flatter the portrait without any likelihood of the sitter's
disowning it for a faithful likeness. And so Whitman has
reasoned: that by drawing at first hand from himself and his
neighbours, accepting without shame the inconsistencies and
brutalities that go to make up man, and yet treating the
whole in a high, magnanimous spirit, he would make sure of
belief, and at the same time encourage people forward by the
means of praise.


II.


We are accustomed nowadays to a great deal of puling over the
circumstances in which we are placed. The great refinement
of many poetical gentlemen has rendered them practically
unfit for the jostling and ugliness of life, and they record
their unfitness at considerable length. The bold and awful
poetry of Job's complaint produces too many flimsy imitators;
for there is always something consolatory in grandeur, but
the symphony transposed for the piano becomes hysterically
sad. This literature of woe, as Whitman calls it, this
MALADIE DE RENE, as we like to call it in Europe, is in many
ways a most humiliating and sickly phenomenon. Young
gentlemen with three or four hundred a year of private means
look down from a pinnacle of doleful experience on all the
grown and hearty men who have dared to say a good word for
life since the beginning of the world. There is no prophet
but the melancholy Jacques, and the blue devils dance on all
our literary wires.