Virginia Woolf, Visits to Walt Whitman (1918)
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 – clergyman, 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 kind 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 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 internment. 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 who spends his time in gossip with passers-by than to a poet with a message. Like a 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 Simmons 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 someone 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.
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This is a review of Visits to Walt Whitman in 1890-1891 in the TLS, 3 January 1918. Reprinted in Virginia Woolf, Granite and Rainbow, ed. Leonard Woolf (1958) and in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vo. 2, ed. Andrew McNeillie (1987).
Beth Rigel Daugherty will lecture on this and other essays in our current Woolf Season on Sat. 6 April 2024. Details here.
