Kitabı oku: «A History of American Literature», sayfa 26

In execution he was, of course, uneven. He wrote scores upon scores of passages that were full of splendor, of majesty, of rugged strength, of tender loveliness. In general it is true that the lines which deal with definite aspects of natural and physical beauty are most effective – lines of which “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” are the purest type; but many of the poems and sections in which concrete imagery is summoned to the explication of a general idea are often finely successful – as in his stanzas on the poet, or on himself, “the divine average,” for example:

 
My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite;
I laugh at what you call dissolution;
And I know the amplitude of time.
 

To the hostile critic he offered an abundance of lines for unfriendly quotation, as almost every prolific poet has done. Furthermore, he opened to attack all the series of “catalogue,” or “inventory,” passages, in which he abandoned the artistic habit of selective suggestion and overwhelmed the reader with an avalanche of detail. It is not necessary to defend these vagaries or excesses; they are obvious eccentricities in Whitman’s workmanship, as are also the wanton barbarisms of wording into which he occasionally lapsed. There are good English equivalents for omnes and allons and dolce and résumé, and better ones than promulge, philosoph, and imperturbe.

The most violent objections launched at Whitman were based on his unprecedented frankness in matters of sex. It was the habit of the Victorian period, whether in England or in America, to shroud in an unwholesome silence the impulse to beget life and the facts surrounding it as if they were shameful matters. In consequence a central element in social and individual experience tended to become a subject of morbid curiosity to young people and one of furtive self-indulgence to adults. This bred vicious ignorance, distorted half-knowledge, and, among other things, hysterical protestations at any open violation of the code in action or in speech. People seemed to feel that they were vindicating their own probity by the voluminousness of their invective. So Whitman was made a scapegoat, just as Byron was at an earlier date; and the merits of the controversies are obscured by the fact that however much in error the poets may have been, their accusers were hardly less in the wrong. Out of the babel of discussion one clearest note emerged in the form of a letter from an Englishwoman to W. M. Rossetti, who had lent her “Leaves of Grass”:

I rejoice to have read these poems; and if I or any true woman feel that, certainly men may hold their peace about them. You will understand that I still think that instinct of silence I spoke of a right and beautiful thing; and that it is only lovers and poets (perhaps only lovers and this poet) who may say what they will – the lover to his own, the poet to all because all are in a sense his own. Shame is like a very flexible veil that takes faithfully the shape of what it covers – lovely when it hides a lovely thing, ugly when it hides an ugly one. There is not any fear that the freedom of such impassioned words will destroy the sweet shame, the happy silence, that enfold and brood over the secrets of love in a woman’s heart.

This single judgment naturally cannot serve as a universal ultimatum, but it should serve as a warning for those who jump to the conclusion that only one mood is possible for the writer or reader of such passages. Those who are disturbed by them should be willing not to read the few score lines that are responsible for all the turmoil.

The only other charge against Whitman worth mentioning – the complaint at his “colossal egotism” – is a subject more for interpretation than for defense. Properly understood, it leads far toward an understanding of the whole man. In the first place, if all his “I’s” should be taken literally they would amount to no more than an unusual frankness of artistic expression. Every creative artist is of necessity an egotist. He is bound to believe in the special significance of what he is privileged to utter in words or tones or lines and colors. The whole anthology of poems on the poet and his work is a catalogue of supreme egotisms, even though most of them are written in the third person rather than the first. Whitman cast aside the regular locution without apology. But, as a further caution to the supersensitive, his “I’s” do not always mean the same thing. Sometimes they are explicitly personal, as in,

 
I, now, thirty-six years old, in perfect health, begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
 

Sometimes they stand just as explicitly for “the average man.” This he explained in the preface to the 1876 edition: “I meant ‘Leaves of Grass,’ as published, to be the poem of average Identity (of yours, whoever you are, now reading these lines)… To sing the Song of that law of average Identity, and of Yourself, consistently with the divine law of the universal, is a main purpose of these ‘Leaves.’”

Finally, the egotistic “I” is often a token of the religious mysticism at the back of his faith. Without an understanding of this factor in Whitman he cannot be known. “Place yourself,” said William James in his lecture on Bergson, “at the center of a man’s philosophic vision and you understand at once all the different things it makes him write or say. But keep outside, use your post-mortem method, try to build the philosophy up out of the single phrases, taking first one and then another, and seeking to make them fit, and of course you fail. You crawl over the thing like a myopic ant over a building, tumbling into every microscopic crack or fissure, finding nothing but inconsistencies, and never suspecting that a centre exists.” It is James again who gives the exact cue to Whitman’s mysticism, this time in a chapter of “Varieties of Religious Experience.” It is the experience of the mystic, he explains, to arrive in inspired moments at a height from which all truth seems to be divinely revealed. This revelation is not a flashlight perception of some single aspect of life, but a sense of the entire scheme of creation and a conviction that the truth has been imparted direct from God. It is clear, like the view from a mountain top, but, like such a view, it is incapable of adequate expression in words, – “an intuition,” and now the words are Whitman’s, “of the absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole of this multifarious, mad chaos of fraud, frivolity, hoggishness – this revel of fools, and incredible make-believe and general unsettledness, we call the world; a soul-sight of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of things, all history and time, and all events, however trivial, however momentous, like a leashed dog in the hand of the hunter.” It was the fashion of speech of the Hebrew prophets, when thus inspired, to preface their declarations with “Thus saith the Lord”; Whitman, with his simpler, “I say” or “I tell you,” regarded himself no less as mouthpiece of the Most High. The vision made him certain of an underlying unity in all life and of the coming supremacy of a law of love; it made him equally certain of the mistakenness of human conditions and unqualifiedly direct in his uttered verdicts.

This sense of the wholeness of life – a transcendental doctrine – made all the parts deeply significant to him who could perceive their meaning. The same mystic consciousness is beneath all these passages, and all the others like them:

 
I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
 

…

 
The wild gander leads his flock through the cool night;
Ya-honk! he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation;
(The pert may suppose it meaningless, but I listen close;
I find its purpose and place up there toward the wintry sky.)
 

…

 
I believe a leaf of grass no less than the journey-work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d’œuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels,
And I could come every afternoon of my life to look at the farmer’s
girl boiling her iron tea-kettle and baking short-cake.
 

It explains, too, the otherwise bewildering excesses of the “inventory” passages, which, for all their apparent unrelatedness, are always brought up with a unifying, inclusive turn. In the universe, then, – and Whitman thought of the word in its literal sense of a great and single design, – man was the supreme fact to whom all its objects “continually converge”; as man was God-created, Whitman was no respecter of persons, but a lover of the common folk, in whom the destiny of human-kind resided more than in presidents or kings. And since he considered the race in the light of ages upon ages, the generating of life seemed to him a matter of holiest import.

For the carrying out of such a design the only fit vehicle is the purest sort of democracy; all other working bases of human association are only temporary obstacles to the course of things; and as Whitman saw the nearest approach to the right social order in his own country, he was an American by conviction as well as by the accident of place. Governments, he felt, were necessary conveniences, and so-called rulers were servants of the public from whom their powers were derived. The greatest driving power in life was public opinion, and the greatest potential molder of public opinion was the bard, seer, or poet. This poet was to be not a reformer but a preacher of a new gospel; he was, in fact, to be infinitely patient in face of “meanness and agony without end” while he invoked the principles which would one day put them to rout.

 
I hear it was charged against me that I sought to destroy institutions;
But really I am neither for nor against institutions;
(What indeed have I in common with them? – Or what with the destruction of them?)
Only I will establish in the Mannahatta, and in every city of These States, inland and seaboard,
And in the fields and woods, and above every keel, little or large, that dents the water,
Without edifices, or rules, or trustees, or any argument,
The institution of the dear love of comrades.
 

To the bard he attributed knowledge of science and history, – the learning of the broadly educated man, – but, beyond that, wisdom:

 
He bestows on every object or quality its fit proportion, neither more nor less…
He is no arguer, he is judgment – (Nature accepts him absolutely;)
He judges not as the judge judges, but as the sun falling round a helpless thing:
As he sees farthest, he has the most faith.
 

He is no writer of “poems distilled from foreign poems”; he is the propounder of

 
the idea of free and perfect individuals,
For that idea the bard walks in advance, leader of leaders,
The attitude of him cheers up slaves and horrifies foreign despots.
 

In America, whose “veins are filled with poetical stuff,” Whitman was certain not only of the need for poets but of their ultimate power; for in America, the cradle of the race, and through the bards God’s will was to be done.

Whitman arrived at the acme of self-reliance. With the mystic’s sense of revealed truth at hand, and a devout conviction that it was the poet’s duty – his duty – to show men a new heaven and a new earth, he went on his way with perfect faith. Emerson wrote of self-reliance in general, “Adhere to your act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age.” Yet he remonstrated with Whitman, and in the attempt to modify his extravagance used arguments which were unanswerable. Nevertheless, said the younger poet, “I felt down in my soul the clear and unmistakable conviction to disobey all, and pursue my own way”; in doing which he bettered Emerson’s instructions by disregarding his advice. Hostile or brutal criticism left him quite unruffled. It reënforced him in his conclusions and cheered him with the thought that they were receiving serious attention. After Swinburne’s fiercest attack says Burroughs: “I could not discover either in word or look that he was disturbed a particle by it. He spoke as kindly of Swinburne as ever. If he was pained at all, it was on Swinburne’s account and not on his own. It was a sad spectacle to see a man retreat upon himself as Swinburne had done.”

His daily preoccupation with “superior beings and eternal interests” gave him some of the elevations and some of the contempts of the Puritan fathers. It leads far to think of Whitman as a Puritan stripped of his dogma. It accounts for his daily absorption in things of religion, for his democratic zeal, his disregard for the adornments of life, even for his subordination of the sentiment of love to the perpetuation of the race. In these respects he dwelt on the broad and permanent factors in human life, regarding the finite and personal only as he saw them in the midst of all time and space. And this leads to the man in his relation to science, with which Puritan dogma was at odds. Whitman was not in the usual sense a “nature poet.” The beauties of nature exerted little appeal on him. He had nothing to say in detached observations on the primrose, or the mountain tops, or the sunset. But nature was, next to his own soul, the source of deepest truth to him, a truth which science in his own day was making splendidly clear. The dependence of biological science on the material universe did not shake his faith in immortality. He simply took what knowledge science could contribute and understood it in the light of his faith, which transcended any science. Among modern poets he was one of the earliest to chant the pæan of creative evolution.

 
Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me,
Afar down I see the huge first Nothing – I know I was even there,
I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist,
And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon.
 
 
Before I was born out of my mother, generations guided me,
My embryo has never been torpid – nothing could overlay it.
For it the nebula cohered to an orb,
The long, slow strata piled to rest it in,
Vast vegetables gave it sustenance,
Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths, and deposited it with care.
All forces have been steadily employed to complete and delight me,
Now I stand on this spot with my Soul.
 

It is impossible, as all critics agree, to compass Whitman in a book or essay or compress him into a summary. He was an immensely expansive personality whose writings are as broad as life itself. It is almost equally impossible for one who has really read over and through and under his poems to speak of him in measured terms. The world is coming round to Whitman much faster than he expected. Every great step in human progress is a step in the direction he was pointing. His larger faith, whether so recognized or not, is yearly the faith of more and more thinking people. And in an immediate way his influence on the generation of living poets is incomparably great.

BOOK LIST

Individual Author

Walt Whitman. Works. Selections from the prose and poetry of Whitman. O. L. Triggs, editor. 1902. 10 vols. The best single volumes are Leaves of Grass, Complete Poetical Works, and Complete Prose Works. (Small, Maynard.) 1897 and 1898. During Whitman’s lifetime ten successive enlarged editions of Leaves of Grass were published: in 1855, 1856, 1860, 1867, 1871, 1876, 1881 (Boston), 1881 (Philadelphia), 1888, 1889, 1891. Other titles are as follows: *Drum-Taps, 1865; *Passage to India, 1871; *Democratic Vistas, 1871; Memoranda during the War, 1875; Specimen Days and Collect, 1882, 1883; Two Rivulets, 1876; *November Boughs, 1888; *Good-bye, My Fancy, 1891. (Titles with the mark * were included as new sections in the next forthcoming edition of Leaves of Grass.)

Bibliographies

Selections from Whitman. O. L. Triggs, editor. 1898.

Library of Literary Criticism of English and American Authors, Vol. VIII, pp. 129–153. C. W. Moulton, editor. 1905. Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. II, pp. 551–581.

Biography and Criticism

There is no complete standard biography. The best single volume surveys are Walt Whitman, by G. R. Carpenter, 1909 (E. M. L. Ser.); and Walt Whitman: his Life and Works, by Bliss Perry, 1906 (A. M. L. Ser.).

Binns, H. B. A Life of Walt Whitman. 1905.

Boynton, P. H. Whitman’s Idea of the State. New Republic, Vol. VII, p. 139.

Brooks, Van Wyck. America’s Coming of Age. 1915.

Burroughs, John. Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person. 1867.

Burroughs, John. Whitman: a Study. 1896.

Carpenter, Edward. Days with Walt Whitman. 1906.

Chapman, J. J. Emerson and Other Essays. 1892.

Dart, W. K. Walt Whitman in New Orleans. Pub. Louisiana Hist. Soc., Vol. VII, pp. 97–112.

Elliot, C. N. Walt Whitman as Man, Poet, and Friend. 1915.

Ferguson, J. D. American Literature in Spain. 1916.

Foerster, Norman. Whitman as Poet of Nature. Pub. Mod. Lang. Assoc. of Amer., Vol. XXI (N. S.), pp. 736–758.

Gould, E. P. Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman. 1900.

Gummere, F. B. Democracy and Poetry. 1911.

Holloway, Emory. Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. II, Bk. II, chap. i.

Jones, P. M. Influence of Whitman on the Origin of “Vers Libre.” Modern Language Review, Vol. XI, p. 186.

Jones, P. M. Whitman in France. Modern Language Review, Vol. X, p. 1.

Lanier, Sidney. The English Novel. 1883.

Lee, G. S. Order for the Next Poet. Putnam’s Magazine, Vol. I, p. 697; Vol. II, p. 99.

Macphail, Andrew. Walt Whitman, in Essays in Puritanism. 1905.

More, P. E. Walt Whitman, in Shelburne Essays. Fourth Series. 1906.

Pattee, F. L. American Literature since 1870, chap. ix. 1915.

Perry, Bliss. Walt Whitman: his Life and Work. 1906 and 1908.

Santayana, George. Walt Whitman, in Interpretations of Poetry and Religion. 1900.

Stedman, E. C. Poets of America. 1885.

Stevenson, R. L. Familiar Studies of Men and Books. 1882.

Swinburne, A. C. Studies in Prose and Poetry. 1894.

Traubel, H. L. In re Walt Whitman. 1893.

Traubel, H. L. With Walt Whitman in Camden, p. 473. 1906. (This is Vol. I of Traubel’s diary notes made during Whitman’s life. Vol. II, 1908; Vol. III, 1914. Vol. IV is announced for early publication, and the whole work, when completed, will fill eight or ten volumes.)

Walling, W. E. Whitman and Traubel. 1916.

TOPICS AND PROBLEMS

Select and discuss poems and stanzas in Whitman which are written in conventional rhythms.

Select and discuss passages in which he employs changing rhythms adjusted to the persons or objects in hand.

Study Whitman’s diction with reference to his use of the average man’s speech and to his occasional use of foreign words, corrupted words (whether foreign or English), and coined words.

List and discuss poems which are clearly autobiographical. Does this list include any personal lyrics?

List and discuss poems written in the first person but intended as poems of “the divine average.”

Select and discuss poems and passages on the theme of companionship.

Select and discuss poems and passages which express his sense of universal law.

Read his longer poems for passages on the subject of the state, the rulers, and public opinion.

Read and discuss his utterances on poetry and the poet, noting especially “The Song of the Banner at Daybreak” and “As I sat by Blue Ontario’s Shore.”

Read and discuss Whitman’s utterances on war and nationalism.

Read for an estimate of his feeling for the beauties of nature.

CHAPTER XXV
THE WEST AND MARK TWAIN

There is a valid parallel between the beginnings of American literature and the early stages of its development in the West, for in both instances it followed on the wave of pioneer settlement. The earliest writers came from the East and were only temporary sojourners in the new country, Bret Harte and Mark Twain corresponding in different degrees to colonists like John Smith and Nathaniel Ward. A more permanent allegiance developed in a second group who lived out their lives in the land of their adoption, such, for example, as Joaquin Miller and Increase Mather. And the final stage is fulfilled by those whose whole lives belonged to the maturing frontier, like most of the second generation. The parallel exists too in the fact that the early authors wrote usually with one eye on the older community, eager for approval and half resentful of criticism – an attitude of West toward East which still survives in the timider element along the chain from London to New York to Chicago to San Francisco to Honolulu. The obvious contrasts between the motives for settlement, the character of the settlers, and the nature of their writings only serve to emphasize the underlying similarities. Manners change, but human nature changes so much more slowly that it seems almost a constant.

Bret Harte (1839–1902) is the outstanding writer who lived for a while in the far West, turned it to literary account, failed in any deep sense either to sympathize with its spirit or to represent it, and left it permanently and with apparent relief. He was an Eastern town-bred boy of cultured parentage who aspired to become a poet. At eighteen he went to California where, before he was twenty-one, he saw life as tutor, express messenger, typesetter, teacher, and drug clerk. During half of the next fourteen years in San Francisco he was secretary of the California mint, and during all of them he was primarily interested in authorship. He wrote for periodicals East and West and had a manuscript accepted by the Atlantic as early as 1863. With the founding of the Overland Monthly in 1868 he became editor, and with the publication of “The Luck of Roaring Camp” in the second number he jumped into fabulous popularity. In 1871 he went to New York, and in 1878 he went abroad, where he lived till his death in complete estrangement from all his old associates. These latter facts deserve mention only as they stress the lightness of his contact with the West. He found fresh material there which he used with great narrative adroitness, contributing definitely to the progress of short-story technique. But his tales are deftly melodramatic, built on a sort of paradox formula, and greatly indebted in detail and mannerisms to the example of Charles Dickens. Harte was beyond any question a good craftsman; his wares would still find a ready magazine market, for they would be modern in execution, but there is no soul in what he wrote. He was a reporter with a gift for rapid-moving, close-knit narrative. He was greatly interested in facts, but very little concerned with the truth. He wrote some clever stories, but he seems like a trinket shop at the foot of Pike’s Peak as Mark Twain looms above him.

The life of Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835–1910) probably touches American life at more points than that of any other author. The first half has been very definitely written into his books, and the whole has been told with his help in one of the best of American biographies.³⁴ It involves indirectly his Virginia parentage and the pioneer experiences of his father and mother in the Tennessee mountains; his own residence in the Mississippi valley and on both seacoasts; his activities as printer, river-pilot, journalist, lecturer, and publisher; his friendships with all sorts and conditions of men from California miners to the crowned heads of Europe; the joys and sorrows of a beautiful family life; the making and losing of several fortunes; and an old age crowded with honors and popularity, yet overshadowed by a tragic cloud of doubts and griefs.

His parents, who had been dissatisfied with their attempted settlement in a Tennessee mountain town, left it in 1835 with four children for Florida, Missouri, allured to the move by the optimism of a relative, as it worked on their own pioneer restlessness. The conditions they left are vividly described in the first eleven chapters of “The Gilded Age.” In a little town of twenty-one dwellings the boy was born in the autumn of 1835. When he was four years old the family moved to Hannibal, a river town. Sam Clemens was an irresponsible, dreamy, rather fragile child, a problem to parents and teachers and given to associating with the boys presented in “Tom Sawyer,” the most notable of whom was Tom Blankenship, the original of “Huckleberry Finn.” His father, consistently unsuccessful, was made justice of the peace and finally was elected clerk of the circuit court, only to die in 1847 from exposure in the campaign. For the next ten years young Clemens was engaged in the printing business, first under his brother Orion on a Hannibal journal (see “My First Literary Venture,” in “Sketches, New and Old,” pp. 110–114); then during fifteen months in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, and next in Keokuk, Illinois, and Cincinnati, Ohio.

Finally, in April, 1857, he began to “learn the river” from Horace Bixby, pilot of the Paul Jones. His experience on the river, the basis for “Life on the Mississippi,” was early marked by the tragic destruction of the Pennsylvania, on which his younger brother, Henry, suffered a fearful death, the first of the personal sorrows which were deeply scored into his life. His career as pilot was ended by the closing of river traffic in the spring of 1861, but it gave him, with many other bequests, his pen name, derived from one of the calls used in sounding the depth of the ever-shifting channel. Piloting during war times did not appeal to him. “I am not very anxious to get up into a glass perch and be shot at by either side. I’ll go home and reflect on the matter.” And after reflection he chose the better part of valor and stayed on land. In the next three months there followed his amusing adventures recorded in “The Private History of a Campaign that Failed” (see “The American Claimant,” pp. 243–265); and in July, 1861, he went with his brother Orion to serve with J. W. Nye, territorial governor of Nevada. The life of the next months went into “Roughing It,” first at Carson City, then at Humboldt, until, in August, 1862, he began his journalistic work in California on The Virginia City Enterprise. At twenty-five he had secured his first view of the country from coast to coast and all down the central artery, he had been schooled in the exacting discipline of the printer’s trade (see pp. 47, 48) and in the still more rigorous responsibilities of river piloting, and he had begun to write for a living. Two more steps remained in the growth of his acquaintance with the external world, and these followed after five years of shifting fortunes on California newspapers. The first was his trip to Honolulu as correspondent for the Sacramento Union, on the new steamer Ajax, and the second, in 1867, was his trip to the Holy Land on the steamship Quaker City for the tour which was to be immortalized in “Innocents Abroad,” first as a series of newspaper letters and then in book form.

With the publication of “The Innocents” in the summer of 1869 Mark Twain came to the halfway point. Out of his wide experience he had developed the habits of an observer and he had learned how to write. He had earned a reputation as a newspaper man, and he had published his most famous short story, “The Jumping Frog,” using his talent in spinning a yarn³⁵ after his own fashion. His lecturing had met with unqualified success; the new book was selling beyond all expectation – 67,000 copies in the first year; and he was happily married to Olivia Langdon, his balance wheel, his severest critic, and the friend of all his closest friends.

The story of the rest of his life is a record of varied and spectacular fortunes. His home from 1871 to 1891 was in Hartford, Connecticut, where he was a neighbor of Charles Dudley Warner and an intimate of the Reverend Joseph Twitchell (the original of Harris in “A Tramp Abroad”), and where William Dean Howells, his friend of over forty years, often visited him. There was a kind of lavishness in everything he did. He built a mansion, made money with ease, spent it profusely, and invested it with the care-free optimism of Colonel Sellers himself. New inventions fascinated him and made him an easy victim for the fluent promoter, so that what was left from his ventures with the Buffalo Express and the Webster Publishing Company went into other enterprises, of which the Paige typesetting machine was the most disastrous for this ex-printer. After his failure for a large amount, a later friend, Henry H. Rogers, took his affairs in hand and by good management enabled Mark Twain to meet all debts and enjoy a very handsome income during his later years.

The ups and downs of business distracted him but did not baffle him. He traveled extensively, living abroad during most of the decade between 1891 and 1901. He made cordial friends wherever he went, but he was not weaned by them away from the old cronies of the Mississippi Valley and the Pacific coast. He accepted honors from Yale twice and from the University of Missouri, and in 1907 was the subject of a four-weeks’ ovation from all England when he went over to receive the degree of Doctor of Letters from Oxford. His opinion was sought on public questions and he was importuned for speeches on every sort of occasion; but his last years were shadowed by a succession of bereavements. In 1903 Mrs. Clemens died. Two children died in childhood, a third under tragic circumstances in 1909, and the surviving daughter was married and far away most of the time. His chief personal solace was found in his friendships with several schoolgirls.

During those years after my wife’s death I was washing about on a forlorn sea of banquets and speech-making in high and holy causes, and these things furnished me intellectual cheer and entertainment; but they got at my heart for an evening only, then left it dry and dusty. I had reached the grandfather stage of life without grandchildren, so I began to adopt some.

He died of angina pectoris in 1910.