mage.

It is an interesting psychological point, this difference between the
"marching breast-forward" of Mrs. Browning's energetic husband,
and the "taking to the open road" of Whitman. In some curious way
the former gets upon one's nerves where the latter does not. Perhaps
it is that the boisterous animal-spirits which one appreciates in the
open air become vulgar and irritating when they are practised within
the walls of a house. A Satyr who stretches his hairy shanks in the
open forest is a pleasant thing to see; but a gentleman, with
lavender-colored gloves, putting his feet on the chimney-piece is not
so appealing. No doubt it is precisely for these Domestic Exercises
that Mr. Chesterton, let us say, would have us love Browning. Well!
It is a matter of taste.

But it is not of Walt Whitman's Optimism that I want to speak; it is
of his poetry.

To grasp the full importance of what this great man did in this
sphere one has only to read modern "libre vers." After Walt
Whitman, Paul Fort, for instance, seems simply an eloquent prose
writer. And none of them can get the trick of it. None of them!
Somewhere, once, I heard a voice that approached it; a voice
murmuring of

"Those that sleep upon the wind,
And those that lie along in the rain,
Cursing Egypt--"

But that voice went its way; and for the rest--what banalities! What
ineptitudes! They make the mistake, our modern free-versifiers, of
thinking that Art can be founded on the Negation of Form. Art can
be founded on every other Negation. But not on that one--never on
that one! Certainly they have a right to experiment; to invent--if they
can--new forms. But they must invent them. They must not just
arrange their lines _to look like poetry,_ and leave it at that.

Walt Whitman's New Form of Verse was, as all such things must be,
as Mr. Hardy's strange poetry, for instance, is, a deliberate and
laborious struggle--ending in what is a struggle no more--to express
his own personality in a unique and recognisable manner. This is the
secret of all "style" in poetry. And it is the absence of this labour, of
this premeditated concentration, which leads to the curious result we
see on all sides of us, the fact, namely, that all young modern poets
_write alike._ They write alike, and they _are_ alike--just as all men
are like all other men, and all women like all other women, when,
without the "art" of clothing, or the "art" of flesh and blood, they li