President Wilsons Addresses | Page 2

fully to appreciate the weight of experience and the
maturity of reflection which give value to his words, it will be worth
while to consider Mr. Wilson's entire career as a scholar and man of
letters, paying particular attention to the growth of his political ideals
and to the qualities of his style.
To be a literary artist, a writer must possess a constructive imagination.
He must be a man of feeling and have the gift of imparting to others
some share of his own emotions. On almost every page of President
Wilson's writings, as in almost all his policies, whether educational or

political, is stamped the evidence of shaping, visionary power. Those of
us who have known him many years remember well that in his daily
thought and speech he habitually proceeded by this same poetic method,
first growing warm with an idea and then by analogy and figure
kindling a sympathetic heat in his hearers.
The subjects that may excite an artist's imagination are infinitely
numerous and belong to every variety of conceivable life. A Coleridge
or a Renan will make literature out of polemical theology; a Huxley
will write on the physical basis of life with emotion and in such a way
as to infect others with his own feelings; a Macaulay or a Froude will
give what color he please to the story of a nation and compel all but the
most wary readers to see as through his eyes. We are too much
accustomed to reserve the title of literary artist for the creator of fiction,
whether in prose or in verse. Mr. Wilson is no less truly an artist
because the vision that fires his imagination, the vision he has spent his
life in making clear to himself and others and is now striving to realize
in action, is a political conception. He has seen it in terms of life, as a
thing that grows, that speaks, that has faced dangers, that is full of
promise, that has charm, that is fit to stir a man's blood and demand a
world's devotion; no wonder he has warmed to it, no wonder he has
clothed it in the richest garments of diction and rhythm and figure.
There are small artists and great artists. Granted an equal portion of
imagination and an equal command of verbal resources, and still there
will be this difference. It is an affair of more or less intellectual depth
and more or less character. If character were the only one of these two
things to be considered in the case of Mr. Wilson's writings, one might
with little or no hesitation predict that the best of them would long
remain classics. They are full of character, of a high and fine character.
They have a tone peculiar to themselves, like a man's voice, which is
one of the most unmistakable properties of a man. It would be no
reflection on an author to say that his point of view in fundamental
matters had changed in the course of thirty or forty years; but the truth
is that with reference to his great political ideal Mr. Wilson's point of
view has not widely changed. The scope of his survey has been
enlarged, he has filled up the intervening space with a thousand

observations, he sees his object with a more penetrating and
commanding eye; but it is the same object that drew to itself his
youthful gaze, and has had its part in making him
"The generous spirit, who, when brought Among the tasks of real life,
hath wrought Upon the plan that pleased his boyish thought."
The world, in time, will judge of the amount of knowledge and the
degree of purely intellectual force that Mr. Wilson has applied in his
field of study. A contemporary cannot well pronounce such a judgment,
especially if the province be not his own.
In the small space at my disposal I shall try, first, to say what I think is
the political conception or idea upon which Mr. Wilson has looked so
steadily and with so deep emotion that he has made of it a poetical
subject. And then I shall venture to distinguish those processes of
imagination, that artistic method, which we call style, by which he has
elucidated its meaning for his readers so as to win for it their intelligent
and moved regard. The inquiry will take into account his earliest book,
Congressional Government, published in 1885, Division and Reunion,
1893, An Old Master and Other Political Essays, 1893, Mere
Literature and Other Essays, 1896, George Washington, 1897, The
State, written 1889, rewritten 1898, A History of the American People,
1902, Constitutional Government in the United States, 1908, and a
volume, issued very recently in England, containing some of the
President's statements on