It will no doubt be urged that, despite his sincerity, there is a good deal in Whitman that is not beautiful. And this must be frankly conceded. But this will be found only when he has failed to separate the husk from the kernel. Whitman’s sincerity is never in question, but he does not always appreciate the difference between accuracy and truth, between the accidental and the essential. For instance, lines like these— “The six framing men, two in the middle, and two at each end, carefully bearing on their shoulders a heavy stick for a cross-beam.” or physiological detail after this fashion:— “Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaws and the jaw hinges, Nose, nostrils of the nose, and the partition, Cheeks, temples, forehead, chin, throat, back of the neck sheer. Strong shoulders, manly beard, hind shoulders, and the ample size round of the chest, Upper arm, armpit, elbow socket, lower arms, arm sinews, arm bones. Wrist and wrist joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, forefinger, finger joints, finger nails, etc., etc.” The vital idea lying beneath these accumulated facts is lost sight of by the reader who has to wade through so many accurate non-essentials. It is well, I think, to seize upon the weakness of Whitman’s literary style at the outset, for it explains so much that is irritating and disconcerting. _Leaves of Grass_ he called his book, and the name is more significant than one at first realizes. For there is about it not only the sweetness, the freshness, the luxuriance of the grass; but its prolific rankness—the wheat and the tares grow together. It has, I know, been urged by some of Whitman’s admirers that his power as a writer does not depend upon his artistic methods or non-artistic methods, and he himself protested against his _Leaves_ being judged merely as literature. And so there has been a tendency to glorify his very inadequacies, to hold him up as a poet who has defied successfully the unwritten laws of Art. This is to do him an ill service. If Whitman’s work be devoid of Art, then it possesses no durability. Literature is an art just as much as music, painting, or sculpture. And if a man, however fine, however inspiring his ideas may be, has no power to shape them—to express them in colour, in sound, in form, in words—to seize upon the essentials and use no details save as suffice to illustrate these essentials, then his work will not last. For it has no vitality. In other words, Whitman must be judged ultimately as an artist, for Art alone endures. And on the whole he can certainly bear the test. His art was not the conventional art of his day, but art it assuredly was. In his best utterances there are both sincerity and beauty. Who could deny the title of artist to the man who wrote those noble verses, “On the Beach at Night”?— “On the beach at night, Stands a child with her father, Watching the east, the autumn sky.