What Conservatism and Liberalism are to Politics Classicism and Romanticism are to Art. Romantic revolutions have swept over literature before the nineteenth century, and Shakespeare was the first of our great Romantics. Then with the reaction Formalism and Conservatism crept in again. But the Romantic Revival at the beginning of the nineteenth century went much further than previous ones. Out of the throes of the Industrial Revolution had been born a lusty, clamorous infant that demanded recognition—the new Demos. And it claimed not only recognition in politics, but recognition in literature. Wordsworth and Shelley essayed to speak for it with varying success; but Wordsworth was too exclusive, and Shelley—the most sympathetic of all our poets till the coming of Browning—was too ethereal in his manner. Like his own skylark, he sang to us poised midway between earth and heaven; a more emphatically flesh and blood personage was wanted. Here and there a writer of genuine democratic feeling, like Ebenezer Elliott, voiced the aspirations of the people, but only on one side. Thomas Hood and Mrs. Browning sounded a deeper note; but the huge, clamorous populace needed a yet fuller note, a more penetrating insight, a more forceful utterance. And in America, with its seething democracy—a democracy more urgent, more insistent than our own—it found its spokesman. That it did not recognize him, and is only just beginning to do so, is not remarkable. It did not recognize him, for it had scarcely recognized itself. Only dimly did it realize its wants and aspirations. Whitman divined them; he is the Demos made articulate. And not only did he sweep away the Conservative traditions and conventions of literature, he endeavoured to overthrow the aristocratic principle that underlies it. Selectness he would replace with simplicity. No doubt he went too far. That is of small moment. Exaggeration and over-emphasis have their place in the scheme of things. A thunderstorm may be wanted to clear the air, and if it does incidentally some slight damage to crops and trees it is of no use grumbling. But in the main Whitman’s theory of Art was very true and finely suggestive, and is certainly not the view of a man who cares for nothing but the wild and barbaric. “The art of Art, the glory of expression, and the sunshine of the light of letters is simplicity. Nothing is better than simplicity, nothing can make up for excess or for the lack of definiteness. To carry on the heave of impulse, and pierce intellectual depths, and give all subjects their articulations, are powers neither common nor very uncommon. But to speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movements of animals and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees in the woods, and grass by the woodside, is the flawless triumph of Art.”