoke of this. W. said: "That is very good: that is about what the Carlyle man said." I thought so too. But I also felt that H. would have essentially approved of Mrs. G's contention. "Yes, that's the other side of the shield: probably that is even implied. Still, Mrs. Gilchrist's statement would seem too severe, too literal, for me." W. went on talking of Mrs. G. "She was always abreast of the times: as to science she would be classified with the extreme radicals if anywhere: indeed, I imagine she'd take the logic of science and follow it out to the full, even beyond the adventurous limits of the savant himself." We talked of women we had known. W. had some things to say about my mother. He spoke of his own mother. "I cleave to the mothers of children—particularly the older mothers." Back to Mrs. G. "She was the mother of a number of children: she had done justice to her children: she had lived a real life with her husband: that was the substratum—a noble substratum, base: then on top of this she built the greatest scientific, intellectual, esthetic superstructure as the sort of crown to all. She was harmonic, orbic: she was a woman—then more than a woman."

     I told W. I had been asked to read a W. W. paper. He said in a merrily playful tone: "I don't know: that is a subject not to be tackled lightly: it has to be done in the right mood to be done right: you've got to tap yourself when you're ready to give—when you're in a fecund mood." But when I got up to go he added: "Well—if you must: I wish you success of your speech." W. read the article on Gérôme in the Century. "It did not hit me: Gérôme has not much for me: he's not our man."

Wednesday, February 6, 1889

     7.45 P.M. W. talking with Mrs. Davis, who sat on the sofa. He was very vivacious. In good voice. He asked me how I was. I said: "Very well." I asked him how he was. He said: "Very well," too. Then Mary and he went on with their talk, which was about Herbert's picture, now in the Academy exhibition. Mary asked W. if the picture was the one H. painted here. W. said: "No: but he worked from that: this is the London picture." Then, after a brief pause: "Old Mr. Ingram has been here: he told me that his daughter, or somebody, had been in the Academy Sunday: that there was a great crowd of people there—many, many: that she, in going about, was attracted to one spot by a thick group of visitors: found they were looking at Herbert's picture." W. also said: "Herbert himself says the picture is well-hung—is in a first rate position just on the line." Mrs. Davis here got up to go. W protested. "Why, Mary, what are you going for?" She said: "Oh, I haven't paid my visit: now I'll say goodnight: I'll not see you again tonight." W. responded: "Well, then good night! good night!" Mrs. Davis gave me H.G.'s Contemporary Club money left here by him for me last night. "Then Herbert was here? I passed him down the street." W.: "Yes, he came in: as he got up to go, was arranging his cloak, he said something about calling on you: I told him he wouldn't find you at home—that you had gone over the river again. I suppose it was that money matter that he wanted most to see you about." Had he brought any news? "Oh no: hardly that: but we had quite a talk: he stayed quite a while. He is very cheery—well, busy, satisfied with the outlook. Put all that with youth: what more could a man want?"

     Intensely cold today. The first severe day of the winter. W. asked me about it. "I envy you who can sally forth and breathe it in." Had

     I had a letter from Morse, dated the 4th. W. said: "Read it." I sent Morse the Whitman busts he left here. He had this to say about them: "They fail to impress people so far. Blake failed to enthuse. The lady in the house said if she should see one in the night she would faint away. That was the impression she got." W. took the humoristic report rather seriously. "Was it only the Whitman busts you sent, and the Cleveland? Is it those he refers to?" and when I answered him "yes" he remarked dubiously: "Well, well: but what more does he say?" Morse went on: "But I shall take them to the Art Institute when I go—my lecture is postponed on account of the exhibit of paintings by the Russian artist that fill all the available space." I half stopped. W. said instantly: "Oh go on, go on: let me hear it all!" And so: "These paintings I have not yet seen. People who have seen them seem dazed, and don't know whether or not to say they're great." W. interrupted: "But they are great: they are among the greatest: they are very deep, subtle, powerful, pathetic." I proceeded: "The critics write them up and write them down." W.: "How's that?" I repeated. He said: "Of course they do: that's what they think they're here for." I again went on: "Verestchagin is the name. The critics handle him as though they knew. Hoothoo! what definite ideas these unfledged mortals have!" W. laughed heartily: "Oh Sidney, Sidney! as though they knew! How significant, how profound, how cute, that is: as though they knew!" He again said: "But go on." Sidney wrote: "The papers here din din at the Anarchists all the while. The effect is, that people begin to wonder if there isn't something genuine underneath what they have misjudged after all. The police captains kicked vigorously against that judge's decision, but have finally quieted down." W. then: "They did well to do so—to quiet down: that's what police captains, policemen, soldiers, secret service men, everywhere, should always do: quiet down—quiet down: yet, disappear."

     Took W. Andrew Lang's Bobs and Pinches—Murray paper on American-English courtesies, &c. W. pleased. "Yes, I like to see all such things—to look through them, if for nothing else than to find there's nothing in 'em!—and I often enough—oftener than enough—find there is nothing in them." Then: "I shall lay it aside for tomorrow with the other thing you brought"—San Francisco Chronicle with adverse review of November Boughs. W. asked: "Does the review amount to much?—to anything?" Spoke of the paper on slang I left with him yesterday. Had he read it? "I could hardly say yes to that: I have looked it through. I can tell very soon after dipping into a book or what not whether there's anything in it for me: a few sentences in this piece convinced me that the writer knew nothing at all about his subject. It sounds like the case of the editor who goes to one of his staff—says: 'Here, you: I want five pages, or six, on such and such a theme—on American slang, for instance': or perhaps he would put it in this way: 'I have such and such space to fill up: you must exercise your ingenuity in filling it': the chosen man straightway sitting down, going to work, grinding it out. This article seems to illustrate such a supposition."

     W. said: "Slang is too stubborn a subject to answer the beck and call of every incidental scribbler." I spoke of it as "the beginnings of language." W. said: "It is more that than people generally imagine: but all slang is not equally good: there are slang words, phrases, which carry no meaning with them—out of which a meaning cannot even by investigation be extracted. I could instance cases. The other day I hit upon the expression, 'in the soup': I could not make a meaning for it or out of it." I said a man drunk was described as "full of soup." W. said: "That's better: I get more out of that." Then he added: "In the old days—maybe still, but in the old days—down in the Bowery there was much slang. It was all sorts: derived from all tongues and no tongue: the French call it argot, patois —we call it slang. There were many fine examples of it current, particularly among the theatrical people, the actors: argot." He half remembered one of their words—"a very common often used word." His memory wouldn't work. "I knew it well: it was a word signifying a hit, a take, a fetch—as when an actor had made a point, was applauded, brought down the house, as we say." W. smiled: "Not getting that word tantalizes me: I've got plenty of words: but

     W. generally flouts The Path. But this time he found something in it to read—a piece on Tennyson's Idylls of the King. I showed him a newspaper account of what Longfellow is reported to have said in reply to the charges of plagiarism in connection with Hiawatha. W. adjusted his glasses. Started to read. Then handed the slip to me. "You read it to me." He settled back in his chair.

     "A New York paper, in some pleasant gossip about Mr. Longfellow, tells a story of the way he treated the charges of plagiarism against the Indian poem Hiawatha, in following closely both the form and substance of The Kalevala, the national epic of Finland. When they began to appear, he showed a profound indifference on the subject; but before long his publisher thought best to call his attention to them, and suggested that a reply from the poet be written. 'Well, I'll think about it,' said Mr. Longfellow, and there the matter dropped. The press continued to echo and re-echo the charge;

     When I had finished W. said: "It makes a very good story," and he said: "but—." I laughed. "Then you don't believe the story?" He said: "I can't say it's not true: it sounds very fishy to me: I can hardly think of Longfellow as meeting the charge just in that way: I imagine he'd meet it with entire silence or with some graver statement: that smart version sounds more like another type of man—the smart aleck kind."

     Saw McKay today. Also Oldach. Dave is still talking of the limited edition. W. still says: "I said no: I meant no: can't you get that into Dave's stubborn skull?" Traces of irritation. "I've said it over and over again, Walt." "Don't he understand you, then?" "He understands but he thinks you're making a damn fool of yourself." "He does, does he? Well—you tell Dave that Walt Whitman has a right to make a damn fool of himself any time he pleases." This made me scream, "Walt, you're certainly whimsical sometimes: a few days ago you said you wanted to please Dave: now you get mad because he differs from you about something that's of no importance whatever. I think you're right but I don't think Dave has committed any crime." This mollified W. He said: "No doubt all that's as you say it is: only, I hate to have anyone attempt to drive me." I suggested: "Walt: Dave has his eye on the market: you have your eye on yourself: that's why you don't agree." W. retorted: "Then to hell with the market, I say: when the market asks me to give up some principle I

     Oldach is having trouble getting leather for the books. W. is impatient. W. says: "I think we should sell a lot of books in England if we get introduced there right." I renewed our insurance for three months.

     W. spoke of literary style. Said "high wrought" expression was "distasteful" to him, though "some of the Elizabethan fellows did the job rather handsomely." "They particularly studied, affected, worked it: the higher the better: were never satisfied with the direct word." Even in Scott "the finest of most fine souls," "one of the most pure, lofty, excellent" men in literature, "we find this appetite for tropes." "The mother of the milky herd, for instance," he said: "not 'cow' but the sublimated term." I referred to Kenilworth. W. thought that "one of the very best—but not the best." He said Quentin Durward and Ivanhoe were "just as wonderful." He felt Scott to be "perennial." "I can always go back to him and find him fresh." W. said anent something quoted from Morse's letter: "New York's the place! If you wish the profound, generous, encompassing things, New York is your natural center of gravity."

Thursday, February 7, 1889

     7.25 P.M. W. reading papers. He had half a dozen of the day's papers on the table near which he sat. Very cold still. I ask him if he had suffered any from it. "No—not at all: I have been snuggled up all day: kept the fire going—the fire within as well as the fire without." Pointed to the stove. "All the prospect's sweet and fair—only man is vile." He seemed to enjoy his own fun. Talked brightly though deliberately. He never talks in a hurry.

     W. again spoke of the telegraph boys in the War. "There were clusters of them—clusters of clusters of them: every general with some, every high officer with many: they did most valiant service: yet no one has ever raised a voice for them: oh! if I had but the power to do it! I wasted many of my own opportunities." Then he said: "That fiction article with its two thousand words don't inspire me at all, but this—ah!"

     W. is after all getting anxious to see the bound book. Annoyed

     W. said: "William's imagination is copious: he can make heavy of the lightest thing—yes, and light of the heaviest. That erysipelas face is immortal. He took the Lucretian matter sorely to heart: you remember his allusions to it in the other letter. It was the sort of fight I didn't want to, had no business to, get mixed up in. William is rather cuter in all that than Maurice: his great talents all lay in that direction: but as William himself says there, it was a thing for Maurice to finally decide for himself." W. had laid aside another letter for me. Was I to keep it? "Yes: poke it into your pigeon hole." Then he laughed. "I'm commencing to think that pigeon hole is bulging all round, Horace." I'll not doctor Schmidt's English.

Copenhagen, January 5, 1872.

Walt Whitman, Esq.,

Dear Sir!

     I will postpone no longer to thank you for your kind letter of 7 Dec. It was in my hands two days before the beginning of the new year. Your Leaves of Grass Clausen had already sent me; but the other papers—especially your Democratic Vistas—shall be very welcome. I wonder that they have not arrived yet, and hope that they have not miscarried on the way. This unexpected delay makes me very sorry; my mind is full of your poems, but naturally I won't begin to write before having in my hands as complete materials as possibly.

     Hans Christian Andersen would perhaps not make you very great joy, if you did know him personally. Björnson would be your man, he is a dear friend of mine and coeditor of the periodical. At present he is living in Christiania.

     The enclosed portrait is no bad photography, but a photographical portrait is never truly a good one.

Most truly yours,

Rudolf Schmidt.

     W. had read Lang's article. "Read it all through. It did not impress me as being profound—even competent: it's rather good natured, though it seems to say all the way through—we are nebulous, still, and only nebulous: only preparing—not yet started: that seems to be the prevailing spirit: no doubt it's in some measure exact: but Lang fishes with a short line: it's the best he has but it'll never do any formidable execution."

     W. quickly said as if it had just come to him: "I want you to do something when you are in town: something for me." What? "This: some day, when you are in the neighborhood of the Academy, go in and take a look at Herbert's picture." I interrupted him. "I intended doing so—intended going Sunday." His face lighted up. "Well—Sunday: that's better still: if I could move around, could go at all, I should go Sunday: Sunday is the democratic day." I suggested: "And to see the people as much as the pictures." "Yes—that too: you are right there: to see the people, who beat all the pictures ever painted—indeed, who paint all the pictures. But go anyhow: and take the girls with you: tell Aggie: tell Anne: tell any of them: I place a very high value upon the impressions of women: they are cute, instant, unequivocal: even when they seem to go wrong (seem so to us—to men) they are lightning-like—crowd you with opulent emotional verities." Finally he said: "Now don't forget: I caution you: go yourself—but have the girls go, too: if not with you, then sometime anyway, so we may get the benefit of their report."

     Something brought up the Eakins portrait. I yesterday saw another fine Eakins canvas—the portrait of a bank president. W. said: "I never get over wondering that no one except two or three of us seem to like or even tolerate the Eakins picture of me. For myself I always say I am not only contented but gratified." As to Eakins' work in general: "I should suppose it to be high-tide product: his best canvas, his crowning canvas, so far seems to have been the Gross picture in Jefferson College." Had he seen the original? He has a reproduction of it downstairs given him by Eakins. "No: I have not

     I quoted a newspaper which said: "Leaves of Grass is dead already." W. ejaculated: "He may be right—who knows?" I put in: "Stop where you are: I know." He asked: "How in hell could you know?" I put my hand over my heart. "From in here." He wanted to know: "Have you a safe guide in there?" I replied: "I wish I was as sure of my future as I am of the future of Leaves of Grass." W. looked surprised. "I thought you always felt sure of your future." I explained: "I don't mean my future beyond this life but my future here." W.'s face lighted up. "Oh! you mean what is called worldly success? getting along? Yes, I see!" Then he added quietly: "Well, the only thing I can say as to that is, that it does not do any good to worry in either case. It is the glory of Emersonism—the Emersonian spirit—that it seems to say, 'Let come what will, what comes is right: accept today, tomorrow, just as they come, with just what they bring: all is as it should be: courage, peace!'" I interjected: "And certainly Leaves of Grass more than reinforces that same glorious trumpet call"—he crying back to me: "I hope it does! I hope it does!"

     W. used the word "shenanigan" with reference to someone's style: "That's argot: that's the word direct." W. again quoted Bucke's Magazine of Poetry piece as "a good example of a more virile embodiment of the new principles of composition." He said W. "is always admirably alive" even when "not preserving his literary impeccability." W. said: "I want simple narrative: no furbelows: no frills: just as in Tom's portraits, which the formalists, the academic people, won't have at any price: not show, not dressiness, not a remaking of nature, but life, its manifests, just as it is, as they are." He was very ready. "I knew an artist, a painter, who had portraitized N.P. Willis: can you imagine what that meant? It was fix this, fix that: it was a curl wrong here, a curl wrong there: now a wrinkle out of place—or one too many: and so on, so on, through a whole Catalogue of should-be's: and so finally the artist was sick of his job. This method is an abandonment of fact, a surrender to ceremony, a

Friday, February 8, 1889

     Ed here entered with a letter. W. took it eagerly. Then relaxed. "Oh! I was hoping it was from O'Connor," he said: "I have been sitting here all day thinking of him." Only a letter asking for an autograph.

     Return to Carlyle: discussion of his status. I was warm pro. "We must take the balance of quality in a man." W. acknowledged. "All that is to be said: I think it only right to allow for all that—to take it into account, give it a large margin. But that was not all: there was a local flavor in Carlyle—a flavor of bitterness that was not wholesome, not generous. I should say that something in the same vein is found in our own Dick Stoddard—in his assaults on Poe, others." I protested: "But Carlyle makes up grandly for all this: he has another side." He admitted it. "That is true—and Stoddard has not." Pausing. "Indeed no one would be more ready to stick up for that than I. Carlyle refrained from assaulting Burns—forgave his peccadilloes." W. further: "I do not know why: Burns was not Carlyle's man: Carlyle probably overlooked the sins because Burns was a Scotchman." If that was so how can we account for his defense of Byron? "Did he ever defend Byron? I did not know it." I quoted Froude—that Carlyle would freely criticise Byron himself but not allow it from another. W. said: "That is good to hear. Strangely, too, my own attitude towards Carlyle has always been the same. Mary Costelloe—Mary Smith—would often say: 'You won't hear anything said against Carlyle, will you?' It was a day in the city there: everybody was against Carlyle: there at Smith's, everybody: I stormed like the devil: I would not have it." I asked him

     I quoted Warden Brush as saying to Chadwick of the Sing Sing prisoners: "They sustain my faith in human nature. They are a big-hearted set: very kind to one another." W. visibly touched. "Yes, yes: I am very amenable on that side—very amenable to the story, the appeal. Indeed, Horace," his voice dropping lower: "indeed, there's not a word you have said—not a word—that I do not myself applaud: not a word. You have touched a chord that always induces my sympathy."

     At this point the talk floated back to O'Connor again. At last things wore "a disastrous outlook." And, as W. said: "All the worse that we cannot go to him—see him." Further talk then of Sarrazin. I asked: "Have you written him?" W. said: "No, but I sent him a copy of the big book—sent him a package of pictures." I judged a picture of S. himself would be welcome to W.? "Yes, indeed: he must be quite a fellow." He had no way of "knowing whether Sarrazin is young or old, rich or poor": "in fact, I know nothing at all about him." "Doctor writes me that he has written to Sarrazin or will write." Here W. laughed heartily. "And what a mess that will be, too! I try to imagine Sarrazin trying to get over the Doctor's handwriting: I confess that is one of the things in the Doctor which I can never become reconciled to. If it had not been that I have become accustomed to it through years—have long struggled with it—I would not be able to make much out of it even now: Doctor has a pernicious habit of stringing his words together—sometimes a whole line: it is hard to puzzle it out. Why in heaven's name a man will write a hell of a hand—good people, too, often the best people (especially the English: they are the worst offenders)—I can't say: an insufferable affectation, negligence, carelessness." Especially was this "the offence of the literary classes." "I feel that I am a great sufferer from it: so many of the fellows write me that way."

     To Sarrazin again. "I showed you his letter, didn't I? You know he said there he would print the article in full, in a book—that part of it was cut out of the magazine. Even as it stands it must make five or six pages. Could you make much of it in the French?" Was Bucke

     W. received a copy of Liberty today. He had not noticed that it contained Carpenter's essay on Customs reprinted from The Fortnightly. "I looked over it: I did not see that: certainly I must lay it aside and read Carpenter." Then he explained: "You know Edward is a great Socialist: in fact, all the young fellows over there seem to be Socialists: even Rhys, if not Socialistic himself, breathes the air of Socialism—absorbs it." In fact, "even Costelloe, Mary Smith's husband," had lately been "elevated through some sort of Socialistic victory" to a position "on the Town Council—something or other—Board, or what not." W. motioned towards the table. "There's a note from Mary—I want to send it to Doctor Bucke—in which she speaks of it." He could not make clear to himself the "precise nature of Costelloe's position"—how "elevated thereto"—but "it came out by some Home Rule and"—here a word lost: "a political combination of some kind, however." It was evidently an important position. "A man so fixed is a distinguished personage." And he exclaimed: "London, with its five or six millions of people: the greatest city in the world: it almost thrills you merely to think of it!"

     W. gave me a copy of the Sarrazin sheet for Clifford: also three dollars for insurance. Saw Oldach. Told him of W.'s anxiety. Promised copies of book tomorrow. McKay goes Monday evening. W. greatly relieved. As to numbering books he said: "You do it, won't you? Do it, too, just in the way you think best: I am afraid to undertake it: the worry of getting the numbers right I must not subject myself to: I want to please you—to do what you and Dave advise: but I think you could manage the numbering better than I." First he thought: "Let us keep all the early numbers for our copies here." Then: "I am not so impressed as you and Doctor and Dave with the necessity of this but I am willing it should be done." San Francisco Chronicle review "very light—not worth considering: I sent it to Doctor today." He also said: Doctor must have his Sarrazin slip by this time: we'll see what he says of it."

     Just as I was about to leave, W. handed me two Rolleston notes pinned together and asked me to read them to him. I looked at my watch. He asked: "Haven't you time?" I said: "Yes: I was only wondering whether it wasn't too late for you." This seemed to

Saturday, February 9, 1889

     W. said: "Gurd is Scotch, to be sure. The Scotch: they are masterful stuff: a little too austere, not enough demonstrative, yet steadfast, inexorable:" Said good things of Thomas Davidson. "He's Scotchy of the Scotch: wonderfully human, too: vast in scholarship, all that, which I make least of: I have great respect for what he is." W. wondered if the scholars "ever really achieve a vital, virile, uncompromising style." Added: "The great French writer Legouvé says this is the final, the supreme, test, after all else is tried—how will a poem read, recite, deliver: with what effect? How will it hold its own when repeated? That is the court in which it must justify itself." W. didn't feel "like giving this a radical endorsement." Yet he regarded it as "a theory not to be rejected scornfully."

     I quoted Ingersoll, who has said to me: "Style should lend itself to the lips." This struck W. "It is profound—true: style should lend itself to the lips: it's so scant in words but means so much!" He added: "And Bob has every right to talk of style: he has achieved an undoubtable style of his own." I said to W.: "I like styles out of school not styles out of the schools." He looked at me quizzically. "Say it over again," he said. After I had done so: "That tops the whole thing: styles out of school! The two should be put together: style should lend itself to the lips: styles out of school: why, Horace, it's the style out of school that lends itself best to the lips." W. then broke into quiet laughter. "I'm thinking of the eminent German critic so-so Rolleston spoke about who said Leaves of Grass was not poetry: I was wondering what he would say if Rolleston replied: 'Maybe not—but what is it then?' Even Leaves of Grass might get

     Ed came in for mail. He goes to the post office every evening towards eight. "There's nothing—nothing at all," said W. As Ed was going out the door W. laughingly continued: "And nothing's not hard to carry, is it, Ed?" adding, however: "But don't take nothing for a precedent, Ed: be sure you bring something back!" Then turned to me: "Why is it everybody delights in letters?" I said: "Every letter is a surprise: the best of life is in its surprises." W. declared: "That seems reasonable: there seems to be the spice of the gambler in all of us: we'd do anything to get out of the beaten track—even commit crimes!"

     I got five copies of the book from Oldach. Left one with McKay on the way home. Gave W. the other four. W. was pleased as a kid with a new toy. Turned the first book he picked up over and over. Looked at it from all sides. "A handsome book indeed I should call it!" he exclaimed. After a pause: "It hits me in general, in particular." Continuing to examine it. "All except this 'edition 1889,' which is still not big enough." I asked: "You won't send Doctor's copy up to him?" "No: he can get it when he comes: I shall be very careful how I send them in the mails: forty cents and more a book is rather a strong pull on a weak purse. Besides, at four dollars, taking out a dollar twenty-four for the cover, I'm not making a great deal." W. felt that "Dave may sell some" but he had "no great expectations." D. already has orders for two copies. W. said: "You can take them over to him Monday." I was to keep the manuscript. Oldach told me "the story of" his "life" today in brief. I repeated it to W., who said: "It's a vivid document: I'm glad to turn over a leaf or two of it." And he was genial this time about O. "He's slow—that's sure: he's stubborn as hell—that's sure too: but after that is said the worst is said: for the rest he pleases me perfectly." I said: "Walt, that would make a great description of you, too: it fits your psychology to a t." He asked: "Do you say that?" and then: "I'm willing." Oldach had spoken of the common demand for cheap meretricious bindings. "They won't let me do things right." W. said: "That is a characteristic which runs wild these times everywhere—in goods, in architecture, in art: showiness, gaudiness, blare." Anyway, he added, "we'll

     Insurance today one dollar and eighty instead of three dollars. W. laughed as I handed him the change. "I'll send you again," he said. Endorsed envelope containing policy and receipt. Ingersoll Lockwood wrote W. notifying him of his election "to membership in something or other" and soliciting "some encouraging words." Had he sent them? He laughed. "That would be almost unheard of." W. referred to Gilder. Then to Stoddard. He exclaimed: "God bless Watson!" Then he stopped. I said: "I don't hear you say: God bless Dick." He laughed. "I'm not averse to it: I wouldn't say God damn Dick!" Then he said: "By the way, Dick's eye operation must have been painful"—adding: "It may help him to see some things he never saw before." De Long, from Medford, who preached for Clifford last Sunday, sent his "regrets and affection" to W. W. said: "I am always glad to take these unexpected handshakes." I told him of Emma Lazarus. She wants to do something "to help make" W. "comfortable." W. said: "It is very companionlike of her to say that: I thank her deeply: such goodwill serves to appease my great hunger." I told W. he seemed a bit below par. He acknowledged it: "I am brooding over William: I can't shake the cloud off: I want to go to him: yet I'm almost as impossible as he is. It's sort of eating into me."

     W. handed me a letter nearly falling to pieces. "What do you think of that? he asked. "It's certainly a curio if no more," he said. There was no envelope for it. "It has always been a puzzle to me why people think that because I wrote Children of Adam, Leaves of Grass, I must perforce be interested in all the literature of rape, all the pornograph of vile minds. I have not only been made a target by those who despised me but a victim of violent interpretation by those who condoned me. You know the sort of stuff that's sent to me here." By this time I had read the letter. "You don't put this in the same category, do you?" He disclaimed it. "No: that fellow Matt Carpenter was a brilliant of the first water, looked at from the point of view of the conventional: he gemmed around about there in Congress for some years: he had a reputation more or less outré —whether deservedly or not, I couldn't say." C. used purple ink and marked his letter "confidential."

Sunday, February 10, 1889

     5.45 P.M. W. sitting by the middle window. "I've been looking at the sky," he said. Cold yellow and gold northwest. The sun was gone. This was only the afterglow. He was easy and cordial. Ready to talk. No visitors today. Big fire in the city. I described it to him. He asked many questions. Hunter was up at the house. Left word with my father for me to say to W. his feet were too bad for him to try to get to Mickle street. W. said: "I should have been glad to see him: he's always a tonic." Hunter is doing German translations. Consults with my father concerning these. "That is just like him," W. said: "that stamps the man: I knew he did it. Hunter is very literary but always literarily honest, straight-forward: he comes over to see your father when he has doubts: the ordinary show of knowledge, then let the thing go. Hunter is too honest: has too much conscience for that: he must have the truth." He continued: "The trouble is that writers are too literary—too damned literary. There has grown up—Swinburne I think an apostle of it—the doctrine (you have heard of it? it is dinned everywhere), art for art's sake: think of it—art for art's sake. Let a man really accept that—let that really be his ruling thought—and he is lost." I suggested: "If we say politics for politics' sake they get mad." W.: "So they do: that is very good: it's true: politics for politics' sake, church for church's sake, talk for talk's sake, government for government's sake: state it any way you choose it becomes offensive: it's all out of the same pit. Instead of regarding literature as only a weapon, an instrument, in the service of something larger than itself, it looks upon itself as an end—as a fact to be finally worshipped, adored. To me that's all a horrible blasphemy—a bad-smelling apostasy."

     Nothing new from O'Connor. "I looked in the mail for a letter from him: there was none—no word at all: things are ominously quiet: I have great hope that he will linger on for some time, perhaps as he is now." Here W. paused. Then: "But that's poor wishing indeed: it seems cruel to make such a wish: I have had enough experience in the hospitals to know what it means to linger on, in helpless pain, through agonies of body and spirit, sometimes with even the consciousness of the man departed. Poor William—poor me: I want him to live, I want him to die: "I can't think of being left in the world without him." I asked: "How could you be, Walt?" "That's so: how could I be? But the body is stubborn: it craves bodily presences: it has its own peculiar tenacities—we might say aspirations as well as desires." Then he spoke of his own condition. "I may say through you to anybody who wishes to know about me that I am still resolute, cheery, though badly whacked: I'm like a tree with the chief limbs gone: I may be even getting worse: we have to get something: I don't see how I'm getting better: so I must be worse: still, I'm not worrying about that. My life from my bed to my chair, from my chair to my bed again, is tedious, but endurable." I said: "Your troubles are local—physical: you are all right every other way." But he shook his head. "I don't know: it is true I feel pretty comfortable: am having a spell of good weather now: but I'm like the remains of myself physically—no more." But he admitted: "I can write, read, work: I find I can laugh, cry, be myself, still, in most ways: I suppose I shouldn't kick because I can't climb mountains."

     I spoke of Clifford. "He didn't see anything strained in that Critic review." W. said: "No: nor do I: Clifford is right. I don't think Doctor has done half justice to that piece: it deserves a great deal more—oh! a great deal more—than he has been willing to give it: I myself think it among the best things recently said in our favor." Then as he poked away at the fire: "The Doctor runs off that way at times: I can't explain it." Sarrazin was mentioned. W. said: "Of course that's a heavier gun: I know the Critic stuff is light weight brought up against anything so formidable, inclusive, as Sarrazin's study." I asked W. how he liked having S. consider him as a Yankee. He took that good-naturedly. "I have not the slightest objection in the world: as he uses the word I am willing to accept it: Kennedy shied over it: I haven't yet written Sloane to say I am unperturbed

     I described a flight of crows I had seen an hour before on the river—"a perfect line of at least eighteen," I said: W. putting in, "like a file of soldiers, I suppose?" I spoke of how as the birds got farther away south they swung and swayed at last like one bird and disappeared. W. said: "I never knew crows to fly like that: I have seen them in groups, clusters, but not in lines: but the gulls and hawks often form so." I went into more detail. Then he said: "They undoubtedly were crows: it was, must have been, a fine spectacle." I asked him about the gulls. "They are the most wonderful of all the birds on the river," I said. He said: "So they are, the gull makes its big stroke—then it is still: floats, floats, across long sweeps of space, without any apparent motion: it is indeed a great sight. The crow never flies that way: he flaps his wings incessantly: is nervous, without inertia." Then he said: "You make me mad for outdoors when you bring in such reports: yet I can't go out: so your reports are the next best thing: they bring outdoors in here a bit: it's only a borrowed satisfaction: yet it helps some."

     I said: "I dropped in at the Academy today." He was all attention at once. "And saw the picture?" "Yes." "And what of it?" I didn't say much of it. "Mrs. Burleigh came up while I stood there." "What did she say?" "She said it failed to give you personality: that made it you only usual: that you are not a usual man." He reflected: "That's interesting—maybe significant: I don't know. But the main thing is, how did it hit you ?" I said: "I don't see that that's the main thing—but I don't mind saying it didn't hit me." "Do you mean hit you for good?" "No: I mean that it left me indifferent." Then he asked me: "Might you not get more out of it if you studied it longer?" I could not deny that. He then asked: "What is the cardinal fault? there must be one: otherwise you would not have been left indifferent: could you put it into a word?" The picture is at the head of the stairs. People who passed it as I stood round asked each other: "Who is that old man?" W. finally said: "I see that you don't want to be quizzed: that's more significant to me than if you said something."

     In the meantime it had grown quite dark. With my help W. closed