The only other charge against Whitman worth mentioning--the complaint at his "colossal egotism"--is a subject more for interpretation than for defense. Properly understood, it leads far toward an understanding of the whole man. In the first place, if all his "I's" should be taken literally they would amount to no more than an unusual frankness of artistic expression. Every creative artist is of necessity an egotist. He is bound to believe in the special significance of what he is privileged to utter in words or tones or lines and colors. The whole anthology of poems on the poet and his work is a catalogue of supreme egotisms, even though most of them are written in the third person rather than the first. Whitman cast aside the regular locution without apology. But, as a further caution to the supersensitive, his "I's" do not always mean the same thing. Sometimes they are explicitly personal, as in, I, now, thirty-six years old, in perfect health, begin, Hoping to cease not till death. Sometimes they stand just as explicitly for "the average man." This he explained in the preface to the 1876 edition: "I meant 'Leaves of Grass,' as published, to be the poem of average Identity (of _yours_, whoever you are, now reading these lines).... To sing the Song of that law of average Identity, and of Yourself, consistently with the divine law of the universal, is a main purpose of these 'Leaves.'" Finally, the egotistic "I" is often a token of the religious mysticism at the back of his faith. Without an understanding of this factor in Whitman he cannot be known. "Place yourself," said William James in his lecture on Bergson, "at the center of a man's philosophic vision and you understand at once all the different things it makes him write or say. But keep outside, use your post-mortem method, try to build the philosophy up out of the single phrases, taking first one and then another, and seeking to make them fit, and of course you fail. You crawl over the thing like a myopic ant over a building, tumbling into every microscopic crack or fissure, finding nothing but inconsistencies, and never suspecting that a centre exists." It is James again who gives the exact cue to Whitman's mysticism, this time in a chapter of "Varieties of Religious Experience." It is the experience of the mystic, he explains, to arrive in inspired moments at a height from which all truth seems to be divinely revealed. This revelation is not a flashlight perception of some single aspect of life, but a sense of the entire scheme of creation and a conviction that the truth has been imparted direct from God. It is clear, like the view from a mountain top, but, like such a view, it is incapable of adequate expression in words,--"an intuition," and now the words are Whitman's, "of the absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole of this multifarious, mad chaos of fraud, frivolity, hoggishness--this revel of fools, and incredible make-believe and general unsettledness,