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Updated: June 28, 2025
When the children of Count Tolstoy endeavored to have him adjudged insane, the Court denied the application and voiced the wisest decision that ever came out of Russia: A man who gives away his money is not necessarily more foolish than he who saves it. And with Horace L. Traubel I assert that Whitman was the sanest man I ever saw.
His shop contains odd curios as well as the usual traffic of a cobbler. "The public loves to be hood-winked," he adds sagely. We wait with particular interest to hear what Philadelphia will have to say about the passing of Horace Traubel. Traubel was the official echo of the Great Voice of Camden, and in his obituary one may discern the vivacity of the Whitman tradition.
This is a matter of no small concern to the curators of the Whitman cult. The soul of Philadelphia cannot be kept alive by conventions and statistics alone. Such men as Traubel have helped. There are two kinds of rebels. By their neckties you may know them. Walt Whitman was of the kind that wears no necktie at all.
He spoke of one of my stories to which Traubel had called his attention, and reproved me gently for not "letting in the light." It was a memorable meeting for me and I went away back to my work in Boston with a feeling that I had seen one of the very greatest literary personalities of the century, a notion I have had no cause to change in the twenty-seven years which have intervened.
Then there is the lesser sort, of which Traubel was one the rebel who wears a flowing black bow tie with long trailers. Elbert Hubbard wore one of these. It is a mild rebellion of which this is symbol. It often goes with shell spectacles. We never knew Horace Traubel, though he was the man we most wanted to meet when we came to Philadelphia.
His protest against iniquities was an honest, good-humoured protest. Horace Traubel will be remembered, as he wished to be remembered, as the biographer of Whitman. Whitman also, we may add, wished Traubel to be so remembered. We were about to say the self-effacing devotion of Boswell; but the beauty of biography is that the biographer cannot wholly delete himself from the book.
The sun shone through the little skylight gilding a tin pan that hung over the cook stove. Tacked here and there were portraits of authors, and I noticed a faded newspaper cutting pinned up. The headlines ran: "Literary Pedlar Lectures on Poetry." I read it through. It seems that the chief Whitman disciple in Camden is Mr. Traubel; and Mr.
As we read their centenary tributes, we are reminded that Lowell never accepted Whitman, who was piqued by the fact and referred to it a number of times in the conversations reported by the Boswellian Traubel. Whitmanites explain this want of appreciation as owing to Lowell's conventional literary standards. Now convention is one of the things that distinguish man from the inferior animals.
It used to annoy us to hear Karl Rosner referred to as "the Kaiser's Boswell." Horace Traubel was perhaps a Boswell; but Rosner never. It is pleasant to know that Boswell was not merely a kind of animated note-book. He was a droll, vain, erring, bibulous, warm-hearted creature, a good deal of a Pepys, in fact, with all the Pepysian vices and virtues. Mr.
In five minutes Walt had pumped me dry. He did it in his quiet, sympathetic way, and, with the egoism of my age, I was not averse from relating to him the adventures of my soul. That Walt was a fluent talker one need but read his memoirs by Horace Traubel. Witness his tart allusion to Swinburne's criticism of himself: "Isn't he the damnedest simulacrum?"
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