248 DEMOCRATIC ART 



Self -righteousness, and personal egotism, and ostrich-fear 

 corrode it. We need to deliver our souls from these 

 besetting sins, and to rise above them into more ethereal 

 atmosphere. The man of letters, the artist, who would fain 

 prove himself adequate to Democracy in its noblest sense, 

 must emerge from earthy vapours of complacent self, and 

 artificial circumstances, and decaying feudalism, It is his 

 privilege to be free, and to represent freedom. It is his 

 function to find a voice, a mode of utterance, an ideal of form, 

 which shall be on a par with nature delivered from unscientific 

 canons of interpretation, and with mankind delivered from 

 obsolescent class distinctions. 



Whitman offers enormous difficulties to the critic who 

 wishes to deal fairly with him. The grotesqueness of his 

 language and the uncouth structure of his sentences render 

 it almost impossible to do justice to the breadth of his 

 thought and the sublimity of his imagination. He ought 

 to be taken in large draughts, to be lived with in long 

 solitudes. His peculiar mode of utterance suffers cruelly by 

 quotation. Yet it is needful to extract his very words, in 

 order to escape from the vagueness of a summary. 



The inscription placed upon the forefront of ' Leaves of 

 Grass ' contains this phrase : * I speak the word of the modern, 

 the word EN-MASSE.' What this word means for Whitman is 

 expressed at large throughout his writings. We might throw 

 light upon it from the following passage : l 



I speak the pass-word primeval I give the sign of democracy ; 

 By God ! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart 

 of on the same terms. 



Thus Democracy implies the absolute equality of heritage 

 possessed by every man and woman in the good and evil of 



1 Walt Whitman, 24. I quote from the New York edition of 1867, 

 being unable to follow the changes in subsequent re-issues of Whitman's 

 works. 



