d intelligence that
speak. When will he redeem all these promises, and become a fixed centre
of thought and emotion in himself? To write poems is no distinction; to be
a poem, to be a fixed point amid the seething chaos, a rock amid the
currents, giving your own form and character to them,--that is something.

It matters little, as Whitman himself says, who contributes the mass of
poetic verbiage upon which any given age feeds.

But for a national first-class poem, or a great work of the imagination of
any sort, the man is everything, because such works finally rest upon
primary human qualities and special individual traits. A richly endowed
personality is always the main dependence in such cases, or, as Goethe
says, "in the great work the great person is always present as the great
factor."

"Leaves of Grass" is as distinctly an emanation from Walt Whitman, from
his quality and equipment as a man apart from anything he owed to books or
to secondary influences, as a tree is an emanation from the soil. It is,
moreover, an emanation from him as an American in the latter half of the
nineteenth century, and as a typical democratic composite man, a man of
the common people, bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh, but with
an extraordinary endowment of spiritual and intellectual power, to which
he has given full swing without abating one jot or tittle the influence of
his heritage of the common stock.

V

There is one important quality that enters into all first-class literary
production and into all art, which is taken little account of in current
criticism: I mean the quality of the manly,--the pulse and pressure of
manly virility and strength. Goethe spoke of it to Eckermann as a certain
urgent power in which the art of his time was lacking. The producers had
taste and skill, but were not masterful as men. Goethe always looked
straight through the work to the man behind it; in art and poetry the
personality was everything. The special talent of one kind or another was
quite secondary. The greatest works are the least literary. To speak in
literature as a man, and not merely as a scholar or professional
litterateur, is always the crying need. The new poet has this or that
gift, but what is the human fund back of all? What is his endowment of the
common universal human traits? How much of a man is he? His measure in
this respect will be the measure of the final value of his contribution.

The decadence of litera