Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 5, 1895 - Miscellanies, Volume II

WALT WHITMAN
apostrophe ; — this, in spite of all the airs ox inspira-
tion, is not the way to do it. It may be very wrong,
and very wounding to a respectable branch of indus-
try, but the word ' hatter ' cannot be used seriously
in emotional verse ; not to understand this is to
have no literary tact ; and I would, for his own sake,
that this were the only inadmissible expression with
which Whitman had bedecked his pages. The book
teems with similar comicalities ; and, to a reader
who is determined to take it from that side only,
presents a perfect carnival of fun.
A good deal of this is the result of theory playing
its usual vile trick upon the artist. It is because he
is a Democrat that Whitman must have in the
hatter. If you may say Admiral, he reasons, why
may you not say Hatter ? One man is as good as
another, and it is the business of the ' great poet ' to
show poetry in the life of the one as well as the
other. A most incontrovertible sentiment, surely,
and one which nobody would think of controverting,
where — and here is the point — where any beauty has
been shown. But how, where that is not the case?
where the hatter is simply introduced, as God made
him and as his fellow-men have miscalled him, at the
crisis of a high-flown rhapsody ? And what are we
to say, where a man of Whitman's notable capacity
for putting things in a bright, picturesque, and novel
way, simply gives up the attempt, and indulges,
with apparent exultation, in an inventory of trades
or implements, with no more colour or coherence
than so many index- words out of a dictionary ? I
12.^