“So long!
I announce a life that shall be copious, vehement, spiritual bold,
And I announce an did age that shall lightly and joyfully meet its translation.”
Cultured conventions, of which we make so much, distress him. They tend, he argues, to enervation, to a poor imitative, self-conscious art, to an artificial, morbid life.
His curative methods were heroic; but who can say that they were not needed, or that they were mischievous?
Certainly in aiming first of all at sincerity he has attained that noble beauty which is born of strength.
Nature, as he saw, was full of vital loveliness by reason of her very power. The average literary artist is always seeking for the loveliness, aiming after beauty of form, without a care whether what he is saying has the ring of sincerity and truth, whether it is in touch with the realities of Nature. And in his super-refinements he misses the beauty that flashes forth from the rough, savage songs of Whitman.
Whitman does not decry culture. But he places first the educative influence of Nature. “The best Culture,” he says, “will always be that of the manly and courageous instincts and loving perception, and of self-respect.”
No advocate of lawlessness he; the influence of modern sciences informs every line that he has written.
As Mr. Burroughs very justly says: “Whitman’s relation to science is fundamental and vital. It is the soil under his feet. He comes into a world from which all childish fear and illusion has been expelled. He exhibits the religious and poetic faculties perfectly adjusted to a scientific, industrial, democratic age, and exhibits them more fervent and buoyant than ever before. We have gained more than we have lost. The world is anew created by science and democracy, and he pronounces it good with the joy and fervour of the old faith.”
In this respect Mr. Burroughs thinks that Whitman shared with Tennyson the glory of being one of the two poets in our time who have drawn inspiration from this source. Certainly no poet of our time has made finer use as an artist of scientific facts than the late Laureate.
But Tennyson seems scarcely to have drawn inspiration