praise.  The writer who has any honest intentions is more likely to be helped by a little judicious acid now and then than by cartloads of honey.  Let us be candid and personal.  When someone in The New Republic spoke of some essays of our own as “blowzy” we were moved for a few moments to an honest self-scrutiny and repentance.  Were we really blowzy, we said to ourself?  We did not know exactly what this meant, and there was no dictionary handy.  But the word gave us a picture of a fat, ruddy beggar-wench trudging through wind and rain, probably on the way to a tavern; and we determined, with modest sincerity, to be less like that in future.

The good old profession of criticism tends, in the hands of the younger generation, toward too fulsome ejaculations of hurrahs and hyperboles.  It is a fine thing, of course, that new talent should so swiftly win its recognition; yet we think we are not wholly wrong in believing that many a delicate and promising writer has been hurried into third-rate work, into women’s magazine serials and cheap sordid sensationalism, by a hasty overcapitalization of the reviewer’s shouts.  For our own part, we do not feel any too sure of our ability to recognize really great work when we first see it.  We have often wondered, if we had been journalizing in 1855 when “Leaves of Grass” appeared, would we have been able to see what it meant, or wouldn’t we have been more likely to fill our column with japeries at the expense of Walt’s obvious absurdities, missing all the finer grain?  It took a man like Emerson to see what Walt was up to.

There were many who didn’t.  Henry James, for instance, wrote a review of “Drum Taps” in the Nation, November 16, 1865.  In the lusty heyday and assurance of twenty-two years, he laid the birch on smartly.  It is just a little saddening to find that even so clear-sighted an observer as Henry James could not see through the chaotic form of Whitman to the great vision and throbbing music that seem so plain to us to-day.  Whitman himself, writing about “Drum Taps” before its publication, said, “Its passion has the indispensable merit that though to the ordinary reader let loose with wildest abandon, the true artist can see that it is yet under control.”  With this, evidently, the young Henry James did not agree.  He wrote: 

It has been a melancholy task to read this book; and it is a still more melancholy one to write about it.  Perhaps since the day of Mr. Tupper’s “Philosophy” there has been no more difficult reading of the poetic sort.  It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.  Like hundreds of other good patriots, Mr. Walt Whitman has imagined that a certain amount of violent sympathy with the great deeds and sufferings of our soldiers, and of admiration for our national energy, together with a ready command of picturesque language, are sufficient inspiration for a poet....  But he is not