and Swinburnian impotence,--that he could do it and not be
ridiculous. To have done it without offense would have been proof that he
had failed utterly. Let us be shocked; it is a wholesome shock, like the
douse of the sea, or the buffet of the wind. We shall be all the better
for it by and by.

XIV

The lover of Whitman comes inevitably to associate him with character and
personal qualities. I sometimes meet women whom I say are of the Whitman
type--the kind of woman he invoked and predicted. They bear children, and
are not ashamed; motherhood is their pride and their joy: they are
cheerful, tolerant, friendly, think no evil, meet high and low on equal
terms; they walk, row, climb mountains; they reach forth into the actual
world of questions and events, open-minded, sympathetic, frank, natural,
good-natured; the mates and companions of their husbands, keeping pace
with them in all matters; home-makers, but larger than home, considerate,
forgiving, unceremonious,--in short, the large, fresh, wholesome open-air
natures whose ideal so completely possessed Walt Whitman.

A British critic wisely says the gift of Whitman to us is the gift of life
rather than of literature, but it is the gift of life through literature.
Indeed, Whitman means a life as much as Christianity means a life. He
says:--

"Writing and talk do not prove me."

Nothing but the test of reality finally proves him:--

"The proof of the poet shall be sternly deferr'd till his country has
absorbed him as affectionately as he has absorbed it."

The proof of Whitman shall be deferred till he has borne fruit in actual,
concrete life.

He knew that merely intellectual and artistic tests did not settle matters
in his case, or that we would not reach his final value by making a
dead-set at him through the purely aesthetic faculties. Is he animating to
life itself? Can we absorb and assimilate him? Does he nourish the manly
and heroic virtues? Does he make us more religious, more tolerant, more
charitable, more candid, more self-reliant? If not, he fails of his chief
end. It is doubtful if the purely scholarly and literary poets, like
Milton, say, or like our own Poe, are ever absorbed in the sense above
implied; while there is little doubt that poets like Homer, like
Shakespeare, are absorbed and modify a people's manners and ideals. Only
that which we love affects our lives. Our admiration for art and
literature as such is something enti