Those moments formerly reputed great are not
excluded, but they are made to march in the ranks with their
companions--plain foot-soldiers and servants of the hour. Nor does the
refusal to discriminate stop there; we must carry our principle
further down, to the animals, to inanimate nature, to the cosmos as a
whole. Whitman became a pantheist; but his pantheism, unlike that of
the Stoics and of Spinoza, was unintellectual, lazy, and
self-indulgent; for he simply felt jovially that everything real was
good enough, and that he was good enough himself. In him Bohemia
rebelled against the genteel tradition; but the reconstruction that
alone can justify revolution did not ensue. His attitude, in
principle, was utterly disintegrating; his poetic genius fell back to
the lowest level, perhaps, to which it is possible for poetic genius
to fall. He reduced his imagination to a passive sensorium for the
registering of impressions. No element of construction remained in it,
and therefore no element of penetration. But his scope was wide; and
his lazy, desultory apprehension was poetical. His work, for the very
reason that it is so rudimentary, contains a beginning, or rather many
beginnings, that might possibly grow into a noble moral imagination, a
worthy filling for the human mind.
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