In the world of literature, as in the world of physical forces, things
adjust themselves after a while, and no impetus can be given to any man's
name or fame that will finally carry it beyond the limit of his real
worth. However "one-sided" my enthusiasm for Whitman may be, or that of
any of his friends may be, there is no danger but that in time he will
find exactly his proper place and level. My opinion, or any man's opinion,
of the works of another, is like a wind that blows for a moment across
the water, heaping it up a little on the shore or else beating it down,
but not in any way permanently affecting its proper level.
The adverse winds that have blown over Whitman's work have been many and
persistent, and yet the tide has surely risen, his fame has slowly
increased.
It will soon be forty years since he issued the first thin quarto edition
of "Leaves of Grass," and, though the opposition to him has been the most
fierce and determined ever recorded in our literary history, often
degenerating into persecution and willful misrepresentation, yet his fame
has steadily grown both at home and abroad. The impression he early made
upon such men as Emerson, Thoreau, William O'Connor, Mr. Stedman, Colonel
Ingersoll, and others in this country, and upon Professors Dowden and
Clifford, upon Symonds, Ruskin, Tennyson, Rossetti, Lord Lytton, Mrs.
Gilchrist, George Eliot, in England, has been followed by an equally deep
or deeper impression upon many of the younger and bolder spirits of both
hemispheres. In fact Whitman saw his battle essentially won in his own
lifetime, though his complete triumph is of course a matter of the distant
future.