nd
thin? The social gods will all be outraged, but that is less to him than
the candor and directness of nature in whose spirit he assumes to speak.

Nothing is easier than to convict Walt Whitman of what is called
indecency; he laughs indifferent when you have done so. It is not your
gods that he serves. He says he would be as indifferent of observation as
the trees or rocks. And it is here that we must look for his
justification, upon ethical rather than upon the grounds of conventional
art. He has taken our sins upon himself. He has applied to the morbid
sex-consciousness, that has eaten so deeply into our social system, the
heroic treatment; he has fairly turned it naked into the street. He has
not merely in words denied the inherent vileness of sex; he has denied it
in very deed. We should not have taken offense had he confined himself to
words,--had he said sex is pure, the body is as clean about the loins as
about the head; but being an artist, a creator, and not a mere thinker or
preacher, he was compelled to act,--to do the thing instead of saying it.

The same in other matters. Being an artist, he could not merely say all
men were his brothers; he must show them as such. If their weakness and
sins are his also, he must not flinch when it comes to the test; he must
make his words good. We may be shocked at the fullness and minuteness of
the specification, but that is no concern of his; he deals with the
concrete and not with the abstract,--fraternity and equality as a reality,
not as a sentiment.

XII

In the phase in which we are now considering him, Whitman appears as the
Adamic man re-born here in the nineteenth century, or with science and the
modern added, and fully and fearlessly embodying himself in a poem. It is
stronger than we can stand, but it is good for us, and one of these days,
or one of these centuries, we shall be able to stand it and enjoy it.

"To the garden the world anew ascending,
Potent mates, daughters, sons, preluding,
The love, the life of their bodies, meaning and being,
Curious, here behold my resurrection, after slumber,
The revolving cycles, in their wide sweep, having brought me again,
Amorous, mature--all beautiful to me--all wondrous,
My limbs, and the quivering fire that ever plays through them, for
reasons most wondrous;
Existing, I peer and penetrate still,
Content with the present--content with the past,
By my side, or back of me, Eve fol