If Doctor Talmage is the Barnum of Theology, surely we may call Doctor Nordau the Barnum of Science.  His agility in manipulating facts is equal to Hermann’s now-you-see-it and now-you-don’t, with pocket-handkerchiefs.  Yet Hermann’s exhibition is worth the admittance fee, and Nordau’s book (seemingly written in collaboration with Jules Verne and Mark Twain) would be cheap for a dollar.  But what I object to is Professor Hermann’s disciples posing as Sure-Enough Materializing Mediums, and Professor Lombroso’s followers calling themselves Scientists, when each goes forth without scrip or purse with no other purpose than to supply themselves with both.

Yet it was Barnum himself who said that the public delights in being humbugged, and strange it is that we will not allow ourselves to be thimblerigged without paying for the privilege.

Nordau’s success hinged on his audacious assumption that the public knew nothing of the Law of Antithesis.  Yet Plato explained that the opposites of things look alike, and sometimes are alike—­and that was quite a while ago.

The multitude answered, “Thou hast a devil.”  Many of them said, “He hath a devil and is mad.”  Festus said with a loud voice, “Paul, thou art beside thyself.”  And Nordau shouts in a voice more heady than that of Pilate, more throaty than that of Festus, “Mad—­Whitman was—­mad beyond the cavil of a doubt!”

In Eighteen Hundred Sixty-two, Lincoln, looking out of a window (before lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed) on one of the streets of Washington, saw a workingman in shirt-sleeves go by.  Turning to a friend, the President said, “There goes a man!” The exclamation sounds singularly like that of Napoleon on meeting Goethe.  But the Corsican’s remark was intended for the poet’s ear, while Lincoln did not know who his man was, although he came to know him afterward.

Lincoln in his early days was a workingman and an athlete, and he never quite got the idea out of his head (and I am glad) that he was still a hewer of wood.  He once told George William Curtis that he more than half expected yet to go back to the farm and earn his daily bread by the work that his hands found to do; he dreamed of it nights, and whenever he saw a splendid toiler, he felt like hailing the man as brother and striking hands with him.  When Lincoln saw Whitman strolling majestically past, he took him for a stevedore or possibly the foreman of a construction gang.

Whitman was fifty-one years old then.  His long, flowing beard was snow-white, and the shock that covered his Jove-like head was iron-gray.  His form was that of an Apollo who had arrived at years of discretion.  He weighed an even two hundred pounds and was just six feet high.  His plain, check, cotton shirt was open at the throat to the breast; and he had an independence, a self-sufficiency, and withal a cleanliness, a sweetness and a gentleness, that told that, although he had a giant’s strength, he did not use it like a giant.  Whitman used no tobacco, neither did he apply hot and rebellious liquors to his blood and with unblushing forehead woo the means of debility and disease.  Up to his fifty-third year he had never known a sick day, although at thirty his hair had begun to whiten.  He had the look of age in his youth and the look of youth in his age that often marks the exceptional man.