That his complete absorption, however, by his
own country and by the world, is ultimately to take place, is one
of the beliefs that grows stronger and stronger within me as time
passes, and I suppose it is with a hope to help forward this
absorption that I write of him now. Only here and there has he yet
effected a lodgment, usually in the younger and more virile minds.
But considering the unparalleled audacity of his undertaking, and
the absence in most critics and readers of anything like full-grown
and robust aesthetic perception, the wonder really is not that he
should have made such slow progress, but that he should have gained
any foothold at all. The whole literary _technique_ of the race for
the last two hundred years has been squarely against him, laying,
as it does, the emphasis upon form and scholarly endowments instead
of upon aboriginal power and manhood.
My own mastery of the poet, incomplete as it is, has doubtless been
much facilitated by contact--talks, meals, and jaunts--with him,
stretching through a decade of years, and by seeing how everything
in his _personnel_ was resumed and carried forward in his literary
expression; in fact, how the one was a living commentary upon the
other. After the test of time, nothing goes home like the test of
actual intimacy; and to tell me that Whitman is not a large, fine,
fresh, magnetic personality, making you love him and want always to
be with him, were to tell me that my whole past life is a
deception, and all the impression of my perceptive faculties a
fraud.
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