ich ore, or plunges into subterrene pools of
nocturnal abominations--veritable regions of the "mother of dead
dogs." Probably the sexlessness of Emerson's, Poe's, and Hawthorne's
writings sent Whitman to an orgiastic extreme, and the morbid,
nasty-nice puritanism that then tainted English and American letters
received its first challenge to come out into the open and face
natural facts. Despite his fearlessness, one must subscribe to Edmund
Clarence Stedman's epigram: "There are other lights in which a dear
one may be regarded than as the future mother of men." Walt let in a
lot of fresh air on the stuffy sex question of his day, but, in
demanding equal sexual rights for women, he meant it in the reverse
sense as propounded by our old grannies' purity leagues. Continence is
not the sole virtue or charm in womanhood; nor, by the same token, is
unchastity a brevet of feminine originality. But women, as a rule,
have not rallied to his doctrines, instinctively feeling that he is
indifferent to them, notwithstanding the heated homage he pays to
their physical attractions. Good old Walt sang of his camerados,
capons, Americanos, deck-hands, stagecoach-drivers, machinists,
brakemen, firemen, sailors, butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers,
and he associated with them; but they never read him or understood
him. They prefer Longfellow. It is the cultured class he so despises
that discovered, lauded him, believing that he makes vocal the
underground world; above all, believing that he truly represents
America and the dwellers thereof--which he decidedly does not. We are,
if you will, a commonplace people, but normal, and not enamoured of
"athletic love of comrades." I remember a dinner given by the Whitman
Society about twenty years ago, at the St. Denis Hotel, which was both
grotesque and pitiable. The guest of honour was "Pete" Doyle, the
former car-conductor and "young rebel friend of Walt's," then a
middle-aged person. John Swinton, who presided, described Whitman as a
troglodyte, but a cave-dweller he never was; rather the avatar of the
hobo. As John Jay Chapman wittily wrote: "He patiently lived on cold
pie, and tramped the earth in triumph." Instead of essaying the
varied, expressive, harmonious music of blank verse, he chose the
easier, more clamorous, and disorderly way; but if he had not so
chosen we should have missed the salty tang of the true Walt Whitman.
Toward the last there was too much Camden in his Cosmos. Qui