"Lincoln," said Whitman, "don't need adorers, worshippers--he needs friends.... The great danger with Lincoln for the next fifty years will be that he will be overdone, over-explained, over-exploited--made a good deal too much of--gather about himself a rather mythical aureole." From such danger Traubel did his best to protect Whitman; the biographer's multitudinous veracity preserves a real man and is a heavy impediment to the critic and literary historian of the future who may try to disobey Whitman's injunction not to "prettify" him. If that impossible and tedious universe, the "whole" truth, is not comprehended in these prolific pages, the errors and omissions are due not to the biographer, but to Whitman himself, who had a silent as well as a loquacious side; he had unexplained depths which probably he did not understand himself. When he spoke he tried to say what he thought, but often he did not speak at all, and at least once he said to Traubel: "I don't care to talk about that." The writer of fiction may invent substance to fit an artistic scheme. The compiler of facts may, under certain conditions, disregard literary form. The biographer or the historian who will have his work read must play skilfully between the double restriction of substance and form. He must be at once man of science and artist. Because of its very great difficulties, because of the high demands it makes upon the writer, biography is rarely well done. One can name few masterpieces of biography in English. Perhaps the only masterpiece that everybody will name is Boswell's Johnson, that extraordinary performance which heaved literary history out of shape and keeps it in a permanent state of distortion. For Johnson was not a first-rate man of letters; he wrote little that is even tolerable to read; his letter to Chesterfield and the preface to the Dictionary are his most vital productions. Moreover, Boswell was a foreordained nonentity. Yet he was a great artist and Johnson was a great person, and the two of them made a great book; it is a puzzle which makes one fall back, outwitted, to the last ditch of adjectives. Whitman's opinion of Johnson is interesting, if only in relation to his own biographer's methods. Johnson knew that Boswell was making notes. Traubel, whose word is infallibly good, says that Whitman did not know that his biographer was keeping a record. Whitman did know that Traubel would write about him and he selected the letters and other documents for the "archives." But he was not aware that Traubel was making a diary. Therefore when he talked he was free at least from the constraint imposed on a man who knows that his spoken words are to appear in print.