a quack is, that the quack pretends to
know it all.

Brigham Young and Joseph Smith were men of phenomenal capacity, who
actually invented a religion and created a community by the apparent
establishment of supernatural and occult powers. The phrenologists, the
venders of patent medicine, the Christian Scientists, the single-taxers,
and all who proclaim panaceas and nostrums make the same majestic and
pontifical appeal to human nature. It is this mystical power, this
religious element, which floats them, sells the drugs, cures the sick,
and packs the meetings.

By temperament and education Walt Whitman was fitted to be a prophet of
this kind. He became a quack poet, and hampered his talents by the
imposition of a monstrous parade of rattletrap theories and professions.
If he had not been endowed with a perfectly marvellous capacity, a
wealth of nature beyond the reach and plumb of his rodomontade, he
would have been ruined from the start. As it is, he has filled his work
with grimace and vulgarity. He writes a few lines of epic directness and
cyclopean vigor and naturalness, and then obtrudes himself and his
mission.

He has the bad taste bred in the bone of all missionaries and palmists,
the sign-manual of a true quack. This bad taste is nothing more than the
offensive intrusion of himself and his mission into the matter in hand.
As for his real merits and his true mission, too much can hardly be said
in his favor. The field of his experience was narrow, and not in the
least intellectual. It was narrow because of his isolation from human
life. A poet like Browning, or Heine, or Alfred de Musset deals
constantly with the problems and struggles that arise in civilized life
out of the close relationships, the ties, the duties and desires of the
human heart. He explains life on its social side. He gives us some more
or less coherent view of an infinitely complicated matter. He is a
guide-book or a note-book, a highly trained and intelligent companion.

Walt Whitman has no interest in any of these things. He was fortunately
so very ignorant and untrained that his mind was utterly incoherent and
unintellectual. His mind seems to be submerged and to have become almost
a part of his body. The utter lack of concentration which resulted from
living his whole life in the open air has left him spontaneous and
unaccountable. And the great value of his work is, that it represents
the spontaneous and unaccountable functioning of