danger and responsibility. He will stand or fall in his own strength. He is wary of organized majorities. Almost in the spirit of Washington he warns against the savageness and wolfishness of parties, so combative, so intolerant of the idea of equal brotherhood and the interests of all. "It behooves you," he declared, "to convey yourself implicitly to no party, nor submit blindly to their dictators, but steadily hold yourself judge and master over all of them." "I am a radical of radicals," he repeats from youth to grey old age. Beside this utterance one should place his golden words to his biographer Traubel: "Be radical; be radical; be not too damned radical." Despite such cautionary modifications, however, one may say that Whitman's primary impulse is one of revolt against whatever deprives the simple separate person of his right to freedom and the pursuit of happiness.
But the second movement of Whitman's mind proves him a far more complex phenomenon than most of the critics have acknowledged. Mr. George Santayana represents him as a kind of placid animal wallowing unreflectively in the stream of his own sensations. This view of him may indeed be supported by reference to certain of his passages which express with unwise exuberance his delight in the reports of his senses. The unwisdom of his exuberance with reference to the sexual life, for example, is pretty nearly demonstrated by the number of critics whose critical faculty has been quite upset
