oul," is descriptive of this trait of
him. One source of his charm is, that we each see some phase of ourselves
in him, as Mr. Gosse suggests. Above all things is he potential and
indicative, bard of "flowing mouth and indicative hand." In his
"Inscriptions" he says:--

"I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a casual
look upon you and then averts his face,
Leaving it to you to prove and define it,
Expecting the main things from you."

This withholding and half-averted glancing, then, on the part of the poet,
is deliberate and enters into the scheme of the work. Mr. Gosse would have
shown himself a sounder critic had he penetrated the poet's purpose in
this respect, and shown whether or not he had violated the canons he had
set up for his own guidance. We do not condemn a creative work when it
departs from some rule or precedent, but when it violates its own
principle, when it is not consistent with itself, when it hath not eyes to
see, or ears to hear, or hands to reach what lies within its own sphere.
Art, in the plastic realms of written language, may set its mind upon
elaboration, upon structural finish and proportion, upon exact forms and
compensations, as in architecture, or it may set its mind upon
suggestion, indirection, and the flowing, changing forms of organic
nature. It is as much art in the one case as in the other. To get rid of
all visible artifice is, of course, the great thing in both cases. There
is so little apparent artifice in Whitman's case that he has been accused
of being entirely without art, and of throwing his matter together in a
haphazard way,--"without thought, without selection," without
"composition, evolution, vertebration of style," says Mr. Gosse. Yet his
work more than holds its own in a field where these things alone are
supposed to insure success. Whitman covers up his processes well, and
knows how to hit his mark without seeming to take aim. The verdicts upon
him are mainly contradictory, because each critic only takes in a part of
his scheme. Mr. Stedman finds him a formalist. Mr. Gosse finds in him a
negation of all form. The London critic says he is without thought. A
Boston critic speaks of what he happily calls the "waves of thought" in
his work,--vast mind-impulses that lift and sway great masses of concrete
facts and incidents. Whitman knew from the start that he would puzzle and
baffle his critics, and would escape from them like ai