as a
gawk or one dumb. The great middle-class ideal, which is mainly the ideal
of our own people, Whitman flouts and affronts. There are things to him of
higher import than to have wealth and be respectable and in the mode.

We might charge him with narrowness and partiality and with seeing only
half truths, as Mr. Stedman has done, did he simply rest with the native
as opposed to the cultivated, with brawn as opposed to brains. What he
does do, what the upshot of his teaching shows, is that he identifies
himself with the masses, with those universal human currents out of which
alone a national spirit arises, as opposed to isolated schools and
coteries and a privileged few. Whitman decries culture only so far as it
cuts a man off from his fellows, clips away or effaces the sweet, native,
healthy parts of him, and begets a bloodless, superstitious, infidelistic
class. "The best culture," he says, "will always be that of the manly and
courageous instincts and loving perceptions, and of self-respect." For
the most part, our schooling is like our milling, which takes the bone
and nerve building elements out of our bread. The bread of life demands
the coarse as well as the fine, and this is what Whitman stands for.

In his spirit and affiliation with the great mass of the people, with the
commoner, sturdier, human traits, Whitman is more of the type of Angelo,
or Rembrandt, or the antique bards, than he is like modern singers. He was
not a product of the schools, but of the race.

HIS RELATION TO HIS COUNTRY AND HIS TIMES

I

It has been said, and justly I think, that in Whitman we see the first
appearance in literature of the genuinely democratic spirit on anything
like an ample scale. Plenty of men of democratic tendencies and
affiliations have appeared, but none that have carried the temper and
quality of the people, the masses, into the same regions, or blended the
same humanity and commonness with the same commanding personality and
spirituality. In recent English poetry the names of Burns and Wordsworth
occur to mind, but neither of these men had anything like Whitman's
breadth of relation to the mass of mankind, or expressed anything like his
sweeping cosmic emotion. Wordsworth's muse was clad in homespun, but in no
strict sense was his genius democratic--using the word to express, not a
political creed, but the genius of modern civilization. He made much of
the common man, common life, common things, but