orms and ceremonies; the
sentiment of realism and positivism, the religious hunger that flees the
churches; the growing conviction that life, that nature, are not failures,
that the universe is good, that man is clean and divine inside and out,
that God is immanent in nature,--all these things and more lie back of
Whitman, and hold a causal relation to him.

III

Of course the essential elements of all first-class artistic and literary
productions are always the same, just as nature, just as man, are
essentially the same everywhere. Yet the literature of every people has a
stamp of its own, starts from and implies antecedents and environments
peculiar to itself.

Just as ripe, mellow, storied, ivy-towered, velvet-turfed England lies
back of Tennyson, and is vocal through him; just as canny, covenanting,
conscience-burdened, craggy, sharp-tongued Scotland lies back of Carlyle;
just as thrifty, well-schooled, well-housed, prudent, and moral New
England lies back of her group of poets, and is voiced by them,--so
America as a whole, our turbulent democracy, our self-glorification, our
faith in the future, our huge mass movements, our continental spirit, our
sprawling, sublime, and unkempt nature, lie back of Whitman and are
implied by his work.

He had not the shaping, manipulating gift to carve his American material
into forms of ideal beauty, and did not claim to have. He did not value
beauty as an abstraction.

What Whitman did that is unprecedented was, to take up the whole country
into himself, fuse it, imbue it with soul and poetic emotion, and recast
it as a sort of colossal Walt Whitman. He has not so much treated American
themes as he has identified himself with everything American, and made the
whole land redolent of his own quality. He has descended upon the gross
materialism of our day and land and upon the turbulent democratic masses
with such loving impact, such fervid enthusiasm, as to lift and fill them
with something like the breath of universal nature. His special gift is
his magnetic and unconquerable personality, his towering egoism united
with such a fund of human sympathy. His power is centripetal, so to
speak,--he draws everything into himself like a maelstrom; the centrifugal
power of the great dramatic artists, the power to get out of and away from
himself, he has not. It was not for Whitman to write the dramas and
tragedies of democracy, as Shakespeare wrote those of feudalism, or as
Tennys