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.
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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. 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[pg 161] philadelphia. we have heard men of all conditions speak of him with affection and respect. he was dedicated from boyhood to the whitman cause. from walt himself he caught the habit of talking about walt, and he carried it on with as much gusto and happiness as walt did. only recently he said in his little magazine the conservator:
when i was quite small i used to want to be a great man. but in my observations of the old man's better than great way of meeting the gifts as well as the reverses of fate i didn't want to be a great man. i only wanted to stay unannexed to any institution as he was. no college ever decorated him. for the best of reasons. no college could. he could decorate them.
so traubel remained unannexed. he was fired from a bank because he happened to take issue in public with one of the bank's chief depositors. he floated about happily, surrounded by young whitman disciples, carrying on his guerrilla for what his leader called the “peerless, passionate, good cause” of human democracy. his little magazine led a precarious life, supported by good friends. 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. in his careful record of the camden[pg 162] sage's utterances and pulse-beats he approached (as nearly as any one) the devoted dignity of boswell. 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. one is always curious about the recording instrument. when we see a particularly fine photograph our first question is always, “what kind of camera was it taken with?”
it seems to us—speaking only by intuition, for we never knew him—that traubel was a happy man. he was untouched by many of the harassing ambitions that make the lives of prosperous men miserable. he was touched in boyhood by one simple and overmastering motive—to carry on the whitman message and spread it out for the younger world. much of the dunnage of life he cast overboard. he was too good a whitman disciple to estimate success in the customary terms. when he left his job in the bank he opened an account in the walt whitman philosophy—and he kept a healthy balance there to the end.
