The modern standard in art is becoming more and more what has been called
the canon of the characteristic, as distinguished from the Greek or
classic canon of formal beauty. It is this canon, as Professor Triggs
suggests, that we are to apply to Whitman. Dr. Johnson had it in mind when
he wrote thus of Shakespeare:--
"The work of a correct and regular writer is a garden accurately formed
and diligently planted, varied with shades and scented with flowers: the
composition of Shakespeare is a forest in which oaks extend their
branches, and pines tower in the air, interspersed sometimes with weeds
and brambles, and sometimes giving shelter to myrtles and to roses;
filling the eye with awful pomp, and gratifying the mind with endless
diversity."
Classic art holds to certain fixed standards; it seeks formal beauty; it
holds to order and proportion in external parts; its ideal of natural
beauty is the well-ordered park or grove or flower-garden. It has a horror
of the wild and savage. Mountains and forests, and tempests and seas,
filled the classic mind with terror. Not so with the modern romantic mind,
which finds its best stimulus and delight in free, unhampered nature. It
loves the element of mystery and the suggestion of uncontrollable power.
The modern mind has a sense of the vast, the infinite, that the Greek had
not, and it is drawn by informal beauty more than by the formal.