commend), the Nation was quite willing—"with no intention of being disagreeable, but rather with sympathetic sorrow"—to "wait." The country would have to wait, in other words, until it had accumulated the material resources, the museums and libraries and national institutes of arts and letters that would support higher learning and cultivated tastes. In the meantime, people who were "anxious that our literature be American" could rest assured that it could not be "anything else." Literature had no obligation to concern itself with the genius of American life, in other words, or with the nation's unique opportunity to reconcile democracy with art and devotion, the satisfaction of material needs with the demands of the spirit. On the contrary, the "dominion of numbers in matters political," as the Nation saw it, meant that "matters intellectual and aesthetic" would have to become self-consciously exclusive and fastidious.

Whitman's Civil War poems, Drum Taps, illustrated the dangers of an art overly aware of itself as American, according to the Nation's reviewer. "The effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry," these inept verses contained "nothing but flashy imitations of ideas." Their only aim was "to celebrate the greatness of our armies" and secondarily the "greatness of the city of New York." Patriotism was no substitute for art; in this form, indeed, it was an "offense against art," which showed that "plain facts" could become art only if one viewed them "from a height."

The author of these lines, Henry James, later repented of them as an exercise of youthful impertinence. ^* At the time, however, they offered a pretty fair reflection of the cultivated point of view. America's war of national unification, the vast wealth that began to accumulate in its aftermath, the rising standards of fashionable expenditure and the growing

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*

In his biography of Whitman, Justin Kaplan writes, "Thirty-eight years later, with a sense of 'deep and damning disgrace,' Henry James confessed to having written this 'little atrocity ... perpetuated ... in the gross impudence of youth.' He had come since to regard Whitman as the greatest American poet. Edith Wharton, hearing James read 'Lilacs'—'his voice filled the hushed room like an organ adagio'—found'a new proof of the way in which, above a certain level, the most divergent intelligences walk together like gods.' "

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