Behind “Leaves of Grass” stands the personality of the man Walt Whitman; that is the charm of the book and its power. It is, in his own words, the record of a _Person_. A man has here sought to give a fresh and frank representation of his nature--physical, intellectual, moral, æsthetic--as he received it, and as it grew in the great field of the world. Sometimes there is an element in this record which, while perhaps very American, reminds one of the great Frenchman who shouted so lustily through his huge brass trumpet, seated on the apex of the universe in the Avenue d’Eylau. The noble lines to “You felons on trial in Courts” accompany “To him that was crucified.” Such rhetorical flourishes do not impair the value of this revelation. The self-revelation of a human personality is the one supremely precious and enduring thing. All art is the search for it. The strongest and most successful of religions were avowedly founded on personalities, more or less dimly seen. The intimate and candid record of personality alone gives quickening energy to books. Herein is the might of “Leaves of Grass.”
In our overstrained civilization the tendency in literature--and in life as it acts on literature and is again reacted on by it--is, on the one hand, towards an artificial mode of presentment, that is, a divorce between the actual and the alleged, a divorce which, in the language of satire, is often called hypocrisy. On the other hand, the tendency is towards a singleness of aim and ideal indeed, but a thin, narrow, super-refined ideal, at the same time rather hysterical and rather prim. In youth we cannot see through these Tartuffes and _Précieuses_; when we become grown men and women we feel a great thirst for Nature, for reality in literature, and we slake it at such fountains as this of “Leaves of Grass.” Like Antæus of old we bow down to touch the earth, to come in contact with the great primal energies of Nature, and to grow strong. We realize that the structure of the world is indeed built most gloriously on the immense pillars of Hunger and Love, and we will not seek to deny or to attenuate its foundations. Presenting a truth so abstract in fresh and living concrete language, this man, as an Adam in a new Paradise, which is the very world itself, walks again upon the earth, sometimes with calm complaisance, sometimes “deliriating” wildly: