ture sets in when there is more talent than
character in current production; when rare literary and artistic gifts no
longer come wedded to large human and manly gifts; when taste is
fastidious rather than robust and hearty. When was there a man born to
English or American literature with a large endowment of the universal
human qualities, or with those elements that give breadth and power, and
which lead art rather than follow it? We are living in an age of great
purity and refinement of taste in art and letters, but destitute of power.
Goethe spoke of Walter Scott not merely as a great talent, but as a
"comprehensive nature." Without this comprehensive nature as a setting,
his great talent would have amounted to but little. This gives the weight,
the final authority. How little there was on the surface of Scott of the
literary keenness, subtlety, knowingness of later producers, and yet how
far his contribution surpasses theirs in real human pathos and
suggestiveness!

The same might be said of Count Tolstoi, who is also, back of all, a great
loving nature.

One has great joy in Whitman because he is beyond and over all a large and
loving personality; his work is but a thin veil through which a great
nature clearly shows. The urgent power of which Goethe speaks is almost
too strong,--too strong for current taste: we want more art and less man,
more literature and less life. It is not merely a great mind that we feel,
but a great character. It penetrates every line, and indeed makes it true
of the book that whoever "touches this touches a man."

The lesson of the poet is all in the direction of the practical manly and
womanly qualities and virtues,--health, temperance, sanity, power,
endurance, aplomb,--and not at all in the direction of the literary and
artistic qualities or culture.

"To stand the cold or heat, to take good aim with a gun, to sail a boat,
to manage horses, to beget superb children,
To speak readily and clearly, to feel at home among common people,
To hold our own in terrible positions on land and sea."

All his aims, ideas, impulses, aspirations, relate to life, to
personality, and to power to deal with real things; and if we expect from
him only literary ideas--form, beauty, lucidity, proportion--we shall be
disappointed. He seeks to make the impression of concrete forces and
objects, and not of art.

"Not for an embroiderer,
(There will always be plenty of embroiderers--I