direct as a challenge, as
personal as a handshake, and yet withal how mystical, how elusive, how
incommensurable! To deny that Whitman belongs to the fraternity of great
artists, the shapers and moulders of the ideal,--those who breathe the
breath of life into the clay or stone of common facts and objects, who
make all things plastic and the vehicles of great and human emotions,--is
to read him very inadequately, to say the least. To get at Walt Whitman
you must see through just as much as you do in dealing with nature; you
are to bring the same interpretive imagination. You are not to be balked
by what appears to be the coarse and the familiar, or his rank
contemporaneity; after a time you will surely see the lambent spiritual
flames that play about it all.

"Prophetic spirit of materials shifting and flickering about me,"

and his cosmic splendor, depth, and power. It is not the denial of art, it
is a new affirmation of life. It is one phase of his democracy. It is the
logical conclusion of the vestless and coatless portrait of himself that
appeared in the first edition of his poems. He would give us more of the
man, a fuller measure of personal, concrete, human qualities, than any
poet before him. He strips away the artificial wrappings and illusions
usual in poetry, and relies entirely upon the native and intrinsic. He
will have no curtains, he says,--not the finest,--between himself and his
reader.

"Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of
all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun (there are millions of
suns left),
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look
through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself."

This is a hint of his democracy as applied to literature,--more direct and
immediate contact with the primary and universal, less of the vestments
and trappings of art and more of the push and power of original character
and of nature.

III

It seems to me it is always in order to protest against the narrow and
dogmatic spirit that so often crops out in current criticism touching this
matter of art. "The boundaries of art are jealously guarded," says a
recent authority, as if art had boundaries like a state or province that
had been accurately surveyed and