, and the
banality of the result is a sufficient indication of the crudeness of
the current taste, and the mean position assigned to the art of letters.
This was pre-eminently the era of the moral tale, the Sunday-school
book. Literature was conceived, not as a thing in itself, but merely as
a hand-maiden to politics or religion. The great celebrity of Emerson in
New England was not the celebrity of a literary artist, but that of a
theologian and metaphysician; he was esteemed in much the same way that
Jonathan Edwards had been esteemed. Even down to our own time, indeed,
his vague and empty philosophizing has been put above his undeniable
capacity for graceful utterance, and it remained for Dr. Kellner to
consider him purely as a literary artist, and to give him due praise for
his skill.

The Civil War brought that era of sterility to an end. As I shall show
later on, the shock of it completely reorganized the American scheme of
things, and even made certain important changes in the national
Puritanism, or, at all events, in its machinery. Whitman, whose career
straddled, so to speak, the four years of the war, was the leader--and
for a long while, the only trooper--of a double revolt. On the one hand
he offered a courageous challenge to the intolerable prudishness and
dirty-mindedness of Puritanism, and on the other hand he boldly sought
the themes and even the modes of expression of his poetry in the
arduous, contentious and highly melodramatic life that lay all about
him. Whitman, however, was clearly before his time. His countrymen could
see him only as immoralist; save for a pitiful few of them, they were
dead to any understanding of his stature as artist, and even unaware
that such a category of men existed. He was put down as an invader of
the public decencies, a disturber of the public peace; even his eloquent
war poems, surely the best of all his work, were insufficient to get him
a hearing; the sentimental rubbish of "The Blue and the Gray" and the
ecstatic supernaturalism of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" were far
more to the public taste. Where Whitman failed, indeed, all subsequent
explorers of the same field have failed with him, and the great war has
left no more mark upon American letters than if it had never been
fought. Nothing remotely approaching the bulk and beam of Tolstoi's "War
and Peace," or, to descend to a smaller scale, Zola's "The Attack on the
Mill," has come out of it. Its appeal to th