ur enormous
materialism to his own purposes, putting it off and on as a garment;
identifying himself with all forms of life and conditions of men; trying
himself by cosmic laws and processes, exulting in the life of his body and
the delights of his senses; and seeking to clinch, to develop, and to
realize himself through the shows and events of the visible world. The
poet seeks to interpret life from the central point of absolute abysmal
man.

The wild and the savage in nature with which Whitman perpetually
identifies himself, and the hirsute, sun-tanned, and aboriginal in
humanity, have misled many readers into looking upon him as expressive of
these things only. Mr. Stedman thinks him guilty of a certain narrowness
in preferring, or seeming to prefer, the laboring man to the gentleman.
But the poet uses these elements only for checks and balances, and to keep
our attention, in the midst of a highly refined and civilized age, fixed
upon the fact that here are the final sources of our health, our power,
our longevity. The need of the pre-scientific age was knowledge and
refinement; the need of our age is health and sanity, cool heads and good
digestion. And to this end the bitter and drastic remedies from the shore
and the mountains are for us.

IX

The gospel of the average man, Matthew Arnold thought, was inimical to the
ideal of a rare and high excellence. But, in holding up the average man,
Whitman was only holding up the broad, universal human qualities, and
showing that excellence may go with them also. As a matter of fact, are we
not astonished almost daily by the superb qualities shown by the average
man, the heroism shown by firemen, engineers, workingmen, soldiers,
sailors? Do we not know that true greatness, true nobility and strength of
soul, may go and do go with commonplace, every-day humanity? Whitman would
lift the average man to a higher average, and still to a higher, without
at all weakening the qualities which he shares with universal humanity as
it exists over and under all special advantages and social refinements.
He says that one of the convictions that underlie his "Leaves" is the
conviction that the "crowning growth of the United States is to be
spiritual and heroic,"--a prophecy which in our times, I confess, does not
seem very near fulfillment.

He does not look longingly and anxiously toward the genteel social gods,
but quite the contrary. In the library and parlor, he confesses he is