Richard Maurice Bucke was born in Methwold, Norfolk, England, in 1837. He was the seventh of ten children of his father, the Rev. Horatio Walpole Bucke, a Cambridge-educated curate of the Church of England who read seven languages and brought a library of over a thousand volumes with him when the family emigrated to North America. The family settled on a large farm some miles outside of London, Ontario, Canada.

Richard Maurice was one year old at the time of the move, and grew up with free range of both the surrounding countryside and his father's library. He describes his chores about the farm: tending animals, working in the hay fields, driving oxen and horses. His "pleasures," he writes, were

as simple as his labors. An occasional visit to the neighboring small town, a game of ball, bathing in the creek that ran through his father's farm, the making and sailing of mimic ships, the search for bird's eggs and flowers in the spring and for wild fruits on the summer and fall. . . . (Bucke Cosmic Consciousness 8).

Bucke has it that he was raised "almost without education," but in Coyne, it becomes apparent that he was rather allowed to educate himself. Bucke's father taught each of his sons to read in a language or two, (Bucke got Latin) and then "left them to shift for themselves. But, to use Maurice's own words, 'they were born with the desire to know, and with the instinct to find out'" (Coyne 13)-a desire which would define Bucke's intellectual life.

Despite his father's profession, Maurice Bucke never embraced traditional religion, though he was passionately curious about the nature of God and the survival of the personality, dwelling "on these and similar topics," "subject at times to a sort of ecstasy of curiosity and hope. As on one special occasion when about ten years old he earnestly longed to die that the secrets of the beyond, if there was any beyond, might be revealed to him" (8). Aside from his fears about the survival of the personality, his childhood religious convictions were in keeping with the liberal spirituality of the time: "that Jesus was a man-great and good, no doubt, but a man. That no one would ever be condemned to everlasting pain." and "That if a conscious God existed he was the supreme master and meant well in the end" (8).
Bucke's youthful reading was broad, and early he evinced a strong emotional reaction to what he read. Again around the age of ten, he read a gothic adaptation of Faust by George W. M. Reynolds, and "being near its end one sunny afternoon, he laid it down utterly unable to continue its perusal, and went out into the sunshine to recover from the horror . . . . which had seized him (8).

Bucke's idyllic childhood did not last: his mother died in 1844, and a stepmother died in 1853, followed by Bucke's father three years later. As Bucke describes it, at this time: "the outward circumstances of his life became more unhappy than can readily be told" (8). At the age of sixteen, he "left home to live or die as might happen." His peregrinations across the North American continent seem a close match to Whitman's more imaginary travels. He worked "on farms, on railways, on steamboats, and in the placer mines of Western Nevada." He was a fireman on a steamboat, a stave-maker in the swamps of Louisiana, and tended an ox-train of merchant goods in a five-month odyssey 1200 miles across the Great Plains to Salt Lake City (Coyne 16-17). He "several times. . . nearly suffered shipwreck by sickness, starvation, freezing, and once on the banks of the Humboldt River, in Utah, fought for his life half a day with the Shoshone Indians" who attempted to rob him and his party of their supplies (Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness 9). During the battle, Bucke exchanged fire with the natives, who were lightly armed with bows and a few long guns. He reported wounding and possibly killing one personally, while two members of his party were injured, one seriously.

During a further trip west, searching for the silver deposits that would become the Comstock Lode, Bucke and Allan Grosh were caught in a blizzard in Squaw Valley for upwards of a week, running low on provisions, eating their only donkey, abandoning their equipment, eventually forced to crawl and stagger down the mountain in blinding snow. At one point, weak from hunger and exposure, Bucke faced down the prospect of his own death, suggesting to his companion that they should "make up our bed for the last time, for we shall never leave this place" only to be convinced by Grosh to continue walking (Bucke Twenty-Five Years After 559). They continued on and reached a mining camp, but Grosh died before two weeks were out, and Bucke had one foot and the toes from the other amputated, a wound which, according to Coyne, "did not thoroughly heal for more than forty years" (Coyne 29). In a speech he gave about the adventure shortly before his death, Bucke said "I have been born again. . . . It has cost me my feet-yet it was worth the price" (qtd in Coyne 29).

Bucke, like the young men on the frontier who made up such a substantial portion of Whitman's audience, had tasted the geography of much of the continent, had tried many professions, and had had his share of adventure: he had (probably) killed, and had become well-acquainted with death by violence, misadventure, and illness. He had faced his own death, and been permanently maimed in the process. He was not yet twenty one.

Bucke was sent to San Francisco by means of a charitable collection among the miners, and, having come into an inheritance from his mother, returned to Canada. He determined to study medicine at McGill University. His thesis, "The Correlation of the Vital and Physical Forces" was acclaimed the best thesis of the year, and published both in a journal and in pamphlet form, and would bring up the themes of the relation between the body and mind that he would treat further in Man's Moral Nature.

In 1872, on a trip to England to recuperate from a lingering illness, Bucke had an experience which would change his life. The way in which he relates the moment that marks what he called his "real and sole initiation to the new and higher order of ideas" (10) deserves a close look. Of particular note is the privileged position he gives to his understanding of Whitman's poetry:

At the age of thirty he fell in with "Leaves of Grass," and at once saw that it contained, in greater measure than any book so far found, what he had so long been looking for. He read the "Leaves" eagerly, even passionately, but for several years derived little from them. The last light broke and there was revealed to him (as far perhaps as such things can be revealed) at least some of the meanings. Then occurred that to which the foregoing is preface.

It was in the early spring, at the beginning of his thirty-sixth year. He and two friends had spent the evening reading Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Browning, and especially Whitman. They parted at midnight, and he had a long drive in a hansom (it was in an English city). His mind, deeply under the influence of the ideas, images and emotions called up by the reading and talk of the evening, was calm and peaceful. He was in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment. All at once, without warning of any kind, he found himself wrapped around as it were by a flame-colored cloud. For an instant he thought of fire, some sudden conflagration in the great city; the next, he knew that the light was in himself. (10)

Bucke writes that this was immediately followed by an

intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe . . . . one momentary lightning-flash of the Brahmic Splendor which has ever since lightened his life . . . . Among other things he did not come to believe, he saw and knew that the Cosmos is not dead matter but a living Presence, that the soul of man is immortal, that the universe is so built and ordered that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all, that the foundation principle of the world is what we call love and that the happiness of every one is in the long run absolutely certain. (10)

Readers of Whitman cannot fail to note the similarity between the noetic content of Bucke's experience and the suggestions to be found in Whitman's "Song of Myself" and other works. Bucke's "the foundation principle of the world is what we call love" seems to be a paraphrase of Whitman's "a kelson of the creation is love" from section five of "Song of Myself" (Whitman LoG 30).

Despite this, Bucke's experience has been widely used in the literature on mystical experience as an example of spontaneous and unintended mystical experience. Christian Barnard writes that Bucke's vision is exemplary because, in part, "it came upon him with very little overt preparation" (Barnard 37) and another scholar of mysticism, Jess Hollenback, finds it "difficult to imagine how the preternatural illumination that surrounded Bucke and surprised him during this moment of supreme joy could have been fully explicable as a by-product of his cultural milieu, since it was experienced as something completely new and unexpected" (Hollenbeck 15). Both fail completely to note the intense preparation Bucke has shown in his preceding reading of and fascination with Whitman's work. Bucke presents his initial intellectual breakthrough concerning the meaning of Whitman's poems immediately before the account of his experience of "Cosmic Consciousness": his account of his experience of reading Leaves of Grass, published in his biography of Whitman some years before, shows a use of the same trope of illumination to describe a reading breakthrough that Bucke would later use to describe the sudden realization of "Cosmic Consciousness"

About eighteen years ago, I began to read it. For many months I was strongly inclined to believe that there was nothing in it to see. But I could not let it alone; although one day I would throw it down in a sort of rage at its want of meaning, the next day or the day after I would take it up again with just as lively an interest as ever, persuaded that there was something there, and determined to find out what that might be. At first as I read, it seemed to me the writer was always on the point of saying something which he never actually said. Page after page seemed equally barren of any definite statement. Then after I time I found that a few lines here and there were full of suggestion and beauty. Gradually these bright spots, as I may call them, grew larger, more numerous and more brilliant, until at last the whole surface was lit up with an almost unearthly splendor. (Bucke Walt Whitman: Walt Whitman's Autograph Revision 103).

The various illuminations seem to be offered as part of a sequence: the metaphorically luminous text of the poem foreshadows a later illumination of the world and the self, which is developed by yet another event described as a spiritual experience-Bucke's first face-to-face meeting with Walt Whitman in 1877: "A sort of spiritual intoxication set in" Bucke wrote "which did not reach it's [sic] culmination for several weeks. . . The hour spent that day with the poet was the turning point of my life. The upshot was the placing of my spiritual existence on a higher plane" (qtd in Bucke Walt Whitman vi). Despite Bucke's emphasis on instantaneous illumination, his own case illustrates a more typical pattern: a variety of preparations, "inspired-feeling" readings, ecstatic experiences and emotional disturbances, read as a more or less continuous progression towards a "higher plane." Equally suggestive (and as equally frequently overlooked) is Bucke's previous susceptibility to nightmarish panic attacks, related to what he called "nervous dyspepsia." In a paper delivered in 1877, Bucke describes his own symptoms in third person:

Some day, we will suppose in the middle of the afternoon, without any warning or visible cause, one of these attacks of terror come on. The first thing the man feels is a great but vague discomfort. Then he notices that his heart is beating much too violently. At the same time shocks or flashes as of electrical discharges so violent as to be almost painful, and accompanied by a feeling of extreme distress, pass one after another through his body and limbs. Then in a few minutes he falls into a condition of the most intense fear. He is not afraid of anything; he is simply afraid. . . . When the climax of the attack is reached and passed, there is copious flow of tears, or else a mental condition upon which the person weeps upon the least provocation. (Qtd. In Shortt 23).

These attacks apparently continued until 1878, five years after Bucke's illumination experience.

S. E. D. Short, the author of Victorian Lunacy, a study of Bucke's practice as a pioneer in psychiatry, suggests that Bucke's "mystical illumination" "may have been related to his labile emotions and history of anxiety states" (23). In the same period as the illumination experience, Bucke experienced other strong, immediate, apparently objectless emotional states. That Bucke medicalized one as "a violent attack of nervous depression from dyspepsia" and sought psychological help for it, while he found in the other a source of solace and an evidence for an evolutionary trend in mankind and a general model of metaphysical speculation, has a great deal to say, I think, about the role of mystical writings and ideas in creating a framework of interpretation for experience.

Bucke, Richard Maurice. Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind. 1901. New York: Dutton, 1968.

 

Man's Moral Nature: An Essay. New York: Putnam, 1879.

The thesis of this book reportedly came to Bucke more or less instantaneously during his 1872 mystical experience, but it took him a number of years to get it written and published. It treats the question of Moral Nature, which in Bucke's definition, comes a little closer to emotional nature or even perhaps emotional attitude. Bucke, a medical man and a self-avowed materialist, first speculates as to what the Moral Nature is, and attempts to find its physiological source in the sympathetic nervous system, then shows how the Moral Nature has evolved in the race over time.

Particularly interesting (to me, anyway) is Bucke's theory on the relationship between faith and belief. Faith is one of the four elementary moral states, being largely related to trust and confidence in yourself and the universe. Belief is the concepts associated with one's faith. In Bucke, the moral state is both the causal and most important element. What people believe is largely immaterial: Christians and savages have equally bad evidence for their religion. But people tend to have beliefs that reflect the nature of their faith: more morally advanced people have more humane and less fearsome beliefs.

Most modern readers will not find Bucke's argument terribly convincing, and it's probably not of much interest to the casual reader, being rather dry, peculiar, and full of obsolete science. It sold very poorly (Bucke blamed the Spanish American War--one of his publishers blamed the title) and has never been reprinted. He never explicitly mentions Whitman in the text, though he uses Whitman's poetry for several chapter-beginning epigraphs, and dedicates the book to him. Bucke intended this work, his biography of Whitman, and Cosmic Consciousness to be taken together, and indeed, the ideas here can help us understand the framework of Bucke's thought, and act as a reminder that Bucke's belief, while unorthodox and peculiar seeming to us, comes from a grounding in the science of his day.

 

Richard Maurice Bucke, Medical Mystic: Letters of Dr. Bucke to Walt Whitman and His Friends. Ed. Artem Lozynsky. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1977.

Lozynsky, in this selection of Bucke's letters, and in a more complete companion volume available to print on demand, does Whitman and Bucke scholarship a profound service. Informed introductions and background (most of his biographical information is from Coyne) are paired with the text of the most important letters from Bucke to Whitman and his circle.

Bucke's letters to Whitman are remarkably mundane, in keeping with Whitman's dislike for "literary" correspondence.

"Ten Years After." The Overland Monthly. 1.2 (1883): 553-60.

This is Bucke's account of one of his more harrowing adventures while looking for the silver deposit that would later be called the Comstock Lode (the adventure which lost him his toes). I have placed the .pdf here.

Walt Whitman, McKay (Philadelphia), 1883, enlarged edition edited by Edward Dowden, Gardner (London), 1883.

Bucke originally intended this authorized biography of Whitman to serve as a

Coyne, James H. Richard Maurice Bucke, a Sketch. Toronto: Henry S. Saunders, 1921.

The best account of Bucke's life, reprinted with revisions from a 1906 article from the Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada. A very polite and complete little biography of under eighty pages. Uses Bucke's letters and autobiographical writings extensively. Used as the primary source for most other biographies of Bucke.

 

Shortt, S. E. D. Victorian Lunacy: Richard M. Bucke and the Practice of Late Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry. New York : Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Shortt, a careful and systematic scholar, takes Bucke's clinical practices at the London asylum as his main subject. He only mentions Bucke's friendship with Whitman in passing. He argues that Bucke essentially read into Whitman what he wanted to, and that Whitman had no real influence on Bucke's ideas. (Interesting, and I certainly agree with the first part of the statement).

The difference in focus shows us a different Bucke, and lets us see some of the ironies that breed between Bucke's ideas as a Whitmanian and his clinical practice.

• The Bucke Collection at the D.B. Weldon Library.
• Brief Entry on Bucke at Keys To Eternity.
• Description of a Bucke collection on microfilm at the Archives of Ontario.
• Bio of Bucke from the Canadian Heirloom Series.
• Very brief review of Cosmic Consciousness.
• Bio of Bucke including a short timeline.
• RTF file on the relationship between Bucke and William Osler, one of Whitman's other doctors. From McGill University, Bucke's alma mater.