His aim is right enough; it is to his method one may take objection. Not on the score of morality. Whitman’s treatment of passion is not immoral; it is simply like Nature herself—unmoral. What shall we say then about his sex cycle, “Children of Adam”? Whitman, in his anxiety to speak out, freely, simply, naturally, to vindicate the sanity of coarseness, the poetry of animalism, seems to me to have bungled rather badly. There are many fine passages in his “Song of the Body Electric” and “Spontaneous Me,” but much of it impresses me as bad art, and is consequently ineffectual in its aim. The subject demands a treatment at once strong and subtle—I do not mean finicking—and subtlety is a quality not vouchsafed to Whitman. Lacking it, he is often unconsciously comic where he should be gravely impressive. “A man’s body is sacred, and a woman’s body is sacred.” True; but the sacredness is not displayed by making out a tedious inventory of the various parts of the body. Says Whitman in effect: “The sexual life is to be gloried in, not to be treated as if it were something shameful.” Again true; but is there not a danger of missing the glory by discoursing noisily on the various physiological manifestations. Sex is not the more wonderful for being appraised by the big drum. The inherent beauty and sanctity of Sex lies surely in its superb unconsciousness; it is a matter for two human beings drawn towards one another by an indefinable, world-old attraction; scream about it, caper over it, and you begin to make it ridiculous, for you make it self-conscious. Animalism merely as a scientific fact serves naught to the poet, unless he can show also what is as undeniable as the bare fact—its poetry, its coarseness, and its mystery go together. Browning has put it in a line:— “. . . savage creatures seek Their loves in wood and plain—_and GOD renews_ _His ancient rapture_.” It is the “rapture” and the mystery which Whitman misses in many of his songs of Sex. There is no need to give here any theological significance to the word “God.” Let the phrase stand for the mystic poetry of animalism. Whitman has no sense of mystery. I have another objection against “The Children of Adam.” The loud, self-assertive, genial, boastful style of Whitman suits very well many of his democratic utterances, his sweeping cosmic emotions. But here it gives one the impression of a kind of showman, who with a flourishing stick is shouting out to a gaping crowd the excellences of manhood and womanhood. Deliberately he has refrained from the mood of imaginative fervour which alone could give a high seriousness to his treatment—a high seriousness which is really indispensable. And his rough, slangy, matter-of-fact comments give an atmosphere of unworthy vulgarity to his subject. Occasionally he is carried away by the sheer imaginative beauty of the subject, then note how different the effect:—