without ever being sober. I remember my own father, and my childhood and youth of struggle to save him. All these men were kind and gentle, idealistic, charming in

manners-"

"I, too, had an uncle," says Mrs. Ogi; "the tenderest heart you ever knew. He drank because he could not stand the life he saw about him, the unsolvable race problem, the mass of ignorance and brutality. I would get his bottle away from him and hide it, and then in his torment he would go so far as a 'damn'; but I never saw him so drunk that he failed to apologize for such a word."

We must take Poe as one of the pitiful victims of these customs; we must understand that his virtues were .his own, while his vices were fed to him in a "sugar-tit." Of all American poets up to this time his was the greatest genius; his was the true fire, the energy, the vision-and for the most part it was wasted and lost. It was wasted, not merely because he got drunk, because he was always on the verge of starvation, because he was chained to slavery, and had to write pot-boilers under the orders of men with routine or mercenary minds; it was wasted also because he was a victim of perverse theories about art and life. He began, as a child, with imitations of Byron, and then came under the spell of Coleridge's disorderly genius. We might take a great part of Poe's work, just as we took "Kubla Khan," and show how his talent goes into the portrayal of every imaginable kind of ruin, terror and despair.

We cannot say to what extent Poe's art theories were the product of his vices, and to what extent the vices were the product of the theories. After he left West Point, and was starving in Baltimore, he met his cousin, a frail, sensitive child, as poor as himself. He married her when she was less than fourteen years old; he adored her, but their life was a long crucifixion, because of her failing health. Several times she broke a blood vessel, and in the end she faded away from tuberculosis. The shadow of that tragedy hung over Poe's whole mature life, and you will note that his loveliest poetry deals with beautiful. women who are dying or dead.

In this tormented body there lived and wrought not merely a great genius, but also a great mind. Poe was a critic, of a kind entirely new to America. He did not

distribute indiscriminate praise from motives of patriotism and puffery; he had critical standards, right or wrong, and was merciless to the swarms of art pretenders. Naturally, therefore, he was hated and furiously attacked; and because of his weaknesses, he was an easy mark for all.

His art theories were those which we are here seeking to overthrow; how false and dangerous they were, his life attests. It is interesting to note that in one of his youthful poems, the first real utterance of his genius, he took a quite different view. Quoting an imaginary passage from the Koran about the angel Israfel, "whose heartstrings are a lute," he wrote:

Therefore thou art not wrong,
Israfeli, who despisest

An unimpassioned song;

To thee the laurels belong,

Best bard, because the wisest.

Well might this tormented Baltimore poet long for the wisdom of the Mohammedan angel! He spent his great analytical powers in concocting a "moon hoax," and in solving all the cryptograms which empty-headed people sent him. It was as if a man should build a mighty engine, and then set it to fanning the air. In his last pitiful years he composed an elaborate work on metaphysics, which he called "Eureka," meaning that he had solved the secret of the ages, the nature of existence and the absolute. It is like all other metaphysics-a cobweb spun out of words; the mighty engine has here been set to fanning a vacuum.

Poe was a fighting man and an ardent propagandist. He fought for art, for the freedom and the glory and the joy of art, as a thing apart from humanity, and from the sense of brotherhood and human solidarity. Life wreaked its vengeance upon him, his punishment was heavy enough, and we should be content with voicing our pity—but for the fact that his art theories are still alive in the world, wrecking other young artists. This is what makes necessary the painful task of drawing moral lessons over the graves of "mighty poets in their misery dead."

CHAPTER LXXX

THE GOOD GREY POET

Edgar Allan Poe lived and wrote to prove that art excludes morality. We come now to another poet, who lived and wrote to prove that art excludes everything else. He had a message and a faith, which was the dominating motive in everything he wrote; in short, he was one of the major prophets-like Dante, Milton, Tolstoi, Nietzsche, who used art as a means of swaying the souls of men.

Referring thus to Walt Whitman, we now have upon our side the weight of critical authority; learned and entirely respectable college professors write in this fashion. about his books, and do not lose their positions for so doing. But realize how different it was in Whitman's lifetime; in the early years respectable opinion looked upon him as a kind of obscene manjac. His first edition of "Leaves of Grass," a thousand copies printed by himself, was left on his hands, except for those which he sent out free-and even some of these were returned, one by the poet Whittier! A critic wrote that Whitman was "as unacquainted with art as a hog with mathematics." Another wrote that he "deserved the whip of the public executioner." He was thrown out of a government position in Washington for having a copy of his book locked up in his own desk, and again and again his publishers were forced by threat of public prosecution to withdraw the book from circulation. Alone among Whitman's contemporaries to recognize his genius was Emerson, and when Whitman published Emerson's letter in the second edition of "Leaves of Grass," Emerson was embarrassed -for in the meantime his horrified friends had persuaded him to hesitate in his opinion. From all this we may learn how difficult it is to judge one's contemporaries.

Walt Whitman was born of farmer folk in an isolated part of Long Island. His father became a carpenter and moved to Brooklyn, then a small town. Walt became an office boy at the age of twelve; he got hold of some good reading, learned printing, and became a teacher, and something of an orator. He was an abolitionist, a teetotaler and other kinds of "crank"; a slow-moving, rather

stubborn youth, who wandered about from place to place, meeting all kinds of people, watching life with interest, but caring nothing for success. He had a good job as a newspaper editor, but gave it up because of his views on slavery. He set a new fashion in life—a type of man now common in the radical movement, who does enough manual labor to keep alive, and spends the rest of his time studying literature and life. Walt's people loved him, but could not make him out; they thought he was lazy when he loafed and invited his soul.

He was finding his own way, guided by the unfolding genius within. He wanted to know people, every kind that lived; he wanted to talk with them, to feel himself one with them. He worked with laborers on the job, he rode in ferry-boats, he made friends with the drivers of busses. He wanted to see America, so he wandered by slow stages to New Orleans and back. He wanted to know literature, so he read, but according to his own taste, taking no one's opinions. When he was ready to express himself, it was a self hitherto unknown in literature, and the most startling voice yet lifted in America.

It often happens that the student learns about new and vital movements through the writings of their opponents. Thus the present writer was made into a rationalist by the reading of Christian apologetics. In the same way I learned about Whitman from an essay by Sidney Lanier, a respectable gentleman-poet from the South, who demonstrated that Whitman's claim to be the voice of democracy was nonsense; the masses of the people had no interest whatever in this eccentric poetry, and could not understand what the poet was driving at.

Does a poet necessarily have to be appreciated by those of whom he writes? Or is it possible to tell something about people which they themselves do not yet know? If a man is picking apples, he is obeying the laws of gravitation, and the apples likewise are obeying it. Sir Isaac Newton comes along, and interprets the behavior of the man and of the apples. Does the truth of Newton's law depend upon the assent of the apple-picker?

Walt Whitman did really know the American people, the masses, as distinguished from the cultured few; he knew them as no man of letters up to that time had known them. He believed there were tremendous, instinctive

forces working within them, and that he, as poet and seer, could enter into that unconscious mass-being and understand it and guide it. He believed that he was laying out the path which democracy would follow, he was voicing the desires it would feel, the love and fellowship and solidarity it would embody in institutions and arts. Whether he was right in these intuitions and mystical prophesyings was for the future to decide. Certainly there were two kinds of persons in Whitman's own day who could not decide; one was the average wage-slave, ignorant and groping; and the other was a gentleman from Georgia, who made excellent but customary rhymes about birds and brooks and flowers.

Walt Whitman was one of those mystics to whom the inner essence of all things is the same; all life is sacred, and all men are brothers in a common Fatherhood. Jesus taught that, and in the nineteen hundred years which have since passed new prophets have arisen every now and then to revive it but the Christians are just as much scandalized every time. Whitman's title, "Leaves of Grass," under which he included all his poems, means that he chose the most common and least distinguished product of nature for his symbol of the human soul. The poet himself was one of these "Leaves of Grass," and celebrated himself as the representative and voice of the rest. He sang the song of himself, and his contemporaries thought this was crude and barbarous egotism. This big bearded fellow who printed his own poems, with a preface to tell how great they were, and his picture in a workingman's dress. without a necktie-he was nothing but a hoodlum, and the critics called for the police.

The worst stumbling block was the portion of the book called "Children of Adam," dealing with sex. The AngloSaxon race was used to horrified silence about sex, and also to sly leering about sex; the one thing it had never encountered was simple frankness. What Whitman did was to take sex exactly as it is, a part of life, and write about it as he wrote about everything else. When I, a student, first looked up "Leaves of Grass" in the Columbia University library, I found this portion of the book so thumbed and worn as to make plain that the young readers had not been taught to understand Whitman. For he gave to this part of his message its due proportion and

as