on. He pursues the same method in poetry,--that is, strives for strong
light or shade, for high color, perfume, pungency, in all ways for the
greatest immediate effect. In so doing he leaves the true way, the way of
Nature, and, in the long run, comes far short of producing her effects."

More light of the same kind is thrown upon his methods by the following
passage from the preface to the first edition of his poems in 1855.

"To speak in literature," he says, "with the perfect rectitude and
insouciance of the movements of animals, and the unimpeachableness of the
sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside, is the flawless
triumph of art." And again: "The great poet has less a marked style, and
is more the channel of thoughts and things without increase or diminution,
and is the free channel of himself. He swears to his art, I will not be
meddlesome; I will not have in my writing any elegance, or effect, or
originality, to hang in the way between me and the rest like curtains. I
will have nothing hang in the way, not the richest curtains. What I tell,
I tell for precisely what it is. Let who may exalt or startle or fascinate
or soothe, I will have purpose, as health or heat or snow has, and be as
regardless of observation. What I experience or portray shall go from my
composition without a shred of my composition. You shall stand by my side
and look in the mirror with me."

VIII

But in view of the profound impression Whitman's work has made upon widely
different types of mind on both sides of the Atlantic, and in view of the
persistent vitality of his fame, the question whether he is inside or
outside the pale of art amounts to very little. I quite agree with the
late Mrs. Gilchrist, that, when "great meanings and great emotions are
expressed with corresponding power, literature has done its best, call it
what you please."

That Whitman has expressed great meanings and great emotions with adequate
power, even his unfriendly critics admit. Thus Professor Wendell, in an
admirable essay on American literature, says that "though Whitman is
uncouth, inarticulate, and lacking in a grotesque degree artistic form,
yet for all that he can make you feel for the moment how even the
ferry-boats plying from New York to Brooklyn are fragments of God's
eternities." In the same way Mr. William Clark, his British critic and
expounder, says that he is wanting in discrimination and art, "flings his
ideas at us in