a heap," etc., and yet that the effect of his work is "to
stir our emotions, widen our interests, and rally the forces of our moral
nature."

It seems to me that a man who, through the printed page, can do these
things, must have some kind of art worth considering. If, through his
impassioned treatment of a prosy, commonplace object like a ferry-boat, he
can so dignify and exalt it, and so fill it with the meanings of the
spirit, that it seems like a part of God's eternities, his methods are at
least worth inquiring into.

The truth is, Whitman's art, in its lack of extrinsic form and finish, is
Oriental rather than Occidental, and is an offense to a taste founded upon
the precision and finish of a mechanical age. His verse is like the
irregular, slightly rude coin of the Greeks compared with the exact,
machine-cut dies of our own day, or like the unfinished look of Japanese
pottery beside the less beautiful but more perfect specimens of modern
ceramic art.

For present purposes, we may say there are two phases of art,--formal art
and creative art. By formal art I mean that which makes a direct appeal to
our sense of form,--our sense of the finely carved, the highly wrought,
the deftly planned; and by creative art I mean that quickening,
fructifying power of the masters, that heat and passion that make the
world plastic and submissive to their hands, teeming with new meanings and
thrilling with new life.

Formal art is always in the ascendant. Formal anything--formal dress,
formal manners, formal religion, formal this and that--always counts for
more than the informal, the spontaneous, the original. It is easier, it
can be put off and on.

Formal art is nearly always the gift of the minor poet, and often of the
major poet also. In such a poet as Swinburne, formal art leads by a great
way. The content of his verse,--what is it? In Tennyson as well I should
say formal art is in the ascendant. Creative art is his also; Tennyson
reaches and moves the spirit, yet his skill is more noteworthy than his
power. In Wordsworth, on the other hand, I should say creative art led:
the content of his verse is more than its form; his spiritual and
religious values are greater than his literary and artistic. The same is
true of our own Emerson. Poe, again, is much more as an artist than as a
man or a personality.

I hardly need say that in Whitman formal art, the ostensibly artistic,
counts for but very little. The intentional art