OF late years the name of Walt Whitman has been a good deal bandied about
in books and magazines. It has become familiar both in good and ill
repute. His works have been largely bespattered with praise by his
admirers, and cruelly mauled and mangled by irreverent enemies. Now,
whether his poetry is good or bad as poetry, is a matter that may admit
of a difference of opinion without alienating those who differ. We could
not keep the peace with a man who should put forward claims to taste and
yet depreciate the choruses in _Samson Agonistes_; but, I think, we may
shake hands with one who sees no more in Walt Whitman’s volume, from a
literary point of view, than a farrago of incompetent essays in a wrong
direction. That may not be at all our own opinion. We may think that,
when a work contains many unforgettable phrases, it cannot be altogether
devoid of literary merit. We may even see passages of a high poetry here
and there among its eccentric contents. But when all is said, Walt
Whitman is neither a Milton nor a Shakespeare; to appreciate his works is
not a condition necessary to salvation; and I would not disinherit a son
upon the question, nor even think much the worse of a critic, for I
should always have an idea what he meant.
What Whitman has to say is another affair from how he says it. It is not
possible to acquit any one of defective intelligence, or else stiff
prejudice, who is not interested by Whitman’s matter and the spirit it
represents. Not as a poet, but as what we must call (for lack of a more
exact expression) a prophet, he occupies a curious and prominent
position. Whether he may greatly influence the future or not, he is a
notable symptom of the present. As a sign of the times, it would be hard
to find his parallel. I should hazard a large wager, for instance, that
he was not unacquainted with the works of Herbert Spencer; and yet where,
in all the history books, shall we lay our hands on two more incongruous
contemporaries? Mr. Spencer so decorous—I had almost said, so dandy—in
dissent; and Whitman, like a large shaggy dog, just unchained, scouring
the beaches of the world and baying at the moon. And when was an echo
more curiously like a satire, than when Mr. Spencer found his Synthetic
Philosophy reverberated from the other shores of the Atlantic in the
“barbaric yawp” of Whitman?