especially obnoxious in his treatment of love, and to condemn him so sweepingly, seems to me scarcely defensible. To extol unreservedly the rankness and coarseness of “The Children of Adam,” and to have no word of commendation, say, for so noble a piece of naturalism as the story of Haidee, seems to me lacking in fairness. Besides, it suggests that the _only_ treatment in literature of the sexual life is a coarse, unpleasing treatment, which I do not suppose Mr. Burroughs really holds. Whitman has vindicated, and vindicated finely, the inherent truth and beauty of animalism. But so has William Morris, so has Dante Gabriel Rossetti, so has poor flouted Byron. And I will go further, and say that these other poets have succeeded often where Whitman has failed; they have shown the beauty and cosmic significance, when Whitman has been merely cataloguing the stark facts. It may be objected, of course, that Whitman does not aim in his sex poems at imaginative beauty, that he aims at sanity and wholesomeness; that what he speaks—however rank—makes for healthy living. May be; I am not concerned to deny it. What I do deny is the implication that the wholesomeness of a fact is sufficient justification for its treatment in literature. There are a good many disagreeable things that are wholesome enough, there are many functions of the body that are entirely healthy. But one does not want them enshrined in Art. To attack Whitman on the score of morality is unjustifiable; his sex poems are simply unmoral. But had he flouted his art less flagrantly in them they would have been infinitely more powerful and convincing, and given the Philistines less opportunity for blaspheming. I have dwelt at this length upon Whitman’s treatment of Sex largely because it illustrates his strength and weakness as a literary artist. In some of his poems—those dealing with Democracy, for instance—we have Whitman at his best. In others, certainly a small proportion, we get sheer, unillumined doggerel. In his sex poems there are great and fine ideas, moments of inspiration, flashes of beauty, combined with much that is trivial and tiresome.