She wrote poetry from her childhood, and when in early youth she was left a widow she settled down to lead a literary life in earnest. In those days and in America this was not so simple a proceeding as it has since become. If you wrote an essay upon Shelley, for example, the most influential family in Providence considered that you had fallen from grace. If, like Mr. Ellery Channing, you went to Europe and left your wife behind, this was sufficient proof that you were not a ‘great perfect man’, as the true poet is bound to be. Mrs. Whitman took her stand against such crudities, and, indeed, rather went out of her way to invite attack. Whatever the fashion and whatever the season she wore her ‘ floating veils’ and her thin slippers, and carried a fan in her hand. By means of ‘ inverting her lampshades ‘ and hanging up bits of drapery her sitting-room was kept in a perpetual twilight. It was the age of the Transcendentalists, and the fans and the veils and the twilight were, no doubt, intended to mitigate the solidity of matter, and entice the soul out of the body with as little friction as possible. Nature too had been kind in endowing her with a pale, eager face, a spiritual expression, and deep-set eyes that gazed ‘beyond but never at you’.
Her house became a centre for the poets of the district, for she was witty and charming as well as enthusiastic. John Hay, G. W. Curtis, and the Hon. Wilkins Updike used to send her their works to criticize, or in very long and abstruse letters tried to define what they meant by poetry. The mark of that particular set, which was more or less connected with Emerson and Margaret Fuller, was an enthusiastic championship of the rights of the soul. They ventured into a sphere where words naturally were unable to support them. ‘Poetry’, as Mr. Curtis said, ‘is the adaption of music to an intellectual sphere. But it must therefore be revealed through souls too fine to be measured justly by the intellect.... Music... is a womanly accomplishment, because it is sentiment, and the instinct declares its nature’, etc. This exalted mood never quite deserted them when they were writing about matters of fact. When Mrs. Whitman forgot to answer a letter Mr. Curtis inquired whether she was ill ‘or has the autumn which lies round the horizon like a beautifully hued serpent crushing the flower of summer fascinated you to silence with its soft, calm eyes?’ Mrs. Whitman, it is clear, was the person who kept them all up to this very high standard. Thus things went on until Mrs. Whitman had reached the age of forty-two. One July night, in 1845, she happened to be wandering in her garden in the moonlight when Edgar Allan Poe passed by and saw her. ‘From that hour I loved you’, he wrote later. ‘... your unknown heart seemed to pass into my bosom — there to dwell for ever.’ The immediate result was that he wrote the verses To Helen which he sent her. Three years later, when he was the famous poet of The Raven, Mrs. Whitman replied with a valentine, of which the last stanza runs —
Then, oh grim and. ghastly Raven
Wilt thou to my heart and ear Be a Raven true as ever
Flapped his wings and croaked ‘Despair’?
Not a bird that roams the forest
Shall our lofty eyrie share.
For some time their meeting was postponed, and no word of prose passed between them. It might have been postponed for ever had it not been for another copy of verses which Mrs. Whitman ended with the line:
I dwell with ‘ Beauty which is Hope ‘.
Upon receipt of these verses Poe immediately procured a letter of introduction and set off to Providence. His declaration of love took place in the course of the next fortnight during a walk in the cemetery. Mrs. Whitman would not consent to an engagement, but she agreed to write to him, and thus the famous correspondence began.
Professor Harrison can only compare Poe’s letters to the letters of Abelard and Eloise or to the Sonnets from the Portuguese; Miss Ticknor says that they have won themselves a niche among the world’s classic love letters. Professor Woodberry, on the other hand, thinks that they should never have been published. We agree with Professor Woodberry, not because they do damage to Poe’s reputation, but because we find them very tedious compositions. Whether you are writing a review or a love letter the great thing is to be confronted with a very vivid idea of your subject. When Poe wrote to Mrs. Whitman he might have been addressing a fashion plate in a ladies’ newspaper — a fashion plate which walks the cemetery by moonlight, for the atmosphere is one of withered roses and moonshine. The fact that he had buried Virginia a short time before, that he denied his love for her, that he was writing to Annie at the same time and in the same style, that he was about to propose to a widow for the sake of her money — all his perfidies and meannesses do not by themselves make it impossible that he loved Mrs. Whitman genuinely. Were it not for the letters we might accept the charitable view that this was his last effort at redemption. But when we read the letters we feel that the man who wrote them had no emotion left about anything; his world was a world of phantoms and fashion plates; his phrases are the cast-off phrases that were not quite good enough for a story. He could see neither himself nor others save through a mist of opium and alcohol. The engagement, which had been made conditional upon his reform, was broken off; Mrs. Whitman sank on to a sofa holding a handkerchief ‘ drenched in ether ‘ to her face, and her old mother rather pointedly observed to Poe that the train was about to leave for New York.
Cynical though it sounds, we doubt whether Mrs. Whitman lost as much as she gained by the unfortunate end of her love affair. Her feeling for Poe was probably more that of a benefactress than of a lover; for she was one of those people who ‘devoutly believe that serpents may be reclaimed. This is only effected by patience and prayer — but the results are wonderful.’ This particular serpent was irreclaimable; he was picked up unconscious in the street and died a year later. But he left behind him a crop of reptiles who taxed Mrs. Whitman’s patience and needed her prayers for the rest of her life. She became the recognized authority upon Poe, and whenever a biographer was in need of facts or old Mrs. Clemm was in need of money they applied to her. She had to decide the disputes of the different ladies as to which had been loved the most, and to keep the peace between the rival historians, for whether a woman is more vain of her love or an author of his work has yet to be decided. But the opportunities which such a position gave her of endless charity and literary discussion evidently suited her and the good sense and wit of the bird-like little woman, who was extremely poor and had an eccentric sister to provide for, seem to justify her statement that ‘ the results are wonderful’.
Visits to Walt Whitman
THE great fires of intellectual life which burn at Oxford and at Cambridge are so well tended and long established that it is difficult to feel the wonder of this concentration upon immaterial things as one should. When, however, one stumbles by chance upon an isolated fire burning brightly without associations or encouragement to guard it, the flame of the spirit becomes a visible hearth where one may warm one’s hands and utter one’s thanksgiving. It is only by chance that one comes upon them; they burn in unlikely places. If asked to sketch the condition of Bolton about the year 1885 one’s thoughts would certainly revolve round the cotton market, as if the true heart of Bolton’s prosperity must lie there. No mention would be made of the group of young men — clergymen, manufacturers, artisans, and bank clerks by profession — who met on Monday evenings, made a point of talking about something serious, could broach the most intimate and controversial matters frankly and without fear of giving offence, and held in particular the view that Walt Whitman was ‘the greatest epochal figure in all literature’. Yet who shall set a limit to the effect of such talking? In this instance, besides the invaluable spiritual service, it also had some surprisingly tangible results. As a consequence of those meetings two of the talkers crossed the Atlantic; a steady flow of presents and messages set in between Bolton and Camden; and Whitman as he lay dying had the thought of ‘ those good Lancashire chaps ‘ in his mind. The book recounting these events has been published before, but it is well worth reprinting for the light it sheds upon a new type of hero and the ki
nd of worship which was acceptable to him.
To Whitman there was nothing unbefitting the dignity of a human being in the acceptance either of money or of underwear, but he said that there is no need to speak of these things as gifts. On the other hand, he had no relish for a worship founded upon the illusion that he was somehow better or other than the mass of human beings. ‘Well,’ he said, stretching out his hand to greet Mr. Wallace, ‘you’ve come to be disillusioned, have you?’ And Mr. Wallace owned to himself that he was a little disillusioned. Nothing in Walt Whitman’s appearance was out of keeping with the loftiest poetic tradition. He was a magnificent old man, massive, shapely, impressive by reason of his power, his delicacy, and his unfathomable depths of sympathy. The disillusionment lay in the fact that ‘the greatest epochal figure in all literature’ was ‘simpler, homelier, and more intimately related to myself than I had imagined’. Indeed, the poet seems to have been at pains to bring his common humanity to the forefront. And everything about him was as rough as it could be. The floor, which was only half carpeted, was covered with masses of papers; eating and washing things mixed themselves with proofs and newspaper cuttings in such ancient accumulations that a precious letter from Emerson dropped out accidentally from the mass after years of interment. In the midst of all this litter Walt Whitman sat spotlessly clean in his rough grey suit, with much more likeness to a retired farmer whose working days are over; it pleased him to talk of this man and of that, to ask questions about their children and their land; and, whether it was the result of thinking back over places and human beings rather than over books and thoughts, his mood was uniformly benignant. His temperament, and no sense of duty, led him to this point of view, for in his opinion it behoved him to ‘give out or express what I really was, and, if I felt like the Devil, to say so!’
And then it appeared that this wise and free-thinking old farmer was getting letters from Symonds and sending messages to Tennyson, and was indisputably, both in his opinion and in yours, of the same stature and importance as any of the heroic figures of the past or present. Their names dropped into his talk as the names of equals. Indeed, now and then something seemed ‘to set him apart in spiritual isolation and to give him at times an air of wistful sadness’, while into his free and easy gossip drifted without effort the phrases and ideas of his poems. Superiority and vitality lay not in a class but in the bulk; the average of the American people, he insisted, was immense, ‘though no man can become truly heroic who is really poor’. And ‘Shakespeare and suchlike’ come in of their own accord on the heels of other matters. ‘Shakespeare is the poet of great personalities.’ As for passion, ‘I rather think Aeschylus greater’. ‘A ship in full sail is the grandest sight in the world, and it has never yet been put into a poem.’ Or he would throw off comments as from an equal height upon his great English contemporaries. Carlyle, he said, ‘lacked amorousness’. Carlyle was a growler. When the stars shone brightly—’ I guess an exception in that country’ — and some one said ‘It’s a beautiful sight’, Carlyle said, ‘It’s a sad sight’.... ‘What a growler he was!’
It is inevitable that one should compare the old age of two men who steered such different courses until one saw nothing but sadness in the shining of the stars and the other could sink into a reverie of bliss over the scent of an orange. In Whitman the capacity for pleasure seemed never to diminish, and the power to include grew greater and greater; so that although the authors of this book lament that they have only a trivial bunch of sayings to offer us, we are left with a sense of an ‘ immense background or vista ‘ and stars shining more brightly than in our climate.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
A HUNDRED years ago one might talk more glibly of American literature than it is safe to do at present. The ships that pass each other on the Atlantic do more than lift a handful of Americans and Englishmen from one shore to another; they have dulled our national self-consciousness. Save for the voice and certain small differences of manner which give them a flavour of their own, Americans sink into us, over here, like raindrops into the sea. On their side they have lost much of that nervous desire to assert their own independence and maturity in opposition to a mother country which was always reminding them of their tender age. Such questions as Lowell conceived— ‘A country of parvenus, with a horrible consciousness of shoddy running through politics, manners, art, literature, nay, religion itself?’ and answered as we may guess, no longer fret them; the old adjectives which Hawthorne rapped out— ‘the boorishness, the stolidity, the self-sufficiency, the contemptuous jealousy, the half sagacity (etc., etc.) that characterize this strange people ‘ — are left for their daily Press in moments of panic; for international criticism, as Mr. Henry James has proved, has become a very delicate and serious matter. The truth is that time and the steamboats have rubbed out these crudities; and if we wish to understand American art, or politics, or literature, we must look as closely as we look when blood and speech are strange to us.
The men who were most outspoken against us brought about this reasonable relationship partly because we read their books as our own, and partly because literature is able to suggest the surroundings in which it is produced. We are now able to think of Boston or Cambridge as places with a life of their own as distinct and as different from ours as the London of Pope is different from the London of Edward VII. The man who contributed to this intimacy, which is founded upon an understanding that we differ in many ways, as much as any of the rest, was undoubtedly Oliver Wendell Holmes, although he did it by means that were very different from theirs. He was, in some respects, the most complete American of them all.
He was born in 1809 of the best blood in the country, for his father, the Rev. Abiel Holmes, came from an old Puritan stock which might be traced to a lawyer of Gray’s Inn in the sixteenth century, and his mother, Sarah Wendell, had distinguished blood from many sources, Dutch and Norman and good American. His father was stern and handsome, and taught ‘the old-fashioned Calvinism, with all its horrors’; his mother was a little sprightly woman, inquisitive and emotional. People who knew them said that the son inherited more from her than from his father. It was one of the charming characteristics of the mature man that he was always looking back to his childhood, and steeping it in such shade and quaintness as a ‘gambrel-roofed house’ built in 1730 will provide; like Hawthorne he had a pathetic desire to mix his childish memories with something old, mysterious, and beautiful in itself. There were dents in the floor where the soldiers had dropped their muskets during the Revolution; the family portraits had been slashed by British rapiers; and there was a chair where Lord Percy had sat to have his hair dressed. From the vague memories that hang about his early years, and inspire some of the pleasantest pages in his books, one may choose two for their importance. ‘I might have been a minister myself, for aught I know, if had not looked and talked so like an undertaker.’ It was not until much later that he could analyse what had happened to him as a child. When he could read he was taught that ‘ We were a set of little fallen wretches, exposed to the wrath of God by the fact of that existence which we could not help.’ He was roused in revolt against what he called ‘the inherited servitude of my ancestors’, and not only decided against the ministry as a calling, but never ceased to preach the beliefs which his early revolt had taught him. These beliefs were started in him, or at any rate his old views were shaken for ever, by a peep through a telescope on the common at the transit of Venus. He looked, and the thought came to him, like a shock, that the earth too was no bigger than a marble; he went on to think how this planet is ‘equipped and provisioned for a long voyage in space’. The shock seems to have shown him both that we are part of a great system, and also that our world will last for a period ‘transcending all our ordinary measures of time’. If it is true that we are to continue indefinitely, then it is possible, he found, to consider that ‘ this colony of the universe is an educational institution ‘ and this is ‘ the only theory which can “justify the wa
y of God to man’”. We may disbelieve in the Garden of Eden and in the fall of man; and we may believe that ‘ this so-called evil to which I cannot close’ is a passing condition from which we shall emerge. He had found a basis for that optimism which inspired his teaching, and, if the reasons which he gave seem insufficient, his conclusions and the way they came to him — looking through a telescope for ten cents at the transit of Venus — - bear out much that we think when we know him better. The practical result of the conflict was that he became a doctor instead of a clergyman, spent two years in Paris studying his profession, visited England and Italy on his way, and returned to practise in Boston, living there and at Cambridge, with the exception of his hundred days in Europe, for the rest of his life.
The most diligent of biographers can find little to add to such a record, nor did Dr. Holmes come to the rescue. His letters are not intimate; like other people who write much about themselves in public, he has little to say in private. As a doctor he never won a large practice, for he not only collected a volume of poetry from time to time, but smiled when the door was opened and made jokes upon the staircase. When someone asked him what part of anatomy he liked best, he answered: ‘The bones; they are cleanest’. The answer shows us the ‘plain little dapper man’, who could never bear the sights of a sick-room, who laughed to relieve the tension, who would run away when a rabbit was to be chloroformed, who was clean and scrupulous in all respects, and inclined, as a young man, to satirize the world with a somewhat acrid humour. Two friends have put together a picture of him. ‘A small, compact, little man... buzzing about like a bee, or fluttering like a humming bird, exceedingly difficult to catch unless he be really wanted for some kind act, and then you are sure of him.’ The other adds that he has a ‘powerful jaw and a thick strong under-lip, that gives decision to his look, with a dash of pertness. In conversation he is animated and cordial — sharp, too, taking the words out of one’s mouth.’
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 494
