the community, on which its own
genteel mentality seems to sit rather lightly. When the foreigner
opens the pages of Walt Whitman, he thinks that he has come at last
upon something representative and original. In Walt Whitman democracy
is carried into psychology and morals. The various sights, moods, and
emotions are given each one vote; they are declared to be all free and
equal, and the innumerable commonplace moments of life are suffered to
speak like the others. Those moments formerly reputed great are not
excluded, but they are made to march in the ranks with their
companions--plain foot-soldiers and servants of the hour. Nor does the
refusal to discriminate stop there; we must carry our principle
further down, to the animals, to inanimate nature, to the cosmos as a
whole. Whitman became a pantheist; but his pantheism, unlike that of
the Stoics and of Spinoza, was unintellectual, lazy, and
self-indulgent; for he simply felt jovially that everything real was
good enough, and that he was good enough himself. In him Bohemia
rebelled against the genteel tradition; but the reconstruction that
alone can justify revolution did not ensue. His attitude, in
principle, was utterly disintegrating; his poetic genius fell back to
the lowest level, perhaps, to which it is possible for poetic genius
to fall. He reduced his imagination to a passive sensorium for the
registering of impressions. No element of construction remained in it,
and therefore no element of penetration. But his scope was wide; and
his lazy, desultory apprehension was poetical. His work, for the very
reason that it is so rudimentary, contains a beginning, or rather many
beginnings, that might possibly grow into a noble moral imagination, a
worthy filling for the human mind. An American in the nineteenth
century who completely disregarded the genteel tradition could hardly
have done more.

But there is another distinguished man, lately lost to this country,
who has given some rude shocks to this tradition and who, as much as
Whitman, may be regarded as representing the genuine, the long silent
American mind--I mean William James. He and his brother Henry were as
tightly swaddled in the genteel tradition as any infant geniuses could
be, for they were born before 1850, and in a Swedenborgian household.
Yet they burst those bands almost entirely. The ways in which the two
brothers freed themselves, however, are interestingly different. Mr.
Henry James has done it