ill,
character, flesh-and-blood reality. We get these things, not as sentiments
or yet theories, but as a man. We see life and the world as they appear to
the inevitable democrat, the inevitable lover, the inevitable believer in
God and immortality, the inevitable acceptor of absolute science.

We are all going his way. We are more and more impatient of formalities,
ceremonies, and make-believe; we more and more crave the essential, the
real. More and more we want to see the thing as in itself it is; more and
more is science opening our eyes to see the divine, the illustrious, the
universal in the common, the near at hand; more and more do we tire of
words and crave things; deeper and deeper sinks the conviction that
personal qualities alone tell,--that the man is all in all, that the
brotherhood of the race is not a dream, that love covers all and atones
for all.

Everything in our modern life and culture that tends to broaden,
liberalize, free; that tends to make hardy, self-reliant, virile; that
tends to widen charity, deepen affection between man and man, to foster
sanity and self-reliance; that tends to kindle our appreciation of the
divinity of all things; that heightens our rational enjoyment of life;
that inspires hope in the future and faith in the unseen,--are on
Whitman's side. All these things prepare the way for him.

On the other hand, the strain and strife and hoggishness of our
civilization, our trading politics, our worship of conventions, our
millionaire ideals, our high-pressure lives, our pruriency, our
sordidness, our perversions of nature, our scoffing caricaturing
tendencies, are against him. He antagonizes all these things.

The more democratic we become, the more we are prepared for Whitman; the
more tolerant, fraternal, sympathetic we become, the more we are ready
for Whitman; the more we inure ourselves to the open air and to real
things, the more we value and understand our own bodies, the more the
woman becomes the mate and equal of the man, the more social equality
prevails,--the sooner will come to Whitman fullness and fruition.

VI

Some of our own critics have been a good deal annoyed by the fact that
many European scholars and experts have recognized Whitman as the only
distinctive American poet thus far. It would seem as if our reputation for
culture and good manners is at stake. We want Europe to see America in our
literary poets like Lowell, or Longfellow, or Whittier. And Eu