rable
quality. The thesis may even be maintained that it is a disease of the
mind, a false way of looking at things. Many great poets have been
without it--Milton for example. Shelley used to speak of "the withering
and perverting power of comedy." But Shelley was slightly mad. At all
events, our really democratic writers have been such as Mark Twain and
James Whitcomb Riley. I do not know what Mark Twain thought of Walt, but
I know what Riley thought of him. He thought him a grand humbug.
Certainly if he had had any sense of humor he would not have peppered
his poems so naively with foreign words, calling out "Camerado!" ever
and anon, and speaking of a perfectly good American sidewalk as a
"trottoir" _quasi Lutetia Parisii_. And if he had not had a streak of
humbug in him, he would hardly have written anonymous puffs of his own
poetry.

But I am far from thinking Walt Whitman a humbug. He was a man of genius
whose work had a very solid core of genuine meaning. It is good to read
him in spots--he is so big and friendly and wholesome; he feels so good,
like a man who has just had a cold bath and tingles with the joy of
existence.

Whitman was no humbug, but there is surely some humbug about the Whitman
_culte_. The Whitmanites deify him. They speak of him constantly as a
seer, a man of exalted intellect. I do not believe that he was a great
thinker, but only a great feeler. Was he the great poet of America, or
even a great poet at all? A great poet includes a great artist, and
"Leaves of Grass," as has been pointed out times without number, is the
raw material of poetry rather than the finished product.

A friend of mine once wrote an article about Whitman, favorable on the
whole, but with qualifications. He got back a copy of it through the
mail, with the word "Jackass!" pencilled on the margin by some outraged
Whitmaniac. I know what has been said and written in praise of old Walt
by critics of high authority, and I go along with them a part of the
way, but only a part. And I do not stand in terror of any critics,
however authoritative; remembering how even the great Goethe was taken
in by Macpherson's "Ossian." A very interesting paper might be written
on what illustrious authors have said of each other: what Carlyle said
of Newman, for instance; or what Walter Scott said of Joanna Baillie and
the like.

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End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Four Americans, by Henr