In order more 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.
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