in concrete expressive symbols of what the artist has thought and felt. Yes, in a degree. The work of every artist, whatever his subject and his medium, expresses something of himself. Whether he paints a portrait or a landscape, whether he composes a song or a symphony, whether he writes a poem, a novel, or a play, something of his own life and experience inevitably goes into his work. In general, however, the artist himself is only implied in his art and not fully expressed. We must pass beyond the work, the subject and the medium, and we must divine the man.

The work of Whitman exhibits this difference from other art and achieves its primary distinction thus, that by deliberate and conscious intention, it is wholly, undisguisedly, relentlessly, the exposition, indeed the exploitation, of personality. Of him it is not to be said that he expresses himself by means of his subject. He himself is the subject. The title of his earliest

and longest poem applies with equal force to the entire volume of his work. It is the

Song of Myself." His purpose was, as he has defined it retrospectively in a postscript to "Leaves of Grass," " to articulate and faithfully express in literary or poetic form, and uncompromisingly, my own physical, emotional, moral, intellectual, and æsthetic Personality, in the midst of, and tallying, the momentous spirit and facts of its immediate days, and of current America -and to exploit that Personality, identified with place and date, in a far more candid and comprehensive sense than any hitherto poem or book." Thus "Leaves of Grass" is the complete explication, detailed and multitudinous, of the personality of Whitman, a single individual, living a certain definite kind of life in America in the middle and later years of the nineteenth century. But at the same time that the book is individual in its details, it is universal in its application. Though Whitman

interprets the world in terms of his own experience, we must not overlook his typical and representative character. We miss the meaning of his work if we fail to see that

Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breed

ing,

No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them, —

this Whitman, gathering into himself every person, character, experience, is but speaking for all men or any man.

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

It is, then, as the representative of you and me that Whitman, actually or imaginatively, sounds the depths of every emotion, penetrates the recesses of men's motives, feelings, and acts, sends out his being into all life, and absorbs the cosmos into himself. In his person we have an embodi

ment of our separate individual experience; and to that extent his poetry becomes for us our own expression.

Such is, in general terms, the figure of Walt Whitman in literature,—his total attitude and special point of view. What he stands for in poetry, what we may expect to find in him as we approach his work, is a compelling attractive personal force. We meet him on the ground of a common humanity. The essence of his personality is distilled for us in his poetry, and therein we have the man in his fullest revelation. But what he was is expressed also in the external events of his life; and these in turn recoiled upon him to mould and modify the receptive, always plastic, disposition that was his by birth. A wider understanding of the man and his work, therefore, may be won by a rapid survey of his actual adventures in the world of men and things.

The story, indeed, can be told briefly, for with the exception of one divinely heroic, devoted service, extending through a period of three years, a service titanic in its effort and incalculably beneficent in its results, the external incidents of Whitman's life are commonplace enough in the recital. Their significance lies in his reaction on them and in what he was able to wrest from them of spiritual experience. The very commonplaceness of it all lends it an added meaning, for his mission precisely was to endow "common lives" with the "glows and glories and final illustriousness which belong to every real thing, and to real things only." Average life is his theme, -ordinary men and women, cities, fields, the sky, morning, noon, and sunset, night and the stars, things "eligible" to all. These are his theme, yet these not in themselves, but as interpreted by personality. For these things, as he says, "involve not only their own inherent quality, but the