PARADOXICAL GENIUS.

others so feeble and ill-conceived, that any discussion of their quality must consist alternately of praise and adverse criticism. Reviewing what has been written, I see that the career and output of the poet under notice are provocative of each in some extreme, and unite to render him a striking figure in that disputed

estate.

393

Walt Whitman, then, has seemed to me a man who should think well of Nature, since he has received much at her hands; and well of Fortune, since his birth, training, localities, have individualized the character of his natural gifts; and well of Humanity, for his good works to men have come back to him in the devotion of the most loyal and efficient band of adherents that ever buoyed the purpose and advanced the interests of a reformer or poet. He has lived his life, and warmed both hands before its fire, and in middleage honored it with widely praised and not ignoble deeds. Experience and years have brought his virile, too lusty nature to a wiser harmony and repose. He has combined a sincere enthusiasm with the tact of a man of the world, and, with undoubted love for his kind, never has lost sight of his own aim and reputation. No follower, no critic, could measure him with a higher estimate than that which from the first he has set upon himself. As a poet, a word-builder, he whit is equipped with touch, voice, vision, zest, all trained man's equip and freshened, in boyhood and manhood, by genuine ment. intercourse with Nature in her broadest and minutest forms. From her, indeed, he is true-born, no bastard child nor impostor. He is at home with certain classes of men; but here his limitations begin, for he is not great enough, unconscious enough, to do more than assume to include all classes in his sympathy and brotherhood. The merits of his verse are lyrical

His genius and limitations.

passion and frequent originality, a copious, native, surprising range of diction, strong feeling, softened by consummate tenderness and pity, a method lowered by hoarseness, coarseness, and much that is very pointless and dull, yet at its best charged with melody and meaning, or so near perfection that we are irked to have him miss the one touch needful, a skill that often is art, but very seldom mastery. As a man of convictions, he has reflected upon the idea of a true democracy, and sought to represent it by a true Americanism; yet, in searching for it and for the archetypal manhood chiefly in his own personality, it is not strange that he has frequently gratified his self-consciousness, while failing to present to others a satisfactory and well-proportioned type of either. His disposition and manner of growth always have led him to overrate the significance of his views, and inclined him to narrow theories of art, life and song. He utters a sensible protest against the imitativeness and complacency that are the bane of literature, yet is more formal than others in his non-conformity, and haughtier in his plainness than many in their pride. Finally, and in no invidious sense, it is true that he is the poet of a refined period, impossible in any other, and appeals most to those who long for a reaction, a new beginning; not a poet of the people, but eminently one who might be, could he in these days avail His future himself of their hearing as of their sight.

reputa

tion.

Is he,

therefore, not to be read in the future? Of our living poets, I should think him most sure of an intermittent remembrance hereafter, if not of a general reading. Of all, he is the one most sure waiving the question of his popular fame - to be now and then examined; for, in any event, his verse will be revived from time to time by dilettants on the hunt for curious treasures

HIS PLACE IN LITERATURE.

in the literature of the past, by men who will reprint and elucidate him, to join their names with his, or to do for this singer what their prototypes in our day have done for François Villon, for the author of "Joseph and his Brethren," and for William Blake.

395

Taylor's career to

be noted in illustration of

THIS

CHAPTER XI.

BAYARD TAYLOR.

HIS poet, the last and youngest of those here made the subjects of distinct review, is no longer a living comrade. The consecrating hand that removed him enables us to free our judgment from conditions. bias of rivalry or affection.

recent

The question of suc

cess.

"Far off is he, above desire and fear;

No more submitted to the change and chance

Of the unsteady planets."

He was taken in his prime, with work spread out before him, yet not until after years of unceasing production. We find ourselves observing one whose ideal was higher than anything which his writings, abundant as they are, express for us, and one who none the less has claims to be estimated in some degree by that ideal. His life was noteworthy; it was a display of heroic industry, zest, ambition, the bravest self-reliance, and from slight beginnings he achieved much. But he was one whose success must be gauged from within. What was his dream? Did he realize it? If not, what hindered him? These questions must be asked; and, in trying to answer them, we see the peculiar advantages which the career of Taylor proffers for an understanding of the literary movement, the social and working life, in which he was involved. Not that he was our most famous singer, nor one whose score was completed,

AUTHORSHIP IN NEW YORK.

but what American poet ever touched life and letters more variously? He let nothing go by him, he essayed everything, and he furnishes examples of what to do and what to avoid. Moreover, his

story enables us to study American authorship under somewhat different conditions from those which have affected the Cambridge group, and with it a period whose bisecting line is indicated by the date of the beginning of our civil war.

397

Obiter

The task laid upon the pioneers of letters in New New York. See p. 53. York has been sufficiently hard, always the need of devotion, toil, patient laying of foundations on which others shall build. Inherited names and resources, and the advantage of university life, have favored the growth of the New England school. Poets who have strayed into New York and here they are more seldom born than imported — have carried the harp with one hand and some instrument of labor cantata. with the other, and have sung their songs in such noonings as they could obtain. Almost without exception they have been thrown upon journalism for a support, and have experienced whatever good and evil that profession brings to the aesthetic sense of its practitioner. Bayard Taylor was not only a sturdy and courageous example of a poet born out of New England, but must be studied with the period already named. Younger than our chief poets still living, he stood with a few companions who found their music The Civil broken in upon by the tumult of a national war. War. Thus, we are to consider the writings of one who dates half-way between the elder and the rising generations; who was not of Cambridge, nor of Concord, but from the Middle States; and in whose works, although the product of a life of action, we always find the influences of the study and the hearth.