rchitectonic suited to the objects of his
newly conceived principles, he felt in Greco the magnetic tendency of
one thing toward another in nature, that trees and hills and valleys
and people were not something sitting still for his special
delectation, but that they were constantly aspiring to fruition,
either physical, mental, or let us say, spiritual, even when the word
is applied to the so-termed inanimate objects. He felt the
"palpitancy," the breathing of all things, the urge outward of all
life toward the light which helps it create and recreate itself. He
felt this "movement" in and about things, and this it is that gives
his pictures that sensitive life quality which lifts them beyond the
aspect of picture-making or even mere representation. They are not
cold studies of inanimate things, they are pulsing realizations of
living substances striving toward each other, lending each other their
individual activities until his canvases become, as one might name
them, ensembles of animation, orchestrated life. We shall, I think,
find this is what Greco did for Cezanne, and it is Cezanne who was
among the first of moderns, if not the first, to appreciate that
particular aspirational quality in the splendid pictures of Greco.
They "move" toward their design, they were lifted by the quality of
their organization into spaces in which they were free to carry on the
fine illusion of life.

Whitman has certainly aspired equally, but being more things in one
than Cezanne, his task has been in some ways greater, more difficult,
and may we say for humanistic reasons, loftier. Whitman's
inclusiveness was at one and the same time his virtue and his defect.
For mystical reasons, it was imperative for him to include all things
in himself, and so he set about enumerating all those elements which
were in him, and of which he was so devoted and affectionate a part.
That he could leave nothing out was, it may be said, his strongest
esthetical defect, for it is by esthetical judgment that we choose and
bring together those elements as we conceive it. It is the mark of
good taste to reject that which is unessential, and the "tact of
omission," well exemplified in Cezanne, has been found excellently
axiomatic. So that it is the tendency in Whitman to catalogue in
detail the entire obvious universe that makes many of his pages a
strain on the mind as well as on the senses, and the eye especially.
The absolute enforcement of this gift of o