If the aim of
civilisation is orderliness, then the Roman aim is the better; but
if the aim is spiritual animation, then the Greeks are the winners.
Yet in the last century, England has been more fruitful in ideas
than America, although America is incomparably more interested in
education than England is.
But it is hard to balance these things. What remains is the fact
that Walt Whitman has drawn a fine democratic ideal. His democrat
is essentially a worker, with every sort of vigorous impulse,
living life in an ecstasy of health and comradeship, careless of
money and influence and position, content to live a simple life,
finding beauty, and hope, and love, and labour, enough, in the
spirit of the great dictum of William Morris, that the reward of
labour is life--not success or power or wealth, but the sense of
living fully and freely.
I do not claim that this spirit exists in England yet; but does it
exist in America? What, in fact, constitutes the inspiration of the
average American; what does he expect to find in life, and to make
of life? Whitman has no doubt at all. But in what other American
writer does this ideal find expression?
4
It remains to say a few words about the artistic methods of Walt
Whitman. He himself claims no artistic standard whatever. He says
that he wishes to create an atmosphere; and that his one aim has
been suggestiveness. "I round and finish little, if anything; and
could not consistently with my scheme.
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