. LIBRARY UNIVLRSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO f. ESSAYS SPECULATIVE AND SUGGESTIVE ESSAYS SPECULATIVE AND SUGGESTIVE BY JOHN ADDINGTON ! SYMONDS flvai a 5fej vfj.veiv. THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 11 external to the human soul. But this alienation of man from the surrounding universe, which constitutes him, and which he helps to constitute, can no longer be maintained. We must return with fuller knowledge to something like the earlier, more instinctive faith about the world, whereof our- selves, body and spirit, are part. And nothing seems more evident than that we are being led back to this point by the hand of Science, enemy as she is supposed to be of poetry, of mysticism, of spiritual contemplation. The ground for this apparent paradox may thus be stated. Science establishes the unity of the Kosmos, together with the exact correspondence and correlation of its parts. But when we begin to regard this unity with eyes from which the scales of Christian antagonism have fallen, we discover that we cannot think of it except as spiritual. The one only thing we can be said to know and to be sure of, is the paramount importance in ourselves of mind. Cogito, ergo sum, as the starting-point for speculation, may sound an antiquated formula, yet it contains incontestable truth, which is hourly verified by experience, and only too pompously proclaimed by ontologists. If, then, we are mind, and nothing in the last resort but mind, logic compels us to expect mind in that of which we are an integrating element, and from the total com- plex of which we cannot be dissevered. The last ambitious system of constructive metaphysics, that of Hegel, made the most of this position. But Hegel overstrained the point when he identified the world-mind with the human mind. His elaborate reasoning from subjective data has been rejected by the common sense of generations trained in the explora- tion of the actual universe. Man's thought does not make the world, into which man entered at a comparatively recent date, and on a relatively minor planet. Quite independent of his thought, the heavens, the earth, the rocks, the rivers, the forests, flowers, and animals, and birds, of which he obtains cognisance through his five senses, would enjoy their own existence. Most of them were prior to him in time, and it is only the vanity of egotism which makes him represent his thought as necessary to their being. The truth, however, 12 THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION remains that man is the highest expression of life upon this glohe, and that his mind is the highest expression of his being. 1 What we know about the world is in our thought. For us, then, human thought is the world ; but only for us. Our mind is not co-extensive with the universe ; yet we may reasonably infer from its presence in ourselves that there is mind in the universe below us and above us. We are compelled to hypothesise an Universal Mind because of the manifest fact that we help to constitute the universe, which was, and is, and will be before, around, and after our phe- nomenal existence. Evolution, admitting no break of con- tinuity in the universe, silently forces us to this conclusion ; and it is only the attitude still maintained, in form at least, by Christianity towards Nature, which prevents our recog- nising the Spirit immanent and everywhere. VII After speaking of a cosmic mind, it is of much importance to define what we mean by mind. To human beings mind appears in the form of consciousness and thinking. Thought is the highest manifestation of our consciousness, graduated upwards from rudimentary sensitiveness and sensations, through perceptions, instincts stereotyped in what may be termed organic habits, states of memory, and so forth, into its final ratiocinative stage. At that point it eludes our observation, just as it eludes us, at the other end of the scale, in stages where we are inclined to doubt the existence of consciousness at all. We have sufficient proof that some of our primitive sensibilities, the lowest chords of consciousness in us, are shared by men with the coarsest types of animals, and even with plants. Among these may be reckoned muscular contractibility, and the faculty of alimentation. In like manner, many of our perceptions, instincts, and rougher 1 The argument might be condensed here into a single sentence : ' The truth, however, remains that we are what we are through thought ; and we may reasonably infer that this is not limited to our condition, but that mind penetrates and animates all existence, forming the essential part of that which was, and is, and is to be.' THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 13 processes of reasoning are shared by men with brutes. Memory, dreaming, inference, even a simple power of generalisation, are possessed by the animals nearest to humanity in organic development. It is, therefore, by no means clear that mind in all its phenomenal manifestations, inferior or superior to man's, should be ratiocinative. That, indeed, is the differentia of mind in our own state of being. Yet we believe that humanity forms the climax of a series which started from simple animated cells. And having admitted that there is no abrupt breakage between these cells and us in the long chain of organised existence, how can we refuse mind in its simpler form to those simpler organisations ? It may even be queried whether our complex mode of being does not render us incapable of appreciating the degrees of consciousness in things lower than ourselves. Because atten- tion is not roused in us by the peristaltic action, it does not follow that ascidians, who are all stomach, have not an acute consciousness of this, their principal activity. On the other hand, analogy leads us to believe that man is not the final product of Nature. Consequently we are justified in enter- taining the belief that existences, higher in the scale of being, may be endowed with intellects more fully organised than ours. Such existences, possibly, transcend the ratio- cinative stage of mind. Similar reasoning may be applied to what we call the inorganic realm. We can only seize form by thought, by mind, by intellect. Shall we not then be bold enough to say that all form form in molecules, in crystals, in planetary systems, in the undulations of light and sound is fundamentally a mode of mind ? To call form merely a mode of matter loses meaning when we have abandoned the abrupt division between man and the rest of the animal and veget- able world. It is true that the transition from inorganic to organic phenomena has not yet been seized. But the doctrine of continuity in Nature ought to render us very doubtful as to the old-fashioned dichotomy, which places an impassable barrier between them. So long as mind was regarded as extraneous to Nature, as a prerogative given to man alone by God, the omnipresence of mind in every particle of the 14 THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION phenomenal universe was not apparent. External Nature could be regarded as a mechanical contrivance under those conditions of belief. Science has forced us to abandon this position. At the same time, the continual experience of mind within ourselves precludes a gross irrational materialism. The fact that we merely know mind in its human differentia, and can form no conception at present of its manifestations in other stages of being, is plainly one of our abiding dis- abilities the incapacity under which we suffer of transcending our own sphere. Yet I have already pointed out that the analysis of mind in man proves that intellect is only the highest function, within our range of vision, to which successive stages of vital organism ascend by complication of structure and development of consciousness. We may approach this problem of the universal mind upon another path, following the indications suggested by the Correlation of Forces. Mind appears to us human beings as the final synthesis of biological functions, attaining to self-consciousness by a gradual progression from the simplest forms of animated things to the most complex organism known to us Man. If we are serious Evolutionists that is to say, if we refuse to recognise a breakage in the sequence which connects man with the lowest types of life upon the planet, and if we repudiate the hypothesis of special creation to account for the phenomenon which we term mind in its final elaboration known to us then we are forced to admit that inorganic Nature is implicated in the process of mental development. We may not indeed be able at present to demonstrate the transition from inorganic to organic modes of the world- substance ; but we are brought to the following dilemma : either we must postulate the evolution of life and mind out of primordial inorganic elements, or we must postulate a special act of creation whereby the rudiments of mind were com- municated together with life to the earliest organised beings. Accepting the latter alternative, we cease to be Evolutionists ; for we have conceded creative interference at one moment of the universal sequence, which is tantamount to abandoning THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 15 the main point of Evolutionary philosophy. Accepting the former alternative, and remaining Evolutionists, we are driven to the conclusion that mind was potentially present in the primordial elements out of which life, and man, as the crown of zoological life upon this globe, emerged. This conclusion, to which the Evolutionist is driven, does not imply that mind, regarded as the final synthesis of biological functions in man, was not something apparently and qualitatively different in the inorganic world as different, for example, to our senses and our intelligence as heat is from motion. We are aware of mind as intelligence. We do not discover any sign of intelligence in the inorganic world. Yet we are compelled by Evolution to conceive of intelligence as the final outcome of vital processes which started from an inorganic basis. When we apply the analogy of the Correlation of -Forces to this problem, we may surmise that what appears as intelli- gence in the biological series was formerly the same power existing under another manifestation in the inorganic series, just as heat is a condition of motion. This would save us from assuming a break in the evolutionary process, and would enable us to comprehend how inorganic things seem irreconcilably alien to organic things when viewed from our present point of vision. In other words, the common sub- stance of the world would now be thought of, in successive moments of its evolution, first as endowed with the capacity of form, next as endowed with the capacity of life and pro- gressive consciousness in addition to form. Thus, instead of destroying the belief that mind constitutes the whole universe, which we know alone through mind, the analogy of the Correlation of Forces helps us to conceive why mind appears to us at one period as inorganic form, and at the next period as organised vitality. We derive from it some ground for expecting that the passage of inorganic into organic modes of the world-stuff will eventually be regarded in the same way as the metamorphosis of heat into motion is now conceived. Whether we choose to call that world- 16 THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION stuff by the name of Spirit or Matter signifies nothing ; for these names are merely symbols, like the x and y of Algebra. VIII Having come into being, as I said, under the dominance of theological ideas about the relation of the human soul to God and the world, Science has hitherto been of necessity positive and materialistic. The most earnest inquirers could not at once emancipate themselves from prejudices for or against the exclusive theories of spiritualism formulated by the Churches. Christian dogmatists abruptly divided the soul from Nature, regarded the universe as a machine created by a God external to it, and laid this earth, our dwelling-place, under the curse of sin and evil. Men of science deal accord- ingly with Nature as something extraneous, outside the mind ; as the object of inquiry, but not at the same time as the subject of the intellect that inquires. The wisest forebore from uttering opinions upon man's relation to the world ; and this abstention, seeing that the word God was rarely found upon their pages, seeing that they did not need 'that hypothesis of Deity,' gained for them the reputation of atheists with the vulgar. Christianity itself was responsible for their position ; but the world lost nothing by the positive and neutral spirit in which they had to work. On the contrary, it gained considerably ; for, without mystical or theological bias, they have gradually been bringing home to our intelligence more and more convincingly the truth that we are part of Nature ; and if in a true sense part, then the truest part of us, ourselves, our consciousness, our thought, our emotion, must be part of Nature ; and Nature every- where, and in all her parts, must contain what corresponds to our spiritual essence. In this way Science, while establishing Law, has prepared the way for the identification of Law with God. I am far from asserting that any disciples of Science at the present moment have drawn this corollary from her teaching ; what I want to indicate is the inevitable point of contact between Science and Religion. THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 17 Finding thought to be the very essence of man considered as a natural product, we are compelled to believe that there is thought, implicit or explicit, in all the products which compose this universe. Nothing can be clearer, as the result of three centuries of scientific industry, than that there is neither loss of elements nor abrupt separation of species in the Kosmos, but that the whole is wrought of the same ground materials and evolved in its multiplicity of forms out of the same fundamental constituents. If then we discover thought in man upon one plane of this immense development, how can we deny it to existences on other planes? How can we conceive that the primitive energies out of which the whole proceeded were not conscious or pregnant with consciousness ? If mind is our sole reality and self, is it not the sole reality and self of all ? Must we not maintain that, the universe being in one rhythm, things less highly organised than man possess consciousness, in the degrees of their descent less acute than man's? Must we not also surmise that ascending scales of existences more highly organised, of whom we are at present ignorant, are endowed with consciousness superior to man's ? Paradoxical as this may seem, it is not incredible that the globe on which we live is more conscious of itself than we are of ourselves ; and that the cells which compose our corporeal frame are gifted with a separate consciousness of a simpler kind than ours. In this speculation of the universe, whether we advance towards the verge of mysticism or abide within the bounds of reverent abstention from such excursions, law the law of the world's life appears as God, brought nearer to experience, the object of obedience, the ever-present source of quickening enthusiasm. To this power, in whom we live and move and have our being, in whom the infinitely great and infinitely small alike exist, we commit ourselves with the assurance that self, purged of egotism, is seeking its own best through dedication. We do not ask for crowns and thrones in the next world ; we do not bargain for compensation which shall make earth's trials insignificant. Face to face with death, o 18 THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION even the death of those whose love was unspeakably precious, we do not passionately demand again our darlings, or cling with tremulous persistence to the promise of immortality. Now, as formerly, the continuance of the individual after death remains a matter for hope and faith. Science as yet can neither affirm nor deny the life beyond the grave ; but it teaches us that it is dangerous to appeal to personal desires upon this topic, and that St. Paul's audacious challenge, 'If Christ be not risen, then are we of all men most wretched,' belonged to a past stage of religious development. The confidence it inculcates is that nothing can come amiss to those who have brought their wills and wishes into accord with universal order. This will be stigmatised as optimism, I am well aware. It is certainly the antithesis of that puny pessimism which forms a marked sign of intellectual enfeeblement in the younger schools of German thought. To the pessimist we say ' Thou art sick of self-love, Malvolio, And taste with a distempered appetite.' It is not my present business to deal with pessimism, how- ever, but to seek out how the scientific spirit is remoulding religion. Religion has been always optimistic ; and whatever science is, it certainly is not pessimistic. The non-religious may draw conclusions from it which envenom life. Those, on the contrary, who naturally incline towards religion, will find in it fresh aliment for masculine contentment. They recognise themselves as factors of a life which is the world, to the effectuation of which they each in their degree con- tribute, the scope and scheme of which, though ill understood by them, requires and must obtain their co-operation. Law and God the order of the whole regarded as a process of unerringly unfolding energy, and that same order contem- plated by human thought as in its essence mind-determined have become for them so all in all, that a wish for self, an egotistical aspiration, is quelled at once as infantile, undisciplined, irrelevant. Their chief dread is that dread expressed by Cleanthes, namely, that peradventure their THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 19 good-will should fail, and they be dragged along their path by force, instead of following with genial submission. IX With such views regarding man's relation to the universe it is not difficult to combine what I have called ' the noble humanities secured for us by Christianity.' Nor is it necessary to abandon the sense of allegiance to and dependence on a Supreme Being, which hitherto has con- stituted the mainspring of religion. The idea of God, attenuated from its rudimentary gross forms through poly- theism of many sorts and monotheism of several degrees of crudity, has recently become a highly rarefied metaphysical conception of divine personality. This process of gradual attenuation, which has reduced the Christian pantheon with startling rapidity to an almost diaphanous residuum of abstract theism, justifies to some extent the assumption that we have reached the vanishing-point of theology altogether. Certainly, theology, considered as a science, can never be so substantial, can never deal with notions and definitions so precise, as in the previous anthropomorphic stages. But a cautious speculator may well pause to consider whether the old impulse of mankind toward theolatry or God-service be not entering upon a new, more spiritual, no less vital, phase of its activity ; whether the idea of God, instead of vanishing or being dissipated, or yielding, as some surmise, to the paramount idea of Humanity, is not about to assume fresh actuality in correspondence with our scientific knowledge of the universe and with our enlarged notions regarding the wants and demands of man considered as a social being. A retrospective glance over the development of Christianity may be useful here, since theism, in any coming stage of development, must resume what is residual and still living in the Christian faith. Primitive Christianity fused the Jewish conception of God as Jehovah with the Greek philosophical conception of God as Law ; these being the two grand monotheistic ideas then 02 20 THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION present to the world. 1 What was tribal in the Jewish con- ception vanished under Christ's preaching of the Fatherhood of God, and St. Paul's extension of this principle to the entire human race. In a short space of time, Christ, con- sidered as being himself God, the divine ideal of suffering humanity, the infinite power of mercy and self-sacrifice, but also the inexorable power of justice destined to judge the world, thrust Jehovah into the background. Simultaneously, the Greek conception of God, as prime principle of law and order in the universe, disappeared beneath a multitude of metaphysical definitions, for the most part designed to establish the divinity of Christ, and to bring this dogma into accordance with previous stages of religious and speculative thought. Independent of the Trinity, as it were, there grew up a secondary series of conceptions, which centred in the man-God Christ : his mother, his cortege of saints, disciples, apostles, martyrs, shared the adoration which was paid to him. This highly anthropomorphic and almost polytheistic Christianity, devotionally more potent than the metaphysical fabric out of which it had emerged, controlled the imagina- tion of the Middle Ages. But, at their close, a thorough-going mental revolution was effected. Through criticism, Science sprang into being ; and Science, so far as it touches the idea of Deity, brought once more into overwhelming prominence the Greek conception of God as Law. On the other hand, the claims of humanity upon our duty and devotion grew in importance, so that the spirit and teaching of Christ, the suffering, the self-sacrificing, the merciful, and at the same time the just, survived the decay of his divinity. In other words, the two factors of primitive Christianity are again disengaged, and again demand incorporation in a religion which shall combine the conceptions of obedience to supreme Law and of devotion to Humanity, both of which have been spiritualised, sublimed, and rendered positive by the action of thought and experience. What religion has to do, if it 1 This point has been ably brought out by Mr. J. Cotter Morrison, in his Service of Man, p. 182 ; a book which I had not read before I wrote this essay. THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 2l remains theistic, is to create an enthusiasm in which the cosmic emotion shall coalesce with the sense of social duty, in which self-abnegating submission to the natural order and self-abnegating service of man shall be regarded as the double function of all human beings in the evolution of the universe. Such an enthusiasm makes serious demands upon unselfishness ; for God, revealed by Science as the Order of the Universe or Law, is divested of anthropomorphic per- sonality, while the claims of humanity become daily more exacting. Yet Religion has always been able to draw largely upon the capital of unselfishness in men, and to find her drafts accepted. Meanwhile, such enthusiasm offers much to the individual ; it frees him from those arbitrary notions original sin, grace, salvation and damnation, election which were the banes and bugbears of anthropomorphic theology. The fear of God, as of a severe parent or a hard taskmaster, disappears. The love of men our brethren succeeds to that very shadowy and subjective emotion which was called the love of God. The Sermon on the Mount retains its value when we read it as the preacher of that sermon meant it to be read. The virtues of faith and hope and love do not fail for want of exercise. We still exclaim : ' Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him ! ' We still acknowledge our complete and absolute dependence on the power which brought us hither and will conduct us hence. Love, the greatest of these three, will always form the binding element of human existence. Science institutes no monastery, no sacerdotal celibacy, no sacrifice of natural affection for the attainment of personal salvation. And what an extension of its province has the virtue of love received from Science! It is no longer con- fined to families and friends, and fellow-countrymen, and foreign people whom we wish to convert. It covers the whole creation and the world of man's inventions. It is co- extensive with discovery, commensurate with law and life; for curiosity is love. How far more lovingly we look on Nature now than when we regarded it as alien and cursed. It is certainly natural, when inspired by Science, to feel true 22 THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION sympathy with beasts and insects, birds of the air and fishes of the sea, trees and flowers, and everything that shares the life divine which throbs in us. Next to love comes humility ; and I need hardly point out how Science edifies that virtue. It teaches us that lower forms of life, such, for instance, as parasites which prey upon our bodies in disease, have their place in the scheme, the same, raison d'etre, while still uncombated, as man. We need not be afraid lest the religious spirit I have been attempting to describe should induce a mere habit of indolent resignation to things as they at present are. On the contrary, the very essence of Science in general and of Evolution in particular, is to stimulate energy, combative, aggressive, struggling after higher stages. It knows nothing of the brutish crass indifference and ignorance of the monastic mind, awaiting beatification. It makes us certain that effort is the indispensable condition of advancement. If we recognise the divine life in parasites, we do not mean to acquiesce in their domination. They have ceased to be regarded as a divine scourge for our sins ; they have become a divine means for urging us to efforts after their elimination. The soul possessed of Evolutionary religion, penetrated with the gospel of our century, runs no peril of lapsing into the hebetude of decadent Buddhism, or of exclaiming with folded hands, 'Whatever is, is well.' That formula will have to be ex- changed for, ' Whatever is, is well ; but nothing really is which is not in progressive and militant movement.' This exposition might be carried further. It might be shown how all the elements of morality are not displaced, but remoulded by the scientific spirit ; how the mysteries of sin, pain, disease, for instance, are quite as well accounted for by formulas of evolutionary strife and imperfect development as by the old hypothesis of a devil ; how duty and volition can assume their places in a scheme of advance by selection and modification whereof the individual is conscious, quite as well as in any orthodox system which steers between the Scylla of creative Deity and the Charybdis of man's liberty to act. People are afraid lest a strictly scientific or deterministic THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 23 view of human development should paralyse morality by encouraging the notion that we are only helpless cogwheels in a vast machine. Whatever may be the real explanation of man's liberty to choose and act, face to face with the inexorable sequence of the universe, it is certain that men live under the same law as that which governs all other organised beings upon this globe, the law of struggle for existence. A recognition of metaphysical fatalism does not destroy this law, or relieve us from the necessity of acting by strife and struggle in the effort to retain our hold on being and to advance toward higher stages. Determinism, as com- monly now held, accepts the theory of man's control within certain limits over his own character. We have come to doubt the power of the will to effect a sudden change from vice to virtue or the contrary; we regard the doctrine of repentance and grace in articulo mortis as a hindrance rather than an incentive to right conduct ; we hold that the indi- vidual can only direct, cultivate, and repress tendencies in himself and others. This, however, implies the power of resolution to form good habits and the determination to enforce them by a continued exercise of volition. A man wills to minimise his tendencies toward vice by encouraging his opposite tendencies toward virtue, quite as much as the man wills who is supposed to change his vicious nature in one moment. The difference is that the process implied by self-culture and formation of habits is a lengthy one, and that the seductive prospect of living in sin with the hope of dying in grace is removed. Thus Science, far more stringently than Christianity, cries to the sinner, ' Be not deceived : God is not mocked ; whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.' Nevertheless it is clear that determinism, unless it renounces ethics altogether, occupies an illogical position ; for it has not overcome the old antinomy of free-will and necessity. It has not explained the possibility of willing to will, apart from the phenomenon of willing as a mode of consciousness. But acquiescence in the illogical forms part of the duty of rational beings, who have become conscious of their limitations, who understand the inevitable conditions of 24 THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION intellectual progress. We must not expect Science suddenly to explain the categorical imperative. Nor must we expect that it will make the existence of sin, pain, disease, want, the inequalities of life in all its phases, the waste that goes on everywhere in Nature, at once intelligible. Only I cannot see how the cosmic enthusiasm fails more conspicuously than Hebrew or than Christian theology face to face with these problems. I cannot see how the conception of universal order, wherein human beings play their inevitable parts, is more destructive to volition than the conception of an all- creative, all-controlling, all-foreseeing deity. I cannot see that Science has rendered men indifferent to the sufferings of then: fellows, or that it has enfeebled their courage, their sense of duty, and their energy in action. I cannot see that they are less sensitive to human hardship than the orthodox of Dante's stamp, who serenely acquiesced in the exclusion of unbaptized souls from happiness for ever. Meanwhile the soundness of the scientific method gives us some right to hope that illumination may eventually be thrown by it upon even the obscurest puzzles of experience. Through it, for the first time, we seem to have obtained some rational control over circumstance. Instead of excluding hope, this new gospel enables us to live daily and hourly in what Blake called ' eternity's sunrise,' the dawn of ever-broadening light and ever-soaring expectation. Men are always in too great a hurry. More than eighteen centuries have elapsed since the apostles awaited the im- mediate coming of their Lord. He has not yet come in the way they hoped for ; and those eighteen centuries now form by far the most important, the best-filled, period of history. During them we have learned gradually to disbelieve in a speedy dissolution of the world ; and lately we have been brought to face the probability that men will last for many millions of years upon this planet. With that thought in our minds, let us look back upon man's past existence. How dim are human memory and records with respect to anything which happened four thousand years ago ! With what con- tinually accelerated impetus has consciousness been growing THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 25 and expanding in the race at large ! Then let us cast our eyes forward through the tens of hundreds of thousands of years to come. Surely we can afford to exercise a little patience, trusting that, if not for us or for our children, yet for men, our late posterity, more insight will be granted and their clarity of vision strengthened. This, then, is the promise of faith extended to religious souls by Science. ' Ah ! but,' it may be urged, ' that is making too large a demand upon unselfishness ! Shall men seek nothing for themselves ? ' I turn to Christians of the old school, and ask whether the renouncement of self, the will to live for others, the desire to glorify God, be not fundamental portions of their creed ? These have always been preached as virtues. Now is the time to apply them in pure earnest as principles of conduct. Should it be objected that the promises which made these virtues palatable are withdrawn, we must remember that we are no longer children for whom the health-giving draught has to be sweetened with honey. Virtue has always been said to be its own reward, and to some extent this is true. At any rate, Science, with far more cogency than any theological system, proves that vice is its own punishment. There is, moreover, some satisfaction surely in contributing to the advance of humanity, from whom we derive everything, who expects from us so much. Without being Positivists, we may learn this lesson from the church of Auguste Comte. 1 My argument has led me into a lay-sermon, more calcu- lated to send people to sleep in some lecture-room than to arrest their busy eyes as they turn the pages of this book. It is time to quit the pulpit. But as I opened this part of my discourse with a Stoic's prayer, I will close it with a hymn by Goethe. The prayer sufficiently represents the 1 While preparing this essay for the press, I came for the first time (I am sorry to say) upon the admirable article of Professor Dowden on ' The Scientific Movement in Literature.' (Studies in Literature, 4th Edition, 1887.) Some of the conclusions to which he has been led corre- spond to those I have been stating here, though he has not committed himself to any mystical and pantheistic speculation. It is an essay which ought to be read and studied attentively. 26 THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION submission and self-dedication demanded by the scientific spirit of religion ; the hymn expresses its aspiration and enthusiasm. How far Goethe had studied the works of Giordano Bruno I know not, but in these stanzas he conveys, frigidly perhaps, yet faithfully, something of the burning faith which animated that extraordinary prophet of the scientific creed. 1 To Him, who from eternity, self-stirred, Himself hath made by His creative word ! To Him, Supreme, who causeth faith to be, Trust, love, hope, power, end endless energy ! To Him, who, seek to name Him as we will, Unknown within Himself, abideth still ! Strain ear and eye, till sight and sense be dim ; Thou'lt find but faint similitudes of Him : Yea, and thy spirit, in her flight of flame, Still strives to gauge the symbol and the name : Charmed and compelled, thou climb'st from height to height, And round thy path the world shines wondrous bright ; Time, space, and size, and distance cease to be, And every step is fresh infinity. What were the God who sat outside to scan The spheres that 'neath His fingers circling ran ? God dwells within and moves the world and moulds, Himself and Nature in one form enfolds ; Thus all that lives in Him, and breathes, and is, Shall ne'er His puissance, ne'er His spirit miss. The soul of man, too, is an universe ; Whence follows it that race with race concurs In naming all it knows of good and true, God yea, its own God ; and with homage due, Surrenders to His sway both earth and heaven ; Fears Him, and loves, where place for love is given. 1 The translation of Goethe's Proemium to Gott und W6lt, which allows above, was made by me many years ago, and was first printed in the Spectator. It gave me pleasure when Professor Tyndall quoted it in one of his volumes of essays, as expressing the religion to which Science can ally itself. ON THE APPLICATION OF EVOLUTIONAKY PRINCIPLES TO AET AND LITERATURE IT is a common habit to speak of Darwinism and the Evolutionary philosophy as though they were identical. This is a mistake. Yet, when we consider the luminous results and decisive impact of Darwin's discoveries, the mistake is neither unnatural nor inexcusable. It has, how- ever, the disadvantage of fastening our minds on biological problems, as though these alone were capable of an evolu- tionary solution. Other issues involved in the philosophy are thrust into the background. Evolution implies belief in cosmic unity, in the develop- ment of the universe on one consistent plan. It implies the rejection of miraculous interferences, abrupt leaps and bounds in Nature. The Evolutionist feels sure that if he could trace the present back through all its stages to the period of origins, the process whereby that incalculably distant past has advanced to this present would be found a gradual unbroken chain of sequences. For him, the genius of a Newton or a Shakespeare ife the ultimate known product of elemental matter shaped by energies and forces. Sir Charles Lyell established geology upon evolutionary principles. Charles Darwin proved that biology, the science of the origins and development of life upon our earth, can only be studied with sound results upon the same principles- Herbert Spencer has applied the evolutionary method to every branch of knowledge, including social institutions in his survey. 28 EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES Professor Huxley, the most brilliant champion of Dar- winism in the lists of polemical discussion, has recently stated his great master's relation to evolutionary science in clear and precise language. 1 While claiming venerable antiquity and a widespread a priori acceptance for this philosophical conception, he reserves for Darwin the merit of having demonstrated its efficiency a posteriori in one department of knowledge, and that the most immediately interesting to human beings. Evolution, in its largest sense, may be denned as the passage of all things, inorganic and organic, by the action of inevitable law, from simplicity to complexity, from an undifferentiated to a differentiated condition of their common stock of primary elements. We have accepted the evolu- tionary theory for geology, or the history of the earth's crust. We have accepted it for biology, or the history of life upon this planet. The next question is, how we can apply it to the history of the human mind in social institutions, religions, morality, literature, art, language. To this question the first answer must be : certainly not in the same way as that in which we have applied it to the history of the earth's crust, and to the history of vegetable and animal life. The subject- matter is different. Nothing can be gained by transferring the language of biological science to the study of mental products. Nothing can be gained by attempting to treat successive stages of society and successive modes of thought as though they were geological strata. In like manner, nothing is gained by transferring the method of geology to biology, and vice versd. Inorganic and organic matter being still disconnected in our thought, each requires its own species of analysis, a different system of investigation, and a separate nomenclature. Yet biology and geology have this in common, that both are evolutionary sciences. The question now is whether mind, which is a function of the most highly organ- ised animals, can be treated upon the principles which are recognised in those two sciences. 1 Life of Chwks Darwin, vol. ii. pp. 180, 186. EVOLTJTIONAKY PEINCIPLES 29 Biology, having entered upon the evolutionary stage, brings mankind with it. We are therefore justified in expecting that anthropology will tend more and more to become an evolutionary science, developing a method and a nomenclature of its own. But anthropology includes psychology, morality, history in all its branches whatever constitutes mankind. These subordinate departments must therefore submit to treatment upon evolutionary principles, unless it should be proved that the old distinction between mind and matter has to be maintained, and that evolution is only useful in explaining the laws of material development. If such a conclusion be arrived at, it will involve the hypothesis that Nature, including living creatures, pursues a process from the simple to the complex, but that mind is acquired from without at a certain point of that process by some living things which are a product of the process. In other words, mind will have to be accepted as destroying the coherence of the universal order. Our growing sense of cosmic unity renders such a dualistic hypothesis improbable. The comparative study of intelligence in animals and men does not tend to confirm it. Meanwhile, what is known about the advance of mankind from savagery to civilisation recent investigation into the origins of mythology, language, and religion, together with the remark- able additions made by Francis Galton to the science of heredity encourage the expectation that mind in its historical development will eventually be treated upon evolutionary principles. These observations are intended to introduce certain mental phenomena which invite an evolutionary explanation. The cases I mean to discuss have this point in common : A certain type of literature or art manifests itself, apparently by casual occurrence, in a nation at a given epoch. If favourable conditions for its development are granted, it runs a well- defined course, in which every stage is connected with pre- ceding and succeeding stages by no merely accidental link ; and when all the resources of the type have been exhausted, it comes to a natural end, and nothing but debris is left of it. 30 EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES Such types suggest the analogy of organic growth. If the analogy be not fancifully strained, it may be helpful in keeping our attention fixed upon the salient features of the phenomenon in question. This, to put the matter briefly, is the development of a complex artistic structure out of elements existing in national character, which structure is only com- pleted by the action of successive generations and individual men of genius, all of whom in their turns are compelled to contribute either to the formation of the rudimentary type, or to its perfection, or to its decline and final dissolution. 1 II Criticism has hitherto neglected the real issues of what is meant by development in art and literature. We are indeed familiar with phrases like ' rise and decline,' ' flourishing period,' ' infancy of art.' But the inevitable progression from the embryo, through ascending stages of growth to maturity, and from maturity by declining stages to decrepitude and dissolution, has not been sufficiently insisted on. We are instinctively unwilling to undervalue individual effort. Our pride and sense of human independence rebel against the belief that men of genius obey a movement quite as much as they control it, and even more than they create it. Yet this is the conclusion to which facts, interpreted by historical and scientific methods, lead us ; and the position we seem forced to assume, though it throws personal achievement somewhat into the shade, is concordant with the spirit of a scientific and a democratic epoch. At first sight, the individual lessens ; but the race, the mass, from which the individual emerges, and of which he becomes the spokesman and interpreter, gains in dignity and greatness. After shifting the centre of 1 The type so produced might have been compared to a nation's thought projected in art to such a thought as becomes a poem in a single man's work but which can find expression only through a hundred workers. It differs, however, from any particular work of art in this, that it does not manifest itself as a simple whole. It describes . a curve of ascent and descent before it is accomplished. EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES 31 gravity from men as personalities to men as exponents of their race and age, we gain a new interest in the history of art, a new sense of the vitality and spiritual solidarity of human thought in the most vigorous epochs. We learn to appreciate the labours of those who in obscurity laid the first foundations for some noble intellectual edifice. We deal more equitably and more sympathetically with those who were perforce obliged to carry art forward through its decadence to final diminution and extinction. Nor, though the individual seems to lessen, will this ultimately appear to be the case. Pheidias and Shakespeare are not less than they were because we know them as necessary to a series. Their eminence remains their own. We have no means at present of stating precisely how or at what moment the germ of a specific type of art is generated in a nation. It often appears that the first impulse toward creativeness is some deep and serious emotion, some religious enthusiasm, or profound stirring of national consciousness. To transmute this impulse into the sphere of art taxes the energies of the first generation of artists, and the form appears to emerge spontaneously from the spirit of the nation as a whole. Unless we knew that nothing is accidental we should be tempted to say that the form of the Attic drama in Greece, the form of the Shakespearian drama in England, was settled by chance. One thing, meanwhile, is certain. The germ, however generated, is bound to expand; the form, however determined, controls the genius which seeks expression through its medium. In the earliest stages of expansion the artist becomes half a prophet, and 'sows with the whole sack,' in the plenitude of superabundant inspiration. After the original passion for the ideas to be embodied in art has somewhat subsided, when the form is fixed, and its capacities can be serenely measured, but before the glow and fire of enthusiasm have faded out, there comes a second period. In this period art is studied more for art's sake, but the generative potency of the first founders is by no means exhausted. For a while, at this moment, the artist is priest, prophet, hierophant, and charmer all in one. More conscious of the 32 EVOLUTIONAKY PRINCIPLES laws of beauty, more anxious about the exponent form than his predecessors were, he makes some sacrifice of the idea in order to meet the requirements of style. But he does not forget that beauty by itself is insufficient to a great and perfect work, nor has he lost his interest in the cardinal con- ceptions which vitalise a nation's most significant expression of its soul through art. During the first and second stages which I have indicated, the people turns out, through its interpreters, poets and artists, a number of masterpieces the earlier of them rough-hewn, archaic, cyclopean, pregnant with symbolism, rich in anticipation the later, exquisite in their combination of full thought and spiritual intensity with technical perfection, with grace, with the qualities of free and elevated beauty appropriate to the elaborated type. But now the initial impulse is declining ; the cycle of animating ideas has been exhausted ; the taste of the people has been educated, and its spirit has been manifested in definite forms, which serve as ideal mirrors to the race of its own qualities, and bring it to a knowledge of itself. Conceptions which had all the magic of novelty for the grandparents, become the intellectual patrimony of the grandchildren. It is impossible to return upon the past ; the vigour of those former makers may survive in their successors, but their inspiration has taken shape for ever in their works. And that shape abides, fixed in the habits of the nation. The type cannot be changed, because the type grew itself out of the very nature of the people, who are still existent. What then remains for the third generation of artists? They have either to reproduce their models, and this is what true genius will not submit to, and what the public refuses to accept from it ; or else they have to extract new motives from the perfected type, at the risk of impairing its strength and beauty, with the certainty of disintegrating its spiritual unity. The latter course is always chosen, inevitably, as we now believe, and by no merely wilful whim of individual craftsmen. Nay, the very artists who begin to decompose the type and to degrade it, and the public who applaud their ingenuity, and dote with love upon their variations from the primal theme, are alike EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES 83 unconscious that the decadence has already arrived. This, too, is inevitable and natural, because life is by no means exhausted when maturity is past, and the type still contains a wealth of parts to be eliminated. Less deeply interested in the great ideas by which they have been educated, and of which they are in no sense the creators, incapable of com- peting on the same ground with their elders, the artists of this third period are forced to go afield for striking situations, to strain sentiment and pathos, to accentuate realism, to subordinate the harmony of the whole to the melody of details, to sink the prophet in the artist, the hierophant in the charmer. There yet remains another stage of decadence, when even these resources latent in the perfect type have been exhausted. Then formality and affectation succeed to spontaneous and genial handling ; technical skill declines ; the meaning of the type, projected from the nation's heart and soul in its origin, comes to be forgotten. Art has ful- filled the round of its existence in that specific manifestation, and sinks into the dotage of decrepitude, the sleep of winter. Ill A familiar example shall first be chosen from the history of English literature. It is what we know as the Elizabethan Drama, a type of art which completed its evolution in little more than half a century. When Miracle-plays, which England possessed in common with other European nations, though in a form specific to herself, had been developed to the utmost, certain episodes from the semi- epical dramatic cycle detached themselves from the unwieldy mass. Comedy found its germ in those lighter scenes which had always been conceded to the popular appetite for entertainment. Eealistic drama emerged from the story of the woman taken in adultery, and from the biography of Magdalen. The History-play had its origin in subsidiary pieces adapted from the Apocrypha, of which the ' Story of Godly Queen Esther ' may serve as an example. D 84 EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES At this point the allegorical elements implicit in the Mediaeval Miracle assumed a leading part in the disintegra- tion of the ancient structure. Moralities paved the way for the dramatic analysis of character, which took a more definite shape in Heywood's Interludes. Minor comic and realistic motives, already detached in the subordinate scenes which enlivened the Miracle, coalesced with this psychological form of the nascent drama. Independent plays, partly historical, partly tragic, on subjects connected with Biblical history, such as 'King Darius' and 'Cambyses,' were prepared for separate presentation. At the same time, two principal per- sonages of the Miracle, Herod and the Devil, extended their influence throughout the transitional phase upon which the theatre then entered. We are able, by the help of documents, to set forth the opportunities for secular dramatic representation to which the custom of Miracle-playing led. Stages were erected in the yards of inns. The halls of abbeys and great houses welcomed companies of strolling actors. At last theatres for the public arose in the suburbs of London ; they were simple wooden structures, partly open to the air. The small scale and the beggarly equipment of these theatres need to be insisted on, since the peculiar form of the English Drama depended in no small measure on these external circumstances. Resuming the points already mentioned, we find that episodical farces, histories, and tragic pieces, together with the specialised allegories called Moralities and Interludes, usurped upon the colossal stationary fabric of the Miracle. Miracle-plays continued to be represented at stated intervals. But a new dramatic type had come into existence. To this we give the name of the Romantic Drama. In its beginnings, as its origin appeared to be casual, this type was undecided and received but little attention from the cultivated classes. Yet it was destined to survive many perils, to realise itself, and to pass with astonishing speed to fixity in Marlowe, to perfection in Shakespeare, to over-ripeness in Beaumont and Fletcher, to decadence in Davenant. EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES 36 Here we have to turn aside and notice the influences of the new learning and the Italian Eenaissance, as these were felt in England. Cultivated scholars and the court, critics like Sydney, men of letters like the authors of ' Gorboduc ' and the ' Misfortunes of Arthur,' threw the weight of their precepts and their practice into the scale against the popular type of drama, which was as yet only in its stage of infancy. For a while it seemed as though the pseudo-classical principles of the Italian stage, derived mainly from Seneca and the Eoman comic poets, might be imposed upon our theatre. But the shoot of the Eomantic Drama, which had risen spontaneously from the crumbling masses of the Mediaeval Miracle, possessed the vigour and assimilative faculty of expansive life. A group of lettered poets, including Greene, Peele, Nash, Lodge, and Kyd, took part precisely at this juncture with the vulgar. They lent their talents to the improvement of the type, which had already gained the affections of the English people. They systematised the amorphous matter of farce, history, and fable under the form of a regular play, with an action divided into five acts. They introduced classical learning and conceited diction. But they did not alter the radically Romantic character of the type. Some features, including the part of the Vice, which were otiose survivals from the Miracle and the Morality, dropped out at this stage of evolution. Marlowe, joining this band of cultured playwrights, who had already turned the scale against the 'courtly makers,' next claims our whole attention. Marlowe ennobled the rough material of the Romantic Drama, and made it fit to rank with the Classical Drama of Athens in her glory. This he achieved by raising dramatic blank verse to a higher power, and by his keen sense of what is serious and impas- sioned in art. Without altering the type, he adopted so much from humanism as it was capable of assimilating. In his hands the thing became an instrument of power and beauty. Shakespeare was content to use the form refined and fixed by Marlowe. He developed it fully in all its parts, according to its own capacities. There is no process but one of gradual Dfl 36 EVOLUTIONAKY PEINCIPLES progression discernible between the few examples of the earlier Eomantic Drama we possess, and ' Macbeth ' or ' Measure for Measure.' The germ has simply grown and effloresced. At the side of Shakespeare stands Ben Jonson, in whom we observe an interesting example of the literary hybrid. Jonson did not succeed in freeing himself altogether from the influences of his race and age. His plays belong in large measure to the Eomantic type, Yet his humanistic training warped him to such an extent that he stood outside the circle of his compeers, protesting in theory and in practice against the genius of Eomantic Drama. After this- point, it remains to notice how the dramatic form, fixed by Marlowe and perfected by Shakespeare, begins to break up. It has realised itself and reached completion. What followed was a stage of gradual disintegration. Motives suggested by the supreme masters were elaborated in their details by men like Webster, Tourneur, Ford. We trace an effort to extract its last capabilities from the type. The complex is reduced to its constituents, and these are handled separately. Poetry runs over into eloquence and rhetoric in the work of Fletcher and his kind, who display a lack of artistic conscientiousness nowhere hitherto observable. Plays are made by pattern, as in the case of Massinger and Shirley. A new generation, without creative force, continue the tradi- tion of their predecessors by exaggeration of motives, isola- tion of elements, facile and conscious imitation. Soon this stage of decadence leads to one of decrepitude. The incoherences of Davenant, Crowne, and Wilson, illumi- nated here and there by flashes of the old fire, prove that those elements of weakness which the Eomantic Drama con- tained in its infancy, but which were controlled by strenuous force in the periods of adolescence and maturity, have reasserted themselves in its senility. To advance further, to save the type from ruin was impossible. The Eomantic Drama had been played out. All its changes had been rung ; the last drop of its vital sap had been exhausted. Even if the Puritans had refrained from ostracising actors, the Elizabethan theatre could not have been continued. EVOLUTIONAEY PRINCIPLES 37 Such, to indicate the outlines of the subject rapidly, is the history of the rise, progress, decline, and dissolution of what we call Elizabethan Drama. The Evolutionist differs from previous students mainly in this, that he regards the totality of the phenomena presented as something necessitated by conditions to which the prime agents in the process, Marlowe and even Shakespeare, were subordinated. For him, this type of art exhibits qualities analogous to those of an organic complex undergoing successive phases of germination, expan- sion, efflorescence, and decay, which were independent of the volition of the men who effected them. To him the interest of Sackville and Norton, of Hughes and Sidney, of Jonson and his followers, consists in this : that they were unable, by thwarting or counteracting its development, to arrest its course, or to import nutriment from alien sources into the structure which it was bound to evolve from embryonic elements. When everything which the embryo contained had been used up in the formation of structure, it came to an end. IV The law of sequence, which I am attempting to describe, admits of wide and manifold demonstration. Indeed, the more we study those types of art which are in a true sense national, which have occupied the serious attention of whole peoples for considerable periods, and which are not the sporadic products of culture or of personal capacity, the more shall we become convinced that its operation is universal. I have pictured those phases of incipient and embryonic energy, of maturely perfected type, of gradual disintegration, and of pronounced decadence, under the metaphor of organic development and dissolution. But it must be remembered that this is, after all, a metaphor. It would, in many respects, have been quite as appropriate to choose a simile from the expansive force which carries projectiles for some space above the earth, and failing, leaves them to sink down again inert. That figure, allowing for its purely symbolic value, nicely expresses the curve described by art in one of 38 EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES the great movements under consideration its vehement and fiery upward-rising, its proud sustention at a certain eleva- tion, and its declension by almost imperceptible gradations into the quiescence of spent energy. We are, however, so far as yet from having penetrated the true essence of organic growth, or of expansive force applied to projectiles, or of human nature working for a common end in national art, that it is wiser not to dwell upon the metaphorical aspects and analogies of the topic under discussion. Metaphors, indeed, can hardly be avoided in this case. But we must strictly bear in mind that they are metaphors, imported from various sources to figure forth the phenomena of mental processes, which seem to possess an independence of their own, and a law of progression which admits of no alteration. Putting metaphors therefore in their proper place of subordi- nation, our main object is to ascertain whether the successive stages which I attempted to describe in the foregoing sections can be traced in many of the larger manifestations of art, and whether we are justified in soberly maintaining that individual genius is incapable of abruptly altering their sequence. The example I have already adduced from the English Drama in the reigns of Elizabeth and James corroborates the principle on which I am insisting. Owing to the abundance of materials at our disposal, and to the short period in which so important an evolution was performed, it is indeed very nicely adapted to my purpose. But enough has been already said upon this single instance ; and all exact students of English literature are so well acquainted with the subject- matter, that each man can decide for himself whether the Shakspearian Drama fulfils the conditions I have indicated. In the evolution of the Attic Drama, the same sequence is clearly marked. Behind the playwrights of Athens, for a background, looms the huge Homeric Epos, performing a part analogous to that of the cyclical Miracle-plays of Mediaeval England. Just when the energy of the Ehapsodes had reached the point of exhaustion, lyrical dramatists began ' to gather up the fragments from the rich Homeric table.' This saying is attributed to ^Eschylus ; and it accurately EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES 39 describes the relation of the earliest Greek playwrights to the epical body of mythology and legend, which they handled by another method. The Drama had small beginnings, apparently in choral songs, to which the recitations of one or more persons setting forth an action came to be super- added. But occasional and arbitrary as this lyrical form may seem to have been, it determined the type of the accomplished drama ; nor were material circumstances in the Greek theatres, as in those of London, wanting which con- firmed the type, and helped to make it what we call Classical as distinguished from Romantic. Most important of these circumstances was the large size of the public buildings used for dramatic exhibitions, with their long shallow stage, and orchestra adapted to the celebration of Dionysiac rites. To these details were due the stationary sculpturesque character of Attic tragedy, the employment of masks and buskins, the prominent part assigned to the chorus, and the conduct of violent action off the stage. Classical drama, from the mere character of its environments, could not be so mobile, could not make such direct appeals to the senses and the fancy of the audience as the drama which sprang up in booths and narrow wooden boxes. The former had affinities to bas- reliefs on temple fronts, the latter to a puppet-show. Once formed, the Greek type subsisted till its dissolution ; even the mechanical attempt to revive it by a Eoman poet (Seneca perhaps) under very altered conditions, when the significance of the original form was lost, reproduced the lyrical element and the stationary sculpturesque mode of presentation which was proper to the Attic stage. What we dimly know about Thespis and Phrynichus proves that the dramatic type initiated by the earlier Bacchic poets underwent in their hands a process of expansion similar to that which Greene and his companions gave to the Romantic plays of England. ^Eschylus, like Marlowe, but with a tenfold weight of spiritual force, determined and fixed the type unalterably. He exhibited the mythus chosen for each special work in its entirety, and allowed full prominence to the religious idea which formed the kernel of the elder 40 EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES drama of his predecessors. At the same time he produced in the ' Agamemnon ' a masterpiece of supreme artistic power. The majesty and glory of that unique play depend upon the perfect interpenetration of a still vivid spiritual faith with still ascendant poetry. The type attained completion, but awaited an artist who should round and temper it with more consummate grace and more of human charm. Sophocles, less profoundly interested in the religious idea than ^Eschylus, manipulates his subject-matter more deliberately as an artist. He stands aloof from the mythus without losing sight of its vivifying inner significance. But he begins to decompose the colossal mass which .ZEschylus, deriving this from predecessors, had moulded into so ponderous a fabric of architectural magnificence. By breaking up the trilogy, and by moralising the conception of theological Nemesis, Sophocles made tragedy at once more manageable and more humanly interesting. The type, in his hands, undergoes an important transformation, which prepares us to expect the next stage. With Euripides the disintegration of the type begins. He neglects the mythus, or uses it only for the exhibition of human nature currently observed by him, modelling character as realistically as the conditions imposed upon all playwrights by the Attic stage allowed. The theosophy of ^schylus, always implicit in Sophocles, survives as a mere conventionality in Euripides. His work might, in truth, be compared to the rhetorical performances of Fletcher in the Romantic style. Again, he concentrates his powers on single characters, single episodes, single motives, often of great beauty, but disconnected from the harmony of parts which the type, as still existing, demanded. His poverty of design, his lack of spiritual enthusiasm, his sceptical and jaded mood of mind, were concealed beneath a mass of casuistical sophistries and stylistic elegances. These delighted the public of his day, who hailed as progress what was really the sublime commencement of the decadence. Unfortunately, we are unable to carry the exposition further on sure ground. Yet what we can collect about the plays of Agathon and Chaeremon justifies us in believing that EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES 41 a kind of flamboyant brilliance and beauty was all that now survived of the great impassioned tragedy of the Athenians. The type had worked itself out. It never afterwards revived again, for the simple reason that its forces were exhausted, that every vein of gold in the mine had been excavated, that the noble vintage had been drunk to the lees, that what the germ could yield of vital structure was exhibited. Those who quarrel with Euripides, and who deplore the extrava- gances of Agathon and Chseremon (poets beloved by Aristotle), have to face the fact for this is what I am insisting on that Agathon could not have taken up tragedy exactly where Euripides left it, any more than Euripides could have stayed at the same point as Sophocles, or than Sophocles could have refrained from refining upon ^Eschylus, or than .^Eschylus could have kept his art within the archaic limits of Phrynichus, or than Phrynichus and Thespis could have avoided emphasising the dramatic element with which the Dionysiac choruses were pregnant. Each playwright, the representative no doubt of many who have perished, was a necessary link in the production of that totality which we call the Attic Drama. It is absurd to blame Thespis because he was uncouth, as to blame a stalk because it is stalky ; as unscientific to condemn Chseremon because he left nothing after him, as it is to condemn a husk because it is husky. Stalk and husk, leaf and flower and fruitage, are necessary to the plant in nature ; and it is the business of criticism to recognise that an analogous necessity, rendering all parts significant, governs that more complex growth which the spirit of a nation evolves in art, and which, unlike the grass of the field, has no power of self-reproduction. Greek sculpture furnishes another illustration of this sequence, although the variety of schools which arose in different provinces of Hellas, and by their reciprocal influence upon the art prolonged its flourishing period, renders it a less perfect example than the Attic Drama. Nevertheless, when we consider the successive stages through which sculpture passed, from the austere, through the sublimely beautiful, to the simply elegant and the realistically striking, we shall 42 EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES concede that the same law is operative. The grave manner of the archaic sculptors, earnestly intent upon the expression of the mythus, culminates (for us at least) in the heroes of the J^ginetan pediment. Pheidias represents the middle period of accomplished maturity. The subject selected for treatment by Pheidias is still penetrated with religious thought and feeling; but it is clear that the artist aims also at free assthetical effect, exerting powers which have rarely been granted to any mortal, and expending unrivalled technical skill upon the revelation of elevated beauty. With Scopas and Praxiteles the type begins to soften. The former, if he be the author of the Niobids, displayed remarkable dramatic power, but a notable effeminacy of style ; while the latter concentrated his attention mainly on the perfecting of single figures, exquisitely graceful the Faun, the Eros, the Hermes, the Aphrodite, the Apollo Sauroktonos, known to us partly in originals, but mostly through copies. In this third period a lack of true virility, a decay of serious intention, and a seeking after novel effects may be discerned ; qualities which, in the succeeding age of the art, were replaced by realism, approximating to brutality in many instances. Powerful as were the sculptors of the school of Pergamus, we recognise that in them the representative Greek art had already abandoned the sphere of representative Greek virtues. From Eome we can expect no enforcement of the principle I am attempting to establish ; for Eoman art, whether literary or otherwise, was essentially a hybrid ; and, as I may attempt in another place to demonstrate, hybrids do not obey the same laws of evolutionary progress as the specific art-growths of a single race and a continuous era. Yet all products of the Grseco-Koman period have their own particular interest. In Poetry, the indigenous genius of the Latin race, as might have been expected, asserted itself with most effect ; for poetry is the direct expression of character. Satire and didactic verse obtained a new and separate value. But the EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES 43 conditions under which the epic, the drama, and the lyric were cultivated rendered these species (as is almost invariably the case with literary hybrids) stationary. They served to exhibit the culture of refined students, to embody personal emotions, to express the sentiment of patriotism, and to preserve some traits of manners, without having in them evolutionary energy. In Sculpture, the Greek strain almost entirely dominated, so that the best statues of the age of Hadrian may be regarded as a kind of after-blossom which reminds us of the age of Alexander. The most characteristic works of Eoman statuary are those bas-reliefs on columns, monumental effigies, and sepulchral portraits, in which the archaic Etruscan style survives. Roman architecture, lastly, although it displays no specifically Latin qualities, remains a genuine manifestation of the masterful imperial race. Roughly speaking, it consists of an amalgam of Etruscan and Greek elements ; Etruria supplying the arch and the vault, which were unknown to Greece, Hellas yielding the superficial decoration of her orders, friezes, fluted columns, metopes, and other details of external structure. The Romans employed these twofold elements in a way peculiarly their own with superb indifference to taste, but with the colossal strength and barbaric fancy of Titan builders. Con- sequently, this hybrid exactly expresses the genius of the nation, itself composite, which succeeded in subduing the world. Without having essential elements of originality, it is original in its ideal and actual correspondence to the Roman domination ; and, in its later phase, in the age of Diocletian, it developed a new principle, which was destined to exercise wide influence over the future. This principle, to put it briefly, was the superposition of the arch to the column, a structural detail which determined Romanesque and Gothic architecture. VI Roman art, for the reasons I have assigned, does not help us to establish the law of evolutionary progress. But it forms an important basis for the next instance, which furnishes, in 44 EVOLUTIONAKY PRINCIPLES my opinion, one of the most striking examples of what I have described as the parabola of art. Wherever Romans estab- lished themselves during the period of the Empire, they introduced one style of architecture, so that France, Germany, England, Spain, and of course Italy, possessed a common Romanesque style of building. After the absorption of Christianity by the Occidental races and the decay of the old Western Empire, this style was handled by the Teutonic tribes, who succeeded to the Latin heritage, upon practically the same lines of treatment. Local and national differences are of course powerfully manifested ; nor should these be neglected in the problem I am going to propound, for they render the phenomenon in question all the more remarkable. What I wish to insist upon is, that from this common material of Romanesque architecture there speedily emerged in all the sections of the sub-divided Western Empire one manner of building, with novel and distinctive attributes. This we are accustomed to call Gothic ; and the name, though derived from a false conception of ethnology, is useful in so far as it reminds us of the fact that the style was one which peoples of Teutonic origin developed from the monuments of their old masters. It fixes attention on the corresponding fact that, although the Romans carried their architecture to Greece and Turkey, to Asia Minor and Palestine, to the North of Africa and Persia, no such novel growth as the Gothic type emerged from it there. This form, then, we have a right to regard as a product of the Teutonic mind, exhibited with characteristic diversities, in all parts of Europe simultaneously. The dis- tinctive features of the new style are the pointed arch and the adoption of piers instead of pillars. After the tentative beginnings of its earliest period, the finest examples of Gothic display a chaste and exquisitely graceful scheme of lancet windows, with restrained parsimony of ornamentation in the mouldings, bosses, pinnacles, crockets, and other subsidiary parts of architecture. This is what has sometimes been called the Early Pointed style. But it could not arrest itself at that pure and comparatively unambitious stage of development. It passed imperceptibly over into the Decorated style, where EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES 45 the windows were enlarged and filled with luxuriant tracery, and ornament was prodigally lavished upon every coign of vantage. From this stage it proceeded to what is known in England as the Perpendicular, and in France as the Flamboyant manner. Here the decadence was perceptible, for the manner of building began to contradict its own essential principles. The soaring arch flattened ; the window usurped upon the wall ; horizontal lines tended to dominate in the construction ; structure, in many details, was sacrificed to effect ; decoration, while it became more conventional, grew more abundant. Yet it is clear to those who study the history of Gothic architecture that this Perpendicular or Flamboyant style was no less a distinct evolution from the Decorated, elucidating factors which were implicit in the purer manner, than was Euripides a development from Sophocles. Never- theless, the type could hardly advance further without committing suicide; and consequently we find that Gothic dwindled into nothingness during those years which imme- diately preceded the Eenaissance. It was not Palladio who dealt a death-blow to Gothic architecture. His pseudo- classical style, corresponding to the humanist culture which overspread Europe from Italy in the sixteenth century, only served to fill a void already patent. The most remarkable point to notice about the progression of Gothic architecture is that it pursued the same course from inceptive energy to efflorescence and decay in all the countries of Europe simul- taneously. We can trace similar and contemporaneously successive stages in France, England, Germany, Belgium, and Spain, underneath the local differences of each nation's monuments. And here it may be remarked, that the national characteristics of each district manifested themselves with greatest distinctness in the period which preceded the dissolu- tion of the type. English Perpendicular, I mean, is more obviously separate from French Flamboyant than English Decorated from French Decorated ; while the later town- halls of Belgium bring specific qualities to light, which are latent in Flemish buildings of an earlier stage. Italy alone, so far as Gothic is concerned, stands apart from the comity 46 EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES of European nations. The reason is obvious : Italy never submitted to Teutonic ascendency ; and consequently, her Gothic monuments can hardly be regarded as more than exotic, albeit they present distinctive attributes. VII I cannot forbear from adducing yet another instance, which ssems to substantiate the position that a clearly marked type of national art, when left to pursue its course of develop- ment unchecked, passes through stages corresponding to the embryonic, the adolescent, the matured, the decadent, and the exhausted, in growths which we are accustomed to regard as physiological. This instance is that of Italian painting. It started from the ruins of Byzantine and Komanesque art, displaying a strongly marked religious bias at the outset, and at the same time deriving much from a renascent interest in classical antiquity. Giotto and his school, who represent the first stage, were earnestly intent upon depicting sacred history and legends of the saints in comprehensive works of fresco on the walls of churches. They also undertook to set forth the political and philosophical ideas of their epoch; a fine example of this industry being the paintings in the Palazzo Pubblico at Siena. After this double task had been accom- plished, and an inexhaustible repertory of pictorial motives had been provided for treatment by successive generations of masters, it was felt that the art of painting required development upon the technical side. Accordingly, a new race, following close upon the heels of their predecessors, gave attention to anatomy and perspective, to the various methods of tempera and oil, and to every detail which might heighten the illusion wrought by painting. These efforts culminated in the works of Fra Lippo Lippi, Perugino, Mantegna, Fra Bartolommeo, Botticelli, Signorelli, and the Bellini, in whom many critics discern the finest flower of the Italian plastic genius. During this second stage, the enthusiasm for antiquity, which had formed a motive force second only to religion from the outset, continued to expand EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES 47 with ever-increasing impetus, so that the artistic type dis- played itself more and more as a wonderful double rose of Christianity and Paganism, exhaling twofold perfumes, and expressing the two diverse factors of the modern spirit. A third generation of painters, Lionardo da Vinci, Baphael, Michel Angelo, Correggio, Giorgione, Andrea del Sarto, brought the type thus elaborated to its fullest completion ; and so rapid was the evolution of energy in Italian painting, that during the very lifetime of these men, and even in the later works of some of them, the inevitable decadence became perceptible. The masterpieces of this third period derive their material indifferently from Christian and Pagan sources. In them both motive powers are utilised for a common artistic purpose ; and a complete aesthetic harmony is effected for the apparently antagonistic elements which constituted the basis of modern European culture. Beyond that point it was hopeless to advance. The spheres of Christian belief and of Graeco-Roman mythology, as these were then under- stood, had been ransacked ; all salient subjects seized upon ; all artistic problems within the limits of the type solved ; every combination and permutation of the primitive series of numbers tried. Unless new ideas could be communicated to the nation in an instant (and this would have implied the genesis of a new type corresponding to them), Italian painting had nothing left but to pass away into hebetude. The passage to the fourth stage was wrought with singular celerity. Michel Angelo survived to see his country swarm- ing with pretenders and mountebanks, who carried the specific qualities of himself and of his mighty compeers to absurdity, while they bedaubed palaces and churches with specious shapes which caught the eye, although they had no life-breath of the spirit in them. Yet the machines of the Mannerists and the Macchinisti, and the more strenuous labours of the Eclectics and the Naturalists, retain their value for students, since these demonstrate how impossible it is for industry and talent to revitalise a type of art which has fulfilled the curve of its existence. The curious point to notice about this decadence of Italian painting is that it imposed its own taste and fashion 48 EVOLUT10NAKY PRINCIPLES on Europe for well-nigh two centuries until, indeed, fresh energies arose, which are conducting us, we hope, to some new avatar of art upon a different basis. VIII It is hardly necessary to adduce further illustrations from the wide fields of ordinary culture. Everyone can set to himself the problem of deciding how far Greek architecture, Italian Eomantic poetry, Medieval painted glass, Italian sculpture, the saga of the Niblungs, the chivalrous epic centring in Arthur, and many other distinct species which might be mentioned, do or do not corroborate the views I have maintained. It might be objected that nothing is gained in clearness of insight and precision of method by thus treating criticism from an evolutionary point of view, while dangerous analogies are suggested when we fall into the habit of regarding pro- ducts of the human mind as subordinate to the same laws of development as living organisms. You prove nothing, it may be urged, by dwelling upon the stages in Greek sculp- ture, beyond the old familiar truth, that this art was closely connected with the religious and spiritual life of the Greek race. Its emasculation after the age of Pheidias was due to the relaxation of the national temper; its realistic leanings at a later period are explained by the fact that tyrants instead of free states then became the patrons of art. I answer, that no one is more convinced than I am of the intimate connection between all art and the spirit of the race which has produced it, but that this does not invalidate the conclusions at which I have arrived. A type of art, once started, must, according to my view, fulfil itself, and bring to light the structure which its germ contained potentially. As this structure is progressively evolved, it becomes impossible to return upon the past. No individual man of genius in the age of Scopas could produce work of Pheidian quality, albeit his brain throbbed with the pulse of Marathonian patriotism. Originality has to be displayed by eliciting what is still left EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES 49 latent in the partially exhausted type. To create a new type, while the old one is existent, baffles human ingenuity, because the type is an expression of the people's mind, and has its roots deep down in the stuff of national character. Men cannot escape the influences of their age ; it is not their fault if they belong to the obscure period of origins or to the sorry period of decadence. All have not the good fortune to be born in the prime and mature splendour of their nation's art. After meridian accomplishment, a progressive deterioration of the type becomes inevitable and cannot be arrested. Are we, for example, to suppose that in the age of Vasari and Bron- zino at Florence there were not painters equal in artistic gifts to Ghirlandajo, Botticelli, Fra Bartolommeo ? The supposi- tion is absurd when we call to mind the profusion of such natures born in Florence during the fifteenth century. So far as capacity goes, there must have been abundance of good craftsmen. The reason why these did not manifest their genius on the same lines is that Painting had per- formed its curve, fulfilled its cycle, displayed its several aspects, effloresced, and been exhausted. In other words, there was no longer the old type to use. Is it credible that in England, after Davenant, there were not men of equal calibre with Webster and Beaumont ? No ; but such men could not produce Romantic dramas, because the Eomantic Drama, as a type, had been accomplished. Their genius was compelled to seek other means of self -manifestation. Without the theory I am attempting to demonstrate, I do not see how we are to explain the fact that a nation like the English or the Greek at one very brief period of its existence, some fifty years perhaps, exhibits a marvellous fecundity of dramatic power, while before and afterwards, although the theatre con- tinues, production of the same quality ceases. The reason why Italian Romantic poetry passed away in caricature and parody is, not that there was nobody in Italy capable of writing Romantic epics, and nobody who cared to read them, but that the thing itself, which had originated with the obscure street-singers of Roland, to which Boccaccio had contributed form, which Pulci and Boiardo had developed E 50 EVOLUTIONAEY PRINCIPLES under two of its main aspects, which Ariosto had perfected, which Tasso had attempted to handle in a novel spirit, and from which Marino wrung the very last drops of life-sap, was now a thing of the irrecoverable past. It was no longer there, although its manifestations survived in printed books. I shall be met with another and not less formidable objection. Your theory, it will be said, does not account for the obvious fact that there are always architects, always sculptors, always painters, always poets, who produce excel- lent work. In the present age, for example, Europe lacks none of these artists, although you are unable to point out any phenomenon corresponding to what you would call a clearly marked type. This objection has indeed to be care- fully weighed, and seems at first sight very difficult to answer. I must first be permitted to repeat words which I have already used while describing the sort of art-types to which I believe the laws of evolutionary development are applicable. I called them 'in a true sense national, which have occupied the serious attention of whole peoples for considerable periods, and which are not the sporadic products of culture or of personal capacity.' Now I would ask whether, at the present time, there is such a thing as national architecture in Europe ? Have we anything corresponding to Greek or to Gothic building beyond more or less meritorious imitations ? It is clear that such architecture as we have is a product of culture. I would ask the same questions with regard to sculpture and to painting, expecting the same answer. With regard to poetry and literature in general, excluding science from the latter species, I feel that the same questions could be asked and the same answer given. Therefore I reply that the arts in their present manifestation do not fulfil those conditions which I laid down as necessary to types obeying the laws of quasi- organic development. Music, it will be noticed, I have carefully refrained from mentioning at all. In the next place, I submit that the arts of Europe, as they now exist, help to illustrate and confirm my theory. They are all of them hybrids, and what I pointed out with regard to Greeco-Koman art is true of them. Ever since the EVOLUTIONAKY PRINCIPLES 51 Renaissance there has been no pure and unmixed manifesta- tion of national spirit in any art except Music. The problem for the Evolutionist increases continually in complexity by reason of crossings, blendings, and complicated heredity ; by reason of our common European culture being adapted to divers national conditions ; by reason of the rapid inter- change of widely separated and specific products. I have, for instance, little doubt that the Novel could be analysed on evolutionary principles. But the Novel is one of the most ' hybridisable genera ' known to us in literature. When we reflect what Cervantes and Lesage taught English novelists, how much Fielding, Eichardson, Sterne, Goldsmith, and Scott contributed to France, what influence Werther exerted for a time outside Germany, how the French producers of romances since the days of Balzac and George Sand have saturated the mind of Europe, what modifications we owe to the practice of American writers, and how the Slavonic peoples are now creating a new ideal for us of the realistic story, it will be admitted that I am justified in proclaiming the Novel to be no less certainly a ' hybridisable genus ' than the Orchis. It would take too much time to demonstrate, as I think it can be demonstrated, that when the arts have entered into conditions of existence which are favourable to hybridity, as in ancient Rome and modern Europe, they do not exhibit that series of phenomena which I have above described at one time under the metaphor of organic evolu- tion, and at another under that of a parabolic curve. Personal capacity, the liberty of individual genius, the caprice of coteries, assert themselves with more apparent freedom in these circumstances. The type does not expire, because the type has become capable of infinite modification. It is indeed no longer a type in the special sense I have put upon that word, but a mongrel of many types. What art loses in force and impressiveness, in monumental dignity and power to embody the strong spirit of creative nations, it now gains in elasticity and disengagement from the soil on which it springs. E2 52 EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES IX We run a great risk when we attempt to break new ground in criticism : and I am conscious that the views I have expressed in this essay lie open to the charge of paradox. ' With all your pains, you have only succeeded in discovering a mare's nest.' ' Instead of the pole-star you have been following some will-o'-the-wisp.' Such are judgments which may be passed, and in the present state of knowledge may be fairly passed, upon the theory I have been expounding. And yet, when it comes to be investigated, I believe that any endeavour to bring criticism into vital accord with the leading conceptions of our age will be found to rest on firm founda- tions. ' Creatures of a day ; what is a man, and what is not a man ? ' cried Pindar, long ago. We have not advanced far beyond this proposition and this question. But our views about the world and man's place in it have so materially changed, that it is no longer possible to approach the study of human energy in any one of its great manifestations religion, the state, art, philosophy without adjusting this to the main current and keynote of thought. If we believe, as we are now constrained to believe, that all things in nature, including the sidereal systems, the multitudinous species of animals and plants upon our planet, and man himself, are products of an evolutionary process, we must logically apply the rules of that process to things which humanity not this person or that person, but the collective personality of races first, and afterwards the larger collective personality of races in conjunction has brought forth. The conception is not new. It has long been latent in the higher thought of Europe. In Hegel's magnificent attempt to organise the world ideally by gazing on the mirror of our mind, it clothed itself with specious splendour. I have suggested that something fruitful for criticism as a branch of science may be adduced if we abandon the old paths of caprice and predilection, abandon the ambitious flight of ideal construction, and confine ourselves for this while to the investigation of points in which the evolution of the spirit seems to resemble the evolution of nature. ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM WHILE tracing the decline of Italian art at the end of the Renaissance period, and its partial revival under the influences of the Catholic Reaction, I had occasion to write a chapter on the Bolognese school of painting. This brought before my mind the revolution to which taste is subject, and the apparent uncertainty of critical determinations. To what extent are there principles, I asked myself, by which men eager for the truth can arrive at a sound judgment in aesthetics, steering amid the shoals and billows of opinion ? Or must we confess that literature and art are bound to remain the province of caprice and shifting fashion ? With these doubts in my mind, I wrote the following paragraphs, which I will here resume, inasmuch as they may serve to introduce further discussion. II In the history of criticism few things are more perplexing than the vicissitudes of taste, whereby the idols of past generations crumble suddenly to dust, while the despised and rejected are lifted to pinnacles of glory. Successive waves of sesthetical preference, following one another with curious rapidity, sweep the established fortresses of fame from their venerable basements, and raise aloft neglected monuments of genius which lay erewhile embedded in the quicksands of oblivion. During the last half -century taste has appeared to be more capricious, revolutionary, and anarchical than at any previous 54 ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM epoch. The unity of orthodox opinion has broken up. Critics have sought to display originality by depreciating names famous in former ages, and by exalting minor stars to the rank of luminaries of the first magnitude. A man, yet in middle life, can remember with what reverence engravings after Raphael, the Caracci, and the Poussins were treated in his boyhood; how Fra Angelico and Perugino ruled at a somewhat later period ; how one set of eloquent writers discovered Blake, another Botticelli, and a third Carpaccio ; how Signorelli and Bellini and Mantegna and Luini received tardy recognition ; and now, of late years, how Tiepolo has bidden fair to obtain the European grido. He will also bear in mind that the conditions under which his own Eesthetical development has taken place studies in the Elgin marbles, the application of photography to works of art, the publications of the Arundel Society in London, the encyclopaedic and comparative collections of German archaeologists explain and to some extent justify what looks like caprice and chaos in aesthetic fashion. Our generation has been engaged in cataloguing, classifying, and rearranging the museums of the past. We need not be astonished then if the palace of art is in some confusion at the present moment. Despite such seeming confusion, a student who has been careful to addict himself to no one school and to no master, is aware that after thirty years of intelligent curiosity he stands on larger and surer ground than his predecessors. Criticism and popular intelligence, meanwhile, are unani- mous upon two points : first, in manifesting an earnest determination to distinguish what is essentially good and true in art from what is only specious, without attributing too much weight to established reputations or to the traditions of orthodox authority; secondly, in an enthusiastic effort to appreciate and exhibit what is sincere and beautiful in works to which our forefathers were obtuse and irresponsive. A wholesome reaction, in one word, has taken place against academical dogmatism ; the study of art has been based upon sounder historical and comparative methods ; taste ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM 55 has become appreciably more catholic, open-minded, and unprejudiced. The seeming confusion of the last half -century ought not, therefore, to shake our confidence in the possibility of arriving at stable laws of criticism. Radical revolutions, however salutary, cannot be effected without some injustice to the ideals of the past and without some ill-founded enthusiasm for ideals of the moment. Nor can so wide a region as that of European art be explored except by divers pioneers, each biassed by personal predilections and sensibilities, each liable to paradoxes of peculiar opinion under the excitement of discovery, each followed by a coterie of disciples sworn to support their master's utterances. In order to profit by the vast extension of artistic know- ledge in this generation, and to avoid the narrowness of sects and cliques, the main thing for us is to form a clear concep- tion of the mental atmosphere in which sound criticism has to live and move and have its being. ' The form of this world passes ; and I would fain occupy myself with that only which constitutes abiding relations.' So said Goethe ; and these words have much the same effect as that admonition of his, 'to live with steady purpose in the Whole, the Good, the Beautiful.' The true critic must divest his mind from what is transient and ephemeral, must fasten upon abiding relations, bleibende Verhaltnisse. He notes that one age is classical, another romantic ; that this generation swears by the Caracci, that by Giotto. Meanwhile he resolves to main- tain the truth that classics and romantics, the Caracci and Giotto, are alike worthy of regard only in so far as they exemplify the qualities which bring art into the sphere of abiding relations. One eminent rhetorician is eloquent for Fra Angelico, another for Rubens ; the former has personal sympathy for the Fiesolan monk, the latter for the Flemish courtier. Our true critic divests himself of idiosyncratic whims and partialities, striving to enter with firm purpose into the understanding of universal goodness and beauty. In so far as the works of Fra Angelico and Rubens are good 66 and beautiful, he will be appreciative of them both, without feeling that the one excludes the other. Aristotle laid it down as an axiom that the ultimate verdict in matters of taste is ' what the wise man would decide.' The critic may become a wise man, a man of enlightened intelli- gence, poVt/Aos, by following the line of Goethe's precepts. The uncertainties of private judgment will never be wholly eliminated from criticism. But these will be diminished by the concentration of our minds upon the whole, upon abiding relations. In working out self-culture and attaining to a feeling for the whole, the critic may derive assistance from the com- manding philosophical conception of our century. All things with which we are acquainted are in evolutionary process. Everything belonging to human nature is in a state of organic transition, passing through necessary stages of birth, growth, decline, and death. Art, in any one of its grand manifestations, avoids this law of organic evolution, arrests development at the fairest season of growth, arrests the deca- dence which ends in death, no more than does an oak. The oak, starting from an acorn, nourished by earth, air, light, and water, offers indeed a simpler problem than so complex an organism as, say, Italian painting, developed under condi- tions of manifold social and psychological diversity. Yet the dominant law controls both equally. 1 It is not, however, in evolution that we must look to find the abiding relations spoken of by Goethe. The evolutionary conception does not supply those to students of art, though it unfolds a law which is of permanent and universal applica- tion. It forces us to dwell on inevitable conditions of muta- bility and transformation. It leads the critic to comprehend what is meant by the whole. It encourages the habit of scientific toleration and submission. By it we are saved from uselessly fretting ourselves because of the unavoidable ; from mourning over the decline of Pointed architecture into Perpendicular aridity and Flamboyant feebleness, over the passage of the sceptre from Sophocles to Euripides or from 1 This theory has been worked out most fully in the preceding essay. ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM 57 Tasso to Marino, over the chaos of mannerism and eclecticism into which Italian painting plunged from the height of its maturity. Our toleration and acceptance of inevitable change need not involve the loss of discriminative perception. We can apply the evolutionary canon in all strictness without ignoring that adult manhood is preferable to senile decrepi- tude, that Pheidias surpasses the sculptors of Pergamos, that one Madonna of Gian Bellini is more valuable than all the pictures of the younger Palma, and that Dosso Dossi's por- trait of the Ferrarese jester is better worth having than the whole of Annibale Caracci's Galleria Farnesina. It will even lead us to select for models and for objects of special study those works which bear the mark of adolescence or of vigorous maturity, as being more perfectly characteristic of the type and more important for an understanding of its specific qualities. Nevertheless, not in evolution, but in man's soul his intellectual and moral nature must be sought those abiding relations which constitute great art, and are the test of right esthetic judgment. These are such as truth, simplicity, sobriety, love, grace, patience, modesty, repose, health, vigour, brain-stuff, dignity of thought, imagination, lucidity of vision, purity and depth of feeling. Wherever the critic finds these whether it be in Giotto at the dawn or in Guido at the nightfall of Italian painting, in Homer or Theocritus at the two extremes of Greek poetry he will recognise the work as ranking with those things from which the soul draws nourishment. The claims of craftsmanship on his attention are not so paramount. It is possible to do great work in art through many different styles, and with very various technical equip- ments. The critic, for example, must be able to see excellence both in the frigidly faultless draughtsmanship of Ingres and in the wayward anatomy of William Blake. At the same time, craftsmanship is not to be neglected. Each art has its own vehicle of expression, and exacts some innate or acquired capacity for the use of that vehicle from the artist. The critic must therefore be sufficiently versed in technicalities 58 ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM to give them their due value. It can, however, be laid down, as a general rule, that while immature or awkward work- manship is compatible with aesthetic achievement, technical dexterity, however skilfully applied, has never done anything for a soulless artist. Criticism, in the last place, implies judgment ; and that judgment must be adjusted to the special nature of the thing criticised. Art differs from ethics, from the material world, from sensuality however refined. It will not, therefore, in the long run do for the critic of art to apply the same rules as the moralist, the naturalist, or the hedonist. It will not do for him to be contented with edification, or differentiation of species, or demonstrable delightfulness, as the scope and end of his analysis. All art is a presentation of the inner human being, his thought and feeling, through the medium of beautiful symbols in words, form, colour, and sound. Our verdict must consequently be determined by the amount of thought, the amount of feeling, proper to noble humanity, which we find adequately expressed in beautiful aesthetic symbols. And the man who shall pronounce this verdict is, now as in the days of Aristotle, the wise man, the man of enlightened intelligence, the judicious man, the man of just and liberal perceptions, sound in his own nature, and open to ideas. Even his verdict will not be final ; for no one is wholly free from partialities, due to the age in which he lives and to the qualities of his specific temperament. Still, a consensus of such verdicts eventually forms that voice of the people which, according to an old proverb, is the voice of God. Slowly, and after many processes of sifting, the cumulative voice of the wise men, the ;cris) by what he can perceive of universal wisdom (KOH/I) ^OVT/O-IS) whether, in fact, the views he promulgates seem to him concordant with the tenor of the best thought of the age in which he lives, and with the lessons of the past which he has tried to appropriate. Then let him take courage and deliver his opinions to the world with such reserve and courtesy as he commands with the expectation, too, of having them severely tried, and being sent himself to school again to study fresh conclusions, and to finger strenuously for the fiftieth time some Gordian knot. Criticism, in brief, requires of a man the combined qualities of Conservatism and Radicalism, of patience and audacity, of humility and self-confidence, of severe respect for the past, and of an honest desire to forecast the future. In so far as he sincerely attempts to live in the whole, and to submit his personal perceptions to the test of what he can perceive of the world-current, the critic may fail through inadequacy of powers, but he shall not be liable to the reproach of vanity or the condemnation passed on wordy rhetoricians. Is there then a prospect, it may be asked, of criticism becoming a science ? The answer to this question depends on what we mean by science. It is clear that any branch of knowledge which has to do with creations of the human mind cannot be classed with the exact or mathematical sciences. It is also clear that criticism, implying as it does judgment, cannot be classed with such a science as geology, which does not pretend to judge, but catalogues, maps out, and attempts to trace the evolution of the material substances composing the earth's crust. Still it might, perhaps, be expected that criticism should become a science in the same sense as that in which we call Ethics and Political Economy sciences ; that is to say, a department of systematised and co-ordinated knowledge. From this point of view one of its branches ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM 65 would be the classification and history of all mental products in the past ; another, the determination of definitions and canons whereby such products should be estimated. No sooner have we stated these conditions than it becomes apparent that too distinct a field is being claimed for criticism, and that we are wandering from the proper meaning of the word. Criticism is not of the same nature as science. It is not a department of systematised knowledge, but an instru- ment or organ ancillary to all sciences and to every branch of investigation which implies the exercise of judgment. After admitting that criticism (as it is at present under- stood) cannot enter the sphere of the sciences, we may still pause to consider how far it can be exercised in a scientific spirit, with a defined method, with principles established rationally and applied logically. In pursuing this inquiry, it will be convenient to limit attention to the criticism of art and literature, which is the main subject of the present essay ; although, as I have said, the critical faculty finds exercise in every province of thought, and its operation in each is determined by the same conditions of psychology and logic. VI Criticism, in order to be methodical, implies a previous metaphysic. The critic must possess views regarding art in general, and the functions of the several arts. He ought also to have formed conceptions of what is meant by the abstract terms he uses. For the most part, in this country, the practice of the critic is empirical, and notions common to the vulgar are accepted at their current value. In Germany, on the other hand, we have eminent examples, from Kant to Hegel, from Kuno Fischer and Schopenhauer to Lotze, of rigorous attempts to deduce the laws of criticism from abstract metaphysic. The two systems differ less than they appear to do ; for whether general notions are empirically borrowed or logically demonstrated, notions of some sort underlie all judgments, and the real acumen of the critic is p 66 ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM displayed in his application of them to particulars rather than in his philosophical ingenuity. It furthermore implies a previous study of history. The critic should be familiar with the main literatures and art- epochs of the past. This, in fact, is more important than the metaphysical groundwork of criticism, and is consistent with the leading philosophical impulse of our age. For a time at least we have abandoned a priori and deductive methods for the study of natural development, and for the inductive accumulation of facts which shall enable us to understand phenomena. It implies a certain amount of technical skill. In order to pronounce opinions upon music, the critic must possess some knowledge of harmony and some command of an instrument. The critic of poetry must understand the prosody of quantity and accent. The critic of sculpture and painting ought to be at least to some extent a draughts- man and a colourist. The critic of architecture should have studied the mathematics of proportion and the mechanical laws of structure. Nevertheless, the critic need not be a professed meta- physician, a recognised historian, a practical artist, or an acknowledged poet. Poets, artists, historians, and meta- physicians may indeed be excellent critics, but not by reason of their special faculty in those departments. The critic is separate from the specialist in any line of art or literature or philosophy ; and nothing is more false than the assumption that specialists should only be judged by specialists. The critic represents and instructs that vast majority of intelligent beings for whom the specialists produce their several works. He has to apply the faculty of sense and judgment which belongs to all liberal natures, but which he has trained beyond the ordinary degree of subtlety and precision by the exercise of sensibility and the acquisition of exact knowledge. It is the critic's function to act as interpreter and balance-holder, to lead and enlighten the common intelligence which forms the final court of appeal in matters of taste, to shape and express the judgments of the