ness. Goethe
is more truly an artist in the first part of Faust than in the second;
Arnold has a more truly artistic mind than Lowell.

The principles of art are always the same in the respect I have indicated,
just as the principles of life are always the same, or of health and
longevity are always the same. No writer is an artist who is related to
his subject simply by mental or logical grip alone: he must have a certain
emotional affiliation and identity with it; he does not so much convey to
us ideas and principles as pictures, parables, impressions,--a lively
sense of real things. When we put Whitman outside the pale of art, we must
show his shortcomings here; we must show that he is not fluid and
generative,--that he paints instead of interprets, that he gives us
reasons instead of impulses, a stone when we ask for bread. "I do not
give a little charity," he says; "when I give, I give myself." This the
artist always does, not his mind merely, but his soul, his personality.
"Leaves of Grass" is as direct an emanation from a central personal force
as any book in literature, and always carries its own test and its own
proof. It never hardens into a system, it never ceases to be penetrated
with will and emotion, it never declines from the order of deeds to the
order of mere thoughts. All is movement, progress, evolution, picture,
parable, impulse.

It is on these grounds that Whitman, first of all, is an artist. He has
the artist temperament. His whole life was that of a man who lives to
ideal ends,--who lived to bestow himself upon others, to extract from life
its meaning and its joy.

VI

Whitman has let himself go, and trusted himself to the informal and
spontaneous, to a degree unprecedented. His course required a
self-reliance of the highest order; it required an innate cohesion and
homogeneity, a firmness and consistency of individual outline, that few
men have. It would seem to be much easier to face the poet's problem in
the old, well-worn forms--forms that are so winsome and authoritative in
themselves--than, to stand upon a basis so individual and intrinsic as
Whitman chose to stand upon. His course goes to the quick at once. How
much of a man are you? How vital and fundamental is your poetic gift? Can
it go alone? Can it face us in undress?

Never did the artist more cunningly conceal himself; never did he so
completely lose himself in the man, identifying himself with the natural
and spontaneous; n