266 DEMOCRATIC ART 



puissant nation ; but he does not find the spirit of a nation. 

 The body is there, growing larger and grander every day, for 

 ever acquiring fresh equipments and more powerful appliances. 

 Meanwhile the soul, the ideality of art and literature, com- 

 mensurate with this gigantic frame, is wanting. 



Viewed, to-day, from a point of view sufficiently over-arching, the 

 problem of humanity all over the civilised world is social and religious, 

 and is to be finally met and treated by literature. The priest departs, 

 the divine literatus comes. 1 Never was anything more wanted than, 

 to-day, and here in The States, the poet of the modern is wanted, or the 

 great literatus of the modern. 2 



What is our religion ? he asks. ' A lot of churches, sects, 

 &c., the most dismal phantasms I know, usurp the name of 

 religion.' 



What is our national prosperity ? * The magician's serpent 

 in the fable ate up all the other serpents ; and money-making 

 is our magician's serpent, remaining to-day sole master of 

 the field.' 



What does our huge material expansion amount to ? 'It 

 is as if we were somehow being endowed with a vast and 

 more and more thoroughly appointed body, and then left with 

 little or no soul.' 



What are our cities ? ' A sort of dry and flat Sahara 

 appears these cities, crowded with petty grotesques, malfor- 

 mations, phantoms, playing meaningless antics.' 



What is our boasted culture ? ' Do you term that per- 

 petual, pistareen, paste-pot work American art, American 

 drama, taste, verse ? ' Instead of poets corresponding to the 

 pitch and vigour of the race, he sees ' a parcel of dandies and 

 ennuyees, dapper little gentlemen from abroad, who flood us 

 with their thin sentiment of parlours, parasols, piano-songs, 

 tinkling rhymes, the five hundredth importation, or whimpering 

 and crying about something, chasing one aborted conceit 



1 These, and all other italics, are mine ; intended to direct attention 

 to the main points, as I conceive them, in my quotations from Whitman. 



2 This and the following extracts are taken from ' Democratic Vistas.' 



