Vol. II. No. 6. Five cents. Per Year, Fifty cents ^"WO -«C-\ Xittle 3ourneps SERIES FOR 1896 Xittle Sourness to tbe Ibomes of Bmerican Butbors The papers below specified, were, with the exception of that contributed by the editor, Mr. Hubbard, originally issued by the late G. P. Putnam, in 1853, in a series entitled Homes of American Authors. It is now- near ly half a century since this series (which won for itself at the time a very noteworthy prestige) was brought before the public ; and the present publishers feel that no apology is needed in presenting to a new generation of American readers papers of such distinctive biographical interest and literary value. No. 1, Emerson, by Geo. W. Curtis. " 2, Bryant, by Caroline M. Kirkland. " 3, Prescott, by Geo. S. Hillard. " 4, Lowell, by Charles F. Briggs. " 5, Simms, by Wm. Cullen Bryant. " 6, Walt Whitman, by Elbert Hubbard. " 7, Hawthorne, by Geo. Wm. Curtis. " 8, Audubon, by Parke Godwin. " 9, Irving, by H. T. Tuckerman. " 10, Longfellow by Geo. Wm. Curtis. " u, Everett, by Geo. S. Hillard. " 12, Bancroft, by Geo. W. Greene. The above papers, which will form the series of Little Journeys for the year 1896, will be issued monthly, beginning January, in the same general style as the series of 1895, at socts. a year. Single copies, 5 cts., postage paid. Entered at the Post Office, New Rochelle, N, Y., as second class matter Copyright, 1896, by g. p. putnam's sons 27 a 29 West 23D Street, New York 24 Bedford Street, Strand, London The Knickerbocker Press, New Rochelle, N. Y. 7$ 3331 WHITMAN. 167 All seems beautiful to me. I can repeat over to men and women, You have done such good to me I would do the same to you, I will recruit for myself and you as I go. I will scatter myself among men and women as I go, I will toss a new gladness and roughness among them. — Song of the Open Road. 168 WHITMAN. BY ELBERT HUBBARD. MAX NORDAU wrote a book- wrote it with his tongue in his cheek, a dash of vitriol in the ink, and with a pen that scratched. And the first critic who seemed to place a just estimate on the work was Mr. Zang- will (who has no Christian name). Mr. Zangwill made an attempt to swear out a writ de lunatico inquirendo against his Jewish brother, on the ground that the first symptom of insanity is often the de- lusion that others are insane ; and this being so, Dr. Nordau was not a safe sub- 169 TIGlbitman ject to be at large. But the Assize of Public Opinion denied the petition and the dear people bought the book at from three to five dollars per copy. Printed in several languages, its sales have mounted to a hundred thousand volumes, and the author's net profit is full forty thousand dollars. No wonder is it that, with pockets full to bursting, Dr. Nordau goes out behind the house and laughs uproariously whenever he thinks of how he has worked the world ! If Dr. Talmage is the Barnum of The- ology, surely we may call Dr. Nordau the Barnum of Science. His agility in ma- nipulating facts is equal to Hermann's now-you-see-it and now-you-don't with pocket handkerchiefs. Yet Hermann's exhibition is worth the admittance fee and Nordau' s book (seemingly written in collaboration with Jules Verne and Mark Twain) would be cheap for a dol- lar. But what I object to is Prof. Her- mann's disciples posing as Sure-Enough Materializing Mediums and Prof. Lom- 170 •QClbitman broso's followers calling themselves Sci- entists, when each goes forth without scrip or purse with no other purpose than to supply themselves with both. Yet it was Barnum himself who said that the public delights in being hum- bugged, and strange it is that we will not allow ourselves to be thimble-rigged without paying for the privilege. Nordau's success hinged on his auda- cious assumption that the public knew nothing of the Law of Antithesis. Yet Plato explained that the opposite of things look alike, and sometimes are alike, and that was quite awhile ago. The multitude answered : " Thou hast a devil " ; Many of them said : " He hath a devil and is mad" ; Festus said with a loud voice : " Paul, thou art beside thy- self.' ' And Nordau shouts in a voice more heady than that of Pilate, more throaty than that of Festus— " Mad— Whitman was — mad beyond the cavil of a doubt ! " In 1862, Lincoln, looking out of a win- dow (before lilacs last in the dooryard 171 TKUbftman bloomed) on one of the streets of Wash- ington, saw a workingman in shirt sleeves go by. Turning to a friend, the President said : " There goes a man ! " The ex- clamation sounds singularly like that of Napoleon on meeting Goethe. But the Corsican's remark was intended for the poet's ear, while Lincoln did not know who his man was, although he came to know him afterward. Lincoln in his early days was a work- ingman — an athlete, and he never quite got the idea out of his head (and I am glad) that he was still a hewer of wood. He once told George William Curtis that he more than half expected yet to go back to the farm and earn his daily bread by the work that his hands found to do ; he dreamed of it nights, and when- ever he saw a splendid toiler, he felt like hailing the man as brother and striking hands with him. When Lincoln saw Whitman strolling majestically past, he took him for a stevedore or possibly the foreman of a construction gang. 172 TKHbttman "Whitman was fifty-one years old then. His long flowing beard was snow white and the shock that covered his Jove- like head was iron grey. His form was that of an Apollo who had arrived at years of discretion. He weighed even two hundred pounds and was just six feet high. His plain check cotton shirt was open at the throat to the breast ; and he had an independence, a self-suffi- ciency, and withal a cleanliness, a sweet- ness, a gentleness, that told that, although he had a giant's strength, he did not use it like a giant. Whitman used no to- bacco, neither did he apply hot and re- bellious liquors to his blood and with unblushing forehead woo the means of debility and disease. Up to his fifty- third year he had never known a sick day, although at thirty his hair had be- gun to whiten. He had the look of age in his youth and the look of youth in his age that often marks the exceptional man. But at fifty-three his splendid health was crowded to the breaking strain. 173 •fldbftman How ? Through caring for wounded, sick, and dying men : hour after hour, day after day, through the long 'silent watches of the night. From 1864 to the day of his death in 1892, physically, he was a man in ruins. But he did not wither at the top. Through it all he held the healthy optimism of boyhood, carrying with him the perfume of the morning and the lavish heart of youth. Doctor Bucke, who was superintendent of a nospital for "the insane for fifteen years, and the intimate friend of Whit- man all the time, has said : "His build, his stature, his exceptional health of mind and body, the size .and form of his features, his cleanliness of mind and body, the grace of his movements and gestures, the grandeur, and espe- cially the magnetism of his presence ; the charm of his voice, his genial kindly humor ; the simplicity of his habits and tastes, his freedom from conven- tion, the largeness and beauty of his manner ; his calmness and majesty ; his 174 TKtbttman charity and forbearance — his entire unre- sentfulness under whatever provocation ; his liberality, his universal sympathy with humanity in all ages and lands, his broad tolerance, his catholic friendliness, and his unexampled faculty of attracting af- fection, all prove his perfectly propor- tioned manliness." But Whitman differed from the disci- ple of Lombroso in two notable particu- lars : He had no quarrel with the world, and he did not wax rich. "One thing thou lackest, O Walt Whitman!" we might have said to the poet, " you are not a financier." He died poor. But this is not proof of degeneracy save on 'Change. When the children of Count Tolstoy en- deavored to have him adjudged insane, the Court denied the application and voiced the wisest decision that ever came out of Russia : A man who gives away his money is not necessarily more foolish than he who saves it. And with Mr. Horace Iy. Traubel I say : Whitman was the sanest man I ever saw. 175 II. SOME men make themselves homes ; and others there be who rent rooms. Walt Whitman was essen- tially a citizen of the world : the world was his home and mankind were his friends. There was a quality in the man peculiarly universal : a strong, virile poise that asked for nothing, but took what it needed. He loved men as brothers, yet his brothers after the flesh understood him not ; he loved children — they turned to him instinctively — but he had no children of his own ; he loved women and yet this strongly sexed and manly man never loved a woman. And I might here say as Philip Gilbert Hamerton said of Turner, " He was lamentably unfortunate in this : throughout his whole life he never came 176 •Gdbttman under the ennobling and refining influ- ence of a good woman." It requires two to make a home. The first home was made when a woman, cradling in her loving arms a baby, crooned a lullaby. All the tender senti- mentality we throw around a place is the result of the sacred thought that we live there with someone else. It is ourhome. The home is a tryst — the place where we retire and shut the world out. Lovers make a home just as birds make a nest, and unless a man knows the spell of the divine passion I hardly see how he can have a home at all. He only rents a room. Camden is separated from the city of Philadelphia by the Delaware River. Camden lies low and flat — a great sandy, monotonous waste of straggling build- ings. Here and there are straight rows of cheap houses, evidently erected by staid, broad-brimmed speculators from across the river, with eyes on the main chance. But they reckoned ill, for the 177 TWlbttman town did not boom. Some of these houses have marble steps and white barn door shutters, that might withstand a siege. When a funeral takes place in one of these houses the shutters are tied with strips of mournful black alpaca for a year and a day. Engineers, dockmen, express drivers, and mechanics largely make up citizens of Camden. Of course, Camden has its smug corner where pros- perous merchants most do congregate : where they play croquet in the front yards, and have window boxes, and a piano and veranda chairs and terra cotta statuary, but for the most part the houses of Camden are rented, and rented cheap. Many of the domiciles are frame and have the happy tumble-down look of the back streets in Charleston or Richmond — those streets where white trash merges off into prosperous colored aristocracy. Old hats do duty in keeping out the fresh air where providence has interfered and broken out a pane ; blinds hang by a single hinge ; bricks on the chimney tops 178 Wbitman threaten the passers-by ; stringers and posts mark the place where proud picket fences once stood — the pickets having gone for kindling long ago. In the warm summer evenings men in shirt-sleeves sit on the front steps and stolidly smoke, while children pile up sand in the streets and play in the gutters. Parallel with Mickle Street, a block away, are railway tracks. There noisy switch engines, that never keep Sabbath, puff back and forth, day and night, send- ing showers of soot and smoke when the wind is right (and it usually is) straight over Number 328, where, according to John Addington Symonds and William Michael Rossetti, lived the mightiest seer of the century — the man whom they rank with Socrates, Epictetus, St. Paul, Michael Angel o, and Dante. It was in August of 1883 that I first walked up that little street — a hot sultry summer evening. There had been a shower that turned the dust of the un- paved roadway to mud. The air was 179 •tfHbftman close and muggy. The houses, built right up to the side-walks, over which in little gutters the steaming sewage ran, seemed to have discharged their occupants into the street to enjoy the cool of the day. Barefooted children by the score paddled in the mud. All the steps were filled with loungers ; some of the men had discarded not only coats but shirts as well and now sat in flaming red under- wear, holding babies. They say that " woman's work is never done," but to the women of Mickle Street this does not apply, but stay ! per- haps their work is never done. Anyway, I remember that women sat on the curbs in calico dresses or leaned out of the windows, and all seemed supremely free from care. " Can you tell me where Mr. Whitman lives?" I asked a portly dame who was resting her elbows on a window-sill. "Who?" "Mr. Whitman!" " You mean Walt Whitman ? " 180 TWlbitman "Yes." "Show the gentleman, Molly, he'll give you a nickel, I 'm sure ! " I had not seen Molly. She stood be- hind me, but as her mother spoke she seized tight hold of one of my fingers, claiming me as her lawful prey, and all the other children looked on with en- vious eyes as little Molly threw at them glances of scorn and marched me off. Molly was five, going on six, she told me. She had bright red hair, a grimy face and little chapped feet that made not a sound as we walked. She got her nickel and carried it in her mouth and this made conversation difficult. After going one block she suddenly stopped, squared me around and pointing said, "Them is he ! " and disappeared. In a wheeled rattan chair, in the hall- way, a little back from the door of a plain weather-beaten house, sat the coat- less philosopher, his face and head wreathed in a tumult of snow white hair. I had a little speech, all prepared 181 TKttbttman weeks before and committed to memory, that I intended to repeat, telling him how I had read his poems and admired them. And further I had stored away in my mind a few blades from Leaves of Grass that I proposed to bring out at the right time as a sort of certificate of char- acter. But when that little girl jerked me right-about-face and heartlessly de- serted me, I stared dumbly at the man whom I had come a hundred miles to see. I began angling for my little speech but could not fetch it. " Hello ! " called the philosopher, out of the white aureole ; " Hello ! come here, boy ! " He held out his hand and as I took it there was a grasp with meaning in it. " Don't go yet, Joe," he said to a man seated on the step smoking a cob pipe. " The old woman 's calling me," said the swarthy Joe. Joe evidently held truth lightly. ''So long, Walt!" " Good-bye, Joe. Sit down, lad, sit down ! " 182 "Mbitman I sat in the doorway at his feet. "Now isn't it queer — that fellow is a regular philosopher and works out some great problems, but he 's ashamed to ex- press 'em. He could no more give you his best than he could fly. Ashamed I s'pose, ashamed of the best that is in him. We are all a little that way — all but me— I try to write my best, regardless of whether the thing sounds ridiculous or not — regardless of what others think or say or have said. Ashamed of our holiest, truest, and best ! Is it not too bad ? " You are twenty-five now? well boy, you may grow until you are thirty and then you will be as wise as you ever will be. Have n't you noticed that men of sixty have no clearer vision than men of forty ? One reason is that we have been taught that we know all about life and death and the mysteries of the grave. But the main reason is that we are ashamed to shove out and be ourselves. Jesus expressed his own individuality 183 imbitman perhaps more than any man we know of, and so he wields a wider influence than any other. And this though we only have a record of just twenty -seven days of his life. "Now that fellow that just left is an engineer, and he dreams some beautiful dreams, but he never expresses them to any one, only hints them to me, and this only at twilight. He is like a weasel or mink or a whip-poor-will, he comes out only at night. " ' If the weather was like this all the time people would never learn to read and write,' said Joe to me just as you arrived. And isn't that so? Here we can count a hundred people up and down this street, and not one is reading, not one but that is just lolling about, except the children and they are only happy when playing in the dirt. Why if this tropical weather should continue we would all slip back into South Sea Islanders ! You can only raise good men in a little strip around the North Temperate Zone — when you get 184 TlGlbitman out of the track of the glacier a tender hearted, sympathetic man of brains is an accident." Then the old man suddenly ceased and I imagined that he was following the thought out in his own mind. We sat silent for a space. The twilight fell, and a lamp-lighter lit the street lamp on the corner. He stopped an instant to cheerily salute the poet as he past. The man sit- ting on the doorstep, across the street, smoking, knocked the ashes out of his pipe on his boot heel and went indoors. Women called their children, who did not respond, but still played on. Then the creepers were carried in, to be fed their bread and milk and put to bed ; and shortly shrill feminine voices ordered the older children indoors, and some obeyed. The night crept slowly on. I heard old Walt chuckle behind me, talking incoherently to himself, and then he said : "You are wondering why I live in such a place as this ? " 185 THUbitman "Yes, that is exactly what I was think- ing of!" "You think I belong in the country, in some quiet shady place. But all I have to do is to shut my eyes and go there. No man loves the woods more than I — I was born within sound of the sea— down on Long Island and I know all the songs that the sea-shell sings. But this babble and babel of voices pleases me better especially since my legs went on a strike, for although I can't walk, you see I still mix with the throng, so I suffer no loss. In the woods a man must be all hands and feet. I like the folks, the plain, ignorant unpretentious folks ; and the youngsters that come and slide on my cellar door do not disturb me a bit. I 'm different from Carlyle — you know he had a noise-proof room where he locked him- self in. Now when a huckster goes by, crying his wares I open the blinds, and often wrangle with the fellow over the price of things. But the rogues have got into a way lately of leaving truck for me 186 TQbitman and refusing pay. To-day an Irishman passed in three quarts of berries and walked off pretending to be mad because I offered to pay. When he was gone, I beckoned to the babies over the way — they came over and we had a feast. "Yes, I like the folks around here; I like the women, and I like the men, and I like the babies, and I like the young- sters that play in the alley and make mud pies on my steps. I expect to stay here until I die." rt You speak of death as a matter of course — you are not afraid to die ? " 1 ' Oh, no, my boy, death is as natural as life, and a deal kinder. But it is all good — I accept it all and give thanks — you have not forgotten my chant to death?" "Not I!" I repeated a few lines from Drum Taps. He followed me, rapping gently with his cane on the floor, and with little interjectory remarks of "That's so!" "Very true ! " " Good, good ! " And 187 TMlbitman when I faltered and lost the lines he picked them up where "The voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird." In a strong clear voice but a voice full of sublime feeling he repeated : Come, lovely and soothing Death, Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving, In the day, in the night, to all, to each, Sooner or later, delicate Death. Praised be the fathomless universe For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious, And for love, sweet love— but praise ! praise ! praise For the sure enwinding arms of cool, enfolding Death. Dark Mother, always gliding near with soft feet, Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome ? Then I chant for thee, I glorify thee above all, I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly Approach, strong deliveress, When it is so, when thou hast taken them I joyously sing the dead, I^ost in the loving, floating ocean of thee, I,aved in the flood of thy bliss, O Death. From me to thee glad serenades, Dances for thee I propose, saluting thee, adorn- ments and feastings for thee, And the sights of the open landscape and the high spread sky are fitting, And life and the fields, and the huge and thought- ful night. 188 TiClbitman The night in silence under many a star, The ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I know, And the soul turning to thee, O vast and well veil'd Death, And the body gratefully nestling close to thee. Over the tree-tops I float thee a song, Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and the prairies wide, Over the dense-packed cities all, and the teem- ing wharves, and ways, I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee O Death. The last playing youngster had silently disappeared from the streets. The door- steps were deserted — save where across the way a young man and maiden sat in the gloaming conversing in low monotone. The clouds had drifted away. A great yellow star shone out above the chimney tops in the east. I arose to go. " I wish you 'd come oftener — I see you so seldom, lad," said the old man, half plaintively. I did not explain that we had never met before — that I had come from New York purposely to see him. He thought he knew me. And so he did — as much 189 ■Qdbitman as I could impart. The rest was irrele- vant. As to my occupation or name, what booted it ? — he had no curiosity concern- ing me. I grasped his outstretched hand in both of my own. He said not a word ; neither did I. I turned and made my way to the ferry — past the whispering lovers on the door- steps, and over the railway tracks where the noisy engines puffed. As I walked on board the boat the wind blew up cool and fresh from the west. The star in the east grew brighter, and other stars came out, reflecting themselves like gems in the dark blue of the Delaware. There was a soft sublimity in the sound of the bells that came echoing over the waters. My heart was very full for I had felt the thrill of being in the presence of a great and loving soul. It was the first time and the last that I ever saw Walt Whitman. 190 III. MOST writers bear no message : they carry no torch. Some- times they excite wonder, or they amuse and divert — divert us from our work. To be diverted to a cer- tain degree may be well, but there is a point where earth ends and cloudland begins, and even great poets occasionally befog the things which they would reveal. Homer was seemingly blind to much simple truth ; Virgil carries you away from earth ; Horace was undone without his Macaenas ; Dante makes you an exile ; Shakespeare was singularly silent con- cerning the doubts, difficulties, and com- mon lives of common people ; Byron's Corsair life does not help you in your toil, and in his fight with English Bards and Scotch Reviewers we crave neutral- 191 •cmbitman ity ; to be caught in the meshes of Pope's Dunciad is not pleasant ; and Lowell's Fable for Critics is only another Dun- ciad. But above all poets who have ever lived the author of Leaves of Grass was the poet of humanity. Milton knew all about Heaven, and Dante conducts us through Hell, but it was left for Whitman to show us Earth. His voice never goes so high that it breaks an impotent falsetto, neither does it growl and snarl at things it does not understand and not understanding does not like. He was so great that he had no envy, and his insight was so sure that he had no prejudice. He never boasted that he was higher, nor claimed to be less than any of the other sons of men. He met all on terms of absolute equality, mixing with the poor, the lowly, the fallen, the op- pressed, the cultured, the rich— simply as brother with brother. And when he said to the outcast, "Not till the sun excludes you will I exclude you," he voiced a sentiment worthy of a god. 192 IMbitman He was brother to the elements, the mountains, the seas, the clouds, the sky. He loved them all and partook of them all in his large, free, unselfish, untram- melled nature. His heart knew no limits, and feeling his feet mortis'd in granite and his footsteps ten on 'd in infinity he knew the amplitude of time. Only the great are generous ; only the strong are forgiving. Like Lot's wife, most poets lookback over their shoulders ; and those who are not looking backward insist that we shall look into the future, and the vast majority of the whole scrib- bling rabble accept the precept, "Man never is, but always to be blest." We grieve for childhood's happy days, and long for sweet rest in Heaven and sigh for mansions in the skies. And the people about us seem so indifferent, and our friends so lukewarm ; and really no one understands us, and our environment queers our budding spirituality and the frost of jealousy nips our aspirations : 44 O Paradise, O Paradise, the world is 193 Wbitman growing old ; who would not be at rest and free where love is never cold." So sing the fearsome dyspeptics of the stylus. O enemic he, you bloodless she, nipping at crackers, sipping at tea, why not consider that although the evolution- ists tell us where we came from, and the theologians inform us where we are going to, yet the only thing we are really sure of is that we are here ! The present is the perpetuality moving spot where history ends and prophecy begins. It is our only possession : the past we reach through lapsing memory, halting recollection, hearsay, and belief ; we pierce the future by wistful faith or anxious hope, but the present is beneath our feet. Whitman sings the beauty and the glory of the present. He rebukes our groans and sighs — bids us look about on every side at the wonders of creation, and at the miracles within our grasp. He lifts us up, restores us to our own, intro- duces us to man and Nature and thus 194 TMlbitman infuses into us courage, manly pride, self-reliance, and the strong faith that conies when we feel our kinship with God. He was so mixed with the universe that his voice took on the sway of elemental integrity and candor. Absolutely honest, this man was unafraid and unashamed, for Nature has neither apprehension, shame nor vain-glory. In Leaves of Grass Whitman speaks as all men have ever spoken who believe in God and in themselves — oracular, without apology, without abasement — fearlessly. He tells of the powers and mysteries that pervade and guide all life, all death, all purpose. His work is masculine, as the sun is masculine ; for the Prophetic voice is as surely masculine as the lullaby and lyric cry is feminine. Whitman brings the warmth of the sun to the buds of the heart so that they open and bring forth form, color, perfume. He becomes for them aliment and dew ; so these buds become blossoms, fruits, 195 Wbftman tall branches, and stately trees that cast refreshing shadows. There are men who are to other men as the shadow of a mighty rock in a weary land — such is Walt Whitman. 196 THE COMPLETE WORKS OF JAMES FENIMORE COOPER MOHAWK EDITION To be completed in 32 volumes, large i2mo, handsomely printed, with illustrations, and substantially bound. The Mohawk Edition will range in ap- pearance with the Hudson Edition of Irving's Works, and the volumes will be sold either separately or in sets. Broken sets can, there- fore, always be made good. Price, per Volume, $1.25. The Mohawk Edition will comprise the complete works as follows : Section I. Comprises ; [The Deerslayer Last of the Mohicans The Pathfinder The Pioneers The Prairie The Spy Section II. Comprises : The Pilot Red Rover Wing and Wing The Water-Witch The Two Admirals The Sea-Lions Precaution Afloat and Ashore Lionel Lincoln Wept of Wish-ton- Wish Homeward Bound The Bravo Home as Found The Hidenmauer Mercedes of Castile The Headsman The Redskins The Monikins The Chainbearer Miles Wallingford Satanstoe Jack Tier The Crater Oak Openings Wyandotte The Ways of the Hour The two sections in brackets are now ready. Other sections will follow at brief inter- vals, until the set is completed. Q. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, New York and London The Philistine : A Periodical of Protest. • * * Would to God my name -were Not so terrible to the enemy as it is / Henry VIII. Printed Every Little While for the Society of The Philistines and Publishedby Them Monthly. Subscription, One Dollar Yearly; Single Copies 10 cents. The Philistine and Little Journeys, one year, One Dollar. "// is very handsome andvery sassy." — Boston Herald. ''It is deliciously impudent" — Rochester Herald. 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