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of a healthy sexual life. He was angry, as well he might be, with the furtive snigger which greets such matters as motherhood and fatherhood with the prurient unwholesomeness of a mind that can sigh sentimentally over the "roses and raptures of Vice" and start away shamefaced from the stark passions--stripped of all their circumlocutions. He certainly realized as few have done the truth of that fine saying of Thoreau's, that "for him to whom sex is impure there are no flowers in Nature." But at the same time I cannot help feeling that Stevenson was right when he said that Whitman "loses our sympathy in the character of a poet by attracting too much of our attention--that of a Bull in a China Shop." {180} His aim is right enough; it is to his method one may take objection. Not on the score of morality. Whitman's treatment of passion is not immoral; it is simply like Nature herself--unmoral. What shall we say then about his sex cycle, "Children of Adam"? Whitman, in his anxiety to speak out, freely, simply, naturally, to vindicate the sanity of coarseness, the poetry of animalism, seems to me to have bungled rather badly. There are many fine passages in his "Song of the Body Electric" and "Spontaneous Me," but much of it impresses me as bad art, and is consequently ineffectual in its aim. The subject demands a treatment at once strong and subtle--I do not mean finicking--and subtlety is a quality not vouchsafed to Whitman. Lacking it, he is often unconsciously comic where he should be gravely impressive. "A man's body is sacred, and a woman's body is sacred." True; but the sacredness is not displayed by making out a tedious inventory of the various parts of the body. Says Whitman in effect: "The sexual life is to be gloried in, not to be treated as if it were something shameful." Again true; but is there not a danger of missing the glory by discoursing noisily on the various physiological manifestations. Sex is not the more wonderful for being appraised by the big drum. The inherent beauty and sanctity of Sex lies surely in its superb unconsciousness; it is a matter for two human beings drawn towards one another by an indefinable, world-old attraction; scream about it, caper over it, and you begin to make it ridiculous, for you make it self-conscious. Animalism merely as a scientific fact serves naught to the poet, unless he can show also what is as undeniable as the bare fact--its poetry, its coars
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