In examining it, a circumstance occurs to me at the outset which throws a strange but effective light upon the whole argument. It seems curious to reflect that the two poets who have most avowedly written for the _people_, who have professed most distinctively to represent and embody the thought of the people, and to be bone of the people's bone, and flesh of the people's flesh, are precisely the two who have most signally failed of all popular acceptance and who have most exclusively found audience at the other extreme of culture. These are Wordsworth and Whitman. We all know how strenuously and faithfully Wordsworth believed that in using the simplest words and treating the lowliest themes, he was bringing poetry back near to the popular heart; yet Wordsworth's greatest admirer is Mr. Matthew Arnold, the apostle of culture, the farthest remove from anything that could be called popular; and in point of fact it is probable that many a peasant who would feel his blood stir in hearing _A man's a man for a' that_, would grin and guffaw if you should read him Wordsworth's _Lambs_ and _Peter Grays_.
And a precisely similar fate has met Whitman. Professing to be a mudsill and glorying in it, chanting democracy and the shirt-sleeves and equal rights, declaring that he is nothing if not one of the people; nevertheless the people, the democracy, will yet have nothing to do with him, and it is safe to say that his sole audience has lain among such representatives of the highest culture as Emerson and the English _illuminated_.
The truth is, that if closely examined, Whitman, instead of being a true democrat, is simply the most incorrigible of aristocrats masquing in a peasant's costume; and his poetry, instead of being the natural outcome of a fresh young democracy, is a product which would be impossible except in a highly civilized society.
At our last meeting we endeavored to secure some solid basis for our ideas of form in general, and to develop thereupon some conceptions of form in art, and especially of literary form, which would enable us to see our way clear among misconceptions of this subject which prevail. We there addressed ourselves towards considering particularly three of these misconceptions. The first we examined was that which predicts the total death of imaginative literature--poetry, novels and all--in consequence of a certain supposed quality of imagination by virtue of which, like some ruin-haunting animals, it cannot live in the light; so that the destructive explanations of advancing science, it was apprehended, would gradually force all our imaginative energies back into the dark crevices of old fable and ruined romance, until finally, penetrating these also, it would exterminate the species. We first tested this case by laying it alongside the historic facts in the case: confining our view to England, we found that science and poetry had been developing alongside of each other ever since early in the seventeenth century; inquiring into the general effect of this long contact, we could only find that it was to make our general poetry greatly richer in substance and finer in form; and upon testing this abstract conclusion by a concrete examination of Tennyson--as a poet most likely to show the influence of science, because himself most exposed to it, indeed most saturated with it--we found from several readings in _In Memoriam_ that whether as to love or friendship, or the sacredness of marriage, or the pure sense of beauty, or the true relation of knowledge to wisdom, or faith in God, the effect of science had been on the whole to broaden the conceptions and to clarify the forms in which they were expressed by this great poet.