ism.

A race that can produce a man of his fibre, his continental type, is yet
at its best estate. Did one begin to see evil omen in this perpetual
whittling away and sharpening and lightening of the American type,--grace
without power, clearness without mass, intellect without character,--then
take comfort from the volume and the rankness of Walt Whitman. Did one
begin to fear that the decay of maternity and paternity in our older
communities and the falling off in the native population presaged the
drying up of the race in its very sources? Then welcome to the rank
sexuality and to the athletic fatherhood and motherhood celebrated by
Whitman. Did our skepticism, our headiness, our worldliness, threaten to
eat us up like a cancer? did our hardness, our irreligiousness, and our
passion for the genteel point to a fugitive, superficial race? was our
literature threatened with the artistic degeneration,--running all to art
and not at all to power? were our communities invaded by a dry rot of
culture? were we fast becoming a delicate, indoor, genteel race? were our
women sinking deeper and deeper into the "incredible sloughs of fashion
and all kinds of dyspeptic depletion,"--the antidote for all these ills is
in Walt Whitman. In him nature shows great fullness and fertility, and an
immense friendliness. He supplements and corrects most of the special
deficiencies and weaknesses toward which the American type seems to tend.
He brings us back to nature again. The perpetuity of the race is with the
common people. The race is constantly crying out at the top, in our times
at least; culture and refinement beget fewer and fewer and poorer and
poorer children. Where struggle ceases, that family or race is doomed.

"Now understand me well--it is provided in the essence of things that
from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth
something to make a greater struggle necessary."

In more primitive communities, the sap and vitality of the race were kept
in the best men, because upon them the strain and struggle were greatest.
War, adventure, discovery, favor virility. Whitman is always and
everywhere occupied with that which makes for life, power, longevity,
manliness. The scholar poets are occupied with that which makes for
culture, taste, refinement, ease, art.

"Leaves of Grass," taken as a whole, aims to exhibit a modern, democratic,
archetypal man, here in America, confronting and subduing o