sonally such a puzzle to most people,--so impossible to classify. On
the street the promenaders would turn and look after him, and I have often
heard them ask each other, "What man was that?" He has often been taken
for a doctor, and during his services in the army hospitals various myths
were floating about concerning him. Now he was a benevolent Catholic
priest,--then some unknown army general, or retired sea captain; at one
time he was reputed to be one of the owners of the Cunard line of
steamers. To be taken for a Californian was common. One recalls the
composite character of the poet whom he outlines in his poems (see
quotation, page 159).

The book is as composite as the man. It is all things to all men; it lends
itself to a multitude of interpretations. Every earnest reader of it will
find some clew or suggestion by the aid of which he fancies he can unlock
the whole book, but in the end he will be pretty sure to discover that one
key is not enough. To one critic, his book is the "hoarse song of a man,"
its manly and masculine element attracts him; to another he is the poet of
joy, to another the poet of health, to still another he is the bard of
personality; others read him as the poet of nature, or the poet of
democracy. His French critic, Gabriel Sarrazin, calls him an apostle,--the
apostle of the idea that man is an indivisible fragment of the universal
Divinity.

XI

What has a poet of Whitman's aims to do with decency or indecency, with
modesty or immodesty? These are social or conventional virtues; he
represents mainly primary qualities and forces. Does life, does death,
does nature, respect our proprieties, our conventional veils and
illusions? Neither will he. He will strip them all away. He will act and
speak as if all things in the universe were equally sacred and divine; as
if all men were really his brothers, all women his sisters; as if all
parts of the human body were equally beautiful and wonderful; as if
fatherhood and motherhood, birth and begetting, were sacred acts. Of
course it is easy to see that this course will speedily bring him in
collision with the guardians of taste and social morality. But what of
that? He professes to take his cue from the elemental laws. "I reckon I
behave no more proudly than the level I plant my house by." The question
is, Is he adequate, is he man enough, to do it? Will he not falter, or
betray self-consciousness? Will he be true to his ideal through thick a