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