He is content to be suggestive, to stir your imagination, to awaken your sympathies. And when he fails, he fails as Wordsworth did, because he lacked the power of self-criticism, lacked the faculty of humour—that saving faculty which gives discrimination, and intuitively protects the artist from confusing pathos with bathos, the grand and the grandiose. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his treatment of Sex. Frankness, outspokenness on the primal facts of life are to be welcomed in literature. All the great masters—Shakespeare, Dante, Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, have dealt openly and fearlessly with the elemental passions. There is nothing to deplore in this, and Mr. Swinburne was quite right when he contended that the domestic circle is not to be for all men and writers the outer limit of their world of work. So far from regretting that Whitman claimed right to equal freedom when speaking of the primal fact of procreation as when speaking of sunrise, sunsetting, and the primal fact of death, every clean-minded man and woman should rejoice in the poet’s attitude. For he believed and gloried in the separate personalities of man and woman, claiming manhood and womanhood as the poet’s province, exulting in the potentialities of a healthy sexual life. He was angry, as well he might be, with the furtive snigger which greets such matters as motherhood and fatherhood with the prurient unwholesomeness of a mind that can sigh sentimentally over the “roses and raptures of Vice” and start away shamefaced from the stark passions—stripped of all their circumlocutions. He certainly realized as few have done the truth of that fine saying of Thoreau’s, that “for him to whom sex is impure there are no flowers in Nature.” But at the same time I cannot help feeling that Stevenson was right when he said that Whitman “loses our sympathy in the character of a poet by attracting too much of our attention—that of a Bull in a China Shop.” {180}