always does the poet stand
apart, the recluse, the hermit, the philosopher, loving and contemplating
these things for purposes of his art. Only through intellectual sympathy
is he a part of what he surveys. In Whitman the common or average man has
grown haughty, almost aristocratic. He coolly confronts the old types, the
man of caste, culture, privileges, royalties, and relegates him to the
past. He readjusts the standards, and estimates everything from the human
and democratic point of view. In his scheme, the old traditions--the
aristocratic, the scholastic, the ecclesiastical, the military, the social
traditions--play no part. He dared to look at life, past and present, from
the American and scientific standpoint. He turns to the old types a pride
and complacency equal to their own.

Indeed, we see in the character which Whitman has exploited and in the
interest of which his poems are written, the democratic type fully
realized,--pride and self-reliance equal to the greatest, and these
matched with a love, a compassion, a spirit of fraternity and equality,
that are entirely foreign to the old order of things.

II

At first sight Whitman does not seem vitally related to his own country
and people; he seems an anomaly, an exception, or like one of those
mammoth sports that sometimes appear in the vegetable world. The Whitman
ideal is not, and has never been, the conscious ideal of the mass of our
people. We have aspired more to the ideal of the traditional fine
gentleman as he has figured in British letters. There seems to have been
no hint or prophecy of such a man as Whitman in our New England
literature, unless it be in Emerson, and here it is in the region of the
abstract and not of the concrete. Emerson's prayer was for the absolutely
self-reliant man, but when Whitman refused to follow his advice with
regard to certain passages in the "Leaves," the sage withheld further
approval of the work.

We must look for the origins of Whitman, I think, in the deep
world-currents that have been shaping the destinies of the race for the
past hundred years or more; in the universal loosening, freeing, and
removing obstructions; in the emancipation of the people, and their coming
forward and taking possession of the world in their own right; in the
triumph of democracy and of science; the downfall of kingcraft and
priestcraft; the growth of individualism and non-conformity; the
increasing disgust of the soul of man with f