from science as did Browning, if we look at the thought underlying the verse. On the whole scientific discoveries depressed rather than cheered him, whereas from Paracelsus onwards Browning accepts courageously all the results of modern science, and, as in the case of Whitman, it enlarged his moral and spiritual horizon.
But he was not a philosopher as Browning was; indeed, there is less of the philosopher about Whitman than about any poet of our age. His method is quite opposed to the philosophic. It is instinctive, suggestive, and as full of contradictions as Nature herself. You can no more extract a philosophy from his sweeping utterances than you can from a tramp over the hills.
But, like a tramp over the hills, Whitman fits every reader who accompanies him for a stronger and more courageous outlook. It is not easy to say with Whitman as in the case of many writers: “This line quickened my imagination, that passage unravelled my perplexities.” It is the general effect of his writings that exercises such a remarkable tonic influence. Perhaps he has never indicated this cumulative power more happily than in the lines that conclude his “Song of Myself.”
“You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.“Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged.
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.”
Yes; that is Whitman’s secret—“Good health.” To speak of him as did his biographer, Dr. Bucke, as “perhaps the most advanced nature the world has yet
produced,” to rank him, as some have done, with the world’s greatest moral teachers, beside Jesus and Socrates, seems to me the language of hysterical extravagant. Nay, more, it misses surely the special significant of his genius.
In his religious thought, his artistic feelings, his affections, there is breadth of sympathy, sanity of outlook, but an entire absence of intensity, of depth.
We shall scan his pages vainly for the profound aspiration, the subtle spiritual insight of our greatest religious teachers. In his indifference to form, his insensibility to the noblest music, we shall realize his artistic limitations.
Despite his genial comradeship, the more intimate, the more delicate experiences of friendship are not to be found in his company. Delicacy, light and shade, subtlety, intensity, for these qualities you must not seek Whitman. But that is no reason for neglecting him. The Modern and Ancient world are rich in these other qualities, and the special need of the present day is not intensity so much as sanity, not subtlety so much as breadth.
In one of his clever phrases Mr. Havelock Ellis has described Whitman “as a kind of Titanic Undine.” [204] Perhaps it is a good thing for us that he never “found his soul.” In an age of morbid self-introspection there is something refreshing in an utterance like this, where he praises the animals because—