humanism and humanitarianism, religion and science were engaged in inconclusive warfare within him. Keen of wit, he was inclined at times to witness this warfare from the vantage point of irony. Fundamentally in earnest, he was oftener inclined to join one side or the other, or to propose an inglorious compromise (symbolized by the title of his poem 'Pessimoptimism'). For the most part, however, his mastering desire was to escape the scene of conflict and take refuge in the realm of outward action, or in friendship, or in nature, or in the reading of books. Living in

This age that blots out life with question-marks,

he could secure himself from his inner tumult in one after another of these asylums of the spirit, and there attain at least the illusion of life.1

It is significant that the essay on Dryden is one of the most discerning that he wrote. Observing that Southey was in some respects similar to Dryden, Lowell leaves it for us to observe that he himself was still more akin to Dryden, both in his endowment of qualities and in the difficulties imposed upon him by his epoch. 'Singularly interesting' to him was this vacillating poet-critic of a transitional epoch hostile to 'earnest convictions.' When he says that 'it is the weight of the whole man, not of one or the other limb of him, that we want,' he calls to mind himself equally with his subject. He reminds us of himself when he reports Congreve's remark that Dryden's life was 'variety and not of a piece'; when he notes in Dryden 'that inequality and even incongruousness in his writing which makes one revise one's judgment at every tenth page'; when he observes that Dryden tended to

1 In Nature in American Literature, pp. 158-70, I have described in some detail Lowell's confusion and his modes of escape - especially his escape through days of 'right Chaucer' with outward nature. Most of the phenomena of his inner life he himself expressed, in their intricate lineaments, in 'The Cathedral,' first published in 1870, a poem of about eight hundred lines which Lowell said 'wrote itself.'

skepticism and was also given to flashes of intuitive insight; when he remarks that Dryden's taste was not 'the result of instinct' but rather 'the slow result of reflection,' surely a fact in his own emphasis on classical form; when he suspects the self-consciousness of Dryden in the lines on Antony Quick to observe, and full of sharp remorse,

He censures eagerly his own misdeeds,
Judging himself with malice to himself;

and when he justly declares that 'there are continual glimpses of something in him greater than he, hints of possibilities finer than anything he has done.' Likewise, when he describes the age into which Dryden was born, Lowell in effect describes the environment in which he (with poor Percival) happened to pass his days. 'It may be conjectured,' he says, 'that Dryden's Puritan associations may have stood in the way of his more properly poetic culture,' just as he believed that the Puritan spirit may have stood in his own way. The fact that Lowell was living too late to experience the full flush of the romantic faith is paralleled with the fact that Dryden was too late to feel the firm support of the Renaissance, the movement in his time being 'a downward one, from faith to skepticism, . . . away from those springs of imagination and faith at which they of the last age had slaked the thirst or renewed the vigor of their souls.' Admirably did Lowell state the large problem that confronted both himself and Dryden:

All ages are, in some sense, ages of transition; but there are times when the transition is more marked, more rapid; and it is, perhaps, an ill fortune for a man of letters to arrive at maturity during such a period, still more to represent in himself the change that is going on.... Unless, like Goethe, he be of a singularly uncontemporaneous nature, capable of being tutta in sè romita, and of running parallel with his time rather than being sucked into its current, he will be thwarted in that harmonious development of native force which has so much to do with its steady and successful application. Dryden suffered, no doubt, in this way.

And so did Lowell, even more. To be uncontemporaneous like Goethe, to rise to a region above the turmoil of the day, was the high ambition that impelled him after his first residence in the scenes of European culture, and that lends to his writings on the great authors not merely a romantic enthusiasm but also an accent of genuine exaltation. His full realization of this ambition was thwarted, however, partly because his native force was inadequate, and partly because he was sucked into the current of his times. At the most we may venture to say of him, as Dryden said of a poet that Lowell loved, that 'he is a perpetual fountain of good sense,' a fountain not unmixed with the waters of Helicon; or to declare that Dryden's praise was also Lowell's- that 'amid the rickety sentiment looming big through misty phrase which marks so much of modern literature, to read him is as bracing as a northwest wind.' At the least we may class him, as he classed Dryden, among those who impregnate rather than invent, among those 'brokers of thought' who perform a great if secondary office in literature.

CHAPTER IV

WHITMAN

81

THE importance of Walt Whitman as a literary critic has never been rightly recognized. He was not, to be sure, a professional critic like Poe or Lowell; he did not concern himself, except casually, with reviewing contemporary books and writing rounded estimates of authors. In the field of what might be termed applied criticism -the application of criteria to particular works or writers - he regarded himself, with excess of modesty, as the 'hell of a critic.' When told that Burroughs thought him a rather considerable critic in his own way, he remarked, 'If I am it must be in an intuitive fashion: but I guess I am not.' This also is less than the truth, if by 'intuitive' he meant impressionistic, since it is certain that he both reflected much on all the authors that interested him from Homer to Carlyle, and applied to them a set of criteria to which he was singularly faithful from his journalistic days to his oracular old age in Camden. Yet, if he was not a professional critic, a writer on men and books, he was nevertheless one of the most important critics that America has produced, because of the theory of literature that he formulated. It will be well for us to remember, in studying this theory, that Aristotle attained his supreme position in the history of criticism, and likewise Wordsworth his prominent place in modern English criticism, by virtue of a few pages of speculation on the nature of poetry. Whitman is a critic in the same sense in which Wordsworth is a critic. Both Wordsworth and Whitman concerned themselves with the theory of poetry; both were primarily interested in the relation of poetry to contemporary life; both illustrated their

theory with collections of poems-'Lyrical Ballads' and 'Leaves of Grass' which made but a slight impression upon the public of the time, but which were destined to be viewed later as turning-points in literary history; and both set forth their theory, awkwardly yet memorably, in a series of prefaces or similar compositions.1

In philosophical speculation such as Whitman attempted, writing without logical method is assuredly an awkwardness, frequently an exasperating awkwardness. In a late essay on American poetry, Whitman blandly informs us that he has 'gossip'd about it all,... taking the privilege of rambling wherever the talk carried me.' Another essay on American literature he wrote in response to an invitation from the editor of the 'North American Review' on condition that he be permitted to 'put down some mélanged cogitations regarding the matter.' This essay belongs to his last years, when invalidism rendered sustained thought impossible, but 'mélanged cogitations' quite as aptly characterizes his first preface to 'Leaves of Grass,' published nearly half a century before. While it would be gratuitous to point out here that Whitman's verse strongly resembles the prose of that preface, it is worth remarking that the prose resembles the verse. As a critic, Whitman announced his theory with the same bald affirmations, the same cataloguing method, the same fragmentary phrasing set off with the same rows of periods, that he had employed with better reason in his ejaculatory verse. Not content with defying the traditions of English verse, he defied also the traditions of English prose. Only, whereas he always approved his choice of verse form, he later drew closer to normal prose-in 'Democratic Vistas,' for example, which conventional rhetoricians might

1 With the prose of Walt Whitman may be included Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person, a work ostensibly by John Burroughs, who in 1920 conceded, 'I have no doubt that half the book is his.' (Barrus, Life and Letters of John Burroughs, 1, 129.) In the present chapter, however, I have not seen fit to draw upon this ambiguous work.