hat he signalizes a new departure in literature. Of poets
about the people there have been many, but he is the first genuine Poet
_of_ the People.

Art is in its essence aristocratic, it strives after selectness, eschews
the trivial and the trite. There is, therefore, in literature always a
tendency towards conservatism; the literary artist grows more and more
fastidious in his choice of words; the cheap and vulgar must be
rigorously excluded, and only those words carrying with them stately and
beautiful associations are to be countenanced. Thus Classicism in Art
constantly needs the freshening, broadening influence of Romanticism.

What Conservatism and Liberalism are to Politics Classicism and
Romanticism are to Art. Romantic revolutions have swept over literature
before the nineteenth century, and Shakespeare was the first of our great
Romantics. Then with the reaction Formalism and Conservatism crept in
again. But the Romantic Revival at the beginning of the nineteenth
century went much further than previous ones. Out of the throes of the
Industrial Revolution had been born a lusty, clamorous infant that
demanded recognition--the new Demos. And it claimed not only recognition
in politics, but recognition in literature. Wordsworth and Shelley
essayed to speak for it with varying success; but Wordsworth was too
exclusive, and Shelley--the most sympathetic of all our poets till the
coming of Browning--was too ethereal in his manner. Like his own
skylark, he sang to us poised midway between earth and heaven; a more
emphatically flesh and blood personage was wanted.

Here and there a writer of genuine democratic feeling, like Ebenezer
Elliott, voiced the aspirations of the people, but only on one side.
Thomas Hood and Mrs. Browning sounded a deeper note; but the huge,
clamorous populace needed a yet fuller note, a more penetrating insight,
a more forceful utterance. And in America, with its seething
democracy--a democracy more urgent, more insistent than our own--it found
its spokesman. That it did not recognize him, and is only just beginning
to do so, is not remarkable. It did not recognize him, for it had
scarcely recognized itself. Only dimly did it realize its wants and
aspirations. Whitman divined them; he is the Demos made articulate.

And not only did he sweep away the Conservative traditions and
conventions of literature, he endeavoured to overthrow the aristocratic
principle that underlies it.