know what we have done; we have exhibited some ugly part of ourselves, of which we are not conscious; we have stricken and wounded another heart, and we cannot see how it was done.  We did not intend to do it, we cry.  Or again we realise that we regard some one with a causeless aversion, and cannot give any reason for it; or we see that we ourselves have the same freezing and disconcerting effect upon another; and so after hundreds of such experiences, we become aware at last that no real, free, entire communication is possible; that however eagerly we tell our thoughts and display our temperaments, there must always remain something which is wrapped in darkness, the incommunicable essence of ourself that can blend with no other soul.

But again it is true that all human souls who have an instinct for expression—­writers, painters, musicians—­have always been trying to do this one thing, to make signals, to communicate, to reveal themselves, to “unpack the heart in words”; and what has often hindered the process and nullified their efforts has been an uneasy dignity and vanity, that must try to make out a better case than the facts justify.  For a variety of motives, and indeed for the best of motives, men and women suppress, exalt, refine the presentment of themselves, because they desire to be loved, and think that they must therefore be careful to be admired, just as the lover adorns himself and puts his best foot forward, and hides all that may disconcert interest or sympathy.  So that it happens in life that often when we most desire to be real, we are most unreal.

What differentiates Walt Whitman from all other writers that I know, is that he tried to reveal himself, and on the whole contrived to do so with less reserve than any other human being.

“I know perfectly well my own egotism,” he wrote; “I know my omnivorous lines, and must not write any less.”  He was not disconcerted by any failure of art, or any propriety, or any apparent discrepancy.

     Do I contradict myself? 
     Very well then, I contradict myself. 
     I am large, I contain multitudes.

He had no artistic conscience, as we say.

  Easily written, loose-finger’d chords—­I feel the thrum of your
    climax and close.

In the curious and interesting essay called “A Backward Glance over Travel’s Roads,” which he wrote late in life, surveying his work, he admits that he has not gained acceptance, that his book is a failure, and has incurred marked anger and contempt; and he good-humouredly quotes a sentence from a friend’s letter, written in 1884, “I find a solid line of enemies to you everywhere.”  And yet, he says, for all that, and in spite of everything, he has had “his say entirely his own way, and put it unerringly on record.”  It is simply “a faithful, and doubtless self-willed record,” he says.