r when they felt
most sure they had him in their verbal nets. So it has been from the
first, and so it continues to be. Without one thing, he says, it is
useless to read him; and of what that one thing needful is, he gives only
the vaguest hint, only a "significant look."

XXI

I may here notice two objections to Whitman urged by Mr. Stedman,--a
critic for whose opinion I have great respect, and a man for whom I have a
genuine affection. With all his boasted breadth and tolerance, Whitman,
says my friend, is narrow; and, with all his vaunted escape from the
shackles of verse-form, he is a formalist: his "irregular, manneristic
chant" is as much at the extreme of artificiality as is the sonnet. These
certainly are faults that one does not readily associate with the work of
Whitman. But then I remember that the French critic, Scherer, charges
Carlyle, the apostle of the gospel of sincerity, with being insincere and
guilty of canting about cant. If Carlyle is insincere, I think it very
likely that Whitman may be narrow and hide-bound. These things are so much
a matter of temperament that one cannot judge for another. Yet one ought
not to confound narrowness and breadth, or little and big. All earnest,
uncompromising men are more or less open to the charge of narrowness. A
man is narrow when he concentrates himself upon a point; even a
cannon-shot is. Whitman was narrow in the sense that he was at times
monotonous; that he sought but few effects, that he poured himself out
mainly in one channel, that he struck chiefly the major chords of life.
His "Leaves" do not show a great range of artistic motifs. A versatile,
many-sided nature he certainly was not; a large, broad, tolerant nature
he as certainly was. He does not assume many and diverse forms like a
purely artistic talent, sporting with and masquerading in all the elements
of life, like Shakespeare; but in his own proper form, and in his own
proper person, he gives a sense of vastness and power that are
unapproached in modern literature. He asserts himself uncompromisingly,
but he would have you do the same. "He who spreads a wider breast than my
own proves the width of my own." "He most honors my style who learns under
it to destroy the teacher." His highest hope is to be the soil of superior
poems.

Mr. Stedman thinks he detects in the poet a partiality for the coarser,
commoner elements of our humanity over the finer and choicer,--for the
"rough" over the gentle