Complete Prose Works
After a one-act farce over, as contrast and prelude, the curtain rising
for the tragedy, I can, from my good seat in the pit, pretty well front,
see again Booth's quiet entrance from the side, as, with head bent, he
slowly and in silence, (amid the tempest of boisterous hand-clapping,)
walks down the stage to the footlights with that peculiar and abstracted
gesture, musingly kicking his sword, which he holds off from him by its
sash. Though fifty years have pass'd since then, I can hear the clank,
and feel the perfect following hush of perhaps three thousand people
waiting. (I never saw an actor who could make more of the said hush
or wait, and hold the audience in an indescribable, half-delicious,
half-irritating suspense.) And so throughout the entire play, all parts,
voice, atmosphere, magnetism, from
"Now is the winter of our discontent,"
to the closing death fight with Richmond, were of the finest and
grandest. The latter character was play'd by a stalwart young fellow
named Ingersoll. Indeed, all the renderings were wonderfully good.
But the great spell cast upon the mass of hearers came from Booth.
Especially was the dream scene very impressive. A shudder went through
every nervous system in the audience; it certainly did through mine.
Without question Booth was royal heir and legitimate representative of
the Garrick-Kemble-Siddons dramatic traditions; but he vitalized and
gave an unnamable _race_ to those traditions with his own electric
personal idiosyncrasy. (As in all art-utterance it was the subtle and
powerful something _special to the individual_ that really conquer'd.)
To me, too, Booth stands for much else besides theatricals. I consider
that my seeing the man those years glimps'd for me, beyond all else,
that inner spirit and form--the unquestionable charm and vivacity, but
intrinsic sophistication and artificiality--crystallizing rapidly upon
the English stage and literature at and after Shakspere's time,
and coming on accumulatively through the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries to the beginning, fifty or forty years ago, of those
disintegrating, decomposing processes now authoritatively going on. Yes;
although Booth must be class'd in that antique, almost extinct school,
inflated, stagy, rendering Shakspere (perhaps inevitably, appropriately)
from the growth of arbitrary and often cockney conventions, his genius
was to me one of the grandest revelations of my life, a lesson of
artistic expression. The words fire, energy, _abandon_, found in him
unprecedented meanings. I never heard a speaker or actor who could give
such a sting to hauteur or the taunt. I never heard from any other the
charm of unswervingly perfect vocalization without trenching at all on
mere melody, the province of music.
So much for a Thespian temple of New York fifty years since, where
"sceptred tragedy went trailing by" under the gaze of the Dry Dock
youth, and both players and auditors were of a character and like we
shall never see again. And so much for the grandest histrion of modern
times, as near as I can deliberately judge (and the phrenologists put
my "caution" at 7)--grander, I believe, than Kean in the expression of
electric passion, the prime eligibility of the tragic artist. For
though those brilliant years had many fine and even magnificent actors,
undoubtedly at Booth's death (in 1852) went the last and by far the
noblest Roman of them all.
NOTES TO LATE ENGLISH BOOKS
PREFACE TO THE READER IN THE BRITISH ISLANDS--"Specimen Days in
America"
London Edition, _June 1887_ If you will only take the following pages,
as you do some long and gossippy letter written for you by a relative or
friend travelling through distant scenes and incidents and jotting
them down lazily and informally, but ever veraciously (with occasional
diversion of critical thought about sombody or something,) it might
remove all formal or literary impediments at once, and bring you and me
closer together in the spirt in which the jottings were collated to
be read. You have had, and have, plenty of public events and facts
and general statistics of America;--in the following book is a common
individual New World _private life_, its birth and growth, its struggles
for a living, its goings and comings and observations (or representative
portions of them) amid the United States of America the last thirty or
forty years, with their varied war and peace, their local coloring, the
unavoidable egotism, and the lights and shades and sights and joys and
pains and sympathies common to humanity. Further introductory light may
be found in the paragraph, "A Happy Hour's Command," and the bottom note
belonging to it at the beginning of the book. I have said in the text
that if I were required to give good reason-for-being of "Specimen
Days," I should be unable to do so. Let me fondly hope that it has at
least the reason and excuse of such off-hand gossippy letter as just
alluded to, portraying American life-sights and incidents as they
actually occurred--their presentation, making additions as far as it
goes, to the simple experience and association of your soul, from a
comrade soul;--and that also, in the volume, as below any page of mine,
anywhere, ever remains, for seen or unseen basis-phrase, GOOD-WILL
BETWEEN THE COMMON PEOPLE OF ALL NATIONS.
ADDITIONAL NOTE, 1887
_To English Edition "Specimen Days"_
As I write these lines I still continue living in Camden, New Jersey,
America. Coming this way from Washington city, on my road to the
sea-shore (and a temporary rest, as I supposed) in the early summer
of 1873, I broke down disabled, and have dwelt here, as my central
residence, all the time since--almost 14 years. In the preceding pages
I have described how, during those years, I partially recuperated (in
1876) from my worst paralysis by going down to Timber creek, living
close to Nature, and domiciling with my dear friends George and Susan
Stafford. From 1877 or '8 to '83 or '4 I was well enough to travel
around, considerably--journey'd westward to Kansas, leisurely exploring
the Prairies, and on to Denver and the Rocky Mountains; another time
north to Canada, where I spent most of the summer with my friend Dr.
Bucke, and jaunted along the great lakes, and the St. Lawrence and
Saguenay rivers; another time to Boston, to properly print the final
edition of my poems (I was there over two months, and had a "good
time.") I have so brought out the completed "Leaves of Grass" during
this period; also "Specimen Days," of which the foregoing is a
transcript; collected and re-edited the "Democratic Vistas" cluster (see
companion volume to the present)--commemorated Abraham Lincoln's death,
on the successive anniversaries of its occurrence, by delivering my
lecture on it ten or twelve times; and "put in," through many a month
and season, the aimless and resultless ways of most human lives.
Thus the last 14 years have pass'd. At present (end-days of March,
1887--I am nigh entering my 69th year) I find myself continuing on here,
quite dilapidated and even wreck'd bodily from the paralysis, &c.--but
in _good heart_ (to use a Long Island country phrase,) and with about
the same mentality as ever. The worst of it is, I have been growing
feebler quite rapidly for a year, and now can't walk around--hardly from
one room to the next. I am forced to stay in-doors and in my big chair
nearly all the time. We have had a sharp, dreary winter too, and it has
pinch'd me. I am alone most of the time; every week, indeed almost every
day, write some--reminiscences, essays, sketches, for the magazines;
and read, or rather I should say dawdle over books and papers a good
deal--spend half the day at that.
Nor can I finish this note without putting on record--wafting over sea
from hence--my deepest thanks to certain friends and helpers (I would
specify them all and each by name, but imperative reasons, outside of
my own wishes, forbid,) in the British Islands, as well as in America.
Dear, even in the abstract, is such flattering unction always no doubt
to the soul! Nigher still, if possible, I myself have been, and am
to-day indebted to such help for my very sustenance, clothing, shelter,
and continuity. And I would not go to the grave without briefly, but
plainly, as I here do, acknowledging--may I not say even glorying in it?
PREFACE TO "DEMOCRATIC VISTAS" WITH OTHER PAPERS--_English Edition_
Mainly I think I should base the request to weigh the following pages on
the assumption that they present, however indirectly, some views of
the West and Modern, or of a distinctly western and modern (American)
tendency, about certain matters. Then, too, the pages include (by
attempting to illustrate it,) a theory herein immediately mentioned. For
another and different point of the issue, the Enlightenment, Democracy
and Fair-show of the bulk, the common people of America (from sources
representing not only the British Islands, but all the world,) means,
at least, eligibility to Enlightenment, Democracy and Fair-show for the
bulk, the common people of all civilized nations.
That positively "the dry land has appeared," at any rate, is an
important fact.
America is really the great test or trial case for all the problems and
promises and speculations of humanity, and of the past and present.
I say, too, we[41] are not to look so much to changes, ameliorations,
and adaptations in Politics as to those of Literature and (thence)
domestic Sociology. I have accordingly in the following melange
introduced many themes besides political ones.
Several of the pieces are ostensibly in explanation of my own writings;
but in that very process they best include and set forth their side of
principles and generalities pressing vehemently for consideration our
age.
Upon the whole, it is on the atmosphere they are born in, and, (I hope)
give out, more than any specific piece or trait, I would care to rest.
I think Literature--a new, superb, democratic literature--is to be
the medicine and lever, and (with Art) the chief influence in modern
civilization. I have myself not so much made a dead set at this theory,
or attempted to present it directly, as admitted it to color and
sometimes dominate what I had to say. In both Europe and America we have
serried phalanxes who promulge and defend the political claims: I go for
an equal force to uphold the other.
WALT WHITMAN,
CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY, _April, 1888_.
Note:
[41] We who, in many departments, ways, make _the building up of the
masses,_ by _building up grand individuals_, our shibboleth: and in
brief that is the marrow of this book.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Glad am I to give--were anything better lacking--even the most brief
and shorn testimony of Abraham Lincoln. Everything I heard about him
authentically, and every time I saw him (and it was my fortune through
1862 to '65 to see, or pass a word with, or watch him, personally,
perhaps twenty or thirty times,) added to and anneal'd my respect and
love at the moment. And as I dwell on what I myself heard or saw of the
mighty Westerner, and blend it with the history and literature of my
age, and of what I can get of all ages, and conclude it with his death,
it seems like some tragic play, superior to all else I know--vaster and
fierier and more convulsionary, for this America of ours, than Eschylus
or Shakspere ever drew for Athens or for England. And then the Moral
permeating, underlying all! the Lesson that none so remote--none so
illiterate--no age, no class--but may directly or indirectly read!
Abraham Lincoln's was really one of those characters, the best of which
is the result of long trains of cause and effect--needing a certain
spaciousness of time, and perhaps even remoteness, to properly enclose