166 The Future Poetry
speech, the rush too of oceanic sound though it is here the surg-
ing of the Atlantic between continents, not the magic roll and
wash of the Aegean around the isles of Greece. What he has not,
is the unfailing poetic beauty and nobility which saves greatness
from its defects — that supreme gift of Homer and Valmiki —
and the self-restraint and obedience to a divine law which makes
even the gods more divine. Whitman will remain great after
all the objections that can be made against his method or his
use of it, but the question is whether what served his unique
personality, can be made a rule for lesser or different spirits, and
whether the defects which we see but do not and cannot weigh
too closely in him, will not be fatal when not saved by his all-
uplifting largeness. A giant can pile up Pelion and Ossa and make
of it an unhewn chaotic stair to Olympus, but others would be
better and more safely employed in cutting steps of marble or
raising by music a ladder of sapphires and rubies to their higher
or their middle heavens. Personality, force, temperament can do
unusual miracles, but the miracle cannot always be turned into
a method or a standard.
Whitman’s verse, if it can be so called, is not simply a ca-
denced prose, though quite a multitude of his lines only just rise
above the prose rhythm. The difference is that there is a constant
will to intensify the fall of the movement so that instead of the
unobtrusive ictus of prose, we have a fall of the tread, almost a
beat, and sometimes a real beat, a meeting and parting, some-
times a deliberate clash or even crowding together of stresses
which recall the spirit of the poetical movement, though they
obey no recognised structural law of repetitions and variations.
In this kind of rhythm we find actually three different levels
— the distinction may be a little rough, but it will serve, — a
gradation which is very instructive. First we have a movement
which just manages to be other than prose movement, but yet
is full of the memory of a certain kind of prose rhythm. Here
the first defect is that the ear is sometimes irritated, sometimes
disappointed and baulked by a divided demand, memory or
expectation, hears always the prose suggestion behind pursuing
and dragging down the feet of the poetic enthusiasm. It is as if