the virile strength tends to coarseness, the eye fixed on
certain broad distant effects misses the delicate by-play of colour and
movement in the foreground. The persistent unconventionality of metre
and rhythm becomes in time a mannerism as pronounced as the mannerism of
Tennyson and Swinburne.

I do not urge these things in disparagement of Whitman. No man can take
up a certain line wholeheartedly and uncompromisingly without incurring
the disabilities attaching to all who concentrate on one great issue.

And if sometimes he is ineffectual, if on occasion he is merely strident
in place of authoritative, how often do his utterances carry with them a
superb force and a conviction which compel us to recognize the sagacious
genius of the man.

III

Indeed, it is when we examine Whitman's attitude towards Humanity that we
realize best his strength and courage. For it is here that his qualities
find their fittest artistic expression. Nothing in Whitman's view is
common or unclean. All things in the Universe, rightly considered, are
sweet and good. Carrying this view into social politics, Whitman
declares for absolute social equality. And this is done in no
doctrinaire spirit, but because of Whitman's absolute faith and trust in
man and woman--not the man and woman overridden by the artifices of
convention, but the "powerful uneducated person." Whitman finds his
ideal not in Society (with a capital S), but in artisans and mechanics.
He took to his heart the mean, the vulgar, the coarse, not idealizing
their weaknesses, but imbuing them with his own strength and vigour.

"I am enamoured of growth out of doors,
Of men that live among cattle, or taste of the ocean or woods,
Of the builder and steerers of ships, and the wielders of axes, and
The drivers of horses.
I can eat and sleep with them week in week out."

Such are his comrades. And well he knows them. For many years of his
life he was roving through country and city, coming into daily contact
with the men and women about whom he has sung. Walt Whitman--farm boy,
school teacher, printer, editor, traveller, mechanic, nurse in the army
hospital, Government clerk. Truly our poet has graduated as few have
done in the school of Life. No writer of our age has better claims to be
considered the Poet of Democracy.

But he was no sentimentalist. More tolerant and passive in disposition
than Victor Hugo, he had the same far-seeing vis