s to speak efficaciously, he must say what is already in his
hearer's mind. That, alone, the hearer will believe; that, alone, he
will be able to apply intelligently to the facts of life. Any
conviction, even if it be a whole system or a whole religion, must pass
into the condition of commonplace, or postulate, before it becomes fully
operative. Strange excursions and high-flying theories may interest, but
they cannot rule behaviour. Our faith is not the highest truth that we
perceive, but the highest that we have been able to assimilate into the
very texture and method of our thinking. It is not, therefore, by
flashing before a man's eyes the weapons of dialectic; it is not by
induction, deduction, or construction; it is not by forcing him on from
one stage of reasoning to another, that the man will be effectually
renewed. He cannot be made to believe anything; but he can be made to
see that he has always believed it. And this is the practical canon. It
is when the reader cries, "Oh, I know!" and is, perhaps, half irritated
to see how nearly the author has forestalled his own thoughts, that he
is on the way to what is called in theology a Saving Faith.

Here we have the key to Whitman's attitude. To give a certain unity of
ideal to the average population of America--to gather their activities
about some conception of humanity that shall be central and normal, if
only for the moment--the poet must portray that population as it is.
Like human law, human poetry is simply declaratory. If any ideal is
possible, it must be already in the thoughts of the people; and, by the
same reason, in the thoughts of the poet, who is one of them. And hence
Whitman's own formula: "The poet is individual--he is complete in
himself: the others are as good as he; only he sees it, and they do
not." To show them how good they are, the poet must study his
fellow-countrymen and himself somewhat like a traveller on the hunt for
his book of travels. There is a sense, of course, in which all true
books are books of travel; and all genuine poets must run the risk of
being charged with the traveller's exaggeration; for to whom are such
books more surprising than to those whose own life is faithfully and
smartly pictured? But this danger is all upon one side; and you may
judiciously flatter the portrait without any likelihood of the sitter's
disowning it for a faithful likeness. And so Whitman has reasoned: that
by drawing at first-hand from himself an