to be pitied who does not understand, however dimly, what Whitman must have gone through in imagination and reality to confide to the author of _Leaves of Grass_ such a shocking confession. He emerged from the experience with that past behind him, but still, I think, unresolved. For it was not his to reconcile instinct with reason in an epigenesis; he passed from one phase to the next without carrying his sheaves with him. From being within sight of real greatness, he declined to the stature of a great American. Following its faithful treatment of the Whitman myth, the _Dial_ examines the case of Mark Twain. It is undoubtedly a pathological case, and not only Mark Twain but America was the victim in it. A nation suffers the fate of its great men; as is their odyssey so is the odyssey of the nation to which they belong. Does a great man in any nation become corrupt; does he succumb to falsehood and to the morality of the herd? Even so his nation is on the downward path. On the other hand, does he maintain his integrity, even though his life should pay for it? There is a sign that his nation also will battle through. From this point of view, Mark Twain presents the spectacle both of a tragedy and a portent. Nobody can read his works without realising the essential truthfulness of the man, his marvellous capacity for intellectual honesty, his unerring perception of the norm of things. Mark Twain, permitted and encouraged to pass free judgment upon American and human life, might have been one of the cultural forces of the new world; he was one of God’s best gifts to America. We know, however, what America did for Mark Twain; it slowly but surely emasculated him in the supposed interests of the female (not the feminine) in the American soul. Under the influence of his wife who, as he said, not only “edited everything I wrote, but edited me,” under the similar influence of all that was bourgeois in America—Mark Twain consented to “make fun” of everything he held dear. Talents and powers which it is spiritual death to trade, Mark Twain prostituted for the amusement of a people whose deepest need was high seriousness. As Mr. Lovett says, Mark Twain “flattered a country without art, letters, beauty or standards to laugh at these things.” The judgment is severe, but it is just; and Mark Twain, I believe, would be the first to acquiesce in it.