WALT WHITMAN


It would be an ill turn for an essay-writer to destroy Walt
Whitman,--for he was discovered by the essayists, and but for them his
notoriety would have been postponed for fifty years. He is the mare's
nest of "American Literature," and scarce a contributor to The Saturday
Review but has at one time or another raised a flag over him.

The history of these chronic discoveries of Whitman as a poet, as a
force, as a something or a somebody, would write up into the best
possible monograph on the incompetency of the Anglo-Saxon in matters of
criticism.

English literature is the literature of genius, and the Englishman is
the great creator. His work outshines the genius of Greece. His wealth
outvalues the combined wealth of all modern Europe. The English mind is
the only unconscious mind the world has ever seen. And for this reason
the English mind is incapable of criticism. There has never been an
English critic of the first rank, hardly a critic of any rank; and the
critical work of England consists either of an academical bandying of a
few old canons and shibboleths out of Horace or Aristotle, or else of
the merest impressionism, and wordy struggle to convey the sentiment
awakened by the thing studied.

Now, true criticism means an attempt to find out what something is, not
for the purpose of judging it, or of imitating it, nor for the purpose