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?
I.
Whitman, it cannot be too soon explained, writes up to a
system. He was a theoriser about society before he was a
poet. He first perceived something wanting, and then sat
down squarely to supply the want. The reader, running over
his works, will find that he takes nearly as much pleasure in
critically expounding his theory of poetry as in making
poems. This is as far as it can be from the case of the
spontaneous village minstrel dear to elegy, who has no theory
whatever, although sometimes he may have fully as much poetry
as Whitman. The whole of Whitman's work is deliberate and
preconceived. A man born into a society comparatively new,
full of conflicting elements and interests, could not fail,
if he had any thoughts at all, to reflect upon the tendencies
around him.
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