173

OH WHITMAN, THE GRAY BARD

Mrs. Peattie Lectures on the Good Poet Before the Unity Club.

Considers Him Greater Than a [?] in That He Deals With Higher and Nobler Themes.

The lecture room of the Unitarian church was crowded last evening to hear Mrs. Elia W. Peattie speak on Walt Whitman. The much discussed yet really little read good gray poet was handled by Mrs. Peattie in a masterly manner; his faults of coarseness, ultra radicalism and egotism a vigorous defense of the man as a man and a poet. Mrs. Peattie quoted freely from both Whitman's prose and poetry to prove her estimate of and assertions regarding him, interpreting all in a manner to make understood probably the least understood of all American writers.

One reason, Mrs. Peattie said, that Walt Whitman has been so generally misunderstood was because thoughtless or shallow persons could not keep pace with the largeness of the man's ideas; because he accepted and taught what to [?] were strange doctrines. He could, the speaker said, be correctly compared with Milton, and though the comparison might be resented, he was, she thought, the greater poet in that he dealt with greater themes for in place of concerning himself with a mythical revolt of angels in heaven he tried with righteous hand to stay the revolt of man on earth; he preached the brotherhood of man in place of the wrath of God; of the harmonies of earth in place of the discords of heaven.

The statement that Whitman was not original, but simply eccentric, was, Mrs. Peattie said, not only an arrogant but an ignorant criticism, and in substantiation his passionate and lofty invocation and invitation to death was quoted as standing solitary and alone in literature. His relation to the Civil war, both as man and poet, was considered briefly by Mrs. Peattie, who said that to him the rebellion meant not a small question of states' rights nor the episode of freeing a million slaves, but that it was to him a grand art in the great drama of human liberty, a part of the sequence of evolution in the development of the democracy in which he believed as surely as he did in the existence of his soul.

Mrs. Peattie then took up the criticism that Whitman was indecent in that he close unbeautiful subjects and took subjects avoided by other writers. But to Whitman, she declared, nothing human or natural was unbeautiful; he accepted that strange paradox in the law of the universe that is natural for man to sin; he saw the reasons for things and forgave men their faults; he was not a discourager or complainer, but saw the truth in men and was willing to cheer them with words of high comfort. His largo friendship for man and his absolute disregard of persons and environments in that friendship was defended by the speaker, who said he could not see why man should apologize to him who made him for his existence, or why he should humiliate himself or be object or fearful; instead he could look straight at God and smile in conscious friendship; that he appreciated God, which is more than most men do, and trusted God to appreciate him, which was also above the average of courage and trust to which men are habituated.

Of the most common criticism of Whitman, that he is too plain. Mrs. Peattie said that people are satisfied to read plain words from men of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries about things which are in themselves unholy and against the laws of nature, yet would not read the words of Whitman, who treated all things with respect, and if he offended with plain speaking, did so from motives essentially good and which were full of charity and kindliness to all living things. Americans were taken to task for not appreciating Whitman by Mrs. Peattie, who said that had he written in Germany, or Italy, or some foreign land translations of his works would have been followed with curious interest, and some day another generation will recognize, as this one does not, both the poet and man.