Those who shrink from virtue as from a split infinitive sometimes speak in disparagement of Mr. Clutton-Brock’s gifts. He is the head of a table at which the virtues and the graces sit down side by side, and they are dressed so much alike that it is not always easy to tell which is which. He is always seeking, indeed, the point at which a virtue passes into a grace, and he knits his brows over those extreme differences that separate one from the other. The standard by which he measures things in literature and in life is an ideal world in which goodness and beauty answer one another in antiphonal music. His ideal man is the _kalos k’ agathos_ of ancient Athens. He goes among authors in quest of this part-song in their work. He misses it in the later Tolstoy: he discovers it in Marvell and Vaughan. He is not to be put off, however, with a forced and unnatural antiphony. He is critical of the antiphony of body and soul that announces “All’s well!” in Whitman’s verse. He finds in Whitman not organic cheerfulness but functional cheerfulness--“willed cheerfulness,” he calls it. And he says of Whitman with penetrating wisdom: “He was a man not strong enough in art or in life to do without that willed cheerfulness; it is for him a defence like irony, though a newer, more democratic, more American defence.” He writes with equal wisdom when he says that Whitman “has got a great part of his popularity from those who were grateful to him for saying so firmly and so often what they wished to believe.” But might not this be said of all poets of hope? Might it not be said of Shelley and of Browning? I am not sure, indeed, that Mr. Clutton-Brock does not do serious injustice to Whitman in exaggerating the element of reaction in him against old fears as well as old forms. His discovery of the secret of what is false in Whitman has partly blinded him to the secret of what is true. Otherwise, how could he ask us whether there is anything in _Leaves of Grass_ that moves us as we are moved by Edgar Allan Poe’s _The Sleeper_? Can he have forgotten _Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking_, to name but one of Whitman’s profoundly moving poems? Mr. Clutton-Brock does, indeed, end his essay with fine if tempered praise of Whitman’s genius. But his essay as a whole is a question-mark, expressing a doubt of something false, something even “faked.”