Part 18 (1/2)

Of course the essential elements of all first-class artistic and literary productions are always the same, just as nature, just as man, are essentially the same everywhere Yet the literature of every people has a stamp of its own, starts from and implies antecedents and environments peculiar to itself

Just as ripe, land lies back of Tennyson, and is vocal through hiy, sharp-tongued Scotland lies back of Carlyle; just as thrifty, well-schooled, well-housed, prudent, and roup of poets, and is voiced by thelorification, our faith in the future, our huge , sublime, and unkempt nature, lie back of Whit, ift to carve his American material into forms of ideal beauty, and did not claim to have He did not value beauty as an abstraction

What Whitman did that is unprecedented was, to take up the whole country into himself, fuse it, imbue it with soul and poetic emotion, and recast it as a sort of colossal Walt Whitman He has not so much treated A American, and made the whole land redolent of his own quality He has descended upon the gross materialism of our day and land and upon the turbulent de impact, such fervid enthusias like the breath of universal nature His special gift is his oism united with such a fund of human sympathy His power is centripetal, so to speak,--he draws everything into hireat draet out of and away from himself, he has not It was not for Whitedies of democracy, as Shakespeare wrote those of feudalis of an overripe civilization It was for hirown, athletic, haughtily taking possession of the world and redistributing the prizes according to its own standards It was for hier,them in himself

In him the new spirit of democracy first completely knows itself, is proud of itself, has faith and joy in itself, is fearless, tolerant, religious, aggressive, triumphant, and bestows itself lavishly upon all sides It is tentative, doubtful, hesitating no longer It is at ease in the world, it takes possession, it fears no rival, it advances with confident step

No man was ever more truly fathered by what is formative and expansive in his country and times than was Whitotten, but by the spirit that lies back of all, and that begat America itself,--the America that Europe loves and fears, that she comes to this country to see, and looks expectantly, but for the most part vainly, in our books to find

It seems to me he is distinctly a continental type His sense of space, of es, his unloosedness, his wide horizons, his vanishi+ng boundaries,--always so and undeood traits of his country and his people are doubtless implied by his work

If he does not finally escape froh it all and clarify it and turn it to ideal uses, draw out the spiritualof him

”The pleasures of heaven are with raft and increase upon ue”

The vital and the forrafts and increases upon himself, and thence upon his reader; the crude, the local, the accidental, he translates into a new tongue It has been urged against Whitman that he expresses our unripe Americanism only, but serious readers of him know better than that He is easy round It seems to me that in his and values in democracy and the modern; we see them translated into character; we see them tried by universal standards; we see theination We see Aet a new conception of the value of the near, the conificance of the coht of an abstract idea, but the light of a concrete example We see the democratic type on a scale it has never before assumed; it is on a par with any of the types that have ruled the world in the past, the al It is at home, it has taken possession, it can hold its own Henceforth the world is going its way If it is over-confident, over-self-assertive, too Ae of the poet, of e do not want a penny prudence and caution; h and it fulfills itself Whitman has betrayed no doubt or hesitation in his poetry His assumptions and vaticinations are tremendous, but they are uttered with an authority and an assurance that convince like natural law

IV

I think he gives newto de out of new conditions, and fully able to justify itself and hold its own It is the newtoward the old I confess that to me America and the modern would nottill they gave birth to a personality equal to the old types

Discussions and speculations about democracy do not carry very far, after all; to preach equality is not s h his eyes, and see new joy and newin it, our doubts and perplexities are cleared up Our universal balloting, and schooling, and : can your democracy produce a ions, and prove as helpful and one types were under the old?

V

I predict a great future for Whit his way The three or four great currents of the century--the democratic current, the scientific current, the huious current, and what flows out of them--are underneath all Whitman has written They shape all and make all They do not appear in him as mere dicta, or intellectual propositions, but as iet these things, not as sentiments or yet theories, but as a man We see life and the world as they appear to the inevitable democrat, the inevitable lover, the inevitable believer in God and immortality, the inevitable acceptor of absolute science

We are all going his way We are more and more impatient of formalities, ceremonies, and make-believe; we more and more crave the essential, the real More andas in itself it is;our eyes to see the divine, the illustrious, the universal in the common, the near at hand; s; deeper and deeper sinks the conviction that personal qualities alone tell,--that the man is all in all, that the brotherhood of the race is not a drea in our modern life and culture that tends to broaden, liberalize, free; that tends to make hardy, self-reliant, virile; that tends to widen charity, deepen affection between man and man, to foster sanity and self-reliance; that tends to kindle our appreciation of the divinity of all things; that heightens our rational enjoyment of life; that inspires hope in the future and faith in the unseen,--are on Whits prepare the way for hiishness of our civilization, our trading politics, our worshi+p of conventions, our h-pressure lives, our pruriency, our sordidness, our perversions of nature, our scoffing caricaturing tendencies, are against his

The more democratic we become, the more we are prepared for Whitman; the more tolerant, fraternal, sympathetic we become, the more we are ready for Whitman; the s, the more we value and understand our own bodies, the more the woman becomes the mate and equal of the man, the more social equality prevails,--the sooner will come to Whitman fullness and fruition

VI

Soood deal annoyed by the fact that nized Whitman as the only distinctive American poet thus far It would seeood manners is at stake We want Europe to see Afellow, or Whittier And Europe may well see much that is truly representative of Aland poets She may see our aspiration toward her own ideals of culture and refine Lowell and Whittier; she otten by our natural environentle hufellow But in every case she sees a type she has long been fahts, moods, points of view, effects, ai known These are not the poets of a neorld_, but of a new _England_ The neorld book implies more than a new talent, inal mind like the poets named; such lish authorshi+p What is implied is a new national and continental spirit, which e, new, democratic personality,--a new man, and, beyond and above hiland poets have carried the New England spirit into poetry,--its sense of fitness, order, propriety, its shrewdness, inventiveness, aptness, and its aspiration for the pure and noble in life

They have finely exemplified the best Yankee traits; but in no instance were these traits h, and copious and denificance It would be absurd to claireat era is to be felt in the work of any of these poets