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