The _Dial_ is particularly to be praised for its courageous criticism of great dead Americans. America, like Europe, suffers from necrophily, a kind of worship of the dead. Indeed, as a good Injun was synonymous with a dead Injun, a great American writer is usually a dead American writer. All his faults die with him, and only his myth remains, with the result that people who would not have acknowledged the existence of, let us say, Whitman living, will not acknowledge a fault in Whitman dead. For a nation thus under a critical statute of Mortmain, the utterance of what seems like blasphemy is a necessary part of their education. They must know that the dead great, by very virtue of their greatness and the survival of their works, are still alive and active, and that the same kind of criticism must be kept playing on them as upon the living forces. The _Dial_ reviewers show no disposition to shirk this unpleasing duty. One by one, as the occasion suggests, the dead great are given the honour of living criticism, and treated as the immortal present which they are. Since their spirits go marching on, criticism must go marching along with them. One of the recently so honoured dead in the pages of the _Dial_ has been Whitman; and in an essay on _Whitman’s Love Affairs_ Mr. Emery Holloway throws a fresh light on an old but still obscure subject. His “love affairs” were obviously more matter for criticism in Whitman than in some other writers, since Whitman was pre-eminently an autobiographical writer who sang himself. What, then, does Mr. Holloway find? A little surprisingly—at least to readers who have not already divined Whitman’s secret—that Whitman “suffered” from love, and struggled against it rather as a raw tyro than as the “master of himself” of his poetic fiction. In some private diaries of Whitman, quoted by Mr. Holloway, we are presented with the spectacle of Whitman grappling with his own soul after the manner of saints mortifying the flesh, or, as I would suggest, after the distinctively modern fashion. Instinct was at war with reason, even in Whitman, and, in the end, as usually occurs with modern men, it was reason that won. Mr. Holloway divides Whitman’s works between two periods: the first, in which he sang “untrammelled natural impulses”; and a second, in which he was concerned about democracy and the immortality of the soul; in short, with reason. And between these two periods, or worlds of discourse, Mr. Holloway tells us, was a purgatory, in which Whitman’s soul was tried as by fire. The diaries already mentioned contain some of the records of Whitman’s conflict with himself. Here, for example, is an entry bearing all the marks of a painful resolution. “I must,” he says, “pursue her no more” ... and resolve “to give up absolutely and for good, from this present hour, the feverish, fluctuating, useless, undignified pursuit of 164 ... avoid seeing her or any meeting whatever from this hour forth, for life.” The reader is